Euangelion
Wesley Hill
Paul and the Trinity: Persons, Relations, and the Pauline Letters
Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2015.
Available from Amazon.com
This is a bold and and breath-taking volume that attempts to show that Paul was a genuinely trinitarian theologian, not merely binitarian with some charismatic worship. For a start, Hill take issues with the standard taxonomy of “low” and “high” views of christology. Instead – following Nils Dahl, Leander Keck, Kavin Rowe, and Francis Watson – he argues for a more complex, dynamic, relational approach. Rather than fit Jesus and the Spirit underneath or beside God, Hill believes that it is better to see the three persons as mutually determining and relationally constituting the very meaning of God! The mutuality between God the Father and Jesus the Son in Paul’s God-discourse demonstrates the Father is only who he is as the Father of Jesus and Jesus is only who he is as the Son of the Father. Hill also deals with the so-called subordination texts such as Phil 2.5-11, 1 Cor 8.6, and 15.24-28 (I wish he had included 1 Cor 11.3!!!). He argues that what we find here is not subordination, rather asymmetry whereby God’s and Jesus’ identities are constituted by their different ways of relating to each other, even so, they remain fundamentally unified and equal in sharing the same divine name as “Lord.” Hill also rejects the idea of binitarianism since the Holy Spirit is also constitutive for God’s identity as the Spirit identifies God as the one who raised Jesus from the dead and made Jesus the Son of God in power. His thesis is best summed up as: “Exegesis of Paul does not reach its full potential without trinitarian theology, I have argued, and, likewise, trinitarian theology is impoverished if it neglects biblical exegesis in general and exegesis of Paul in particular” (p. 171). All in all, one of the best books about the Bible and the Trinity in living memory.
See also the review of Wesley Hill’s book by N.T. Wright over at The Living Church.
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