Triune Creator

Stephen Holmes’s The Quest for the Trinity: The Doctrine of God in Scripture, History and Modernity is a learned, sharp challenge to the “Trinitarian revival” of the 20th century. One of his central criticisms is that recent Trinitarian theology, in contrast to patristic theology, focuses almost exclusively on the New Testament. As an illustration of a contemporary appropriation of patristic modes of reading the Old Testament, he offers this summary of Francis Watson’s discussion of Genesis 1 ( Text, Church, and World: Biblical Interpretation in Theological Perspective ):

According to Watson, there are “three distinct modes of divine creative action” in the creation narrative: “transcendent command . . . bodily involvement [“made”] . . . and mediation by indwelling.” Put together, God’s creative work is “at once utterly transcendent, profoundly involved, and immanent in the sense of God exercising power through the granting of potency to creative intermediaries. As Watson notes, in the texts these modes all intermingle in the creation of land creatures . . . and occur elsewhere singularly or in pairs. He reads this as an account of triune divine action, indivisibly united, but representing the particular modes of relation of the three persons: transcendent command; bodily presence; and immanent indwelling” (Holmes, 48).

Holmes comments, “perhaps this is an example of what good theological interpretation should look like, and how a witness to the doctrine of the Trinity might be found in the Old Testament” (48-9).