The Mystery of the Trinity: A Trinitarian Approach to the Attributes of God, by Vern S. Poythress. Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R, 2020. xxx + 688 pp. $49.99.
For the better part of the past two decades, evangelicals have debated the nature of the absoluteness of God, particularly what it means to say that God is impassible. At times, the controversy has been rancorous; accusations of heresy have split at least one denomination. Both sides reject process theology and open theism, in which God is entirely absorbed into the flux of the finite world. But the classical theists (James Dolezal most prominent among them) have argued that many otherwise conservative theologians have nonetheless compromised the absolute nature of God.
Vern Poythress makes it clear that The Mystery of the Trinity addresses the present controversy, particularly in the appendices (three of which are entitled “Issues in the Controversy,” “Suggestions for Classical Christian Theists,” and “Suggestions for Christian Personalists”). Yet his ambitions for this book are broader; it is not intended solely as a work of polemical theology. Nor is he seeking to find some middle position by blending classical theism with Christian personalism (Poythress’s label for what Dolezal calls theistic mutualism). Rather, Poythress wishes to emphasize the centrality of intentional Trinitarianism to this entire debate.
Poythress is to be commended for making a truly daunting subject as accessible as possible. Most chapters conclude by showing a link between the chapter’s topic and the Resurrection. While some of these feel forced, their inclusion shows that Trinitarian theology is not a mere abstraction. Each chapter also closes with a list of important terms (many of which are keyed to the volume’s glossary), study questions, further reading, and a devotional prayer. (The absence of impassibility from the glossary—and the book’s index—is a flaw.) There are well over 200 diagrams to illustrate Trinitarian concepts, although some seem more complicated and puzzling than the text itself. Poythress favors simple language as much as possible, despite the depths of the discussion.
After a couple of introductory chapters on methodology, Poythress opens the body of his work with a survey of the attributes of God, chiefly those that highlight God’s transcendence. These are brief chapters in which Poythress summarizes and affirms God’s classical attributes, including immutability and simplicity.
The next major section introduces Poythress’s main argument: that discussions of the attributes of God must be self-consciously Trinitarian. Right away, he insists that our doctrine of divine simplicity must not be incompatible with the Trinity. This should be obvious given Christian orthodoxy, but one of Poythress’s chief concerns (reflected in the next two sections of the book) is that classical theism has committed itself linguistically to philosophical systems (chiefly, Aristotelianism) that are fundamentally anti-Trinitarian and therefore anti-Christian. Christian Trinitarianism, not abstract considerations of “perfect being” theology, must be fundamental to our doctrine of God.
To be sure, Poythress acknowledges at multiple points that appealing to the Trinity does not resolve all the difficulties that arise when we attempt to conceive of a God who is absolute yet who nevertheless has genuine interaction with his created world. But that is the point: mystery is not avoidable when finite creatures think about our Creator. There is nothing “back of” the Trinity. Any attempt to erase all mystery will result in a sub-biblical theology.
The next section of chapters unpacks a Trinitarian theology of language. Even more basic than the question of how finite creatures can speak about God is how we can truly speak about anything. Human thought and language derive their power from being created by God himself. They are analogous to divine thought and speech, which (apart from any reference to the finite world) evidences Trinitarian unity and diversity. Understood in this way, human language has meaning. But if finite language is supposed to stand independent of God, it fails (this is a Van Tilian point as Poythress explains more fully in chap. 42).
For that reason, in the next section of the book, Poythress argues that inasmuch as the language of classical theism is derived from philosophical systems not rooted in Scripture, we must be aware that the language can itself smuggle in metaphysical concepts alien to Scripture and ultimately incompatible with how God has revealed himself. Here, Poythress analyzes the Aristotelian notions of form, matter, and essence that are so prominent in both discussions of God’s attributes and Trinitarian theology. His argument is that, while these terms (and the Aristotelian categories that underlie them) give the appearance of clarity and precision, some of that is illusory.
This argument is exemplified in the next long section, in which Poythress explores how three theologians wrestle with the complexities of a simple God who creates, regrets, and saves: Thomas Aquinas, Francis Turretin, and Stephen Charnock. The discussion here is very involved, but in general, Poythress argues that the more one is committed to Aristotelian categories the more difficult he will find it to affirm all that Scripture says about God.
The final two sections are Poythress’s attempts to make further application of his Trinitarian emphasis to the vexing questions about God’s attributes and relations. Here, he constantly emphasizes the dangers of the two suction pools: the quicksand that would absorb God into the world of creation and the black hole that cuts God off from any intelligible contact with creation. Reacting against either position, Poythress argues, makes one likely to be drawn into the opposite error.
The particulars of the present debate, as with Trinitarian debates of significance throughout church history, will take time to resolve. But Poythress’s contribution is an important one and deserves careful consideration.
