3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Highly Recommended: Intellectually Stimulating and Clear, April 14, 2010
This review is from: Father, Son and Spirit: The Trinity and John's Gospel (New Studies in Biblical Theology) (Paperback)
I just finished reading Father, Son and Spirit: Trinity yesterday-I will refer to the authors as K&S from this point on. I must say that the book was much different than I anticipated. This is not to say that I was disappointed in the least. The authors in the first half of the book (and I am over-generalizing here) seek to lay forth John's teaching about each of the three persons in the trinity individually first and then in regard to how they relate to each other. In the second half of the book they focus their attention more on building a coherent theology of the trinity within the framework of John's unique theological purpose and emphasis. The first half of the book really stood as the foundation for the second half.
Those who have spent any serious time studying John's Gospel will find the first half of the book to be delightfully straightforward. I will say, however, that the second half of this book is what really makes this work worthy of honorable mention. I will warn the reader to not skip the general teachings of the Godhead in the first part of the book to delve into the rich theological insight of the second half of the book. The first half really does set a necessary stage for what follows.
The two most helpful chapters (for me, at least) were Chapters 7 ("Christology in John's trinitarian perspective: Jesus' Filial Identity") and 9 ("`As the Father Has Sent Me, So I am Sending You': Toward a Trinitarian Mission Theology"). I think I underlined about half of the content in each of these two chapters. K&S's discussion on both the sonship of Christ and the fatherhood of God and their focus on John's unique trinitarian emphasis in regard to mission was simply stunning. These two chapters provided more than just a little insight; they completely clarified and (maybe I could go so far to say) revolutionized my understanding of (specifically) John's trinitarian emphasis.
I highly recommend The Father, Son and Spirit: The Trinity and John's Gospel. I was surprised by the readability of the book (although the last chapter was quite dense) and would not be afraid to recommend it to my own congregation for prayerful/thoughtful/discerning consumption. The focus of the book is not simply trinitarian theology, but rather trinitarian theology as communicated specifically in John's Gospel. Because this is the emphasis, the book is biblically based to the core. If you are more interested in biblical theology than you are in logical theology (not that the two should be completely separated, but arguments from actual texts of Scripture read in context should inform our logical categories of theology, and especially when it comes to such an other-worldly doctrine as the trinity-a doctrine which transcends finite logical categories) you will find this book to be extremely informative and stimulating (both intellectually and spiritually).
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20 of 31 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Anachronism Should Be Avoided, December 2, 2008
This review is from: Father, Son and Spirit: The Trinity and John's Gospel (New Studies in Biblical Theology) (Paperback)
Review of Andreas J. Kostenberger and Scott R. Swain, Father, Son and Spirit: The Trinity and John's Gospel (New Studies in Biblical Theology 24; Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2008).
Since other reviewers have summarized and/or outlined the book, my aim in this review is to engage the content of the book more substantially in detail.
"Anachronism should be avoided" (p.21). These words from by Kostenberger and Swain offer a crucial warning regarding the subject of "the Trinity and the Gospel of John" that is the book's focus. If the authors had heeded their own warning, I suspect that this review would be far more positive.
Kostenberger and Swain engage in a "trinitarian" reading of the Gospel, one that, in essence, interprets the Gospel as though the Nicene and Chalcedonian formulations could be presupposed as the text's background. While such an approach is interesting, it is also strange, precisely because their book is not being written in the fourth century, but rather in the twenty-first. What sense can there be in writing a book that neither engages the distinctive questions of our own time (which are not precisely those of the Nicene fathers), nor seeks to interpret the Gospel first and foremost against the background of its own time? Mention of Philo is minimal, and other texts (like the Testament of Abraham) that might have shed further light on how a key agent of God might be thought to bear the divine name are nowhere mentioned. If discussion of key background material for the Gospel's time and setting of composition are minimal, neither does the book really engage the debates of the pre-Nicene and Nicene era, and the way this Gospel was read and interpreted in that context.
The authors explain that one of their aims is to get beyond the distinction Gabler famously made between Biblical and Dogmatic theology (p.20). Yet no better method is proposed, and so the authors engage in what can only be called a "dogmatic" reading of John, one that assumes rather than demonstrates that the Nicene understanding of God as Trinity (as they themselves understand it) can be presupposed as the background for the Fourth Gospel. But as experts on the history of the Arian controversy will confirm, it is simply impossible to explain the duration and intensity of the debates of the third and fourth centuries if the answers to the questions that were at the heart of those debates had been clearly answered centuries earlier and enshrined in Scripture.
In other words, there is no doubt that it is possible to read the Gospel of John as a "trinitarian" document in the later Nicene sense. Christians have been doing so for many centuries. But Kostenberger and Swain seem to have no interest in asking why such a reading is preferable to others. That this approach became orthodox may be sufficient in some traditions. But if Kostenberger and Swain wish to reflect either a Protestant approach that is willing to re-evaluate doctrine by holding to Scripture as the ultimate authority, then they cannot simply engage in the common practice of reading John through the lens of the Nicene Creed. For Protestants, the evaluation would be expected to run in the other direction. But rather than try to make the case that a Trinitarian reading in the full and precise Nicene sense makes the best sense of this Gospel, instead we get what is at best a reader-response treatment, illustrating how a Protestant who wishes to adhere to Nicene orthodoxy might read (and write about) this Gospel. As a result, some of the most important and most interesting historical questions are not answered, such as how the author of this Gospel could write about Jesus as he does "without any sustained attempt at ajudicating the issue of how the God of the Hebrew Scriptures and Jesus can both be called theos" (p.60).
The authors call their approach "confessional criticism" and claim that it respects the "historical and cultural context" while also reading the text "with awe and wonder and with prayerful dependence on 'the Spirit of truth'" (p.23). But merely claiming to do these things - whether being confessional, relying on the Spirit, or respecting the context of the Gospel - is not the same as actually doing them. Given the authors' apparent lack of interest in engaging issues of historical and cultural context in any depth, one gets the sense that they are using a mere rhetorical ploy when they claim to do so. One then wonders whether the same might be true of their claim to treat the text with awe and to rely on the Spirit. Such language seems intended to impress conservative Evangelical readers, and perhaps even make it seem that reviewers who criticize the book are not fighting against men, but against God. But this attempt to shield themselves from criticism will not work, since the book is clearly open to criticism on a number of points, and few Christian reviewers are likely to agree to shift the blame for these shortcomings away from the human authors and onto "the Spirit of truth". It would have been more honest, and more accurate, if they acknowledged that their reliance is most squarely on their presuppositions and those of their faith tradition. They might also have honestly said that they were striving to be open to and guided by the Spirit. But it would not have been at all inappropriately modest for them to acknowledge the possibility that, in their human frailty, they might not have fully attained their expressed aims, whether those of scholarship or of faith.
The extent of the authors' interest in the historical and religious context of the Gospel of John appears to be their reading of Bauckham (with a dash of Hurtado thrown in for good measure). They rely heavily, and uncritically, on Bauckham at all points apart from the one that does not suit their presuppositions, namely Bauckham's conclusion that John son of Zebedee was not the Gospel's author (pp.27,29,31-39). As one might expect under such circumstances, the authors claim, on the basis of Bauckham's notion of "divine identity", that, on the one hand, a plurality within God was an option left open by Jewish monotheism in this time, while on the other hand, no one within Judaism before the rise of Christianity actually explored these possibilities. How likely is it that a concept that does not appear in the text, nor other texts from that time, and was coined relatively recently, will provide the background to and the solution to the perplexities of Johannine Christology? Once again, a lack of familiarity with the relevant background material leads Kostenberger and Swain to make claims such as that "calling Jesus 'God' stretched the boundaries of first-century Jewish monotheism" (p.49). What needs to be explained is why, if one were to replace "Jesus" in the quotation with "Moses" or "an angel" the problem apparently vanished for first-century Jewish monotheists. As I argued in John's Apologetic Christology, and treat in still more detail in my forthcoming book The Only True God, it seems to be the application of such language to Jesus, rather than the language itself more generally considered, that was the crux of the issue for the author of the Fourth Gospel and his opponents.
The claim of Kostenberger and Swain to be reading this Gospel in its canonical context is likewise not without problems that require further discussion and justification. They affirm at one point that, from the perspective of the Gospel of John, "the Jews' monotheism proves to be too rigid to accomodate a plurality of persons within the one Godhead" (p.54). If one reads Deuteronomy or Second Isaiah, for instance, one does not get the impression that these Jewish Scriptures taught that monotheism ought to be flexible. If one is to read "canonically", one must address why the appropriate approach is to let John (and the Nicene Creed) be one's guide to Deuteronomy, rather than vice versa. And if one is to argue that progressive revelation leads one to rethink monotheism in light of the Gospel of John, then it must be explained why the New Testament authors never come right out and say so. Why is there nothing in the New Testament that explicitly calls upon monotheists to rethink and reinterpret monotheism? The possibility that such calls are absent because John did not view Jewish monotheism as too rigid deserves serious consideration.
There are other aspects of their treatment of earlier parts of the canon that may raise eyebrows, as for instance on p.79, where the Jewish religion, called "inferior" because "under it, no one could see God", is denigrated as "Moses' system". It may be that Christians ought to follow Jesus' lead in being open to the possibility that various elements - perhaps even monotheism? - that are expressed in the Jewish Scriptures are merely what "Moses" gave "because of the hardness of your hearts" (Matthew 19:8), but this can scarcely be done in passing, and would certainly lead us quite far from the outlook of the Fourth Gospel. In fact, there is a case to be made that "canonical criticism" ought to mean more than merely reading later parts of the canon back into earlier ones as though things ought to have been clear all along. Yet that often seems to be the outlook of this book (see e.g. p.82).
Nor is the treatment of other parts of the New Testament much better, for instance when the authors claim (p.40) that Christians always viewed Jesus' resurrection and exaltation as conferring on him a status he already had (Phil. 2:6-11, at the very least, is open to other interpretations); or when it is asserted that "The parable of the wicked tenants...makes clear that Jesus was God's Son sent into this world from above" (p.39), which ignores the fact that others are sent in the parable, and the difference between servants and sons is one of relationship to the father,...
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