From the very relevant NTW:

ntwrightpage.com/Wright_JIG.htm

I know, we don’t like to follow links but seriously, if you have interest at all this is a worthy read. It is pro - trinitarianism.

Love the foxes, Dave. I’m slowly reading through this. Interesting so far; thanks!

The little critters always make me smile.

I’m glad you’re reading it - you’ve noticed that it is subtle - not sly like a fox - but considered, unpacked, open and non-dogmatic, sort of. Let us know what you think?

The essay shows the only sense in which the concept ‘trinity’ makes any sense to me - that is, understanding it in terms of Jesus’ self-understanding as a first-century, second-temple Jew, his vocation and what He considered to be His calling.

This avoids metaphysics, where the trinitarian argument just does not work; and also avoids dogmatic creedal formulations which without fail just beg the question. I have read and studied this till I’m blue in the face - which is not a pretty sight - and cannot find any justification for the metaphysical arguments or creedal formulations. Of course, this is just my opinion - just as any trinitarian is free to offer his/her opinion.

So once again, there is no simple answer to the question: do you believe in the Trinity? The question has to be asked: what trinity do you believe in, if any?

But I think this essay is a great start to an answer.

I liked the article, Dave. As I understand it, there’s nothing I’d object to there. I appreciated his perspective, that Jesus would have had to be able to look at Himself as one with God the Father from a 1st century Jewish perspective. That makes sense to me. I was sad that he didn’t talk about the place of the Holy Spirit. That seems always to be left out, though to be fair, I guess that’s not really what the article was about. What’s my version of the Trinity? I guess my best picture is of a perfectly unified family. One family; three persons, but one entity – not three individuals.

Thanks for sharing this. I’m glad I got the chance to read it.

I’m glad you enjoyed it Cindy. I too was hoping for more on the HS, but I think he was wise to keep away from a metaphysical/creedal approach to the incarnation, differing persons and natures, etc - those formulations in other words that have served to divide Christians into different camps.

The whole 3 persons/1 nature or 1 person/2 natures thing can be avoided as unnecessary and one can still be ‘trinitarian’ - just not in the exact metaphysically-defined manner as some demand - by paying attention to the way Tom approaches it.

In any case, put this next one in your back pocket for a rainy day - a little longer essay on Romans that I almost guarantee will give you a couple of ‘aha’ moments and for sure provides a great strategic grasp of the book:
ntwrightpage.com/Wright_Romans_Theology_Paul.pdf

I’m not a shill for Tom Wright btw - but honor where honor is due…

Thanks, Dave

I downloaded that, and I’m sure I’ll enjoy it. I have a particular interest in Romans.

I’ll have a read of both of those when I can find time to concentrate on them. From the little I know of Wright’s treatment of Romans overall, I’m much more inclined towards some of his views on it - for example, I seem to remember that he doesn’t just dismiss verses like v.13 of chapter 2 (“For it is not the hearers of the law who are righteous before God, but the doers of the law who will be justified.”) as just a build up to chapters 3 and 4, where God apparently imputates righteousness (or justness) to us even though we’re unjust, through punishing Jesus etc.

I was a little sceptical at first when he wrote that Ch 1-8 of Romans were written so that Ch 9-11 could be written, but now I think he’s absolutely correct. Previously I thought ch. 8 was the pinnacle of what Paul had to say - not so! As wonderful as the first 8 ch are, 9-11 (and the rest) were the point Paul was aiming at all along. Fascinating.
You’re certainly right that it deserves some good attentive time. Good luck.

I read the article. It seems to me that Wright was not advocating classic Trinitarianism. I think he was even needling classic trinitarianism a bit.
I think he was advocating modalism. A lot of people who think they are Trinitarians are actually modalists.

I think you are absolutely correct that the trinitarian position stated is NOT the classical model. That’s really the reason that I find it somewhat concordant with my thoughts on the matter.
The modalist slant is one I will have to think about, thanks for that observation Paidion.

If he was advocating modalism, I guess I missed that bit, but quite a lot of it was, shall we say, over my head.

Well he would NOT consider himself a modalist, I’m certain of that.

The problem with Jesus and the Victory of God (which this article summarizes on this topic), is that NTW ended up trying to say (often over-against scriptural data he himself agreed to be accurate) that Jesus, though God Most High incarnate (and not one of two or three Gods Most High, nor one of two or three lesser gods of the same highest species existing within an overarching fundamental reality) wasn’t conscious of being God Most High but rather took it on faith.

He thus ended up implying somewhat tacitly that this unconsciousness was necessary for a(n ultimately only apparent) personal distinction between the Father and the Son, though that probably wasn’t his intention; but then he was very unclear in JVG why he so strongly insisted on Jesus not having a conscious experience of being God the way He had a conscious experience of being wet or hungry or, more importantly, of being human.

Frankly he can be kind of sloppy, especially when he’s trying to be cute.

But he does affirm the following positions in the article:

1.) There is only one God Most High, the self-existent YHWH, upon which all not-God reality depends for existence.

2.) Jesus is this YHWH (the one and only self-existent God Most high), and also fully human.

3.) Jesus and the Father are distinct persons, personally interacting with one another. (For example, “The death of God’s son can only reveal God’s love (as in, e.g., Rom 5:6-10) if the son is the personal expression of God himself. It will hardly do to say “I love you so much that I’m going to send someone else.””)

The modalism comes in with the impression that only Jesus’ humanity is in personal interaction with the Father. Wright used to loosely imply that God became multiple persons by the incarnation, or not even that! He may have tightened up on that since then (I read JVG almost 20 years ago, and this paper summarizes his Christology from JVG a few years later – unless they both came out in 98, but I recall JVG being 96). His methodology on this point was lax at best in JVG; this paper is only a summary, so that largely nixes a careful look at his methods. His apparent rejection that the NT authors (and Jesus by report) are speaking of the Son “as the 2nd Person of the Trinity” really just means they weren’t using such distinct categories of thought yet; what the concept means, he thinks the NT authors were trying to say. But it can look like he’s denying the person of the Son even exists apart from the Incarnation.

4.) The Spirit isn’t the Father and isn’t the Son though the Spirit is (also) the one and only God Most High. (Wright only says the Father sends the Spirit of the Son as well as sending the Son, but regards this as evidence of “incipient trinitarianism”, so doesn’t think the Spirit is always just another way of referring to the Son or to the Father.)

What ought to be of great interest is that NTW, who is an annihilationist and doesn’t actually believe God saves the world at last (certainly he was back then, still is so far as I know), goes very far in talking as though he believes the assurance, not only the scope, of God saving the whole world through (and as) Jesus Christ. That’s very normal, until he realizes what he’s saying and backs off. There’s a whole infamous early paper where he trolls the audience with the attempt (as in its title) to argue for Biblical Universalism, when he’s actually arguing against God successfully saving all sinners from sin, and only limiting the “universalism” to the scope of God’s intention and action to save. (I think we have that paper around here somewhere on site…)

Consequently, when he hits for trinitarian affirmation various texts which, as we know, have strong connections to successful universal salvation of sinners from sin, yet he doesn’t put his methods into practice to get those conclusions out of them, or says he believes them but demonstrably doesn’t only in a partial qualified sense; that in itself can lead to suspicion that he says one thing when apparently affirming them for incipient trinitarianism but really means something else, like maybe Jesus the human isn’t really the one and only divine YHWH of Isaiah 45, though YHWH might be operating in Jesus or something like that.

His moves on interpreting prophecy as only preterism, already fulfilled in 70, lend a similar suspicion over whether he actually believes what he seems to be saying he affirms when it comes to arguing for incipient trinitarianism. It doesn’t help that his methodology on this is so inconsistent than when faced with agreeing that the statements about fearing the one who has authority to destroy both body and soul in Gehenna cannot refer to the destruction of Jerusalem but to some afterlife situation, he tries to make the one to be feared to be Satan! – despite his own belief of annihilationism, where he doesn’t think Satan is who destroys the soul finally in Gehenna (much less has authority to do so).

That’s aside from the question of the proper interpretation of those two sayings in context; my point is only that he’s wildly inconsistent about his methods sometimes, and this leads naturally to an underlying suspicion about what he seems to be doing when affirming trinitarian theism. (A non-trinitarian might reply he’s being wildly inconsistent about his methods the other way around, and so shouldn’t be affirming incipient ortho-trin!)

So on one hand he writes, “Did [Jesus] think he was in any sense the embodiment of Israel’s God? I cannot myself see that an orthodox christology or atonement theology can give a negative answer to either of those questions without running into serious difficulties. Can you really be God incarnate and have no idea of it? But equally I cannot think that an orthodox christology, which takes Jesus’ humanity at least as seriously as Chalcedon did, can avoid asking how Jesus could think thoughts like that precisely as a second-Temple Jew?”

And then he writes (referring back to JVG), “Let me be clear, also, what I am not saying. I do not think Jesus “knew he was God” in the same sense that one knows one is tired or happy, male or female. He did not sit back and say to himself “Well I never! I’m the second person of the Trinity!” Rather, “as part of his human vocation grasped in faith, sustained in prayer, tested in confrontation, agonized over in further prayer and doubt, and implemented in action, he believed he had to do and be, for Israel and the world, that which according to scripture only YHWH himself could do and be.””

But that’s just caricature of the sort he explicitly asked us to avoid: as though Jesus knowing he was God in the same sense one knows one is tired or happy, male or female, must necessarily involve Jesus expressing that knowledge in categories of, with this explicit terminology, “the second person of the Trinity”. That’s a blatantly false dilemma, and NTW himself ought to have known and avoided it, VERY VERY OBVIOUSLY OUGHT TO HAVE AVOIDED IT BY HIS OWN EXPLICIT CRITIQUES AGAINST PEOPLE DOING THAT – which then naturally leads to the question of why he thought this was so important to try to feed readers on anyway? Such radical discontinuity in his own methodology seems to point to either underlying fundamental doubts about what he is trying to argue elsewhere after all, or else point to him playing some kind of language game (of a sort he roundly denounces when Crossan the Derridian deconstructionist does it), with the reader or maybe with the school of his peers, where he’s saying what they want to hear (yes yes of course I affirm all the beliefs about the Trinity) but really he’s meaning something else though what exactly is unclear – just certainly not really affirming trinitarian doctrines. And doesn’t he constantly mock “dogma” and “doctrine” and the whole work of post-Biblical theologians trying to address specific problems and difficulties in what to believe correctly about the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit?

Which naturally leads to an insoluable suspicion that though he may affirm points like those I numbered above, he really means something like a half-assed mix of modalism and unitarianism, where God Himself is doing things in and as Jesus but Jesus the human is a different person more-or-less along for the ride though cooperating as far as he can. And yet Wright denounces that idea, too (including in this paper)!

Well, that was umpteen years ago; and he took a lot of flack (including from me at the time, not that my opinion matters a whit ) for problems like this, and may have tightened up his methodology significantly since then. To be honest, after reading JVG, and watching his methods constantly imploding toward the end (keeping in mind this was several years before I became a Christian universalist, but even then I had problems with his occasional forays into annihilationism), I opted out of following him closely afterward until when-if-ever I heard and saw evidence he wasn’t playing self-refuting rhetorical games with the audience (and maybe himself) anymore. The New Testament and the People of God I truly admired, and still do. JVG and summary articles like this which he wrote at the time to defend himself? – I want to admire them, I have a lot of agreement with them, but…

I have found NTW to be tremendously helpful in dealing with a whole host of topics.

I think most of us here are well able to read large works - I’ve read over 2,000 pages of NTW myself, and there is more - and benefit GREATLY even though we might disagree with this or that particular. In fact, that is part of being a mature reader, yes?

If we as readers are hyper-x (x being a variable, a lens through which we judge everything) - then we read all things as they relate to x. But, the author is not writing with that focus. NTW has done an extremely valuable service by uncovering the method for understanding the worldview, intentions and aims of Jesus, as a first century Jew and during Second Temple Judaism. Just understanding those things opens up the parables and much much else in a way that has enlarged my grasp of scripture.

By all means pay attention to the learned Mr. Pratt, from whom we have all benefitted. But if the Bereans searched the scriptures to see if what Paul was saying was true, how much more do we all need to pay attention to what NTW himself wrote. You will not be disappointed.

I guess the way I read the article (and I was actually struggling to follow it), it sounded like NTW was saying that Jesus saw the signs and knew He had to be the One, and to do things that only YHWH could do, but that He lived his life as a human being. He emptied Himself of His divine power and attributes (if I’m remembering that scripture accurately), and that would say to me that He lived strictly AS a human being with the only difference being that He lived by the power and guidance and connection of the Holy Spirit, pouring into Him the words and desires of the Father. I know He had far more to do than just to be an example for us, but I think that was part of it. He lived as we live (yeah, He definitely did it a whole log better), and we have the same resources He had as a human being. It wasn’t “Einstein playing at preschool” as someone put it – can’t remember who. He really was a human being living by the Spirit; just like us.

Maybe I missed something though. It wouldn’t surprise me a bit since I was pretty much skating over the top trying desperately to keep hold of the strand of the narrative.

I think you followed it very well, and the things you mentioned are the things I got out of the piece as well.
The entire 5- volume ‘big’ work of NTW is under the rubric “Christian Origins and the question of God”.

Those are HUGE topics. (Even That is a big understatement). Reading the first 3 volumes in order has been a real education. Reading Tillich was an education too, but the two could not be further apart. Tillich is abstract, ontology-oriented, speculative. And brilliant. He knows his church history as well.
NTW is historical, analytical, theological. Not ‘speculative’ in the sense that Tillich is; though he is not shy of extrapolation once ALL the evidence is in.

His shorter books are excellent as well; whether or not you ‘agree’ with everything he writes, he does give reasons for his opinions, reasons that can be weighed and researched if one is of a mind to.

I have no problem at all with Jesus being fully conscious of being the second Person of the holy Trinity. That consciousness in no way lessens the fact that Jesus is fully man.

One problem I have with Wright (though I have learned an awful lot from him) is that he discounts the essential historicity of John’s Gospel. I think that John’s Gospel is the matrix in which the Synoptics are best situated and understood. To take only one example: Chronology. How long was Christ’s earthly ministry? John shows that it was two years (starting with a Passover, encompassing a second Passover, and ending with a third Passover). How many times was Christ in Jerusalem? Several. When did He cleanse the Temple? At the beginning of His ministry. When did Christ’s enemies decide to murder Him? Immediately following the resurrection of Lazarus.

Without John’s chronology, we’d be forgiven for thinking that Christ’s earthly ministry lasted only one year, that He visited Jerusalem only once, and that He cleansed the Temple at the end of His ministry.

John’s chronology and account of the cleansing of the Temple shine a light on the Olivet discourse that gives it an interpretation quite different than one might posit if he assumed that the Olivet discourse was given only a few days before Christ’s crucifixion.

Hi Jason,
I very much agree with your reservations regarding Wright.

I think this is illustrated in your quotation of Wright’s regarding someone who is Orthodox having to believe that Jesus knew He was God - and yet Wright then concluding the opposite - in spite of the Gospel records.

The point is that Wright does NOT see himself as Orthodox in this regard (he does not believe that Jesus was virgin born, God and man - hence He could not know He was God), but you got the impression from the way that he wrote that he was.

I find this is a common trait with Wright, it is very hard to clearly establish what he in fact believes (or not). He obscures things very very effectively by talking about other people’s opinions in a way that gives the impression that that is what he believes. That is a wrong assumption to make.

Similarly he uses the word “incarnation” with a different meaning to what most assume - also the word “god”

As an historian who only accepts reasonable, credible, “natural” explanations of (most) events, Wright has come to reject the “supernatural”, virgin-born, God-in-flesh, Jesus; the “Christ of faith”.
Instead, he now believes in a much more credible, historically acceptable “Christ of history”. A man who thought, but was not sure, that he had a vocation to pre-enact YHWH’s future destruction of the Temple - like other prophets in the OT; Ezekiel lying on his side or Jeremiah smashing his pot.
Wright misleadingly uses the words “incarnate” and “embody” to describe these symbolic pre-enactments.

When Wright calls Jesus “god” he means something very different to what the Church has believed and what you assume.

“After fifteen years of serious historical Jesus study, I still say the creed ex animo; but I now mean something very different by it, not least by the word ‘god’ itself. The portrait has been redrawn. At its heart we discover a human face, surrounded by a crown of thorns.”
“…What are we therefore saying about the earthly Jesus? In Jesus himself, I suggest we see the biblical portrait of YHWH come to life…
“…the Jesus I have discovered through historical research is certainly not … the Jesus I expected or wanted to find when I began this work nearly twenty years ago”
(Jesus and the Identity of God)

“I have found from time to time that the Jesus I knew by faith seemed less and less like the Jesus I was discovering by history” (The Meaning of Jesus, 25).

“My own understanding of Jesus, and hence of Christianity, has been deeply and profoundly affected by my historical study. … The closer I get to Jesus within his historical context, the more I find my previous ideas, and indeed my previous self, radically subverted.” (Wright “Who Was Jesus”)

Best Regards, Eric

Yeah, I haven’t exactly felt like expending my limited time and energy keeping up with NTW since writing that post, but I can’t say I’m surprised at the apparent arc he’s going.

But to be fair, as noted I still haven’t caught up with him, so maybe there’s some kind of defense to his game playing there.