Scripture and Trinitarian Theology: David Yeago's Argument

By distinguishing between judgments and concepts, we can discern how biblical judgments about God and Christ are the same as the judgments made at Nicaea.

I recently argued that what marks Christians off from others is their worship of the triune God: Father, Son, and Spirit. Thus, to deny the Trinity would be tantamount to being outside of any notion of traditional Christianity.

The responses to my claim varied. Some said that the Nicene Creed represents a Greek philosophical system, while the Bible itself does not teach the doctrine of the Trinity. The Trinity, it is claimed, is a philosophical system that is not found in the Bible. The concept of the Trinity and of Christ being the eternal Son of the Father, consubstantial with him, to them felt out of bounds.

By distinguishing between judgments and concepts, we can discern how biblical judgments about God and Christ are the same as the judgments made at Nicaea.

That assumption is not uncommon in biblical scholarship. Since the term homoousia does not occur in the Bible and appears in a later century than when the New Testament was written, many reason that the Bible does not share the conviction of Nicea.

I suspect many that hold to the doctrine of the Trinity may partially agree, not being able to discover how something like the Father being homoousia with the Son could be, in fact, biblical when the word itself does not appear in Scripture.

However, David Yeago made a compelling case for the relationship between Scripture and doctrine in his 1994 article "The New Testament and the Nicene Dogma," arguing that classical doctrines emerge from Scripture itself rather than being imposed upon it:

"No theory of the development of doctrine which attempts to save the classical doctrines without accounting for the unanimous conviction of the Christian tradition that they are the teaching of Scripture can overcome the marginalization of the doctrines which is so evident in the contemporary Western church and theology." (153)

Thus, Yeago argues, "The Nicene homoousion is neither imposed on the New Testament texts nor distantly deduced from them, but rather describes a pattern of judgments present in the texts, in the texture of scriptural discourse concerning Jesus and the God of Israel" (153).

Patterns of Implicit and Explicit Judgments

Yeago identifies two reference points in the New Testament for its view of God and Christ: early Christian devotion and worship of Christ and the scriptures of Israel (153, 156).

One important biblical passage that can show how these two reference points help to make sense of the doctrine of the Trinity is Philippians 2:5–11:

"Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father."

Philippians 2:9–11 both points to early devotion to Christ and cites the Old Testament, in particular, Isaiah 45:21–24. This citation identifies Jesus with God, Yahweh.

"21 Declare and present your case; let them take counsel together! Who told this long ago? Who declared it of old? Was it not I, the Lord? And there is no other god besides me, a righteous God and a Savior; there is none besides me. 22 "Turn to me and be saved, all the ends of the earth! For I am God, and there is no other. 23 By myself I have sworn; from my mouth has gone out in righteousness a word that shall not return: 'To me every knee shall bow, every tongue shall swear allegiance.' 24 "Only in the Lord, it shall be said of me, are righteousness and strength; to him shall come and be ashamed all who were incensed against him. 25 In the Lord all the offspring of Israel shall be justified and shall glory" (Isa 45:21–25).

Here, we can see that Jesus Christ is the Lord that Isaiah speaks of, that is, the God of Israel. And yet Christ is just that Lord to the glory of God the Father. In Yeago's words, "God has so utterly identified himself with Jesus, and Jesus has been so inextricably associated with God, that it is not possible to turn to the God of Israel without at the same time turning to Jesus" (155).

A bit later, Yeago argues:

"It is perfectly consistent with this that the early communities came to speak by preference of the God of Israel as Jesus' Father and of Jesus as God's unique Son, in a relationship definitive for the identity of each. The point of this language, as St. Athanasius saw, is that each title asserts an identity to which relationship is intrinsic. One can be 'Father' only by virtue of a relationship to another, to some particular offspring. Likewise, one can be 'Son' only by virtue of a relationship to another, to some particular progenitor. When YHWH and Jesus are identified as Father and Son, their mutual relationship is inscribed constitutively into the identity of each. The language of Father and Son precisely articulates the apprehension of the relation of YHWH and Jesus implicit in the worship of the ekklesia." (155–6)

The point here is that passages like Philippians 2 identify Jesus as not other than the LORD God as described in Isaiah 45. Yeago states:

"If relationship to Jesus of Nazareth is intrinsic to the identity of YHWH, if Jesus is not 'other' than YHWH in the sense of Isaiah 45, then it is impossible to fix any moment as the moment when that relationship began." (157)

Yeago continues:

"For that moment would then be the moment when the creature Jesus became divine. If 'there was when he was not' (Arianism) or if any moment can be identified as the beginning of his relationship with YHWH (Adoptionism), then his association with YHWH would amount to the enthronement of a 'second god' alongside the Lord God of Israel. And we are forbidden to think that by the deepest logic of Israel's faith: there is only one God, YHWH, incomparable and unique." (157)

He eventually makes the key conclusion:

"The affirmation that this God has so radically identified himself with Jesus can rhyme with Israel's confession of the singularity and incomparability of God if and only if their relationship is eternal. There is only one God, YHWH, and relationship to Jesus of Nazareth is somehow intrinsic to this God's identity from everlasting. There is only one God, but the one God is never without his only-begotten Son." (157)

Judgments and Concepts

The question that Yeago wants to answer is whether or not Paul's language of the Son being in "the form of God" and having "equality with God" (Phil 2:6) means the same thing as homoousia in the Nicene Creed. Here, Yeago distinguishes the concepts that we use to name our judgments about truth.

Concepts like homoousia and equality with God derive from human language in all its contingency. But they are concepts that give words to judgments about God and Christ. Judgments with concepts exist to make affirmations or denials in discourse. That is a complicated way of saying that words don't exist in a vacuum.

We can say that someone“speaks winsomely,” and another person may say that this same person has "a way with words." Those different phrases or concepts make the same or similar judgments.

Thus, Yeago will argue "That the judgment about Jesus and God made in the Nicene Creed—the judgment that they are 'of one substance' or 'one reality'—is indeed 'the same,' in a basically ordinary and unmysterious way, as that made in a New Testament text such as Philippians 2:6ff" (160).

It is worth quoting Yeago in full here:

“1. The logical subjects in each case are identical: the crucified and exalted kurios Jesus of Nazareth and the God of Israel. The Creed employs narrative markers to secure the identity of the 'Jesus' it talks about with the one to whom the New Testament bears witness and likewise makes clear that it is the specific God of Israel to which it makes reference; no other putative deity could be meant by 'one God … ruler of all, maker of heaven and earth.'

2. Each text predicates of these two subjects the most intimate possible bond, using the strongest terms available within the conceptual idiom of each. Homoousion to patri and the complex of terms employed in the Philippians text—en morphe theou, 'equal to God,' 'name above every name,' and the whole set of associations arising from the evocation of Isaiah 45—are in this respect logically equivalent, playing the same role within their respective contexts, and to that extent of the same type, despite their differences in historical background.

3. The point of the two affirmations is substantially the same: to articulate the judgments implicit in distinctive Christian proclamation and practices of worship (as well as the Christian mission to the nations).

Thus, Philippians 2:6ff. and the Nicene homoousion meet all our ordinary criteria of 'sameness.' Despite the conventional wisdom of the critics, it is not at all odd or naive to claim that they 'say the same thing' about Jesus and the Father." (160)

What Yeago is getting at is if we study all the concepts in the Bible and church history, thinking through the various things that concepts like equality, form of God, homoousia could mean, then we would have a giant set of possibilities. Historical study of concepts simply tells us what concepts could mean.

But what one has to do is pay close attention to what judgments texts make about God and Christ, what sort of affirmations and denials are being made. And at that point, one can see if the judgments that concepts name signify some overlap or mean the same thing.

If Paul says the Son existed in the form of God and had equality with God in ways limited by Isaiah 45, can we not say that Paul and Nicaea are saying almost the same thing? Yeago thinks so, for the reasons already given.

Conclusion

I conclude by once again quoting Yeago:

"The fathers, scholastics, and reformers had such reasons: they believed that when we conform our thinking to the pattern of judgments embedded in the prophetic and apostolic Scriptures, our understanding is illumined by a divine light (Ps. 36:9), and so we come to share the nous Christou, the mind of Christ (1 Cor. 2:16)." (163)