Triune Relations

Wesley Hill argues in Paul and the Trinity that recent discussions of Pauline christology are locked into a misleading hierarchical framework in which the main question is whether the Christology is high or low. Hill wonders whether the category of “relationality,” especially “mutual relationality,” so prominent in recent Trinitarian theology and so much eclipsed in New Testament studies, might prove a more fruitful hermeneutical framework. His book is a detailed answer in the affirmative.

As he points out, when relationality is brought into the picture, “the question of whether Jesus/’the Son’ occupies a ‘high’ or ‘low’ position relative to ‘God’ is not likely to appear as an urgent one, since ‘God’ is never construed as identifiable apart from ‘the Son.’ And, vice versa, ‘the Son is never taken to denote an identity explicable apart from his relation to God” (44).

Hill’s book is not just a venture into Trinitarian theology, but into Pauline theology, and much of the book consists of detailed commentary that aims to show that Paul’s theology proper and his Christology are centrally concerned with relation. For Paul, God is defined in terms of His relation to and actions toward the Son; the Son is who he is in relation to the Father. Almost as if Paul were the first Trinitarian theologian.

He concludes from an examination of Romans 4 that “Paul used resurrection language . . . and a theological account of the Christ-event’s effects . . . in his description of the God in whom Abraham trusted. In other words, Paul specifies who God is, even prior to the resurrection of Jesus, by reference to Jesus. Paul identifies the God of Abraham by means of what he knows of that God through the Christ-event.” This is not merely a matter of affirming that the same God opened Sarah’s womb and also did something similar by raising Jesus. Hill puts the point more strongly: God was for Abraham the God who would raise Jesus” (61). Romans 8:11 confirms a similar point: “God is, from the time before the sending of the Son, the God whose identity is bound up with the Son. . . . God does not become what God was not, for Paul does not know a time when God was not already the God who would send his Son so that believers might be conformed to his image” (64).

From Paul’s use of Isaiah 45 in the “Christ hymn” of Philippians 2, Hill concludes that “Jesus is not . . . brought into a close relationship with YHWH. He is not simply given some of YHWH’s prerogatives. He is, rather, shown to belong within what makes YHWH unique; he is shown to be the rightful bearer of the divine name.” Quoting David Yeago, he conclueds that “the relationship between YHWH and Jesus . .  . must always have been intrinsic to YHWH’s identity” (95-6).