Steve Stanley’s Reviews > Biblical Reasoning: Christological and Trinitarian Rules for Exegesis > Status Update

As the transcendent and immutable God, he became what we are without ceasing to be what he is. So we must acknowledge that the one Son who is homoousios with the Father and the Spirit in his divinity became also homoousios with us in his humanity. And this was for our sake, that we might be adopted into the life he eternally enjoys with the Father and the Holy Spirit.

Doctrine is therefore chiefly divine teaching: being taught by God, about God, to lead us to God. Discourse about God—theology—is thus poorly conceived if it is divorced from the presence and activity of the God who discourses about himself. . . . Beholding Christ by faith requires that we hear and obey Christ’s teaching. In order to understand Christ’s teaching, we must reason both exegetically and dogmatically.

Exegesis is not merely the analysis of historical background and cultural encyclopedia, the situations of writer and recipients, word meanings, grammar, flow of thought, intracanonical connections, and the unfolding of redemptive history. Exegesis is also, inescapably, reasoning about the subject matter of the text: God and all things in relation to God

By calling Christ “the Lord of glory [1 Cor 2:8]," Paul identifies him as the one who possesses the unique, unshareable divine glory (cf. Isa 48:11). And Paul asserts that this divinely glorious Christ was crucified. Paul predicates an inescapably human fate of the divine Lord. Paradox? Yes. Contradiction? No. Why? Because it was precisely by becoming incarnate that the Lord of glory became crucifiable.

The Spirit sent into our hearts enables us to call God now what the Son has always called him: Abba! Father! By sending his Son and Spirit, the Father did not merely reveal the intradivine fellowship—he extended it to include us [Gal 4:4-7].

Hence, the warrant for scriptural statements that imply any inequality between the Father and the Son is not the bare fact that the Son was sent but the form of a servant the Son took to himself in the sending. After all, the sending of the Spirit does not imply any inequality or inferiority on the Spirit’s part.

Scripture sometimes attributes to only one divine person a perfection, action, or name common to all three, because of some contextual fit or analogy between the common attribute and the divine person in question. Read such passages in a way that does not compromise the Trinity’s oneness and equality.

The external works of the Trinity are indivisibly one, just as God is one. Whenever Scripture mentions only one or two divine persons, understand that all three are equally present and active, undertaking the same actions in ways that imply their relations to one another. In this way, learn to count persons rather than actions.

The one true and living God is eternally Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, distinct in their relations to one another and the same in substance, power, and glory.

“We worship one God in the Trinity, and the Trinity in Unity; without confusing the persons or separating the substance,” for which reason we understand that the Father is glorious, the Son is glorious, and the Spirit is glorious; yet there are not three glories but one glory. . . . So when we perceive the glory of the crucified Christ, we perceive the glory of God—full stop—which is our hope and joy. (92-93)