Origen explained why the disposition of the agent is essential to the virtuous life. It is true, he says, that “if someone is just he pursues justice.” But it does not follow that “if someone is just he pursues justice.” For one must “pursue justice justly” [LXX of Deut 16:20]. Origen explains that the adverb is essential for it is possible to pursue justice unjustly. Some persons do things that are good, giving to the poor for example, but only to be praised [or to stay in political power!]. They act out of vanity, not because they have the “disposition of justice.” Virtue required a conversion of the affections.

As Orgien’s disciple Gregory described the nature of things, “The virtues are great and lofty, and can only be attained by someone in whom God has breathed his power.”

Robert Louis Wilken, The Spirit of Early Christian Thought, 271 (emph. added).

Although [Christian] thinking about the moral life moved within a conceptual framework inherited from Greek and Latin moralists, Christian thinkers redefined the goal by making fellowship with the living God the end, revised the beginning by introducing the biblical teaching that we are made in the image of God, and complicated the middle with talk of the intractability and inevitability of sin.

Robert Louis Wilken, The Spirit of Early Christian Thought, 275

By the time the creeds were written in the 3rd century, what had happened to the conception of the kingdom of God? The Nicene Creed mentions it once, but only in reference to our life beyond the borders of this life, in heaven: ‘Thy kingdom is an everlasting kingdom.’ The Apostle’s Creed and the Athanasian Creed don’t mention it at all.

The three great historic creeds summing up Christian doctrine, mention once what Jesus mentioned a hundred times. Something had dropped out. A vital, vital thing had dropped out. A crippled Christianity went across Europe, leaving a crippled result….A vacuum was left in the soul of Western civilization.

E. Stanley Jones, writing in Good News Magazine in 1970. Jones is not anti-creed, but very pro-kingdom and concerned with the implications for Christian conception of discipleship, the Bible, and salvation.

However I think the concern is a bit overstated and perhaps is more appropriately aimed at later eras, after the creed (N.B. I haven’t seen the context of this statement by Jones). The kingdom is inseparable from the resurrection and enthronement of Jesus, forgiveness of rebels, cross as victory over death sin and hades, the radical fellowship of the saints, future resurrection, and the pouring out of the Spirit as the sign that the old had begun to pass, and the new was invading. It is also inseparable from the status of Jesus as royal Son of God, Lord, and future Judge.

Viewed from this perspective, the Apostle’s Creed is in fact “kingdom-rich.” In the second section (person and work of Jesus) it describes the coming of the kingdom (gospel), and the third section describes the reality of the kingdom in the present and in the future (the blast zone of the gospel?).

Moreover, the language of “kingdom of God” has many near synonyms, so that one doesn’t have to use that label. Note its near-absence in John, even though many related concepts such as everlasting life and the gift of the Spirit (which, like the kingdom, are not entirely limited to the future) appear. Unfortunately, for many Christians, these related ideas (such as rebirth and everlasting life) do not evoke the rich biblical theology we often associate with the kingdom of God. But they should! And it’s not the Creed’s fault if they do not.

And that is what killed the kingdom: not creeds, but the loss of biblical theology and the story of salvation. Only when we forget that the creeds rely on the Scriptural story (and like Calvin’s Institutes, are meant to direct us back to the Word and its plot) do we begin to lose the depth of the imperial reign of God and humanity.

In large part this reaction is probably a legacy of my seminary education (and, no doubt, my own, peculiar, contrarian nature). I’m grateful for many things from my time at Oak Hill, but perhaps the most important ongoing influence was the importance placed on reading primary texts. I think in particular of the daunting OT exam (covering 1 Kings-Malachi), which contained questions like (at this distance, I paraphrase!), “Compare and contrast the eschatological vision of Ezekiel with that of Isaiah,” and in which we weren’t allowed a Bible; the reasoning being that it would compel us to read that part of the OT thoroughly before entering the exam room (OT professors take note – it was a great educational strategy). Or the church history essays I wrote, in which it was made clear to us that engaging seriously with the writings of C19 liberal theologians, e.g., would gain us far better marks than footnoting summaries of their teachings drawn from elsewhere, or where I wrote on Calvin’s doctrine of the Lord’s Supper without citing a single secondary source in my bibliography or footnotes (I don’t recommend this!), and got the feedback: “Strengths: Lots of lovely primary texts”. As a result, it’s instinctive to me that, if I want to know what Augustine taught about the Trinity, I should jolly well read Augustine. It also gave me the confidence that on the whole (with judicious help from good secondary sources where necessary) this is doable, and is far more fruitful and enjoyable.

None of this is to deny the value of secondary literature. I’d be poorer for not having read Cranfield, Moo and Wright on Romans; or Lewis Ayres’s Nicaea and Its Legacy; or Richard Muller’s stellar work on Reformation and Post-Reformation dogmatics; or Gilles Emery on Aquinas’s trinitarian theology. These scholars, who have devoted decades to studying their subjects and are fine readers of texts, are not only able to summarise a text’s meaning, or untangle a particularly knotty argument, or point one in the direction of further sources; they are also able to situate the text in its historical, social, and linguistic context in a way I never could because I lack the skills and expertise. Nevertheless, I’m convinced that nothing beats repeated, careful reading of Romans itself, or Augustine and the Cappodocians, or the Reformed confessions, or Aquinas. And if I were forced to choose one or the other, I’d go primary every time.

Going primary is certainly slower. It takes time to get used to a new thinker and to begin to inhabit their world. Potted summaries would be easier to absorb. But they’re also thinner, less demanding, less rewarding. There’s a reason that Plato’s writings, and those of Athanasius, and Edwards, and Barth are classics. And nothing stretches and expands a small mind so much as thoughtful, albeit sometimes bemused and foggy, contact with a great one.

So, I for one am mostly likely to be found studiously ignoring lists of books written in the past few years, and brewing myself a strong coffee or pouring a glass of wine, and settling back with an old book in the hope of making a new friendship or renewing an old one.

*All of this in addition to my almost comically violent dislike of lists laying guilt trips on pastors by telling them that here is yet another list of books they positively have to read. Why not call these lists, “Ten books that might possibly benefit some pastors if they don’t already have more than enough to read to last them a couple of lifetimes, not to mention their innumerable other pastoral responsibilities”?

Augustine’s On the Trinity (De Trinitate) is one of the masterpieces of church history, and a model for ecclesial theology. Few works are as demanding of their readers, as unrelenting in exegesis and analysis, and yet also as pastoral in intention.

On the Trinity requires a lot of intellectual heavy-lifting. Augustine warns at the start that, ‘nowhere…is the search more laborious’ than in consideration of the unity of the Father, Son, and Spirit (I.5), and at the end he says he has ‘argued much and toiled much’ (15.51). The difficulty is increased by the complexity of the structure and the frequency, length, and density of Augustine’s often fascinating but not always relevant digressions.

However, this is no mere intellectual exercise. Error is ‘dangerous’; Augustine is concerned to refute the homoians, who argued that the Son is of like nature (homoiousios), but not of the same nature (homoousios) with the Father (e.g., Barnes 1991; Williams 1991).

Nevertheless, neither intellectual exercise nor ecclesiastical polemics is the ultimate goal of the treatise. Augustine is seeking a reward: ‘nowhere else is a mistake more dangerous, or the search more arduous, or discovery more advantageous.’ (I.6) That reward is the face of God.

In his translator’s introduction, Edmund Hill notes that at three key moments in the work, Augustine quotes Psalm 105:3f: ‘Let their hearts rejoice who seek the Lord; seek the Lord and be strengthened; seek his face always.’ (1.5, as he invites us on the journey with him; 9.1 as he turns from Scriptural exegesis to rational analysis of the image of God; 15.2, as he prepares to sum up his achievements (Augustine 1991: 21). He also alludes to this verse as he concludes in prayer (15.51)).

Augustine is inviting his readers to join him on a quest: ‘let us set out along Charity Street together, making for him of whom it is said, Seek his face always (Ps 105:4).’ (I.6) This is pilgrim theology and pastoral theology. Thus, although it was not written as a sequel to his Confessions, in some ways that is how it functions. Although Bishop Augustine’s heart has found its rest in God, he does not yet see him face to face, and so his restful heart remains restless, his faith always seeking deeper understanding.

This is an important, though not the only, function of the explorations of the possibility of Trinitarian analogies in the divine image in humans in books VIII-XIV, particularly in books 12-14 where Augustine expounds the image in creation, sin, and redemption. As Rowan Williams has observed (pace some of the critics of Augustine’s use of the triad of memory, understanding, and will), for Augustine, ‘we cannot look at a detached human self as an object in itself and say, “God is rather like that.”‘ (Williams 1999: 850). Indeed, as he concludes, Augustine says that we have been looking at God in a mirror, seeing darkly (in Bk 15, he repeated cites 1 Cor 13:12). There is an ‘enormous difference’ between human knowledge understanding and will and God’s (15.12), and so despite the likeness between God and his image, ‘who can adequately express how great the unlikeness is?’ (15.21) Thus, ‘this image, made by the trinity and altered for the worse by its own fault, is not so to be compared to that trinity that it is reckoned similar to it in every respect. Rather, he should note how great the dissimilarity is in whatever similarity there may be.’ (15.39).

In this lengthy exercise, Augustine has been taking the soul on a journey towards true knowledge of God. In what Williams calls ‘a crucial moment in the argument’, in Book 12.16, Augustine notes that, in Williams’ words, ‘the image of God itself cannot lie in the mind relating to the things of this world, or even to itself as a self-contained process (which in any case it never is). To image God is to reflect God relating to God. Thus, while there are vestiges and likenesses in the triadic structure of the mind, it is only when the mind is turned Godward that the image in the strict sense is discernible’ (1999: 849).

To read On the Trinity can be a baffling and frustrating experience, as one seeks to follow the often arcane twists and turns of Augustine’s arguments. But it is also always to be in the company of one of history’s greatest minds and most passionate lovers as he urges us to follow him, sometimes breathlessly, sometimes stumblingly, along Charity Street towards the face of the Triune God who in the gospel has sought us out and enabled us by faith to seek him.

Michel R. Barnes, ‘Exegesis and Polemic in Augustine’s De Trinitate I’, Augustinian Studies 30 (1999): 43-52.

Rowan Williams, ‘De Trinitate‘ in Allan D. Fitzgerald, ed., Augustine Through the Ages: An Encyclopedia (Grand Rapids, Eerdmans, 1999): 845-51.

Augustine, On the Trinity, The Works of Saint Augustine: A Translation for the 21st Century, trans Edmund Hill (Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 1991).

Luther makes it clear that the righteousness which man must seek is the iustitia alina Christi, the alien righteousness of Christ, which is always extra nos.

For Augustine, justifying righteousness becomes part of man’s being; for Luther, it merely covers him, as a cloak–man is righteous extrinsically, but a sinner intrinsically, simul iustus et peccator.  Both Luther and Augustine are agreed that the source of justifying righteousness is God–but they are in fundamental disagreement on the question of the subsequent location of that righteousness.

Thus both Luther and Augustine are in agreement that justification involves the non-imputation of sin–but Augustine has no need for the concept of the imputation of righteousness, for man actually possesses righteousness, being made righteous in the process of justification.  The concept of iustitia Christi aliena has no Augustinian parallel.

Calvin likewise departs from Augustine; they agree on Christ as the source of righteousness, but for Augustine, “that righteousness nevertheless resides within the believer, and is located within him.”

“Melanchthon appears quite unaware of the fact that his interpretation of the Pauline concept of imputed righteousness, as expressed in his doctrine of forensic justification, is itself an innovation, in that it is not merely absent from the writings of the patristic era (including those of Augustine), but is actually excluded by those writings (especially those of Augustine).”

Alister McGrath, “Forerunners of the Reformation?  A Critical Examination of the Doctrines of Justification,” Harvard Theological Review 75 (1982) 219-42 [232 and 235 cited, emphasis original, para. breaks added].

This is more reasonable, even  if out of step with their earlier comments. But what the right hand gives, the left hand takes away. Bradley and Muller go on to state that a historian should not render judgment on the matter studied. “As a historian, one makes no judgment about the rightness or wrongness of the person’s teaching on an absolute scale. . . the student should not ask whether or not Arminius is ultimately doctrinal right or wrong.” And again, “One’s own writing should not register one’s own theological opinion, pro or con.”

Here I must voice strong disagreement. The entire point of historical studies as done by Christian theologians and historians is precisely to render theological judgment in service to the Church. The conscious divorce between systematic theology and historical studies is the curse of academic theology. To be sure, historians—christian or non—must be careful to do the hard work of finding out what was really going on in the original context; we can’t appropriate what we haven’t accurately understood. But to suggest that Christian historians shouldn’t appropriate the theological reflection of our tradition is significantly unhelpful.

I am reminded here of a recent exchange in JETS between two Calvin scholars on the role of “union with Christ” in Calvin’s soteriology. Thomas Wenger argues for a more traditional, forensic reading of Calvin and accuses Marcus Johnson of allowing his theological agenda to carry undue weight. Wegner writes, “It seems that Johnson has a vested interest to ground his existing theological views in Calvin, and in then grounding Calvin in Paul. . . My arguments have been decidedly historical, and in the original article I do not make a single theological claim.”

Pause here. What was the point of Wegner’s article then? With all due respect to Dr. Wegner (who is a pastor, ironically),  I don’t really care what Calvin thought about anything unless it can be demonstrated that Calvin’s thought has relevance to the Church as she exists today. Wegner’s article is excellent. Indeed I think his read on Calvin is more accurate than Johnson’s  (and I even agree theologically with Johnson!). But the superiority of Wegner’s article is not because he refuses to render theological judgment. If anything, this is a significant weakness of the article. Who is he writing this for, anyway? Apparently not the church, whose very life-blood runs red with theological judgments.

Johnson has not misread Calvin because Johnson has a vested interest in the subject matter. No doubt Wegner has a vested interest as well. No. Johnson has misread Calvin because he misread Calvin.

Bradley and Muller are correct. “It is…exceedingly unlikely that badly done history can be the basis of well-done theology.” Agreed. But  “well-done theology” is the ultimate telos of good history. Historical analysis that doesn’t terminate in theological assertions and a prophetic call to mission is like a “house” with no framing and only a foundation. Good as far as it goes, but useless in and of itself.