One of the sentiments and occasional explicit critique of developed theological reflection on the Trinity has to do with God’s ineffability, infinity, or excessiveness. Since God is infinitely more than we can apprehend or conceptually situate, the reasoning goes, we should not work to develop extensive theologies about the nature of God’s being and personhood. To do so is to fail to respect God’s transcendence and inexhaustible plenitude.
The big problem with this sort of false theological humility is how it gets things backwards. It assumes that since God’s being is “exceedingly abundantly beyond all the we could ask or think” that therefore our attempts to understand it are vain and potentially idolatrous. What an awareness of God’s excessiveness and plenitude should do however, is not discourage us from attempting to know God, but rather drive us to that task. Because God is inexhaustibly excessive and infinitely rich in being, we should strive all the more to know and learn and speak about God.
God’s infinitude does not signify a lack of our ability to be brought into knowledge of God, or make God unspeakable. It should not be construed as a sort of deferral, but rather as an overabundant arrival that cannot be exhausted. It is not that God is so ineffable that we cannot speak of God, rather God is so utterly excessive in his self-giving that we cannot ever finish saying enough about God. This is why theology must be understood as doxology. God’s excessiveness means that we must never stop saying things about God’s being, exploring his unveiled reality, because it is only in this way that we come to participate in God’s life, to experience salvation.
In short, God’s excessiveness, his incomprehensibility should not discourage our theological reflections and statements about God. Rather it demands that we never ever stop such exploration and that we understand that task as the vocation of joyful doxology.
Theological Commentary: A Few Thoughts
2. Theological commentary is theological. It is a practice of reading and interacting with Scripture from a distinctly Christian perspective that is fundamentally informed by Christian commitments to the triune God and the centrality of Jesus Christ.
3. Theological commentary is part of the church’s missional task. Commenting on Scripture is a way of holding Scripture “open” before oneself and the church as a whole, calling us into the story told therein. It is a way of situating ourselves within the story of God’s own trinitarian drama of salvation. As such theological commentary is a practice of attempting to find our place within God’s missional calling on his people.
4. Theological commentary is a discipline, the aim of which is to facilitate our own sanctification and transformation. There are many aims and ends of commenting on Scripture, but the immediate aim of theological commentary is to encounter the Word of God in the text of Scripture and in that encounter to be caught up more deeply into the communio that is the triune life of God.
5. Theological commentary is ecclesial in shape and practice. Commenting on Scripture theologically means doing so within the context of the church’s interpretive tradition and history. It likewise means doing so within the immediate communal setting of the local church which serves as the primary locus of testing and exploring claims and questions about Scripture.
6. Theological commentary is an offering to the church for consideration, dissection, correction, and edification. It is to be done in the mode of gifting, not in the mode of confrontation. Unlike the role of the preacher who is called to confront the church with the Word of God, theological commentary is a humble attempt to engage with the Word of God, not knowing how such engagement will turn out. It is prior to and grounds the practice of proclamation.
7. Theological commentary is not done rightly unless done in the context of doxology and prayer. The end of theological commentary is an ever-deepening union with the triune God through Christ. Such communion only occurs through being drawn, by the Spirit of Christ, into God’s life through the posture of worship.
8. Theological commentary is never finished in any sense whatsoever. In that Scripture participates in God’s economy of revelation and reconciliation, there is a plenitude to Scripture that precludes ever having come to the end of meditating on any and all of it. The depth of riches contained in Scripture can never be exhausted thought theological commentary or any other form of exegetical engagement with Scripture. Rather the Scriptures are penultimately inexhaustible, a place of living and dwelling that will never be fully explored prior to the consummation of all things in God.