Placher expertly weaves insights on divine transcendence from Continental philosophy, the polarity in Trinitarian thinking reflected by Karl Barth (an Augustinian, psychological model of the Trinity) and Jürgen Moltmann (a social view of the trinity), the priority of the historical Jesus from Wolfhart Pannenburg, and Hans Frei’s history-like realistic reading of the Gospel narratives. The end result is an engaging and highly compelling entrance to both Trinitarian scholarship and a method of thinking about God that offers great possibilities for both the scholar and those reflecting devotionally on God’s nature.
In that sense, you might consider it theology for the rest of us. As much as I would like everyone to pick up Jürgen Moltmann’s Trinity and the Kingdom or Thomas F. Torrance’s The Christian Doctrine of God, I can’t do it. It’s asking too much. How can one read Moltmann without knowing the relevant issues of divine simplicity verses complexity, unity verses trinity, present verses future kingdom, or monotheism verses pan(en)theism? How can one read Torrance without at least a passing familiarity with Patristic literature and its relevant Trinitarian terminology (ousia, hypostases, personae, perichoresis) and heresies (subordination, monarchism, modalism, etc., etc., etc.)?
Enter William C. Placher’s The Triune God: An Essay in Postliberal Theology. It’s been a long since I’ve found a work of theology such an aesthetic delight to read. Placher writes with both humor and accessibility without sacrificing depth and penetrating insight. Due to its technical nature much of theological writing’s obscurity leads to a huddle where one expert talks to another. The end result is that the theologian in practice divorces himself from the Church she is called to serve.
I do not know anyone who sat in Placher’s classroom. I’d like to believe that he was the best sort of professor: the type who uses his considerable intellect and passion to guide, provoke, stir, and stimulate his students into thinking theologically in the most constructive of manners possible.
Chapter One: The Unknowable God
The Triune God is not a typical systematic treatise in the Trinity. Traditional systematic texts traditionally follow the three articles of the Apostles/Nicene Creed and unpack the nature of the person and work of the three persons. Thus, chapter one, one would expect, would cover such topics as creation, divine perfections, etc.
Placher doesn’t do this. Instead he treats God in abstract. The God he calls unknowable.
For any doctrine or talk of God to be truthful, it must stem from God’s own self-revelation. As such, faithful theological discourse stands between secularism and idolatry. In secularity, God-talk is denied all together. In idolatry, our projections of God (Descartes and Locke) replace the self-revelation of God with a “god” constructed in our image. As such, there is constant danger of saying too little (secularization) or too much (idolatry).
Between the poles of secularism and idolatry there have been voices that affirm both the possibility of speaking positively of God’s self-revelation as well as respecting the mystery that is God. God would not be God is we could label and define. God’s ultimate reality always remains just beyond our elusive grasp. And it is this last point that derives the bulk of the chapter. In the apophatic tradition represented by unorthodox selections such as Aquinas and Anselm and Kierkegaard, Levinas, and Wittgenstein, Placher sees a strong corrective and limit to the over-confidence in modern theological discourse—Christian or otherwise.
Be that as it may, one can get to God because God has come to us in Jesus Christ.
Chapter Two: The Word Made Flesh
After opening with the God in abstract (my term) or the unknowable God (his term), Placher moves to the person of Jesus Christ. He affirms unequivocally that “we do not need to try to find our way to God, for in Jesus Christ God has come to us.” Here Placher makes a surprising turn. One might expect him to begin with the deity of the Son and then moving to his humanity. Placher does no such thing. Instead, following the likes of Pannenberg, he moves from the humanity of the Son to His deity. Placher implies two reasons for this 1) it follows the experience of the Early Church and 2) it better reflects the history-like nature of the Gospel narratives.
If this move was curious, his next move is more so: Placher spends most of the chapter expounding a Biblical hermeneutic. Placher unabashedly follows Karl Barth through Hans Frei in this regard. The gospels (and although he doesn’t mention it specifically, he means any narrative portion of the Bible) are “history-like witnesses to truths both historical and transcendent.”
The term “history-like” is totally dependent on the work of Hans Frei. By “history-like” he means the gospels are not works of fiction. They are not myths. They are not works of modern history. The gospels are truthful and purposefully reconstructed narratives that covey the person Jesus was. As a literary genre, the gospel writers demand out world to enter into theirs. It is a faulty hermeneutic to ask how there world is like ours? Instead, we find our story in the world of Biblical narrative.
The term “witness” is one near and dear to Barth’s heart. They are testimonies to events that transformed their lives. These events are both historical (i.e. the “history-like” character of the gospels) and transcendent (e.g. the incarnation, Jesus Christ’s redemptive death.)
By reading in the gospels in this manner Placher is able to briefly sketch a positive picture of the person and work of Jesus that stands in continuity with historical understandings of him and do so in a manner that is consistent with the literary quality of the text itself.
Here one might ask, “If Placher’s preliminary findings are consistent with historical presentations why is a new kind of hermeneutic needed?” While familiarity with Frei is helpful here (especially his Eclipse of the Biblical Narrative) modern readings of the Bible have been split between an a-historical ostensive reading where the God who appears in flesh, is crucified, and was raised is mytho-poetic garb for deeper transcendent truths and a propositional flat reading the severs Biblical meaning from it’s literary form and is both subject to and dependent on the historical verification and reconstructions of our historians. In the last two hundred years, both positions have consistently eroded as compelling positions to hold.
Chapter Three: The Epistemology of the Spirit
The chapter on the Holy Spirit is probably the most straightforward of the book. If the Biblical hermeneutic offered in chapter two was full of fresh vitality, the chapter on the Holy Spirit is ripe with pleasant familiarity. Placher begins with Spirit and scripture before moving onto the Holy Spirit in the three representative and constructive theologians: John Calvin, Jonathan Edwards, and Karl Barth. While this is certainly a responsible structure, it felt a bit stale after the first two chapters. That being said, Placher should be commended for his attempt to mediate an Augustinian view of the Spirit as the bond of love between the Father and the Son and the Eastern view which speaks of the Spirit proceeding from the Father.
Chapter Four: The Three are One
Far and away the most complex of the book, here Placher tackles the great questions of Trinitarian discourse that have dominated discussion for the better part of 1800 years. These are the questions of God’s threeness verses oneness. Questions of being, essence, substance, and personhood. It is questions of mutual indwelling, space, forms, and appearances.
I’ve yet to encounter a writer who takes these complexities and makes them simple to understand. But, and I think Placher would make this same point, if it’s simple and something we can grasp on our own perhaps it isn’t God but a projection of God. Still, Placher lays out the issues admirably and lays mediating positions that both affirm the reality of God as the Three who are One.
Criticism
First, Placher forgoes traditional topics (creation, soteriology, etc.) of systematic reckonings of the Trinity. This isn’t as big as a problem as it first seems. For starters, the subtitle of the book is instructive. This isn’t so much Placher’s Summa as it is An Essay in Postliberal Theology. As such it addresses methodological concerns than more than their results. For some this is a major problem. One of the chief criticisms of the nebulous school of Postliberal theology is that it is all hermeneutic and nothing else. It is a plastic Easter egg with no prize in the belly. From my perspective this misses the point of Postliberal theology. If anything Placher and his contemporaries respect their students enough to believe they will pick up their work and carry it into new places. As such Placher doesn’t so much bludgeon the reader with a Placherian Summa as invite the reader into a new world and a new hermeneutic. The reader is invited to question seriously what a history-like narrative reading of the Gospels mean for questions of Kingdom theology, personal and social salvation, or even pastoral theology. In this regard Placher is an impetus for moving back to the world of the Bible and is a catalyst for a new (old) type of theology.
A second and more significant criticism is that Placher gives short shrift to the Old Testament. After reading his chapter on Jesus Christ you would be forgiven for being unaware that there is a First Testament that informs the world of the Second Testament. Considering this is a chapter that addresses hermeneutics and Biblical Interpretation at length this is a bit puzzling and more than a bit unforgiveable. Placher invites us to consider the New Testament as a “history-like witness to truths both historical and transcendent”. As such, the New Testament and especially the four gospels (and I’d imagine he considers Acts to fall within the scope of Luke) should be read neither as myth, modern history, or fiction but as narratives narrating something that actually happened. But the world of the Gospels presumes the world of the First Testament. One would have liked Placher to have at least mentioned recent work on areas of scholarship on literary theories such as intertexuality which would have drawn out the history-like Jewishness of the Jesus narratives. One might consider the work of Thomas F. Torrance here. While Torrance believes that it is the New Testament witness that must take priority as the center of our witness to the Triune God, to do so presumes that Jesus of Nazareth emerged from the womb of Israel. As such the First Testament saturates the New and must be understood as a central witness to Christ and the nature of covenant relationship of God to humanity.
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