Review of Simply Trinity:The Unmanipulated Father, Son, and Spirit, by Matthew Barrett.
This is a hard book to review. The author is attacking the view that Jesus Christ is, functionally, eternally subordinate to the Father even while being ontologically equal with Him. This view is known as eternal functional subordination (EFS). Barrett’s tone at the beginning was so unnecessarily off-putting to me that I had to get over my irritation before I was ready to fairly assess his argument. Eventually he was able to convince me.
As far as the positives go, Barrett is clearly an accomplished expert on the church fathers, both pre- and post- Nicene. His arguments are firmly grounded in logic, philosophy, and the historical development of the theology of the Trinity. The vast bulk of his assertions come from these quarters, less so from Scripture (though he handles the Scripture well). Unfortunately, Barrett dismisses opposing arguments that rise from Scripture by perjoratively labeling his opponents as “biblicist,” as though they were unaware of the context and larger narrative of Scripture.
Barrett’s main argument is that the only distinctions between the persons within the ontological Trinity (ad intra) are “eternal relations of origin:” the Father is unbegotten, the Father eternally begets (generates) the Son (meaning the Father eternally communicates to the Son His own essence and nature), and the Father and the Son spirate, or send forth, the Holy Spirit. Barrett admits to additional distinctions in the outward operations (ad extra) of the economic Trinity.
In chapter three, Barrett does a good job in tracing modern liberalism’s illegitimate reconstruction of the Trinity to fit their own agenda for society. But in my opinion, he wrongly accuses conservative, biblical theologians of doing the same thing: starting with their desired construct of social relations and then imposing that construct on the Trinity. This seems to me to be a grossly uncharitable charge: is it not possible that those theologians derive their view of the Trinity (even though incorrect) from their honest understanding of Scripture and then see analogs in human relationships? Barrett gets in the way of his own message repeatedly with accusations like this. Another example is found on page 36 where he throws out the accusation that sola scriptura has been interpreted as “me and my Bible alone.” This is unfortunate: Barrett’s debate is with theologians, not the average believer in the pew. Does he really think any credible theologian would hold such a silly view?
Occasionally Barrett appears to overstate his point. On page 104 we find this statement:
For the first-century believer, to become a Christian was to embrace the salvation given and accomplished by none other than the triune God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit…. For these early Christians, to believe the gospel was to believe that the one God of Israel was triune. Anything less was simply not Christian. A gospel that was not trinitarian was no gospel at all.Well, yes. And, no. While belief that Jesus is the divine Son of God was (and is) crucial to salvation, there was still much confusion, even among believers, as to exactly how that truth was to be reconciled with the historic monotheism of the Jews. Barrett’s confident assertion flies in the face of 400 years of church history, in which godly men were seeking to untangle the mystery of the Trinity. Barrett seems to claim that the first century Christians had it all figured out. But does not the early history of the church record their debates, disagreements, and difficulty in fitting the pieces together?
On the other hand, there are places in which Barrett is able to condense his argument to a single, brilliant statement, and this constitutes a large part of the value of his book. For example, on page 123 Barrett states: “[Christ’s] eternal relation to the Father constitutes his redemptive mission to the world, but not vice versa. Get that order right, and we see the gospel in proper trinitarian perspective; get that order wrong, and we misuse the gospel to redefine the Trinity in eternity.”
In my view, Barrett makes his strongest argument against EFS on pages 138-9. He builds a case that to be one in essence but manifested in three persons, means of necessity that there cannot be three different wills. Because the three (persons) are one in essence, there can only be one unified (simple) will. The one shared will of the Trinity rises out of the one shared divine nature of the Trinity. The problem with EFS is this: if Christ is eternally submitted to the Father’s will (rather than sharing the one and same will), it implies that there are two different wills—the Father’s, and Christ’s—which would then argue for two different natures. This creates an untenable division in the ontological Trinity; such a thing cannot be.
Barrett makes another powerful argument on page 239:
But EFS is asking the wrong question. The right question is this: is submission ad intra or ad extra; is it intrinsic to the immanent Trinity, or is it something that occurs in the economy (in the context of salvation history)? Biblical Christian orthodoxy has always acknowledged that the economy of salvation involves the incarnate Son submitting to the mission his Father has given to him for the purpose of salvation.Barrett goes on to flesh out the thought. I think this is the point in which I finally allowed Barrett to sharpen my understanding, by understanding the Son’s submission to the Father to be connected to his redemptive mission but not to his eternal relation to the Father. Barrett deals with 1 Corinthians 15:24-28 on page 243, stating that it applies not to the Son in the form of God, but to the Son in the form of a servant: “The context is not the immanent Trinity but the economy, the redemptive mission of the incarnate Son.”
Like Barrett’s book, this review has already gone on too long. In conclusion I believe Barrett makes his principal point, demolishing EFS and asserting that the distinctions in the immanent Trinity have to do with eternal relations of origin. It is unfortunate that Barrett occasionally gets in his own way by unnecessary and uncharitable characterizations of people on the other side of the fence. For his excellent command of the early church fathers, Barrett gets five stars. For his at-times-uncharitable tone and the excessive length of the book and the sense of repetition, three stars. For the fact that he did ultimately convince me that my former position (EFS) on the Trinity was wrong, we’ll settle with four stars. Recommended.
If you don’t have the time to read Barrett’s book, read Mike Riccardi’s excellent five-page blog post entitled, “EFS Redux: Aiming for Closure on the Trinity Debate.” Google it. Riccardi gets right to the point (in five short pages), and his logic is unassailable.
