The Divine Name(s) and the Holy Trinity: Vol. 1, Distinguishing the Voices
by R. Kendall Soulen
Westminster John Knox Press, Louisville, Ky. 300 pages
reviewed by CHRISTOPHER MORSE
In this first of a projected two-volume work on “the most appropriate way of naming the persons of the Trinity,” Kendall Soulen, professor of systematic theology at Wesley Theological Seminary in Washington, manages both to surprise and confound the reader by showing how much the naming of God matters and why. The surprise of this book is how exciting such a scholarly inquiry into one of Christianity’s oldest confessional traditions can be. What is confounding is how relevant today these ancient traditions regarding God’s threefold naming can be shown to be. Even judged by writing style alone, Soulen’s felicitous prose and conceptual clarity make this book exceptional. The chapters read like a brilliant detective story, with the clues as well documented as the conclusion is revealing.
A central contention of Soulen’s analysis is that a crucial mistake occurs in the formation of Christian thinking when the biblical references to God’s unspeakable name, as present in the Hebrew Scriptures, become mistakenly equated with philosophical concepts of divine ineffability as namelessness, as present in the formative period of Trinitarian doctrine. By tracing this lost significance of the Tetragrammaton (Exod. 3:15) as a proper, if unspeakable, name of God in Christian doctrine, and arguing for its unrecognized import and needed recovery in a theological understanding of the New as well as the Old Testament canon, Soulen argues that it is precisely such an obliquely identifying and uncircumscribable way of theological naming that is the fount of the threefold christological naming of God in the New Testament as “Father, Son, and Spirit.” Yet faith’s naming of God by way of threefold references has also employed many additional terms in the history of theology.
These “ternaries that faith has subsequently coined,” which Soulen lists with numerous examples (249-251), he designates as a pneumatological pattern of naming most suited to express the unrestricted movement of God’s Spirit in the contextual variety of human experience. “In contrast to the theological pattern, which tightly orbits a single personal proper name, and the christological pattern, which makes uses of a limited selection of human kinship terms — the pneumatological pattern paints with an immeasurably fuller linguistic palette” (251).
By explaining through 14 chapters how these three patterns of naming the Trinity may be said to cohere, in a manner analogous to the persons of the Trinity themselves — as mutually distinctive but equally important and inseparably related — Soulen underscores how each pattern distinctively, yet inseparably from the other two, opens up theological insights for more faithfully addressing such urgent contemporary issues raised today by Christian usage in naming God’s triunity as the relationship with the Jewish people, the multicultural diversity of global Christianity, and the false implication of a deified masculinity. All this is provocative grist indeed for the pastor and preacher as well as the academic scholar.
CHRISTOPHER MORSE is Dietrich Bonhoeffer Professor of Theology and Ethics at Union Theological Seminary in New York.{fshareid=17104}
