Paul’s ways of speaking about God, Jesus, and the Spirit are intricately intertwined: talking about any one of the three, for Paul, implies reference to all of them together. However, much current Pauline scholarship discusses Paul’s God-, Christ-, and Spirit-language without reference to Trinitarian theology.
In contrast to that trend, Wesley Hill argues in this book that later, post-Pauline Trinitarian theologies represent a better approach, opening a fresh angle on Paul’s earlier talk about God the Father, Jesus Christ, and the Spirit. Hill looks critically at certain well-known discussions in the field of New Testament studies—those by N.T. Wright, Richard Bauckham, Larry Hurtado, and others—in light of patristic and contemporary Trinitarian theologies, resulting in an innovative approach to an old set of questions.
Adeptly integrating biblical exegesis and historical-systematic theology, Hill’s Paul and the Trinity shows how Trinitarian theologies illumine interpretive difficulties in a way that more recent theological concepts have failed to do.
There has long been a consensus among New Testament scholars that the doctrine of the Trinity has little to contribute to the study of the New Testament in general and Paul in particular. Wesley Hill presents here a fundamental challenge to that consensus, making sophisticated use of resources drawn from ancient and modern Trinitarian conceptuality to bring to light the pervasively relational structure of Paul’s statements about God, Christ, and the Spirit.
—Francis Watson, professor of New Testament, Durham University
Hill engages carefully and explicitly with some of the key resources of Trinitarian theology—in particular, the relational understanding of personhood—to illuminate both Paul’s thinking about Jesus within the identity of God and modern attempts to grasp it.
—Douglas A. Campbell, professor of New Testament, Duke Divinity School
This book is a breakthrough. Wesley Hill notes and describes an element of Paul’s thought that has been overlooked for too long. . . . Exegetes who rightly fret over the danger of imposing a foreign and anachronistic conceptual grid on Paul’s texts are invited to take up and read: without flash or bombast, Hill nimbly models just how apt and illuminating the Trinitarian matrix is for serious biblical studies.
—Fred Sanders, associate professor of theology, Torrey Honors Institute, Biola University
Wesley Hill provides an intriguing argument for fundamentally reframing the questions we ask about Pauline Christology and Trinitarian theology. Given the exegetical care and theological consciousness on display in this well-written book, Hill’s case deserves serious consideration. Along the way, the book models promising interaction between Scripture and Christian doctrine.
—Daniel J. Treier, Blanchard Professor of Theology, Wheaton College
