Abstract
This is Fred Sanders’ fourth book on the Trinity. His first focused on Karl Rahner. His second, The Deep Things of God: how the Trinity changes everything (Crossway, 2010), was a popular effort to explain and claim Trinitarian theology for his own Evangelical party, which, he says, ‘have been in reality the most thoroughly Trinitarian Christians in the history of the church’ (Deep Things, p. 9). His third, The Triune God (Zondervan, 2016) was his fullest all-round treatment of the subject. Now he focuses his Trinitarian sights on soteriology specifically.
Sanders writes out of the Torrey Honors College at Biola University and the Evangelical pedigree of his second book is well in evidence in the fourth. Fountain of Salvation can be read as an attempt to take stock of modern ‘Trinitarian revivalist’ soteriologies and to bring their best insights into line with classical evangelicalism.
After a clear and helpful recapitulation of the ‘Trinitarian revival’ (a bit of historiography which Sanders contests) and its implications and imputations for soteriology, Sanders re-examines the relationship between salvation history and the eternal, ‘immanent’ Trinity. He is keen to push back, gently, on some of the more extreme representations of modern scholars such as Rahner and LaCugna, which, he says, ‘collapsed the immanent trinity into the economic’ (p. 4). He wants to restore a right emphasis on divine aseity and immanence – in other words, to hint at a vast hinterland of Trinitarian ‘Godness’, which exists beyond just what is revealed in the economy of salvation. This flows, one feels, out of his Evangelical concern for the glory of God against some of the more reductive schools.
He then canters through some discourses on atonement, ecclesiology, the Christian life and the eternally begotten nature of the Son. Some of these chapters feel a bit thin, or as though the author never quite gets beyond literature review. In the chapter on atonement, for instance, Sanders gives us an erudite discussion of theologians such as John Webster and John Behr, but he could do more to walk us through precisely what is, for him, the relationship between Trinity and satisfaction. The book ends with a further, robust, discussion of recent literature on Trinity and salvation economy.
This volume is nicely put together and well expressed, with attractive turns of phrase (‘the Holy Spirit, who seems simultaneously to precede Christ, accompany Christ and follow Christ’ (p. 15)) and neat little reductios (‘not everything that God does is to be taken as revelatory of what he is … if Jesus had brown eyes should we say that the eternal Son before the foundation of the world had this feature?’ (p. 20)). Sanders is proud of his Evangelical heritage and treats us to quotations and examples from Scottish preachers and Georgian nonconformists all the way through.
Altogether, Fountain of Salvation is a well-argued guide to the contemporary literature on this subject and Sanders is confident in his conclusions. Colleagues of other schools and churchmanships should not be blind to Sanders’ growing seriousness as a Trinitarian scholar.