There’s been a good amount of discussion about the trinity at several different blogs:
1 Cor 3.23: Our Subordination to Christ; Christ’s to God (Monotheism in 1 Corinthians, 1)
The Subordination of Christ to God in 1 Cor 3? – A Response to Ecce Homo
Trinitarian and Historical Theological Ignorance
In light of all of this, I thought I would share a few things I’ve read/written. The first is actually a post I wrote some time ago, which then turned into a post for the 2009 Trinity Blogging Summit: Exegetical Implications of NP Focus – its title for the Blogging summit was rather different.
The second is actually a Note from Facebook with some musings of Dan Wallaces’ very excellent book. I’ve reproduced the majority of the note below. I’m not sure you could consider this a review of the book, its just some random notes. But this is one of the best books I’ve read this year.
Book Musings: Granville Sharp’s Canon and Its Kin: Semantics and Significance (Studies in Biblical Greek)
Wallace’s new book on Granville Sharp and the significance of the Greek article in various KAI constructions is easily one of the best Greek monographs I’ve read this year (currently tied with Steve Runge’s Discourse Grammar. I read then entire book over a period of two days because I couldn’t put it down — though I must confess, the entire time I was traveling by car and plane.
Here are a few highlights and thoughts:
I loved the historical survey – both Sharp’s life and work as a scholar as well as the response, both positive and negative, of his monograph during his life time. I was amazed (and disappointed) that the validity of a grammatical construction could be challenged and rejected simply because a big name grammarian had different theology.
The linguistic-phenomenological analysis was a rich treat – though I’m glad to say that 1) there really are linguists out there who very much begin with the empirical evidence before the theory (page 87 n5). I think that what Wallace calls a Grammarian I would call an Applied Linguist and what he calls a Linguist I would call a Theoretical Linguist. More so, I would be quite willing to say that Dr. Wallace is very much a linguist. What an incredible analysis!
At 129f., I’m not sure that Strabo Geography 17.1.11 is necessarily an exception, my natural inclination would be to read “the fourth and seventh were the worst” not as referring to the distinct individuals – one could just as easily say, “the fourth and seventh kings,” which would make the ordinals anaphoric to βασιλεύς, which is a generic. If this wouldn’t be considered “a weak-wristed approach” it would reduce the number of semantic categories by one.
At 214ff. I love it anytime someone takes Grudem to task. That should happen more often — and the criticisms are Ehrman were a delight too.
At 228ff. While I agree that Sharp cannot be appealed to for Ephesians 4:11, I do think that the distinction and difference in meaning between DE and KAI is enough to draw the conclusion that pastors and teachers should be viewed together.
At 242f., I love the fact that Sharp’s Canon is confirmed via native speaker intuition. For me, this was by far the strongest argument, though I wish that a few of the Arians who conceded the syntax of the construction were mentioned or cited. That would have been helpful.
Finally, the book is extremely well written and an engaging read. As I said before, I could not put it down. I’ll be coming back to this book again and again as time goes by in my own research and studies.
Koine-Greek 