Dr. Frank Turek, a Christian evangelist and apologist, will be speaking at the College of William and Mary, on Thursday, February, 20, 2025, 7pm-9pm, at the Commonwealth Auditorium, in the Sadler Center, the main student gathering place on campus.
Frank Turek is the author of I Don’t Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist, co-authored with the late Norman Geisler. He gives talks at colleges and universities across the country covering the primary questions discussed in his book:
Does truth exist?
Does God exist?
Are miracles possible?
Is the New Testament true?
His talk at William & Mary will be followed by a Q&A session. This event is sponsored by the William & Mary Apologetics Club, and is open to the public.
From his CrossExamined.org website, “Frank is a widely featured guest in the media as a leading apologetics expert and cultural commentator. He has appeared on hundreds of radio programs and many top TV networks including: Fox News, ABC, and CBS. He also writes a column for Townhall.com and several other sites.
A former aviator in the US Navy, Frank has a master’s degree from George Washington University and a doctorate from Southern Evangelical Seminary. He and his wife, Stephanie, are blessed with three grown sons and two grandsons (so far).”
Frank hosts the CrossExamined radio program on American Family Radio, and has a Wesleyan theological background. He has publicly debated prominent atheists about the truth claims of the Christian faith, such as Michael Shermer and the late Christopher Hitchens. Frank gives thoughtful answers to a wide range of questions raised by skeptics and inquiring Christians from the floor.
The event maybe livestreamed. If so I will update with a link here.
Below is a 2-minute clip of one student asking Frank a question, followed with his answer:
I just read today that one of the world’s most recognized Egyptologists, Kenneth Kitchen, died Thursday, February 6, 2025, at age 93. Kitchen was an idiosyncratic legend, an archaeologist who studied the Ancient Near East, specializing in ancient Egyptian history, and who upheld the Old Testament as a reliable source for understanding the history of the ancient world. In my mind, he was the “real Indiana Jones.”
Few today would be dazzled by Kitchen’s study on The Third Intermediate Period in Egypt. But for the Christian interested in the intersection between the Bible and archaeology, his 2003 erudite defense of the Bible, On the Reliability of the Old Testament, stands squarely in the maximalist tradition, affirming the historicity of the Exodus and the biblical Patriarchs. I read his book almost twenty years ago and was blown away by the breadth and depth of his scholarship.
While many scholars today tend to be skeptical of the story of Moses and the flight of Israel out of Egypt, spending forty years wandering the Sinai desert, Kenneth Kitchen was resolute in marshaling detailed evidence to support the testimony of the Bible. Kitchen was careful not to say that the biblical stories of the Patriarchs could be “proved” by the archaeological record, but he likewise stressed that archaeology has not “disproved” this history as presented in the Bible either.
Kenneth A. Kitchen’s On the Reliability of the Old Testament is a modern classic defending the historicity of the Old Testament. Kitchen begins with the most recent period in Israelite history, working his way backwards towards the earliest Patriarchs, showing that figures like Moses and Abraham line up with what we read in the archaeological record.
Born in Scotland, the life-long bachelor Kitchen was a contrarian in several ways, and not afraid of being combative in his research. Not only did he take on minimalist colleagues, such as Ronald Hendel, who concluded that the historical Moses was a fictional product of Israelite imagination at least four or five centuries after the traditionally dated Exodus period, Kitchen was critical of even conservative Old Testament scholars for not reading the text carefully enough. He rejected the traditional, early date for the Exodus, in the mid 15th century BCE, around the year 1446, while Amenhotep I, Thutmose I, or Thutmose III served as Pharaoh, an interpretation which has been based on a non-metaphorical reading of the years described in 1 Kings 6. Archaeologists like Bryant Wood continue to hold to this traditional view.
Instead, Kitchen favored a late date alternative, about 200 years later in the 13th century BCE, when Rameses II served as Pharaoh. Kitchen argued that the early date has lacked sufficient archaeological support. Instead, the city of Rameses in Egypt was known in the 13th century, corresponding to what has been read from Exodus 1:11, and that archaeological evidence for the destruction of Hazor in the 13th century matched what has been described by Joshua’s conquest of the Promised Land in Joshua 11:10-11.
Kitchen also chided Old Testament scholars who insisted that the large numbers associated with texts like the census in Numbers 1-2, following a non-metaphorical interpretation of such numbers, did not match the archaeological data, which has supported a smaller, yet still sizable group of Israelites wandering the Sinai wilderness for some 40 years.
Kitchen’s views even went against the idiosyncratic proposal by atheist and fellow Egyptologist David Rohl, who has argued that a new chronology for Egyptian history should be adopted, which pushes the possible date for the Exodus earlier than what the late date proposes. David Rohl’s innovative hypothesis has been popularized by Tim Mahoney’s Patterns of Evidence franchise of documentary filmmaking. Kitchen rejected this view as “100% nonsense.”
What helped to win me over to the late date for the Exodus was the argument regarding the location of the slave city near a residence for the Pharaoh. The ancient city of Thebes, located near modern day Luxor, Egypt, was the primary residence for the Pharaohs during the Late Bronze Age. However, we have evidence that in the 13th century the city of Rameses, thought to have been a residence of a Pharaoh of the same name, was located in the Nile delta area. Rameses was in the northeast region of Egypt not that far from the modern city of Cario, and was built by slaves living in a nearby slave city, Avaris.
The journey from that slave city to Rameses would have been less than a few hours by foot, which makes sense of the many meetings that Moses would have had with Pharaoh mentioned in the Book of Exodus. However, any look at the map shows that a journey from the Nile delta to Thebes took at least 6 days to walk, which makes the late-at-night journeys that Moses took from the slave city to Pharoah’s residence rather ludicrous. Unless the Hebrews had built some nuclear-powered speed boat for Moses to travel quickly up the Nile to visit Pharaoh in Thebes, it is hard to imagine how Moses could have made such a relatively quick visit in the middle of the night to Pharoah.
Advocates for an early date for the Exodus might respond by saying a 15th century Pharoah might have built a residence within close walking distance near the 15th century slave city or encampment, but that we simply do not have evidence for such a residence…. at least not yet. But why appeal to evidence we do not currently possess when we actually have evidence that supports a different date, and that still affirms the testimony of Scripture? In my mind, this is a case of having a bird in the hand is worth two in a bush. It is better to hold onto the evidence you already have than it is holding out for evidence which you may never find. Kitchen was that type of evidentialist who opted for the former.
What I did not know about Kitchen was just how idiosyncratic he really was. As Tyndale House scholar Peter J. Williams puts it:
His abode was a small three-bedroom terraced house, without central heating or any modern appliance. [Kitchen] was very proud that nothing was connected to the internet so there could be no possibility of a virus destroying his work…..
Ken Kitchen basically didn’t have a kitchen: it was a tiny box room. Ken lived all his life without a refrigerator. He had milk delivered fresh, and had no need for the complexities of unnecessary equipment. He lived in the utmost simplicity….
Despite his great learning, Ken Kitchen was a man of a deep and simple faith in Jesus Christ as his Saviour and Lord. Though he knew a lot, he was also humble and aware of his own fallibility and frailty. He would want us in remembering him to think of the One he served. As I think about Ken’s life, as a bachelor living a life of ascetic discipline and dedication to scholarship, I find myself challenged by his work ethic and his incredible focus, even as I recognise that Ken was one of a kind. We will not see the like of him again.
Actually, in his later years, Kitchen finally was forced to get a refrigerator after he contracted food poisoning. His doctor strongly advised him to a get refrigerator, for his own safety.
This might be near the top of the list of the most confusing Bible passages. In 1 Corinthians 15:29, what is Paul talking about when mentioning people being baptized for the dead?
When was the last time you heard a sermon about this? I am not a gambling person, but if I was I would wager to say, “NEVER.”
Hip-hop artist Lecrae was “rebaptized” in the River Jordan, in September, 2019…. Baptism is a central feature of the Christian faith. But what do we make of Paul’s mention of “baptism for the dead” in 1 Corinthians 15? That is a real puzzler.
My mother spent a number of years researching the genealogical records for our family. Anyone who has labored in genealogical research knows that one of the best sources of information is found with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, commonly known as the Mormons. They interpret 1 Corinthians 15:29 as saying that a Mormon could undergo a kind of “proxy baptism” on behalf of dead people, normally family members. In order to do that, you need to have good records to identify deceased members of your family tree. LDS genealogical resources are therefore available for converts to Mormonism who want to undergo a proxy baptism for deceased family members, going generations back, as a means of making sure that there is a place in God’s Heaven for them, according to that theology.
Most scholars today put the Mormon interpretation down towards the very bottom of the list of being the most legitimate way of understanding this text. So, if Joseph Smith missed it, what is the right way to interpret 1 Corinthians 15:29? The verse reads in the ESV translation:
Otherwise, what do people mean by being baptized on behalf of the dead? If the dead are not raised at all, why are people baptized on their behalf?
Context for “Baptism for the Dead” in 1 Corinthians 15
Some context does help immensely here. In the 1 Corinthians 15 chapter as a whole, Paul is writing to certain Corinthian believers who have some serious doubts about the bodily resurrection of believers in Christ when the Lord Jesus comes back at his final return, to set the world right. Paul is aware of this practice of some Christians being baptized on behalf of those who have already died. He is not making a judgment on the practice in verse 29, right or wrong. But he is using the practice as an illustration to correct this theological error about the resurrection among the Corinthians.
In other words, what is the point of being baptized on behalf of the dead, if there is no future resurrection? If there is no future resurrection, then the practice of “baptism for the dead” does not make sense.
Here is the main takeaway of the passage: There is going to be a future resurrection of believers!!
Parsing Out the Best Interpretation of 1 Corinthians 15:29
Still, what is this “baptism for the dead” all about, anyway?
Without going off on some endless rabbit trail, some have suggested that this “baptism for the dead” was actually a pagan practice, possibly connected with the Greco-Roman mystery religions. However, most scholars take the view advanced by the late and eminent Gordon Fee that there is no real evidence to support this idea. Some of these ancient mystery cults had rites for water purification, but they did not have the same importance and meaning that the early Christians had regarding baptism. For Fee, this “baptism for the dead” was an infrequent practice, but it was nevertheless performed by some early Christians (Fee, NICNT Commentary on First Corinthians, first edition, p. 764).
Is this passage talking about water baptism or some metaphorical understanding of baptism?
Why are these people undergoing this baptism? Is it a form of penance for the Purgatorial relief of the dead? In other words, was Joseph Smith onto something?
Is the phrase “baptized on behalf of the dead” really just a reference to a ritual washing of dead bodies, not having anything to do with baptism as we normally think of it?
Interestingly, Eastern Orthodox priest Stephen De Young, author of The Religion of the Apostles: Orthodox Christianity in the First Century, takes a very similar approach that Michael Heiser does. One particular observation, rooted more in the original Greek text of the letter, which tends to be obscured in many English translations, is that “the dead” spoken here in this verse are actually deceased Christians. Paul had been going around preaching the Gospel across the Roman Empire, and some believers had already died before Jesus’ return.
In the New Testament era, it was quite common for Christians to believe that Jesus would be returning within the lifetime of the apostles, and of those who had become Christians in that same generation. Christians back in the first century might never have imagined that the timing of the Second Coming might be delayed by at least around 2,000 years! So, what about those believers who had died in that first generation before the return of Jesus?
Was it because those dead believers were possibly not baptized, suggesting that a form of “proxy baptism” was practiced? Well, this is highly unlikely as the normative practice in that era of the early church was to baptize people immediately after conversion. It was not until some time had passed, and more pagan-background people were coming to have faith in Christ, that it became necessary to delay baptism, in order that these new believers had sufficient enough instruction to undergo baptism, to make sure that these new Christians knew more about what they were getting themselves into! By the third or fourth century or so, when more and more people without much background knowledge of the Bible were coming into the church, the typical delay for baptism after conversion could have been up to THREE YEARS! (See J. I. Packer’s Grounded in the Gospel).
Most probably these deceased believers were already baptized before they died. We can reasonably infer that some kind of “proxy baptism” was not in view here. So if indeed “proxy baptism” is off the table, what is really going on here?
A careful look at the text again in various translations helps: The KJV takes a very word-for-word approach with the idea that these living Christians were being “baptized for the dead.” But translations like the ESV take an extra step more aligned with more thought-for-thought translations: “baptized on behalf of the dead.” The same Greek word translated word-for-word as “for” is translated in much the same way in the ESV of Philemon 1:13,”I would have been glad to keep him with me, in order that he might serve me on your behalf during my imprisonment for the gospel.” Acts 9:16 is similar, as is 2 Corinthians 1:6.
In 1 Corinthians 15:29, this idea of being “baptised for the dead” can be translated in four possible ways:
Baptised vicariously in the place of the dead, or just baptized in place of the dead. But this interpretive translation can be ruled out since Jesus already vicariously died in place of the dead believers with his own death. No one else would have to die to benefit those already dead, since Jesus already took care of that.
Baptised for the benefit of the dead. Again, what is the benefit for the dead person or persons? There is no known reason to explain this. So, we can rule this out as well.
Baptised for the sake of the dead. This is much better. It suggests that there is some goal in mind. However, that goal is not terribly clear in this passage, so we should be cautious here.
Baptised in honor of the dead. Heiser agrees that this is the best option available. There is no benefit for the person or persons who have already died. If there is a benefit, it is more an honorific benefit. A good example of this is when someone you know dies, and the family asks that any gifts for the survivors be given to a charity that the deceased person really likes; like an animal shelter or a medicine-based charity; such as, fighting to end cancer. You honor the dead person by providing some type of benefit to that charity.
So, which translation is best? Of the four possible translations, this last interpretation ties in best with the context of 1 Corinthians 15 as a whole. Remember that Paul mentions that some 500 people witnessed the bodily resurrection of Jesus. But by the time Paul was ministering in Corinth, there was a good chance that a number of these 500 witnesses might have already died, and not been given the opportunity to witness the Second Coming of Jesus within their earthly lifetimes. Therefore, there were some new Christians in Corinth who decided to get baptized, partly as a way of honoring those believers who had already died, as well as themselves also receiving the benefits of baptism, thus marking ones’ entry into the Christian community.
The Religion of the Apostles, by Stephen De Young, shows how the beliefs and practices of the early church connect with the world of Second Temple Judaism, the historical context for Jesus of Nazareth and the New Testament. One of the oddest practices among some, though clearly not all, early Christians is the rite of baptism for the dead, giving honor to believers who have already died. See the four part Veracity review of De Young’s book for more.
Christians Being Baptized in Honor of Other Dead Believers in the Early Church
Stephen De Young, in The Religion of the Apostles, agrees with this honorific interpretation of 1 Corinthians 15:29, noting that there was an ancient practice among the early Christians to do exactly this; that is, to be baptized in a way that gave honor to those believers who had already died. De Young says that these early Christians were doing this, but they were not explicitly making reference to this passage of 1 Corinthians 15:29 to support this practice (De Young, p. 162).
De Young also notes that the act of baptism is passive. It is not “those who baptize for the dead,” but rather “those who are baptized for the dead” (De Young, p. 162).
This interpretation proposed by both Stephen De Young and Michael Heiser is the most convincing to me, as has the least amount of problems with it as compared to alternative views, though every time I think about it, I still scratch my head a bit. Stephen De Young suggests that this odd passage explains why the practice of saint veneration took off even in the era of the early church, building on the “baptism for the dead” ritual. The practice continues today in many Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox circles. Because of the Protestant Reformation’s rejection of saint veneration , particularly with respect to icon veneration, (many Protestants call it an accretion), this practice died off within at least the last 500 years, in most of Protestant Western Christianity.
Should Christians still practice “baptism for the dead?” Paul himself refers to the practice in the third person (see the Christian Standard Bible translation of this verse, which uses the pronoun “they”), and neither as a practice he himself advocates nor practices (no “I” or “we”). Since Paul makes only passing reference to the practice, neither approving or disproving it, it can simply be regarded as a custom and not a command of Scripture. We should honor the lives of Christians who have died, but the Bible does not dictate any specific way to do this which transcends culture.
But at least this interpretation helps to make better sense of a very, very puzzling passage of Scripture.
Exactly 1700 years ago this year, back in 325, a gathering of Christian leaders at the modern lake-side city of Iznik, Turkey began a process which took almost a century for the brightest minds in Christendom to hammer out the basic idea of the Triune nature of God. Even still, what the Nicene Creed summarizes regarding the doctrine of God has generated volumes of theological works down through the ages. Millions of Christians (though not all!) recite the core features of the Trinity expressed in the Nicene Creed every week during worship services. But once you go beyond the idea of “One God in Three Persons”, it can be intimidating to try to think through what it all means.
The doctrine of the Trinity is one of the most central doctrines of the Christian faith, but it is also one of the hardest theological concepts to grasp without falling off the edge into heresy. As a young Christian myself, I early on adopted the analogy of water to explain the Trinity: one substance with three distinct states: a gas like steam, a liquid like water, and a solid like ice. It sure made sense to me back then. Little did I know that such an easy formulation is regarded as a heresy by some of the most brilliant theologians in the church.
Ouch.
While some authors, like the 5th century African Saint Augustine of Hippo, have written classic works on the Trinity, others have distorted the doctrine or rejected it as unimportant. The father of 19th century Protestant liberalism, Frederick Schleiermacher, pretty much dismissed the doctrine of the Trinity as a metaphysical waste to be easily disposed of. In response, more than any other theologian of the 20th century, the Swiss thinker Karl Barth recovered the doctrine of the Trinity as part of the core teaching of Christianity, rescuing it from Schleiermacher’s attempts to discard it. Conservative evangelical theologians since then have taken a renewed interest in articulating this doctrine of God for the postmodern era. Some get it right, but according to Matthew Barrett, a professor at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, some have gotten it terribly wrong.
Simply Trinity: The Unmanipulated Father, Son, and Spirit. Baptist scholar Matthew Barrett wants to revive the classic doctrine of the Trinity, keeping the doctrine of God unmanipulated by contemporary social concerns.
Recovering the Classic Doctrine of the Trinity
In Simply Trinity: The Unmanipulated Father, Son, and Spirit, Matthew Barrett is concerned that even in some of our best evangelical seminaries that many have fallen into a kind of “trinity drift,” whereby Christian thinkers have ever so increasingly veered away from the classic formulation of the Triune doctrine of God, as articulated in the famous Nicene Creed. While some of the terminology and names associated with the great 4th century debate over the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit will be unfamiliar to some, Matthew Barrett wants to make the doctrine of the Trinity accessible to interested lay persons who do not know who either Arius or Athanasius was.
Oddly enough for a serious book on theology, Simply Trinity is actually a fun read. Barrett tosses out enough pop culture references to engage his audience, mainly ordinary Christians who want some type of fairly easy read to try to make sense of a complex doctrinal topic. Simply Trinity is not only educational, it is entertaining, listening to it in Audible audiobook form.
Harkening back to the movie classic, Back to the Future, Barrett invites the reader regularly to go “back to the DeLorean,” to meet some of the figures in church history who wrestled with terms like “essence” and “person,” when we think about the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Barrett apparently loves basketball, so he envisions a kind of “Dream Team” to champion the cause of Nicene Orthodoxy. The NBA has had its Magic Johnson and Larry Bird, but the church has had its Athanasius and Thomas Aquinas. Did you know that the Puritan theologian John Gill was the “Patrick Ewing” of trinitarian authors, or that Augustine of Hippo was the “Michael Jordan” of the early church? It is a clever way for Barrett to introduce some deep ideas. I think it works.
In Simply Trinity, Barrett, the host of the Credo Magazine podcast, wants to argue that what makes the doctrine of the Trinity so beautiful and essential to faith is its simplicity. In summary, the Father is unbegotten, the Son is begotten, or generated from the Father, and the Spirit is spirated, or breathed out, from the Father. These qualities have to deal with the internal character of the persons in terms of their origins, often called the “immanent” Trinity. God also acts in history, which displays his external relations to the creation, what is often called the “economic” Trinity. The “immanent” Trinity is about who God is, whereas the “economic” Trinity is about what God does.
Yet as Barrett sees it, the problem with a lot of modern understandings of the Trinity is that ideas have been invented by theologians regarding the “economic” Trinity, and that these ideas have been imported back into the “immanent” Trinity, thereby causing distortions as to who God really is.
“To be blunt, they have not revived the Trinity, but they have killed it, only to replace it with a different Trinity altogether – a social Trinity – one that can be molded, even manipulated, to fit society’s soapbox” (Barrett, 92).
Barrett is bothered by what he understands to be conceptions of a “social doctrine of Trinity,” emphasizing what God does, as a model for human interpersonal relationships, whether these be principles for governance and politics, economic structures, the organization of the church, and how Christians should think of marriage and family.
Jürgen Moltmann, the great German Reformed theologian of the late 20th century, though not fully a conservative evangelical, pioneered the concept of a “social trinity.” Moltmann developed this theology in an effort to provide a Christian basis for relations within society, and other causes, ranging from care for the environment to a critique of economic systems, like capitalism. Theologians, both liberal and conservative, have followed Moltmann in his wake to apply the model of “social trinity” to other areas of human communal life.
To make his case against a “social trinity,” Barrett sufficiently rehearses the history of the Nicene controversy of the 4th century, and how some of the best theologians since then have reaffirmed the truth of the classic Nicene doctrine of the Trinity. Names like Arius and Athanasius emerge, helping to form the narrative for this ancient theological battle of ideas. Along the way, Barrett illustrates his points through a fictive admirer of Jesus, a Jewish woman named Zipporah, who narrates her own encounter with Jesus and the religious leaders who opposed him. It is a pretty creative way to educate people about the classic doctrine of the Trinity, without diving too much into sophisticated theological jargon.
However, the zinger comes when Barrett attacks the efforts of “social trinitarian” scholars who inadvertently distort the classic doctrine of the Trinity. He chides evangelical egalitarian scholars who base the relations within marriage, between husband and wife, on the supposedly social arrangement within the Triune persons in the Godhead. A husband and wife are essentially equal in their relations to one another because the social trinitarian theologian says that this mirrors the essential equality between the persons of the Godhead. But this is all wrong, says Barrett, because this way of talking about God is really a manipulation of the doctrine of God to serve a kind of social arrangement within human communities. Keep it simple, says Barrett, in response. Do not distort our understanding of God by introducing elements within trinitarian thought that no one before the modern era ever considered.
The Eternal Functional Subordination of the Son (EFS) as an Unhelpful Modern Theological Innovation
But Matthew Barrett saves his most stinging critique to take down the modern concept of the Eternal Functional Subordination (EFS) of the Son, advanced by scholars like Bruce Ware and Wayne Grudem (chapter 8). In the EFS view, God is ultimately defined in terms of a pattern of authority and submission within the Godhead. For example, the Father is in authority and the Son is in submission to the Father. Why is this important? Because it explains the earthly human pattern as to how a wife is to submit to the authority of her husband.
Classically understood, when the Son became incarnate as Jesus the Messiah, the Son was indeed submissive to the authority of his Father. This activity of God through the incarnation is about what God has done, but the EFS theologians have projected this functional arrangement of the Father in authority and the Son in submission back into the very immanent, ontological aspect of God in all eternity. The EFS theologians maintain that such an arrangement is gladly accepted by both the Father and the Son, therefore there is a kind of equality within God, so it has the appearance of orthodoxy. But Barrett makes the case that the EFS view ultimately veers away from the classic doctrine of God by projecting something from the economic activity of God towards humanity back into God’s very internal relations, a violation of Christian truth which has been received down through the ages.
What really shocked me was to learn about the EFS tendency to suggest that each person of the Trinity has a will of their own (chapter 10). For when one speaks of an eternal function of subordination of the Son to the Father, it implies that the Son has a will distinct from the Father’s will, with the same idea applying to the Spirit. This does border on tritheism, as the early church fathers aligned with Nicaea argued for the singularity of the divine will, and not three distinct wills.
What makes Matthew Barrett’s critique so striking is that Barrett acknowledges that he is fully committed to a complementarian view of marriage and church office, namely that the husband is the head of the wife, and that only qualified men are to serve as elders of a local church. But Barrett is fully convinced that what EFS theologians have done is to try to bolster their particular brand of complementarian theology by wrongly drawing on a false view of the Trinity, in order to support their views.
Regarding his criticism of the Eternal Functional Subordination of the Son (EFS), Matthew Barrett makes a most compelling case that EFS is off-the-mark. Back in 2016, evangelical Twitter exploded in controversy when another complementarian Bible scholar raised the spectre of EFS as being “heresy,” which generated hundreds and hundreds of comments online back and forth. Now that the air has cooled down several years later, in 2021 Matthew Barrett has written a very careful, sober case for why EFS, despite whatever good intentions it may have had initially, is simply barking up the wrong tree. Is EFS heresy? Well, if it is not, it sure leans in a direction away from the received tradition of the church, and we need a course correction, if we are going to have a fully robust, and simpler view of the Trinity as Matthew Barrett proposes.
Other reviews of the book are mostlyvery positive. However, defenders of EFS will probably say that Matthew Barrett has straw-manned their position, and misrepresented what they are trying to say. Perhaps this is the case, but I am not so sure. It is quite telling that such a committed complementarian thinker regarding marriage and local church elders would argue so strongly against the EFS view. One reviewer even acknowledges that Matthew Barrett once held to an EFS-like view, though Simply Trinity makes the case that he has now repented of that wrong viewpoint. So, I find it hard to believe that Barrett would so badly mischaracterize the weakness of the EFS position, if he indeed once held it himself.
On the other side of the gender debate, egalitarian critics of Matthew Barrett’s position argue that a complementarian view of male/female relations collapses without the EFS doctrine of the Trinity. But this alternative view does not hold up very well. An egalitarian must still find an explanation for passages like 1 Corinthians 11:2-16 and 1 Timothy 2:8-3:15, which are difficult passages that simply can not be easily waved away. Long before EFS became fashionable in evangelical circles, Christians have historically held to some kind of complementarian view of gender relations, between male and female. The fact that many complementarian scholars agree with Matthew Barrett testifies to the fact that complementarian theology is not tied to the hip of an EFS doctrine of the Trinity.
The strongest takeaway for me is in Barrett’s critique as to how advocates of EFS misuse 1 Corinthians 11:3, their primary New Testament prooftext, to defend the Son’s eternal functional subordination to the Father:
…when Paul says the “head of a wife is her husband, and the head of Christ is God” (11:3), he has in view the incarnate, suffering servant, who fulfilled his mission by means of his obedient life, death, and resurrection as the Messiah (Christ). There is absolutely nothing in the immediate or wider context that says anything at all about the Son apart from creation and salvation within the immanent Trinity. To infuse and impose discussions of immanent Trinity on this text is a failure to treat the context with integrity. Paul has in view the salvific lordship of the anointed One, the Messiah (Barrett, chapter 8).
For if the EFS advocates were correct, Paul would have said that the head of the Son is the Father, and not what he did say, “the head of Christ is God.” Paul intentionally speaks of the Son’s incarnate ministry as the Messiah, and not the internal relations between the Son and the Father. Without 1 Corinthians 11:3, the support for the EFS view basically falls apart.
Critical Engagement with Matthew Barrett’s Book on the Trinity
The book is not perfect, as there are a few places in Simply Trinity that left me twitching a bit. In chapter 10, Barrett flies his Reformed tradition colors rather proudly with his reference to the “doctrines of grace” embodied in the “five points of Calvinism.” That right there is enough to send non-Calvinist Christians into fits. But what was so odd is that I really did not get how Barrett’s appeal to the “doctrines of grace” really tied into the substance of his argument regarding the inseparability of the persons of the Trinity. Barrett could have just as easily made his point without annoying his non-Calvinist readers.
In his chapter 9 on the “spiration” of the Spirit (which in most versions of the Nicene Creed is called the “procession” of the Spirit), Barrett has a sidebar discussing the vexing issue of the filioque. In 589 C.E., about two hundred years after the Nicene Creed was finally formalized, the Council of Toledo in the West modified the Nicene Creed to say that the Spirit “proceeds from the Father and the Son.” That last phrase, “and the Son” isfilioque in Latin. Originally, the Creed as agreed upon by both East and West simply read that the Spirit “proceeds from the Father.”
The insertion of the filioque has been regarded as heresy by the Eastern church ever since the Great Schism of 1054 C.E., as it unilaterally changed the Creed without the full participation of the East. Most Christians in the West are completely oblivious to this controversy. But if you ask an Eastern Orthodox Christian, who converses with Western Christians, the filioque controversy stands out as a real sore point. I think our Eastern Christian friends are right to register their protest.
Oddly, Barrett justifies the action of the Council of Toledo, appealing to Anselm’s reasoning that the addition of the filioque protects against any slippage of the church back into the heresy of Arianism, which compromises the fully divine nature of all three persons in the Godhead. But this justification seems like a contradiction of the main thesis Barrett is advancing in the Simply Trinity, that we should not be monkeying with the doctrine of the Trinity that was originally formulated in the 4th century by the early church fathers. For if you are going to be consistent and poke holes at modern innovations like EFS, you should also poke holes at earlier post-Nicene innovations from the 6th century, like the filioque.
Barrett criticizes modern translations, which the older KJV translated as “only begotten,” now as simply “only,” as John 3:16′s “For God so loved the world he gave is only Son.” But one need not drop the concept of God the Father “begetting” the Son because the Greek word monogenes is translated in a less interpretive manner in today’s translations. Later in chapter 7, Matthew Barrett does come back to acknowledge this: The idea that Jesus is God’s “only begotten Son” can be inferred from this and other passages. It is sufficient to ground the language of the Son’s “only begotten-ness” in other concepts aside from the contested analysis of the Greek word monogenes.
These criticisms aside, my takeaway is that Simply Trinity has changed my mind in a more general way. Back in the 1990s, I held to an egalitarian view of marriage and church structure with respect to elders, and I largely based it on the kind of “Social Trinitarian” theology being advanced back then in evangelical egalitarian circles. But Matthew Barrett has convinced me that whether promoted by egalitarian scholars or by complementarian scholars, trying to use the Trinity as a model for how to conceptualize male-female relations in either marriage or the local church is a wrong-headed way of thinking, in that it invariably leads to a distorted way of thinking about God.
More generally, Matthew Barrett as an evangelical Protestant makes a strong appeal to the “Great Tradition,” the confluence of thought found in Protestant, Roman Catholic, and Eastern Orthodox traditions, which can be traced back to the Council of Nicaea. He laments that a number of evangelical scholars in the name of what Barrett calls a ‘narrow, crude biblicism” have jettisoned the Great Tradition’s formulation of the Trinity in favor of something novel. This is refreshing, as in my mind, too many evangelical Protestants have confused their understanding of sola scriptura; that is, scripture and scripture alone as the final authority for matters of Christian faith and practice, with a kind of “nuda scriptura“; that is, scripture naked, whereby the Bible is stripped of certain understandings of tradition which have served the church well going back to the era of the early church fathers.
This is not to say that the patristic tradition, associated with early Christian luminaries like Saint Augustine and Ireneaus are infallible. Historically orthodox Christian faith was formed within the crucible of the early church. However, it is to say that if you feel compelled to ditch a traditionally received interpretation of the Scripture going back to the era of the early church, the evidence in favor of a revised view should be able to pass a high bar for acceptance. In the case of social Trinitarian models of theology, whether that be EFS or even egalitarian interpretations which Barrett critiques, those revisionist solutions have not met that high bar standard. Matthew Barrett has convincingly shown that novel concepts, such as the Eternal Functional Subordination of the Son, have set the bar far too low, thereby compromising the integrity of the Great Tradition. In effect, theological positions like EFS have managed to tweak the doctrine of the Trinity to serve purposes that were never envisioned by the 4th century architects of Nicaea who hammered out the classic doctrine of the Trinity.
Even if you lay the controversial chapter 8 aside, there is much in the other chapters of Simply Trinity that can help any Christian have a more confident view about the doctrine of the Trinity. A Christianity Today magazine review hails Simply Trinity with this: “For anyone who has read confusing blog posts about the Trinity in recent years, the book will help you regain your theological bearings.” Each chapter has helpful key point summaries, to keep the reader from getting lost, and interesting sidebars contain juicy nuggets, which helps to retain the reader’s focus. From even a purely devotional perspective, Simply Trinity is just a joy to read. The book captured my attention from beginning to end. I wish all theology books read like this one!!
As 2025 is the 1700th anniversary of the Council of Nicaea (or “Nicea,” as some spell it), look for a few more blog posts commemorating this all important date in Christian history.
The folks at Remnant Radio have a good interview with Matthew Bates about Simply Trinity. Enjoy!
Let me respond to this. We live in a day, particularly in the West, when people have a lot of questions about Christianity, when biblical illiteracy has sky-rocketed, despite us living in an information age. If you listen to the podcast, Joe Rogan asks Wes Huff plenty of questions about the Christian faith. But Wes Huff was prepared enough to give credible answers to Joe’s questions. There is even a compilation of the moments during the interview when Joe Rogan said “Wow” in response to Wes’ informed responses to such questions.
Here is the point: When you have millions of people tuning in to listen to a Christian apologist explain where our oldest New Testament manuscripts come from, the majority of whom are young men between the ages of 18-35, you have to wonder why is it that so many of our churches are not doing more to step up and provide more educational resources for people to become better informed about their faith. Sadly, the exact opposite has happened, whereby many churches try to “dumb down” the message, for fear that people might become overwhelmed with too much Bible, too much Christian history, too much Christian apologetics, etc.
In my view, the lesson learned from Wes Huff’s appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast is that many churches tend to “dumb down” the message way too much. Folks like Joe Rogan are hungry for answers. You do not have to be working towards a PhD like Wes Huff is doing. Having academic training does not make you a better Christian. But every Christian can learn better ways to answer curious questions from their non-believing family members, friends, and co-workers. The Christian faith is based on particular truth claims, which can be examined and studied. If we believe in the concept of truth, we should be doing what we can to defend that truth, and not skirt around difficult questions.
As far as the skeptical response goes, it is true that Wes Huff did slip up a few times during the podcast. But my goodness, it was a 3-hour interview!! No one not working off of notes in front of them would nail down everything with perfection in such a conversation.
Perhaps the most noticeable gaffe was when Wes Huff claimed that the Great Isaiah Scroll from the Dead Sea Scrolls, dated a thousand years before our other earliest copy of the Book of Isaiah, copied during the Middle Ages, matches “word for word.” (Look through the transcription of the podcast to find this). Alex O’Conner, formerly known as the Cosmic Skeptic, has one of the most popular YouTube channels challenging the truthfulness of the Christian message, and Alex pounced on that fumble in a video response.
Actually, there are a number of variants between the Dead Sea Scrolls and what we have in the 10th century Aleppo Codex, with the Book of Isaiah. But the vast majority of those variants are very, very minor, as in spelling differences. For example, consider the differences between how Americans and the Brits spell different words. Both groups speak English, but they vary on how to spell words like “color” (“colour“) or “honor” (“honour“). So who is correct here? Are the Americans spelling such words correctly and the Brits are in error, or is it the other way around?
Frankly, I do not care…. and frankly, neither should you.
Such supposed “errors” do not rise to the level of compromising what might best described as a flexible, nuanced view of biblical inerrancy. Wes’ point during the Joe Rogan podcast was to testify to the remarkable agreement between the Great Isaiah Scroll found at Qumran and our other later manuscripts, despite the existence of minor errors. Gavin Ortlund came out with a helpful response video that addresses these and other concerns made by Alex O’Conner.
Veracity 