Invocation and Assent: The Making and the Remaking of Trinitarian Theology

by Jason E. Vickers

In the seventeenth century the adoption of a new rule of faith forever changed the way many English-speaking Protestants perceive the doctrine of the Trinity. Instead of the proper personal name by which Christians come to know and love their God, English-speaking Christians increasingly began to think of the Trinity as a network of propositions in need of evaluation for rationality and intelligibility. Suddenly, it was no longer clear that the Trinity mattered for salvation. Invocation and Assent by Jason Vickers charts the effects of this crucial shift in the identity and function of the rule of faith. Examining this turning point in seventeenth-century theological thought, Vickers illuminates the origins of indifference to the Trinity found in many quarters of Christianity today.

Genres: Theology

235 pages, Paperback

First published August 20, 2008

Reviews

[Bryce Beale · Rating 2 out of 5]

Vickers has no doubt a real point in showing how Trinitarian theology shifted just after the Reformation. The Early and Medieval Churches were more interested in the practice of Trinitarian theology--the Trinity was to them first and foremost the name of God which they invoked in worship. But in the late 16th and early 17th century, especially in England, the emphasis changed. The Trinity became a doctrinal piece of data to be rationally understood and assented to.

This point is fair and well defended. Still, two themes in the book were off-putting for me. First, this is a rather "high church" sort of book. I was surprised to find an ardent Wesleyan like Vickers almost siding with, if not intellectually then at least sympathetically, the Catholic opponents of the English Protestants whose arguments he traces in the bulk of the book. Maybe this was an accident, born of his wish to discredit those rationalist Anglicans who caused the Trinitarian shift. But Vickers' preference for form and tradition are clear in other ways--most notably, in the second theme which bothered me.

For one of the central arguments of Invocation and Assent is that the blame for the shift in Trinitarian theology from worship to reason comes largely from the Protestants' desire to replace the rule of faith with Scripture. I tried very hard to understand Vickers on this point, since my first gutteral reaction was repulsion. How could anything but Scripture be our rule of faith without us ascending as high church as the Church of Rome? If the rule of faith is tradition, and if it must govern our thought equal to or above Scripture, then we are Catholic, not Protestant. I must be misunderstanding Vickers on this point.

So, the benefit of Vicker's book is in its reminder not to make the Trinity a mere rational equation, but to always use what data we know of the Trinity from Scripture as an opportunity for heartfelt worship (as he well shows in his chapter on Charles Wesley's hymns about the Trinity). The book's weakness is its ambiguous but certainly adversarial stance against Scripture as our rule of faith.

[Pastor2112 · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sometimes, the unintended consequences of well-intentioned actions can make things worse. This is certainly true with Trinitarian theology. In this book, Vickers demonstrates how the Protestant doctrines of "sola scriptura" (all we need is Scripture alone, rendering tradition irrelevant and unreliable) and the perspecuity of Scripture (that the most important truths of the Bible are clear to all) led to devastating consequences in Trinitarian theology. In the centuries to follow, many who held to "sola scriptura" did not "clearly" see trinitarian doctrine within it. Furthermore, they found the mystery of the Trinity unreasonable. This led some to abandon Trinitarian doctrine. The echoes of this rejection continue to the present. There are few doctrines I would fight and die over, but I would like to think that the Trinity, the Incarnation of God in Christ, and salvation by Grace are at the top of the list. This book is highly academic and extremely detailed, so I wouldn't recommend it to just anyone. But for those interested in these kinds of things, this book is fantastic.