Journal: Bibliotheca Sacra
Volume: BSAC 179:715 (Jul 2022)
Article: Book Reviews
Author: Matthew S. DeMoss

BSac 179:715 (July-September 2022) p. 357

Book Reviews

By The Faculty And Staff Of Dallas Theological Seminary

Matthew S. DeMoss

Editor

The Mystery of the Trinity: A Trinitarian Approach to the Attributes of God. By Vern S. Poythress. Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R, 2020. xxx + 688 pp. $49.99.

Distinguished professor of New Testament and systematic theology at Westminster Theological Seminary, Poythress offers a magisterial compendium on the divine attributes within a distinctly Trinitarian framework. Poythress has authored some twenty books across a diversity of subjects including the philosophy of science, theological method, hermeneutics, biblical translation, and even dispensationalism.

Sinclair Ferguson introduces The Mystery of the Trinity as Poythress’s magnum opus scaling “theology’s Mount Everest,” “the theme of all themes—God himself” (xvii). The work builds on the concept of “perspectivalism” as developed in various works by Poythress (Symphonic Theology) and colleague John Frame. Perspectivalism maintains that because we are finite, our knowledge of God is limited to different perspectives. Scripture and the created universe reveal the triune God in multiple ways such that, while much can be understood of God, we must recognize the limits of our understanding regarding the divine mystery. Poythress insists that the theology of the Trinity must not be overridden by Aristotelian or other philosophic assumptions. There is no back stairway to the transcendent God. Rather God has revealed who he is and how he wants to be known and worshiped preeminently in the Bible.

The author introduces the work by considering several challenges regarding how the infinite God can be independent, immutable, eternal, and simple yet have genuine relations with his creation in time and space. Much of the volume responds to these challenges and seeks to enhance the reader’s understanding God in light of Trinitarian confession.

Poythress divides the work into eight parts with forty-eight chapters. Part 1 sets forth basic resources for knowing God through natural and direct revelation especially in Christ and the Bible. God far exceeds what our minds can comprehend, yet we can know him truly through his revelation to us—a truth rejected in the Enlightenment (20).

In Part 2 Poythress begins to address classical theism’s attributes of God: absoluteness (independence from creation), infinity (limitlessness), immensity (omnipresence), eternity (noting that Christ both transcends yet enters into space and time), immutability (unchangeability of nature), omniscience, and simplicity—themes to which he returns throughout the volume.