Trinitarian reading

In her book on Joachim of Fiore, Marjorie Reeves notes that Joachim insists on diligent study of both testaments as the means for reaching the Spiritual interpretation: “The relationship is clearly a Trinitarian one: in Joachim’s phrase, the Spiritualis intellectus proceeds from both the Testaments, just as the Spirit proceeds from both the Father and the Son.”

This means, of course, that Joachim cannot be Marcionite in his reading of Scripture; without the first status we can have neither the second nor the third. He could not (as some of his followers did) leave the Old Testament behind, because leaving it behind would mean losing the Spirit, not to mention the third age or third status .

And his suggestion that there is a Trinitarian thing going on here is very intriguing.

Fuzzily, it seems that: The robustness of Trinitarian theology is directly proportional to the robustness of double, that is, typological reading; the Spirit is the one who harmonizes the Old and New as the breath and music of God; there is something mystical in the experience of reading so that Old and New mutually illumine one another – there is a rush of the Spirit, a bursting of the energy of God, that you can’t get while keeping Old and New in separate compartments and departments; and, on Joachimite premises, the separation of Old and New in our schools of theology institutionalizes the quenching of the Spirit.

But there are signs that the Spirit is being unleashed: What Time has recently described as the re-Judaizing of Jesus, and what we find in the work of NT Wright, Richard Hays, and others; the renewed interest in patristic and medieval interpretation; the holistic biblical interpretation coming from Africa, Asia, and Latin America – all these are perhaps signs of a Pentecostal moment in church history.