Vestigiae trinitatis

Is the vestigia tradition valid? Does the NT give us any warrant to think that there will be Trinitarian imprints on the creation? The answer is Yes.

1 Corinthians 12 describes the diversities of gifts from the one Spirit, the same Lord, and the same God (vv. 4-6). Gordon Fee suggests that the passage shows that the ecclesial “diversity reflects the nature of God and is therefore the true evidence of the work of the one God in their midst.” In a completely “unstudied” fashion, Paul’s argument moves from divine diversity and unity to ecclesial diversity and unity: “Just as there is only One God, from whom and for whom are all things, and One Lord, through whom are all things, so there is only One Spirit, through whose agency the One God manifests himself in a whole variety of ways in the believing community.”

John 17 makes it clear that the church is also the image of the perichoretic intertwining of the Persons of the Trinity. The Father is in the Son, and the Son is in the Father; that is the way they are One. And Jesus prays that the disciples would be one “just as” Father and Son are one, in perichoretic union with the Son and Father, and with one another. Human unity, human life, human self-sacrifice and mutual self-giving are all reflexes of the life of Father and Son.

1 Corinthians 11 gives us another example of vestigia; the order of sexes in marriage manifests the order of life in God. Paul writes that “Christ is the head of every man, and the man is the head of a woman, and God is the head of Christ” (v. 3). Whatever that means, it means that the Christ/man relation is analogous to the man/woman relation, and these are in turn analogous to the God/Christ relation. All are relations of headship.

In verse 7, Paul describes the connection of God and man, and of man and woman, differently. Here it is not a relation of headship, but a relation of glory. The God/man relation is the relation of God to His image and glory; God is the head of man, and the man is the glory of his head. This applies to the relation of man and woman too; Paul has already said that the relation of man to woman is a headship relation; now he looks at the relation from the other angle: Man is head, and woman is glory. The relation of man and woman reflects the relation of God to man.

In verse 7, however, Paul does not give the third term of the comparison. He says God/man is analogous to man/woman; but he doesn’t explicitly say that this is, in turn, analogous to God/Christ. Given the logic of verse 3, however, we can fill in that gap. If God is the head of Christ, and a head is in relation to his glory and image, then Paul implies that Christ is the “image and glory of God” (cf. 2 Corinthians 4:4). Thus, the relation of God to man (perhaps the Creator-creature relation more broadly) is analogous to the relation of God to Christ. And, the relation of God to Christ is also manifest in the relation of man to woman. All of these are head/glory relations.

From these, we can extrapolate a logic that has broader application (just as we extrapolate a hermeneutical logic from the apostolic reading of the OT): Divine-human, and human-human relations, are patterned on the relation of the divine persons. That much is explicit. But we can also perhaps extrapolate a logic that draws out analogies between human-world relations and the relation of divine persons, and also a logic that more explicitly includes analogies to the Spirit.

However we extrapolate from these explicit statements, they are sufficient to provide general endorsement to the vestigia tradition.