Trinitarian language in Paul Tensions in the description of Father, Son and Spirit

This essay is aiming to go through and study the most important and frequently mentioned terms and titles used in the letters of Paul to denote and describe God, the Father, the Son and the Spirit. These include “Christ” and “Lord” as well. The purpose has been two-fold: on the one hand I wished to study the background and meaning of the concepts in question, as used by Paul; on the other hand – and this has been my main concern – I specifically wanted to look at what kind of language Paul uses to denote Father, Son and Spirit in terms of their attributed characteristics, roles and theological functions. The questions are focused on if it is possible to identify specific and unique attributions, for example made to the Father, which are not attributed to the Son or the Spirit and vice versa. And if there are ways in which the decriptions overlap each other, in terms of characteristics, roles or functions. What makes for example talk about the Father different from that of the Spirit; and are there any kind of linguistic tensions in Pauls' way of describing God and his actions? The main sources used to answer these questions have, of course, been the letters in the canon of the New Testament ascribed to, and read by the church as written by Paul the apostle. I have studied the corpus as a whole, but I also wanted to let the individual passages and even whole letters be interpreted (as far as possible) with a sensibility for the narrower contexts in which they stand. I read through the letters and identified where, how often and in what way Paul uses the different terms – written apart from each other as well as together. I primarily used the official swedish translation Bibel 2000 by Bibelkommissionen, but where there in comparison with other translations seemed to be different options at hand, I consulted the greek text as presented in Novum Testamentum Graece by Nestle-Aland. Secondary literature consists primarily of well-known and recognized bible commentaries, books and exegetical dictionaries by for example Joseph A. Fitzmyer, James D.G. Dunn, Martin Hengel, Ferdinand Hahn, Gerhard Schneider, N.T. Wright etc. What I have found in my study is that Paul uses the terms and titles in a way that, on the one hand carefully and in somewhat systematically seeks to describe them as distinct from one another. First in the obvious way of denoting them as Father, Son and Spirit (the Son is not called the Father and the Spirit is not the Son, and so forth); and secondly they are given different theological roles and functions in the salvation history. The Spirit did not for example take on flesh and die for the sins of humanity, and the Son did not raise from the dead by himself. Prayer and thanksgiving, likewise, seems only to be offered to God, the Father, and never the Spirit or Christ, even though the proper way of praying and giving thanks to Him, according to Paul, is through or in the name of Jesus Christ and in the Spirit. But on the other hand Paul uses a language that makes it impossible to understand God only in such a categorical and distinguishing way. In several ways he talks about Father, Son and Spirit with an overlapping language of description when it comes their theological characteristics, roles and functions. The Father is known as “Father” in relation to the Son, and it is always God, the Father who is said to act in, with and through the Son and the Spirit. The Son and the Spirit never works by, or for them selves in opposition with God's will, but are constantly fulfilling God's purposes and pointing at the glorification and importance of him or one another. Paul's use of the terms makes it obvious that they as Father, Son and Spirit is fully interdependent on each other. God the Father appears and reveals himself through and in the Son and the Spirit. And in turn, the Son and the Spirit enables experience, availability and revelation or understanding of each other and of the Father. Paul's christology would have no grounds or relevance if there were no patriology; and likewise his patriology would be rather abstract and unsatisfactory without his pneumatology of the Spirit as God's renewed presence amongst his people. Therefor, for Paul, talk about God is necessarily talk about Father, Son and Spirit