It is the product of a multistep process of comparing the two translations and combining their strengths. With an eye for clarity and theological integrity, a team of readers—including W. H. Velema, the lone surviving author, together with Lawrence W. Bilkes and Gerald M. Bilkes—checked the entire work.

One might be tempted to question if this nearly 1,000-page tome rightly bears the descriptor concise. Compared to many systematic theology books, 1,000 pages is by no means brief, but held to the standard of other Dutch works like those of Bavinck (3,024 pp.), Kuyper (3,486 pp.), and Vos (≈1,900 pp.), it is definitely on the smaller side.

This volume is composed of 15 chapters covering the following topics:

1. Introduction . . . 1
2. Revelation . . . 20
3. Holy Scripture . . . 58
4. Concerning God . . . 117
5. God’s Counsel . . . 193
6. God, the Creator of Heaven and Earth . . . 246
7. God’s Providence . . . 283
8. Man as the Image of God . . . 314
9. Sin . . . 385
10. Christ, the Mediator . . . 437
11. The Covenant of Grace . . . 539
12. The Doctrine of Salvation . . . 573
13. The Church . . . 677
14. The Means of Grace . . . 753
15. Eschatology . . . 819

You can read the TOC, prefaces, and part of the introductory chapter at the Westminster Bookstore site and a handful of endorsements at the Westminster Bookstore Blog.

Another book that caught my eye recently is Douglas F. Kelly’s forthcoming Systematic Theology I: The God Who Is—The Holy Trinity.  Karl Trueman shared some brief thoughts on a review copy that he received. The information on this volume is scant, so I don’t know much about it beyond what Trueman shares. No mention of it on the publisher’s website. At any rate, I’m eager to take a look at it and am excited to see an entire volume in a systematic theology set devoted to the doctrine of the Trinity—especially from the evangelical camp, which has been notorious for giving insufficient attention to the doctrine.

HT: James Grant

Also, how about we get someone to translate the whole thing—all 3,486 pages of it—into English for print and digital publication?

It’s composed of four volumes:

• Locus De Deo (949 pp.)
• Locus De Sacra Scriptura, Creatione, Creaturis (774 pp.)
• Locus De Providentia, Peccato, Foedere, Christo (1,035 pp.)
• Locus De Salute, Ecclesia, Sacramentis (728 pp.)

Sounds like a project for the Dutch Reformed Translation Society, Baker Academic, and Logos Bible Software, if you ask me.

While I’m on the subject of Dutch writers’ works in need of English translations, we really need to get Geerhardus Vos’s 1,900-page Gereformeerde dogmatiek (sometimes referred to simply as Dogmatiek) translated as well! I didn’t even know he had written one until Vos scholar extraordinaire Jim Dennison told me about it.

Update: On the subject of the Dutch Reformed Translation Society, it looks like they might have their hands full for a while. They are working on Petrus van Mastricht’s massive Theoretico-Practica Theologia.

I got a friendly email yesterday reminding me that I still needed to write my review and mentioning the week-long series of blog posts on verbal aspect from the book’s author next week at the Zondervan Koinonia blog. It appears that I’m not alone as I’ve seen several other reviews coming out today.

Though I had 11 semesters of Greek classes in college and seminary and taught elementary and intermediate Greek for six semesters, my exposure to the verbal aspect theory has been rather limited. In fact, I don’t recall its ever being mentioned in any of my Greek courses with the one exception of the 15- or 20-minute overview in Advanced Greek Grammar. But by that time, I had already done some reading on my own, first prompted by a question from one of my first-year Greek students (he had a friend from another school whose teacher was a proponent of the verbal aspect theory) and then by my preparing to teach tense uses to my fourth semester students. But the extent of my reading was the section in Wallace’s Grammar, “An Assessment of Time in Verb Tenses,” and a smattering of articles and papers that I found online. I have since read and would recommend an article written by my friend Andy Naselli, “A Brief Introduction to Verbal Aspect Theory in New Testament Greek.”

All this to say that I was excited to have an opportunity to dig a little bit deeper.

Contents

Verbal Aspect Theory

1. What is Verbal Aspect?
2. The History of Verbal Aspect
3. Perfective Aspect
4. Imperfective Aspect
5. The Problem of the Perfect

Verbal Aspect and New Testament Text

6. Verbal Lexeme Basics
7. Present and Imperfect Tense-forms
8. Aorist and Future Tense-forms
9. Perfect and Pluperfect Tense-Forms
10. More Participles

Summary

BVABG brings a technical and controversial subject down to a level that most Greek students can understand and benefit from. It’s a fairly easy read, even for those with little to no exposure to the details of the verbal aspect debate.

What follows is a brief summary of Campbell’s positions on some of the main issues.

Aspect and Aktionsart are distinct and must not be confused.

1. Aspect is the author’s subjective viewpoint or way of portraying action. A tense-form is always either perfective or imperfective. That never changes.
2. Aktionsart refers to the various kinds of action that a verb can perform based on the semantics, the lexeme, and the context. A tense-form can have many different Aktionsarten as those influencing factors change.

There are only two aspects—perfective and imperfective—not three (stative is not an aspect but an Aktionsart) or four as some have suggested.

1. Perfective aspect views the action externally, as a whole, in summary. It’s like a reporter watching a parade from a helicopter.
2. Imperfective aspect views an action internally, as it unfolds. It’s like a reporter watching a parade from the street.

Aspect corresponds to semantics, which is contrasted with pragmatics. Pragmatics corresponds to Aktionsart.

1. Semantics (or more properly verbal or grammatical semantics) refers to the “values that are encoded in the verbal form” (22). They are always present and uncancelable. Semantics answers the question “Who am I?”
2. “Pragmatics refers to the semantic values in context and in combination with other factors” (23). As such, they are changing. Pragmatics answers the question “What do I do?”

This semantics–pragmatics dichotomy is what leads Campbell and others to exclude time from the tense-forms, for if the time element is changeable or cancelable (and it is), then it must be part of pragmatics and thus a part of the verbs Aktionsart, not a part of semantics, what the tense-form always communicates. And to say that time belongs to pragmatics is to say that the tense-forms don’t encode temporal reference.

As Campbell puts it,

The remaining question related to the distinction, however, is this: Is temporal reference semantic or pragmatic? If temporal reference is semantic, then Greek verbs truly are tenses. A verb’s temporal reference is uncancelable and is a core part of its meaning. An aorist is a past tense and must always be a past tense.

But here, of course, lies a problem. We learn early on that aorist are not always past referring. Therefore, we are led to ask: Is past temporal reference a semantic value of the aorist? . . . Even though the aorist often ends up expressing past temporal reference when used in Greek texts, this is a pragmatic implicature rather than semantic encoding. (24)

The most important players in the history of verbal aspect are Georg Curtius, K. L. McKay, Stanley Porter, Buist Fanning, Mari Broman Olsen, Rodney J. Decker, T. V. Evans, and—the author himself—Constantine R. Campbell.

The present points of disagreement among scholars are

1. whether time is intrinsic to the tense-forms in the indicative mood,
2. how many aspects there are, and
3. which tense-forms belongs to which aspects—a point that Campbell leaves off.

Perfective Tense-Forms

Campbell argues that both the aorist and future tense-forms are perfective. Many have maintained that the future is aspectually vague or non-aspectual, but Campbell disagrees. In addition to being perfective, the aorist is remote, which can take the form of spatial, temporal, or logical remoteness. The future is also perfective, but, unlike all the other tense-forms, it is a true tense in that it always conveys future time, and by extension remoteness. I’m not sure why Campbell feels the need to make an exception with the future in terms of time. It seems that this is a similar move to Olsen’s when she maintains that some lexemes convey temporal reference in their semantics, but others do not. The bigger problem is the overlap between the aorist and the future. Since (1) both are perfective, (2) both are remote, and (3) both can be future, what’s the difference between them when they are both future referring. Why choose one over the other? Campbell’s attempt to differentiate between them in this case is less than satisfying.

Imperfective Tense-Forms

Since there are only two aspects in Campbell’s system, he puts the remaining tense-forums in the category of imperfective.

1. Present is imperfective and proximate.
2. Imperfect is imperfective and remote.
3. Perfect is imperfective and more proximate.
4. Pluperfect is imperfective and more remote.

Campbell defends his view based on the similar roles that the present and perfect on the one hand and the imperfect and pluperfect on the other hand play in narrative.

The rest of the book goes on to discuss the Aktionsarten of each of the tense-forms. Chapters 7–10 include examples as well as exercises, with an answer key in the back. Oddly enough, Campbell’s system results in something not too different from the tense uses that you find in Wallace’s Grammar. Though I do think that Campbell’s system does provide a more linguistically informed and organized approach to the Greek verbal system, I’m not yet convinced that it really changes as much as proponents seem to suggest.

Evaluation

As one who has not delved into the technical literature on this subject, I find Campbell’s book informative, accessible, and fairly well reasoned. It doesn’t answer all of the questions, but it certainly provides one with a nice introduction to the major players and contours of the issues involved in the verbal aspect debate. I highly recommend it to those wanting to learn more about verbal aspect.

Finally, one grammatical error that was missed: “Thus, the semantic values of the future indicative tense-form is [are] perfective aspect and future temporal reference” (39).

Endorsements

Other Reviews

Mike Aubrey at his ἐν ἐφέσῳ: Thoughts and Meditations blog:

• The Basics of Verbal Aspect
• The Basics of Verbal Aspect - A Review Part I
• The Basics of Verbal Aspect - A Review Part II

Michael Hanel at the BibleWorks Blog:

• Review of Campbell’s Basics of Verbal Aspect in Biblical Greek - Introduction
• Review of Campbell’s Basics of Verbal Aspect in Biblical Greek - Part Two
• More on Campbell and Verbal Aspect

Donald Kim at his blog:

• Basics of Verbal Aspect in Biblical Greek, A Review

Matthew Malcolm at his Crypto-theology blog:

• Verbal Aspect in Biblical Greek

Andy Naselli at his blog:

• Con Campbell’s Primer on Verbal Aspect Theory

William Varner at Amazon:

• A Good Start, But…

HT: JT

CrossOver Linux is a customized, commercial version of Wine, the popular software that allows you to run many Windows applications on Linux (e.g., Ubuntu, et al.).

On October 28, 2008, the folks at CodeWeavers are making either of these products—in its downloadable, professional version—free of charge for one day only (though I successfully downloaded it tonight at at 8:00 PM PST).

Here’s what they say,

We are giving away all of our software for free on Tuesday, October 28th, 2008. This is a fully working, fully supported copy of either CrossOver Mac Professional, or CrossOver Linux Professional. No hooks, tricks, timebombs, or gimmicks: it’s the real deal.

Here’s how to get it:

1. Go to http://lameduck.codeweavers.com/free/ and enter your email address. You’ll receive a serial number via email.
2. Go to http://register.codeweavers.com/ and enter your serial number. You’ll receive an email with instructions on how to log in and download your software.
3. Go to http://www.codeweavers.com/account/, change your password, and go to My Downloads and download the appropriate trial version of the software.
4. Install the trial software and unlock it within the application with your email address and password to upgrade it to the full professional version.

At the My Downloads page, you’ll read this note:

Due to high demand during the Lame Duck Free Day, we have temporarily disabled the unlocked builds normally available on this page.

At this time we are offering downloads of our trial version available from our world wide network of mirrors. Please be aware that the trial version can be unlocked to the full version from within the software itself. So you are not missing out on any features this way.

Once the traffic returns to normal levels you can return to this page at anytime if you still wish to download the fully unlocked builds.

I can verify that downloading the trial version and unlocking it from within the application does successfully upgrade it to the full professional version, though it took a few minutes for the registration to go through. Be patient.

Find out why they are giving it away and other pertinent details at The Unofficial Apple Weblog or in the official Codeweavers press release.

HT: Karl Kleinpaste

In the last section of his chapter on the Trinity, “Logic and the Doctrine of the Trinity,” Feinberg is responding to criticisms that challenge the logical coherency of the doctrine.

Timothy Bartel raises an objection that parallels the McCall–Yandell argument very closely, the only difference being which properties are in view. McCall and Yandell attacked the notions of authority and submission, but if their argument is applied consistently, it would have to encompass any properties that the three don’t share in common.

Feinberg summarizes the objection like this:

The church, as we noted, said that the Father is ungenerate and that he begets the Son. The Son’s property is being eternally begotten by the Father, and the Holy Spirit’s property is his procession from the Father (or Father and Son). Given these respective properties, . . . we seem to have a problem, according to Bartel, for we can now write an argument like the following:

God the Son is eternally begotten of the Father qua divine.
God the Father is not eternally begotten of the Father qua divine;
Therefore, God the Son is not the same deity as God the Father. (494)

Those familiar with the McCall–Yandell argument will immediately see the similarities. If one of the persons has a property that at least one of the others lacks, then they don’t have the same divine nature and Arianism is the result. It sounds logical on the surface, but Feinberg explains why it fails:

This may seem to be an insuperable dilemma, but Bartel thinks not, and I agree. . . . The reason is that being eternally begotten and eternally proceeding are not properties the Son and Spirit have in virtue of being divine, but in virtue of being distinct subsistences of that divine essence. Hence, the premises of the above should read “qua subsistence or person,” and the conclusion should say, “Therefore, God the Son is not the same person or subsistence as God the Father.” (494–95)

I think Feinberg’s analysis highlights perfectly why the McCall–Yandell argument just won’t work. It wrongly tries to draw a conclusion about the one shared divine nature when the properties under discussion belong to the persons qua persons, not to the persons qua divine.

Here’s a selection from the publisher’s description:

This Bible [the ESV] has been growing in popularity among students in biblical studies, mainline Christian scholars and clergy, and Evangelical Christians of all denominations.

Along with that growth comes the need for the books of the Apocrypha to be included in ESV Bibles, both for denominations that use those books in liturgical readings and for students who need them for historical purposes. More Evangelicals are also beginning to be interested in the Apocrypha, even though they don’t consider it God’s Word. The English Standard Version Bible with the Apocrypha, for which the Apocrypha has been commissioned by Oxford University Press, employs the same methods and guidelines used by the original translators of the ESV, to produce for the first time an ESV Apocrypha. This will be the only ESV with Apocrypha available anywhere, and it includes all of the books and parts of books in the Protestant Apocrypha, the Catholic Old Testament, and the Old Testament as used in Orthodox Christian churches. It will have a lovely pre-printed case binding, and will include a full-color map section, a table of weights and measures used in the Bible, and many other attractive features.

More info here:

• Bible Design and Binding has the news: Oxford’s ESV with Apocrypha.
• Here’s the listing on Oxford’s site: English Standard Version Bible with Apocrypha.
• Here’s the listing on Amazon: English Standard Version Bible with Apocrypha (Hardcover).

Maybe this is old news, but I don’t recall seeing anything about this in my slice of the blog world.

HT: Sam Bray

The Argument

Here’s their argument:

1. If the Son is eternally subordinate to the Father in all possible worlds, then the Son is necessarily subordinate to the Father.
2. If the Son is necessarily subordinate to the Father, then the Son is essentially subordinate to the Father.
3. Thus, the Son, as essentially subordinate to the Father, is of a different essence or nature than the Father, which entails a denial of homoousion.

My First Response

My first line of response is to show that this argument can be equally applied to any eternal difference between the Father and the Son. Let’s take the Son’s property of sonship and apply their own argument to it.

1. If the Son is eternally the Son and the Father is eternally not the Son in all possible worlds, then the Son is necessarily the Son and the Father is necessarily not the Son.
2. If the Son is necessarily the Son and the Father is necessarily not the Son, then the Son is essentially the Son and the Father is essentially not the Son.
3. Thus, the Son, as essentially the Son, and the Father, as essentially not the Son, are of a different essence or nature, which entails a denial of homoousion.

The result of extending the argument this way is that it demonstrates—assuming the legitimacy of the argument—that there can be no eternal difference of any kind without denying homoousion. But Yandell himself affirmed in the debate that the Son alone has the property of being the Son, and the Father alone the property of being the Father, and the Spirit alone the property of being the Spirit. Yet, according to his own argument, he must deny homoousion because these eternal differences constitute necessary differences, which constitute essential differences.

Yandell and McCall are attempting to affirm three propositions that simply cannot stand together. Here are the three incompatible propositions:

1. The argument is valid.
2. There are eternal differences among the three persons of the Trinity.
3. The Father and the Son are homoousios.

If they wish to maintain their claim to rationality, they must either deny (1) the legitimacy of the argument, (2) that the Son alone has the property of being the Son, etc. (which amounts to a denial of the Christian doctrine of the Trinity), (3) the doctrine of homoousion, or (4) some combination of the three. At least one of these has to go. All three cannot coexist.

My Second Response

My second line of response to this argument is to show that it confuses categories—just like Kevin Giles does in his unhelpful books on the subject.

Assuming for a moment that we should not deny that there are some eternal differences among the three persons of the Trinity, which, again, even Yandell acknowledged when he said that the Son alone has the property of being the Son, there must be some way to account for these differences without abandoning homoousion. I make this claim on the basis that Scripture seems to teach both.

First, it is important to point out that McCall and Yandell seem to be using only two categories: essence and function; while Grudem and Ware use three: essence, person, and function. Thus what Grudem and Ware mean by essence and person end up getting merged together into McCall and Yandell’s single category of essence.

In the two-category system, we need a place to put personal properties like fatherhood, sonship, and “spiritness.” Do they belong to essence or function? I doubt anyone would want to maintain that sonship is simply something the Son does and not something that He possesses or is. But does sonship belong to the one divine essence? No. If it did, then all three persons would be the Son, since they all share equally the one divine essence. So where do we put it? We must, in a two-category system, differentiate between the one divine essence shared equally by all three persons and their own individual essences that constitute what each person holds uniquely. This double use of the term essence is what seems to cause confusion for so many, so this might not be the best set of terms to use.

The important thing to note, though, is that this necessary distinction allows part of their conclusion—with a minor modification—(i.e., “the Son, as essentially the Son, and the Father, as essentially not the Son, are of a different essence different essences”) to be affirmed without denying homoousion, because it is the individual essences, not the shared essence, that the conclusion necessarily has in view (i.e., since the major and minor premises concern not what they share, but what they hold uniquely).

In the three-category system, the term essence is reserved for the one shared divine nature, while the term person is used for those properties that belong uniquely to each. So fatherhood, sonship, and “spiritness” would not belong to the one divine essence, but to the category of person. This approach has the advantage of using separate terms and avoiding confusion introduced by the two-category system, but it’s not without its challenges.

It doesn’t really matter to me what we call the category that accounts for their differences. The fact is that there must be such a category or we are forced to abandon rationality or deny clear biblical teaching.

Regardless of which system we go with (perhaps there’s a better option?), we must account for what the three share in common and what they hold uniquely, even if we do have to struggle to find the right terms. My main point is this: if the persons of the Trinity can equally share the one divine essence without obliterating their differences of being Father, Son, and Spirit, then we at least have a way to conceive of how they can equally share the one divine essence without obliterating their differences of authority and submission.

In the next post, I’ll respond to the second argument concerning the Father’s supposed inability to become incarnate.

See these previous posts of mine for the context of this post (most recent on top):

• My Question for Dr. Yandell
• Trinity Debate—Live
• Ware–Grudem vs. McCall–Yandell on the Trinity

Update 1: For clarification, I added “in all possible worlds” to the first premise of the argument. I was assuming it all along, but should have stated it explicitly to represent the argument most faithfully and avoid misunderstanding.

Update 2: Replaced my misuse of homoousian, which typically refers to someone who believes in homoousion, with the more appropriate homoousion.

Update 3: The discussion has continued over on James Gordon’s blog, Conquering Thirst.

If the Son is necessarily the Son and the Father is necessarily not the Son, then the Son is essentially the Son and the Father is essentially not the Son. Thus the Son is essentially different from the Father. Must you not deny homoousion on the basis of your own premises?

This parallels the central argument that Drs. Yandell and McCall were making—and shows its weakness:

If the Son is necessarily subordinate to the Father, then the Son is essentially subordinate to the Father. Thus, the Son is essentially different from the Father, which entails a denial of homoousion.

Unfortunately, Dr. Yandell didn’t understand the question. But it is one that needs to be addressed.

Neither he nor Tom shows how their position—on their own premises—can account for any necessary differences without denying homoousion, because, they argue, all necessary differences are essential differences.

They are left with three choices:

1. Deny homoousion.
2. Deny that there are any necessary differences among Father, Son, and Spirit.
3. Withdraw their argument.

I’d suggest #3, but they must choose at least one.

Update 1: Nick understands the force of my question.

Update 2: I develop the argument more thoroughly in my next post: Does Eternal Subordination Entail a Denial of Homoousion?

Update 3: Replaced my misuse of homoousian, which typically refers to someone who believes in homoousion, with the more appropriate homoousion.

Update 4: The discussion has continued over on James Gordon’s blog, Conquering Thirst.

I don’t know if I’ll liveblog. We’ll see. But I probably will write a post later analyzing the debate.

I wish I had access to this technology when I was running down this quote.

Check it out: http://labs.google.com/gaudi.

Read more:

• TechCrunch: “Google Launches Audio Indexing”
• ReadWriteWeb: “Google Audio Indexing: Keyword Searches for Political Videos”
• Google Blog: “Google Audio Indexing now on Google Labs”

In this interview you’ll learn important things about R. C., like what kind of vegetable he would be if he were one.

Right now they have their annual Customer Appreciation Sale going on. Save 10% on your order, and get free shipping with a $50+ purchase.

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They don’t always beat Amazon, but they’re worth checking out.

NOTE: If you don’t already have a Libronix Customer ID, make sure to download the free Libronix engine and create a Libronix Customer ID before you grab this commentary.

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• Interview with John Frame on the Problem of Evil
  Andy Naselli at Between Two Worlds
• The Logical and Emotional Problems of Evil
  Andy Naselli at his Theology blog
• The Problem of Evil, Suffering, and Pain
  C. Michael Patton at Parchment and Pen
• The Problem of Evil with John MacArthur
  Chris Larson at the Ligonier Ministries Blog

They all look worth a read or listen.