Is Nicene Trinitarianism "In" the Scriptures? Lewis Ayres Tout ce qui demeure cache dans le Nouveau Testament fait encore partie du Nouveau Testament1 My title poses a blunt question, one that is full of ambiguity. But this is just the sort of question that my students are apt to pose when they study the emergence of classic doctrinal formulae, and I emphasize that the controversies that gave them birth are deeply exegetical. The crux of any plausible answer to the question is the bridge that one must construct between the language of the New Testament—where a clear statement of the nature of the godhead is absent—and the language of later Nicene Trinitarian formulation.2 My own attempt at spanning what to modern eyes easily seems a significant gap will begin by critiquing another attempt, [End Page 1285] one that might initially seem to offer all that we need. As I do so it will be clear that I am focused on the texts of the New Testament, but as I begin to set out my answer I will at least hint at how we might also extend this argument to cover Israel's Scriptures. I In the first few years of my teaching career, David Yeago's short essay "The New Testament and the Nicene Dogma" was frequently referenced as an answer to the question of how one might understand the classical formulae of the Christian faith to be fundamentally in accord with that which is revealed in Scripture.3 The essay offers an approach to the question of my title that appeals to any scholar taken by the post-liberal vision of doctrine as fundamentally regulative, or taken by the concept of the "plain sense" of Scripture as it was articulated by a number of those who were associated with Yale during the 1970s and 1980s. At the heart of Yeago's argument lies a fairly simple principle: in order to understand the relationship between the Church's Trinitarian teaching and the text of the New Testament we need to look to the judgments that the text renders. Yeago writes: The New Testament does not contain a formally articulated "doctrine of God" of the same kind as the later Nicene dogma. What it does contain is a pattern of implicit and explicit judgements concerning the God of Israel and his relationship to the crucified and risen Jesus of Nazareth.4 Thus, Philippians 2:9 tells us that God has bestowed on Christ "the name which is above every name," and this must be the name of Yhwh. We read this text in the light of the Philippians 1:10–11 insistence that "every knee should bend," and we know the latter to be alluding to Isaiah 45:21–24, which insists that in Yhwh are "saving justice and strength." Hence the judgment of the text is that "within the thought-world of Israel's Scriptures, no stronger affirmation of the bond between the risen Jesus and the God of Israel is possible."5 Yeago goes on to write: It is perfectly consistent with this that the early communities came [End Page 1286] to speak by preference of the God of Israel as Jesus' Father and of Jesus as God's unique Son, in a relationship definitive for the identity of each.6 Yeago's understanding of the judgments that Scripture delivers is quite expansive and yet precise: The affirmation that this God has so radically identified himself with Jesus can rhyme with Israel's confession of the singularity and incom-parability of God if and only if their relationship is eternal. There is only one God, Yhwh, and relationship to Jesus of Nazareth is somehow intrinsic to this God's identity from everlasting. There is only one God, but the one God is never without his only-begotten Son.7 In this quotation Yeago seems to be arguing that the judgments we can attribute to the text include some second-order logical consequences. Thus, he doesn't point to other key texts that one might use to argue for the Son's eternity, but presents belief in the Son's co-eternity as a necessary...