‘The Bible is not “like any other book”’: Katherine Sonderegger and the Bible as Vestigium Trinitatis

Abstract

The second volume of Katherine Sonderegger's Systematic Theology is a daring attempt to do something new in trinitarian dogma: find a fulsome, technically sophisticated doctrine of the Trinity in key Old Testament texts using an interpretive approach, and employing assumptions, that might be recognizable to certain Jewish theological readings of the same texts. This paper situates this project in Sonderegger's longstanding belief in a need for Christianity to overcome its pervasive anti-Judaism, and shows how, to achieve this aim, Sonderegger constructs a highly unique and provocative understanding of the Bible as the creaturely site wherein God's immanent, holy life is manifest. The author commends Sonderegger's ontology of scripture as stimulating and compelling, while also raising some questions for further consideration.