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How much could one make of the claim that, even as for the Greeks, what is decisive is who God is, so for the Jews, what is decisive is what God does? Perhaps this question should be asked slightly differently: How much could one make of the claim that, even as for the Greeks, what is decisive about a thing is what it is, so for the Jews, what is decisive about a thing is what it does? In any case, what I want to be able to say is that the doctrine of the trinity is implied by Christian faith and witness as such only conditionally, not unconditionally.

The crucial question christologically, given that the question christology answers is also and most fundamentally the existential question, is not whether Jesus is man or God, but whether Jesus is an authority, even, possibly, the (primary) authority, or the explicit primal ontic source of authority. Clearly, the earliest explicit christologies, whose assumed concepts were such as "Christ," "Son of Man," "Son of God", "Son of David," "King," etc., intended to assert that Jesus, although a man, is indeed the authorizing source, even though, given their concepts, they did not and could not say that Jesus is God. In fact, relative to the conceptual assumptions of these earliest christologies, the question whether Jesus is God didn't so much as arise. Consequently, they can't be rightly interpreted as "low" christologies that answered it negatively – -- any more than Paul, say, can be rightly interpreted as a subordinationist in his christology simply because he speaks of Jesus as the one Lord through whom are all things and through whom we exist, as distinct from the one God the Father from whom are all things and for whom we exist (1 Cor 8:6 ff.). But this means that, relative to these same assumptions, there neither was nor could have been any doctrine of the trinity, even though the motives that, given other conceptual assumptions, eventually led to the doctrine need by no means to have been absent. (Of course, the question of their presence or absence is about as difficult as the question of the presence or absence of subordinationism in the christology of Paul.)

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