Re‐imagining Divine Simplicity in Trinitarian Theology

This article reconsiders the relationship between divine simplicity and trinitarian theology based on historical and systematic grounds. I first show that in its early emergence, simplicity was not understood as posing intuitive incompatibilities with the development of trinitarian language. This provides good reason to question the assumption that incompatibility of this kind exists between simplicity and Trinity. I then argue that simplicity deeply enriches the doxological dimension of trinitarian theology. Divine simplicity forces us into the habit of questioning our understanding of the Trinity based on concepts that we are familiar with. As a result, it magnifies our sense of the Trinity's ‘super‐abundant richness’. I conclude that trinitarian theology will lose a great deal of its doxological potential if we give up the doctrine of divine simplicity.     

IS JOHN ZIZIOULAS AN EXISTENTIALIST IN DISGUISE? RESPONSE TO LUCIAN TURCESCU

This essay responds to Lucian Turcescu's article, “ ‘Person’ versus ‘Individual’, and Other Modern Misreadings of Gregory of Nyssa”, Modern Theology Vol. 18 no. 4 (October, 2002) in which he argues that John Zizioulas's relational ontology of trinitarian personhood is indebted more to modern personalism and existentialism than to the Cappadocian Fathers. Turcescu's focus on Gregory of Nyssa does not warrant the claim that a relational ontology of personhood cannot be found within the thought of the Cappadocian Fathers. More substantively, Turcescu never addresses Zizioulas's interpretation of the Cappadocian affirmation of the monarchy of the Father, which, I argue, is central to Zizioulas's relational ontology insofar as such an ontology attempts to express the realism of divine‐human communion.     

Divine Simplicity and the Holy Trinity

The doctrine of divine simplicity is largely ignored in modern continental theology and has been criticized by some analytic theists. However, it plays a central role in patristic and medieval trinitarian thought, and is a doctrinal affirmation of the Catholic Church. This article seeks to illustrate the significance of the teaching first by examining the contrasting modern trinitarian theologies of Karl Barth and Richard Swinburne, noting how each suffers from a deficit of reference to the doctrine of divine simplicity. The article then presents four aspects of Aquinas’ teaching on divine simplicity. From this a consideration of trinitarian persons ensues that illustrates why the distinction of persons in God can best be understood by making use of Aquinas’ theology of ‘subsistent relations’, while the unified nature of God can best be understood in terms of ‘personal modes of subsistence’. Based on this analysis, the contrasting insights of both Barth and Swinburne can be fully retained, without the contrasting inherent problems that the theology of each presents.     

Difficulties in Defining the Concept of God: Kierkegaard in Dialogue with Levinas,Buber, and Rosenzweig

This article investigates difficulties in defining the concept of God by focusing on the question of what it means to understand God as a ‘person.’ This question is explored with respect to the work of Søren Kierkegaard, in dialogue with Franz Rosenzweig, Martin Buber, and Emmanuel Levinas. Thereby, the following three questions regarding divine ‘personhood’ come into view: First, how can God be a partner of dialogue if he at the same time remains unknown and unthinkable, a limit-concept of understanding? Second, if God is love in person and at the same time a spiritual reality ‘between’ human agents, in what ways are his personal and trans-personal traits related to each other? Third, what exactly is revealed through God’s ‘name’? By way of an inconclusive conclusion, divine personhood is discussed in regard to prayer, where the problems of predication that arise in third-personal speech about God are linked with the second-personal encounter with God.

     

SEXUAL DIFFERENCE AND TRINITARIAN DEATH: CROSS,KENOSIS, AND HIERARCHY IN THE THEO‐DRAMA

Hans Urs von Balthasar's “Theo‐Drama: Theological Dramatic Theory” exhibits a mutual funding of a hierarchical ordering of the relation between “man” and “woman” and a hierarchical ordering of the relation between the Father, the Son, and the Spirit. The two hierarchies explain, illustrate, and support one another. Von Balthasar's oscillation between hierarchy and equality, particularly in the divine case, results in a tortured understanding of personhood where being in relation means handing oneself over to another with the threat of death always present. Von Balthasar's understanding of personhood turns out to be fundamentally masochistic. Further, difference collapses into hierarchy and thus turns out to be no more than repetition in the mode of reception, which then poses a serious challenge to Balthasar's account of divine and human being. Since the point of connection between the two is found in his account of the way inner‐trinitarian relations of origin are extended into the world in the sending of the Son, this is the thesis which needs problematizing. For von Balthasar, the kenotic nature of the inner‐trinitarian processions explains what in the life of God makes the cross possible, but this move ascribes something like suffering and death to the inner life of God in a way that undercuts the fullness of divine love while undergirding a hierarchical understanding of divine relationality.     

Divine Persons and Their ‘Reduction’ to Relations: A Plea for Conceptual Clarity

Contemporary trinitarian ‘revisionist’ theologians frequently accuse ‘classical’ or ‘Western’ (e.g. Augustinian, Thomistic) trinitarian theologies of ‘reducing’ the divine Persons to their relations with and to one another. In response, many defenders of the Western tradition of trinitarian theology suggest that the alternative accounts of contemporary revisionists, likewise, ‘reduce’ the Persons to relations. Thus, the same charge (the reduction of Persons to relations) is employed in two opposing viewpoints as a way of critiquing the other. This article aims to note this (apparently hitherto unremarked) phenomenon and to explore the theological rationale for its development. In conclusion, the article suggests how a new conceptual clarity may be achieved in light of this semantic confusion and points toward the possibility of a renewed dialogue between classical forms of trinitarian theology and their contemporary critics.     

Luther’s Trinitarian Hermeneutic and the Old Testament

In this study, the author shows that Luther’s trinitarian understanding is shaped by the royal Psalms’ dialogical model as well as informed by a hermeneutics that moors a trinitarian semantics in the Hebrew text of the Old Testament. The analysis concentrates on Luther’s translation into German of two Hebrew names for God and of passages classically associated with the trinitarian doctrine (Psalm 110:1; Psalm 2:2.12). The result is a trinitarian structure of transparency. The text’s syntax, narrative and direct speech mirror literally the transparency of the divine essence through the distinguishing characteristics of each trinitarian person.     

The ‘Divine Names’ and the ‘Attributes of Deity’: On the (Infinite) Analogical Interval in Forty-Six Aphorisms

For the modern tradition of analytic philosophy of religion (that this article rejects), goodness, beauty, wisdom, and so on are divine attributes, whereas, for the classical tradition of Christian theology, they are divine names. This crucial distinction between attributes and names helps to explain why feminist philosopher Grace Jantzen’s charge of an identification of the male self with the divine self in Anglo-American philosophy of religion leads on, directly, to a critique of the ‘doctrine’ of analogy. Jantzen’s critique of ‘classical theism’ is directed against the (largely modern) reduction of God to a (male) superbeing. Here, God’s ‘attributes’ are merely human ones, even if extended to a superlative degree. I distinguish the analogical reflections of Aquinas (following Dionysius) and his heirs from the anthropomorphic dissolutions of the divine in contemporary analytic philosophy of religion. Theology’s analogical speech, I argue, has the potential to answer – at least partially – the feminist critique of God as a ‘pure projection’ of ‘man’. For Aquinas, God’s perfections must be qualitatively different and not merely quantitative maximisations of our own. I contend that feminist philosophy of religion cannot afford to dismiss the potential of the way of analogy, especially in its negative or apophatic dimensions.     

God is not a person (an argument via pantheism)

This paper transforms a development of an argument against pantheism into an objection to the usual account of God within contemporary analytic philosophy (’Swinburnian theism’). A standard criticism of pantheism has it that pantheists cannot offer a satisfactory account of God as personal. My paper will develop this criticism along two lines: first, that personhood requires contentful mental states, which in turn necessitate the membership of a linguistic community, and second that personhood requires limitation within a wider context constitutive of the ’setting’ of the agent’s life. Pantheism can, I argue, satisfy neither criterion of personhood. At this point the tables are turned on the Swinburnian theist. If the pantheist cannot defend herself against the personhood-based attacks, neither can the Swinburnian, and for instructively parallel reasons: for neither doctrine is God in the material world; in the pantheist case God is identical with the world, in the Swinburnian case God transcends it. Either way both the pantheist and the Swinburnian are left with a dilemma: abandon divine personhood or modify the doctrine of God so as to block the move to personhood.

     

Eucharistic priority in Hilary of Poitiers' trinitarian theology: a critique of contemporary approaches to divine–human communio

The notion of koinonia or communio is at the heart of contemporary ecclesiology, and trinitarian theology has become its necessary presupposition. This article argues that the way many contemporary theologians have envisaged this link between divine and human communion is deeply problematic. Hilary of Poitiers was the first theologian of communio, and he offers a bold critique of contemporary discussions. Hilary gives eucharistic priority to trinitarian theology, that is, there is a movement from Eucharist to Trinity in his thinking on the relation between divine and human communion. A retrieval of Hilary's eucharistic priority in trinitarian discourse can provide constructive avenues in trinitarian theology which avoid the anthropocentric tendencies of contemporary social doctrines of the Trinity and reject the misdiagnosed problem of trinitarian ‘relevance’ in current discussions. Such a retrieval recovers trinitarian doctrine as a practised, performed reality, lived out in human communio itself through the eucharistic life of the Church.     

Visual Theologies and Material Form

This article offers a reading of a feature of John Calvin's theology that has received little attention – the role of visuality in his writings on the sacraments as developed between the years of 1536 and 1561. As an intervention into longstanding debates over the legacy of his sacramental theology, I argue that Calvin's use of visual categories to describe the sacramental event is best understood in terms of what I will call the ‘apoiconic’: a vision of divinity had through visual negation. I suggest that for Calvin the sacramental elements signal a divine absence that, in turn, redirects the gaze upward to Christ, whose spiritual presence constitutes the sacraments' substance. To make this argument, I trace the trinitarian dynamics of this ‘apoiconic vision’, where the Spirit unveils the living Christ by illumining the eyes of faith to comprehend the power of God that dwells therein. I close by reflecting on ‘apoiconicity’ as a strategy for moving beyond anxieties over materiality's idolatrous entanglements and for developing a sacramental theology that is cosmic in scope.     

DISABILITY,IMPAIRMENT, AND SOME MEDIEVAL ACCOUNTS OF THE INCARNATION: SUGGESTIONS FOR A THEOLOGY OF PERSONHOOD

Drawing on insights from the medieval theologians Duns Scotus and Hervaeus Natalis, I argue that medieval views of the incarnation require that there is a sense in which the divine person depends on his human nature for his human personhood, and thus that the paradigmatic pattern of human personhood is in some way dependent existence. I relate this to a modern distinction between impairment and disability to show that impairment—understood as dependence—is normative for human personhood. I try to show how medieval theories of the resurrection of the body can provide, within this context, plausible accounts of what it might be for human persons to be redeemed.     

Hailing Zenobia: Anti‐Judaism,trinitarianism, and John Henry Newman

John Henry Newman's early nineteenth‐century monograph The Arians of the Fourth Century iterates and intensifies the anti‐Jewish rhetoric already conveyed by the Nicene trinitarian theology inaugurated by Athanasius of Alexandria in the fourth century. Invoking philosopher Judith Butler's analysis of the performative power of ‘hate speech’ not only to injure, but also to interpellate subjects who may be heard to ‘talk back’, the present article seeks to surface the subversive potentialities contained not only within Newman's text (read in its immediate historical context), but also within trinitarian discourse more generally. Zenobia, third‐century ruler of Palmyra, reviled by Newman as both a ‘Judaizer’ and an ancestor of ‘Arianism’ (i.e. anti‐trinitarian theology), serves in this article (as in Newman's text) as the privileged figure for an interpellated subject, at once ‘Jewish’ and ‘feminine’ (thus seductively ‘oriental'), that may be heard to give voice to the ‘insurrectionary’ counter‐speech harbored within the very discourse of Christian orthodoxy that seeks to suppress it.     

Luther's Trinitarian Hermeneutic and the Old Testament

In this study, the author shows that Luther's trinitarian understanding is shaped by the royal Psalms' dialogical model as well as informed by a hermeneutics that moors a trinitarian semantics in the Hebrew text of the Old Testament. The analysis concentrates on Luther's translation into German of two Hebrew names for God and of passages classically associated with the trinitarian doctrine (Psalm 110:1; Psalm 2:2.12). The result is a trinitarian structure of transparency. The text's syntax, narrative and direct speech mirror literally the transparency of the divine essence through the distinguishing characteristics of each trinitarian person.     

Videtur Quod: On Method in Theology

Abstract: Theological language has always faced a fundamental dilemma: it seeks to put the divine reality into limited human language. While this dilemma can obfuscate our theological pathways, it can also generate a new awareness of the task and possibilities of the discipline. New testimonials, or uniquely accented human experiential utterances, have emerged in theological discourse in the past decades, greatly increasing our vision of the expansiveness of theology. The tools for integration into systematic or discursive development are still, however, lacking. This article suggests that an extension of the innovative methodology of Thomas Aquinas, beginning and ending with ‘what seems’ to be the case, putting testimony into discursive forms, and testing for a fittingness with the mysterious and excessive mystery of the divine reality, offers a promising path for discerning common and trustworthy theological language.     

Trinitarian Missiology: Towards a Theology of God as Missionary1

Abstract: This article explores the possibilities of using ‘missionary’ as an attribute of God, as has been done recently in some ecclesial discourse. To this end, it offers an exegesis of John 20:21–23 via expositions of Augustine's discussion of the divine missions in De Trinitate, Barth's account of election, and the Lateran condemnation of Joachim of Fiore, and a discussion of the relationship between trinitarian theology and the divine attributes.     

Pessimism About Motivating Modal Personism

In ‘What's Wrong with Speciesism?’, Shelly Kagan sketches an account on which both actually being a person and possibly being a person are relevant to one's moral status, labelling this view ‘modal personism’ and supporting its conclusions with appeals to intuitions about a range of marginal cases. I tender a pessimistic response to Kagan's concern about motivating modal personism: that is, of being able to ‘go beyond the mere appeal to brute intuition, eventually offering an account of why modal personhood should matter in the ways we may intuitively think that it does.’     

ON THE VERY IDEA OF CRITERIA FOR PERSONHOOD

I examine the familiar criterial view of personhood, according to which the possession of personal properties such as self‐consciousness, emotionality, sentience, and so forth is necessary and sufficient for the status of a person. I argue that this view confuses criteria for personhood with parts of an ideal of personhood. In normal cases, we have already identified a creature as a person before we start looking for it to manifest the personal properties, indeed this pre‐identification is part of what makes it possible for us to see and interpret the creature as a person in the first place. This pre‐identification is typically based on biological features. Except in some interesting special or science‐fiction cases, some of which I discuss, it is human animals that we identify as persons.     

The Staurocentric Logic of Eberhard Jüngel: Pneumatology and Ecclesiology

Ecclesiology and pneumatology remain two areas of Eberhard Jüngel's thought that are repeatedly critiqued as being ‘underdeveloped’ or ‘deficient’ due to his reliance on an Augustinian grammar in describing the Holy Spirit. This article argues for a revised understanding of both Jüngel's trinitarian theology and ecclesiology in light of his commitment to staurocentrism. Jüngel's staurocentric doctrine of God, for which he is so often lauded, is only possible because of the Augustinian grammar he accepts for his pneumatology. Only as the bond of love, the relation between the relations, can the Spirit make clear how it is that the triune God, fully identified with the life of Jesus, can die. Ultimately, Jüngel builds on Augustine's doctrine of the Spirit to demonstrate two distinct, yet interrelated, theological principles: first, that the person of the Spirit is indispensible within the event of God's triune being; and second, that within the church it is the Spirit's personhood, uniquely, which makes possible ecclesial correspondence to God.