A Compelling Trinitarian Taxonomy: Hans Urs von Balthasar's Theology of the Trinitarian Inversion and Reversion

In trinitarian theology, the problematic place of the Holy Spirit in the taxonomy of the immanent Trinity (Father, Son and Holy Spirit) does not seem to correspond to what is revealed in the economy (Father, Holy Spirit and Son). Because of this pneumatological problem, some theologians have abandoned the traditional trinitarian taxonomy. This approach, however, does not provide a finally convincing answer that is consistent with both the biblical witness and the theological tradition. In this article, I argue that Hans Urs von Balthasar's theology of the trinitarian inversion and reversion does provide a convincing answer to the trinitarian taxonomy problem. After supporting my thesis by first referencing the traditional trinitarian taxonomy offered in Augustine's de Trinitate and then examining the possibility of abandoning the taxonomy given by Jürgen Moltmann and Leonardo Boff, I will offer von Balthasar's solution as the most compelling trinitarian taxonomy, especially in light of the ecumenical dialogue between the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches.     

LOVE OF GOD AND LOVE OF NEIGHBOR IN THE THEOLOGY OF KARL RAHNER AND KARL BARTH

The way Barth and Rahner envision the relationship between the commands to love God and neighbor is affected by their views of the relationship between the immanent and economic Trinity. Rahner identifies the immanent and economic Trinity; thinks the two commands are identical, and believes that self‐acceptance is the same as accepting Christ and revelation. Barth insists that, while identical in content, the immanent and economic Trinity must be sharply distinguished without separation; insists the two commands are inseparable but not identical and maintains that we must seek God only in Christ. This divergence, I contend, results from their very dissimilar understandings of nature and grace and is rooted in their different starting points for theology, namely, transcendental experience for Rahner and God's Word and Spirit for Barth.     

'Honouring the Spirit': Analysis and Evaluation of Jonathan Edwards' Pneumatological Doctrine of the Incarnation

Abstract: This article analyses and evaluates Jonathan Edwards’ mature thought on (1) the role of the Spirit in the hypostatic union of God with humanity in the incarnation of Christ, and (2) the nature of that humanity (fallen or unfallen?). The influence of the notion of correspondence between this and the other two pneumatological unions that characterize Edwards’ trinitarian theology (the Trinity and theosis) is noted. Evaluation of Edwards’ thought is made in light of patristic, Reformed‐Puritan (principally Calvin, Owen, Barth) perspectives on the nature and importance of the incarnation, and with reference to contemporary Edwardsean scholarship and that concerning the fallen–unfallen humanity issue.     

Barth and the Evangelicals – Engaging with Barth: Contemporary Evangelical Critiques – Edited by David Gibson and Daniel Strange

This review examines twelve conservative evangelical responses to David Gibson and Daniel Strange's Engaging with Barth. Witten in a charitable spirit that gives deference to Barth, the essayists remained uncomfortable with the prospect of rehabilitating Barth's radical neo‐orthodoxy for contemporary evangelical theology. In the article, I summarize the authors' critiques to Barth's exegetical, historical, and theological program, and locate their contributions pertaining to the reading of Barth's dogmatics. The review concludes with a possibility of interrogating the pneumatological‐underpinnings in Barth's theology as a constructive reworking of Barth's trinitarian theology for evangelical theology. There are ‘spaces’ for evangelicals to mine from the Barthian legacy, albeit via the medium of turning Barth's proposals on its head.     

Schleiermacher and Spirit Christology: Unexplored Horizons of The Christian Faith

One of the more recent efforts at christological construction has focused on Spirit christology, issuing in sometimes opposing constructions. At first sight, considering Schleiermacher's synthetic approach to the doctrine of the Trinity, one would suspect the irrelevance of his christology for these present efforts. However, an analysis of the convergence between christology and pneumatology in the Glaubenslehre could contribute significantly to this debate. By interpreting the God-consciousness of Jesus as the presence of the Spirit in him and correlating this with the communication of this consciousness as the work of Christ in regeneration and sanctification we achieve an identity between Christ as Spirit-bearer and Spirit-sender (viz. the Redeemer understood according to his 'peculiar activity' and 'exclusive dignity'). By lending a stronger pneumatological bearing to Schleiermacher's theological discourse (picking up the suggestion of Karl Barth) Schleiermacher helps illuminate some of the issues that have arisen in debate over Spirit christology.     

The Mystery of the Spirit in Three Traditions: Calvin, Rahner, Florensky Or, You Keep Wondering Where the Spirit Went

Nineteenth- and twentieth-century North Atlantic theology has seen a succession of Trinitarian revivals. Some observers take as an index of a theologian's success whether he or she has much interesting to say about the Holy Spirit, and some, including Robert Jenson, have also noted a tendency to announce the Spirit and talk about the Son. While Rogers shares that concern, he qualifies the characterization to note that authors in three traditions sometimes admit the charge and demur, claiming that is how it should be, citing passages in Calvin, Rahner, and Pavel Florensky. Of these the boldest is Florensky, who anticipates Jenson's critique but, writing in 1913, makes it not of Barth but of Eastern Orthodox theology (usually seen as a model to follow here), even in its liturgy. Rogers leaves this puzzle unresolved.     

Launching the Ian G. Barbour Lectureship in Religion and Modernity

Over the last twenty years, the Divine Action Project has produced various theories of God's activity in the world. Increasingly, however, there has been a movement to think about divine action in christological and eschatological perspective, with the resurrection of Jesus as the major case linking the present age with that of the world to come. However, the introduction of such trinitarian data invites a rethinking of the idea of divine action in pneumatological perspective. This essay attempts to further the discussion via proposing a pneumatological theology of divine action informed by the Pentecostal-charismatic experience of God's activity in the world.     

The Spirit in the Church: The Universal Christ, Particular Spirit and Christian Unity

Modern theology has had difficulty in producing an ecclesiology that makes the full visible unity of the church an essential aspect of the church's nature. One reason for this is that important modern ecclesiologies are built on a trinitarian model that either subordinates the Spirit to the Son, or reduces the Spirit to a vague, invisible 'domain of resonance', with the result that the church itself is either subordinated or rendered invisible. A new trinitarian model is needed, one that shows how the Spirit cooperates with the Son to produce a visibly united church.     

The Promise of an Actualistic Pneumatology: Beginning with the Holy Spirit in African Pentecostalism and Karl Barth

Christians in the developing world are sending a clear message to all who will listen: more attention needs to be paid to the Holy Spirit than ever before in the history of Christian thought. This essay explores what African Pentecostalism could teach Karl Barth and in particular how the actualistic Christology that Barth is known for can be applied to concrete acts of the Holy Spirit. The essay employs James Buckley's distinction between what Barth says versus what Barth shows to demonstrate profound possibilities that exist within Barth's thought for beginning theological reflection from the concrete acts of the Spirit.     

THE MEDIATION OF CHRIST'S NORMATIVE SPIRIT: A CONSTRUCTIVE READING OF SCHLEIERMACHER'S PNEUMATOLOGY

Contemporary theologians have enriched our understanding of the Holy Spirit's identity and broadened our grasp of the pneumatological tradition, but a crucial question has not been sufficiently addressed: while we have renewed understandings of who the Spirit is and what the Spirit does, very little has been said about how the Spirit works. On the basis of some clues from Schleiermacher, this essay elaborates and defends an answer to this question. According to this proposal, Christ's normative Spirit is mediated through a process of mutual recognition which carries on the Spirit of Christ's beliefs and actions.     

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.     

The Spirit Moved Over the Face of the Waters: The Holy Spirit and the Created Order

The article is a sketch for a dogmatics of the Creator Spirit and contends that the Spirit's relation to the creation in general cannot be treated either without attention being paid to its trinitarian matrix or in the absence of some consideration of the human creation in particular. A christologically formed attempt is made to expand the Cappadocian theology of the Spirit as the creation's perfecting cause. This leads into some fragmentary remarks about the Spirit in relation to church, political order and culture more generally.     

Holy Scripture under the Auspices of the Holy Trinity: On John Webster’s Trinitarian Doctrine of Scripture

As he approached the monumental task of writing his own systematic theology, John Webster gave strategic attention to constructing a doctrine of Scripture that was adequate to support such a project. In contrast to some well‐respected modern systematic theologies that got by with less robust bibliologies (those of Pannenberg and Jenson), Webster saw the need to establish from the outset a more fully elaborated doctrine of Holy Scripture. He framed that doctrine of Scripture by appealing above all to his central dogmatic commitment, the doctrine of the Trinity. The trinitarian contours of Webster’s doctrine of Scripture are most conspicuous in his treatment of the missions of the Son and the Spirit. Webster understands the entire Bible as the self‐testimony of the risen Christ (mission of the Son), and explains its cognitive effectiveness in terms of the full range of the work of the Holy Spirit in inspiration and illumination (mission of the Spirit). The trinitarian grounding of his doctrine of Scripture enabled Webster to retrieve the Protestant orthodox doctrine of Scripture’s inspiration.     

A Question of Two Answers: Difference and Determination in Barth and von Balthasar

This essay uses the motif of 'the woman as answer' in Barth and von Balthasar to explore aspects of their accounts of sexual difference in relation to ontological and trinitarian difference. In both cases the motif is shown to be problematic for reasons which become apparent in christology. Barth's characterisation of woman as the 'sufficient answer' to the prior 'question' posed by man indicates a tendency towards the elision of difference in his anthropology, which is reflected in the nonsexuality of Christ - the 'true Man' Ð and in aspects of his trinitarian theology. Von Balthasar's 'double answer' of woman to man moves beyond viewing sexual difference as the locus of man's self-completion, but the overdetermination of 'woman' in his mariology undermines this. The pneumatology of von Balthasar's 'Spiritus Creator' suggests possibilities for the development of a christologically-focused anthropology which maintains difference.     

The Holy Spirit and Unity: Getting out of the Way of Christ

This article argues for a limited pneumatological definition of Christian unity, in favor of a more exclusive christological explanation. It traces some of the theological problems associated with tying Christian unity too closely with the Holy Spirit, by examining the works of three near‐contemporary seventeenth‐century theologians, Bossuet, Baxter and Owen. The pneumatological ‘expansionism’ in each of these writers, still common in contemporary discussions of ecclesial unity, are not only counterproductive but obscure the specific kinds of charismatic gifting demanded by Christian reconciliation.     

Triune Grace

Grace is the favor of God, both the giver and the gift at the same time. In trinitarian understandings of grace, the Father is the ungifted giver; the Son and the Spirit are in different ways the gift. The Son is the external act of grace in humanity; and the Spirit is the internal gift. Both are infused. Although this is essential to Lutheran theology, it is here offered as ecumenical theology.     

Who is God in the Old Testament? Retrieving Aquinas after Rahner's Answer

Karl Rahner adamantly argued that the God of the Old Testament is the unoriginate Person of the Father. This forms the bedrock of his trinitarian theology, often credited as renewing Christian appreciation for the Trinity. However, his position that the Old Testament God must be identified as the Father contradicts much of the Christian tradition, including strands of Greek theology whose emphasis on the Father he claimed to restore to the West. This article retrieves the theology of Thomas Aquinas after Rahner in order to correct the imbalance of Rahner's position with greater nuance in appreciating the mystery of God in the Old Testament.     

Some Dogmatic Implications of Barth's Understanding of Ebionite and Docetic Christology

This article shows how Barth's understanding of Ebionite andDocetic Christology shaped his trinitarian theology and argues that theologianstoday should learn from Barth in order to avoid the pitfalls of groundingChrist's uniqueness either in experience or in an ideology instead of in Christ himself. The article exhibits how Barth's insights relate to the views of a number of prominent contemporary theologians, illustrating how thesetheologians, in varying ways, actually reach problematic conclusions preciselyto the extent that they do not actually begin their christological reflections with the fact that Jesus is the Son of God simply because he is.     

God by Any Other Name?

"Father, Son and Holy Spirit" is not a name for God, but a doxological convenience; a mode of reference to the transcendent mystery that is condensed in Jesus' person and work. It therefore ought to be possible to refer to God differently without referring to a different God, to use other "names" for God that are just as true to the triadically structured mystery revealed in the economy of God's salvation. Those who argue that this breaks the semantic link with the narrative of God's incarnation in Jesus Christ neglect the subjective and pneumatological aspect of our address to God.