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Perichoresis and Projection: Problems with Social Doctrines of the Trinity

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2024

Karen Kilby
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Over the last three decades there has been a great outpouring of writings from both Catholic and Protestant theologians on the doctrine of the Trinity, almost all of which, ironically, have lamented the neglect of the doctrine. Again and again one reads that although the Trinity is central and crucially important to Christianity and Christian theology, it has not been given adequate treatment. It is unacceptable, theologians protest, that the Trinity has come to be regarded as an obscure and complex theological technicality, a piece of celestial mathematics impossible to understand and with little relevance to the life of the ordinary Christian. Karl Rahner remarked that modern Christians were ‘almost mere “monotheists’” paying lip service to the Trinity but in practice ignoring it. If it were announced that the dogma had been a mistake and was to be erased from official Christianity, nobody, he thought, would be too bothered, neither the ordinary believing Christians nor the authors of theological textbooks.’ Rahner’s diagnosis has been widely accepted and widely regretted. The consensus is that the Trinity is at the heart of Christianity, and both theology and piety have gone astray if it is regarded as belonging to the specialists. A retrieval (it is believed) is needed: the Trinity must be understood once again (one reads) as a positive and central element in the Christian faith rather than an embarrassing obscurity, and as profoundly relevant to the life of individual Christians, to the life of the Church, and perhaps beyond.

Type
Research Article
Information
New Blackfriars , Volume 81 , Issue 957 , November 2000 , pp. 432 - 445
Copyright
Copyright © 2000 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers

References

1 Rahner, Karl, The Trinity, trans. Donceel, Joseph (NY: Crossroad, 1997) pp 10–11Google Scholar.

2 Published in 1980, and in English translation in 1981.

3 One can find examples of this fundamentally positive approach to “persons” in writings of Moltmann, Gunton and Boff, to name but a few. Cf. Chapter 1 of Zizioulas, John D., Being as Communion (New York: St. Vladimir's Seminary Press, 1985)Google Scholar for a similar line of thinking in a somewhat different context.

4 Gunton and Moltmann once again provide examples of this.

5 The Trinity and the Kingdom of God (London: SCM, 1981), p. 175Google Scholar.

6 Ibid.

7 Plantinga, Cornelius Jr., “Social Trinity and Tritheism” in Feenstra, Ronald J. and Plantinga, Cornelius Jr., eds. Trinity, Incarnation and Atonement (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1989)Google Scholar.

8 Wilson‐Kastner, Patricia, Faith, Feminism and the Christ (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1983), p. 122Google Scholar.

9 Ibid., p. 123.

10 Ibid., p. 127.

11 The Trinity and the Kingdom, p. 195.

12 Ibid., p. 196.

13 Ibid., p. 201.

14 Ibid.

15 Ibid., p 198.

16 Ibid.

17 Ibid.

18 In what follows I shall be drawing primarily on The One, The Three and the Many (Cambridge: CUP, 1993)Google Scholar, but see also his “Trinity, ontology and anthropology” in Schwöbel, and Gunton, , eds., Persons: Divine and Human (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1991)Google Scholar.

19 The One, the Three and the Many, p. 152.

20 Ibid., p. 170.

21 This has indeed been questioned by historical theologians. Cf. for instance the arguments of Michel Barnes, René in “The Use of Augustine in Contemporary Trinitarian Theology”, Theological Studies 56 (1995)CrossRefGoogle Scholar and “Rereading Augustine on the Trinity” in Davis, Stephen T. et al., The Trinity (Oxford: OUP, 1999)Google Scholar.

22 Cf. Tanner, Kathryn, The Politics of God (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1992)Google Scholar for an extended discussion of the different ways in which a belief in God's transcendence can function politically.

23 Faith, Feminism and the Christ, p. 126

24 Ibid.

25 Ibid.

26 Denis Edwards, in a similar vein, suggests that the Christian ideal of love, as represented by the Trinity, “concerns self‐possession as well as self‐giving, love of self as well as love of other”, The God of Evolution: A Trinitarian Theology. (New York: Paulist Press, 1999) p. 16Google Scholar.

27 Readers of George Lindbeck's The Nature of Doctrine (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1984)Google Scholar will immediately recognize his influence here. It is worth noting, however, that one need not commit oneself to a grammatical interpretation of doctrine in general in order to consider whether the Trinity in particular is best thought of in this light.