Thesis Conclusion: The Secret Fears of Our Trinitarianism
New visions of the Trinity have emerged
in our time, but it seems their resurrection bodies are an admixture of
half-remembered pasts; trees fed by the soil of the falsely marked gravesites
from which they rose. As was stated in
the introduction, the point of this essay has been largely negative:
contemporary Trinitarian theology often predicates its decision making tendencies
upon poor historiographical tropes distinguishing between Eastern and Western
“strategies” of Trinitarianism, and by often simultaneously excoriating a
caricature labeled “Classical theism.”
We have argued that both the so-called “De Regnón” paradigm, and the
caricatured “Classical theism,” which often collude with one another are, in
Castelo’s words, “nonviable as categories in contemporary systematics.” This is not because something akin to
“Classical theism,” does not exist, or that there are no broad distinctives
between Eastern and Western trinitarianism, but such things have been misidentified
in largely systemic manners that echo throughout contemporary Trinitarian
theology.
The primary purpose of our (largely
negative) presentation of the post-univocalist and nominalist shifts was not to
condemn them entirely—or suggest that they are somehow unorthodox. It was to bring to awareness that
periodization and claims of continuity and discontinuity are far more than fine
distinctions which give scholars something to argue at the pub about—they
indicate how wider networks of theory and practice are understood and fit
together (or fall apart). It was also to
gesture toward—however briefly—the strange fact that the understanding of
Trinitarian theology and its (supposed) decline and reemergence are tightly
linked together to similar theories regarding the nature of modernity and the
emergence of secularization.
But
what of it? Though this cannot be
elaborated in detail, our essay here also has a caution that lingers in the
background. The panic of joy of the
Trinitarian renaissance, as we called it, despite having many benefits, was not
just based in part on sloppy historiographical meta-narratives, but perhaps in
the very panic of its joy evinced a deeper anxiety about the fundamental nature
and legitimacy of theology itself. Before
we turn directly to what we mean, let us narrate a historical tale, and take it
as something of a fable for our own time and situation: When turning to the question of why the
Trinity in certain sectors of Christianity fell into decline, four recent
studies all point to 17th century England and (among other things)
the Socinian controversy as a particularly forceful case study.[1] We have no space left to elaborate the
stories that each tell—but the overlap in the themes of their stories are
suggestive. Each argues that in the
Socinian controversies, those who did the largest amount of damage to the
Trinity were ironically those who argued most vociferously on behalf of
orthodox Trinitarian doctrine. The
reasons for this are complex—ranging from the tempestuous nature of the
personalities involved, to political concerns regarding monarchy and post-war
fatigue regarding dogma—but again and again damage was done to the Trinity
primarily because of a change in the conception of language, epistemology, and
theology itself, which all four studies narrate as a shift from analogy,
worship, and doxology, to predicating the discussion on “clear and distinct”
reason.[2]
Terms like “person” and “substance”
were thought to be self-evident to purely natural reason, and applicable to the
problems of Trinitarian theology, creating a perspicacious
and—consequently—logically undeniable case for the Trinity. This did several things, not least of which
was assuming the playing field to be used was the very same territory annexed
by the Socinians: reason, of a very specific sort—clear, distinct, easily
manageable. In the name of “completing”
the Reformation and purging all “Popish” doctrines like the Trinity, the
Socinians deemed it necessary to scrub Greek metaphysics out with a good deal
of what they deemed common sense. For
how could God damn people for not understanding doctrines that were not
themselves clear and evident even to a farm-boy?[3] If the Trinity could not pass this test, then
it was not only not a matter of
salvation, but it was not in any sense a true understanding of scripture.
Many Trinitarian proponents accepted
this line of reasoning completely, merely coming to the conclusion that the
Trinity—as vital—was indeed able to
be clearly outlined in a way that its nuances would not be lost on farm hands
and milk maids. Far from providing such
a perspicacious account, it was not just the farm hands and milk maids who
seemed perplexed, but the academics themselves, who were quite dismayed that
when they checked each other’s work, one’s “clear and distinct” presentation of
the Trinity did not agree with another.
The Socinians and others (like Catholic polemicists who saw such
confusion as demonstrating the absurdity of Protestant sola scriptura) made great sport of this, as one might imagine. To make matters worse, many of the
Trinitarian proponents, believing philosophers like Locke and Hobbes to be
covert Socinians, drew these thinkers into the Trinitarian debates where both
had previously been content to avoid the fray.
Spurned on, however, they turned their considerable talent toward
demonstrating how language understood as precise, univocal, and clear, had to
go on holiday when speaking of the Trinity (or with Hobbes’ bizarre version of
the Trinity, at least the usual orthodox account
could not pass muster) so that one merely had to point to the absurdity of the
doctrine’s own defenders. Regarding
Edward Stillingfleet’s defense of the Trinity, for example, John Locke could
write amusingly, “I know no book of more dangerous consequence to that article
of faith.”[4] Neither Hobbes nor Locke, of course, explicitly
denied the Trinity (still a very dangerous thing to do in that time, at any
rate), and while no one followed Hobbes’ concept of the Trinity, for example,
even those who rejected Hobbes and Locke still fought them within the limits of
the discussion they set up—a limit we might recall, which is implicated in the
shift from “divine names” to “divine attributes.”[5]
Dixon and Vickers in particular trace
how these debates began to ossify more and more, until even in their victorious
moments, the pro-Trinitarians no longer appeared to be speaking about Scripture
but about the manipulation of “clear and distinct” conceptual tokens piecing
together persons and substance. Vickers
writes that by the end of the 17th century the Trinity was no longer
about invocation or worship, but pure assent to ideas,[6]
while Dixon notes that the end of the 17th century marked the total
constriction of the “Trinitarian imagination,” within the bounds of univocal
language, where the Trinity “ceased to be the center of life and worship, and
became a problem in theology.”[7] And not just a problem—as problems can be
exciting indeed—but a dry, shriveled thing, perhaps occasionally revered behind
museum glass and closed doors, but put away when company was about.
This, at first blush, appears an odd
fable for our own times. The Trinitarian
imagination is flourishing, and nearly everyone—from Moltmann, to Zizioulas, to
LaCugna—rightfully speaks of regaining the doxological instead of purely
conceptual realm for Trinitarian theology.
Yet, as we hinted in the introduction, perhaps Marx’s famous thesis that
all history occurs twice—fist as tragedy, then as farce—applies quite
accurately here. In England, the tragedy
was that Trinitarian doctrine dried up because of a host of
incompatible—supposedly “clear and distinct”—defenses of the Trinity, which not
only seemed to disintegrate the doctrine, but perhaps worse made it irrelevant
even as it occasionally preserved it.
Today this is of course not the case.
Just the opposite. The farce, as
we cited in the introduction, is that there is a growing sense of unease
regarding the doctrine’s proliferation, and this for (at least) two reasons.
The first is the fact that historical
and constructive work has to a startling degree been shaped by the paradigm
illicitly attributed to de Regnón. Bruce
Marshall, though perhaps overstating the matter, certainly puts his finger on
the gravity of the situation: “When guided by this thesis [of the supposed
difference of Eastern and Western approaches] this century’s reflection on the
Trinity arguably embodies not so much the renewal as the eclipse of Trinitarian theology as an ongoing
tradition of inquiry.”[8] And this severe judgment occurs precisely
because the de Regnón paradigm, and its concomitants, do not seem to be
extrinsic to the purposes of modern Trinitarianism itself: “The notion that,
from the patristic period to the present, the Trinitarian theologies of the
Eastern and Western catholic traditions have obeyed contrary logics and have in
consequence arrived at conclusions inimical each to the other … will no doubt
one day fade away from want of documentary evidence. At
present, however, it serves too many interests for theological scholarship to
dispense with it too casually.”[9] Or
as Michel René Barnes puts it:
To know exactly what possibilities the loss of the cliché of
the distinction between Latin and Greek models of Trinitarian theology opens
up, first requires understanding how the existence of the contrasting paradigms
has served as a necessary presupposition for modern theology. How is the modern understanding of
Trinitarian theology predicated on the opposition dramatized (fictionalized?)
in the Greek and Latin epitomes? We are
almost at the point where we can say that modern theology, needing the
doctrinal opposition between “Greek” and “Latin,” Trinitarian theologies, invented it. [Emphasis added]. Forensically then, what was (is) that
need? Rather than treating de Régnon’s paradigm as a description of fourth-
and fifth-century Trinitarian theologies, we should imagine it as a symptom or
a structural prerequisite of modern thinking about Trinitarian theologies. [Emphasis added].[10]
The key, then, is to know what these
interests and structural prerequisites are.
Here we only deal with one. “It
is always a good question,” says Kerr, “to ask of theologians what they fear.”[11]
Thus, to put it provocatively: the de Regnón paradigm and the concomitant
critique of Classical theism and Western Trinitarianism, create conditions that
allow for the subsequent “robust” Trinitarian projects produced from those
critiques to compensate for and mask anxiety regarding the fragility of the
nature of the theological task itself in an increasingly secular West. As
Ingolf Dalferth puts it, the theological crises of the modern age are precisely
questions whether there are theological
crises:
The argument so far has assumed there are theological problems.
But precisely this has been questioned.
The problems which theology attempts to solve—as Hegel, Freud, and
logical empiricists have argued in their different ways, are said either to be
unintelligible and thus unsolvable, or, if they are intelligible, they are not
specifically theological and cannot be solved by theology. Under the philosophical microscope they turn
out to be the result of conceptual confusion, or dissolve into a set of historical,
philosophical, psychological, and sociological problems, which fall into the
domain of these disciplines but do not require any specifically theological
treatment. What traditionally has been
taken to be a theological problem really is an unanalyzed complex of spurious
and/or non-theological problems. It
follows that theology can be reduced without loss to science and philosophy,
and, therefore, no longer claim to be an autonomous and intellectually
respectable discipline.[12]
Dalferth is not alone in noticing this
particular (and perhaps particularly odd) aporia.
What he calls the “reductionist
argument,” Neil MacDonald has called the “meta-theological dilemma,” a quandary
posed by the friend of Nietzsche, Church historian turned atheist Franz
Overbeck: “every truth formerly cited as an example of theology was in actual
fact either meaningless, or a function of, and hence reducible to, a truth of
non-theology (natural philosophy, physics, history, anthropology, etc); … one
either did non-theology, or nothing.”[13] It is of peculiar interest to our essay here
as well, because if theology as a whole can be attacked as obsolete, or
non-information bearing linguistic nonsense (as in Linguistic Positivism), it
seems a fortiori this claim redounds
upon the Trinity which already emerged in the Modern period as the quintessence
of dogmatic obscurity. So Immanuel Kant,
for example, could claim that even if true, the Trinity could have no practical
import on our lives.[14]
Perspicaciously, as such Matthew
Levering has identified that one of the leading tendencies of contemporary
Trinitarian theology is to head off this dilemma by countering what he calls
its “Jamesian impass,” after a challenge similar in nature to Kant’s, this time
posed by the American philosopher William James.[15] To overcome this challenge, notes Levering,
contemporary Trinitarianism insists vehemently that the Trinity is the most “practical” of Christian
doctrines. Keith Johnson writes in the
same vein: “Kant would be hard pressed
to make his criticism stick today,” since “Contemporary theologians are driven
by a quest to relate Trinitarian doctrine to a wide variety of concerns. Books and articles abound on Trinity and
personhood, Trinity and societal relations, Trinity and gender, Trinity and
marriage, Trinity and church, Trinity and politics, Trinity and ecology, and so
forth.”[16] Yet Johnson, much as Levering, is quite
reticent about this trend in Trinitarian theology, not because they do not
believe that Trinitarian doctrine has practical and even political
consequences, but because the explicit focus
on directly applying the Trinity to theoretical problems as a sort of
“blueprint” (as Johnson calls it) paradoxically displaces the Trinity from the center of life and thought, as it has to
abstract the pro-Nicene account of the doctrine in order to make it
theoretically malleable (which is to say, univocal) to whatever problem is at
hand. As
Gilles Emery puts it:
The contemporary discourse on unity as
perichoretic communion is fundamentally animated by a practical purpose that recalls
the project of theodicy and which is presented as a response to the critiques
of modern theism and atheism … one expects the doctrine of God the Trinity to
be such that … it bears within it a remedy to modern individualism and avoids
any presentation of God which, in conceiving him as a supreme substance over
against man, would make him a ‘rival’ for man.
Trinitarian theology is thus put in service of anthropology…[17]
The tail is often wagging the God here. Or as Paul Molnar puts it: “relationality
[has become] the subject, and God the predicate.”[18] The pro-Nicene grammar of the doctrine is
thus replaced with some univocal cipher explicated under the veneer of
traditional Trinitarian language.[19]
Stephen Holmes pulls no punches: “in each case the
acceptable ethical outcomes [of contemporary Trinitarian projects] cannot flow from the Patristic doctrine
of the Trinity: the dogma needs massaging, relativizing, or simply reversing
before it generates ‘acceptable’ political content for today … [P]olitical
utility is only achieved [in these contemporary projects when] the received
form of the doctrine of the trinity is radically adjusted.”[20] Or as Kilby summarizes nicely: “It is
possible to ask whether there are not certain dangers associated with the
robust trinitarianism of our time. If
this is indeed, as I have suggested, a reaction—whether to a thin rationalism
or to a limp liberalism—then it is
arguably not simply a return to the tradition, but rather a distinctive
reshaping of it.”[21]
What this reshaping often
does not realize is the paradox that the wide-spread cascade of Trinitarian
projects as such are ironically non-Trinitarian
judged by pro-Nicene standards, precisely because the theoretical moves they
want to make undo key aspects of pro-Nicene grammar by turning Trinitarian
symbols—person, substance, relation, perichoresis, etc. … --into tokens to be
imbued with a sort of autonomous content (pure nature here raises its head in a
most peculiar location). Yet as Kilby
puts it, “The order of
discovery and development [of Trinitarian doctrine] are permanently
significant. They give a non-reversible
direction to the doctrine. Neither the
function nor the meaning of the Trinity can be detached from the context of its
development…one can never kick away the ladder.”[22] Or, as Khaled Anatolios notes: “we cannot
ignore the historical development [of Trinitarian doctrine] and gain direct
access to the objective referents of the normative statements of Trinitarian doctrine;
we must creatively re-perform the acts of understanding and interpretation that
led to those statements.”[23] One cannot extract the “essence” of
pro-Nicene Trinitarianism while discarding some of its “missteps” like
simplicity and immutability—precisely because these were not adventitious to
its thought but part of its core. If one
wants to discard either, then that argument is important and must be made—but
it must then also be realized that adherence to “pro-Nicene” Trinitarianism has
in that act been shaken, not necessarily upheld in some new purity.
A
second cause for concern is not just that traditional formulations seem
dissolved and displaced in these univocal applications of the Trinity as a
paradigm or blueprint, but the fact that in such employment the conclusions one
wants to draw—like egalitarian or complimentarian social policies—either do not
follow from their supposedly Trinitarian premises,[24]
or such conclusions do not produce much by way of new information. Kathryn Tanner puts it in a fairly damning
essay, these projects of Social Trinitarianism are guilty of “ideological
pandering,” so that often “what the Trinity tells one about politics is no more
than what one already believes about politics.”[25] Indeed advocates of “social trinitarianism,”
seem to assume whatever their “ideal” conception of community is, and project
it upon God as the “transcendental” ground of possibility for that
communion.
“The danger of such [Trinitarian]
strategy” says Tanner, “is that the Trinity fails to do any work. We do not need the Trinity to tell us that
human beings condition one another by way of their relationships.” We do not even need the Trinity “to tell us
that persons are catholic in their conditioning by others; there is nothing
especially Trinitarian about the idea that individuals are a microcosm of the
whole world’s influences. These ideas
are platitudes of the philosophical literature and recourse to the Trinity does
not seem to be doing anything here to move us beyond them.”[26] Thus in a thoroughly ironic sense,
Trinitarian theologians who are at pains to display the relevance of
Trinitarian doctrine misdiagnose the nature of the theological problem at
hand. In the words of D. Stephen Long,
“Theology is often always already too relevant,
and so redundant.”[27]
Hence
what once was the tragedy of Trinitarian decline has turned to the farce of
Trinitarian proliferation—in some sense tending toward the same results. The two are not so dissimilar after all. The first happened due to a narrow definition
of clear and distinct reason rendering the doctrine abstract and absurd; the farce
that follows tragedy is clear and distinct practical application doing much the
same—indeed practical application often predicated upon a history misunderstood
through univocalism and nominalism.
Undoubtedly there is no sense in which the Trinity will disappear or
again be marginalized. And yet both in
its historiographical methodology, and in its application, it appears that the
explicit—even “hypertrinitarian” methodology is often little more than a
sleight of hand, a Trojan horse, which serves as a vehicle to distract, and
smuggle in other implicit values that are actually in the drivers’ seat.
This, of course, does not apply to
everyone, or even to the works of individual theologians like Gunton or
Zizioulas as a whole. Yet there is a
painfully ironic sense of how little we understood how our Trinitarian
solutions were still marked by the modern options they were attempting to
transcend, how in the very act of challenging modernity, we repeated some of
its most deeply inlaid and pejorative interpretations of Christian tradition.[28] Solutions
based on historical caricatures will only ever be shadowboxing, however, leaving
us with the unstable movements of off-balance strikes toward the historical
figments and phantoms that flicker always just out of reach at the sides of our
vision. Social Trinitarianism, radical
kenoticism, a suffering God—are often seen as beacons precisely because their flames dance
before the shadows of sacred "theistic" monsters they themselves have colluded to
create—intentional or not.[29] Once the silhouettes flee, so does the
chiaroscuro often giving these modern exaggerations the sharpness with which
they cut against tradition. “We called what we were doing a ‘Trinitarian
revival.’ Future historians might want
to ask us why,” says Stephen Holmes.[30]
It is indeed time to ask ourselves that same question, for many reasons,
and perhaps begin again. For a
forgetfulness has stolen in, and appeared as the very fierceness of our memory.
[1] We are here referring to Babcock, “A Changing of the
Christian God,”; Dixon, Nice and Hot
Disputes; Vickers, Invocation and
Assent; and Placher, The
Domestication of Transcendence.
[2] Cf. Dixon, Nice and
Hot Disputes, 64-65: “We can…observe the beginning of a significant shift
in the focus and understanding of the nature of language. There is a move away from the imaginative and
the analogical towards the univocal.
Contemporary evidence for this shift is shown in part by a growing
impatience with the technical language of scholastic philosophy in certain
quarters…The emergence of an attitude that privileged the univocal was bound to
preclude the exercise of imagination needed to engage fruitfully with the
doctrine of the Trinity. This
‘flattening’ of language was to increase as the century progressed and have
dire consequences for the doctrine of the Trinity.”
[3] Vickers rightly points out this very question already
demonstrates that the Socinians were merely picking up on an already changed
situation tending toward epistemology rather than ontology.
[4] Quoted by Dixon, Nice
and Hot Disputes, 137.
[5] It is thus interesting then, that, for example, Dixon, Nice and Hot Disputes, 93n.54 writes
“Hobbes’ nominalism is one of the roots of his problem with the Trinity,” and
earlier “The ‘scholasticism’ [Hobbes] attacked was specifically that which had
developed in the latter sixteenth century, and the authors in his sights were
not so much those of the Middle Ages but their more recent commentators. The Leviathan
for instance, attacked Suarez by name” (73).
Thus in part nominalism is playing out even here.
[6] Vickers, Invocation
and Assent, 191: “In much English Protestant theology, the combining of sola scriptura with a rationalist
hermeneutics and a canon of essential doctrine has shifted the emphasis in
Trinitarian theology from invocation to assent, that is, from reflection on the
use of the divine name in the full range of the church’s catechetical and
liturgical activities to reflection on the rationality or intelligibility of a
network of propositions and assertions regarding the divine nature ad intra (the immanent Trinity).”
[7] Dixon, Nice and Hot
Disputes., 212.
[8] Bruce Marshall, “Trinity,” 200.
[9] David Bentley Hart, “The Mirror of the Infinite: Gregory of
Nyssa on the Vestigia Trinitatis.” Modern Theology vol.18 no.4 (October
2002): 541. Emphasis added.
[10] Michel R. Barnes, “The Fourth Century as Trinitarian
Canon,” in Christian Origins: Theology,
Rhetoric, and Community, ed. Lewis Ayres and Gareth Jones (London:
Routledge, 1998), 61.
[11] Kerr, After Aquinas,
136.
[12] Ingolf Dalferth, Theology
and Philosophy (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988), 13.
[13] Neil B. MacDonald Karl
Barth and the Strange New World Within the Bible: Barth, Wittgenstein, and the
Meta-Dilemmas of the Enlightenment (Georgia: Paternoster Press, 2000), 13.
[14] Immanuel Kant, The
Conflict of the Faculties, trans. Mary J. Gregor (New York: Abaris, 1979),
65-67.
[15] Matthew Levering, Scripture
and Metaphysics: Aquinas and the Renewal of Trinitarian Theology
(Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), 12ff. Cf. Kathryn Tanner, Christ the Key (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010),
207-247.
[16] Keith Johnson, Rethinking
the Trinity & Religious Pluralism: An Augustinian Assessment (Illinois:
InterVarsity Press, 2011), 17.
[17] Quoted in Vanhoozer, Remythologizing Theology, 160n.99.
[18] Molnar, Divine
Freedom, 227.
[19] Johnson, Rethinking
the Trinity, 219.
[20] Holmes, Quest for the
Trinity, 29.
[21] Kilby, “Is Apophatic Trinitarianism Possible?” 66. Emphasis added.
[22] Ibid., 68-69.
[23] Anatolios, Retrieving
Nicaea, 1. And in more detail:
“Trinitarian doctrine emerged not from some isolated insight into the being of
God, such that its meaning might be grasped from a retrieval of that singular
insight, or from some creaturely analogue that somehow approximates that
insight. Rather, orthodox Trinitarian
doctrine emerged as a kind of meta-doctrine that involved a global interpretation
of Christian life and faith and indeed evoked a global interpretation of
reality. Its historical development thus
presents a dramatic demonstration of Karl Rahner’s characterization of
Trinitarian doctrine as the summary of Christian faith. To appropriate the meaning of Trinitarian
doctrine today, one must learn from the systematic thrust of its development
how the entirety of Christian faith and life means the Trinity. . . The point
is not to shift from objective reference to subjective intention, but rather to
retrieve the intentions of the theologians who had a formative role in the
doctrine’s expression, precisely in order to thereby learn how to correctly
refer to God’s Trinitarian being.” (10)
[24] On this cf. Karen Kilby, “Perichoresis and Projection:
Problems With the Social Doctrine of the Trinity,” New Blackfriars 81 (2000): 432-445.
[25] Kathryn Tanner, “Trinity,” in the Blackwell Companion to Political Theology (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2007), 324. Cf. Tanner, Christ the Key, 247ff.
[26] Kathryn Tanner, “Trinity,”
327. On this account Tanner perhaps
overstates her case precisely by ignoring how accounts of reciprocity and
communion have themselves been influenced historically
by Trinitarian theology. Thus while
her general point is sound, it suffers from the deficit of not acknowledging
the historically grounded theological inheritance of what she sees as the
current “philosophical commonplace.”
[27] Long, Speaking of
God, 23.
[28] Cf. D. Stephen Long, “Fetishizing Feuerbach’s God: Contextual
Theology as the End of Modernity,” Pro
Ecclesia 12 no.4: 447-472.
[29] This is a play on the
title of Richard Peddicord, The Sacred
Monster of Thomism: Life and Legacy of Reginald Garrigou-LaGrange (Rome:
St. Augustine Press, 2014).
[30] Stephen Holmes, Quest
for the Trinity, 200.
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