The Invention of "Classical Theism" (My Abridged Thesis, Part One): Introduction
I have decided to select portions of my Th.M. thesis to post here. While my thesis ranges over a good deal of material, the selections I am posting essentially make the argument that many contemporary theological critiques of something called "Classical Theism" actually revolve around very particular historical constructions of Christian doctrine that come quite late in the game (post-13th century, and in particular post-19th century), which combine as well with the (now notorious) "De Regnón Paradigm" of the supposed differences of Eastern and Western trinitarian theology. As such the pejorative (and sometimes lionized) category of "Classical Theism" understood in a particular way paradoxically is not wholly representative of Patristic and Medieval thought. If this is the case, however, many criticisms of the tradition that also serve as a preamble to more "constructive" moves made in contemporary theology (towards a "passible" or "suffering" God, to "relational" metaphysics against "substance" categories, radical "kenotic" thought, etc. ... ) residing as they do upon tenuous historiographical grounds, lose much of their desirability as the historical reasons ballasting their seeming necessity are deflated. I myself see many corrections and additions/revisions that I must make if this claim to continue to stand, but for what its worth it is the first extensive exploration I made. Enjoy!
A PANIC OF JOY.
Those who
narrate the story of God clearly wield no little authority. The same can be said for those who narrate
the story of the doctrine of God.
--Kevin
Vanhoozer[1]
In the mid-1990’s, the theological
world awoke, and was startled to find itself Trinitarian. This was by all accounts an odd turn of
events, seemingly quite out of synch with the immediate environment from which
it emerged; the previous opinion—we might call it an anti-dogmatic dogmatic
consensus—was that Orthodox Christianity was otiose, and its now bloodless
“onto-theological” [2] corpse was to be dismembered and
distributed for repurposing.
Hegelianism,[3]
anti-metaphysical and scientific positivism, Death-of-God-ism, Process
philosophy,[4]
Demythologization, A/theology—these were to be the new growth out of the
compost heap, the life out from death.[5]
Such fruit turned out to be grown
within ecologies quite east of Eden, however, and the 20th century
found its true resurrection in the panic of joy now entitled the “Trinitarian
renaissance.”[6] It is gloried in now, by seemingly everyone,
everywhere: “Its roots are hard to
isolate … but the current trinitarian revival itself is unmistakable … [V]irtually
every serious theological movement of recent years has sought in its own terms
to state and shape Trinitarian doctrine.”[7] Indeed starting in the 1960’s, as the story
goes, and largely under the influence of the “two Karls”—the eponymous Barth
and Rahner—Trinitarian thought began to accumulate until, quite late in the
twentieth century, it reached something of a “critical mass.” We say “quite late” because if a renewal of
Trinitarianism had been brewing in various avenues for quite some time, in
terms of rising to explicit methodological self-awareness it was not recognized as a renaissance until the
last three decades of the twentieth century or so.[8]
Just so, in 1993 the Lutheran
theologian Ted Peters commented “Trinitarian thinking has proved to be one of
the best kept secrets in theology during the last half of the twentieth
century.”[9] Whereas once, the trinity was “no more than
one of six impossible things to believe before breakfast,”[10]
such was not the case any longer at the time of Peter’s writing in 1993, where
it became of point of pride viz-a-viz the
theoretical fecundity of theology itself.
One can trace this famine-to-feast-to-critical-mass in the last decade
or two of the 20th century even within different editions of key
works. Colin Gunton, for example, in his
1990 collection of essays called The
Promise of Trinitarian Theology, sings
the praises of the rising number of Trinitarian projects with the slightly
vague designator of “a hopeful sign.”
Just six years later in the introduction to the 2nd edition,
Gunton’s tone has changed and becomes slightly sardonic: “Suddenly, we are all
Trinitarians, or so it would seem.”[11] Karl Marx’s famous dictum that all historical
events occur twice, first as tragedy, then as farce, seems to hold true for the
decline and rebirth of Trinitarian theology.
Such was the onslaught of works in the 1980’s and, mainly, the 1990’s
that in 1998 David Cunningham somewhat warily noted that the phenomenon now
looked less a renaissance, than “a bandwagon,”[12]
and that “once threatened by its relative scarcity in modern theology, the
doctrine of the Trinity seems more likely to be obscured by an overabundance of
theologians clustered around it.”[13]
Such an overabundance perhaps not only
threatens to obscure the doctrine itself, but brings with it concomitant
tendencies to canonize blind-spots in methodology, as narratives regarding the
doctrine’s decline and re-ascension embedded within these works are routinely
thumbed-through in textbook accounts like so many rosary beads. Historical
inquiries into the Trinity more often than not share a typical course of
investigative procedure:[14]
they begin with overviews of the Patristic and Medieval eras, usually
terminating around Thomas Aquinas or Gregory Palamas, only to suddenly pick up
the story again around Schleiermacher, thus dutifully recounting the now-rote
received story that he consummated the lamentable decline of the Trinity by
relegating it to an appendix of The
Christian Faith [15]
Then the firework show starts with Karl Barth and the revitalization of the
doctrine of the Trinity in the latter half of the twentieth century, popcorn is
popped, a few key phrases in the academic shibboleth like “perichoresis” and
“relationality” show up amidst winks and head nods, and we all go home
edified. Such historiographical strategy
gives a whole new meaning to “the God of the gaps,” however, as it creates a
sort of optical illusion that Schleiermacher and the twentieth-century are the
more or less direct and unproblematic inheritors of all the strengths (and
indeed, difficulties) of the Patristic and Medieval tradition so
represented. As if the more than
six-hundred year gap between Aquinas and Schleiermacher passed hardly without
consequence for our perception of the history of Trinitarian thought.
A concomitant (and stubbornly
invisible) dilemma, is that when one then asks the quite pertinent question
“where and why did the doctrine of the Trinity go wrong?” and “how do we fix
it?” the methodological course of action now will inevitably seem to be to
skirt back around the gap once more to find patient zero amongst the Fathers
and Medievalists directly. The criteria
for such a search is then, understandably, to look for any seed-like idea in Augustine,
for example, that will germinate into the (now illusorily proximate)
Trinitarian anemia of Protestant Liberalism, Deism, or other phenomenon
inimical to the sensibilities of the so-called Trinitarian renaissance of the
twentieth century, trace its line of descent (again, usually only so far as
Aquinas and then starting back up again around Schleiermacher) and reject or
modify it within one’s own constructive work accordingly. This “genealogical discourse” is a theme,
says David Cunningham, which at first glance,
Seems of small importance . . . but actually turns out to be
quite significant. This feature, which I
shall call ‘historical scapegoating,’ represents the apparent necessity felt by
many theologians to explain the decline of Trinitarian theology by casting
aspersions on a particular theologian or theological movement. …There even
seems to be something of a contest in progress, seeing just how far back into
Christian history a theologian can locate the beginnings of the ‘decline of
Trinitarian theology.’[16]
It is precisely within this omitted historical interval between Aquinas and
Schleiermacher, however, that, as William Babcock so arrestingly put it over
twenty years ago “large numbers of Christians seem
quietly to have shifted their allegiance to another God, leaving themselves
with the doctrine of the Trinity but no longer retaining the God whom it
adumbrates.”[17] He continues: “It is just here … that the
typical pattern in historical studies of the doctrine of the Trinity puts us at
a loss. It leaves blank the very interval that we most need to have filled-in
if we are to gain some understanding of where and how this shift of
sensibilities took place, the interval between the trinitarian theology of the
medieval scholastics and the trinitarian theology of Schleiermacher and those
who came after him.”[18] These “typical patterns” are so prevalent as
to fall within the ambit what the Patristic scholar Lewis Ayres has generally
entitled “reading habits” or “tropes” which organize a “culture of
modern systematic theology.”[19] It is a culture, which “inculcates views of
how one understands and deploys anything pre-modern counted as authoritative …”
Views which, he argues, are not extrinsic to modern Trinitarian theology and
are not easily replaced.[20] In fact:
The particular narratives I have been opposing fit into a
category of narratives about pre-modern theology that are not extrinsic to
modern systematic theology. … First, [these narratives] frequently serve as
quasi-confessional statements, indicating existing options, setting out a
narrative that results in a range of possibilities for current use, or they
narrate a story of error such that certain modern assumptions seem necessary.[21]
And, second
Narratives of the pre-modern are intrinsic to modern
systematics because they are frequently interwoven with meta-narrative
assumptions about the course of intellectual history that subtly serve to
render necessary the assumptions of modern systematic discourse … the
narratives of the fourth century deployed by modern systematic theologians are
frequently interwoven with assumptions about how theology should be practiced
and about how theology has developed that hold at arm’s length the real
challenge that pro-Nicenes offer.[22]
As such Jason Vickers
notes, in regards to precisely the same gap, “The time has come for theologians to attend to the focused
work of developing a more sophisticated account of what happened to the Trinity
and why.”[23] With Vickers, Babcock, Ayres, and an increasing number of
other scholars, our essay here intends to help fill out this gap and bring to further
light what happened to Trinitarian theology—what Nicholas Lash has termed
“puzzles … whose roots lie deep within the Western tradition.”[24] To do so, we propose the hypothesis that the
gap can be illuminated by watching how the concepts of nominalism, voluntarism,
and univocity of being play out—focusing upon Duns Scotus and especially
William of Ockham—which results in the breakdown not just of the ontological
concept of analogous predication of names to God, but more importantly shatters
its concomitant soteriological concepts relating to participation in the Triune
God through Christ, and hence deification as creatures. These concepts
(analogous and apophatic predication, participation, deification) stood as the
necessary presuppositions of pro-Nicene Trinitarianism and its concomitant
ideas regarding spiritual growth and union with Christ.[25] The weakening of these concepts through
conditions created by nominalism, voluntarism, and univocity of being, are
implicated in certain sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth-century trends
like English rationalism, German Idealism, and neo-Thomism, which implicate
both what is often meant by “classical theism,” and just what trinitarian
theology in its historical forms—and consequently its current state—came to be
conceived as “overcoming.”
The story we are going to tell is how streams of thought in a
post-nominalist environment created a picture whose general contours came to be
considered “Classical theism,” and how this picture coopted and dovetailed with
Theodore de Regnón’s analysis of the difference between Eastern and Western
Trinitarian theology. Both accounts—the
notion of tenable historiographical and theological categories to analyze the
tradition under the terms “Classical Theism” and “De Regnon Paradigm”—have been
powerfully called into question by recent scholarship, but have not been told
together as a single story in a way that displays how they mutually implicate
and are interwoven with one another. As
such the contributions of this essay are largely negative: The point of all this is to present—especially by focusing on the
reception history of the doctrine of divine simplicity as a case study—how
high-level theoretical decisions are being made in contemporary Trinitarian
theology at large, which are often predicated upon tenuous historiographical
reading’s of the tradition. Our essay concludes briefly by arguing that
despite the fact that these narratives were faulty, they often became
perpetuated in theological discourse because they spoke to real anxieties about
the nature of theology and its place in a secular world. This leads to the unsettling conclusion that
to some extent the explosion of Trinitarian theology today is not a sign of
health in all quarters, but paradoxically perpetuates some ills it set itself
to cure.
[1] Kevin Vanhoozer, Remythologizing
Theology: Divine Action, Passion, and Authorship (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2010), 82.
[2] On the phenomenon of “onto-theology” cf.: Merold Westphal, Overcoming Onto-Theology: Toward a
Postmodern Christian Faith (n.l.: Fordham University Press, 2001). Tellingly, in regards to the topic at hand in
this paper, Westphal notes that the criticism of ‘onto-theology’ actually does
not apply to the majority of Christian theological formulation, i.e. it does
not apply to the major “theistic” thinkers—Augustine, Anselm, Aquinas. By analogy then, theologians who have picked
up on this critique likewise are not actually getting beyond these figures, but
simply mutating them if they think the onto-theological critique, and hence its
solutions, need apply to them.
[3] As we shall see, however, this Hegelian program itself
assumed a quite fecund Trinitarian
legacy—though the ultimate weight of the Christian
Trinity is often ignored by Hegelian commentators in favor of his
philosophical system. For excellent introductions
to Hegel through the lens of the Trinity, cf. .Cyril O’Regan The Heterodox Hegel (New York: State
University of New York Press, 1994); Samuel M. Powell, The Trinity in German Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge Press, 2001),
104-142.
[4] Though interestingly Whitehead himself—the father of
Process philosophy—once declared that “the doctrine of the Trinity is one of
the greatest achievements of the human intellect.” Quoted in Stanley Grenz, The Named God and the Question of Being: A Trinitarian Theo-Ontology (Louisville: Westminster John-Knox, 2005), 12. To an orthodox Christian, though, it seems
impossible to take this otherwise than as a backhanded Feuerbach-esque
compliment.
[5] Though as this chapter and the following hope to
demonstrate, they also became, through a shared “critique of classical theism”
often evident in both Trinitarianism and these other movements, strange
bedfellows.
[6] One of the first significant uses of the term “Trinitarian
renaissance,” occurred in a 1986 article by the Catholic systematic theologian
Catherine Mowry LaCugna, “Philosophers and Theologians on the Trinity,” Modern Theology 2, no.3 (April, 1986):
169-181 in which she outlines nine major works published in that decade alone;
cf. Christoph Schwöbel, “Introduction: The Renaissance of Trinitarian Theology:
Reasons, Problems, and Tasks,” in Christoph Schwöbel, ed. Trinitarian Theology Today: Essays
on Divine Being and Act (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1995).
[7] Ronald J. Feenstra and Cornelius Plantinga, Jr., eds. Trinity, Incarnation, and Atonement:
Philosophical and Theological Essays (Notre Dame: Notre Dame Press, 1989),
3.
[8] An important exception to this was a work by George
Lindbeck’s predecessor at Yale, Claude Welch’s unfortunately still much
neglected In This Name: The Doctrine of
the Trinity in Contemporary Theology (New York: Schribener’s, 1952). Welch notes that in the aftermath of Barth
(but we might note, before Rahner’s own famous remarks in The Trinity) Welch’s own day was experiencing a “renewed and
growing interest in the trinitarian conception.” And that it was of such a scope he thought it
appropriate to bring together “in a single focus the widely divergent lines of
thought represented in the contemporary theological scene, ranging from
complete indifference or outright opposition to the notion of the Trinity, to
explicit efforts to restore this doctrine to the central place in the
theological scheme.” (xiii-ix).
[9] Ted Peters, God as
Trinity: Relationality and Temporality in the Divine Life (Louisville: Westminster
John Knox, 1993), 7.
[10] Holmes, Quest for the
Trinity, 2.
[11] Colin Gunton, The
Promise of Trinitarian Theology 2nd ed. (New York: T&T
Clark, 2007), xv.
[12] David Cunningham, These
Three Are One: The Practice of Trinitarian Theology (Massachusetts:
Blackwell Publishing, 1998), 19.
[13] Ibid. Cf.
Schwöbel, “Trinitarian Renaissance,” 1: “At the beginning … it still seemed
necessary to lament the neglect of trinitarian reflection in modern theology
and to offer apologies for engaging with such allegedly remote and speculative
issues; both lamentation and apologies would seem out of place in today’s
theological situation.”
[14] Some otherwise quite helpful and insightful studies that
embody this typical procedure include Veli-Mati Karkkainan, The Trinity: Global Perspectives (Philadelphia:
Westminster John-Knox, 2007); Stanley Grenz, Rediscovering the Triune God: The Trinity in Contemporary Theology (Minneapolis:
Augsburg Fortress Press, 2004); Edmund Hill, The Mystery of the Trinity (London: Cassel, 1985) jumps from
Aquinas to the twentieth-century; Perhaps no such “typical” account has been
more influential as of late than the seminal study of Catherine LaCugna, God For Us: The Trinity and the Christian
Life (San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 1991) who narrates the history
of the doctrine up until Gregory Palamas, and then jumps to contemporary
concerns. Perhaps one of the only major
figures within the pantheon of the Trinitarian Renaissance theologians to not
overlook this critical transition is Wolfhart Pannenberg, Systematic Theology vol I. trans. Geoffery W. Bromiley (Grand
Rapids: Eerdman’s Publishing Company, 1991): “Part of the decay of the doctrine
of the Trinity in the Protestant theology of the 17th and 18th
centuries as due to the lack of an inner systematic connection between the
Trinitarian statements and the divine unity … the moment it appears that the
one God can be better understood without rather than with the doctrine of the
Trinity, the latter seems to be a superfluous addition to the one God.”
(290-291).
[15] This view is—despite whatever deficiencies exist in
Schleiermacher’s trinitarianism—patently false.
The Trinity does not occur in
an “appendix,” but rather in his conclusion. The Trinity is, as he says, “the coping-stone
of Christian faith,” and as such takes its place as the summation of the entirety of Christian doctrine. Undoubtedly this is not enough to ultimately
vindicate his vision, nevertheless we must be rid of the all-too-easy
caricature that so hastily dismisses Schleiermacher’s brilliance. See: Francis Schüssler Fiorenza
“Schleiermacher’s Understanding of God as Trinity,” in., The Cambridge Companion to Friedrich Schleiermacher Jacqueline
Marina ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 171-188; Samuel M. Powell, The Trinity in German Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2001), 87-104.; Cf. Jason Vickers, Invocation
and Assent: The Making and Remaking of Trinitarian Theology (Grand Rapids:
Eerdman’s 2008), x: “Suffice it to say, it is time to give poor Schleiermacher
a break.” Grenz, Rediscovering the Triune God is a notable exception among
introductory works for actually giving credence to and incorporating the
literature on this revised understanding of Schleiermacher (17ff, cf. 18);
Sarah Coakley, God, Sexuality, and the
Self: An Essay ‘On the Trinity’ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2013), 105: “Schleiermacher’s discussion of the Trinity is often misunderstood;
in fact he did not intend to ‘relegate it to an appendix’ as is so often
charged, but rather to place it, in a less obviously ontological form, as the
final ‘coping stone’ (schlusstein is
his own chosen word) at the end of his systematic project, holding it all
together.” Much more perspicacious is Stephen Holmes’ treatment of
Schleiermacher. More important than the
supposed relegation of the Trinity to the shadowy back bits of Systematic
Theology by Schleiermacher, is Schleiermacher’s historical methodology itself: Holmes notes that Schleiermacher was adamant
that in order to do justice to the tradition one “must be responsible in doing
theology at our own moment of history,” which actually means that the
fundamental historical stability of the doctrine of the Trinity which Holmes is
at pains to enumerate was seen by Schleiermacher as “an enormous, almost
intractable, problem” (The Quest for the Trinity,
187-188). Thus from Schleiermacher “the harvest of nineteenth-century
theology includes a broad sense that the discipline stood in need of
fundamental reformulation…if we try to analyze this…it tends to reduce to a
series of claims about the broad narrative of the theological tradition…which
were based on nineteenth-century historical work.” We suffer now from
what Holmes calls “dislocation,”—“we all know now that the historical work was
inadequate in many ways, but the sense that the tradition we have received is
somehow warped or broken remains strong.” (195) We are thus left with a
“curious legacy” where there is “in some unspecified and shadowy way” the
suspicion of distortion in need of correction by modern reconstruction
(197). As we shall see, this general
“narrative sense” of the course of intellectual history is of great import.
[16] Cunningham, These
Three Are One, 31. Despite his
admission of its “great importance” Cunningham himself finds little to gain
from these genealogical endeavors (32).
One seminal example is Catherine LaCugna God For Us. Specifically for
our purposes here her historical narrative spans the first half of the book
(1-205): “the history of doctrine and theology tells the story of the emergence
and defeat of the doctrine of the Trinity.” (198) In spite of this, “in all
traditions today a renaissance of the doctrine of the Trinity is taking place.”
Just so, it is thus imperative, “if this revitalization is to succeed, we must
grasp fully the historical and theological reasons that led to the defeat of
the doctrine of the Trinity” (144). Or
take (now Cardinal) Walter Kasper, The
God of Jesus Christ, “The history of modern thought is not only a history
of the destruction of Trinitarian confession,” he writes, “it is also a history of the many attempts made to reconstruct the
doctrine of the Trinity.” (265); cf. John Webster “Theologies of Retrieval,” in
The Oxford Handbook of Systematic
Theology ed. John Webster and Kathryn Tanner, (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2007), 583-600; Cyril O’Regan, “Von Balthazar’s Valorization and
Critique of Heidegger’s Genealogy of Modernity,” in Christian Spirituality and the Culture of Modernity: The Theology of
Louis Dupré (Grand Rapids: Eerdman’s Publishing, 1998), 123: “If once very
much an adiaphora in philosophical and theological discourse, genealogy
increasingly has come to play a more and more central role, indeed has become
so ‘inscripted’ that it itself has become in some places the script. However regrettable this inversion of priorities
may be, genealogical production shows little sign of abating, and in
philosophy, at least, it is responsible for much of the most interesting and
vital work of the past decades.”
[17] William S. Babcock, “A Changing of the Christian God: The
Doctrine of the Trinity in the 17th Century.” Interpretation no.45
(1991): 134.
[18] Ibid., 135.
[19] Lewis Ayres, Nicaea
and Its Legacy: An Approach to 4th Century Trinitarianism
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 385.
[20] Ibid.
[21] Ibid., 385.
[22] Ibid., 386.; So
also Anatolios, Retrieving Nicaea: The
Development and Meaning of Trinitarian Doctrine (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2011), 11: “Standard textbook accounts of the
development of Trinitarian doctrine are beholden to typical preconceptions of
the meaning of Trinitarian doctrine …”
[23] Vickers, Invocation
and Assent: The Making and Remaking of Trinitarian Theology (Grand Rapids:
Eerdman’s Publishing, 2008), 191.
[24] Nicholas Lash, “Considering the Trinity,” Modern Theology vol.2 no.1 (1986): 183.
[25] John Milbank, Beyond
Secular Order: The Representation of Being and the Representation of the People
(UK: Wiley-Blackwell Publishing, 2013), 50ff: “Theologically speaking,
univocity breaks with the entire legacy of negative theology and eminent
attribution.”; Conor Cunningham, The
Genealogy of Nihilism (New York: Routledge, 2002), 169-219. Cf. 182: “At the heart of analogy lie
causality and participation [in God] … Indeed participation, causality, and
analogy are, in a sense, a dynamic trilectic which keeps the understanding of
each in check …” Cf. Dixon, Nice and Hot
Disputes, 208: “The developing popular appropriation and appreciation of
the doctrine of the trinity in our own time is enhanced and enriched by a study
of its evisceration in the seventeenth century.”
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