How Neo-Thomism Affected 20th Century Trinitarianism: (Part One) Thesis
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| Pictured: A sad Thomas, right after he realized all his work was but straw. |
[A]n
appeal to reconsider classical Christian resources that have been rejected on
the basis of misapprehensions cannot but also involve reconsideration of the
histories of theology implicit in all of these recent proposals
—Lewis
Ayres[1]
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[2]
The
building up of … new theory had varying repercussions on the interpretation
given to older texts.
—Henri
De Lubac[3]
In
the 1980’s the theological world awoke, and was startled to find itself
Trinitarian. In the mid-1990’s, some
became concerned that it was little else.
What had been brewing since the turn of the century—as the story goes[4]—with
the work of Karl Barth, and later, Karl Rahner—turned, in the penultimate
decade of the twentieth-century, into a self-aware panic of joy.[5] As the initial euphoria of the Trinity’s
newly rediscovered celebrity sank in, however, notes of caution began to emerge
amongst the chorus of theologians. One
can trace this 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.”[6] Such was the onslaught of works in the 1980’s
and, mainly, the 1990’s that already in 1998 David Cunningham somewhat warily
noted that the phenomenon now looked less a renaissance, than “a bandwagon,”[7]
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.”[8]
It is not
just the doctrine itself that might be obscured by the very abundance and
plasticity of its employment,[9]
more to our concerns here such an overabundance brings with it concomitant
tendencies to canonize blind-spots in historical methodology. The constructive agenda of the contemporary
20th century Trinitarian revival has without fail been ballasted—and
received the sharpness of its own positions—by contouring and contrasting
against presumed histories of Trinitarian theology. Stephen Holmes has recently labeled this
phenomenon a sense of “dislocation” bequeathed as a legacy of Friedrich
Schleiermacher on Trinitarian thought.[10] Far from taking the well-traveled (and
much-misunderstood)[11]
road of lambasting Schleiermacher’s placement of the Trinity in the shadowy
back-bits of The Christian Faith,
Holmes is more interested in Schleiermacher’s historical methodology itself. He
observes 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 means that the fundamental historical stability of the doctrine
of the Trinity which Holmes is at pains to enumerate in his own work, was seen
by Schleiermacher as “an enormous, almost intractable, problem.”[12]
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. … [W]e 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.”[13] 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.[14] As such, despite the fact that Schleiermacher
only shows up in trinitarian theology to be promptly criticized and shooed
away, quite ironically one of the most major agendas of the Trinitarian revival
is thoroughly indebted to him. Though it
has often escaped commentary until more recently, this suspicion of
Schleiermacher’s covert legacy is reinforced further in the method and judgment
of many key-works in the Trinitarian revival.
There is a “genealogical discourse” at work attempting to discern where,
when, and by whom the doctrine of the Trinity went awry. And this 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.’[15]
This
covert historiographical warfare, which Lewis Ayres has remarked constitutes
what amounts to a “culture of modern systematic theology”[16]
which “inculcates views of how one understands and deploys anything pre-modern
counted as authoritative …”[17]
is being waged on many fronts.[18] But in particular our concern for this essay
is to observe how historiographical descriptions of something generally termed
“classical theism” on the one hand, and the common juxtaposition of “Eastern”
and “Western” trinitarianism (referred to in the shorthand—illicitly, as we
shall see—as the “de Regnón paradigm”) often converge to create a sort of
standardized working-model of theological (and philosophical) history that
ballasts the constructive moves made by contemporary theologians. This convergence tends to circulate around
the figure of St. Augustine, and even more specifically his idea of the
doctrine of divine simplicity (DDS) and its legacy upon theism generally and
Trinitarian theology specifically.[19] “[These connections of modern systematic
theology’s historical narratives] have provided the architecture for a grand
story of modern origins now taken as axiomatic by thinkers with little in
common. And Augustine’s place within
them is crucial as one of the West’s great metaphysical pillars,”[20]
as Michael Hanby puts it. Indeed “Saint Augustine occupies a vexed place in
modernity’s vexed self-understanding.”[21]
[1] Lewis Ayres, “(Mis)Adventures in Trinitarian Ontology,” in
John Polkinghorne, ed., The Trinity and
an Entangled World: Relationality in Physical Science and Theology (Grand
Rapids: Eerdman’s Publishing, 2010), 131.
[2] Kevin Vanhoozer, Remythologizing
Theology: Divine Action, Passion, and Authorship (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2010), 82.
[3] Henri De Lubac, The
Mystery of the Supernatural trans. Rosemary Sheed (New York: Cross Road
Publishing, 1998), 6.
[4] While it is in line with our general thesis of
historiographical misunderstanding latent within the Trinitarian Renaissance,
tracing the exact nature of the “renaissance” in the twentieth century goes
beyond the scope of what we are dealing with.
Needless to say there are many scholars who question the general
“received story” of a complete “renaissance” of the doctrine and its
implications. As Lewis Ayres, Nicaea and
Its Legacy: An Approach to Fourth-Century Trinitarianism (Oxford: Oxford
University, 2004), 408n.48 has not hesitated to point out, is that Karl Rahner
in particular, “while asserting that Christians have become ‘mere monotheists’
[he] cites 16 articles and books written between 1927 and 1958 that try toshape
a Trinitarian spirituality or make the Trinity central to Christian theology.”
And this, as Ayres goes on to point out, does not even include English language
theology. Claude Welch, In This Name: The Doctrine of the Trinity in
Contemporary Theology (New York: Scribner, 1952), for example, already in
1952 detected in the English-speaking world a surge of work beginning in the
1940’s up to his own time that he designated a “revival” of Trinitarian
doctrine (cf. esp. 3-122 for his summary of this history). Indeed, as Fred Sanders “The Trinity,” in
Kelly M. Kapic and Bruce L. McCormack, eds., Mapping Modern Theology: A Thematic and Historical Introduction
(Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2012), writes: “Everything that is routinely
praised as belonging to the excitement of the Trinitarian revival … is fairly
easy to find in those older sources.”
And, just as important, there does not seem to be any notable
“chronological gap during which serious theological voices were not holding
forth on the doctrine of the Trinity with faithfulness and creativity”
(42). The very notion of a “Trinitarian
renaissance” itself has been borrowed from earlier thought: as Walter Kasper, The God of Jesus Christ (London: S.C.M
Press, 1984), puts it “the history of modern thought,” as a whole, can be
summarized as “a history of the many attempts made to reconstruct the doctrine
of the Trinity” (311). Admittedly,
Kasper’s concomitant claim is that this history is primarily the history of philosophers, and not theologians, to
keep the doctrine alive (265).
Similarly, writing in the late 1870’s, Isaac Dorner congratulated the
“followers of Hegel for keeping alive the doctrine in what had seemed otherwise
dark days” (Cited in Lewis Ayres, “Into the Cloud of Witnesses: Catholic
Trinitarian Theology Beyond and Before Its Modern ‘Revivals’” in Giulio Maspero
and Robert Wozniak, eds., Rethinking
Trinitarian Theology: Disputed Questions and Contemporary Issues in Trinitarian
Theology (New York: T&T Clark, 2012)).
Ironically, Nicholas Lash, “Considering the Trinity,” Modern Theology no.2 vol.3 (1986): 185,
notes that the philosophers attempted to revitalize the Trinity precisely
because the theologians abandoned the Trinity “and selected for their subject
matter the most unchristian entity that came to be known as the ‘god of the
philosophers.’” Nonetheless, even where
explicit theological attention was not given, the liturgical and doxological
modes of Christian life—such as in the hymns of Charles Wesley—carried
Trinitarian theology forward even if unreflectively (cf. Jason Vickers, Invocation and Assent: The Making and
Remaking of Trinitarian Theology (Grand Rapids: Eerdman’s Publishing
Company, 2008), 169-191).
[5] 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).
[6] Colin Gunton, The
Promise of Trinitarian Theology 2nd ed. (New York: T&T
Clark, 2007), xv.
[7] David Cunningham, These
Three Are One: The Practice of Trinitarian Theology (Massachusetts:
Blackwell Publishing, 1998), 19.
[8] Ibid.
[9] This specific topic will be address in our follow-up essay,
“The Secret Fears of Our Trinitarianism.”
[10] Holmes, Quest for the
Trinity, 195.
[11] 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.”
[12] Holmes, Quest for the
Trinity, 187-188.
[13] Ibid., 195.
[14] Ibid, 197.
[15] 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).
[16] Lewis Ayres, Nicaea
and Its Legacy: An Approach to 4th Century Trinitarianism
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 385.
[17] Ibid. Cf. 385-386: “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. … 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.”
[18] As a few examples—all immediately relevant to the topic of
this essay: 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.”; Aristotle Papanikolaou, Being With God: Trinity, Apophaticism,
and Divine-Human Communion (Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 2006),
10-11, points out that both Vladimir Lossky and John Zizioulas—two important
Eastern Orthodox figures in the revitalization of the Trinity in the 20th
century—“illustrate the realism of divine-human communion, [by] construct[ing]
a history of Eastern and Western patristic thought,” And though Papanikolaou is
a very sympathetic interpreter, he notes “these histories … are often too
simplistic and texts are often interpreted in such a way as to be forced into
particular trajectories.” (154-155); As Philip Clayton The Problem of God in Modern Thought (Grand Rapids: Eerdman’s
Publishing, 2000), 11, helpfully puts it, this historical turn in philosophy
and theology “suggests handling the great texts of the past in a different
manner. No longer can they appear as
necessary, canonical moments in a perfectly unfolding story. This gives us a new task: not just to
interpret author’s intentions but also rationally to reconstruct their work in
light of the narrative as we now see it.; Morwenna Ludlow, Gregory of Nyssa: Ancient and Postmodern (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2007); This genealogical discourse
has even affect the interpretation of much more recent thinkers like Karl
Barth. Cf. D. Stephen Long, Saving Karl Barth: Hans Urs Von Balthasar’s
Preoccupation (New York: Fortress Press, 2014), 107: “The difference
between Balthasar and McCormack are not antiquarian squabbling: the different
histories serve different dogmatics, one an orthodox modern neo-Protestantism,
the other Catholic.”; And of course, quite notoriously, the “Radical Orthodoxy”
movement is predicated upon telling the story of intellectual history in a
certain light. Cf. James K. A. Smith, Introducing Radical Orthodoxy: Mapping a
Post-Secular Theology (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2004), esp. 87-125.
[19] Michael Hanby, Augustine
and Modernity (London: Routledge, 2003), nicknames this caricature
Augustine’s “grim paternity” for Western thought. He remarks: “In its theological guise, the
reassessment of Augustine is part and parcel of Christianity’s ongoing
self-assessment, especially in the West,” and, “in its philosophical and
political guise, it is part of culture’s ongoing reassessment of Christianity,”
in relation to new, secular forms of life and thought” (6). As Patristic specialist John Behr “Calling
Upon God as Father: Augustine and the Legacy of Nicaea,” in Orthodox Readings of Augustine ed.
Aristotle Papanikolaou & George E. Demacopolous (New York: St. Vladimir’s
Seminary Press, 2008), 153, summarizes: “this century has not been good for
blessed Augustine.” At this juncture it
behooves us to note that we hardly mean to defend Augustine on all points of
his theology. Our contention is that his
Trinitarian theology (and the much-maligned Western, Latin Trinitarian
theology) has a lot to add in dialogue with current theology that is often
overlooked because of skewed historical readings. It is always important to take into account,
as John Rist, “Augustine of Hippo,” in The
Medieval Theologians, ed. G.R. Evans (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2001),
3, puts it, that: “No account of the effects and influence of Augustine can
ignore the challenge of the relationship between the genuine and the supposed
beliefs of the bishop of Hippo.” Cf. the
helpful remarks of David Tracy, “Augustine’s Christomorphic Theocentricism,” in
Orthodox Readings of Augustine,
268-269.
[20] Hanby, Augustine and
Modernity, 135.
[21] Ibid., 6. Cf. Karen Kilby, “Aquinas, the Trinity, and
the Limits of Understanding,” International
Journal of Systematic Theology no.7 vol.4 (October, 2005): 415-416, who
rightly acknowledges how this narrative spills into readings of Thomas
Aquinas. She writes: “The need for this
[Trinitarian] rehabilitation stems from the fact that, in the broader revival
of Trinitarian theology over the last forty years or so, Aquinas has often been
presented as a classic example of thinking about the Trinity gone wrong,
trinitarian theology done in such a way as to make the doctrine seem sterile,
confusing, and irrelevant. … Thomas is rarely censured in isolation: most often
the context is a criticism of the whole Western tradition of Trinitarian
reflection. The pattern was set by
Augustine, and it is his influence … that is the root of the problem, a problem
which, according to many, is seen today in the fact that the doctrine of the
Trinity so easily appears to be an intellectual puzzle with no relevance to the
faith of most Christians. … This is a criticism which does not always remain at
a merely abstract and methodological level: often the same theologians who
reject the Augustinian approach to the Trinity want to jettison central
elements of classical patristic and medieval conception of the divine
nature—elements which are seen as merely the product of philosophical influence
such as, for instance, simplicity, aseity, eternity, immutability, and
impassibility. ‘The Christian God’ a
genuinely Trinitarian God, is presented in partial or complete contrast with
the too philosophical God which had a grip over so much of the Christian
tradition.”
[22] William S. Babcock, “A Changing of the Christian God: The
Doctrine of the Trinity in the 17th Century.” Interpretation no.45
(1991): 134.
[23] Ibid., 135.
[24] William Placher The
Domestication of Transcendence: How Modern Thinking About God Went Wrong (Louisville:
Westminster: John-Knox, 1996), 2, for example, writes “some of the features
contemporary critics find most objectionable in so-called traditional Christian
theology in fact come to prominence only in the seventeenth century. Some of our current protests, it turns out,
should not be directed against the Christian tradition, but against what
modernity did to it.”; Nicholas Lash
cautions us to understand that “between the
thirteenth century and the end of the twentieth [stands]…two centuries of modern theism, [emphasis added]” Lash,
“Considering the Trinity,” 188; Walter Kasper, The God of Jesus Christ, can speak of this modern phenomenon as the
“heresy of theism,” (294) where “the modern age has to a great extent abandoned
concrete [that is, Trinitarian] Christian monotheism in favor of the abstract
theism of a unipersonal God who stands over against man as perfect…In the final
analysis this conception is the popular form of Christianity half under the
influence of the Enlightenment, or else, the religious remnant of Christianity
in a secularized society” (295); Frans
Jozef van Beeck, “Trinitarian Theology as Participation,” in Steven T. Davis et
al. The Trinity: An Inter Disciplinary
Symposium on the Trinity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 320,
argues: “The remote, impassive, faceless ‘God-out-there’ which the West … has
gotten used to, surfaced only at the confluence of a number of late medieval,
early modern, and modern trains of thought and mentalities.”
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