Book Review Essay: Theologies of Retrieval, edited by Darren Sarisky
Book Review Essay: Darren Sarisky, ed., Theologies of Retrieval: An Exploration and Appraisal (New York: T&T Clark, 2017) 359pp. $148 Hardcover.
History is the product of a technology. It does not simply lie around like stones or apples, ready to be picked up by anyone who pleases. It must first be produced.
—Constantin Fasolt, The Limits of History[1]
Christianity is not one of the great things of history; history is one of the great things of Christianity.
—Henri de Lubac, Paradoxes of Faith[2]
Let us not bury the lead for those who are reading this to get a verdict: Darren Sarisky, a Tutor in Doctrine and Ministry at Wycliffe Hall, and a member of the Faculty of Theology and Religion at the University of Oxford, UK, has brought together an uncanny group of scholars in this edited volume. Like all collections of a similar nature, the quality and payoff varies slightly (but only slightly) from essay to essay as one traverses through the surprisingly brisk pace of the nineteen chapters. But the overall effect is deeply illuminating and informative. Without reservation it can be said that this is an essential volume for anyone interested in the constructive task of theology, and who wonder about its relationship to history. All the while, the volume for the most part deftly avoids the somewhat dismal, empty feeling one gets when dwelling too long on theological method without getting on with the actual task of theology. One selfishly hopes, indeed, that a sequel will be penned, so that many more topics can receive such an excellent treatment in this manner.
Retrieval’s Place On the Map of Things
So, just what are “theologies of retrieval”? One can already hear students groaning at yet another category of theology to place alongside what seems to be an increasingly exotic menagerie of schools, styles, and movements. Yet, “retrieval” indicates less a discrete program or group of thought, as it does a general strategy covering a diverse array of examples. Retrieval is not just historical theology. Rather, to borrow Rowan Williams felicitous phrase (which Sarisky helpfully points to in his introduction), retrieval is an act of “creative archaeology”[3]in which the past is brought into the present in order to produce previously unrealized opportunities. Or, as Sarisky puts it in his own essay contribution to the volume: “[theologies of retrieval] move beyond the state of the present and what is commonplace within contemporary thinking by reconnecting with the legacies of the Christian tradition, thereby seeking to renew the present via accessing insights that lie outside its scope” (202). As such, many theologians with other labels already attached to them—liberal, post-liberal, analytic, neo-orthodox, dialectical, feminist, neo-Patristic, nouvelle, Reformed, liberationist et. al.—can under the right circumstances also be brought under the canopy of “retrieval”. Many of these labels are, in fact, represented in the present volume. Thus for example as Kenneth Oakes puts it “Barth’s timely theology of retrieval, with its Reformed atmosphere, habits of judgment, and conversation partners” will no doubt differ “from the Lutheran renaissance initiated by Karl Holl and the twentieth-century Roman Catholic ressourcementmovement,” there will nonetheless be, “clear marks of convergence at times” (121).
The only real—or at least consistent—distinction the volume wants to draw to discriminate retrieval from other forms of theology, is that of more “correlationist” strategies seen, for example, in some of the “mediating theology”[4]in Germany, so-called “contextual theologies,” or more recently in the “Chicago School” represented by thinkers like Paul Tillich or David Tracy. As Sarisky puts it in his introduction to the volume: “It is arguable that the great divide in theology today is not between [Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, and Protestantism] but rather between various types of correlationism or conversational theology, on the one hand, and theologies of retrieval, on the other” (3). This claim doesn’t quite map onto John Allen Knight’s recent argument that the great divide in theology is actually between liberalism and post-liberalism in terms of the so-called “verification problem,”[5]though there are interesting analogies.
For one, Sarisky’s very useful summary regarding theologies of retrieval rings in a post-liberal key (especially when contrasted to correlationist theology). “Theologies of retrieval”, he helpfully notes, are less concerned to secure the plausibility of Christian theology by means of “establishing similarities to presently influential ideas, but rather are more focused “on simply attending to, indwelling, and commending what they take to be the most compelling articulations of the Christian gospel” (2). For some, this will be a breath of fresh air. For others, this no doubt creates a few conceptual difficulties for the task of theology as many currently perceive it akin to those criticisms that have been leveled against post-liberalism.
On the one hand it could appear, for example, that retrieval is less a robust theological project than a fiat designed to avoid answering legitimate conceptual difficulties that attend to doing theology today. A particularly incisive criticism along these lines comes from David Congdon in his own large project retrieving the thought of Rudolf Bultmann (I know what you are thinking, but don’t dismiss this just because you have some textbook caricature of Bultmann in mind).[6]
On the other hand, the concern has been raised that theologies of retrieval are often vehicles that smuggle in prior (often post-liberal) methodological and metaphysical positions that are not clearly or explicitly articulated, yet control the presentation of ideas and practices. In particular one can point to a feisty (or, one might say somewhat bad-tempered) essay by Alan Brown, where he defends John Zizioulas against criticisms including “social-trinitarianism” that Brown takes to be driven almost entirely by an engine of methodological presuppositions unique to Anglophone post-liberal Patristic scholarship.[7]Francesca Aran Murphy has also raised concerns about theology in the mode of what she terms “Grammatical Thomism” and “Story Barthianism” in her monograph, God is Not a Story.[8]This is not a criticism of Thomas or Barth per se,but rather “principles which narrative theologians have considered these writers to yield,” and in which thinking about Karl Barth or Thomas Aquinas “method becomes the very content of their theology.”[9]
As Paul Dehart reminds us, however, the strict binary of “post-liberal vs. liberal” or “Yale vs. Chicago” is often overplayed at the expense of a nuanced understanding of their similarities,[10]and likewise Sarisky’s insightful summary regarding theologies of retrieval should be interpreted more as a helpful guideline than a strict rule. In his essay “The Past Matters Theologically” in the present volume, Stanley Hauerwas notes something similar when he writes “the presumption that one must choose between tradition and what is now identified as liberal theology is a mistake. Liberalism, at least liberalism understood as a stance within Protestant theology, is itself part of the tradition” (38).
To make that point, Hauerwas looks at the neglected work of Yale theologian Robert L. Calhoun, without whom “the recovery of tradition, which has become, perhaps misleadingly, known as the Yale School, would not have been possible” (39). At the same time, with Calhoun, Hauerwas argues we encounter a figure who developed a “theological perspective … that did not entail the rejection of the concerns that has shaped the development of theological liberalism” (39). One of Calhoun’s students at Yale, Robert Cushman, notes that Calhoun “mightily helped doctrinally illiterate children of liberal American Christianity in the thirties and forties recover a critical comprehension of the well-nigh unsearchable riches of inherited wisdom” and in this way Calhoun unexpectedly opened the “possible reception of ‘neo-orthodox’ theology’ (i.e. Barth)” but also “produced [theologians] able to be in conversation in Catholic and Protestant ecumenical movements” (41). While we should—with Kenneth Oakes in the present volume—completely reject the possibility of the typical textbook category “neo-orthodox” serving as a helpful label for Barth’s project (117 n.1), this mitigation of the typically sharp perception of a liberal/post-liberal divide is extremely helpful.
David Tracy’s “Chicago School” theological project (to continue to use that loose moniker) can also be represented as a sort of critical theology of retrieval (see William E. Myatt’s essay in this volume, 315-332). For Tracy, the “religious classic” (Myatt notes Tracy later in his career changes this concept slightly to “fragment”) is meant not to bolster some pre-set orthodox nostalgia. Rather, the religious classic as a “singular expression” or concentrated form of the quest for truth in a given tradition, is “perpetually interruptive” (326), since it always eludes easy assimilation through its very richness. Retrieval as such, far from an ossifying force, ironically builds “interruption into the theological conversation itself” (327). This is, to continue the theme of somewhat relativizing liberal vs. post-liberal labels, very similar to how Sarisky himself describes retrieval as assuming both “that certain [theological] high points do in fact exist in the past” but also “that present thought should expose itself to them to be unsettled” (203).
Other forms of theological reasoning that would initially seem hostile to theology in the mode of retrieval, including feminist and liberationist “contextual” theologies, are also included here. While “retrieval” might suggest repristinating a past full of hegemonic and oppressive features, these essays suggest that the possibility of a hybridized “contextual-retrieval” theology of some sort is possible. Brian Bantum thus asks “What is theological retrieval in the shadow of the plantation? … How should we remember? How do various projects of theological retrieval navigate the reality of our racialized world?” (262) This is a difficult task, he notes, because “the effects of … misremembering are so complete, so thorough, that it is difficult to point to an exception in American Christian life where the realities of America’s and Europe’s racist and colonialist ventures have not been fundamentally” ignored or ingrained in the imagination of Christian life (265).
Drawing on recent works such as those of J. Kameron Carter and Willie James Jennings (both of whom are doing a work of retrieval to unearth and overcome a theological genealogy of racialization),[11]Bantum argues retrieval must always have an eye to freedom: “in the corners of the world where Christianity served as a legitimizing framework to enslave black bodies, retrieval is reaching beneath the structures of oppression, dismantling the edifices that houses the oppressor and the shacks that sheltered the enslaved” (270), in order to unearth and again make possible a “vibrant and vital space where humanity’s possibilities become reimagined in the various encounters of races and cultures, but above all in the ongoing encounters between God and humanity” (273).
Similarly, Ruth Jackson in her essay “On Gender and Theology in the Mode of Retrieval” (279-296) looks at how the figure of Mary has been variously received. For Simone de Beauvoir and, following her, Mary Daly, Maria Warner, and Elizabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, Mary is the ultimate proof they need that the tradition of theology perpetuates an absolute feminine submission. Even as (especially as) the “Mother of God” (theotokos)—which is the highest honor a woman could receive—the feminine as represented by Mary, so they argue, is only honored relatively in terms of her reference to maleness and masculinity (284). Nonetheless, while wanting to account for these critiques, Jackson—following Tina Beattie—emphasizes the “sheer depth and labyrinthine quality of the Christian story itself” in order to discover latent or overlooked potentials for both men and women internal to the Christian tradition (288-289). To do this, Jackson looks at the work of medievalist Caroline Walker Bynum, whose intricate investigations “frustrate unthinking appeals to thick and totalizing categories like ‘medieval religion’ or ‘the oppression of women’” (291) by producing a “complex and multilayered picture of Christian community” in which “women manipulated the dominant tradition to free themselves from the burdens of fertility [while at the same time] making fertility a powerful symbol … to facilitate their own imitatio Christi” (291, quoting Bynum).
Peril and Promise
Holding one finger up, looking straight at me with fury in his eyes, he said, ‘You will remain theologically uneducated until you study carefully Athanasius, Augustine, and Aquinas.’ In his usual gruff voice and gruff speech, he told me I had not yet met the great minds of my own religious tradition. He explained that he had gone through a long season of restitution after his erratic days and found it necessary to carefully read the Talmud and the Midrashim to discover who he was. Likewise, he felt that I would have to go to a quiet place and sit at the feet of the great minds of ancient Christianity to discover who I was.
—Thomas C. Oden, A Change of Heart[12]
For this next section, I hope I can be permitted a brief personal reflection, which I think illustrates both the peril and the promise of theologies of retrieval. For those entirely uninterested in my theological autobiography in miniature, the questions I want to raise in this section are: at what point does non-identical repetition of the tradition (a goal of theologies of retrieval) become blatant misrepresentation? Are there regulative ideals, broadly conceived, that theologies of retrieval need to consider? Is there a way, for example, to differentiate between the claims that German idealism, or in particular Hegel’s philosophy represents, broadly speaking, a legitimate extension of traditional Christian theology[13]from the contrary claim that Hegel represents a “misremembering” of Christian theology?[14]Thankfully, as we shall see many of the essays in the present volume guide us through some of these complexities. Though as one might expect, there are no absolute answers.
The phrase “Theology of Retrieval” is not new with this volume, but goes back at least to the late John Webster (who himself has an excellent essay on creation ex nihilo in the present volume). When I first ran across John Webster’s article “Theologies of Retrieval” in the Oxford Handbook of Systematic Theology,[15]I was given a vocabulary (or, at least, a phrase) that allowed me to name an impulse that at the time was beginning to shape the entirety of my theological education. In my undergraduate days I had, like many, become enamored with what has been labeled the “Trinitarian renaissance,” in the twentieth-century, and did my best to read as many of the major players as possible. Theologians both major and minor filled my days with wonder as the Trinity was presented, in the words of Robert Jenson’s oft-quoted phrase, not as a “separate puzzle to be solved,” but rather as “the framework within which all of theology’s puzzles are to be solved.”[16]
By itself, this suggestion was intriguing enough, and the possibilities of a revitalized Trinitarian theology seemed endless to the budding theologian in me. But just as wonderful, those partaking in this renaissance were also slaking a deep curiosity and love of theological history of which I was not explicitly conscious at the time. For, like clockwork, these books contained in varying lengths and detail historical narrations of the doctrine of the Trinity that were part and parcel of the larger projects of constructive theology with which they were associated. As Sarisky notes, “theologies of retrieval depend, in some way or another, on judgments that theologians have made about the flow of the history of ideas” (2).
Thus in reading these works I was not only offered a new and uniquely enthralling “tool” in the doctrine of the Trinity (Kevin Johnson has pejoratively—and rightly, I think—referred to this as the “Blueprint” concept of Trinitarian discourse). At the same time, I was given the false impression that I had by proxy learned of the intricacies of doctrinal history and in particular where, when, and by whom our notions of the doctrine of the trinity were led astray.[17]I was very quickly disabused of this notion when, in my first semester as a graduate student, I took a course in Patristic and early Medieval theology with one of my soon to be mentors, Dr. Jon Robertson,[18]and quickly realized I did not recognize the portraits of theologians like Augustine, the Cappadocians, Maximus, Aquinas, and others that I encountered in many monographs and edited volumes on Trinitarian “retrieval” (“renaissance” is sometimes the preferred term).
Augustine did not appear to be a monist when it came to God, or a dualist when it came to the God-world relationship. The Cappadocians by no means appeared to fit attempts to label them as “social Trinitarian” precursors. Anselm and Aquinas did not to my mind fit characteristics of aloof “substance metaphysics”[19]philosophizing associated with the label “classical theists,”[20]often used as a catch-all term of both praise and opprobrium. And the list of disconnects between contemporary representations and the thinkers themselves went on nearly endlessly. My confusion quickly amplified when, with another one of my soon to be theological mentors, I took an elective in contemporary Trinitarian theology with Dr. Paul Louis Metzger[21]and read (among other things) David Bentley Hart’s The Beauty of the Infinite alongside Eberhard Jüngel’s God as the Mystery of the World. For those unfamiliar with either work, they do not synthesize well, to say the least.
It would only be slightly exaggerated to say the rest of my time as a graduate student was spent trying to sort out what had happened to cause these disconnects in interpretation and retrieval, a project which eventually became my combined M.Div./Th.M. thesis and (in my opinion) a much tighter, recently published essay[22](which I am honored to say makes a brief cameo in Fred Sander’s essay on the Trinity in the present volume). All of this is not merely a self-indulgent trip down memory lane (though obviously it is that), but points to real working concerns which we mentioned at the start of this section: at what point does non-identical repetition become blatant misrepresentation? How far can the concerns of the present lead the sensibilities of retrieval before what is retrieved is distorted beyond recognition, or becomes a mere prop to launch an essentially unrelated project? How can we guard against the felt need of certain forms of retrieval that are themselves based upon caricatured or outright false forms of reception history? Are there certain forms of attempted retrieval that are intrinsically alien to the task? As Sanders remarks in his essay on the Trinitarian renaissance in particular, “the main lines of Trinitarian retrieval have to be judged so inadequate … as to be counterproductive” (213) and (quoting Scott Swain) “renewal without retrieval” (215).
These aren’t pedantic questions reserved for fussy academics, but are in a real sense the axis upon which theologies of retrieval turn. In fact, many recent studies by Morwenna Ludlow (the many retrievals of the figure of Gregory of Nyssa), Jennifer Newsome Martin (Hans Urs von Balthasar), Fergus Kerr (the many retrievals of the figure of Thomas Aquinas), Tamsin Jones (Jean-Luc Marion), John Inglis (neo-Thomism), Rinse H. Reeling Brouwer (Karl Barth), Paul Gavrilyuk (Georges Florovosky), Jason Robert Radcliff (T.F. Torrance), Joshua McNall and Bradley G. Green (each with a monograph on Colin Gunton), have been dedicated at least in part to looking into how we can calibrate the ideas of recent figures by detailing their strategies of retrieval. Several of these authors appear as well in the present volume.
Jenifer Newsome Martin in her chapter on Catholic retrieval theology, David Grumett’s essay specifically on Henri de Lubac, and Gabriel Flynn’s essay which reserves a large amount of space for Yves Congar, for example detail the struggle of these figures against what de Lubac called the “Thomist dictatorship” in both theology and, we might say, the historiography of theology (quoted by Martin, 83). Neo-Scholasticism was deficient precisely on the grounds of “excessively relying on what otherwise would be goods, in its reactionary and myopic restriction of theology to a system of rational propositions … that was not representative of the complexity of the tradition” (83). Here again we encounter the idea that retrieval is not merely opposed to innovation or newness. Martin concludes her essay by noting that Catholic ressourcementwill retain its viability to the extent that it “recovers the originary unity between ressourcement and aggiornamento” (100) which is also a note she strikes in her monograph on von Balthasar and his sources old and new.[23]And Grummett notes that de Lubac emphasized retrieval precisely to bring forth “the theological diversity that any genuine recovery of past thought will inevitably uncover” (138) and not to create a monolith of thought and practice.
Another excellent example of how one can calibrate thought by attending to how retrieval functions within an overall project is the chapter on Georges Florovsky by Paul Gavrilyuk. While not anti-Western, Florovsky was deeply concerned with what he termed, following Oswald Spengler, the “pseudomorphosis” that occurred when eastern theology was influenced by western rationalism, mysticism, and in particular German idealism (103-104) though as both Gavrilyuk and others like Brandon Gallaher have pointed out Florovsky was more indebted to German idealism than he let on. Regardless, Florovsky emphasized the need to “acquire the mind of the fathers” (105) in what he termed a “neo-Patristic synthesis” (113). While this inspired a great deal of scholarship, amongst many other factors (not least of which being the exilic status of many scholars who had to flee from Russia to Paris), it also bequeathed to Florovsky’s students a bit of a generalized anti-western antagonism within the neo-Patristic project that served as something of a Rorschach test for any given Orthodox theologian (or self-deprecating westerner). As Gavrilyuk puts it in his monograph, “Florovsky rarely discusses any specific deviations from Church dogma at length. … He usually expresses himself in general terms, rarely taking the trouble to explain how precisely a given ‘western influence’ actually distorts the Orthodox teaching.”[24]Thus while Florovsky was often very clear that “[I]ndependence from the West must not degenerate into an alienation which becomes simply opposed to the West,”[25]many of those who later took up his mantle may have veered into this dangerous territory.
Some Payoffs
But this reevaluation of Florovsky and others serve as an example where we see the immense upshot of attending to theologies of retrieval. Lately, for example, they have proved a fertile ground for a new wave of theology that is no longer satisfied with fairly simplistic East-West divisions: “The categories of East and West are always fluid, always multiform, and almost always projections of an imagined difference”[26]as George Democopoulos and Aristotle Papanikolau have put it. For example, the felt need to resource the eastern (and in particular, the Cappadocian) Fathers in order to correct western Trinitarian deficiencies has been proven to be extremely overwrought and traceable as a pattern of thought in large part to the widespread misuse of the (itself often misinterpreted) Latin/Greek typology of the French Jesuit Theodore de Regnón. As Kristen Hennessy put it de Regnón’s “Études became the hidden spine supporting English textbook accounts of Trinitarian development.”[27]Similarly, large scale typologies and histories using the differences between Palamism and Thomism regarding the doctrine of divine simplicity and the Palamite essence/energy distinction,[28]or the notion that Aquinas was met with little more than widespread hostility in the east from the word go, have been largely brought in to question.[29]Even the morass of the filioque debates have been softened by retrieving new historical information (like the fact that the filioque really only became enforced in the west after the Carolingians; or the existence of unexplored alternative formulations from folks like Nikephoros Blemmydes and Gregory of Cyprus).[30]
Brandon Gallaher, as one example in addition to Gavrilyuk, has pointed out how Florovsky created an ultimately unsatisfactory identity for Orthodoxy by making it polemically dependent on a western “Other”[31]when ironically Florovsky was indebted to western categories to make his polemic. Sarah Coakley has recently claimed the same for Vladimir Lossky.[32]And, in the present volume, Andrew Louth makes a fascinating observation softening radical east/west divisions more generally by noting that “what we understand by the Patristic tradition nowadays is largely the result of non-Orthodox scholarship, both in terms of critical editions and of interpretive scholarship” (61). Louth then asks, “what does this mean for our Orthodox understanding of tradition, and the Fathers?” In general he answers with both a positive and a negative. Positively, there is an ecumenical dimension that “has implications for the nature of Patristic authority” (63). Negatively, “Patristic scholarship [as a whole] emerged in the Renaissance and Reformation to support the appeal made by the humanists and especially Catholics against Protestants, and Protestants against Catholics: many of the great monuments of patristic erudition … had … polemical aims” (62) of which we must do our best to take account so as to overcome.
As the reader may have gleaned, in my opinion one of the most important functions for theologies of retrieval is their ability to leap over false dilemmas that shortened or deformed historical memory creates. As I have also already made clear, I find this volume to be a fantastic and sorely needed addition to literature on theological method (though I myself am notably predisposed in its favor). I spoke in the introduction of my hope for a sequel of sorts. Let me close by indulging in a wish list of topics: the proofs of God – are they or are they not proofs? How did they function in larger theological projects? I would also hope, in the same vein, for analytical theology in the mode of retrieval. As Thomas McCall has recently argued, though many argue analytic theology is opposed to history, this is not necessarily the case.[33]But, while McCall and many other “analytic theologians” (I must confess, I am still pretty hazy on what qualifies for this category) like Sarah Coakley can often make the operation look effortless, I count myself among many who feel analytic theology has a tendency to turn the flesh of thought into a catalogue of bones. In addition, recently much has been made of the difference between “classical theism” and “theistic personalism.” A very fruitful chapter could be penned looking at patterns of retrieval in either “camp.”
In addition, while this present volume covers how more contemporary figures reached back to retrieve the tradition (Karl Barth, Georges Florovsky, Charles Péguy, Heri de Lubac, David Tracy) a few chapters dedicated to the variety of ways historical figures have been retrieved would be enormously helpful. Morwenna Ludlow has catalogued the dizzying array of ways in which Gregory of Nyssa has been utilized, and similar treatments with other figures would be wonderful. One could also travel down the endless road of hoping that each of the standard loci of theology could be covered in this manner as well. But, to end on a particular hobby horse of mine, I think a strong candidate to prove fertile ground for retrieval would be the relation of theology to what we now label as scientific discourse. As William Placher noted a while back in his The Domestication of Transcendence, a variety of ills we tend to lump under “classical” pictures of God actually only arose in the 17thcentury. But these features had a tendency to creep backwards, and change how prior figures were interpreted. The ability of retrieval to leap back over the gulfs of misunderstanding and bear gifts forgotten in the past, gives me great hope for the future of theology.
[1]Constantin Fasolt, The Limits of History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), xiv.
[2]Henri de Lubac, Paradoxes of Faith (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1987), 145.
[3]Rowan Williams, Why Study the Past? The Quest for the Historical Church (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans Publishing, 2005), 100.
[4]A helpful look here is Bruce McCormack, “Introduction: On Modernity as a Theological Concept,” in Bruce McCormack and Kelly M. Kapic, eds., Mapping Modern Theology: A Thematic and Historical Introduction (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2012), 1-20. Cf. 3: “’Modern theology emerged … at the point at which (on the one hand) church-based theologians ceased trying to defend and protect the received orthodoxies of the past against erosion and took up the more fundamental challenge of asking how the theological values resident in those orthodoxies might be given an altogether new expression, dressed out in new categories for reflection. It was a transition, then, from a strategy of ‘accommodation’ to the task of ‘mediation’ that was fundamental in the [modern] ecclesial sphere.”
[5]John Allen Knight, Liberalism and Post-Liberalism: The Great Divide in Twentieth Century Theology (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2012).
[6]David Congdon, The Mission of Demythologizing: Rudolf Bultmann’s Dialectical Theology(Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2015), 316n.22: “Whether we want to call this [present] period ‘post-modern’ or ‘later modern’ or some other label is irrelevant. The point is that the theological problem today is no longer the problem of God; it is the problem of the church. Where once the first and second articles occupied the minds of theologians, now it is the third article that seems to be ground zero for every major dogmatic dispute. This has been the case at least since George Lindbeck’s postliberal revolution in North American theology, which had the effect of allowing theologians to avoid altogether to avoid the problem of history and hermeneutics that characterized modern theology, with its debates over the limits of human reason and the quest for the historical Jesus. The focus has shifted instead to the community wherein God-talk becomes meaningful. We see the evidence for this in the rise of, inter alia, virtue ethics, political and contextual theologies, Radical Orthodoxy, theological interpretation of scripture, evangelical post-conservativism, Kuyperian theology, and ecumenical theology. Also indicative is the fact that many Protestant evangelical theologians now view ancient church tradition as theologically normative. Rational and historical apologetics has been replaced by social and ethical apologetics; validation by ethos has replaced validation by logos.”
[7]Alan Brown, “On the Criticism of Being as Communion in Anglophone Orthodox Theology,” in Douglas H. Knight, The Theology of John Zizioulas: Personhood and the Church (New York: Ashgate Publishing, 2007), 35-78.
[8]Francesca Aran Murphy, God Is Not A Story: Realism Revisited(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).
[9]Ibid., 6. She notes that others like Henri De Lubac have often suffered the same fate. See 5: “contemporary responses to de Lubac, both positive and negative, take the ‘natural desire’ as a proposal for how to practice theology, rather than as a paradoxical affirmation about what human beings are.” Cyril O’Regan theorizes that such strong blurring the method/content of theology might be another piece of Hegel’s legacy. See: Cyril O’Regan, Gnostic Return in Modernity (Albany, NY: State University of New York, 2001), 21, 45, 66-67: “It is … because of the narrative constitution of the Hegelian Trinity that … it differs crucially from the classical view. … Narrative articulation is made subject to Trinitarian form, and Trinitarian articulation is narrative articulation. … For Hegel, the Deus Revelatus is narratively enacted and, as such, is constrained by properties endemic to all narratives.”
[10]Paul Dehart, The Trial of the Witnesses: The Rise and Decline of Postliberal Theology (New Jersey: Wiley-Blackwell, 2005), xiv: “An insufficiently reflective reliance on the categories ‘postliberal’ and ‘liberal/revisionist’ has characterized and hampered both sides of the dispute. The prejudices built up over the course of the debate continue to linger in a way that I have come to regard as profoundly unhelpful. … On the one hand, sympathetic reception and appropriation of these [postliberal] thinkers, still determined by the now-atrophied polemical categories, has often tended toward a sophisticated but defensively conservative confessionalism or traditionalism. In their turn, progressive critics of ‘postliberalism’ are tempted to see this confessionalist retreat as inevitable, a confirmation of the suspicion they had all along that Frei and Lindbeck were simply peddling a clever form of repristination.”
[11]J. Kameron Carter, Race: A Theological Account (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); Willie James Jennings, The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010).
[12]Thomas C. Oden, A Change of Heart: A Personal and Theological Memoir (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2014), 135-136.
[13]Samuel M. Powell, The Trinity in German Thought(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 104-141; Dale M. Schlitt, German Idealism’s Trinitarian Legacy (New York: State University of New York Press, 2016).
[14]Cyril O’Regan, The Heterodox Hegel (New York: State University of New York, 1994); Cyril O’Regan, The Anatomy of Misremembering: Von Balthasar’s Response to Philosophical Modernity (New York: Cross Road, 2014); William Desmond, Hegel’s God: A Counterfeit Double? (Burlington, VT: Routledge, 2003).
[15]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.
[16]Robert W. Jenson, “Karl Barth,” in The Modern Theologians: An Introduction to Theology in the Twentieth Century, 2nd ed., ed. David F. Ford (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1997), 31.
[17]David Cunningham, These Three Are One: The Practice of Trinitarian Theology(Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 1998), 31: This “genealogical discourse [of the Trinity]” is a theme, 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.”
[18]Jon Robertson, Christ as Mediator: A Study in the Theologies of Eusebius of Caesarea, Marcellus of Ancyra, and Athanasius of Alexandria (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).
[19]Gilles Emery, “Essentialism or Personalism in the Treatise on God in Saint Thomas Aquinas?” The Thomist 64 (2000): 521-563; Timothy L. Smith, “Thomas Aquinas’ De Deo: Setting the Record Straight on His Theological Method,” Sapientia, vol.53 no.203 (1998): 119-154; Richard Cross, “Quid Tres? On What Precisely Augustine Professes Not to Understand in De Trinitate V and VII,” Harvard Theological Review 100 (2007): 215-232.
[20]See: Daniel Castelo, The Apathetic God: Exploring the Contemporary Relevance of Divine Impassibility (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2009), 40-41: [G]iven that ‘classical theism’ is an anachronistic category of convenience for labeling different and distinct voices under one heading, the term fails to account for the multivalent ways in which divine impassibility functioned for numerous ancient writers and thinkers, especially those who were able to affirm both divine impassibility and the legitimacy and value of the incarnate Christ who suffered in the flesh . . . [I argue] that the category of ‘classical theism’ [is] nonviable for contemporary systematics …”[Emphasis added].
[21]See, for example, Paul Louis Metzger, The Word of Christ and the World of Culture: Sacred and Secular Through the Theology of Karl Barth (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003); Paul Louis Metzger, ed., Trinitarian Soundings in Systematic Theology (New York: T&T Clark, 2005).
[22]Derrick Peterson, “A Sacred Monster: On The Secret Fears of Some Recent Trinitarianism,” Cultural Encounters: A Journal for the Theology of Culture vol.12 no.1 (Winter 2016): 3-36.
[23]Jennifer Newsome Martin, Hans Urs Von Balthasar and the Critical Appropriation of Russian Religious Thought (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press), 2-3: “Von Balthasar may indeed be operating in a mode of retrieval, but he is a visionary, innovative theologian who is far from retrograde. He is decidedly not a simple repristinator of the Fathers. … [it is] crucial to note here that Balthasar aligns himself first with the Russian school of Soloviev and Bulgakov, which self-consciously engaged with modern Western philosophy, rather than with the neo-Patristic school of Vladimir Lossky and Georges Florovsky.”
[24]Paul L. Gavrilyuk, Georges Florovsky and the Russian Religious Renaissance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 189.
[25]Quoted in ibid., 197.
[26]George E. Demacopoulos and Aristotle Papanikolau, “Orthodox Naming of the Other: A Postcolonial Approach” in Orthodox Constructions of the West, ed.George E. Demacopolous and Aristotle Papanikolau(New York: Fordham University, 2013), 1-23
[27]Kristin Hennessy, “An Answer to de Regnón’s ‘Accusers’: Why We Should Not Speak of ‘His’ Paradigm,” Harvard Theological Review 100, no.2 (2007): 180.
[28]In the twentieth century John Romanides in particular singled out the West’s use of divine simplicity to obliterate the essence/energies distinction as a key—perhaps the key—theological error of the West; An error that allegedly led to Western rationalism, deism, even atheism. See: John Romanides, An Outline of Orthodox Patristic Dogmatics, ed. and trans. G. Dragas (Rollingsford, NH: Orthodox Research Institute, 2004), 58. This argument can be found in a more sophisticated and developed form with David Bradshaw in his otherwise very insightful Aristotle: East and West: Metaphysics and the Division of Christendom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), esp. 263-277.
[29]Regarding divine simplicity and the essence/energies distinction, see the near-monograph length essay by John Demetracopoulos, “Palamas Transformed: Palamite Interpretations of the Distinction Between God’s ‘Essence’ and ‘Energies’ in Late Byzantium,” in M. Hinterberger and C. Schabel, eds., Greeks, Latins, and Intellectual History, 1204-1500 (Paris: Peeter Leuven, 2011), 263-373. Cf. as well Christiaan W. Kappes, J. Isaac Goff, and T. Alexander Giltner, “Palamas Among the Scholastics: A Review Essay Discussing D. Bradshaw, C. Athanasopoulos, C. Schneider et al., Divine Essence and Divine Energies: Ecumenical Reflections on the Presence of God in Eastern Orthodoxy (Cambridge: James and Clarke, 2013)” in Logos: A Journal of Eastern Christian Studies Vol. 55 (2014) No.1-2: 175-220. Regarding the general reevaluation of the reception history of Aquinas in the East, see: Marcus Plested, Orthodox Readings of Aquinas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). On theosis, see also A.N. Williams, The Ground of Union: Deification in Aquinas and Palamas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).
[30]Myk Habets, ed., Ecumenical Perspectives on the Filioque for the 21stCentury (New York: T&T Clark, 2015). For my review of this volume see Derrick Peterson, “Review of Myk Habets, ed., Ecumenical Perspectives on the Filioque for the 21stCentury” in Participatio: Journal of the Thomas F. Torrance Theological Fellowship vol. 6 (2016): 227-232.
[31]Brandon Gallaher, “’Waiting for the Barbarians’: Identity and Polemicism in the Neo-Patristic Synthesis of Georges Florovsky,” Modern Theology27:4 (2011): 659-691.
[32]Sarah Coakley, “Eastern ‘Mystical Theology’ or Western ‘Nouvelle Theologie’?: On the Comparative Reception of Dionysius the Areopagite in Lossky and de Lubac,” in Orthodox Constructions of the West, 125-142.
[33]Thomas H. McCall, An Invitation to Analytic Christian Theology(Downer’s Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2015), 83-123.
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