Notes Toward Revisiting the Trinitarian Renaissance of the 20th Century

I am slowly writing a large review covering six or seven recent books on Christology in the early Church. This has rekindled a desire in me to go back to some of my roots and return to some unfinished research on the historiography of the 20th century "Trinitarian renaissance." So, theologian friends, to that end I want to bring up what in your minds were some of the major themes of the renaissance, right or wrong? Here are a few I've written (in no particular order). I should note, I am not saying I agree with these statements necessarily, merely that they elucidate some claims that have been made regarding why the Trinity is important. What else have I left out?

1.) The Trinity references the distinctly Christian God

2.) The Trinity evidences the distinct contributions of theology to human knowledge

3.) The Trinity can provide a central unifying theme for systematic theology

4.) The Trinity can overcome the dialectic of "mere theistic/deistic" positions that led to atheism(s) in the modern period

5.) The Trinity provides a distinctively personal and relational approach to God as opposed to impersonal "substance metaphysics"

6.) The Trinity allows a dynamic rather than a static view of God

7.) The Trinity properly balances the cataphatic and apophatic approaches to God

8.) The Trinity provides the proper theological and doctrinal grammar that allows us to read and properly interpret scripture (especially e.g. Robert Jenson's claims about "Father, Son, and Holy Spirit" providing the coordinates of past, present, and future)

9.) The Trinity balances transcendence and immanence

10.) The Trinity provides us the proper ontological and epistemological access to God (a la T.F. Torrance's use of the homoousian)

11.) The Trinity gives us a proper view of creation in that it differentiates creation from the generation of the Son

12.) The Trinity gives the proper ground for salvation, uniting the different moments like justification, forgiveness, sanctification (etc) and incorporates them into the sweep of recapitulation and our entrance into God's inner life

13.) The Trinity provides the true end of philosophy, which will always tragically fall short without this completion (e.g. as Colin Gunton claims in The One, The Three, and the Many, or as Sergius Bulgakov argues in The Tragedy of Philosophy).

14.) The Trinity provides a model of ecclesiology or, more broadly, human community at large

15.) The Trinity provides the ontological grounding of "difference" and "sameness" or "the one" and "the many."

16.) The Trinity (somehow) avoids ontotheology

17.) The Trinity (somehow) grounds anthropology (such as male/female relationships)

18.) The Trinity provides the correct gloss on how attributes like aseity, freedom, omnipotence, and the like are to be understood (e.g. freedom is an intra-trinitarian referent rather than voluntarism tout court)

19.) The Trinity is historically responsible for how we understand personhood (Zizioulas), or history (Gadamer), the relativity of space and time (Torrance), literary realism (Auerbach, Steiner), science (Foster, Grant), memory, thought, will and their relationships (Friedman, Milbank, et. al.) secularization via incarnation (Gauchet, Vattimo) et al.

20.) The Trinity is the ground and grammar of revelation (early Barth, Pannenberg, Torrance)