Theology Today - Vol 38, No. 4 - January 1982 - ARTICLE

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Trinitarian Theology
A Review Article
By M. Douglas Meeks

"Moltmann's proposal is to think of the Trinity as the biblical traditions do. But to do this will require a radical criticism of the predominance and priority of 'unity,' 'substance,' 'hypostasis,' 'persons/mode of being' in the language of the traditional doctrines of the Trinity."

THERE HAVE been times in the Christian tradition when the doctrine of the Trinity was the assumed center of the interpretation and communication of the Christian faith. Even today most Christian worship is focused by and on the Trinity. Have any Christians not been baptized in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit? What would it mean to be baptized in another name?

And yet the Trinity hardly makes an appearance in modern apologetic writings. There is still a widespread attack upon the Trinity as a useless, speculative impediment to faith. The Trinity seems to be the chief reliquary of everything defunct in the tradition. From Kant on, it was assumed that the Trinity could not be an object of human knowledge and thus any talk of the Trinity was sheer speculation, not at all necessary for faith and the conduct of the good life. For Schleiermacher, the Trinity did not fit into the modern concept of experience as the immediate self-consciousness of the believer. Nor does the Trinity fit into modern pragmatism and the theology of the practical application of the truth.

Would anyone be willing to argue again that everything in the Christian faith is at stake in the doctrine of the Trinity? Yes, Jürgen Moltmann argues precisely this in the first volume of his "systematics," which, because "systematics" implies a closed system preventing the open conversation of theology, he is calling "Contributions to Theology." Earlier renditions of some chapters of the book formed the basis

M. Douglas Meeks is Professor of Systematic Theology and Philosophy at Eden Theological Seminary, St. Louis. He is here reviewing Jürgen Moltmann's volume, The Trinity and the Kingdom of God: The Doctrine of God (trans. Margaret Kohl; Harper & Row, 1981). This is the first volume of Moltmann's magnum opus to which he gives the general title "Systematic Contributions to Theology." Dr. Meeks is the author of Origins of the Theology of Hope (1974) and a well known translator and interpreter of the theology of Jürgen Moltmann.

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for the Warfield Lectures at Princeton Theological Seminary in October 1979.

What Moltmann sees at stake in the Trinity has been steadily appearing in his three major works and several smaller programmatic books. The basic question is how God's power will be defined. Moltmann's basic thesis is that "monotheism is monarchism." Christian monotheism like all other forms of religious monotheism uses a political concept of unity to ground absolute power. Many of the concepts in traditional doctrines of God support political domination, economic exploitation, and socio-cultural exclusion. The concept of God as a homogenous, radically individual being or as an absolute self gives justification to power as imperial domination. "The notion of a divine monarchy in heaven and on earth, for its part, generally provides the justification for earthy domination-religious, moral, patriarchial, or political domination-and makes it a hierarchy, a 'holy rule.' The idea of the almighty ruler of the universe everywhere requires abject servitude, because it points to complete dependency in all spheres of life" (pp. 191-192). Religious monotheism motivates political monotheism and legitimates domination whether in the form of ancient emperor cults, Byzantine despots, absolute ideologies of the seventeenth century, or the dictatorships of the twentieth century.

These tendencies are also found in modern liberal doctrines of God which finally understand God as the unity of being or of the selfidentical subject. One would probably sense and share the urgency with which Moltmann makes his case only if one agrees that modern forms of Arianism and Sabellianism are rampant in our churches today and that the survival of Christian faith depends on the development of a new doctrine of God. Modern Protestant theology has not overcome the tendency of Western theology since Thomas Aquinas for the Godhead's single substance to take precedence over the doctrine of the Trinity. When one says "God," one is speaking, in the final analysis, of the sole, simple sovereignty of the one God.

Following Schleiermacher, much of modern theology reduces the Trinity by a subordinationist process to a Sabellian, modalistic montheism. These more sophisticated modern forms of monotheism and tritheism, which guard the unity of divine almightiness at all costs, also have their clear effect on the shape of rule in our church and our society. This can be changed only if "the indispensable idea of God's unity can be expressed in trinitarian terms, and no longer in pre-trinitarian ones" (p. 190). The process of developing a non-imperialistic, non-dominating doctrine of the Trinity will thus be at the same time the process of developing a doctrine of freedom. (For the ways in which the Trinity is related to liberation, see Daniel L. Migliore's article, "The Trinity and Human Liberty," THEOLOGY TODAY, January, 1980, pp. 488-497.)

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Moltmann's proposal is to think of the Trinity as the biblical traditions do. But to do this will require a radical criticism of the predominance and priority of "unity," "substance," "hypostasis," "persons/modes of being" in the language of the traditional doctrines of the Trinity. Our only access to the life of the Trinity is through the story/history of the Trinity's relationship to the world. When we consider the immanent Trinity, we can only "tell" or "relate." We cannot "sum up" in reductionist, generic, or universalistic categories. "We have to remain concrete, for history shows us that it is in abstractions that the heresies are hidden" (p. 190). The foundations for the doctrine of the Trinity are to be found in "narrative differentiation." Thus Moltmann's consistent method is to begin with the narrated history of the distinct persons of the Trinity and only then to ask about the unity of the Trinity, not on the basis of an imported theory of substance, self-identical person, experience, or praxis, but on the basis of the story itself.

As soon as we turn to the theological narration of the Christian tradition, however, we are faced with the New Testament proclamation which perceives God in the passion of Christ and the passion of Christ in God. This story understands "the suffering of Christ as the suffering of the passionate God" (p. 21). According to Moltmann, the monotheistic abstractions of the tradition have resulted from the theistic axiom of God's apathy, "the deity's essential incapacity for suffering." A doctrine of the Trinity based on biblical narrative will have to begin with the axiom of God's passion.

Moltmann's dialogue partners in this attempt to begin with the axiom of God's passion are varied and immediately demonstrate the intensely ecumenical character of his theology. Moltmann finds in the work of Abraham Heschel and Gershom Scholem an emphasis on the "pathos" of God in the history of God's shekinah, God's self-humiliating dwelling amidst the suffering of God's people. God's capacity for passion requires the notion of self-differentiation in God. The shema Israel means that God the Lord is the "only," the "single" God, not that God is a simple individual (monas) in a monistic sense. The way Moltmann is carrying on this debate in current Jewish-Christian dialogue can be seen in the book he co-authored with Pinchas Lapide, Jewish Monotheism and Christian Trinitarian Doctrine (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1981).

Seldom has a German theologian been so impressed with English theology as has Moltmann with the theology of God's passibility represented in the work of J. K. Mozley, C. E. Rolt, and G. A. Studdert-Kennedy. From them, Moltmann believes, we can rediscover the importance of meditation, contemplation, and doxology for the doctrine of the Trinity. Spanish passion mysticism is introduced in the form of Miguel de Unamuno's panentheistic universal theology of pain

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according to which "either God lets people suffer, or he suffers himself" (p. 40). The Russian theme of the "tragedy in God" also enters prominently into the discussion in the form of Berdyaev's claim that the heart of the history of freedom is to be found in the history of God's passion.

III

The theology of the divine passion redefines the nature of God's freedom. The freedom of God has usually been denoted as God's having no need of human beings, as God's being self-sufficient and perfectly beatific within God's own life. This formalistic concept construes God's freedom as absolute freedom of choice and is reflected in Barth's early notion of God's groundless decision or decree as the basis of God's love. But this view of freedom is akin to the concept of the absolute power of disposal of property found in Roman law and reconstructed in the modern world by John Locke. In large part, Moltmann's project on the Trinity is a search for material concepts of freedom which describe personal and communal relationships rather than laws applying to property.

The notion of God's freedom as "free choice" denies God's nature as love. God does not have the "choice between mutually exclusive possibilities," between being love and not being love. "If he is love, then in loving the world he is by no means 'his own prisoner'; on the contrary, in loving the world he is entirely free because he is entirely himself. If he is the highest good, then his liberty cannot consist of having to choose between good and evil. On the contrary, it lies in doing the good which he himself is, which means communicating himself" (pp. 54-5 5). The concept of freedom appropriate to God, therefore, cannot be derived from the language of domination (lordship, power, possession) but rather from the language of friendship, community, and fellowship. "God's freedom is his vulnerable love … God demonstrates his eternal freedom through his suffering and his sacrifice, through his self-giving and his patience. Through his freedom he waits for man's love, for his compassion, for his own deliverance to his glory through man" (p. 56).

That "God is love" means that God has to be thought of as a community whose freedom is found in self-giving love. This doctrine of God's freedom has profound implications for Western views of "possessive individualism" and of property as a right to private disposal and to .exclusion of others in the community. Moltmann develops the implications of a consistently biblical doctrine of the Trinity in the sphere of politics, but it is increasingly clear that we are going to have to work out the praxiological implications of the Trinity also for economics. It is no mistake that the questions of God's relations to the world have been worked at traditionally under the heading of the "economic Trinity."

For Moltmann the question which must be asked of every doctrine of. the Trinity is whether it is faithful to the New Testament witness. He

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agrees with Barth that the Trinity is the Christian hermeneutic, the way we should read and understand the Bible. But he argues against the preliminary hermeneutical decision of both liberalism's moral interpretation and Barth's monotheistic interpretation (despite his great attempts to remove Sabellian elements from his theology). The former thinks that what has to be interpreted is human work (history) in its moral potential. It generally uses the modern category of "experience" and is able to speak of the human experience of the divine (the feeling of absolute dependence) but not of God's experience of human beings and the world. The latter, on the other hand, thinks that what has to be interpreted is God's lordship. Barth generally uses the concept of God's self-revelation, which does not agree with the New Testament claim that the Son reveals the Father (Matt. 11:27). A thorough-going use of the "self-revelation" concept leads to the notion of "God giving up himself' and finally to the notion of the "death of God." Both of these preliminary hermeneutical decisions deny a reciprocal relationship between God and the world. In order to protect the notion of "absolute subject" (whether human or divine), neither speaks of how human beings and the world affect God.

Moltmann's method is to begin with the history of Christ which the New Testament already relates in trinitarian terms. These relationships are not fixed in one external pattern within God's closed internal life. One cannot think of the Trinity as a fixed geometrical figure. Rather, the Trinity is a history of reciprocal relationships between the persons of the divine community in which the persons take initiative in action or are acted upon according to their functions in creation, redemption, and new creation. They are relationships which are genuinely affected by God's freedom, since God's essence is the self-giving love of the Trinity and "God cannot deny himself."

Moltmann is introducing many fascinating new concepts into the growing world-wide dialogue on the Trinity. His emphasis on the Holy Spirit, as a Person (not just a dynamistic power) who acts, has vast implications for the whole of theology and could pave the way for a much greater interest among mainline Protestants in the "left-wing" Reformation traditions. His thorough-going criticism of Western trinitarian heresies makes it possible for him to make imaginative proposals to the Eastern Orthodox Church on how to mend the centuries-old schism between East and West, a rift that has to do with the question of the internal life of the Trinity. Moltmann even suggests that the East-West political and economic divisions can in part be explained and worked at through trinitarian problematics.

Of great interest to many readers will be Moltmann's appreciation of the idea in the Jewish Kabbalistic tradition that the first act in God's creation of the world was a "passion," a self-humiliation, namely, God's withdrawal of God's universal presence in order to give the world room to be. That leads to the many inviting suggestions Moltmarm makes concerning the feminine aspects of God the Father. "Creator" is not a

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good substitution for Father in trinitarian language because it introduces the notion of the Father Creator (Zeus) found in patriarchal religions. The New Treatment speaks consistently of "Father of the Son" and confesses this one to be the Creator. The Christian tradition speaks of both the generation and the birth of the Son from the Father. For example, the Council of Toledo in 675 A.D. says that the Son was born out of the Father's womb (de utero Patris).

All of these insights point to a conception of the Trinity as open to the world and constituted by God's history of suffering love which is aimed at the destruction of domination and the realization of God righteousness and glory in all things. We are coming to another period in history when the church will have to decide whether it is necessary to speak of and engage in this history by means of the Trinity.