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Modern Trinitarian Perspectives
By John Thompson
New York, Oxford University Press, 1994. 165 pp. $32.00.
As John Thompson indicates in the preface, his book is primarily a survey of the thought of others, not a statement of his own theology of the Trinity. His preferences, to be sure, do manifest themselves in the choice of authors (mainly European and, above all, German theologians) and in the judgments he makes upon their work. But all the major topics currently associated with the doctrine of the Trinity (for example, the suffering of God for and with creatures, the Trinity and a just social order, the Trinity and interreligious dialogue) together with the contributions of various contemporary theologians to these themes are taken up and carefully evaluated.
After an introduction in which he defends the foundation of the doctrine of the Trinity in both the Old and New Testaments, Thompson
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addresses, in chapter two, the issue of the relation between the economic and the immanent Trinity, offering a critique of authors who, misunderstanding Karl Rahner's intent in The Trinity (1970), tend to equate the two. Likewise, he expresses some skepticism with respect to the efforts of Jürgen Moltmann and Wolfhart Pannenberg to establish an eschatological understanding of the Trinity, that is, the Trinity as "completed" by world history. Rather, with Barth and Hans Urs von Balthasar, he affirms the full reality of the immanent Trinity apart from creation, Similarly, in chapter three, he criticizes Moltmann's and Jüngel's theology of the cross in the light of Barth's and Balthasar's understanding of the suffering of God for and with creatures.
In chapter four, he interprets the missionary activity of the church in the light of the missions of the triune God to the world. The church is properly the instrument of the divine persons in their own work of reconciling the world to themselves. Christians, accordingly, are to engage in interreligious dialogue with full awareness of the uniqueness of Christ and of the invisible work of the Holy Spirit among the adherents of non-Christian religions. Chapter five indicates how belief in the Trinity informs Christian life and worship. Chapter six evaluates the so-called social model for the Trinity, the Trinity as the prime analogue for the creation of more egalitarian forms of human association, above all, in the economic and political spheres of life. Thompson notes that Greek Orthodox theologians, with their emphasis on the notion of perichoresis, provided the inspiration for Western theologians like Moltmann and Leonardo Boff in this regard. But he calls attention to the danger of tritheism in all these communitarian analogies and endorses Barth's view that God "has life, love, and fellowship within himself," but that the divine persons are to be understood as subsistent "modes of being" of the one God rather than interrelated centers of activity within a transcendent community. Along the same lines, he quotes a recent document of the British Council of Churches to the effect that gender has no place within the divine community. Hence, while the abuse of women by men in human affairs should be repudiated, this practice by itself does not justify a renunciation of the use of the traditional male names for the persons of the Trinity.
In the last two chapters of the book, Thompson continues the discussion of the "social model" of the Trinity. In chapter six, he reviews the history of the notions of "person" and "being" or "substance" in the Eastern and Western churches, concluding, with Barth, that it is dangerous to speak of three "personalities" rather than three "modes of being" within God. Yet, in chapter eight, he concedes that the three divine persons must possess some form of individual self-consciousness as part of their communal awareness of being one God. In the end, however, he sides with Barth in affirming that one's analysis of the Trinity should begin and end with the one God "who repeats himself three times-a oneness in threeness and a threeness in oneness." Thompson's treatment of the Trinity, accordingly, stays well within the parameters of traditional
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Christian orthodoxy, even as he takes account of all the speculation on the Trinity and the God-world relationship in recent years. In this sense, the book could be recommended for survey courses on the doctrine of God and/or the doctrine of the Trinity at the undergraduate level.
Joseph A. Bracken
Xavier University
Cincinnati, OH