409 - The Promise of Trinitarian Theology

The Promise of Trinitarian Theology
By Colin E. Gunton
Edinburgh, T&T Clark, 1991. 188 pp. $31.95

For Christians, the doctrine of the Trinity has frequently proven to be a source of confusion in their quest for self-understanding, a source of embarrassment in their ongoing dialogue with non-Christian others. Certain theologians have struggled to alleviate the conceptual difficulties that plague the doctrine, sometimes by formulating and refining novel analogies of the "immanent" Trinity. Other analysts have focused on the dynamics of the "economic" Trinity, on the relevance of this doctrine to so teriological considerations, its significance for Christian praxis and spirituality. Either emphasis is likely to yield an analysis with shortcomings. In the first instance the doctrine of the Trinity supplies the backdrop for typically obscure exercises in metaphysical speculation; in the second, its importance for all of Christian life and thought is underscored with little insight regarding the very real conceptual difficulties that the doctrine engenders.

Professor Colin Gunton of the University of London has successfully avoided both of these pitfalls, carefully probing the crucial theoretical issues surrounding the doctrine of the Trinity with a constant attentiveness to their general theological significance. For Gunton, the " promise" of Trinitarian theology can be fulfilled only insofar as one insists on its primacy. Indeed, Christian theological reflection ought to begin with the consideration of God's triune nature precisely because "in the light of the theology of the Trinity, everything looks different." For this very same reason, the Trinity is not something that Christian theologians can properly apologize for, but rather, it should be regarded as "the centre of Christianity's appeal to the unbeliever."

Nevertheless, Gunton contends, much of Western theology in the Augustinian tradition has so emphasized the divine unity that "the tacking on of his threeness appears as an unnecessary complicating of the simple belief in God." As a corrective to Augustine's influence, Gunton looks to the Cappadocians, in particular to their insight that "God is being in communion"; God's being is always already a "being-in-relation." This insight allows Gunton the luxury of rejecting contemporary claims that God "must" create a world and stands in need of that creation. At the same time, it permits him to jettison a problematic distinction between the God who is manifested in salva-

410 - The Promise of Trinitarian Theology

tion history as the Trinity and some unknowable divine substance underlying it. Rather, "if God is truly God, he must be eternally what he shows himself to be in time."

Such a critique of Western trinitarian thinking in the Augustinian mold is hardly novel with Gunton, and he cites, among others, the important, earlier insights of Karl Rahner. But Gunton has formulated his own critical analysis in an admirably lucid and consistent manner, this despite the fact that his book largely consists in a diverse collection of previously published articles and lectures, framed by new introductory and concluding essays (chapters one and nine). The entire collection is unified by Gunton's Barthian insistence on the necessity of our understanding what sort of being God is before we "can we come to learn what kinds of beings we are and what kind of world we inhabit." His Barthian priorities, predictably, lead Gunton to eschew " modern theologies like Hegel's and Schleiermacher's" that pursue knowledge of God through the portal of human consciousness and experience. Yet, it is not at all clear that Gunton's critique of certain problematic tendencies in Augustine's thinking about the Trinity is logically tied to his rejection of these "modern theologies." Rahner, for example, was able to make some of the same critical moves while, nonetheless, creatively exploiting Hegelian resources in his trinitarian theology. (Perhaps Gunton finds Hegelian logic to be excessively distasteful, but one wonders what he might be able to accomplish were he to adapt modern discoveries in the logic of relations-like those of Charles Peirce-for the purpose of developing his Cappadocian insights.)

This book makes a number of significant contributions to contemporary theological discussion, too many for a brief review to acknowledge each of them specifically. But at least two additional features of Gunton's work should be noted here. The first is his illuminating discussion of the religious thought of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Second, and in continuity with these reflections on Coleridge, Gunton develops an interesting proposal in the last chapter for speaking about God's "otherness" and "relation" to the world, in preference to talk about divine transcendence and immanence. This is hardly a frivolous proposal; the case that Gunton makes for it is anchored in arguments that he has been developing throughout the book.

In summary, Gunton offers a fresh perspective on a classical theological topic. Theologians most of all, but philosophers of religion and historians of Christianity as well, should profit from his clear and critical insights.

Michael L. Raposa
Lehigh University
Bethlehem, Pennsylvania