Among the loci theologici of Christian doctrine, trininitarian theol-ogy has arguably, depending on where one stands, benefited or suffered the most from the use of metaphysics and analogies. To begin with analogies, they range from homespun images of the triangle or the sham-rock or father, mother, and child to the so-called psychological models devised by Augustine4or Dorothy L. Sayers5to contemporary scientific models (e.g., particle, wave, and field).6 Currently there is an excess of creativity in devising analogies for the Trinity, from the so-called
13
vestigia Trinitatisso that any triad, however artificial and accidental, is harnessed for an illustration of the Trinity.7 Furthermore, since all knowledge of and language for God, even that derived from the Bible, are by way of analogy, the question is raised as to whether there are criteria by which to judge the legitimacy and value of the analogies used for God, especially for the immanent Trinity. For example, are analogies derived from humans as imago Dei preferable to those taken from the material world? If so, what are the criteria to judge their usefulness and where are they to be found? Are they to be exclusively based on the Bible or to be determined philosophically?
With regard to the use of philosophy, from the historical standpoint, a variety of philosophical systems has been adopted, at times as mutually exclusive alternatives, to expound the Trinity, especially with regard to what is called the immanent Trinity. Among these philosophies neo-Platonic metaphysics, Stoic cosmology, Aristotelian substance meta-physics, Hegelian dialectical historicism, and, more recently, White-headean process philosophy have occupied a prominent place, each with a long line of distinguished exponents and schools. Methodologically, the basic question is whether it is legitimate, let alone necessary, to have recourse to metaphysics in doing theology, especially in expound-ing the immanent Trinity. For instance, is it theologically permissible to begin the exposition of the Trinity with what reason can discover about God, for example God’s existence, essence, and attributes, and only then to proceed to examine what God has revealed about Godself in the Bible, that is, God as Father, Son, and Spirit, their activities in history, and their mutual eternal relations? Is “natural theology” possi-ble at all? Is all true knowledge of God obtained exclusively from God’s self-revelation in Jesus (sola scriptura)?
Furthermore, granted that the use of metaphysics in trinitarian the-ology is legitimate and even necessary, and hence the indispensabil-ity of the analogia entis for theology (of course not all theologians, e.g., Karl Barth, would agree with this view), the question still remains as to which philosophical system is to be appropriated, albeit always critically. For example, should one use substance ontology,8or process philosophy,9or Hegel’s philosophy of the Absolute Spirit,10or the Taoist yin-yang world-view,11or simply the metaphysics that is implicit in the Bible itself?12
In adopting a philosophy as the framework for trinitarian theol-ogy, what are the criteria for judging its appropriateness? For several contemporary theologians such philosophy must have at least two fea-tures, in accord with the nature of Christian revelation. First, it must be
thoroughly historical and eschatological, since the Trinity has revealed itself in history as the world’s future; and second, it must highlight the interpersonal and communitarian dimension of human existence, since the Trinity has revealed itself as a communion or perich ¯or ¯esis of Father, Son, and Spirit. In fact, among contemporary theologians, some would privilege the first, others the second, and still others both.13
Another methodological issue is how to structure trinitarian the-ology, or, more concretely, how one should begin the discussion of the Trinity. Should one start with the unity of the divine nature (the
“essentialist” approach) or the plurality of the three divine persons (the
“personalist” approach)? Arguably, either starting point can be justified biblically, since both the unity and the trinity of God are revealed, albeit through stages, as Gregory of Nazianzus has argued,14and provided that the understanding of both the oneness and the trinity of God is rooted in revelation.
After Th ´eodore de R ´egnon’s historical studies of trinitarian doctrines,15 the essentialist approach is popularly identified with the Latin/Western theology and the personalist approach with the Greek/
Eastern one. Such historical characterization however has been severely, and rightly, criticized, as a gross and misleading oversimplification, especially when Augustine and Aquinas are included among those accused of ontologizing the immanent Trinity with little or no atten-tion to the economic Trinity.16While historically inaccurate if applied to great theologians such as Augustine and Aquinas, this criticism hits the target when aimed at neo-scholastic textbooks that were widely used in Roman Catholic seminaries prior to Vatican Council II (1962–65), with their treatment of God divided in two tracts, De Deo Uno and De Deo Trino. The former treatise generally adopts a philosophical orientation, though it often adduces proofs for its the-ses by citing texts from the Bible and church authorities. The lat-ter is strictly biblical, though it also argues that Christian beliefs about the Trinity are harmonious with or at least not contradictory to reason.
Whatever the historical validity of Rahner’s and other theologians’
critique of the separation of the immanent Trinity from the economic Trinity in post-Augustinian theology, it has had an extremely salutary effect on the way the treatise on the Trinity is conceived and structured today. Rarely do contemporary theologians divide it into two parts, the first philosophical and the second theological. Even those who still pref-ace the discussion of the Trinity with a presentation on the one God no longer can plausibly, from the Christian perspective, do so without
taking God’s self-revelation as the normative source for understand-ing the unity of God. Thus, for instance, it would be methodologically unacceptable for a Christian theologian to expound on God’s immutabil-ity without taking into account the incarnation of the Logos and his death on the cross and exploring how these Christian “facts” should qualify whatever philosophers have to say about divine perfection and immutability. This is so because the one God is identified with God the Father of Jesus, whether this divine unity is seen to be rooted in the divine substance (in Latin theology), or in the Fatherhood of the First Person (in Greek theology) or in the perich ¯or ¯esis of the three divine persons (according to the proponents of social Trinitarianism).
doctrines
One of the much-debated doctrinal issues in trinitarian theology concerns the relationship between the economic Trinity and the imma-nent Trinity, with three interrelated questions.17First, is it possible and necessary to speak of the immanent, or transcendent, or ontological Trinity, that is, the eternal relations among Father, Son, and Spirit at all? Are not reflections on the economic Trinity, that is, on what God has revealed Godself to be, namely, Father, Son, and Spirit and their dis-tinct activities in history, already sufficient? Is the God in se (in God’s self) nothing more than the God pro nobis (for us)? If a discussion of the immanent Trinity is superfluous, how can believers reconcile theologi-cally their distinct experiences of the presence and activities of the three divine persons with their belief in the one God? Does not the refusal to speak of the immanent Trinity leave the door open to tritheism, a lurking danger on the popular level?
Second, if a theology of the immanent Trinity is possible and even necessary, is the so-called psychological model that uses the human mind (Augustine’s mens or memoria), with its twofold operation of knowing and loving (intellegentia and amor) as an analogy of the imma-nent Trinity, still valid and useful? On the one hand, does it not inevitably lead to modalism, and on the other, does it not produce ahis-torical, spiritually sterile speculations, unmoored from God’s activities in history? Does Augustine’s account of the three divine persons as the Father knowing-himself (thereby generating the Son) and loving-himself (thereby originating the Spirit “through” and/or “and” the Son), while securing divine unity, not jeopardize the interpersonal relations in the Trinity, both immanent and economic?
Third, how are the economic Trinity and immanent Trinity related to each other? Is the immanent Trinity eternal, existing independently of its creative, redemptive, and sanctifying work in the world, or is it in the process of being constituted as Father, Son, and Spirit by their activities in history? If the former position is held, and hence the immanent Trinity is totally unaffected by the flow of history into which the Logos has really and truly entered and taken upon himself in Jesus of Nazareth, then the historicity of God’s self-revelation, which is Christianity’s distinctive teaching, is not taken in all its radical con-sequences. If the latter is espoused, and hence the history of Jesus and that of the world constitute and indeed are the history of God, divine freedom and autonomy will be compromised, since who God is in God-self is made dependent upon human actions in response to God’s God- self-revelation.
Distinguished theologians can be found on both sides of the debate.
Perhaps the best way to illustrate the stark differences in the theological stances on the relationship between the immanent Trinity and the eco-nomic Trinity is to examine how the so-called “Rahner’s Rule” has been variously received.18In an effort to overcome the marginalization of the Trinity from Christian daily life, Rahner formulates as a fundamental axiom of trinitarian theology: “The ‘economic’ Trinity is the ‘immanent’
Trinity and the ‘immanent’ Trinity is the ‘economic’ Trinity.”19In one way or another the axiom involves the three questions outlined above.
Interestingly it has been interpreted by both disciples and opponents alike as endorsing or rejecting both mutually contradictory answers to those three questions, depending on whether both parts of Rahner’s Rule are accepted or only the first (i.e., the economic Trinity is the immanent Trinity) and not the second (i.e., the immanent is the economic Trinity).
Today all theologians would likely subscribe to the first part of Rahner’s Rule, agreeing that what humans encounter in history is nothing less than the immanent Trinity itself. Many however would reject its sec-ond part, on the ground that it would collapse the immanent Trinity into the economic Trinity, thereby compromising God’s freedom and transcendence.
At least prima facie, Rahner posits a distinction (albeit also an iden-tity) between the economic Trinity and the immanent Trinity. Theoreti-cally then it is possible and even necessary to discourse on the immanent Trinity, as Rahner himself has done.20Those who favor this position can appeal to the authority of the Cappadocians, Augustine, Aquinas, and a long list of less illustrious theologians. On the other hand, one might argue that if the economic Trinity is the immanent Trinity, what we
already know of the former is what we would know of the latter, and hence any subsequent discourse on the immanent Trinity would be at best superfluous and at worst a distraction from the spiritual and pas-toral implications of the Trinity, or, as Catherine Mowry LaCugna puts it, a “defeat” of the Trinity.21
As for the usefulness of the psychological model, there are some who still make use of this analogy, though they are fully aware of its limi-tations, regarding it more as an illustration than as a properly theologi-cal interpretation. Others, while defending the necessity of a discourse about the immanent Trinity, would jettison the whole psychological conceptual apparatus and adopt a social model which favors interper-sonal relationships.22
Finally, regarding the relationship between the economic Trinity and the immanent Trinity, the second part of Rahner’s Rule is generally rejected by those who defend God’s freedom and eternity and assert, appealing to the teaching of Athanasius against the Arians, that the Trinity would still be Father, Son, and Spirit even if God had not created.
By contrast, those who accept the second part of Rahner’s Rule without reservation would eliminate the eternal immanent Trinity altogether23 or would hold that it is an eschatological reality, and hence on the way to becoming the Trinity of Father, Son, and Spirit in the fullness of history.24 Still others, like Hans Urs von Balthasar, on the one hand hold on to the eternity and immutability of the immanent Trinity and on the other speak of the incarnation and death of Jesus on the cross as made possible by the “supra-temporal yet ever actual event” of the Father’s self-emptying (kenosis) into the other, namely the Son (in other words, the divine “missions” in history are made possible by the intra-trinitarian eternal “processions”).
However these three questions are answered, it is clear that the rela-tionship between the immanent Trinity and the economic Trinity, that is, the issue of whether the former is eternal and ontologically prior to the latter or whether it is dissolved in and is historically constituted by the latter, though they are “identical” with each other, remains thorny and is a far from resolved issue in contemporary trinitarian theology.
Currently, the consensus seems to be that the economic Trinity must be granted epistemological priority, that is, the only way to know God is by way of the activities of the Father through the Son and by the power of the Spirit, and that ontological priority must be given to the immanent Trinity to safeguard divine freedom and grace.
The second doctrinal issue concerns how to speak of the plurality of “actors” in the Trinity, both economic and immanent. As mentioned
in Chapter 1, in developing a trinitarian theology the church has to make use of culturally available conceptual categories and terminology and at the same time modify them, ascribing new connotations to make them adequate expressions of its beliefs about the Trinity. More precisely, it has to find terms to express what God is, that is, God’s being, nature, or essence, and who God is, that is, Father, Son, and Spirit. For the former, it uses ousia and physis (Greek) and essentia and natura (Latin) respectively. For the latter, it uses hypostasis and prosopon (Greek) and substantiaand persona (Latin) respectively, even though hypostasis (lit-erally, that which stands under) in secular usage is synonymous with ousia and even though its Latin equivalent substantia is not used to refer to who God is but to what God is, that is, as equivalent to essentia and natura and not to hypostasis.
As to the meaning of hypostasis, prosopon, and persona as applied to the Trinity, they do not mean that the Father, the Son, and the Spirit are three “individuals” belonging to the same species (as, for instance, Peter, Paul, and Mary are three individuals sharing the same human nature), for otherwise there would be three Gods. Rather they mean, as the Cappadocians put it, “modes of subsisting” (tropoi hypaxeos). These distinct modes are characterized by the three ways in which the numer-ically one and identical divine nature exists: as ungenerated or unori-ginated in the Father (agennesia), as generated in the Son (gennesis), and as proceeding in the Spirit (ekpempsis or ekporeusis). Consequently, modalism is avoided. Thus “person” in the Trinity does not have the psychological connotation of self-consciousness with intellect, will, and freedom, as commonly understood today. Of course, God does have – or more exactly is – infinite intellect, will, and freedom, but this is not what is meant when Christians speak of the Father, the Son, and the Spirit as “persons.” Given the widespread psychological connotation of
“person” and given the fact the church cannot control the meaning of words in secular usage, there is a clear and present danger of tritheism, at least at the popular level, in using the word “person” for the Trinity.
The question is whether, in order to forestall this danger, new words should be coined to express what Christians mean by “person” in the Trinity. Barth suggests the phrase “mode of being” (Seinsweise), echo-ing the Cappadocians’ tropos hypaxeos, while Rahner proposes a more extended one: “three modes of subsistence of the one God in his one sole nature,” or more simply, “mode of subsistence” (Subsistenzweise).
These new expressions, while theologically precise, are widely criticized as unsuitable for personal piety. However, the issue is much more than terminological. Both Barth and Rahner have been faulted, for example,
by Moltmann, for continuing to conceive God as person in terms of the Hegelian absolute subject endowed with a single intellect and will and for denying as a consequence that there are interpersonal relations withinGod. That there are interpersonal relations among the three per-sons in the economic Trinity is arguably incontrovertible. Furthermore, if the economic Trinity is the immanent Trinity, as both Barth and Rahner maintain, then it must be inferred that there are interpersonal relations in the immanent Trinity as well.
The question therefore is how to conceive the “personhood” of God (“personhood” in the ontological sense, rather than “personality” in the psychological sense) in such a way as to both eschew tritheism and do justice to the reality of the interpersonal relations within the Trinity.
One possible way is to derive our understanding of divine personhood not from the philosophical concept of person but from the relation-ships among the three divine persons. This will allow us to affirm, as Thomas Torrance, Hans Urs von Balthasar, Walter Kasper, and a host of proponents of social trinitarianism suggest, that while there cannot be three consciousnesses, and hence three intellects and three wills, in God (that would be tritheism), there are three “subjects” engaged in mutual knowing and loving, each conscious, in his proper and distinct way (that is, as Father, Son, and Spirit), of the one consciousness and hence also conscious of the others. In other words, each divine person has, as John Thompson puts it, “a three-way relationship and consciousness – a self-consciousness as divine, a self-consciousness of the other persons as of one divine being with them, and a consciousness of the others as persons in relation to them.”25
The third doctrinal issue, which is related to the concept of person, concerns the theology of the Spirit (pneumatology). It is somewhat easy to understand the relations betwen God the Father and God the Son in terms of the Father being the unoriginated source (fatherhood) and the Son in terms of being generated from him (sonship), and consequently it is not difficult, partly thanks to their names, to imagine them as
“person” (indeed, Christian art has often represented them as an older man and a younger man). The same thing can hardly be said of the Spirit, about whose personhood three issues are raised, namely, his mode of
“person” (indeed, Christian art has often represented them as an older man and a younger man). The same thing can hardly be said of the Spirit, about whose personhood three issues are raised, namely, his mode of