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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 October 2009
This article seeks to summarise and critically analyse Colin Gunton's trinitarian theology in regard to the claim that the doctrine of the Trinity is a doctrine with radical consequences for human life. To this end it engages, first, in an examination of Gunton's trinitarian project following his thought from a cultural critical starting point finally leading to the establishment of three open transcendentals and, second, in a critical analysis of this approach, highlighting some essential inconsistencies in regard to Cappadocian theology, the concepts of relationality and personhood and practical consequences for human life. In conclusion, the article suggests that Gunton's strong emphasis on relationality and his search for open transcendentals could be understood as the result of his passionate aspiration to heal the wounds of an egocentric, individualistic and alienating modern culture through an ontology of communion.
1 The Promise of Trinitarian Theology, 2nd edn (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1997), p. 6.
2 Ibid., p. 7.
3 Ibid.
4 The One, the Three and the Many (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 13.
5 Promise, p. 28.
6 Gunton himself points towards the necessity of apologetics in a modern world in order to renew modern culture and Christianity: Promise, pp. 22–3.
7 The One, p. 37.
8 Ibid., p. 38.
9 In Act and Being: Towards a Theology of the Divine Attributes (London: SCM Press, 2002) he revisits the traditional doctrine of the divine attributes and attempts to reformulate them from a trinitarian perspective. In his Father, Son and Holy Spirit: Toward a Fully Trinitarian Theology (London: T. & T. Clark, 2003) Gunton is not only concerned with a trinitarian christology and pneumatology but also tries to link his trinitarian insights with the doctrines of creation, redemption, atonement and baptism.
10 Kilby, Karen, ‘Perichoresis and Projection: Problems with Social Doctrines of the Trinity’, New Blackfriars 81 (2000), pp. 432–45CrossRefGoogle Scholar; ‘Aquinas, the Trinity and the Limits of Understanding’, International Journal of Systematic Theology 7 (2005), pp. 414–27.
11 God for us: The Trinity and Christian Life (San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1993).
12 God as Trinity: Relationality and Temporality in Divine Life (Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1993).
13 Promise, p. xix.
14 The One, p. 134.
15 Ibid., p. 171.
16 Ibid., p. 172.
17 Gunton, ‘Trinity, Ontology and Anthropology: Towards a Renewal of the Doctrine of the Imago Dei’, in C. Schwöbel and C. Gunton (eds), Persons, Divine and Human: King's College Essays in Theological Anthropology (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1991), p. 56.
18 Cf. Gregory of Nyssa: ‘We therefore affirm that while they [Father, Son, and Spirit] share ousia in common there are characteristics to be seen in the Trinity which are incompatible and not held in common; these constitute the particular character of the persons (prosopa) of whom the faith has taught us. . . . What we see here is a sort of continuous and indivisible community’: ‘On the Difference between Ousia and Hypostasis’, in M. Wiles and M. Santer (eds), Documents in Early Christian Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), p. 34.
19 Promise, p. 9. Cf. Zizioulas, J., Being as Communion: Studies in Personhood and the Church (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1985), p. 17Google Scholar.
20 Ibid., p. 10.
21 The One, p. 164.
22 ‘Trinity, Ontology and Anthropology’, pp. 47–61.
23 Gunton, ‘Relation and Relativity: The Trinity and the Created World’, in C. Schwöbel (ed.), Trinitarian Theology Today: Essays on Divine Being and Act (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1995), pp. 92–112.
24 The One, p. 167.
25 Ibid., p. 172.
26 Ibid., p. 173.
27 Promise, p. 88.
28 ‘Trinity, Ontology and Anthropology’, p. 58.
29 Act and Being, p. 72.
30 Ibid., p. 73.
31 Ibid., p. 147.
32 In relation to the concept of creation he employs a parallel argument: ‘I am going to ask some questions about conceptual similarities, and raise the question of whether the concepts developed in trinitarian theology enable us not only to conceive the reality of God, but also have transcendental possibilities, and so enable us to come to terms with the fundamental shape of being . . . [T]he thesis to be argued here is that the world is like God not in being in his image, but in the more limited sense that there are some conceptual parallels between the concepts in which the being of God is expressed and the way in which we may conceive the world’: ‘Relation and Relativity’, pp. 95–6.
33 Because Gunton grounds his search for transcendentals in the whole of creation he excludes, for instance, sociality as a transcendental candidate. Although sociality is an essential and ideal status for personal beings it does not apply to everything. The universe as a whole is rather marked by relationality: The One, p. 229.
34 Ibid., p. 206.
35 Ibid., p. 207.
36 Ibid., p. 191.
37 Ibid., p. 200.
38 See his sections on the problem of substantiality and the particular: The One, pp. 188–204.
39 Zizioulas, ‘On Being a Person: Towards an Ontology of Personhood’, in C. Schwöbel and C. Gunton (eds), Persons, Divine and Human (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1991), p. 40.
40 Fermer, Richard, ‘The Limits of Trinitarian Theology as a Methodological Paradigm’, Neue Zeitschrift für Systematische Theologie und Religionsphilosophie 41 (1999), p. 165CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
41 Ibid., pp. 164–6.
42 The One, p. 191.
43 ‘The notion of uncreatedness and incomprehensibility applies in exactly the same way to the Father, to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit. No one of them is either more or less incomprehensible or uncreated than either of the others. Now in the case of the Trinity it is essential to keep the distinctions free from all confusion with the help of the particularizing characteristics. So in deciding what is particular to each, we shall leave out of account everything which the three are observed to have in common, such as being uncreated and being beyond comprehension. We shall look only for those things which allow us clearly and without confusion to distinguish our conception of each of the three individually from our conception of the three considered together’: Gregory of Nyssa, ‘Difference between Ousia and Hypostasis’, p. 33.
44 Fermer, ‘Limits of Trinitarian Theology’, p. 175. Cf. Lienhard, J., ‘Ousia and Hypostasis: The Cappadocian Settlement and the Theology of “One Hypostasis”‘, in Davis, S. et al. (eds), The Trinity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 99–121Google Scholar; Meyer, J., ‘God's Trinitarian Substance in Athanasian Theology’, Scottish Journal of Theology 59 (2006), pp. 81–97CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
45 A case in point is David Cunningham's book These Three are One: The Practice of Trinitarian Theology (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998). Cunningham suggests viewing the Trinity as relations without remainder. The result is that the notion of the subject tends to vanish completely and particularity gains its meaning solely as a derivation from the concepts of polyphony and participation. But how shall I give myself to the other and participate in the other if there is no unique part, a unique I? Implications which Cunningham draws on the ethical level are therefore rather general, leaving the individual Christian wondering what it actually is that he or she can do since it is the polyphonic community that determines their behaviour.
46 ‘Limits of Trinitarian Theology’, p. 181.
47 Promise, p. 114.
48 Ibid., p. 115.
49 Ibid., p. 80.
50 ‘The pneumatological dimensions of creation theology accordingly allow us to develop an ontology of the material particular as that which is destined to achieve a distinctively finite completeness or perfection in space and through time’: The One, p. 206.
51 Cf. his opening chapter ‘From Heraclitus to Havel’: The One, pp. 11–40.
52 One cannot fail to notice that Gunton somehow plays the following tune over and over again: a) Irenaeus is praised as a theologian who is still ‘balanced’ trinitarian, b) the Cappadocians are the highlight and are lauded for devising the distinction between ousia and hypostasis, thus giving the concept of the person priority over substance, c) in Augustine the development started to go wrong by favouring substance over person, d) Aquinas cemented this one-sidedness (the one over the three), e) this theological development within the doctrine of God towards strict monotheism as well as the philosophical one-sidedness of giving priority to mind, reason and the universal over against matter, experience and the particular led to all the problems of the Enlightenment and the modern culture with its many problems such as the ‘death of God’, secularisation, individualism, alienation from each other and the modern aspiration for homogeneity.
53 The One, p. 125.
54 Ibid., p. 223.