Ecclesiological reflections on Kathryn Tanner's Jesus, Humanity and the Trinity

Abstract

This review explores the incipient ecclesiology of Kathryn Tanner's brief systematic theology, Jesus, Humanity and the Trinity. Gift is the central concept around which Tanner's articulation of the divine life and the incarnation revolves. The lack of ecclesial definition in Jesus, Humanity and the Trinity creates tension between Tanner's theology of gift and her insistence elsewhere on the church as a ‘genuine community of argument’. Her brief appeal to a ‘community of mutual fulfillment’ needs more elaboration to head off worrisome interpretations of her vision of divine and human economies. An ecclesiological extrapolation from Tanner's Christology in Jesus, Humanity and the Trinity suggests that the church needs to be at once a community in which God's gifts are received and shared and a community of argument in which problems and shortcomings in the church's life can be faced and negotiated.