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The Social Model of the Trinity and Its Critics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 January 2009

John L. Gresham Jr
John L. Gresham Jr
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2628 Liveoak Waco, TX 76708
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Extract

One of the analogies used by the Cappadocian Fathers and other early theologians to illustrate the doctrine of the Trinity was the social analogy in which Father, Son and Spirit were likened to three human persons. Beginning with Augustine however, Christian Theology, particularly in the Western Church, shifted away from the social to the psychological analogy. Augustine found analogies to the Trinity in all of creation but the clearest analogy to the Trinity, in fact its unique image, was the human soul. The divine image was not found in the union of three persons but in the unity of three activities, remembering, knowing, willing in the individual human soul. The social analogy reappeared in the twelfth century in Richard of St Victor's argument for the existence of three persons in God based on the premise that supreme charity required shared interpersonal love. Though some of Richard's insights were taken up by Bonaventura, the impact of his trinitarian theology was overshadowed by the dominant influence of Thomas Aquinas with his masterful use of the psychological analogy to probe and illuminate the inner being of the divine Trinity. Following Aquinas's further development of Augustine's psychological analogy, the interpersonal approach of the social analogy all but disappeared from subsequent trinitarian theology. Even with a later shift away from the Augustinian-Thomistic model, modern theology retained its unipersonal image of the trinitarian God.

Type
Research Article
Information
Scottish Journal of Theology , Volume 46 , Issue 3 , August 1993 , pp. 325 - 343
Copyright
Copyright © Scottish Journal of Theology Ltd 1993

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References

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15 I have in mind here especially the Cappadocian Fathers. By treating prosopon as synonymous with hypostasis, they sought to avoid the Sabellian view possibly suggested by prosopon. (See Basil Epistle 236.6 Nicene and Post Nicene Fathers 2nd series 8: 278). Moreover, in the Cappadocian theology, the divine hypostases ‘were not merely three metaphysically distinct realities who were one God, they were also three really distinct subjects of divine life, who know, love and operate divinely’ (Fortman, E.J., The Triune God: A Historical Study of the Doctrine of the Trinity (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1972), 81)Google Scholar. Cornelius Plandnga, Jr. argues along similar lines in ‘Gregory Nyssa and the Social Analogy’.

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26 Gregory of Nyssa, for example argued that to be philosophically correct one should even speak of‘Man’ in the singular not the plural. (Gregory of Nyssa, ‘That we Should Not Think of Saving There Are Three Gods‘, Christology of the Later Fathers, ed. Hardy, E. R. and Richardson, C. C. (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1954), 257–258.Google Scholar

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47 The value of both models is affirmed in a comparison of Augustine and Richard of St Victor in Fortman, 194. These two analogies illustrate the two-fold unity in the Trinity noted by Aquinas, a unity of essence and love. See Aquinas‘ commentary on John, In Joann. 17, lectio V, 2, cited by Boff, 144–145.

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61 Boff, 196–198, 210–212. While he avoids the term, Boff's view is problematical in suggesting that Mary is the ‘incarnation’ of the Spirit. Donald Bloesch offers a preferable approach when he presents Mary and the Church as pointing ‘indirectly’ to the feminine dimension of God. See Bloesch, , The Battle for the Trinity (Ann Arbor: Vine Books, 1985), 37–39.Google Scholar

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64 Moltmann, TK, 162–165. Moltmann and Boff both refer to the Council of Toledo (675), which spoke of the Son's generation out of the Father's ‘womb’, as evidence for the Father's maternity. This ignores, however, that same council's contrast between the Son's eternal generation from a Father without a mother and his temporal birth from a mother without a father. (See ‘Eleventh Council of Toledo’ in The Christian Faith in the Doctrinal Documents of the Catholic Church, rev. ed., ed. Neuner, J. and Dupois, j. (New York: Alba House, 1982), 170.) Nonetheless, their affirmation of the maternal qualities of the Father is valid, though it would be more faithful to scriptural revelation to speak of God as a motherly Father rather than a fatherly mother.Google Scholar