Unicity vs. Trinity: Letter to a Friend

Choice Reviews Online, 2011

Over the last decade there has been a resurgence of writing on the Trinity, indicating a renewal of ideas and debate concerning this key element of Christian theology. This introduction challenges the standard account of a decline and revival in Trinitarian theology, taking into account recent, alternative readings of the theological tradition by Lewis Ayres and Michel Barnes amongst other scholars. By clearly analysing the scope of these new approaches, the authors establish the importance of a considered understanding of the Trinity, resisting the notion of separating faith and reason and identifying theology's link to spirituality. Their account also eschews the easy stereotypes of Western Christianity's supposedly more Unitarian approach, as opposed to the more Trinitarian view of the East. Offering an overview of the main people and themes in Trinitarian theology past and present, this book thus provides an accessible, comprehensive guide for students and scholars alike.

Reviews in Religion and Theology

Recent years have seen an outpouring of books on the Trinity. Many of these have lamented the neglect of the doctrine, emphasizing its centrality and arguing for the need for retrieval and reinstatement. This phase in trinitarian theology, however, is perhaps now past. Books currently coming out no longer need to make the lament, and no longer need to argue so emphatically for the Trinity's importance, which is now, for better or worse, taken for granted. Instead of writing with the aim of rescuing the doctrine, then, theologians with a commitment to its centrality are beginning to take up a variety of other questions and make the Trinity central to their answers. Thus in Trinity and Truth Bruce Marshall aims to offer a theological account of truth and the justification of belief and to put the doctrine of the Trinity at the heart of this account. The Christian community ought, he insists, work out its own conception of truth and justified belief, rather than submitting its claims to externally determined standards. The doctrine of the Trinity is central to Christianity-it is what primarily distinguishes the Christian Church from other religions and non-religious communities. (Marshall's effort to establish this 'empirically' is reminiscent of, and about as non-theological as, Schleiermacher's attempt to define the Christian Church in the introduction to The Christian Faith.) Therefore, he argues, the doctrine of the Trinity ought to have 'unrestricted epistemic primacy': the church does not (should not) consider its belief in the Trinity to be in need of justification, but

AJPS 27.2, 2024

The unity in diversity of communion among people has its anchor in the life of the Triune God. The Triune God, the one God who is eternally three, makes both the unity and diversity of divine persons absolute. The diversity of Triune persons is not to be dissolved into divine unity (as with modalism, which denies the relations of persons in God). Neither is the unity of persons to be dissolved for the sake of diversity (as with Subordinationism which views the Father alone as divine and the Son and the Spirit as separate natures not “truly” divine). Communion in fact requires both unity and diversity and embraces both as essential to personal existence.

2006

After a long period of quiet, there is now considerable noise in evangelicalism regarding the Trinity. When I undertook doctoral work on contemporary trinitarian theology in the late 1990s, my bibliography was dominated by the usual suspects: Barth, Rahner, Moltmann, Pannenberg, von Balthasar, Jenson, Gunton, etc. 1 My non-evangelical advisor at a non-evangelical school knew that I identified myself as an evangelical Christian, and became concerned that I was not engaging in dialogue with any evangelical authors. I assured him that I was not ashamed of my heritage, and that I would gladly have interacted with evangelical authors, but that there simply were none who were doing significant work in this field. Indeed, the entire late twentieth-century renaissance of trinitarian theology took place without active participation from evangelical theologians.