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85 pages

English

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God the Holy Trinity brings together leading scholars from diverse theological perspectives to reflect on various theological and practical aspects of the core Christian doctrine of the Trinity. Throughout, the contributors highlight the trinitarian shape of spiritual formation. The esteemed lineup of contributors includes Alister E. McGrath; Gerald L. Bray; James Earl Massey; Avery Cardinal Dulles, S.J.; Frederica Mathewes-Green; J. I. Packer; Timothy George; Ellen T. Charry; and Cornelius Plantinga Jr. This book will appeal to students, church leaders, and interested laity. It is the second book in the Beeson Divinity Studies series.

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Christian theology

Philosophie et théologie

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Publié par	Baker Publishing Group
Date de parution	01 octobre 2006
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781441206688
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0634€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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Beeson Divinity Studies
Timothy George, Editor
Beeson Divinity Studies is a series of volumes dedicated to the pastoral and theological renewal of the Church of Jesus Christ. The series is sponsored by the faculty of Beeson Divinity School of Samford University, an evangelical, interdenominational theological school in Birmingham, Alabama.

© 2006 by Timothy George
Published by Baker Academic
a division of Baker Publishing Group
P.O. Box 6287, Grand Rapids, MI 49516-6287
www.bakeracademic.com
Ebook edition created 2012
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means for example, electronic, photocopy, recording without the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.
ISBN 978-1-4412-0668-8
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC.
Unless otherwise indicated, Scripture quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyright 1989, Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
Scripture quotations labeled ESV are from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version, copyright © 2001 by Crossway Bibles, a division of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
Scripture quotations labeled KJV are from the King James Version of the Bible.
Scripture quotations labeled NIV are from the HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION®. NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 by International Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved.
Scripture quotations labeled RSV are from the Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyright 1952 [2nd edition, 1971] by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
The internet addresses, email addresses, and phone numbers in this book are accurate at the time of publication. They are provided as a resource. Baker Publishing Group does not endorse them or vouch for their content or permanence.
For James M. Houston
O Trinity, O Trinity,
the uncreated One;
O Unity, O Unity
of Father, Spirit, Son:
You are without beginning,
Your life is never ending;
and though our tongues are
earthbound clay,
light them with flaming fire today.
From the Lenten Triodion of the Orthodox Church
Contents
Cover
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Introduction Timothy George
1 The Doctrine of the Trinity: An Evangelical Reflection Alister E. McGrath
2 Out of the Box: The Christian Experience of God in Trinity Gerald L. Bray
3 Faith and Christian Life in the African-American Spirituals James Earl Massey
4 The Trinity and Christian Unity Avery Cardinal Dulles, S.J.
5 The Old Testament Trinity Frederica Mathewes-Green
6 A Puritan Perspective: Trinitarian Godliness according to John Owen J. I. Packer
7 The Trinity and the Challenge of Islam Timothy George
8 The Soteriological Importance of the Divine Perfections Ellen T. Charry
9 Deep Wisdom Cornelius Plantinga Jr.
Notes
Contributors
Index
Introduction
T IMOTHY G EORGE
When I was a student at Harvard Divinity School during the 1970s, one of my teachers published a book entitled God the Problem . This prompted a retort from one of his colleagues: “Those theologians, they can make a problem out of anything!” While reveling in obscurity and complexity may be the delight of some theologians, if there has ever been a genuine “problem” in Christian doctrine, then surely it is how the eternal God can be both One and yet ever Three at the same time. But this is what all orthodox Christians do confess: that the one and only Almighty God who created heaven and earth has forever known himself, and through salvation history has revealed himself to us, as the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. So basic is this belief in the Holy Trinity that it has become one of the essential markers of the Christian faith.
The essays in this volume are part of the rich harvest of trinitarian thinking that has characterized Christian theology for more than seventy-five years now. We must set this revival of trinitarian theology against the backdrop of several centuries that saw declining interest in the doctrine. The Reformation, in both its Protestant and Catholic modalities, remained formally committed to the orthodox trinitarian consensus of the early church. The doctrine of the Trinity was not a matter of dispute between Wittenberg or Geneva and Rome. Most of the radical reformers also affirmed the doctrine of the Trinity, with the exception of a small number of evangelical rationalists such as Michael Servetus, Faustus Socinus, and the Polish Brethren. The two burning issues of the Reformation were soteriology, “What can I do to be saved?” and ecclesiology, “Where can I find a true church?” In his famous maxim “To know Christ is to know his benefits,” Philipp Melanchthon well expressed what we might call the soteriological concentration of Reformation theology. Melanchthon and nearly everyone else on both sides of the confessional divide in the sixteenth century assumed a trinitarian framework for their elaborate discussions of justification, predestination, eucharistic theology, and the like. Yet this would not be the case several centuries later, when scholars applied Enlightenment epistemology to the content of Christian theology. Immanuel Kant, for example, claimed that the human mind could know God only as an ordering concept, like the “soul” or the “world.” This meant that Christian doctrines such as the Trinity were at best constructs of human consciousness, a mental grid of sorts, certainly not a reality that one could know, appropriate, or enter into in the way the Christian tradition had always claimed. Given these two developments the soteriological concentration of the Reformation and the Kantian limit upon knowledge claims it was “merely a matter of logic before trinitarian doctrine found itself on the margins of Christian theology.” [1]
The father of modern theology was Friedrich Schleiermacher, who famously defined the Christian religion as “a feeling of absolute dependence.” Despite his roots in the Reformed tradition and his strong ties to Moravian Pietism, Schleiermacher was the first great post-Kantian theologian, and his treatment of the doctrine of the Trinity reflects this commitment. In a few paragraphs the Trinity makes a brief appearance at the end of his long doctrinal treatise The Christian Faith . The Trinity is not the apex of his thinking but rather an appendix, almost an afterthought. By radically reinterpreting traditional doctrines in the light of Christian self-consciousness, Schleiermacher was able to relativize not only the doctrine of the Trinity but also much of the substance of historic creedal Christianity. Others would go even further. As Jaroslav Pelikan put it, “Schleiermacher’s dictum that certain doctrines may be ‘entrusted to history for safekeeping’ became an axiom by means of which other theologians could assign much of the orthodox tradition to irrelevance.” [2]
Karl Barth stands at the headwaters of a renewed interest in the doctrine of the Trinity in the twentieth century. Unlike Schleiermacher, Barth places the doctrine of the Trinity at the beginning of his theological project, in the opening chapters of his Church Dogmatics . With Barth, theology begins not with human self-consciousness but rather with God’s self-revelation. Human beings on their own are not capable of peering into the mystery of God, but the God of the Bible has spoken Deus dixit ! and this is the basis for our understanding of the Triune God as Revealer, Revelation, and Revealedness ( CD I/1:295). Because God has made himself known in this way, we can truly know him, Barth says, “in unimpaired unity yet also in unimpaired distinction.” [3] Barth’s trinitarian thinking has proved enormously fertile for other theologians who, while critical of Barth at key points, have extended his own Christocentric emphasis. Among the most creative and notable theologians in this trajectory are Eberhard Jüngel and Robert Jenson. At the same time, we must recognize that the doctrine of the Trinity remained marginalized in a great swath of Protestant theology. For example, Rudolf Bultmann, one of the most influential theologians of the twentieth century, showed no interest in the Trinity and remained much in the tradition of Schleiermacher on this subject.
Because Roman Catholic theology has retained the substance of creedal Christianity through the centuries, this tradition never seriously questioned the doctrine of the Trinity. This is not to say, however, that there has been no significant development in Roman Catholic trinitarian theology in recent times. In traditional Roman Catholic dogmatics, the doctrine of the Trinity ( De Deo Trino ) was always distinguished and treated separately from the study of God’s reality and unity ( De Deo Uno ). As a major corrective to this approach, Karl Rahner declared: “The ‘economic’ Trinity is the ‘immanent’ Trinity, and the ‘immanent’ Trinity is the ‘economic’ Trinity.” [4] It is misleading, Rahner argued, to divorce the reality and unity of the one eternal God from the way this God has manifested himself in the history of salvation. “Father,” “Son,” and “Holy Spirit” are not mere masks God wears at different moments in history, like the same actor who plays different parts at different times in a three-act play. Instead, these divine names are a divinely given and accurate depiction of who God actually is. Alister McGrath summarizes this view: “The same God who appears as a Trinity is a Trinity. The way in which God is known in self-revelation corresponds to the way God is internally.