Book Review: Incarnational Realism: Trinity and the Spirit in Augustine and Barth

Abstract

Incarnational Realism: Trinity and Spirit in Augustine and Barth. By Travis E. Abies. TT $39.95 (paper).Travis E. Abies s Incamational Realism: Trinity and Spirit in Augustine and Barth takes as its point of departure late twentieth-century claim that Latin Christianity lacks a robust pneumatology, and this dismal state of affairs is due to Augustine's problematic Trinitarian theology. Abies, however, rejects this reading of Augustine and Latin Christianity and argues convincingly that Augustine is not guilty of alleged Geistvergessenheit. However, this is not merely a book championing Augustine's teachings; rather, as book's title indicates, Karl Barth's doctrine of Spirit, contrary to charges that his overemphasized Christology eclipses pneumatology, likewise has a role to play. In other words, Abies argues that both Barth and Augustine provide us with theologically rich teachings on Holy Spirit that, when read together and properly synthesized, offer important correctives to contemporary Trinitarian theology.In particular, Abies focuses on shortcomings of Trinitarian personalism and Trinitarian idealism. Abies worries that both contemporary expressions of Trinitarian teaching are too reductionistic and thus ultimately fail to maintain the integrity of reconciling act in economy of (p. 180). On one hand, Ables's concern regarding Trinitarian personalism is that it diminishes essential character of act in history, rendering it as an accidental occasion or concrete illustration of what is essentially a purely metaphorical relationship between human and divine community (p. 180). In other words, metaphorical relationship becomes so primary that it downgrades revelatory significance of Triune work in salvation to Jesus' exemplary relational existence as Son to Father (p. 180). On other hand, Trinitarian idealism is overly smitten with Hegel's Geist. Here God's self-revelation in economy is only possible as a result of necessity of self-alienating otherness internal to GodselP' (p. 181). In this narrative, God is not depicted as pouring out his love in but rather as incorporating history into Godself in what sometimes begins to look like a startlingly narcissistic picture of self-reflexivity (p. …