Immanent Trinity Research Articles

Deus Trinitas: Some Dogmatic Implications of David Coffey's Biblical Approach to the Trinity

The author explores Coffey's Lonerganian method and conclusions, and suggests that, while it is important to have a contemporary doctrine of the immanent Trinity, Coffey's own starting point causes him to compromise some of the most important insights of the doctrine that he originally intended to uphold. Coffey's own natural theology, it is claimed, leads him to compromise both God's freedom in se and his free action ad extra by following Rahner's belief that love of neighbour is identical with love of God.

Unapocalyptic Theology: History and Eschatology in Balthasar's Theo‐Drama

In this essay, I evaluate the claim that Hans Urs von Balthasar's interpretation of trinitarian doctrine undermines the importance of history for the Christian God. Where other critics argue that the very distinction between immanent and economic Trinity robs the economy of salvation of theological significance, I contend that the underlying problem lies in how Balthasar restricts the theo‐drama to an event between heaven and earth on the cross of Golgotha. Through this limitation of God's active involvement in history to a single event, Balthasar's theo‐drama becomes an “unapocalyptic theology”, which devalues God's salvific history with the world and the biblical expectation of an eschatological end of history. Furthermore, Balthasar underplays the messianic‐political dimension of the Christian concept of salvation and thereby cements the status quo of a yet unredeemed world.

Entangled in the Trinity: Economic and Immanent Trinity in Recent Theology

Entangled in the Trinity: Economic and Immanent Trinity in Recent Theology

Trinity: Economic and Immanent

AbstractTheologians have recently been criticizing the notion of an immanent Trinity as idle speculation and focusing their attention exclusively on the economic Trinity. The change thus proposed is at once too radical and not radical enough. It is too radical in that it seems to set aside almost two thousand years of careful theological reflection on the reality of God as derived from Scripture and Tradition. It is not radical enough in that it does not grasp the deeper issues involved here. For, what is really needed is not a move away from ontology toward phenomenology, but rather a conscious shift in ontologies, a move, in other words, from a metaphysics of being to a metaphysics of becoming as the appropriate conceptuality for an understanding both of the doctrine of the Trinity and of the God-world relationship.

Toward a Contemporary Doctrine of the Immanent Trinity: Karl Barth and the Present Discussion

What is the purpose of a doctrine of the immanent Trinity? Broadly speaking it aims to recognize, uphold and respect God's freedom. Without theoretical and practical awareness of this freedom all theological statements about the significance of created existence become ambiguous and constitute merely human attempts to give meaning to creation using theological categories.

Christ and the Spirit: Spirit-Christology in Trinitarian Perspective by Ralph Del Colle

656 BOOK REVIEWS Christ and the Spirit: Spirit-Christology in Trinitarian Perspective. By RALPH DEL COLLE. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994. Pp. 240. $35.00 (cloth). Ralph Del Colle has written a conscientious work on Spirit-christology. He attempts both to be faithful to the conciliar Christological tradition (Nicaea and Chalcedon), and yet to advance simultaneously the proper and rightful role of the Spirit within a Christological and Trinitarian setting. As he states: What is new and distinctive in Spirit-christology is that, on the level of theological construction and doctrinal interpretation, it proposes that the relationship between Jesus and God and the role of Christ in redemption cannot be fully understood unless there is an explicitly pneumatological dimension. In other words, the relationship between Jesus and the Spirit is as important to conveying the truth of the christological mystery with its soteriological consequences as that of Jesus and the Word. (4) Without this pneumatological dimension, the full deposit of faith, Del Colle believes, is diminished and even jeopardized. His hope is that his new model of Spirit-christology will not only "preserve the integrity" of the Church's Trinitarian tradition, but will "profoundly enrich" it (5). Del Colle's study takes place on three interrelated levels-those of the Trinity, Christology, and grace. By clarifying the proper role ofthe Holy Spirit within the Trinity, he attempts to enhance the appropriate function and position ofthe Spirit within Christology and the theology ofredemption and grace. To accomplish this he examines, in Chapter One, the Western Trinitarian position, specifically the place of the Holy Spirit, in light of the Eastern criticism , especially that of V. Lossky. Chapters Two and Three respectively take up the Neo-scholastic development of the role of the Spirit within the Christology (M. Scheeben and E. Mersch) and within the theology of grace (De la Taille, Rabner, and W. Hill). Having shown the strengths and weaknesses of this Neo-scholastic development, Del Colle, in Chapter Four, studies in depth the Trinitarian, Christological, and soteriological thought of David Coffey, who he believes both advances the tradition and produces a highly creative and fully mature Spirit-christology. In light of Coffey's thought, he then critically examines (Chapter Five) other contemporary Spirit-christologies-such as those of Dunn, Schoonenberg, and Lampe. Lastly, in Chapter Six, he explicates the implications of his Spirit-christology for culture, social praxis, and religious pluralism. Del Colle's work has many strengths. Firstly, the questions he raises and the issues he addresses concerning the role of the Holy Spirit within the Trinity, in Christology, and in the theology of grace are of inherent and contemporary importance. He rightly perceives that within the Christian tradition the Holy Spirit has not assumed his proper place both within the immanent Trinity and within the economy of salvation. Secondly, he has a good BOOK REVIEWS 657 sense of theological development. He not only creatively critiques the past, but he also, while being faithful to the best of the past, attempts imaginatively to proceed beyond it. Thirdly, with the help of Coffey, he proposes a Spiritchristology that, in many ways, admirably enhances Trinitarian thought, Christology, and the theology of grace. Fourthly, because of the depth of his own Spirit-christology, Del Colle can thoroughly critique the often superficial and revisionist Spirit-christologies of such modems as Schoonenberg and Lampe. In order to propose a proper role for the Holy Spirit both within the Trinity and in Christology Del Colle, following Coffey, champions a "bestowal model" (most recently renamed by Coffey as the "model of return") of the Trinity that would complement and augment the traditional "procession model." Unlike the "procession model," which sees the Son proceeding from the Father and then the Spirit proceeding from the Father and (or through) the Son, the "bestowal model" understands that the Father bestows his love on the Son and the Son in return bestows his love on the Father. This mutual bestowal oflove is the Holy Spirit (see 107-8). This "bestowal model" adds more dynamism and personalism both within the Trinity and within the economy of salvation. The love of the Father for the Son does not lie dormant in the Son...

Schleiermacher et la doctrine de la Trinité. Réflexions critiques (Première partie)

In accentuating the static presence of the divine being in Christ, to the detriment of the "emptying" and Incarnation of the Logos in the flesh, Schleiermacher tones down the drama of the johannine prologue. Because he is unable to conceive of an intradivine historicity, Schleiermacher comes closer to the historical doctrine of Sabellianism. However, his theory does not even coincide with this exactly. Although he would like to preserve an equilibrium between the "monarchy" and the "economy" and the identical divinity of the three Persons, Schleiermacher falls far short of doing so. In excluding the immanent Trinity, he condemns himself into grasping God as an undifferentiated unity, and thus oscillates between the extremes of pantheism and deism. By only admitting the "procession" of the Holy Spirit ex Patre Filioque in the sense of missio, the resulting modalism never does discover the determination of the Spirit as Love, in the intimate and eternal mystery of God.

The Function of the Immanent Trinity in the Theology of Karl Barth: Implications for Today

Many modern theologians, including Jürgen Moltmann, Wolfhart Pannenberg and Eberhard Jüngel have been influenced by Karl Barth; they also accept Karl Rahner's axiom that the immanent and economic trinity is identical. By accepting this axiom, however, they actually stand opposed to Barth's most basic theological insight, namely, that ‘a deliberate and sharp distinction between the Trinity of God as we may know it in the Word of God revealed, written and proclaimed, and God's immanent Trinity, i.e., between “God in Himself” and “God for us,” between the “eternal history of God and His temporal acts,”’ must be maintained in order to avoid confusing and reversing the role of Creator in relation to creature both theoretically and practically. This article will explore Barth's reasons for neither identifying, separating nor synthesizing the immanent and economic trinity; and will contrast his method with more recent theological approaches. We hope to show that the contemporary tendency to identify the immanent and economic trinity uncritically compromises God's freedom. Barth was concerned that Moltmann had subsumed ‘all theology in eschatology’:To put it pointedly, does your theology of hope really differ at all from the baptizedprincipleof hope of Mr Bloch? What disturbs me is that for you theology becomes so much a matter of principle (an eschatological principle).…Would it not be wise to accept the doctrine of the immanent trinity of God? Barth hoped that Moltmann would ‘outgrow’ this ‘onesidedness’.

The Trinity and the Incarnation: Hegel and Classical Approaches

Previous articleNext article No AccessThe Trinity and the Incarnation: Hegel and Classical ApproachesAnselm K. MinAnselm K. Min Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Journal of Religion Volume 66, Number 2Apr., 1986 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/487360 Views: 9Total views on this site Citations: 1Citations are reported from Crossref Copyright 1986 The University of ChicagoPDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Anselm K. Min The Dialectic of Divine Love: Pannenberg's Hegelian Trinitarianism, International Journal of Systematic Theology 6, no.33 (Jul 2004): 252–269.https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2400.2004.00133.x

Re-conceiving the Trinity as the Mystery of Salvation

We began by wondering what it might mean to speak of the immanent and economic threefoldness of God. Rahner's axiom provided leverage on the problem by showing that trinitarian theology is meant above all to be a truth about the mystery of salvation. That is, it is a way of both narrating and conceiving the God whosavesand theGodwho saves.The correspondence between these two emphases presented a hermeneutical problem at two methodological levels, and so the second step was to examine the meaning of the copula in Rahner's axiom in order to decide how we might (a) link up our narrative of God's history with us with God's inner history, and, having answered that, how we might (b) link up our speculation about God's ‘inner’ life with the divine reality. We replied in the case of (a) that the axiom legislates speaking of God by drafting an equivalence between the temporal history of God-with-us and the eternal history of God, andvice versa: the economic trinityisthe immanent trinity, andvice versa. In the case of (b) and building on the answer to (a), we proposed an understanding of the trinity as a theological model. The model (trinity of relations) is related to the ‘modeled’ (God-in-relation) both heuristically and ontologically. The theological model of trinity therefore must incorporate imagistic as well as discursive, indirect as well as direct modes of discourse.Finally, we indicated some of the theological and methodological consequences of understanding God as being the ‘God for us’, and of re-conceiving the doctrine of the trinity to be a theological model of salvation.

Appreciative Awareness: The Feeling-Dimension in Religious Experience

RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE is the term which describes the encounter between the human person and God. The sensations, feelings, emotions, mind, and spirit are the arenas which mediate the experience to consciousness. Knowledge results which is at the same time both clear and unclear. Reason may cpme to know clearly the distinction between the economic and immanent Trinity, but the heart recognizes the triune presence. The experience always remains richer than Like a lit candle placed in the center of a dark room, the area close to the flame is clear and details are seen. But as one looks to the more remote areas of the room, the light cannot penetrate the darkness, details become obscure, and only large objects are discernible. The obscured objects remain no less real than the illuminated ones. The challenge confronting theology is the person who seeks to understand faith in the world today and who wants faith to issue into a deeper love of God. Therefore the question is not whether God manifests Himself to me in experience but how I communicate with Him. This article will examine the manner in which the person in the feeling-dimension of religious experience communicates with God. I am primarily concerned, then, with the knowledge of the heart. Bernard E. Meland calls it appreciative knowledge. Appreciative knowledge is best described by the analogy to art. In this aesthetic mode the feelings rather than logic lead the individual in the encounter. Thus the person cannot be a viewer but becomes a participant on the feeling-dimension. The analogy does not focus upon the relationship of creating but of appreciating art. The act of appreciating implies an interaction between the person and an which forms a context of relationships. Appreciative knowledge, then, depends upon recognition, a discernment of sorts, that perceives what the feelings convey in relationship with another, whether the other is an El Greco painting, music by Beethoven, or sculpture by Rodin. Hence the art object interacts