Christ and the Cosmos: A Reformulation of Trinitarian Doctrine

Description

The concept of the ‘social Trinity’, which posits three conscious subjects in God, radically revised the traditional Christian idea of the Creator. It promoted a view of God as a passionate, creative, and responsive source of all being. Keith Ward argues that social Trinitarian thinking threatens the unity of God, however, and that this new view of God does not require a ‘social’ component. Expanding on the work of such theologians as Barth and Rahner, who insisted that there was only one mind of God, Ward offers a coherent, wholly monotheistic interpretation of the Trinity. Christ and the Cosmos analyses theistic belief in a scientific context, demonstrating the necessity of cosmology to theological thinking that is often overly myopic and anthropomorphic. This important volume will benefit those who seek to understand what the Trinity is, why it matters, and how it fits into a scientific account of the universe. Preface page ix Acknowledgements xvii part i the threefold nature of the divine being 1 Introduction: Talking about the Trinity 3 2 Why We May Need to Restate the Ways in Which We Talk about the Trinity 6 3 The Doctrine of Divine Simplicity 11 4 Cosmological and Axiological Explanation 18 5 Divine Potentiality and Temporality 23 part ii the biblical sources of trinitarian thought 6 Three Centres of Consciousness? 33 7 The Synoptic Gospels 43 8 John’s Gospel 52 9 The Trinity in the Epistles 66 10 The Idea of Incarnation 73 part iii the trinity, immanent and economic 11 Why Three? 85 12 The Trinity and Revelation 92 13 Hegel and Modern Theology 98 14 The Immanent Trinity 102 15 The Identity of the Immanent and the Economic Trinity 108 16 Hegel Again 111 17 What Creation Adds to the Trinity 116 18 The Epistemic Priority of the Economic Trinity 120 19 The Trinity and Naive Realism 128 20 The Trinity and the Cosmos 133 21 Revelation and the Immanent Trinity 137 part iv the social trinity 22 Persons and Substances 145 23 The Idea of a Personal and Free Creation 151 24 The Logical Uniqueness of Persons 155 25 The Divine Nature and Freedom 158 26 Freedom in God and in Creatures 166 27 Persons as Necessarily Relational 171 28 An Ontology of the Personal? 176 29 Intra-Trinitarian Love 184 30 Infinite Gods 188 31 Divine Love and Necessity 191 32 Love and Alterity 199 33 Trinity versus Monotheism 204 34 The Passion of Christ 207 35 God and Abandonment 211 part v the cosmic trinity 36 The Doctrine of Perichoresis 219 37 The Convergence of Social and One-Consciousness Models of the Trinity 232 38 Life-Streams and Persons 239 39 Modalism and Necessity 246 40 The Cosmic Trinity 257 Bibliography 263 Subject Index 267 Name Index 270