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The Trinity and Christian Life: A Broadly Thomistic Account of Participation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2024

Lydia Schumacher
Lydia Schumacher*
Affiliation:
University of Edinburgh, Divinity, Edinburgh, United Kingdom
*
[email protected]
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Type
Original Article
Information
New Blackfriars , Volume 96 , Issue 1066 , November 2015 , pp. 645 - 657
Copyright
Copyright © 2015 The Dominican Council

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References

1 See for example Boff, Leonardo, Trinity and Society (Eugene: Wipf and Stock reprint, 2005)Google Scholar; Coakley, Sarah, God, Sexuality and the Self: An Essay On the Trinity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014)Google Scholar; Fiddes, Paul S., Participating in God: A Pastoral Doctrine of the Trinity (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 2000)Google Scholar; Gunton, Colin, The Promise of Trinitarian Theology (London: Continuum, 2003)Google Scholar; Moltmann, Jürgen, Trinity and the Kingdom of God (London: SCM, 2000)Google Scholar; Powell, Samuel M., Participating in God: Creation and Trinity (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003)Google Scholar; Volf, Miroslav, After Our Likeness: The Church as the Image of the Trinity (Grand Rapids: Eerdman's, 1998)Google Scholar; Zizioulas, John, Being as Communion (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 2004)Google Scholar;

2 Rahner, Karl, The Trinity, trans. Donceel, Joseph (London: Burns and Oates, 1970), p. 16–17Google Scholar.

3 Karl Rahner, The Trinity, 22, 55: on ‘Rahner's rule’.

4 For example Catherine LaCugna, God for Us; John Zizioulas, Being as Communion.

5 See Jürgen Moltmann, ‘The Mystery of the Trinity’, in Trinity and the Kingdom of God, ch. 5 (pp. 129–190).

6 MacQuarrie, John, In Search of Deity: An Essay on Dialectical Theism (London: SCM, 2012)Google Scholar.

7 For example, Paul Fiddes, Participating in God; Jürgen Moltmann, Trinity and the Kingdom of God.

8 Philosophical versions of social Trinitarianism can be found in the thought of Richard Swinburne, David Brown, Cornelius Plantinga, and Peter van Inwagen.

9 Moltmann, Jürgen, ‘Perichoresis, An Old Magic Word for a New Trinitarian Theology’, in Meeks, M. Douglas (ed.), Trinity, Community, Power: Mapping Trajectories in Wesleyan Theology (Nashwood: Kingsood Books, 2000), pp. 69–83Google Scholar. Karen Kilby offers a relevant critique in, ‘Perichoresis and Projection: Problems with Social Doctrines of the Trinity’, New Blackfriars 81:957 (November 2000), pp. 432–45CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Also see Carl Mosser in his article, ‘Fully Social Trinitarianism’, in McCall, Thomas and Rea, Michael C. (eds), Philosophical and Theological Essays on the Trinity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, where he writes: ‘According to perichoresis, the divine persons know and love one another in an unreserved, uninhibited, unmediated, and utterly unselfish manner. They therefore experience a depth of communion far beyond anything known in human society that results in a profound harmony of thought, purpose, and will. Power is exercised by the individual persons only with the consent and co-operation of the other two.’

10 Carl Mosser, ‘Fully Social Trinitarianism’, 145.

11 On this matter, see especially the work of Moltmann in Trinity and the Kingdom of God, Boff in Trinity and Society, and Miroslav Volf in After Our Likeness.

12 ST (Summa Theologiae) Ia.3.

13 ST 1a.3–11. See David Burrell's defence of divine simplicity and riposte to process theology in, Aquinas: God and Action (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, repr. 2008)Google Scholar.

14 ST Ia.33.

15 ST Ia.27.2; ST Ia.34–5: on the Son as Word and Image.

16 ST Ia.37.

17 ST Ia.36.

18 ST Ia.37–8

19 ST Ia.27.3–4.

20 ST Ia.18.4.

21 ST IIIa.10.

22 For a detailed discussion of this matter, see chapter three on Aquinas of Weinandy, Thomas, Does God Change? The Word's Becoming at the Incarnation (Still River: St Bede's, 1985)Google Scholar. See also chapters four and five for Weinandy's response to kenotic and process theology, respectively.

23 See Thomas Weinandy's Thomist refutation of claims regarding divine suffering in Does God Suffer? (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2000)Google Scholar.

24 Tanner, Kathryn, ‘Social Trinitarianism and Its Critics’, in Rethinking Trinitarian Theology, ed. Wozniak, Robert J. and Maspero, Giulio (London: T & T Clark, 2012)Google Scholar, see, especially pp. 382–86.

25 ST Ia.40.

26 See David Fergusson's work to chart a course between communitarianism and individualism in Community, Liberalism and Christian Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005)Google Scholar.

27 See Harriet A. Harris’ superb article on this score, which responds to a number of accounts in which personhood is defined in terms of relations, ‘Should We Say that Personhood is Relational?’ Scottish Journal of Theology 51: 2 (May, 1998), pp. 214–34CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

28 On this, see Zachhuber, Johannes, ‘Who Loves? Who is Loved? The Problem of the Collective Personality’, in Dynamics of Difference: Christianity and Alterity: A Festschrift for Werner Jeanrond, ed. Schmiedel, U./Matarrazo, J. (London: T & T Clark, 2015), 199–207Google Scholar.