The Triune Creator: A Historical and Systematic Study by Colin E. Gunton

Author:Colin E. Gunton
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Published: 2010-01-23T12:47:00+00:00

7

RETURNING TO THE TRINITY: A TALE OF FIVE CENTURIES

It is not the case that there is no trinitarian dimension to the theology of creation of the Middle Ages. As we have seen, certainly in the later period, there is a return to trinitarian considerations which appears to have had some effect on the wider world. In any case there are always continuities within the discontinuities of history. The first with which we are concerned is that between the later Middle Ages and the Reformation, for although there is a new beginning, it does not come out of the blue. We have seen that there is in Scotus a conception of the christological determination of all reality, and the influence of Scotus and his successors on John Calvin has recently been charted.' On the other hand, the shape of the discontinuity - although, again, it is not a complete one, as we shall see when we come to trace the theology of Calvin - is marked by the extreme voluntarism of William of Ockham. We have already seen that his essentially monistic and non-trinitarian conception of the divine willing helped to engender the world of deism with its vanishing creator. Crucial here is the distinction between the absolute and the ordained power of God. At the outset, we must affirm that some distinction between what God could have done and what he actually did in creating the universe is essential, not only for the notion of the contingency of the world - the world is what it actually is, not what it had necessarily to be - but also for maintaining the distinction between God and the world. But it does not follow that all formulations of the doctrine are adequate.

The weakness of the Ockhamist theology is that it tends to move from the former to the latter: from what God can do to what he has done, rather than the other way round. The tendency of all theology of creation after Augustine is to move from the abstract to the concrete: from abstract omnipotence or absolute power to the economy of creation and redemption. The deficiencies of the theologies we have traced are shown in part by a concentration on the concept of causality at the expense of a more personally conceived relation between God and the world. Instead of action mediated through Jesus Christ we are presented with abstract considerations which effectively by-pass the second and third persons of the Trinity in favour of some immanent continuity between God and the semi-divine ideas, and so between the mind and God. A similar problem returns in the nineteenth century with Schleiermacher, whose conception of the absolute dependence of the world on God, by being conceived for the most part independently of the eternal, let alone the incarnate, Son - in whom that theologian appears not to have believed - is always liable to collapse into pantheism.

With the Reformers two notes are struck which help to generate a renewal of the trinitarian tradition.

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