God, Evil and the Limits of Theology

Karen Kilby

• Publisher: T&T Clark
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780567698209
• eBook ISBN: 9780567684592
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Denominations

Karen Kilby explores the doctrine of the Trinity and issues of evil, suffering and sin. She offers a critique of the lack of respect for mystery found in the most popular Trinitarian thinking of our time. Kilby gives an apophatic reading of Aquinas on the Trinity and offers a distinct next step in the sequence on the Trinity – the appeal of social doctrines of the Trinity lies principally in their ecclesial and political relevance. She engages with Miroslav Volf's famous ' The Trinity is our social program ' essay and addresses the question of what an alternative politics of an apophatic theology of the Trinity might look like. The essays explore the question of theodicy and argue that evil poses a question to Christians and Christian's theology which can neither be answered nor dismissed. Kilby argues that Christians must live with this mystery, this lack of resolution, rather than trying to diminish the gravity of evil, or allowing evil to dictate their conception of God's goodness or power. By offering a critical reading of Hans Urs von Balthasar and Julian of Norwich she explores the question of whether Christianity can avoid giving a positive valuation to suffering, and concludes the two represent two different strands within the Christian tradition in relation to thought on suffering.

Chapter 1

Perichoresis and projection

Problems with social doctrines of the Trinity

Over the last three decades there has been a great outpouring of writings from both Catholic and Protestant theologians on the doctrine of the Trinity, almost all of which, ironically, have lamented the neglect of the doctrine.¹ Again and again one reads that although the Trinity is central and crucially important to Christianity and Christian theology, it has not been given adequate treatment. It is unacceptable, theologians protest, that the Trinity has come to be regarded as an obscure and complex theological technicality, a piece of celestial mathematics impossible to understand and with little relevance to the life of the ordinary Christian. Karl Rahner remarked that modern Christians were ‘almost mere “monotheists”’, paying lip service to the Trinity but in practice ignoring it. If it were announced that the dogma had been a mistake and was to be erased from official Christianity, nobody, he thought, would be too bothered, neither the ordinary believing Christians nor the authors of theological textbooks.² Rahner’s diagnosis has been widely accepted and widely regretted. The consensus is that the Trinity is at the heart of Christianity, and both theology and piety have gone astray if it is regarded as belonging to the specialists. A retrieval (it is believed) is needed: the Trinity must be understood once again (one reads) as a positive and central element in the Christian faith rather than an embarrassing obscurity, and as profoundly relevant to the life of individual Christians, to the life of the church, and perhaps beyond.

If there is a consensus about the problem, there is also something increasingly approaching consensus as regards the nature of the solution: the chief strategy used to revivify the doctrine and establish its relevance has come to be the advocacy of a social understanding of the Trinity. This line of thought has been gaining momentum especially since the publication of Jürgen Moltmann’s The Trinity and the Kingdom of God,³ and by now has achieved, in many quarters, dominance – it has become the new orthodoxy. Increasingly, indeed, one finds references to it in popular Christian literature and hears its influence in Trinity Sunday sermons.⁴

In what follows I want to raise some doubts about the new orthodoxy. My argument will not be directed against social analogies to the Trinity as such: in themselves these analogies are perhaps no worse than any others. The way in which they are very often used, however, and the claims which are made for them are, I shall argue, deeply problematic.

II

The first step is to offer a brief characterization of contemporary social theories of the Trinity. Most basically social theorists propose that Christians should not imagine God on the model of some individual person or thing which has three sides, aspects, dimensions or modes of being; God is instead to be thought of as a collective, a group, or a society, bound together by the mutual love, accord and self-giving of its members. Many social theories of the Trinity share considerably more than this minimal basis, however. In particular I want to draw attention to three frequently recurring features: first, a certain understanding of the meaning of the word ‘person’ in the classical Trinitarian formula; secondly, a particular picture of the history of the doctrine of the Trinity; and thirdly a tendency to wax enthusiastic when it comes to explaining how the three in the Trinity can also be one.

First of all, then, the term ‘person’. All Christian theologians who want to consider themselves orthodox are committed to the proposition that God is three ‘persons’. And all modern theologians seem to agree that the meaning of person in the context of the Trinity is not simply identical with our current understanding of the word. But as to just how different the meaning is, and in what way, there is not such unanimity. Those twentieth century theologians who do not espouse social theories tend to emphasize what a highly technical term ‘person’ is in the Trinitarian formula, how it has almost nothing to do with our modern notion. Both Barth and Rahner, for instance, suggest that the term is in fact so misleading to the untrained that in most contexts theology would do better to abandon it altogether, to substitute a different terminology. They suggest such alternatives as ‘mode of subsistence’ or ‘mode of being’. The problem, they think, is that because of the evolution of the word’s meaning, when we hear ‘three persons’ we inevitably think of three separate ‘I’’s, three centres of consciousness, three distinct wills and so on, and this, they insist, must be rejected as outright tritheism. So in all but the most technical contexts it is counterproductive to continue to use the word.

Social theorists, on the other hand, acknowledge that the meaning of the word person has changed, but not quite so radically as these others think – not so much that the word itself needs to be abandoned. What is needed is not a new word but only that in using the word ‘person’ Trinitarian theology put up a resistance to some features of the modern secular understanding of this notion. Our contemporary society’s basic understanding of the word, of what it means to be a person, in other words, needs to be reformed by a return to the true Trinitarian understanding. The problem with our usual notion of personhood lies in its connotations of individualism, in the assumption that ultimately each person is an isolated being over against all others. A proper understanding of the Trinity and of the Trinitarian perichoresis (to which I shall return shortly) counteracts this, in their view, and enables one to understand persons as by their very nature interactive, interdependent, in communion with one another.⁵

So the first point that unites the social theorists is that they are, comparatively speaking, quite happy to carry on using the term person in a Trinitarian context. The second, as I mentioned, is a certain reading of the history of doctrine. Social theorists very often distinguish sharply between the way the doctrine of the Trinity was worked out in the East, and how it developed in the West.⁶ In particular, it is often claimed that the Cappadocians in the East took as their starting point the three persons of the Trinity and then asked about unity whereas Augustine in the West began with the oneness of God, with an abstract notion of the divine substance, and then puzzled over how to give an account of the threeness of the persons. And it is in this Augustinian precedence of oneness over threeness that the whole Western tradition went wrong, according to the social theorists’ typical account. They see as one of the consequences of Augustine’s approach, for instance, the fact that from the thirteenth century onwards theological textbooks begin with a treatise on the one God de Deo Uno, and only then move on to God’s threeness, de Deo Trino, and they see this in turn as linked to the contemporary problem of irrelevance: if one has already been introduced to God, learned the basic facts as it were, before ever the question of the Trinity is raised, then it is no surprise that the latter will come to seem simply an intellectual difficulty, a secondary bit of information to be reconciled with a prior, less problematic understanding of God.

The third common characteristic of contemporary social doctrines of the Trinity is the enthusiasm their proponents exhibit when it comes to accounting for how the three persons in God are one. This can be made clear by way of a contrast. One might say that, if one follows Augustine (or at least Augustine as he is understood by the social theorists) and begins from God’s oneness, then the problem of the Trinity is to find a way of accommodating God’s threeness, whereas if one begins with the social theorists from the three persons then the problem is to find a way of making sense of the claim that God is one. But in fact social theorists do not speak of a problem. Instead they tend to see the question of how the three are one as the point where the doctrine comes into its own.

Often social theorists at this point invoke the patristic concept of perichoresis. It is the divine perichoresis which makes the three one, and it is perichoresis which makes the Trinity a wonderful doctrine. There is among the three divine persons, it is said, a kind of mutual interpenetration which is not to be found among human persons, and it is because of this perfect interpenetration that the three persons are one God. ‘The doctrine of the perichoresis’, writes Jürgen Moltmann, ‘links together in a brilliant way the threeness and the unity, without reducing the threeness to the unity, or dissolving the unity in the threeness’.⁷ Moltmann characterizes this perichoresis as a process whereby each person, by virtue of their eternal love, lives in the other two and ‘communicates eternal life’ to the other two; as a circulation of the eternal divine life; as a fellowship; and as a ‘process of most perfect and intense empathy’.

The social theorists’ enthusiasm for perichoresis comes out in two ways. First, God is presented as having a wonderful and wonderfully attractive inner life. I already mentioned Moltmann’s notion of ‘the most perfect and intense empathy’ existing between the persons. Another proponent of the social doctrine, Cornelius Plantinga, in what is in general a very carefully constructed and restrained presentation, writes of the Trinity as ‘a zestful, wondrous community of divine light, love, joy, mutuality and verve’, where there is ‘no isolation, no insulation, no secretiveness, no fear of being transparent to another’.⁸ So the interrelatedness of the Trinity, the divine perichoresis, makes God intrinsically attractive.

Secondly, and more significantly for our purposes, God’s inner life is presented as having positive implications for that which is not God. It is worth looking at some examples. Patricia Wilson-Kastner, in the final chapter of Faith, Feminism and the Christ, commends the doctrine of the Trinity, conceived according to the social analogy, on the grounds that it is supportive of feminist values. The most commonly heard feminist assessment of the Trinity is, of course, rather different, and rather more negative. Usually the attention is on the problematic nature of the language of Father and Son. Whereas abstract philosophical theism may be able to assert that God has no gender, Christian Trinitarianism is tied to speaking of God in these all male terms – or, at best, in language that is two thirds male and one third neuter. But Wilson-Kastner argues that feminists should in fact prefer a Trinitarian understanding of God to what she terms strict monotheism. Imaging God as three persons, she writes, ‘encourages one to focus on interrelationship as the core of divine reality, rather than a single personal reality’, and a single personal reality is almost always, she suggests, whatever the theory may be, ‘imaged as male’.⁹ When in the history of Christian thought the emphasis has been on the one God, this has been God the Father in heaven, ruler of all, the dominant one, the ‘only and unquestioned deity’ who ‘modelled on a cosmic scale the male dominant behaviour expected of all men, living in splendid and absolute isolation’. The Trinity, on the other hand, understood according to the social theory, supports the sort of vision and values favoured by feminists:

Because feminism identifies interrelatedness and mutuality – equal, respectful and nurturing relationships – as the basis of the world as it really is and as it ought to be, we can find no better understanding and image of the divine than that of the perfect and open relationships of love.¹⁰

Wilson-Kastner’s account is influenced by, though not identical to, that of Jürgen Moltmann. He too sets up a contrast between the positive implications of the socially conceived Trinity and the undesirable corollaries of the alternative, which he calls Christian monotheism, and by which he means Christian trinitarianism as it has traditionally been understood in the West. Moltmann argues that Christian monotheism corresponds to, and has been used to legitimate, certain forms of government. In early Christianity it was the Roman empire: corresponding to the one God there is the one empire which brings peace to the warring nations, and the one emperor, who is ‘the visible image of the invisible God’, whose will is law, who makes and changes laws but is not himself bound by them.¹¹ Later, seventeenth-century notions of the absolute right of kings owed something to this same monotheism: the king is ‘above the community of men because he occupie[s] the place of God on earth’; the king’s sovereignty must be absolute because it is a ‘portrait’ of...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Title
• Contents
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 PERICHORESIS AND PROJECTION: PROBLEMS WITH SOCIAL DOCTRINES OF THE TRINITY
• Chapter 2 AQUINAS, THE TRINITY AND THE LIMITS OF UNDERSTANDING
• Chapter 3 IS AN APOPHATIC TRINITARIANISM POSSIBLE?
• Chapter 4 THE TRINITY AND POLITICS: AN APOPHATIC APPROACH
• Chapter 5 THE STATUS OF THE CONCEPT: A REFLECTION ON JOHN ZIZIOULAS’ BEING AS COMMUNION
• Chapter 6 EVIL AND THE LIMITS OF THEOLOGY
• Chapter 7 SIN, EVIL AND THE PROBLEM OF INTELLIGIBILITY
• Chapter 8 GRACE AND PARADOX
• Chapter 9 CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY, ANTI-LIBERALISM AND MODERN JEWISH THOUGHT
• Chapter 10 JULIAN OF NORWICH, HANS URS VON BALTHASAR AND THE STATUS OF SUFFERING IN CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY
• Chapter 11 BEAUTY AND MYSTERY IN MATHEMATICS AND THEOLOGY
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright