Wolfhart Pannenberg's Doctrine of the Trinity

1990 ◽  
Vol 43 (2) ◽  
pp. 175-206 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. Olson

In the past some of Wolfhart Pannenberg's interpreters have suggested that a major weakness of his revision of the doctrine of God is a neglect of the doctrine of the Trinity. In 1975 Herbert Burhenn criticised Pannenberg for exercising considerable reservation with regard to the three-in-oneness of God and for reducing the trinitarian distinctions of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit to temporal distinctions. He also stated that ‘The Trinity cannot function for Pannenberg, as it does for Barth, as a structural principle of theology.’ About a decade later Elizabeth Johnson very cogently noted the need for a well-developed concept of the Trinity in Pannenberg's theology:

1993 ◽  
Vol 29 (4) ◽  
pp. 465-495 ◽  
Author(s):  
T. W. Bartel

If proof is required that yesterday's scandal can become today's fashion, we need look no further than recent discussions of the Christian doctrine of the Trinity. Just a generation ago, Trinitarians typically insisted that the members of the Godhead are not distinct persons in any literal sense. But during the past few years, more and more philosophically sophisticated Christians have unblushingly maintained that the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are not just different persons, but different individuals – that the Trinity consists of three divine beings.


Author(s):  
David. T. Williams

The emergence of the Charismatic movement has generated a new awareness and interest in the Person and work of the Holy Spirit, but has also brought a realisation that there is a still-neglected Person of the Trinity, the Father. Part of the reason for this lies in the historical development in the doctrine of the Trinity, which led to a belief that external actions of God are not differentiated between the Persons, and also in the fact that the Father only generally acts in the world by Son and Spirit, so has no clear role. It seems natural to attribute creation to the Father, but even here, the Bible sees the Son as the actual creator. Nevertheless, the Father can be seen as the source of the concepts and means behind the material; interestingly there are hints of this in classical Greek thought and other faiths. This is ongoing, perhaps particularly in the evolutionary process of the world. Thus, paralleling the incarnation, the Father is present in the material universe, as its ethos. He can also be seen to be affected by creation, sharing in its nature in his kenōsis, and in its suffering. Creation then inspires a sense of wonder not only from its existence, extent and nature, but from its interactions and underlying concepts; this is worship of the Father. Sin is then when this is overlooked, or when actions disrupt it; these are an offence to the Father.


2017 ◽  
Vol 99 (2) ◽  
pp. 255-274
Author(s):  
Jillian Jackson

This paper uses the doctrine of the Trinity to demonstrate the unique role God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit can play in the healing of eating disorders and explores how a trinitarian framework may be brought alongside healthcare services to aid in recovery. Drawing on the theological work of Sarah Coakley, the paper considers various trinitarian models and practices that can redirect our minds, hearts, and imaginations to a new participation in the trinitarian God. This essay seeks to show that it is also possible to challenge the idolatrous thought patterns of an eating disorder by redirecting the mind to participation in life through the lens of the life-giving Trinity.


Author(s):  
Kyle C. Strobel

Commonly recognized as fundamental to his thought as a whole, Edwards’s doctrine of the Trinity has, nonetheless, been the subject of much discord in the secondary literature. After initially mapping the various perspectives (or ‘instincts’) on the issue, this chapter turns to the notion of personalism to explain the inner logic of Edwards’s account. This unique feature of Edwards’s doctrine explains how he can utilize traditional theological machinery in his doctrine of God (i.e. psychological imagery, simplicity, actus purus, filioque, and divine blessedness), to establish his idiosyncratic development of perichoresis and the divine attributes. What this reading of Edwards’s doctrine helps establish is how he articulates human speech about God, and various rules for how that speech functions (e.g. talk about God is to talk about person(s); God’s self-giving is funded by, rather than diminished by, God’s perfection).


Author(s):  
Dan Howard-Snyder

The doctrine of the Trinity is central to Christian theology. The part of the doctrine that concerns us here may be stated in these words: although the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are different persons, each is the same God as the other; they are not three Gods, but exactly one God. These words arguably imply a contradiction. For example, if the Father is not the same person as the Son, then the Father is not identical with the Son; thus, if each is a God, there are at least two Gods, which contradicts the claim that there is exactly one God. Analytic theologians have responded to this line of argument and others related to it. Each response aims to model a consistent doctrine of the Trinity, one that provides the resources to reject such arguments while retaining Trinitarian orthodoxy. We can classify these attempts by distinguishing those according to which there is no numerical sameness without identity from those according to which there is numerical sameness without identity. Attempts in the first group tend to raise worries about consistency with orthodoxy. Attempts in the second group tend to raise worries about intelligibility.


2007 ◽  
Vol 20 (3) ◽  
pp. 278-290
Author(s):  
Adam McIntosh

Although Karl Barth is widely recognised as the initiator of the renewal of trinitarian theology in the twentieth century, his theology of the Church Dogmatics has been strongly criticised for its inadequate account of the work of the Holy Spirit. This author argues that the putative weakness of Barth's pneumatology should be reconsidered in light of his doctrine of appropriation. Barth employs the doctrine of appropriation as a hermeneutical procedure, within his doctrine of the Trinity, for bringing to speech the persons of the Trinity in their inseparable distinctiveness. It is argued that the doctrine of appropriation provides a sound interpretative framework for his pneumatology of the Church Dogmatics.


2019 ◽  
Vol 75 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Teddy C. Sakupapa

This contribution offers a survey of the modern African theological discourse on the Trinity as a distinctive Christian doctrine of God. It is a systematic narrative review of primary literature on the doctrine of the Trinity in modern African theology with a view to identify main trends, key concepts and major proponents. It is argued that the contemporary African Trinitarian Hermeneutics cannot be understood in isolation from African debates on translatability of concepts of God framed first in terms of the reinterpretation of the theological significance of pre-Christian African concepts of God and subsequently as an outcome of African Christological reflection. The article affirms an apophatic resistance to any tendency to take God for granted as recently advanced by Ernst Conradie and Teddy Sakupapa.


2006 ◽  
Vol 59 (2) ◽  
pp. 175-182 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gordon S. Mikoski

This paper elucidates the connections in Gregory of Nyssa's thought between the rite of baptism, the doctrine of God as Trinity, and practices of ecclesial pedagogy. These components formed a dynamic and differentiated whole for Gregory. To consider one element in isolation from the others runs the risk of interpretive distortion of Gregory's work. This means that the current tendency to harvest Gregory's trinitarian ideas abstracted or disembodied from the rite of baptism and practices of ecclesial pedagogy perpetuates the false notion that the doctrine of the Trinity can be adequately treated apart from liturgical and pedagogical concerns.


Horizons ◽  
2006 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 239-255 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brian M. Doyle

ABSTRACTThis essay examines the methodological relationship of social doctrines of the Trinity and ecclesiologies of communion. The Theologies of Gisbert Greshake and Leonardo Boff represent theologians arguing that ecclesiology must be based on a doctrine of God which they present from a social (or psychological) perspective. The goal of the essay is to expose some of the methodological assumptions made by ecclesiologists and the value of social approach to the Trinity can have in an ecclesiology of communion.


1917 ◽  
Vol 5 ◽  
pp. 73-99 ◽  
Author(s):  
Albert Henry Newman

The intellectual, social, and religious upheaval of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries of which the Renaissance and the Protestant Revolution were phases, along with the decidedly skeptical tendency of the Scotist philosophy which undermined the arguments by which the great mysteries of the Christian faith had commonly been supported while accepting unconditionally the dogmas of the Church—together with the influence of Neoplatonizing mysticism which aimed and claimed to raise its subjects into such direct and complete union and communion with the Infinite as to make any kind of objective authority superfluous:—all these influences conspired to lead many of the most conscientious and profoundly religious thinkers of the sixteenth century to reject simultaneously the baptism of infants and the traditional doctrine of the Trinity. Infant baptism they regarded as being without scriptural warrant, subversive of an ordinance of Christ, and inconsistent with regenerate church membership. Likewise the doctrine of the tripersonality of God, as set forth in the so-called Nicene and Athanasian creeds, involving the co-eternity, co-equality and consubstantiality of the Son with the Father and the personality of the Holy Spirit, they subjected to searching and fundamental criticism.


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