Social Doctrine of the Trinity and Communion Ecclesiology in Leonardo Boff and Gisbert Greshake

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.

1983 ◽  
Vol 36 (2) ◽  
pp. 213-227 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roger Olson

Whether or not one may wish to call it a renaissance in the doctrine of the Trinity, there has been a notable resurgence of interest in trinitarian thinking in recent theology. Some of the most suggestive contributions have been made by two theologians whose works are generally regarded as ‘eschatologically’ oriented. In a volume recently published in English asThe Trinity and the Kingdom of God, Jürgen Moltmann attempts to develop a comprehensive doctrine of the trinitarian being of God taking up and expanding themes already set forth in such earlier works asThe Crucified God, The Church in the Power of the Spirit, and several journal articles dealing with the ‘trinitarian history of God’. Throughout these works Moltmann was concerned to demonstrate the openness of the being of God for man and history and toward the future. The trinitarian differentiation and unity of God, he argued in various ways, is to be closely identified with the events of salvation history, especially the cross of Jesus. In his most recent book, he attempts to systematise this approach to the doctrine of God through a ‘salvation historical’ and ‘social’ doctrine of the Trinity. This work represents a major contribution to trinitarian thought and is both complex and wide-ranging in its treatment of the subject. It will be our concern here simply to investigate some of the major themes related to the problem of God's relationship to history, that is, God's ‘historicality’.


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).


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.


2018 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 65-84
Author(s):  
DOUGLAS F. KELLY

In the context of Evangelical reformulations of the Trinity in a new sub-ordinationism, the article reasserts the traditional assertion of the full equality of all persons of the Trinity. To that end, the author exposits John Calvin’s formulation of the Trinity and that of the church fathers, which anticipates Calvin’s doctrine. Crucial to a proper understanding are the distinctions between essence and persons and between the ontological Trinity and each person’s role in redemption. The historical survey concludes with B. B. Warfield’s and Thomas F. Torrance’s assessments of Calvin’s contribution. Finally, three implications linked to our doctrine of God—knowledge, forgiveness, and love—are considered.


2013 ◽  
Vol 67 (2) ◽  
pp. 101-116
Author(s):  
Hans Burger

Discussions concerning the trinitarian renaissance often focus on the social doctrine of the trinity. However, this renaissance was originally also of hermeneutical significance, as demonstrated in the work of Ingolf U. Dalferth. In the cross and resurrection of Jesus Christ, God’s Spirit discloses God’s presence to us and affords us new orientation in this light. The main problem of Dalferth’s contribution is the lack of hypostatical weight of the Son. As a result, the renewal of human subjectivity in Christ is neglected.


2001 ◽  
Vol 54 (3) ◽  
pp. 366-384 ◽  
Author(s):  
Randall E. Otto

Perichoresis (perichoresis, circumincessio) is a theological term which describes the ‘necessary being-in-one-another or circumincession of the three divine Persons of the Trinity because of the single divine essence, the eternal procession of the Son from the Father and of the Spirit from the Father and (through) the Son, and the fact that the three Persons are distinguished solely by the relations of opposition between them.’ This term was popularized in the eighth century by John of Damascus who, in his De fide orthodoxa, said the three Persons of the Trinity ‘are made one not so as to commingle, but so as to cleave to each other, and they have their being in each other [kai ten en allelais perichoresin] without any coalescence or commingling.’ This important theological term, which Karl Barth rightly regarded 'as the one important form of the dialectic required to complete the concept of ‘three-in-oneness’ ‘from the side of the unity of the divine essence’ and ‘from the side of the original relations,’ has suffered in some recent theology from its appropriation to describe relationality apart from mutually shared being. For example, in his influential social doctrine of the Trinity, Jürgen Moltmann emphasizes the ‘relational, perichoretically consummated life processes’ of the three Persons who ‘cannot and must not be reduced to three modes of being of one and the same divine subject,’ whose unity ‘cannot and must not be seen in a general concept of divine substance.’


Author(s):  
Richard H. Roberts

Kant’s critique of the limits of the knowable and the status of the self in relation to God ceded a marginal role lying outside scientific knowledge. The Christian doctrine of God as Trinity was both conserved and marginalized. Schleiermacher and Ritschl subjected the doctrine of God to major reinterpretation. Hegel’s account of the doctrine of the Trinity is part of a diachronic ontology and epistemology patterned by, but radically at variance with, the synchronic Kantian critique and an ambiguous achievement. The dialectical fragmentation of Hegel’s thought following his death in 1831 informed the nineteenth century, and flows through the twentieth into the twenty-first century. eResponses to Christian thought on God include Schelling, Marx, Feuerbach, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, historians of dogma and theologians from Harnack and Troeltsch to Barth and Andresen, an array of twentieth-century thinkers and theologians, besides second- and third-wave feminism and post-colonial critique.


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