God the Trinity

Author(s):  
Gilles Emery

Aquinas occupies a prominent place in today’s discussions of Trinitarian theology. Each of the seven sections of this chapter deals with an aspect that is or should be present in any reception of Aquinas’ doctrine of the Trinity: the centrality of Trinitarian faith in Aquinas’ theology; the nature and purpose of Aquinas’ Trinitarian theology; the cardinal place of the economy of salvation; the relationship between Trinitarian processions and missions; the organization of the ‘treatise’ on God in the Summa theologiae; the divine persons as ‘subsisting relations’; the Son as Word and Image, and the Holy Spirit as Love and Gift. In Aquinas, Trinitarian doctrine provides the interpretive framework for understanding all other theological topics (from creation to eschatology).

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.


2011 ◽  
Vol 64 (4) ◽  
pp. 410-424
Author(s):  
Jeffrey Vogel

AbstractThis article explores Austin Farrer's contribution to trinitarian theology, arguing that he grounds understanding of the doctrine of the Trinity in the life of prayer. While Farrer nowhere offers a systematic presentation of the believer's experience of the Trinity, an investigation of his writings, particularly his sermons and devotional works, reveals that it is precisely in prayer that he thinks the force of the doctrine is revealed to the believer. Beginning with Farrer's ‘empirical principle’, the idea that to know anything one must exercise one's relation to it, the article attempts to show how the act of praying constitutes a living out of the doctrine of the Trinity. Living in the Son entails an adoption of an attitude of sonship towards the Father, which Farrer describes most succinctly as an ‘active openness of heart’. This filial attitude, which Christ expressed humanly throughout his life, is adopted by believers through the Holy Spirit who, according to Farrer, is not an object of direct experience. In this, his trinitarian understanding of prayer differs from Sarah Coakley's, whose reflection on this topic serves as a point of comparison at various places throughout the article. Through Coakley's work, the trinitarian nature of prayer has become a theme in contemporary theology. Thus, this article is aimed at more than simply illuminating a somewhat neglected aspect of Farrer's thought; it is also an attempt to contribute to an ongoing, constructive conversation about the Trinity in the life of faith.


2016 ◽  
Vol 12 (32) ◽  
pp. 426
Author(s):  
David T. Ejenobo

The doctrine of the trinity has generated a lot of controversies down the centuries among New Testament scholars. The problem generated by scholars to dissect the Personhood of God has resulted in various shades of interpretations on the relationship between God the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. It is against this background that this paper seeks to examine Paul’s understanding of the Holy Spirit viewed against the backdrop of the doctrine of the Trinity. This study adopted the textual critical method to examine the various nuances of Paul’s allusion to the Holy Spirit with a view to situating them within a proper understanding of the concept of the trinity. The author discovered that for Paul there is no personality distinction between God the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, since man encounters these “persons” in the spiritual realm. Applying the hermeneutical method of contextual interpretation, the author is of the opinion that for the African, conceptualizing God within the realm of the Spirithood of God would be a more practical way of describing the activities of God the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit than the Western conceptualization of the Three Persons in on Godhead.


2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 65-76
Author(s):  
Herman Punda Panda

Karl Rahner made a major contribution to the trinitarian theology in this post-modern era. He has attempted to reconcile the classical doctrine of the Trinity with contemporary thought. Rahner spoke about the topic of the oneness and triadity of God. Regarding the oneness of God, Rahner did not speak about the one ousia / divine essence, but rather the unity or perichoresis of the three divine persons. What is called God here, is not the essence of divinity but the Father who is the source of the Son and the Holy Spirit. Furthermore, Rahner emphasizes the identification and relationship between the immanent Trinity and the economic Trinity which according to him is the important point in the theology of the Trinity. Consequently, the only starting point for developing a theology of the Trinity is the history of our experience with God, in which God reveals Himself in two ways, namely through the Word and the Spirit. This article presents Karl Rahner's thoughts on the Trinity and its relevance to human life. First of all, the author describes about the place of Trinitarian theology in the general framework of Rahner's anthropological theology. Next, it discussed his thoughts on the Trinity itself and at the end, the relevance of the Trinity to human life. This relevance becomes evident in Rahner's thought about the communication of God to man in the form of His Word and Spirit.


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.


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.


Author(s):  
Paul McPartlan

The chapter explores three deeply interlinked aspects of John Zizioulas’s highly influential ecclesiology: the relationship between the church and the Trinity; the relationship between the church and the Eucharist; and finally the consequences of those relationships for the structure of the church. The church is a communion through its participation in the life of the Trinity. In Christ and by the power of the Holy Spirit, it receives and re-receives the gift of communion in every Eucharist, and communion has a shape that reflects the life of God. The Trinity is centred on the Father, and so in the church at various levels the communion of the many is centred on one who is the head. This is the purely theological reason why the synodality of the church requires primacy at the local, regional, and universal levels. The chapter concludes that, while prompting many questions and needing further development, Zizioulas’s proposal has great ecumenical value.


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.


2012 ◽  
Vol 65 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-16
Author(s):  
Najeeb Awad

AbstractIn their study of Augustine'sDe Trinitate, scholars read the fifteen books which comprise this text as a monolithically written discourse on the doctrine of the Trinity. This article is an attempt to examine if it is possible to argue on tenable bases that pneumatology, rather than any other doctrine, is the subject of Augustine's text by showing that the interpretation of the identity and consubstantiality of the Spirit occupies inDe Trinitatea more foundational and central place than just being part of Augustine's discussion on the doctrine of the Trinity. It ultimately suggests that freeing Augustine's text from diachronic prejudices means also wondering if he really wanted to write an additional version of the orthodox doctrine of the Trinity which he already followed, or whether he wanted to contribute something new about a relatively neglected doctrine in the faith of the church.


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