Divine Persons and Notional Acts in the Trinitarian Theology of Thomas Aquinas

2021 ◽  
Vol 82 (4) ◽  
pp. 603-625
Author(s):  
Nicholas E. Lombardo
Keyword(s):  
Thomas Aquinas ◽  
Trinitarian Theology ◽  
The Trinity

This article presents a reconstruction of an important but neglected element of the trinitarian theology of Thomas Aquinas: namely, his teaching on the notional acts, the intratrinitarian acts attributed to the Divine Persons, and how they relate to individual Divine Persons. In the process, this article shows that, for Aquinas, and for medieval theologians more generally, although we can distinguish between the Divine Persons and their respective intratrinitarian acts according to our human mode of understanding, each Divine Person is, in reality (literally, in the res, or in the thing), nothing other than a single eternal act. This article also explains how thinking of the Divine Persons as divine acts offers significant resources for contemporary theology and corrects against certain perceived weaknesses of Aquinas’s trinitarian theology and relation-centered accounts of the Trinity more generally.

Redefining progress in Trinitarian theology: Stephen R. Holmes on the Trinity

2014 ◽  
Vol 86 (1) ◽  
pp. 6-20
Author(s):  
Fred Sanders
Keyword(s):  
Systematic Theology ◽  
Trinitarian Theology ◽  
Divine Attributes ◽  
Classical Theism ◽  
Doctrine Of The Trinity ◽  
Constructive Work ◽  
Historical Theology ◽  
The Trinity

This essay examines some of the implications for contemporary constructive work on the doctrine of the Trinity if Steve Holmes is correct in his judgments about the direction taken by the recent revival of interest in the doctrine. Holmes raises serious questions about the exegetical basis of the doctrine, and raises the question of what God has revealed in the sending of the Son and the Spirit. Some areas of maximal divergence between the classic tradition and the recent revival are probed, such as the recent lack of interest in the elaboration and defense of divinity unity, and also of the divine attributes as explored by classical theism. Finally, Holmes’s work raises questions about the proper relationships between systematic theology and allied theological disciplines such as historical theology and analytic theology.

Word

2019 ◽  
pp. 39-62
Author(s):  
Nathan Lyons
Keyword(s):  
Thomas Aquinas ◽  
Trinitarian Theology ◽  
Cultural Dimension ◽  
Semiotic Analysis ◽  
Divine Nature ◽  
The Absolute

This chapter gives a new, semiotic reading of Thomas Aquinas’ Trinitarian theology, in order to establish the theological ‘height’ of culture. Aquinas develops Augustine’s psychological analogy in explicitly semiotic terms, so that the divine Word is the sign of the Father. He confirms this also in terms of the Son as name and image. Because for Aquinas signs are a kind of relation, his semiotic analysis can be integrated with his notion of divine persons as substantial relations. Aquinas’ semiotic Trinity can be understood as an absolute ‘cultural nature’, in which the divine nature is identical with the semiosis of the persons (signified origin, expressed sign, eternal interpretation). This theological claim suggests a new vantage on the nature-culture question: all created natures possess a cultural dimension, reflecting the absolute cultural nature that is their origin.

Cajetan (Thomas de Vio) (1468–1534)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Edward P. Mahoney
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Psychology ◽  
Great Influence ◽  
Thomas Aquinas ◽  
Human Soul ◽  
Philosophical Thought ◽  
Interesting Development ◽  
The Trinity

Thomas de Vio, better known as Cajetan, has long been considered to be the outstanding commentator on the philosophical thought of Thomas Aquinas. He has had a great influence not only on discussions about Aquinas’ theory of analogical predication regarding God and creatures but also on discussions about Aquinas’ fundamental notions of essence and existence. On both counts his interpretations are at variance with Aquinas himself. He also set himself in opposition to Aquinas when he denied in his later writings that the immortality of the human soul could be demonstrated, arguing that it is a doctrine that must be accepted simply on faith, like the doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation. His explication of Aquinas’ cognitive psychology is an interesting development that goes beyond Aquinas.

Augustine and the Trinity: Whose Crisis?

2003 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 17-32
Author(s):  
Neil Ormerod
Keyword(s):  
Trinitarian Theology ◽  
Human Consciousness ◽  
The World ◽  
The Trinity

This article analyses criticisms made of Augustine's Trinitarian theology by Colin Gunton. It demonstrates that many of these criticisms are unfair, or are based on inconsistencies and inadequacies in Gunton's own position. More constructively, it shows that Augustine's account of human consciousness is not that of an isolated monad, but of a consciousness always in relationship with the world.

The Doctrine of Appropriation as an Interpretative Framework for Karl Barth's Pneumatology of the Church Dogmatics

2007 ◽  
Vol 20 (3) ◽  
pp. 278-290
Author(s):  
Adam McIntosh
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Holy Spirit ◽  
Karl Barth ◽  
Trinitarian Theology ◽  
Church Dogmatics ◽  
The Holy Spirit ◽  
Doctrine Of The Trinity ◽  
The Church ◽  
The Trinity ◽  
Interpretative Framework

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.

Re-conceiving the Trinity as the Mystery of Salvation

1985 ◽  
Vol 38 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-23 ◽  
Author(s):  
C. M. LaCugna
Keyword(s):  
Second Step ◽  
Trinitarian Theology ◽  
Inner Life ◽  
Doctrine Of The Trinity ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Trinity

We began by wondering what it might mean to speak of the immanent and economic threefoldness of God. Rahner's axiom provided leverage on the problem by showing that trinitarian theology is meant above all to be a truth about the mystery of salvation. That is, it is a way of both narrating and conceiving the God who saves and the God who saves.The correspondence between these two emphases presented a hermeneutical problem at two methodological levels, and so the second step was to examine the meaning of the copula in Rahner's axiom in order to decide how we might (a) link up our narrative of God's history with us with God's inner history, and, having answered that, how we might (b) link up our speculation about God's ‘inner’ life with the divine reality. We replied in the case of (a) that the axiom legislates speaking of God by drafting an equivalence between the temporal history of God-with-us and the eternal history of God, and vice versa: the economic trinity is the immanent trinity, and vice versa. In the case of (b) and building on the answer to (a), we proposed an understanding of the trinity as a theological model. The model (trinity of relations) is related to the ‘modeled’ (God-in-relation) both heuristically and ontologically. The theological model of trinity therefore must incorporate imagistic as well as discursive, indirect as well as direct modes of discourse.Finally, we indicated some of the theological and methodological consequences of understanding God as being the ‘God for us’, and of re-conceiving the doctrine of the trinity to be a theological model of salvation.

The Trinity and Unicity of the Intellect of St. Thomas Aquinas

1947 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 120-120
Author(s):  
Vernon J. Bourke ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Thomas Aquinas ◽  
The Trinity
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