tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-155758642024-03-06T23:28:39.718-08:00Gunton Research Discussion GroupThis blog is intended to serve as a discussion forum for all things related to the study of Colin Gunton's theology. Try out ideas, ask questions, point others to a good book or article, or give good criticism here.nate sudahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01381339742322848085noreply@blogger.comBlogger21125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15575864.post-53279092277866522652007-04-27T15:25:00.000-07:002007-04-27T15:37:27.569-07:00PhDs and MastersWell, this blog does seem to be springing back into life again, so it's time I emerge out from under my rock and make a post.<br /><br />I'm pleasantly surprised to see a number of folks recently completing PhDs or Master's theses on Gunton. We could all do the laborious task of tracking down these nuggets the old fashioned way, or if you have recently completed a thesis, are about to finish a thesis, are working on a thesis and really should be finished by now, or just starting a thesis on Gunton, or incorporating Gunton in some way you could post all the pertinent details below to aid your fellow Guntonian researchers. If you are not of an entirely altruistic mind, then you could at least post your details below to make sure no one else nabs your topic before you submit.<br /><br />I'll get the ball started with my own:<br /><br />Nathaniel Suda, 'The Difference the Trininty Makes: A Critical Examination of the Theology of Colin Gunton', University of Aberdeen (not yet submitted). The one sentance summary: a doctrine-by-doctrine account of Gunton's theology paying particular attention to the influence Gunton's doctrine of the Trinity has on each of those doctrines.nate sudahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01381339742322848085noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15575864.post-1140598240631728942007-03-27T10:40:00.000-07:002006-03-30T06:57:13.633-08:00What's New<p><a href="http://www.lst.ac.uk/whoweare/faculty.php?person=GrahamMcFarlane">Graham McFarlane</a> has kindly agreed, and his editor has graciously given permission to reproduce an <a href="http://guntonresearch.blogspot.com/2006/03/guntons-impact.html">article</a> written a few years ago on the influence Gunton has had on theology in the last twenty years. For those less familiar with Gunton's presence in the theological scene, and especially for our North American readers, it is only a very slight exaggeration (if that at all) to describe Colin Gunton's presence in British theology as ubiquitous. The very character of theology in the UK shifted enormously during the time Gunton was writing. He of course was not the sole influence of this change, but he was certainly a leading voice. Gunton mentions this change in the preface to the second edition of The Promise of Trinitarian Theology, Douglas Knight alludes to it in <a href="http://guntonresearch.blogspot.com/2006/03/from-metaphor-to-mediation.html">his essay </a>posted here, and now we have the most extended treatment of Gunton's influence that I've seen in <a href="http://guntonresearch.blogspot.com/2006/03/guntons-impact.html">Graham McFarlane's piece</a>. I am sure you will enjoy.<br /><p>A couple of interesting pieces of news; whether you are in <a href="http://guntonresearch.blogspot.com/2006/03/gunton-in-japan.html">Tokyo</a> or the <a href="http://guntonresearch.blogspot.com/2006/03/theology-in-marketplace.html">frozen food aisle</a>, Gunton’s works will be close by. Worth a look!</p><br /><p>Launched: <a href="http://guntonresearch.blogspot.com/2006/03/launched-guntonresearch-email.html">GuntonResearch Email</a>. Just enter your email in the little box to the right, click join, and you will have the latest posts and comments sent directly to your inbox. Enjoy!</p><br /><p>Two new papers for your reading pleasure. First up is <a href="http://www.tasc.ac.uk/theology/staff/dk/">Douglas Knight</a>'s paper <a href="http://guntonresearch.blogspot.com/2006/03/from-metaphor-to-mediation.html">'From Metaphor to Mediation: Colin Gunton and the concept of mediation</a>' You might have seen this one before, as it was previously published in Neue Zeitschrift für Systematische Theologie. You can also find it on Douglas' excellent web-site <a href="http://www.resourcesforchristiantheology.org/">Resources for Christian Theology</a>. If you like Douglas' stuff, then you will want to check out his <a href="http://www.douglasknight.org/">blog</a>, packed with good theological posts, and perhaps take him up on his offer for a <a href="http://www.resourcesforchristiantheology.org/content/blogcategory/8/70/">free e-copy</a> of his latest book forthcoming from Eerdmans, or you can order a copy from Amazon <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0802863159/qid=1137764933/sr=1-4/ref=sr_1_4/102-3365847-1014542?s=books&v=glance&n=283155">here</a>.</p><br /><p>My own more modest <a href="http://guntonresearch.blogspot.com/2006/03/gunton-on-genesis-1-and-2.html">'Aspects of Colin Gunton's Reading of Genesis 1 and 2' </a>is also newly posted, written for presentation at the <a href="http://www.huss.ex.ac.uk/theology/sst/">SST</a> a couple years back (incidentally where I first met Douglas). As ever, if you take the time to read these papers (it's worth it), then take the time to leave a comment - it only takes a few minutes, and not only does it help advance the discussion of Gunton's thought, but it is a great boost to the writers.</p><br /><br /><p></p><p><br />-------<br /><br />This blog exists as a community for those wanting to discuss Gunton's work. If you have a paper, short essay, or a few collected thoughts which might grow into something more, please let me know and I can post them for discussion - you are sure to get constructive feedback.</p>nate sudahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01381339742322848085noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15575864.post-1143729533181440542006-03-30T06:38:00.000-08:002006-03-30T06:41:01.723-08:00Gunton's Impactreprinted from <a href="http://catalystresources.org/issues/272mcfarlane.html">Catalyst</a> 27 (2001) 2, by Graham McFarlane; used with permission<br /><br />PROFILE: COLIN E. GUNTON <br /><br /><br />In a recent book from the North American evangelical stable (Ancient-Future Faith: Rethinking Evangelicalism for a Postmodern World [Baker, 1999]), R.E. Webber states that before the church learns to be contemporary, it must learn to be historical. Interestingly, another North American, systematician D.H. Williams, argues for a similar return to the historical traditions of the early church (Retrieving the Tradition and Renewing Evangelicalism: A Primer for Suspicious Protestants [Wm.B. Eerdmans, 1999]). Such critical insights are hardly benign. As a British systematician I read them with interest and excitement; they reflect, after all, a significant development from within evangelical systematic theology. In addition, they parallel seismic changes taking place within contemporary, British systematics. As the song goes, “the times they are a changing.” <br /><br />The question that has to be asked in response to such change concerns the reasons why it has occurred at all. Admittedly, the sociological tributaries that feed it are various: the postmodern turn in the last two decades and the steady establishmentarianism of the evangelical constituency as it becomes more mainstream economically and politically. However, there are also significant theological reasons for such a change in attitude from that which once described the evangelical mind and which is best articulated in D. Wells’ critique of evangelicalism—namely, that “what orthodoxy had and what contemporary Evangelicalism so often lacks is a theology at its centre that defines the faith and prescribes the sorts of intellectual and practical relations it should establish in the world” (No Place for Truth [Wm.B. Eerdmans, 1992] 96). His critique may have been pertinent a decade ago, but this is a churchmanship in serious search of a theological identity and is in the process of re-discovering it. <br /><br />Surprisingly, one of the main contributors to this renewal within evangelical theology is a theologian who would not instinctively describe himself as “evangelical.” When we turn to look at the significance of the English, United Reformed Professor of Systematic Theology, C.E. Gunton, at King’s College, University of London, we see clearly the influence one man can have and the difference he can make. <br /><br />Gunton succeeded to the chair in Systematic Theology within a department of Theology renowned for its highly liberal stance. And yet, within the space of two decades, he has turned this department around to the extent that it attracts undergraduates and postgraduates from around the world, many of whom would identify themselves from within the evangelical constituency. For brevity’s sake we can identify two major influences for this. First, there is the methodological reason. From his doctoral studies in Barth and Hartshorne onwards, Gunton has articulated a contemporary Reformed, trinitarian theology, and sought to unpack its systematic implications. As a result of Gunton’s influence, English Systematic Theology has moved from being a purely prescriptive theology of the likes found in L. Berkhof (Systematic Theology [Wm.B. Eerdmans, 1996]), which can be learned parrot-fashion, to one that is much more open-ended and fluid. As Gunton argues, this discipline must have an overall consistency in what it says as well as be aware of the relation between one’s theology and the Bible and wider culture. After all, a systematic theology is not so much one that is rigidly logical, but rather one that has an internal coherence and an external relevance. <br /><br />The second identifiable reason for Gunton’s impact is theological. That is, the content of his theology is rigorously trinitarian, based on the personal revelation of the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ through the Holy Spirit. It is salutary to note that when I commenced my own doctoral studies under Colin the whole trinitarian agenda was on the point of deconstruction. It is now fourteen years later and the very subject is de rigueur. Within English and North American theological circles this can be traced back to the impact of C. Gunton and his immediate circle and mainly through two channels. <br /><br />On the one hand, there has been the ground-breaking development within postgraduate studies. Prior to Gunton’s professorship, postgraduate studies was an isolated affair. At King’s, however, Gunton established a context within which postgraduate studies could flourish. He did this by setting up weekly research seminars where faculty and postgraduate students would meet, listen to an academic paper, and discuss for 2-3 hours. As an academic, this is the ideal working environment. As a doctoral student it was like dying and going to heaven each week! One had a master-class with some of the best theological minds around: Gunton, Metropolitan Zizioulas, Stanley Hauerwas, Robert Jenson. Needless to say, this academic model is now essential to any serious postgraduate community. And from such seminars have come four significant publications: Persons, Divine and Human: King’s College Essays on Theological Anthropology (T. & T. Clark, 2000); Trinitarian Theology Today (T. & T. Clark, 1995); God and Freedom; The Doctrine of Creation (T. & T. Clark, 1997); and On Being the Church: Essays on the Christian Community (T. & T. Clark, 1999). <br /><br />On the other hand, there is Gunton’s prolific and accessible publications. What marks Gunton apart from clearly evangelical writers such as the English McGrath or Canadian Grenz are the facts that he both writes for a wide readership that is not explicitly evangelical and that he is very much a creative theologian who takes the content of his faith and applies it to the major issues facing the contemporary church. In this respect, his published works reflect the key areas requiring theological reflection and innovation. It almost goes without saying that the publications outlined above summarize these areas well. Their contemporary relevance only make them more meaningful. <br /><br />For brevity’s sake we can identify the influence and impact that Gunton has exercised within the discipline of Systematic Theology into five key areas. <br /><br />First, Gunton has identified the correct problematic needing to be addressed. It is the love-hate relationship that we have with Modernity and the Enlightenment. What I have always appreciated in Gunton is his ability to identify the good even in the worst of theological responses. Here is a theologian who both denounces the legacy bequeathed to us by the Enlightenment, and yet will be the first to defend its own critique of a Christianity that was rightly under cultural judgment. His Enlightenment and Alienation: An Essay towards a Trinitarian Theology (Marshall Morgan & Scott, 1985) and his critically acclaimed, The One, the Three and the Many: God, Creation and the Culture of Modernity, The 1992 Bampton Lectures (Cambridge, 1993) outline Gunton’s maturing dialogue with the contemporary world. What will fascinate the reader is an almost total contempt of the postmodern—and rightly so: our cultural and ecclesial malaise stems from our dalliance with modernity, not its flawed successor. <br /><br />Second, Gunton has never abandoned the task of pure theology. What marks him out here from the plethora of voices is his fluid writing style. He is, on the whole, an easy read. This he applies to key doctrinal themes. Thus, it is not surprising to trace a rationale to his publications, beginning with christology in Yesterday and Today: A Study of Continuities in Christology (Wm.B. Eerdmans, 1983), and his now classic The Actuality of Atonement: A Study of Metaphor, Rationality and the Christian Tradition (T. & T. Clark, 1988), which can be described as the application of his critique of modernity in relation to the death of Christ and how it is understood. The mature Gunton has, in turn, exercised his influence in establishing the impressive and excellent International Journal of Systematic Theology, which seeks to publish quality systematic theology in the English medium. <br /><br />Third, Gunton serves as an excellent example of the publishing academic: He publishes what he teaches! Possibly the best example of this is his postgraduate lectures contained in A Brief Theology of Revelation (T. & T. Clark, 1999), in which the systematic task of theology is applied to the problem of revelation in modern theology. This is systematics at its best. For those who are interested, it is further enhanced by two subsequent publications in which Gunton further hones his communication skills. On the one hand there is his very creative Theology through the Theologians (T. & T. Clark, 1997), a master-class in engagement with theological worthies from Augustine through Owen to Irving and Barth. This is then topped by the obligatory, The Cambridge Companion to Christian Doctrine (Cambridge, 1997), edited by Gunton and containing probably some of the best articles on systematics, ethics, and doctrine available. This is a must have, must read requisite to any theological library. <br /><br />Fourth, Gunton’s sense for the immediate is revealed in the growing interest he has in a long-neglected aspect of Christian thought—namely, the relation between God as Creator and creation. It starts in his superb little book, Christ and Creation (Wm.B. Eerdmans, 1993), a theological masterpiece in miniature, and culminates with his The Triune Creator: A Historical and Systematic Study (Wm.B. Eerdmans, 1998). This volume is another must for the student of serious contemporary theology, remembering the aphorism at the start of this review that to be contemporary is to remember history. Once again, Gunton reveals the precocious (some might call it prophetic) nature of faith thinking. <br /><br />Last, with Gunton we meet a culturally informed and exceptionally interesting personality. This comes through in any conversation with the man. His presence is informed by his prescience which has been earthed and grounded in a profound engagement not only with the Fathers of the church, but also with contemporary prophets and sages, whether popular or academic. Here is a theological mind that is not afraid to eschew the cultural and epistemological altars and expose their fallacious identities. To some extent, the mantle of Calvin, Owen, and Barth has fallen in its right place. In turn, by method and example, he has emboldened new generations of thinking Christians, both men and women, old and young, European and Asian, Capitalist and Communist, to take up the challenge to study, be approved, rightly handle, and defend. In so doing, one is encouraged to persevere and plot a chart through sometimes hostile waters. <br /><br />Consequently, Gunton deserves his place among some of the most significant theologians of the twentieth century. He is not a Barth because Barth has already pulled down the walls of modernity. Nevertheless, he has the same tenacious and unswerving focus and determination as Barth and his doctoral supervisor, R. Jenson. This being so, his influence has not waned and will continue well into the present century. For this reason, he should be read on both sides of the water. <br /><br />By Graham McFarlane, London Bible College.nate sudahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01381339742322848085noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15575864.post-1143491876649745402006-03-27T12:34:00.000-08:002006-03-27T12:37:56.773-08:00Gunton in JapanForget Bill Murray, something is gained in translation. A quick look at the logs for this site shows me Gunton has a worldwide appeal, but mostly in English-speaking countries. So I was pleasantly surprised when <a href="http://www.hashimoto-church.org">Taku Suda </a>contacted me about his <strong>Japanese translation of <em>Christ and Creation</em></strong>. Taku is a minister in Japan, but is currently studying at Cambridge doing a PhD on John Owen’s Trinitarian theology; before that he completed a M.Div thesis on Pannenberg and a B.Th. thesis on Gunton’s Trinitarian theology. The Japanese edition includes a brief introduction to Gunton’s theology in the afterword, and a short introduction by Gunton himself. <br /><br />Also, to be seen on the shelf soon is a translation of <em>Theology through Preaching</em> by Hiroo Yanagida. <br /><br />Taku added “My translation of <em>Christ and Creation </em>and Yanagida's translation of <em>Theology through Preaching</em> (not yet published) are the only translations of his book in Japan. Sadly enough, Gunton is not yet well-known in Japan so far, though similar interest in theology has been widespread. But after my publication, it seems he [is becoming] recognized by some scholars.”<br /><br />Well done Taku and Hiroo!<br /><br />P.S. Taku and I have the same last name, but no relation.<br />P.P.S. If you will be at the SST Conference in Leeds next week look up Taku, he will be there.nate sudahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01381339742322848085noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15575864.post-1143491679342520762006-03-27T12:33:00.000-08:002006-03-27T12:34:39.850-08:00Theology in the MarketplaceShopping List: potatoes, carrots, milk, pork chops, bread, sugar, cereal, and . . . <em>Act and Being</em>? Apparently now you can pick up some of Gunton’s best while walking down the frozen foods isle at <a href="http://www.tesco.com/books/search.aspx?Ntt=colin+gunton&VSI=1&Ntk=primary&Nty=1&Ntx=mode%2Bmatchall">Tesco’s</a>. What’s next, <em>The One, the Three and the Many</em> on Oprah’s Book Club?<br /><br />(for our non-UK readers, Tesco’s is a major supermarket)nate sudahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01381339742322848085noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15575864.post-1142620460150132852006-03-17T10:33:00.000-08:002006-03-17T11:19:38.783-08:00Launched: GuntonResearch EmailAs more and more people are visiting this site, I thought it would be useful for folks to get the latest posts and comments sent directly to their inbox. With that in mind, see the new 'Join GuntonResearch' section in the sidebar. Enter your email in there, click join, and you will receive all new posts and comments directly in your inbox! No more need to venture back to this site every day, or subscribe to the syndication feed. No catches; just one way of helping this expanding community grow.<br /><br />PS: If you are a blogger, and want to put something like this into your blog, contact me (either by posting a comment to this post or via email which can be found in my profile page) and I'll help you through it.nate sudahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01381339742322848085noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15575864.post-1142329369229415122006-03-14T01:41:00.000-08:002006-03-14T01:42:50.540-08:00From Metaphor to MediationFrom Metaphor to Mediation: Colin Gunton and the concept of mediation. <br /><br />Douglas Knight <br /><br /><br />The context of English theology at the beginning of the nineteen-eighties was The Myth of God Incarnate. What right did theology have in the university and Dare we speak of God in public? were deemed the questions of the day. Theology was written in conditional mode, sentences took the form ‘If, as Christians have traditionally believed,…’, with the truth of statements deferred to the arrival of permission from ‘rationality’, or some such abstraction. There was an audible cringing and sneering. Doctrines were examined to ask which of them insulted the dignity of ‘modern man’ and ought to be expunged. Tradition, imagination and the indeterminability of the relationship of language and world had to be laboriously defended. Reason and faith were invariably set in opposition, the doctrine of the atonement was losing to theodicy, and Father Son and Holy Spirit were discovered to be names, and therefore less adequate than concepts. <br /><br />The crisis was taken with the utmost seriousness. The pace of change was increasing exponentially, nothing could remain as it was, everything had to be dumped in favour of something not yet constructed. It is the Church's task to make its confession against claims about the imminent passing away of all knowledge, but English theology seemed to be without resistance to this sort of cheap millenarianism. The declarations of the absolute newness of the time were nothing more than a vacuous rhetoric, but voices saying so could hardly be heard. <br /><br />Amongst those not impressed by the declaration of crisis was Colin Gunton. Gunton believed that the tradition had seen all this before, indeed, that far from being alarming because utterly new, these self-styled new challenges were composed of elements as old as the tradition and were quite familiar to those prepared to immerse themselves in its history and make diachronic comparisons. In Yesterday and Today he argued that the Church had cut its teeth on exactly these challenges, and that the scars of honourable war-wounds sustained against them remain in the creeds precisely so we should not forget this. In ‘modernity’ we were being offered the familiar gnostic ingredients re-warmed; these ingredients did not make an intellectual alternative, being composed of nothing more than breathless excitement. The Church has always encountered such claims about the coming of some new aeon, with its new leader and his claims to new revelation, and it has always been the job of theologian to meet them with laughter and sober scholarship. Belief in such an aeon is no more than the demand theology give away (to the enemy) the resources of memory and imagination entrusted to it, and which constitute its weapons. The mistakes attributed to theology ‘from above’ were to be rectified by a theology that started from history and humanity and believed itself able to arbitrate on what fell within the definition of the human, and what constituted acceptable extrapolations from human history to divine. Gunton argued that theology from below was simply the reverse of what it took to be the approach of its opponent, not a serious attempt to question a crass polarity from the perspective of the Church's confession. Just as there is no talk of man without God, so there is no account of God except as he has made himself known and continues to control his own appearing and our knowledge of it. Gunton argued that theologies, including secular theologies, that start from one side or the other were opposites sides of a single debased coin. <br /><br />Since the nineteen-eighties the strong monist drive of modernity has flipped over to become a rhetoric about plurality, though it is no clearer about how particularity and thus plurality can be secured. Within this altered context the theological scene has recovered some self-respect and dropped the self-deprecatory tone. That the context has changed is due to many factors, but that there has been a change of tone in theology in the UK is due in part to Colin Gunton. Gunton argued that the challenges to theology were themselves ‘theologies’, impoverished and disguised, but traceable by the historian, and identifiable as the returning fall-out from earlier crises. We should revisit the history of the tradition to identify where such ‘theologies’ have previously come to the surface, for such moments tell us about the deeper currents of the metaphysics on which Western thought continues to move. In particular Gunton's contention is that the concept of person is theological, and has since Augustine been insufficiently interpreted as such by the Western tradition. Christian theology challenges the ‘theologies’ that appear under the names of ‘secularity’ and ‘modernity’, and that talk of God is the means to secure a place for man and give meaning to talk of man. The doctrine of the Trinity is the means to talk about the world of action for God and man together that God has opened for us in Jesus Christ. <br /><br />Gunton has authored and edited a series of books setting out what the Trinity as doctrine and rule achieves. A trinitarian concept, the imago Dei differentiates the concepts of person and individual. Persons are mutually constitutive, whereas that peculiarly impoverished concept of person, the individual, defined in opposition to all others and otherness, has no means to tolerate or be with what is not himself. The kind of philosophy that theology has understood itself to be answerable to asked questions that relied on just this sort of view in which individuals regarded their social and natural worlds as alien and unpleasant. It may be that such philosophy exists only in departments of religion, but there it asks questions about autonomy derived from an over-simplified view of what was claimed and settled in the enlightenment. <br /><br />Gunton champions the atonement as the medium of that enlightening which is brought by the revealing of Jesus Christ. He has laid out the central idioms of the atonement - divine justice, the victory of Christ, and sacrifice, and used the conceptuality of metaphor to do so. In this paper I will introduce some of his thought on the issues of persons and atonement, and suggest ways to move out of what I see as the risky idiom of metaphor into what Gunton himself always demands - a pneumatological concept of mediation. Such mediation involves not only confessing the Trinity as the doctrine of God, but employing it as the rule that regulates talk of all God's action. I will ask how successful Gunton has been in showing that God is the issuer of the medium and language in which atonement talk must be set. Is Gunton moving towards a developed pneumatological and ecclesiological medium, via the linguistic-economic question of which community is speaking, hearing and obeying? <br /><br />Trinitarian Theology. <br />Amongst the first to integrate Barth into the English theological conversation, Colin Gunton led the recovery of the doctrine of the trinity, and so the ability to think connectedly and systematically, rather than in the ‘occasional’ English style. The Trinity is a rule about how to talk about the God who addresses himself and corresponds to himself, and for talk about ourselves that corresponds to our future as his creatures, as those can talk about him because they are addressed and taught by him. This rule allows us to talk about the One and the Many without making them mutually exclusive opposites. The trinity is the grammar of plurality which opens the freedom of two parties, by which God and Man may both be free, and freely together. One major change in the culture of theology is a greater readiness to understand that freedom may be given by limits and definitions, not defined merely in absolute opposition to all definition, particularity and constraint. Humans are now free for one another, not to be free from one another. <br /><br />Colin Gunton argues for a strong distinction between person and individual. The unity of the person is not that person's own achievement or possession, but is the work of God, and the concept of person is a theological one. The identity of each person is not hidden in an monadic place-without-extension (the mind, the soul), but spread across the whole nexus of human personhood, constituted and sustained everywhere, and by everyone. One person is not the function of many other persons, for then the question would indeed just be of which persons and which community. Each person is the function of all persons, and decisive in this definition are the persons of Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Not only does the concept of person have the totality of doctrine as its context, but any account of the person has to deal also in smaller and larger ‘non-personal’ categories and units, and be expressed in terms of those forces and elements that are ordered into the process of the becoming of the person. <br /><br />God both distinguishes himself from his work, and identifies his work with himself. Making this distinction and identification is his work, and our knowledge of it is his work too. The distinction between God and world is not obvious (it is no transcendental deduction): it is a function of the grammar of God's work. We are not able lay out this grammar flat before us to see it all at once, or make it available to ourselves as method, for it is personal, is himself the person of God. The concept of person demands that we refuse to put first the question of God or man. Just as method is not prior, the question of ‘either-or’ (..God or man) is not methodologically prior to the answer ‘both-and’ (God, and man). As long as we insist in talking only on the basis of a divine-human dichotomy, we have not understood that persons are imago Dei, they are God's image of God - that they are God's ongoing work, and are therefore presently only readable as such by God, and by us inasmuch as our knowledge is his work. <br /><br />The Imago Dei and Persons divine and human. <br />Gunton defends the primacy of God's action in the relationship of God and man by referring to the divine and human natures of Jesus. This two natures doctrine refers to a concept of nature, by which ‘humanity’ is in the first place the proper predicate of man, and only secondarily may ‘human’ be said to become a predicate of God. Is this not to attempt to secure the freedom of God (from the world, rather than for it) by making the issue of a subordination (naturally rather than theologically interpreted) more significant in the definition of the creature than the relatedness of the Creator to it? I suggest that there is no basis for saying that God - who is not individual, not alone, not without glory or without company - may not make man the proper predicate of his own being. Humanity is a function of the agreement of the Father and Son; the Holy Spirit secures that they can be really for each other in this idiom, and this idiom, humanity, does not detract from their proper being for each other. God is Spirit, able to move freely on both sides of a Creator-creature, divine-human line: two-natures language is intended to state the doctrine of creation, not problematise it. <br /><br />God is not without servants or speech. That God is alone and is the only god - the first clause of the Decalogue - does not clash with the declaration that he has his servants with him. God is alone, and distinct from Israel, and God is with Israel and a member of Israel. Two things are implied in this double statement. The first is that the Law is what God and Israel say and do together. The Torah must understood as witness and as law, that is as both record and as the rules deduced from that record by God and Israel, the two witnesses together. It is not that, without Israel's involvement, God says what will be the case: this would give Israel nothing constitutive to do, nothing except to fail to be God and thus to fail, full stop. To say the same thing again: it is not the case that the Father says what is the case and the Son merely and mutely receives this - the obedience of the Son is more complex and reciprocal than that, albeit asymmetrically reciprocal. The second is that God teases and draws Israel out into agency and intentionality and that the proper definition of agency is the dialectic of converse and conversation with God, the dual or multiple agency of creature and Creator together. It is the concerted obedience of many generations - or the failure of obedience of many generations retroactively supplied by the obedience of One - that makes the obedience of Israel. This obedience and hearing is the work of God, for the Word is already its own reception and obedience. <br /><br />The Western philosophical tradition tends mistakenly to assume that an agent must be single. Insufficiently trinitarian theology therefore always seeks to decide either whether Man is acting alone, and acting on or against God, or God is acting, and without man and against him. The error is in the attempt to break agency down into some substrate that is not agency, and thus to be rid of it. The ordo salutis believes representation and substitution are a zero-sum game in which any action of God diminishes man's room for action. Kant (and Sölle) protested against substitution, believing that Christ's being for us would be an outrage against our own individuality. But we must reply by saying that the end of the action of God is the freedom of action of his creature. The creature of God is not an individual, so there is no account of him that can be made in terms of his isolation from God but only of his freedom with God, a freedom he has to learn within relationship with God. God relates himself to Israel, and because God makes himself the source of Israel's definition, Israel is no unit or monad. The image of God - personhood - is not intrinsic to man - it is not his property - but the function of the work of the Father, Son and Spirit. It is their work, and plurality and freedom are its goal.<br /><br />We can perhaps illustrate this by drawing a broad contrast between the approaches of Augustine and Irenaeus. Augustine's concern was for the soul and interiority, and what has come to be called the concept of mind. On Augustine's version we are drawn out of the world to be saved from it, and the Church is the authority intended to keep its weaker individual members safe until that time. For Irenaeus however, our salvation consists in being drawn together from all corners of the world, together to start the new community that will bring about the renewal and transformation of the world. He stresses the redeemed sensus communis that is learned by the elect and baptised community, within which we are tutored and grown into the skills of relatedness, holding one another open to God's proper action, that will unite earth to heaven. The Imago Dei is plural, and issues not in nature but in freedom. So one question to ask of any theology is whether the Trinity is being fully employed as rule, so it does not rely on any natural or absolute distinction between God and man, as though they were two gods locked in terminal struggle. <br /><br />Atonement 1. The court of law.<br />In Actuality of Atonement Gunton took advantage of the ontology of personhood to talk about the atonement, which involves talking about justice and the lawcourt. Anselm is the chief exponent of the language of the lawcourt. ‘God is the one to whom certain obligations are due: ‘to sin is the same thing as not to render his due to God’ It is God to whom these certain obligations are due, but we must spell out a little further that because they are due to God the Creator they are due also to his creatures - not because creatures have a right, but because it is the will of their Creator that these creatures grow up into the estate he intends for them. <br /><br />To make sense of this talk of obligations we have to show that being is constituted by the whole economy of action in which we speak and give and receive names. The demand we make of the other is that they give us something of themselves, and that that something should be an account of themselves in which we feature, that they sketch out some place which we may come to share with them. The man who does not acknowledge and name his fellows (and their joint lord, the provider of the language in which they can be together) and offer some account of himself among them, leaves himself without anyone to return his own name to him. In refusing to offer them his account of their identity, he cuts himself off from his identity-givers and has no (one else's) account of himself to offer. The accounts we make of each other and which we offer to each other constitute the whole currency and medium of human interaction. The condition of being without supporters, of having a missing identity is the condition of being obliged to give a more public and formal account of yourself - the condition of being taken to a court of law.<br /><br />If being is both the action of recognition-giving and the fabric that is created by it, it can be damaged by infringement or lack. When praise and reputation is not given there is a deficit of being as both fabric and action. Praise and recognition are due to God as the issuer of this economy - but they are therefore due to every member of this economy. What is due to the Creator is also due to his creatures because they are his, and each to receive their specific praise - as creature, as Creator. This doxological ontology is often understood to be true merely of religious discourse (and it is this belief that makes that discourse religious discourse) but it is true of the world too. Does Gunton make this second step of arguing for the general truth of the doxological ontology, or does he see it as a merely religious truth? <br /><br />‘It is sometimes dismissively observed that Anselm takes his view of legality from the medieval feudal order, and the suggestion is that this is to liken the deity to an arbitrary or oppressive ruler. The fact is, however, that the opposite is the case. It was the duty of the feudal ruler to maintain the order of rights and obligations without which society would collapse.’ The lawcourt represents the condition of crisis caused by the appearance of a gap in the fabric of being. ‘Anselm's argument depends upon a particular conception of justice. He holds that God cannot simply overlook breaches of the universal law.’ Such breaches are missing person-fabric which God supplies and fore-gives. God sees what is lacking and responds by supplying what is missing. The two acts are one: the missing fabric is noticed - there is judgement and wrath - and supplied. ‘The ‘plausibility structure’ supporting Anselm’s work is the belief in a divine universal order in which God, man and the creation are to be in harmonious relation. <br /><br />A God who simply remitted penalties would not be God. God defends the poor against those who articulate law and history to their disadvantage. Though he is a king, his power is not ‘absolute’, but federal (asymmetrically reciprocal): God does not give mercy to one by robbing another of justice. A God who remitted penalties would not be God who makes all relationships possible, for to wipe history is to destroy the personal continuity of the parties to the covenant. God does simply make the past of no account, but rather makes up what is missing from it. He supplements what is missing from the account with his own account, but his own account will properly place and restore the account that has been given so nothing is lost or lived in vain. This embraces Kant's insistence that one cannot substitute for another, and meets the claim of justice that the poor are supplied with what has been withheld from them. <br /><br />One question that could be asked of Gunton is whether he is entirely successful in keeping the concept of sin theologically determined. Sin is not a natural category. It is what the elect community, held within a covenant and driven on to holiness, identifies through processes of confession and repentance. Those outside that community can have no knowledge of sin and can no more be guilty of it than an animal can. Sin is gentile being, and only Israel, now gathered out of the gentiles, can retrospectively and doxologically say what it is that she has been redeemed from. If sin is not thoroughly bound in to other doctrines, in particular that of the election of Israel, will it not be derived from a concept of nature, an Aristotelian understanding of sin either as deviation from the norm, or as failure to achieve the full measure of the big man? On such a basis sin would be measured from an origin and be a stuff intrinsic to human being. All Adam's stock lies under sin only because Adam is judged from an eschaton in which he will be holy. A thoroughly theological definition measures sin from the telos, against what the people of God will become. <br /><br />Atonement 2. Sacrifice. <br />Any account of God's coming to man must include an account of cost, for which sacrifice is the conceptuality. ‘Trinitarian biblical talk of the saving action of God draws heavily on the language of sacrifice.’ Gunton believes that the notion of sacrifice can be supported by an appeal to its derivation ‘from something deep in human nature, of such a kind that it appears to be rooted in a universal or near universal feature of our life on earth.’ One problem though is that sacrifice is archaic. ‘We no longer slaughter animals ritually’. So ‘to call the death of Jesus a sacrifice is obviously a metaphor: although there is a death, it is not on an altar.’ By a effort of empathy and imagination, Gunton argues, we are able to extrapolate from what the ancients did to what God does for us. <br /><br />Sacrifice of animals has been replaced by a sacrifice of thanks and praise, and yet this represents no diminution of the cost of this sacrifice. Sacrifice really was the medium by which Israel was supplied with what she required in her relation to God, and learned that the holiness of the God who was her supply. By the sacrifice and consumption of animals, life, in the form of blood, was circulated through the ecosystem to reproduce a new generation for Israel, so the covenant God has with Israel is not brought to an end by death. ‘It is impossible that the blood of bulls and goats should take away sins’ (Heb10.14), yet blood was offered in the Temple precisely because it did indeed, not finally, but yearly take sins away. Animal sacrifice is one of the propaedeutic devices by which this elect community is brought up to the character of her God. <br /><br />The climax of God's work is the triumph of all God's preceding work, not the supersession and replacement of failed earlier attempts by later successful ones. What comes last does not replace but sets in place all that has gone before, and what went before is vindicated by this climax. There are two risks here. The first is that God appears to demand from Israel something that he could not produce for himself, and here we must say that what God wants is not a thing, but the freedom of Israel. Giving and demanding (sacrificial) return is the process by which Israel is brought up into the skills of freedom and the full status of the creature of God. The second risk is that an answer in terms of honour and praise (we give God a sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving) is a spiritualisation and evacuation of sacrifice, because praise appears to cost nothing. Gunton fears that thanks and praise might seem to represent a reduction, so he pleads for a metaphorical understanding, so a sacrifice of praise is still a real sacrifice, non-material yet still in some way costly. I suggest that we again need to employ a doxological metaphysics and economics of persons-in-constitutive-relation to do this. <br /><br />Jesus pays the price. What price does he pay? We all daily work under the assumption that payment involves money, and money is real, natural and necessary. Payment in praise works in the world of metaphor, but not in the shops. On this basis, talk of payment in honour and recognition, or ‘praise and thanksgiving’, is a merely metaphorical derivation from money. What we need here is one of Gunton's deft historical sketches to show that it is in fact the other way around. Money works in the shops because money is the present form of the practices of the denomination of human being, practices of doxology that we might very appropriately term ‘praise’. Money is not a function of nature but a particular outcome of history. With a full-blown constitutive theory of personhood we can see that being is neither substance nor nature, but the work of attribution and recognition in which all human being and doing consists. Each man receives his praise from the other; God's praise of man is God's being for man, and all the praise or being man has for man is derived from the praise and being God has for man. God (alone) returns our being to us (the being he intends for us, not any being that we could regard as our property). By telling the history of the origins of money as a particular idiom and convention of human being and relating we need no longer argue that the form of payment is a given of nature, and sacrifices of thanks and praise metaphorical extensions of it.<br /><br />The next question is to whom the price is paid, and discussion usually makes the point that the price is not made to the devil. (Anselm was not the only church father to consider whether the devil had at least the rights of custom due a squatter). Gunton believes that the question of to whom the payment is made is not an appropriate one, but I will make a slightly different response. The price which you were bought for is also the price that is paid to you, and the price paid is the whole currency and medium in which you (thought you) existed. The belief is that each of us is his or her own work, but we are paid with the removal of the whole fabric of this false belief - our own medium is taken away from us, and it is replaced and re-positioned by another, larger and more adequate medium. We are paid not in the form of some payment made within a currency that we ourselves have issued, but by the supply of a whole medium that makes us for the first time other-compatible and that therefore opens a world and new forms of action to us. <br /><br />Sacrifice then is not simply the foregoing of one thing for another. It is ‘not simply the offering of a human life but of the concentrated summation of humanity: it is the kind of offering that, so to speak, longs to offer not only itself but all flesh. That one offering can stand in for the others because, in anticipation of the eschatological presenting of all spotless before the throne, it takes the representative and random sample of fallen flesh and offers it, through the Spirit perfect to the Father.’ It intends to teach all flesh to present itself to God, and to do this by inducting it into a new medium, and new currency and form of payment and account-giving. ‘Sacrifice, in this concrete realisation of the transcendental, is the expression and outworking of the inner-trinitarian relations of giving and receiving. The inner being of God is a taxis, a dynamic orderedness, of love construed in terms of mutual and reciprocal gift and reception. If the sacrifice that is Jesus's human life and death is a realisation in time of the eternal taxis, than it is indeed universal.’ <br />‘God the Father ‘gives’ up’ his only Son, allows him to be delivered into the hands of sinful men. Jesus lays down his life, and.. offers his humanity, made perfect through suffering to the Father. so it is with the Spirit. As the gift of the Father he is the aparchai, first fruits, of the perfecting action of God in Christ. Although, under the conditions of the Fall, the sacrifice of Jesus must take the form of spilling of blood, that aspect is not of the essence of sacrifice, which is rather to be found in the notion of gift. It is the Father's giving of the Son, the Son's giving of himself to the Father and the Spirit's enabling of the creation's giving in response that is at the centre… It is as a dynamic of giving and receiving, asymmetrical rather than merely reciprocal, that the communion that is the triune life must be understood.’ <br />With all this we must agree. The next question is what else it is necessary to say in order to say this. <br /><br />Medium. <br />We must spend a little more time on the question of the medium of payment, to establish the novel thought (novel in the English-language at least) that payment is related to telling, describing and giving an account. There is no natural dichotomy between paying, on one hand, and telling a history or story on the other. In what medium can account be given and measurement made? What units does this creation and work of God let itself be measured in? The units of God's devising measure his creation good and make it good. His measure is an orthopaedic garment that achieves that good shape and dimension that it intends to bring about, that fits uniquely each particular, and makes each particular fit for the end that its Creator opens to it. <br /><br />How can a finite account be given of the action of an infinite agent? The infinite agent gives an account of himself. The infinite agent gives that finite medium of account in which such an account of his action can be made. The giving of the finite account depends on the giving of the medium of the account, and the health of the finite medium depends on the truth of the account of the agent that is given in it. We are not obliged to decide whether the medium or the message is prior, but simply that in the case of this infinite agent, the giving of the account is the giving of the medium and vice versa. Account and medium are the work of one agent, and the one never comes without the other. <br /><br />What God does is obvious only within the medium he supplies. We can talk about profit and loss, exchange and transaction only when we are dealing in a common currency. To say that God provides the currency, is to confess that this is his household and economy, and that he provides the medium, language, currency and world in which men may meet and find each other, and exchange accounts of each other, and in the medium of this account-giving, confess God. All the creatures of the household (the elect community) speak the language he has brought them up in, and they account in the accounting medium they have become familiar with through familiarity with him. But - God's giving his Son is his giving the medium in which this is meaningful and true. <br /><br />The reconciliation of creation takes place in the ‘medium’ of disorder, so disorder pays with its own dissolution for the establishment of order. Re-creation does not take place on an empty plain (ex nihilo) but on the field of battle of the yet unreconciled powers and forces. Chaos, nothingness, Satan, sin, death name all the deviations of old Adam, the sum of world-memes that receive no place in the creation of God, and yet which have a place in the telling of the process of the arrival of the new creation. The medium of the action of God for us and on us is therefore the powers and authorities of which our world is made, authorities which are subdued, but which nevertheless remain part of the obedient account that must be rendered of God's action by those of his creatures who grow into the fullness of the being he prepares for them. The saints will judge the earth, the (former, usurper) kings of the earth will be their footstool. <br /> <br />The action of God opens four and more dimensions to us, yet it must be described in three dimensional terms, in terms of a finite economy (zero-sum) in which a gain here is a loss there. We must be able to say God faces loss, for he bears us away from loss, chaos and nothing, and into being in freedom. The finite account and its medium are the work of the Holy Spirit, a worker who, because he is not yet satisfied by what is, submits it to further work, and does not yet commit his presence to it. Discussion limited to immanence and transcendence cannot establish either: it is as work that it is immanent (present), and as work that it is transcendent (not yet present to it or at home with it) and work must therefore be the third term. ‘In the triune economy there is, by virtue of the priority of giving, no calculation of quantities and ends.’ What is given is rather the skill of calculation of quantities and ends. We are to be joined in the person of the Son by discovering the character of the Son (Law) by rehearsing the actions of the Son (gospel). The world as creation is the medium in which we are delivered to the Son, delivered to each other as part of this medium, and which continues to be part of our character. That there is world and place, role and office, for us, is to say that there is mediation and language supplied to us within which we can be delivered to the Son. The whole creation is the medium across which the character of the Son is written, woven and told. Atonement, sacrifice and exchange are the grammar of the three dimensions into which we grow and become present to the native inhabitants of those infinite dimensions that may numbered but never brought to an end. <br /><br />Metaphor and Economy.<br />God fashions a household. His fashioning includes his own commentary on his work; his work has speech, and includes its own grammar (law). This oikos is never without its nomos. To establish the point that language is already both a household and law, we must see what sort of a claim metaphor is, and why it has been resorted to. <br /><br />Gunton resorted to metaphor in response to the accusation of the English Bultmannians that biblical language is mythological. ‘Metaphor’ was the riposte to the charge of ‘myth’. George Caird had always argued that biblical symbols were complex political symbols. NT Wright, Stephen Fowl and others now argue that these symbols belong to the language of the elect community, are the compressed learning of generations which has to be learned by those baptised into that community. Since this did not seem to meet the demands for public truth, recourse was made to empathy and imagination. Metaphor, Gunton claimed (in company with Ortony and Soskice) was a ‘transfer of language’, which revealed ‘hidden features of the human condition by carrying over meaning from one sphere of reality to another.’. This would seem to make meaning a substance that can be taken from one place to another, rather than mean-ing, ‘common-ing’ - what is composed, received and held in common by the commons - the definition that more clearly belongs to a theology stressing relationality. <br /><br />There are two problems about metaphor. The first is that to argue for metaphor is to accept Kant's account of things, an account in which there is a sphere of reason, and another (lower) sphere of imagination, and that there is a gap between them across which things have to be ferried by the vehicle of metaphor from normal use (‘reason’) to new use (‘imagination’). But there is only such a gap if we hold only a non-perichoretic view of the world in which things are closed containers rather than relations and fields. Secondly, metaphor is based on an assumption that new uses of language are created by the single artist, the poet, by the sheer power of his own subjectivity. <br /><br />The concept of metaphor belongs with the two hundred year history of ‘text’ and ‘interpretation’, the history of the author who creates his own world. The belief that an individual plucks a metaphor from the resources of his own subjectivity relates to the assumption that language has no intrinsic relation to bodiliness and world, but always has to have such a relation (‘meaning’) re-established for it by the author. Such an individual is unable - stubbornly declares himself unable - to take his place from God, has not the skill by which to receive his place. Yet ‘metaphor is an intrinsic feature of all human language…’. It is not the particular skill of the poet that makes language creative but just the indeterminacy of language as such. Error and confusion are every bit as creative of new language as metaphor, and as are exaggeration, alliteration, humour, irony and all the other tropes of the prosody or musicality of language. The creativity of language is not to be reduced to the creativity of an individual.<br /><br />But our world is not a function of our constructing alone, and our place is not a function of our will, but a matter of where other people place us. They place us. To say we place ourselves, which is what the concept of metaphor amounts to, is to abuse the concept of place. We do not choose our own story or, in any sense but the most trivial, select at random a metaphor through which to make sense of our situation. Rather metaphor or story is that local rationality and set of rules without which we are just not present to each other. It is the domain within which we may come to be and the gravity by which we are held together. The Trinity is the conceptuality by which we can make the confession that God works, and his working binds up and holds together what would not otherwise hold together, and holds open what would otherwise collapse and close. It is the conceptuality of plural agency which makes an extrinsic medium such as metaphor redundant. Priest, judge and sacrifice are not models or metaphors, but the priestly offices the saints will come to occupy. <br /><br />Perhaps part of the problem is, as I have suggested, that language seems to make a strict distinction between telling and counting. In the case of counting we cannot influence the outcome, but must concede what is necessarily and unalterably there. But if we can we make a case that telling and paying, text and money, are one and the same thing, we can more easily see that every use of the medium of counting - money - involves us in a complex of claims and tales about the world, and reinforces the sense of their necessity. With every trip to the shop we lend credence to a price system that claims to be a mere reflection of a world that is unalterably given. Theology - talk of God - not only shows however that the natural claims on the human being are neither natural nor necessary, but itself releases us from the spell that our practices have over us, demonstrating the contingency of whatever declares itself necessary, and thereby proclaiming the freedom of the Christian. Belief in the one God is our release from the many godlets which seek to re-determine us for their own ends.<br /> <br />The doxological linguistic economy of being.<br />The term ‘economics’ has a history. ‘After such a beginning it happened that a household word (economy, oikou nomos), along with its transferred application to the organisation of finances and the running of the state, was commandeered by theology.’ Yet what we need to hear is that the household consists of the sum of things said. Each member of the house continually reminds all the other members of the position in the household he desires for them. There is an economy of exchange of attributions of worth and status - a doxology. We can say that the financial economy is a language game, and no more normative than other (domestic or theological) uses of the word ‘economy’. Then we can say that finance is just a particular poor expression of a singleness that can really only be theologically established. To return to what we said above about justice and covenant, we can say that if you want to convince us that you belong to our household, that a certain position within our household belongs to you, you will have to adopt the linguistic skills and resources in use here to say some of the things that are said here. Every household, or language game is also an agreement to stay within the household or language game: it is a covenant, within which alone members can be and communicate together. The household is something subscribed to by its members, for it is their determination to be for (and against) each other that makes them this single language-entity. <br /> <br />Language belongs to all its speakers. It is their body-fabric, and every language use is a pushing and stretching of them. Language is prior to the issue of which use of language is wrong or right. Before I go on to develop the concept of place as linguistic which gives us the medium in which statements (not only the theological) can be true, I must refer again to the issue of the origin of right and wrong. <br /><br />Sinlessness.<br />We touched on the issue of sin in dealing with the image of God. Gunton criticises Robert Jenson's lack of interest in Jesus's sinlessness. I believe Jenson has the best of the argument. Jesus's sinlessness is not a matter of nature (understood either as ‘what is necessary’, or ‘what is in common’). It must rather be understood as the work of God by which Israel is made holy and sinless - with the hypostasis of Jesus as the single first-fruit of this work. The question of whether Christ has one will or two is the question of the reality of the struggle we see in the Garden of Gethsamene, of whether we can truly say that the Son learned obedience. We must give two accounts, in one of which there must be a struggle, the struggle of the world and flesh with God. To say Christ could not have sinned is simply to say too much. We can only say he did not sin. We must not attribute this to any essence, phusis or necessity in Jesus, but to his freedom, a freedom determined for him by the Spirit. That Jesus did not sin is an action, not inherent sinlessness, not a nature. He was found to be without sin because, being found one with the Spirit, sin could not cling to him. Jenson rightly insists that ‘the mind of Christ’ is the habitus and practice that results from God's action on Israel, rather than a matter of ‘what Jesus thought he was doing’. The alternative is surely to rest on a psychology, a doctrine about the nature of minds. <br /> <br />Place.<br />This leads us to the issue of where humankind is now. We must not let the definition of man's place rest on the fall, but on the doctrine of creation. The question of where the atonement takes place is part of the answer of how it takes place, so we should talk about the fall only in the context of creation and atonement. Gunton seems to take the view that God's transcendence is adequately secured by saying only that God is beyond the world. I suggest that the result is that mankind alone gets to define what space it is that mankind occupies and which God has to enter in order to come to his creature. Since the seventeenth century, when the fall was first assumed to be a natural truth that stands on its own apart from the totality of doctrine, mankind has described itself in terms of its (self-delusory) success in its self-appointed task of keeping God at a distance. In asking about the status of space Gunton tackles the issue without challenging this vocabulary, with the result is that he is trying to ask where space is - whether inside God or outside God. An uninterpreted concept of space results in space determining God rather than the other way around. <br /><br />Lutherans have traditionally had a difficulty here, but Jenson and Pannenberg have identified the Lutheran conundrum, and decided that the world is not a container and God does not have first to be invited in to it before he may act within it. The two cities are not of equal status, the human city does not succeed in holding out against the divine city nor the earthly and human history succeed in establishing any definition of humanity against God's definition of humanity. Jenson and Pannenberg understand that the human city and history have a merely provisional propaideutic status, that they are a function of the work of the divine city and history. These two theologians do not therefore need to show that God has to ask humanity before he can enter the human realm. To Gunton they appear to have erased the (transcendental) difference between the two cities. Gunton's demand for a transcendental definition of the difference between the human and divine is in danger of being secured by man's definition of the world as the place where God is not, and thus the definition of sin becoming one with the sin of the definition. Jenson and Pannenberg treat space in terms of God's action, and thus in something like the terms of honour and linguisticality that I have been using here. The world is rather the cradle and harness in which we are kept safe, and allowed to arrive at no other end than the end that God has prepared for us, and God uses the earthly city for the double function of keeping us in some measure secured in and by our self-deceit so our own self-destructive ends are prevented, and using it (despite us) to bring us to his own end - the full freedom of the creature. <br /><br />So I have suggested that talk of atonement and sacrifice must be set within an economy, and must answer the question of whose economy and creation the world is to be. We may not put the Wholly Other-ness and transcendence of God first, before the claim that God is a member of Israel. Christology from above is not more worshipful for all that it seeks to attribute a vanishingly high status to God. Christology from below, God-talk that starts with man-talk, is mistaken in its claim that, because humanity is the easier case, it is also the easier route to God-talk. I hope we have seen that God's action requires the concepts of mediation and economy, and that God's action on occasion requires parallel accounts that may not be reduced to one. The question of first, is a loose ball that rolls around causing damage everywhere - it turns every question into a question of who is first, God or man, and reinforces the idea that these are two more or less equal entities, two ‘natures’. Equality is entirely the wrong question, an irrelevant issue. The point is that not God is first and man is second. Man is not second. God is second. God is first and second, for God is the builder of a medium of account in which things may be ordered and so come into arrangement and being-together, and come to recognise and give place to each other. He is the issuer of this account and its first receiver. Only when God is both Alpha and Omega does there start to be a middle world in which man may be p and q, and in such plural relationships (m-n-o-p) and (q-r-s-t) there may come into being relationships between God and man (Alpha-(p-q)-Omega), of the pattern God-man-man-God. <br /><br />It is a large part of Colin Gunton's achievement to have made use of the concept of sacrifice, even to have shown it should be treated as a doctrine. God works in human time and space in such a way as to make up the losses that appear in our account and medium of being, and re-places and redeems our time, space and medium within his. Within an ontological and constitutive view of personhood sacrifice is not a model adopted to aid understanding, but which must also be left behind. Sacrifice, judgement and cost are intrinsic to God's account of himself and of the priestly office to which he elects and prepares us.nate sudahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01381339742322848085noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15575864.post-1142329256186558462006-03-14T01:37:00.000-08:002006-03-14T01:41:06.243-08:00Gunton on Genesis 1 and 2Aspects of Colin Gunton’s Reading of Genesis 1 and 2<br /><br />Nathaniel Suda<br /><br /><br /> Colin Gunton is a theologian not known for his exegetical powers, and while it would be fair to say that he pursued his theology in commitment to the biblical story, he rarely made direct use of extended biblical passages in his writing. However, Genesis 1 and 2 is at least one exception. Early in his work The Triune Creator Gunton gives a series of readings of key passages in the creation narrative. While even this treatment could not be called a detailed exegesis by most, Gunton’s writing on Genesis 1 and 2 provides us with a remarkable insight into both the doctrine of creation, and Gunton’s theology as a whole. We begin with Gunton’s reading of the Genesis text.<br /><br />Genesis and the Old Testament<br /><br /> In the second chapter of The Triune Creator, Gunton gives an interpretive reading of five short passages within the account of creation. He begins with:<br /> <br /> 1.) ‘In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth.’ Gunton first notes that exegetical attention on this verse should not centre on the question if or if not the phrase ‘in the beginning’ implies a creation out of nothing. Gunton recognizes that this text does not directly speak of what could be called a creatio ex nihilo, and to make it do so do so, presumably, would be to force an improper understanding on the text. This is significant, for the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo is critical for Gunton’s larger theological project. However, he does comment that this verse and the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo have a large area of overlap. Gunton writes: “Yet the theological function of the expression is clearly similar to that which the doctrine of creation out of nothing was later to perform. It is to show that the world in which we live is established firmly by the action of God . . . something once and for all.” More importantly, thinks Gunton, we should focus on the words ‘heaven and earth’. While this has often been interpreted as the creation of a bipartite creation – the ‘spiritual’ realm of heaven and the ‘material’ realm of the earth, Gunton notes that this verse should be read in conjunction with those verses which follow, specifically those “which affirm the goodness of all realms of creation – the earth (v.10), the heavenly bodies (v.18), the creatures of sea and air (v.21), the beasts of the earth (v. 25) and finally, after the creation of the human race, come the words, ‘God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good’ (v.31).” <br /><br /> Second, 2.) Gunton asks what we should make of the ‘days’ of creation. Are these literal 24-hour periods, eras, or have no temporal reference at all? To introduce his own contrasting opinion, Gunton offers a summary of Augustine’s interpretation: “Like other features of Augustine’s thought, [his embarrassment with this verse] derives from a refusal to recognize the self-limitation of God in creation, the fact that he [God] can be conceived to ‘take his time.’ For Augustine, creation ‘must have been’ instantaneous, and the days only introduced as a concession to human limitation.” Gunton thinks that such understandings of God’s relation to time presume that the act of creation was an act of abstract omnipotence, inadequately relate the act of creation to the doctrine of salvation. For, just as we hear of Jesus of Nazareth’s life to be a divine event that occurred through time, then we should likewise recognize that ‘God allows time for his purposes [of salvation] to be worked out.’ Gunton finds a more adequate interpretation in the thought of Basil of Caesarea. Gunton represents him as saying ‘When scripture says ‘one day,’ he says, it means that it wishes to establish the world’s relation to eternity, and is depicting ‘distinctions between various states and modes of action’ – that is to say, different ways in which God acts towards and in the world.’ In other words, in his creation of the world in days, we see that God works out his purposes for the created world ‘in time’. <br /><br /> Third. 3.) “The Spirit of God was moving over the face of the waters” Gunton notes that we cannot categorically identify ruach Elohim with what we know as the Holy Spirit, but he remarks ‘we should not be afraid to understand it trinitarianly in the light of later thought.’ In any case, based on other uses of the phrase in the Hebrew Bible, it would be unlikely that this phrase was meant as ‘breath of God’ or ‘wind of God’, but Gunton notes that these interpretations do have some credibility.<br /><br /> Fourth, 4.) “Then God said, ‘Let there be lights in the expanse of the heavens to separate the day from the night, and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for says and years; and let them be for lights in the expanse of the heavens to give light on the earth’; and it was so. And God made the two great lights, the greater light to govern the day, and the lesser light to govern the night; he made the stars also. And God placed them in the expanse of the heavens to give light on the earth, and to govern the day and the night, and to separate the light from the darkness; and God saw that it was good.” While some interpreters suggest a similarity to Babylonian creation myths, Gunton follows Westermann that this passage highlights the differences between a Babylonian and Hebrew view of creation: ‘What distinguishes the priestly account of creation among the many creation stories of the Ancient Near East is that for P there can be only one creator and that all else that is or can be, can never be anything but creature.’ Gunton continues, ‘Everywhere else in the ancient world the sun and the moon – and it is significant that here they are not named, but simply described as lights – were at least semi-divine agencies, who ruled the earth, but not in the merely subordinate way they are here allowed.’ Gunton finds similar features in the treatment of water in the story of Noah, which he conceptually links by the mention of water in Genesis 1:2 ‘and the ruach Elohim was moving over the surface of the waters’. The treatment of water in the Noah story being out two points Gunton thinks are pertinent to keep in mind when reading the account of the creation of ‘the lights’. The first is that God is at all times sovereign over his creation. ‘That story [Noah] is also testimony at once to God’s dominion over the water and his use of it as a medium of judgement and salvation. As merely H2O, it remains subordinate to the creator.’ This point is especially pertinent in the story of ‘the lights’, which Gunton wants to contrast heavily with the Babylonian creation myths. The second point is that God maintains his sovereignty over creation to keep stability within it, and to use his creation to realize its eschatological destiny. As Gunton comments ‘The rainbow in Genesis [is] a symbol of both irrigating water and ripening sun servers to represent the providential stability of creation, that creation’s bounds are maintained by the creator. Baptism similarly uses the water that drowns as the vehicle of saving judgement, and as a promise that evil will be overcome: ‘and there was no more sea’ (Revelation 21:1)’ Gunton doesn’t do a great job of pointing out the conceptual links in this second point, but it serves to illustrate an important feature of Gunton’s thought which he elsewhere explains very convincingly. Gunton’s point is this: God’s act of creation, while an act of sovereignty, is not voluntarist – it is not an expression of ‘pure will’, but it is an action undertaken in love, directed towards the end of God’s communion with his creation in Christ; thus Gunton’s reference to baptism and the promise that evil will be overcome. We will hear more of Gunton’s Christological reading of Genesis later in this paper.<br /><br /> Fifth, 5.) Gunton questions the significance of verse 27: ‘male and female he created them’. While not wanting to enter the history of interpretation of this verse, particularly in regards to sexual differences as constitutive of the image of God, Gunton seeks a much simpler interpretation. He simply wants to suggest that this verse indicates ‘that our material constitution is in a central way important for the writer, as it is for the rest of the Old Testament. The general point is that Genesis represents the close relations of the human species with God, on the one hand, and with nature, on the other.’ If this is an evasion of the text’s mention of sexual differentiation, we will let the reader decide. However the important point to remember is that for Gunton, our creation by God shows that humanity are in a particular relation to God in contrast to the rest of creation, but also a close continuity with creation on the basis of our physicality. <br /><br /> Gunton closes his interpretative notes on Genesis with two concluding thoughts. The first is that Genesis does not have a monopoly on the Old Testament material on the act of creation. Gunton mentions in particular Psalms 33, 104, 139, Isaiah 40:28, Job 38-41, and the Proverbs and Wisdom literature generally. The themes Gunton finds in these passages are a.) divine action continues in creation through God’s providential action in the world which is to be understood as a project, b.) the world as the reliable and meaningful creation of God (affirming materiality), c.) the absolute sovereignty of God over the created order, and d.) God as ‘the creator of the ends of the earth’. Each in their own way, these Old Testament passages support what Gunton finds in Genesis 1 and 2. The second concluding thought is that while a firm doctrine of creation out of nothing cannot be gleaned from Genesis 1 and 2, ‘the Old Testament came very near to later teaching both in its assertions of divine sovereignty and in affirmations . . . that the earth has been established by God once and for all.’ Gunton continues in a passage ripe with insight into his style of reading the biblical text: <br /><br />‘The grounds for later doctrines of creation are undoubtedly present, particularly in the expressions of the freedom and sovereignty of God which are everywhere to be found. They are to be found above all in, first, the way in which the language of myth is transformed in order to remove any suggestion that this God, unlike the gods of other cultures, was in any way limited by any other reality; second, in passages like Isaiah 48:7, 43:19 and 45:7, where ‘creation’ language is used of God’s redemptive action in history; and third Ezekiel 37:1-14, where the Spirit of God is shown to be in sovereign interrelation with the created world. In that latter vision of the transformation of the dry bones, we read an anticipation of what was to find more systematic expression in New Testament and early theology.’ <br /><br />Many significant conclusions could be drawn from Gunton’s reading of Genesis 1 and 2 just on his treatment of those texts alone. However, for the moment, we will resist the urge to draw those conclusions until we have briefly covered his parallel treatment of the New Testament, as it sheds much light on his reading of the Old.<br /><br /><br /><br />The New Testament<br /><br /> Gunton begins his treatment of the doctrine of creation in the New Testament with these two sentences “In the New Testament there are to be found a number of creedal affirmations of the doctrine of creation in general. Some are almost certainly dependent upon Genesis 1, and it may be that it operates as an invisible matrix for one of them, Hebrews 11:3.” For Gunton, the biblical narrative of creation is not limited to Genesis, but extends throughout the entire corpus of the canon – indeed; some of the most important passages are to be found outside the Old Testament. While the New Testament is very important theologically for understanding Genesis, Gunton’s treatment of it in relation to his exegesis of the Genesis account is very brief and topical. His interest focuses on two aspects of the New Testament narrative – the role of the Son and the Spirit in creation and recreation. With regards to the role of the Son, Gunton first wants to affirm His role in the act of creation. To do this, he enlists the aid of John 1:1 and 1 Corinthians 8:6. Gunton points out that the latter verse likely ‘reflect[s] very early tradition as a confession of belief appealed to by Paul . . . placing Christ alongside God the Father as co-agent of creation.’ Later tradition in Colossians 1:16 alludes to the second point Gunton wishes to make of the role of the Son in the act of creation – namely that he sustains and redirects creation towards its telos. The verse in Colossians speaks of Christ as the one in whom ‘all things were created, in heaven and on earth . . . all things were created through him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together’. Gunton finds a similar idea in Hebrews 1:2f. The significant theological point Gunton takes from a reading of Christ ‘in [whom] all things hold together’ is ‘that it is possible to treat creation as an externalization – the creation of a reality outside of the being of God – without the perils of deism. It is created in the past in such a way that already provision is made for a conception of God’s continuing interaction with it.’ In other words, as the one who is uniquely divine and human, Jesus Christ is able, as God, to mediate divine action in the created world. Further, Gunton concludes that the narrative of Jesus’ life shows God’s sovereignty and loving purposes in creation. This is exhibited in the miracle accounts, particularly in the driving out of demons, which show ‘Jesus a not merely a teacher, but one exercising – or rather reasserting – God’s lordship over the created order . . . they are concerned with God’s sovereignty over the created order, its exercise and reassertion, in the interest above all of human healing and wholeness’. While the Christological and eschatological aspects of God’s sovereignty over creation are exhibited in the miracle accounts, the importance of these accounts is overshadowed, in Gunton’s opinion, by the resurrection. Gunton writes ‘There is little doubt that a major impulse for the development of a Christological and pneumatological treatment of creation came from the resurrection of Jesus from the dead. It suggests two things: first, the freedom of God’s action in and towards the created order; and second, that the fate or destiny of creation is in some way bound up with Jesus of Nazareth. That the body of Jesus is raised shows that God’s redemptive activity is concerned with the whole of human life, not merely the ‘moral’ or ‘spiritual’, in the narrower sense sometimes given to the latter word.’ The resurrection is extremely important for Gunton’s doctrine of creation, and a theological idea he uses in a great variety of contexts. The resurrection shows God’s interest in, and affirmation of, the materiality of creation. It also shows God’s sovereignty over creation, not only by performing an act which ‘breaks the laws of nature’, but also as an event which redirects the course of human history – directing it away from sin and death and towards communion with the Father. Further, Gunton later argues that the resurrection shows that creation has an absolute beginning and absolute end. He argues if creation is understood to have a telos – an (end) point, then it must also have a starting point, at which time the end was conceived. <br /><br /> As for the role of the Holy Spirit, Gunton briefly mentions him in relation to the renewal and redirection of humanity, as the one who ‘raised Christ from the dead’ (Romans 8), and as the one who leads creation back to the Father, by providentially breathing life into creation (cf. Ezekiel 37:1-10). Gunton closes his brief treatment of the New Testament with a short summary which makes for a nice transition into the next phase of our discussion: ‘He is creator and not creation, but he is also, in realisation rather than denial of that transcendence, one who in Christ becomes part of the creation, freely involved within its structures, in order that he may, in obedience to God the Father and through the power of his Spirit, redirect the creation to its eschatological destiny. It is because of this that we are able to look back at the Old Testament passages and see them as in their own way witnessing to the God made known in the revelation in Jesus Christ.’<br /><br /><br /><br />Observations<br /><br /> We began this paper noting that Gunton is not well known for his work as an exegete. In fact, what we are here calling his ‘exegesis of Genesis’ is less like an exegesis, and more like a Midrash on the text. In many ways similar to the way Gunton reads the theological tradition, Gunton reads Genesis very selectively, and also very briefly. He is more concerned to get the ‘gist’ of a text, and then consider the possibilities theologically, especially in relation to other brief passages, than he is to engage in a laboured and exacting discussion. This is not necessarily a criticism. Gunton’s theological instinct is often correct, and enables him to read Genesis and the New Testament, the narrative of Jesus in particular, in parallel, and argue a theological point by moving between the two as though they existed in the closest proximity within the canon. This is our first observation of Gunton’s reading of Genesis 1 and 2; he reads Genesis and the life of Jesus in such an integrated manner that his reading of Genesis aids him in reading the theological meaning of narratives of Jesus, and his reading of the life of Jesus aids him in uncovering the theological meaning of Genesis. To fully explain this interrelation would be at least dozens of pages in and of itself, but here we will offer a few examples in outline. First ways in which Gunton’s reading of Genesis informs his reading of the New Testament. 1.) The most obvious is the affirmation of the material aspects of creation. In the act of creation, God repeatedly pronounced creation ‘good’, and once ‘very good’. This gives us sufficient reason to take the Son’s incarnation seriously as a real incarnation of the Son in material, human, bodily existence. 2.) It is also clear that by his act of creation, God is the ruler of creation. He called the world into being. Just as God called the world into being, so he can freely become incarnate within it, and redirect created reality from sin to communion. There are other examples, but for now we will move to ways in which Gunton’s reading of the New Testament informs his reading of Genesis. 1.) The incarnation, resurrection and ascension of Jesus Christ further affirm our material existence, and support that reading of the creation account. 2.) The explicit eschatological emphasis given to creation in the resurrection provides, on Gunton’s account, sufficient ground for the doctrine of creation out of nothing. This in turn allows a much clearer reading of Genesis 1 and a heightened appreciation of God’s sovereignty in the act of creation. 3.) The life of Jesus Christ, while at the same time a divine action and a human life lived over the course of human time shows that God can and does act in a temporally extended manner. Therefore the ‘days’ of creation can be understood as in some sense temporal – the beginning of a creation which, to use Gunton’s vocabulary, is a project, ‘stretched out’ in time. 4.) Since the Son was a co-agent in the act of creation, we can conclude that the incarnation was intended from the beginning of the world, and a reading of Genesis must keep in mind the soteriological and eschatological aspects of creation. While only a few examples, hopefully these begin to show that, on Gunton’s account, the acts of creation and the incarnation and life of the Son are so intimately connected that it is truly impossible to say anything of one without saying equally as much about the other. That this has not always been the case in the history of Christian theology represents for Gunton the worst perversion of the gospel. In sum, the story of the act of creation is not to be found soley in chapters 1 and 2 of the Book of Genesis. It is found throughout the canon of scripture. We cannot expect to read simply Genesis and expect to understand the Gospels, nor can we read simply the Gospels and understand Genesis. These two crucial points in the biblical narrative, as well as everything that is in between and comes after, must be read simultaneously, both texts continuously interpreting the other and in turn itself.<br /><br /> The account of creation in Genesis, particularly the passages relating to humankind’s dominion over the rest of creation, and its creation in the divine image, has often been read as a doctrine on the constitution of the created world. Genesis 1 and 2 have often been read as about humankind and the rest of creation. However, while Gunton is interested in the ramifications of these two chapters for our understanding of anthropology and the rest of the created world, the doctrine of creation is, first and foremost for Gunton, a doctrine about God. God’s act of creation shows especially his sovereignty over creation, as has been mentioned several times in various contexts in this paper, but it also shows much more besides. The Genesis account, when read alongside the New Testament narrative, shows that God created out of an act of will, not necessity, and his will was a will directed towards creation, intending its eschaton from the moment of creation. Just as God’s decision to create is internally necessary and intrinsic to himself, so is his loving relation to creation. We can see in God’s act of creation that this was an act which took place over an period of time – the ‘days’ of creation, and God is able to interact with creation in such a way as to preserve its temporality. Similarly, we can also see that God interacts with his creation in a non-competitive manner. God’s affirmation of material existence means that the material creation does not have to aspire to a non-material ‘spiritual’ existence, nor does God have to debase himself to interact with the material world as such. The distance is one of difference, not hierarchy. Of course there is a division created by sin and the distinction of creator and creature, but God in his interaction with humanity does not create any metaphysical problems of a spiritual God interacting with a material world. As even a brief read of Gunton’s other works will confirm, it is in the act of creation that God discloses many of the fundamental characteristics of his being, and any doctrine of God would be wise to begin, of course with copious reference to the incarnate life of the Son, with the act of creation. In sum; God created, therefore God is the creator. In the manner of his creation, and in the manner of his providential action God discloses positive content about himself. Albeit in a non-competitive way, in his actions God is the subject of those actions. <br /><br /> So far we have been by in large affirmative of Gunton’s reading of Genesis 1 and 2, and with good reason. However, there is one aspect of his reading of the account to which we must draw attention, and distinguish our own position. That is, Gunton understands the act of creation as an act of creation. For various theological reasons, Gunton is eager to affirm that God discloses himself in his actions. This is a theme which has dominated Gunton’s works right from his PhD thesis. There is good theological reason for such a position; however, in Gunton’s case it clouds his reading of Genesis 1, and perhaps, causes a serious flaw in his theology. Simply, the problem is this: Gunton reads God’s creation as an act, rather than as a speech-event. Throughout Gunton’s theology, he can only conceive of God’s interaction and communication with creation as by act, rather than by his Word in divine speech. Gunton is very fond of Irenaeus’ metaphor of God’s ‘two hands’, i.e., the Son and the Spirit, but here especially, it seems that that metaphor operates in a highly material meaning in Gunton’s thought to the effect that Gunton ignores those details of the Genesis account where we find it written ‘ . . .and God said . . . and there was . . .’. God’s Word is not the only way by which God created, but it is surely a significant one. Gunton’s inability to give an adequate account of the creative power of God’s speech in creation, either as symptomatic of other theological concerns, or the root cause, leads to huge problems within his theology – virtually ignoring the entire Old Testament prophetic tradition, no mention of God’s verbal communication in guiding and counselling the believer, specifically exhibited in his complete lack of any language of prayer, and more generally a difficulty in treating the existential aspects of the Christian life, not to mention the failure to address Jesus’ parables or his significance as a teacher. These are critical aspects of the biblical text, and failure to incorporate them leads to a very imbalanced understanding of who God is, and the manner and content of his character. It is apparent from the Genesis text that God’s Word has efficacious creativity in itself, and any doctrine of creation should highlight that aspect of God’s act of creation. God is not bound to mediate his will or his love through actions which need to be understood in some way as material. God’s Word has an immediate power in itself as God’s Word. This is exhibited time and again throughout the Bible. Because of the clear textual connections between ‘. . . and God said . . . and there was . . .’, the doctrine of creation seems an ideal place to begin a doctrine of the power, sovereignty, and love of God’s Word.nate sudahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01381339742322848085noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15575864.post-1141820475355166052006-03-08T04:11:00.000-08:002006-03-08T04:28:15.103-08:00Google GuntonThis is probably the most exciting thing I will discover all week.<br /><br />Need to find a particular sentence, or wondering how often a word occurs in one of Gunton's works? Then Google Gunton. Google has launched a fantastic service whereby you can search the text of one of many books they have in their database. You get the usual Google snippet and page reference. Unfortunately you can't always see the full page on screen, and the number of books by Gunton is limited, but if they search the book you need and you have the book you now know right where to go. I've put all the links for Gunton's works in the sidebar. When you go there, type in something in 'Search within this book' and watch the magic. Want to know which other books reference Gunton? Then do a new search for 'Colin Gunton' - that secondary bibliography is going to be growing exponentially in the next few days!nate sudahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01381339742322848085noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15575864.post-1141641620429278282006-03-06T02:25:00.000-08:002006-03-06T02:40:25.083-08:00How to post a paper<strong>If you would like to post a paper:</strong><br /><br /><em>Fantasitc! Keep reading.</em><br /><br />The best way is to <a href="mailto:natesuda@gmail.com">email</a> me your paper. I'll then give it a read (just because I'm very interested in what anyone has to say about Colin Gunton), post it on the site, and give it a high profile link on the sidebar. <br /><br /><em>Why would you want to post a paper?</em><br /><br />This site is new, but the number of people visiting it are rising very quickly (just search for 'Colin Gunton' on MSN or Google - last I checked we are near the top of the list). By posting a paper here it will be read by many people - and you are likely to get some very quick feedback by way of comments. Oh, and the paper remains entirely your possession. If ever you want to remove it, or change it, you may.<br /><br /><em>But my paper isn't good enough.</em><br /><br />Rubbish. That's what's called the imposter complex. Every scholar thinks that they know less than everyone else at the table and that they really don't belong, but somehow they squeaked in. Research on Colin Gunton's theology is so new that there aren't any experts and anything goes. What are you waiting for? Toss your hat in the ring and join the fun! Go on, give it a <a href="mailto:natesuda@gmail.com">go</a>.nate sudahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01381339742322848085noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15575864.post-1141121640058026982006-02-28T02:07:00.000-08:002006-02-28T02:14:00.296-08:00QuestionsWe might not all have papers to contribute (but hopefully we all will in time), but what we all have are questions . . . things Gunton wrote that we don't quite understand, or ideas we just can't get our heads around. Here is a space for those conundrums. If you have a question, post it here as a comment. I personally will try to answer every question the best that I can; your question might send me back to the books to find the right quote, but all the better – we will both be edified. Then the folks casually reading will share in the wealth and may even choose to join in themselves, and Gunton will become better understood by many.<p/> Post your questions about Gunton here.nate sudahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01381339742322848085noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15575864.post-1140622971080363952006-02-22T07:40:00.000-08:002006-03-01T02:48:03.130-08:00Bibliography - Secondary WorksCampbell, Cynthia McCall. "Response to Colin Gunton." <i>Theology Today</i> 43, no. 3 (1986).<p/><br />Williams, Stephen N. "Theologians in pursuit of the Enlightenment." <i>Theology</i> 86 (1986): 368-374.<p/><br />Slater, Graham. "Some recent responses to key issues: The Doctrine of the Atonement." <i>Epworth Review</i> 21, no. 1 (1994): 85-92.<p/><br />Bartholomew, Craig G. "The Healing of Modernity: A Trintiarian Remedy? A Critical Dialogue with Colin Gunton's "The One, the Three and the Many: God, Creation and the Culture of Modernity"." <i>European Journal of Theology</i> 6, no. 2 (1997): 111-130.<p/><br />Cunningham, David. <i>These Three Are One: Practice of Trinitarian Theology</i>, <i>Challenges in Contemporary Theology Series</i>: Blackwell Publishers, 1997.<p/><br />Green, Brad. "Gunton, The Gospel and the Old Problem of Modernity: Colin Gunton's Trinitarian Critique of Modernity." Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the ETS Southwest Region, Criswell College, Dallas, TX 1998.<p/><br />Fermer, Richard M. "The Limits of Trinitarian Theology as a Methodological Paradigm." <i>Neue Zeitschrift für Systematische Theologie aund Religionsphilosophie</i> 41, no. 2 (1999).<p/><br />Green, Brad. "Did Augustine's trinitarian theology lead the West astray? a look at a contemporary trend in theology." Paper presented at the 51st National Conference of the Evangelical Theological Society, Danvers, MA 1999.<p/><br />Long, Thomas E. "The viability of a sacrificial theology of atonement." PhD, Marquette University, 1999.<p/><br />Patterson, Sue. "Creation and Postmodernity." In <i>The Task of Theology Today</i>, edited by Victor Pfitzner and Hilary Regan. Edinburgh: T & T Clarck, 1999.<p/><br />Green, Brad. "Augustine and the Trinity in contemporary theology." Paper presented at the Southeastern Regional Conference Meeting of the Evangelical Theological Society, Jackson, TN 2000.<p/><br />———. "Colin Gunton and the failure of Augustine: an exposition and analysis of the theology of Colin Gunton in light of Augustine's De Trinitate." PhD, Baylor University, 2000.<p/><br />Paik, Grace Lee. "An analysis of Sallie McFague's metaphorical theology with special reference to Gunton's trinitarian theology of creation." M.A., Trinity International University, 2000.<p/><br />Shaw, William H. "The trinitarian theology of Colin Gunton: a contribution to the development of an interpretive tool and model for the theological engagment of culture." M.A., Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, 2000.<p/><br />Chiu, Shung Ming. "The displacement of subjectivity by particularity and relationality: a study of Colin E. Gunton's critique of modernity and his trinitarian theology of culture." PhD, Hong Kong Baptist University, 2001.<p/><br />Knight, Douglas. "From Metaphor to Mediation: Colin Gunton and the concept of mediation." <i>Neue Zeitschrift für Systematische Theologie aund Religionsphilosophie</i> 43 (2001): 118-136.<p/><br />Loos, Andreas. "Divine Action and the Trinity: A Brief Exploration of the Grounds of Trinitarian Speech about God in the Theology of Adolf Schlatter." <i>International Journal of Systematic Theology</i> 4, no. 3 (2002): 255-277.<p/><br />Molnar, Paul. <i>Divine Freedom and the Doctrine of the Immanent Trinity</i>: T&T Clark Publishers, Ltd, 2002.<p/><br />Ndubuisi, Godfrey Chukwudi. "Assessing indicators of spirituality: comparisons and critique grounded in Gunton, Volf, Lewin, and biblical theology." PhD, Trinity International University, 2002.<p/><br />Horne, Brian. "The Cross and the Comedy: Dante's Understanding of the Atonement." In <i>The Theology of Reconciliation</i>, edited by Colin Gunton. London: T & T Clark, 2003.<p/><br />Höhne, David Allan. "What can we say about perichoresis?: an historical, exegetical and theological examination of Colin Gunton's use of the concept." M.Th., Moore Theological College, 2003.<p/><br />Lyle, Randal Curtis. "Social trinitarianism as an option for 21st century theology: a systematic analysis of Colin Gunton's trinitarian paradigm." PhD, Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2003.<p/><br />Rae, Murray. "A Remnant People: The Ecclesia as a Sign of Reconciliation." In <i>The Theology of Reconciliation</i>, edited by Colin Gunton. London: T & T Clark, 2003.<p/><br />Rauser, Randal. "Can there be theology without Necessity." <i>Heythrop Journal</i> 44 (2003): 131-146.<p/><br />Santmire, H. Paul. "So That He Might Fill All Things: Comprehending the Cosmic Love of Christ." <i>Dialog</i> 42, no. 3 (2003).<p/><br />Sonderegger, Kate. "Tribute to Colin Gunton." Paper presented at the American Academy of Religion, Atlanta 2003.<p/><br />Webster, Barth. "Gunton and Barth." Paper presented at the American Academy of Religion, Atlanta 2003.<p/><br />Jenson, Robert W. "LET US NOW PRAISE - Colin Gunton (1940-2003)." <i>Theology Today</i> 61, no. 1 (2004): 85.<p/><br />Norwood, Donald W. "Gunton, Barth and the Bible." Paper presented at the Society for the Study of Theology, Exeter, UK 2004.<p/><br />Schaeffer, Hans. "Createdness and Ethics: The Doctrine of Creation and Theological Ethics in the Theology of Colin E. Gunton and Oswald Bayer." PhD, Theologische Universiteit Kampen, 2004.<p/><br />Suda, Nathaniel. "Aspects of Colin Gunton's Reading of Genesis 1 and 2." Paper presented at the 2004 Annual Conference of the Society of the Study of Theology, Exeter University 2004.<p/><br />———. "Gunton's Vision of the Incarnation: A Reply to Bruce McCormack." Paper presented at the 2004 Annual Conference of the Society of the Study of Theology, Exeter University 2004.<p/><br />———. "Space, Time and Creation: Alan Torrance and Colin Gunton on Creation and Providence." Paper presented at the 2004 Scottish Universities Postgraduate Conference, Glasgow University 2004.<p/><br />McCormack, Bruce. "The One, the Three and the Many: In Memory of Colin Gunton." <i>Cultural Encounters</i> 1, no. 2 (2005).<p/><br />Metzger, Paul Louis. "Response to Bruce L. McCormack's Tribute." <i>Cultural Encounters</i> 1, no. 2 (2005).<p/><br />Suda, Nathaniel. "Foundationalism, Non-Foundationalism and Colin Gunton's Proposal of Open Transcendentals." Paper presented at the Society for the Study of Theology/Irish Theological Association Joint Conference 2005, St. Patrick's College and Trinity College, Dublin 2005.<p/><br />Wright, Terry. "Moving Towards Perfection: Colin Gunton's Theology of Providence." 2005.<p/>nate sudahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01381339742322848085noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15575864.post-1140597261785676382006-02-22T00:07:00.000-08:002006-02-22T00:34:21.866-08:00Gunton on Creation<div align="left">Colin Gunton’s Trinitarian Theology of Creation:<br />Creation as Creed, ex Nihilo and Trinitarian<br /> </div><div align="left">(currently under revision)</div><div align="left"> </div><div align="left">by Jonathan Dodson</div><div align="left"><br />Humility in Theology<br /> As finite formulators of truth, theologians are forced to nurture their understanding of God within a limited span of time. How each theologian uses his or her time is a personal decision. Personal, finite encounters with a three-personed, infinite and omniscient God require humility and specialty. Theologizing requires humility of heart because in order to understand God, we need his help. Exercise of the intellect apart from dependence upon the One ‘from whom are all things’, renders the theologian philosopher, one who seeks wisdom without seeking the wise One. Such contemptuous disrespect for the God of truth characterized St. Augustine’s pre-conversion search for rational certainty. Resistant to the inspiring preaching of Ambrose, Augustine desired certainty for the things he could not see, the kind of certainty that accompanies the equation of 7+3=10.<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn1" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn1" name="_ftnref1">[1]</a> In reflection upon this memory he writes: “By believing I could have been healed so that my mind’s clearer sight would be directed in some way to your truth, which endures forever and is lacking in nothing (emphasis added).”<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn2" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn2" name="_ftnref2">[2]</a> Augustine distilled this realization into the oft quoted phrase, fides quaerens intellectum, “faith seeking understanding.”<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn3" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn3" name="_ftnref3">[3]</a> <br /> Faith is the flipside of Godward humility and the healing hand for true theology. However, faith in God does not reduce God’s immensity to comprehensibility.<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn4" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn4" name="_ftnref4">[4]</a> As a result, theologians (or anyone who seeks to think God’s thoughts after him) are humbly forced to narrow the depth of their understanding into specialty. The late professor Colin Gunton (1941-2003) was no exception to humility or specialty; in fact, humility fueled his theological expertise. One is hard-pressed to read his work without noting his magnanimous footnotes, crediting students and colleagues alike for their helpful insights. As King’s College professor of Christian doctrine, Gunton wrote over a dozen books, a stream of articles and served as the editor of the International Journal of Systematic Theology, while concurrently preaching and serving as the associate pastor of Brentwood church in Essex, England for a quarter of a century. The density of Gunton’s output reveals a thoughtful theologian, one who specialized in two major areas: the doctrine of creation and the doctrine of the Trinity. With a doctrine in each hand Gunton, accompanied by humble skill, wove together a trinitarian theology of creation, the content of which will occupy the remainder of this paper.<br /> Gunton’s trinitarian theology of creation is articulated in, but not limited to his well-known work, The Triune Creator: A Historical and Systematic Study.<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn5" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn5" name="_ftnref5">[5]</a> As suggested by the title, Triune Creator is a work of theological history, an attempt to erect the dogmatics of creation upon historical critique.<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn6" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn6" name="_ftnref6">[6]</a> True to Gunton’s historical-theological method, this paper will engage an influential interlocutor, namely St. Irenaeus of Lyons († c. 202 A.D.).<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn7" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn7" name="_ftnref7">[7]</a> In addition, we will draw broadly from Gunton’s writings in order to allow the “historical Gunton” to speak and his theology of trinitarian creation to be heard. As a result, a trinitarian theology of creation will emerge. To that end, three major features of Gunton’s doctrine of creation will be explored: creation as creed, ex nihilo, and trinitarian. <br /><br />Creatio as Credo<br /> The Christian doctrine of creation was affirmed as an article of faith as early as the 2nd or 3rd century in the first sentence of the Apostles’ Creed: “I believe in God the Father, Maker of heaven and earth.” The Christian creed has its origin in a twofold Christian imperative, to believe and to confess one’s belief, both of which are in view here.<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn8" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn8" name="_ftnref8">[8]</a> No doubt the authors of this historic creed had Hebrews 11.3 in mind when penning the first line: “By faith we understand that the universe was created by the word of God, so that what is seen was not made out of things that are visible.” Prior to the time of the apostles, the early chapters of Genesis set forth an account not only of Jewish origins but also of the entire universe: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth (Gen 1.1).” Scriptures and confessions alike underscore the fact that creation is an article of faith and not something ascertained by mere reason. Even Thomas Aquinas, the father of natural theology, affirmed that the idea that the beginning of creation in time cannot be derived from philosophy but must come from authoritative revelation.<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn9" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn9" name="_ftnref9">[9]</a> Commenting on the Apostles’ Creed Gunton writes: “It can not be stressed too strong that ‘I believe’ is not the same thing as saying ‘I know intuitively’ or ‘reason shows me that…’. The words form the first article of a creed of a community of worship and belief which continues to say things without which they can not be understood.”<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn10" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn10" name="_ftnref10">[10]</a> To believe in the Christian doctrine of creation is to believe in YHWH, Maker of heaven and earth. <br /> Unfortunately, Gunton offers very little exegesis of the biblical texts mentioned above. His lengthiest treatment of creation texts is found in Triune Creator.<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn11" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn11" name="_ftnref11">[11]</a> However, his short shrift of Scripture is not without justification. He writes: <br /><br />“We must be particularly aware that there are dangers in the discussion of the individual texts of scripture and perhaps none more so than those of the creation narratives. It is surely significant that Irenaeus showed little interest in disputing the interpretation of individual texts with his opponents. He refers to Genesis very little, and rightly, for his concern is with the theology of creation as an interpretation of the first article of the Christian creed, which is itself a summary of the teaching of scripture as a whole on divine creation.<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn12" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn12" name="_ftnref12">[12]</a><br /><br />To be sure, dangers abound in the exegesis of said texts. For instance, church history has demonstrated an unhealthy preoccupation with the chronology of creation, at the expense of its theology. Other “dangers” could be listed; however, if the doctrine of creation is creedal, then sound exegesis should serve to deepen the roots of the doctrine of creation. Although Gunton discusses a variety of issues related to Genesis 1 and 2 in Triune Creator (exegesis of Gen 1.1, status of days, imago Dei), it appears that his historical eye is not without an occasional cataract. Gunton’s trinitarian theology of creation is profoundly influenced by Irenaeus in a variety of ways, and rightly so. However, it may be that his affinity for the insightful church father may have diverted him from what would have otherwise greatly enriched his work.<br /> Nevertheless, Gunton rightly points out that the primary source for Christian doctrine, through which the Old Testament is interpreted, is the New Testament, where the theology of creation is more prominent than historically recognized.<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn13" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn13" name="_ftnref13">[13]</a> Of course, the adage of Augustine is not to be ignored, “The New is in the Old contained and the Old in the New explained.”<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn14" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn14" name="_ftnref14">[14]</a> Gunton does, in fact, recognize the critical role that Genesis plays as the background to important New Testament texts such as Jn 1.1; Heb 4.3b-4, 11.3; Rev 4.11,<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn15" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn15" name="_ftnref15">[15]</a> and maintains that the definitive contribution of the NT to the development of the doctrine of creation is its christological character.<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn16" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn16" name="_ftnref16">[16]</a> To that end, trinitarian reflection on Christ’s role as mediator of creation is one of the areas in which Gunton excels. Before pressing onto this all important aspect of creation, a few comments regarding the context in which the Christian doctrine of creation emerged are apropos.<br /> The doctrine of creation as derived from both the Old and New testaments was inspired and forged in the midst controversy. In the ancient Near Eastern world of the Hebrews, competing creation stories abounded such as the Sumerian epics Enuma Elish, The Epic of Gilgamesh and the Egyptian Mephite Theology of Creation.<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn17" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn17" name="_ftnref17">[17]</a> In the Hellenistic world, Greek philosophy gradually moved away from the anthropomorphism and polytheism of Homer and Hesiod to more rational and impersonal cosmogonies and cosmologies as seen in the works of Thales, Heraclitus, Parminides and the rest of the Pre-socratic philosophers.<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn18" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn18" name="_ftnref18">[18]</a> However, it was the Platonic conception of creation as depicted in Timaeus, that loomed large in writings of the early church fathers. <br /> At the outset of Triune Creator, Gunton lays out three key themes of the Christian doctrine of creation that distinguish it from alternative creation theories. He writes: “We shall understand the distinctiveness of the Christian theology of creation only if we realize that these three themes – creation as an article of the creed; creation out of nothing; and creation as the work of the Trinity, Father, Son and Holy Spirit – are in some way bound up with each other, both historically and systematically.”<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn19" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn19" name="_ftnref19">[19]</a> Having briefly covered the first theme, creation as an article of the creed, we now turn to the theme of creation ex nihilo.<br /> <br />Creatio ex Nihilo<br /> The Christian teaching that God created the universe out of nothing, creatio ex nihilo, can be summarized as follows: “…God is not to be likened, let us say, to a potter who makes a pot from the clay which is to hand; he is, rather, like one who makes both the clay and the pot. This teaching, which baffles understanding and is often rejected because there is no analogy to it in human experience, must be understood as an interpretation and summary of scripture’s witness to God as a whole.”<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn20" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn20" name="_ftnref20">[20]</a> Commenting on the historical formation of creatio ex nihilo Gunton writes: “Unlike the definitions of the being of God and the person of Christ, the dogma of creation out of nothing was not made the subject of definition by an early church council, and appears to have been generally accepted, in theory if not always in practice, as the result of Irenaeus' decisive intellectual defeat of his opponents in the second century.”<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn21" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn21" name="_ftnref21">[21]</a> Despite historical affirmation of creation ex nihilo as creed, the doctrine has come under scrutiny in recent years. Modern controversy regarding creation ex nihilo can be traced to Schleiermacher’s conflation of the doctrines of creation and conservation.<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn22" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn22" name="_ftnref22">[22]</a> In his widely acclaimed work, Creatio ex Nihilo: The Doctrine of “Creation out of Nothing” in Early Christian Thought, Gerhard May has concluded that the doctrine is not warranted by Scripture regarding it primarily as a Christian reaction against Middle Platonism and Gnosticism.<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn23" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn23" name="_ftnref23">[23]</a> However, as Paul Copen and William Lane Craig point out in their recent book, Creation Out of Nothing: A Biblical, Scientific and Philosophical Exploration, “May proffers little substantiation of this claim, and many who cite him take it on his authority that creation out of nothing is ‘not demanded by the text of the Bible.’”<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn24" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn24" name="_ftnref24">[24]</a> Moreover, Copen and Craig point out that renewal in creation ex nihilo studies is rejuvenating the doctrine, especially due to the work of noted theologians such as Colin Gunton, Robert Jenson and Wolfhart Pannenberg.<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn25" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn25" name="_ftnref25">[25]</a> Commenting on the importance of creatio ex nihilo, Gunton says: “The teaching that the creation is the outcome of God’s willing is one of the most momentous developments in all the history of thought, affecting as it does the way in which the relation of God and the world is understood and, in the longer term, the development of science.<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn26" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn26" name="_ftnref26">[26]</a><br /><br /><br />Philosophical and Historical Context of the Doctrine of Creation<br /> Among his many contributions to a lucid explanation of creation ex nihilo is Gunton’s grasp of the doctrine’s historical development, some of which will be concisely summarized here. The impetus for the Patristic formulation of creatio ex nihilo came via the pre-Socratic philosophers. The ontological makeup of the universe was a popular theme in the writings of the Greek philosophers, who oscillated between cosmological conceptions of the one and the many, represented by Heraclitus (the Logos) and Parmenides (it is) respectively.<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn27" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn27" name="_ftnref27">[27]</a> Subsequently, Plato’s conception of creation articulated in Timaeus, proved immensely influential for the Greeks and, in turn, the Christians.<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn28" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn28" name="_ftnref28">[28]</a> In fact, Christians would do well to approach the doctrine of creation with the piety of Plato:<br /><br />“All men, Socrates, who have any degree of right feeling, at the beginning of every enterprise, whether small or great, always call upon God. And we, too, who are going to discourse of the nature of the universe, how created or how existing without creation, if we be not altogether out of our wits must invoke the aid of gods and goddesses and pray that our words may be above all acceptable to them and in consequence to ourselves.”<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn29" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn29" name="_ftnref29">[29]</a> <br /><br />Plato affirms elements of both the one and the many, conceiving of creation as a product of the demi-urge, a divine mediator who replicates the invisible eternal forms by impressing their pattern upon the receptacle substance from which the visible world is created. He considers the world “the fairest of creations.”<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn30" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn30" name="_ftnref30">[30]</a> As a result, Plato affirms the goodness of creation while simultaneously downgrading its ontology; it is inferior to the eternal forms. The really real is the realm of the forms, not the visible world. The platonic conception of creation is picked up later by the Neo-platonist, Plotinus, whose application of platonic philosophy to Christian theology led to the development of the classical, yet heretical form of the doctrine of emanation.<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn31" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn31" name="_ftnref31">[31]</a> Plotinus was followed by Origen, who modified the doctrine of creation by developing the doctrine of eternal creation. In turn, eternal creation laid the groundwork for Arius’ assertion that the Christ is the highest of all created beings, later refuted by Athanasias. The doctrines of the Forms, emanation and eternal creation are all departures from orthodox Christian teaching on creation.<br /><br />Insight from Irenaeus<br /> Having briefly set the historical and philosophical backdrop for the necessity of a clear articulation of the doctrine of creation, we turn to St. Irenaeus of Lyons. Commenting on the stature of the bishop of Gaul, Kelly remarks: “The theologian who summed up the thought of the second century, and dominated Christian orthodoxy before Origen, was Irenaeus."<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn32" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn32" name="_ftnref32">[32]</a> Of course, Irenaeus’ theological influence was not dictated in the seclusion of an ivory tower but rather developed in the throes of theological controversy.<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn33" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn33" name="_ftnref33">[33]</a> In his treatise, Against the Heresies, Irenaeus confronted a variety of Gnostic teachings rooted in platonic dualism which, in turn, coaxed his out his theology of creation. In the preface to Heresies in which he addresses the Gnostics as men who have “set the truth aside.” Irenaeus demonstrates a preoccupation with the integrity of creation and the glory of the Creator:<br /><br />“These men falsify the oracles of God, and prove themselves evil interpreters of the good word of revelation. They also overthrow the faith of many, by drawing them away, under a pretence of [superior] knowledge, from Him who rounded and adorned the universe; as if, forsooth, they had something more excellent and sublime to reveal, than that God who created the heaven and the earth, and all things that are therein (emphasis added).”<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn34" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn34" name="_ftnref34">[34]</a><br /><br />In addition to producing his doctrine of creation, Heresies demonstrated Irenaeus’ fidelity to biblical exegesis. Although Heresies is not a treatise on the doctrine of creation per se, the doctrine profoundly informs Irenaeus’ apologetic. Moreover, it is his trinitarian theology of creation that enables him to affirm the goodness of the created order (contra Gnosticism). Gunton comments, “By strengthening the trinitarian aspects of the doctrine of creation, Irenaeus was able, first, to develop a markedly positive view of the value of the created order, material and spiritual alike.”<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn35" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn35" name="_ftnref35">[35]</a> In his refutation of Gnostic error, Irenaeus builds an argument that initially questions the consistency of Gnostic philosophy, followed by a retrenchment of true Christian doctrine against the Gnostic claims to apostolic sanction. Marked by pastoral concern and a zeal for truth, Irenaeus’ Against Heresies is a fine example of a contextualized, trinitarian biblical theology of creation.<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn36" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn36" name="_ftnref36">[36]</a> Given Gunton’s admiration for Irenaeus, one is left to wonder why he did not imitate his esteemed interlocutor’s model of exegetical argumentation.<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn37" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn37" name="_ftnref37">[37]</a><br /> Nevertheless, Gunton skillfully lifts creatio ex nihilo from the mass of Gnostic refutation in Against Heresies, writing:<br /><br />“In opposition to the plethora of mythologies of the creation to be found in Gnosticism, Irenaeus stressed the absolute freedom of God to create. There must be creation out of nothing, he argued, because if there is anything coeternal with God, that would be a kind of deity for it would impose necessity on the creator. All things other than God must, therefore, derive from the unconstrained will of the creator.”<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn38" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn38" name="_ftnref38">[38]</a> <br /><br />Here Gunton links the importance of creation ex nihilo with the omnipotence and sovereign freedom of God. Accordingly, Irenaeus writes, “While men, indeed, cannot make anything out of nothing, but only out of matter already existing, yet God is in this point preeminently superior to men, that He Himself called into being the substance of His creation, when previously it had no existence.”<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn39" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn39" name="_ftnref39">[39]</a> Although Irenaeus was not the first to teach creation ex nihilo, his contributions to the doctrine are unique and substantial.<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn40" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn40" name="_ftnref40">[40]</a><br /> As noted by Gunton, Irenaeus affirmed creation out of nothing in contradistinction to the Gnostic concept of angelic mediation.<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn41" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn41" name="_ftnref41">[41]</a> To assert that anything other than God created the universe would imply one of three things: disinterest in creation, inferiority to the other creator and/or ignorance of creation (2.2). However, Irenaeus demonstrates that, according to Scripture and reason, God took great interest in his creation, being fully aware and active in its formation, as, at least, any man would:<br /><br />“For this is a peculiarity of the pre-eminence of God, not to stand in need of other instruments for the creation of those things which are summoned into existence. His own Word is both suitable and sufficient for the formation of all things, even as John, the disciple of the Lord, declares regarding Him: ‘All things were made by Him, and without Him was nothing made.’<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn42" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn42" name="_ftnref42">[42]</a> Now, among the “all things” our world must be embraced. It too, therefore, was made by His Word, as Scripture tells us in the book of Genesis that He made all things connected with our world by His Word. David also expresses the same truth [when he says] "For He spake, and they were made; He commanded, and they were created.”<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn43" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn43" name="_ftnref43">[43]</a> (2.2.5)<br /><br />Moreover, as can be seen above, a Christological element forms part of his argument. Another layer in Irenaeus’ argument is Johannine, namely that all things have been made through Christ (Jn 1.1-3, 14).<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn44" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn44" name="_ftnref44">[44]</a> Later on, he emphasizes the centrality of Word in creation: “For the Creator of the world is truly the Word of God: and this is our Lord, who in the last times was made man, existing in this world, and who in an invisible manner contains all things created, and is inherent in the entire creation, since the Word of God governs and arranges all things; and therefore He came to His own in a visible manner, and was made flesh, and hung upon the tree, that He might sum up all things in Himself.” (5.18.3) It is also important to note that for Irenaeus, Christ as Creator should not be divorced from Christ as Redeemer. Jesus is the mediator of creation and new creation. Thus, Irenaeus’ trinitarian theology of creation begins to emerge.<br /> <br />The ‘Two Hands’ of the Creator<br /> Gunton outlines two implications for Irenaeus’ creatio ex nihilo: a theology of mediation and the freedom of God in creation, both of which are facilitated by his uniquely trinitarian theology of creation.<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn45" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn45" name="_ftnref45">[45]</a> A lengthy quote will explain:<br /><br />“As is well known, Irenaeus frequently says that God created by means of his two hands, the Son and the Spirit. This enables him to give a clear account of how God relates to that which is not God: of how the creator interacts with his creation. The second aspect reveals the other side of this same reality, the freedom of God in relation to the created universe. Because God created by means of his own Son and Spirit, he is unlike the deities of the Gnostics and the One of neoplatonism in that he does not require beings intermediate between himself and the world in order to achieve his ends. That is, because the Son and the Spirit are God, to create by means of his two hands means that God is himself creating. This is accordingly a theology of mediation which breaks through Hellenic doctrines of degrees of being. There do not, on this account need to be intermediate beings between God and the world because the Son and the Spirit mediate between the divine and the created.”<br /><br />To be sure, Irenaeus’ “two-handed” imagery is distinctly trinitarian.<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn46" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn46" name="_ftnref46">[46]</a> He writes, “Now man is a mixed organization of soul and flesh, who was formed after the likeness of God, and moulded by His hands, that is, by the Son and Holy Spirit, to whom also He said, ‘Let Us make man.’”<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn47" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn47" name="_ftnref47">[47]</a> However, it is interesting to note that this trinitarian metaphor occurs less than ten times in the span of Heresies’ five books.<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn48" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn48" name="_ftnref48">[48]</a> Moreover, only a few of the references make an explicit connection between the hands of the Son and Spirit and non-human creation (one text which Gunton most frequently cites, 4.20.1).<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn49" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn49" name="_ftnref49">[49]</a> Although the “two hands” of the Father is a technical phrase for Irenaeus, its infrequent use limits our understanding. Unlike the Cappadocians and other post-Nicene fathers, Irenaeus does not offer a full blown doctrine of the Trinity. Thus, Gonzalez is correct to point out that the metaphor is more or less left to stand on its own: “Irenaeus bypasses the more subtle aspects of trinitarian doctrine and simply affirms, as he must have heard from his ancestors in the faith, that God is Father, Son and Spirit, without discussing the relationship between the three.”<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn50" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn50" name="_ftnref50">[50]</a> However, we must be weary of committing the word-thing fallacy, for Irenaeus makes numerous references to trinitarian creation that do not employ the two hands metaphor.<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn51" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn51" name="_ftnref51">[51]</a> Moreover, each instance of the “two hands” metaphor is undeniably trinitarian. <br /> What then, according to Irenaeus, is the purpose of the “two hands” metaphor and how does it relate to creation ex nihilo? First and foremost, the “two hands” metaphor emerges at the beginning of Book IV, which contains Irenaeus’ attempt to “add weight, by means of the words of the Lord” to his argument (4.pref.1). Thus, he is beginning to turn away from strict reason and return to the faith through which his reason operates. More specifically, this first reference is in response to Gnostics “teaching blasphemy against God our Maker and Supporter, and derogating from the salvation of man (4.pref.4).” Immediately after this sentence he writes, “Now man is a mixed organization of soul and flesh, who was formed after the likeness of God, and moulded by His hands, that is, by the Son and Holy Spirit, to whom also He said, ‘Let Us make man.’ This, then, is the aim of him who envies our life, to render men disbelievers in their own salvation, and blasphemous against God the Creator (4.pref.4).” Thus, Irenaeus perceives two Gnostic atrocities, 1) an attempt to blaspheme God (who is triune) and 2) to undermine Christian faith. How then does Gen 1.26 inform his argument? The quotation from Genesis 1 will appear disjointed unless we perceive two key elements in Irenaeus’ theology. One, Gnostic assault upon the Creator is an assault on the Triune God and two, to attempt to subvert redemption is to disfigure God’s new creation. For Irenaeus, Creator and Trinity go hand in hand, just as creation and redemption. Thus, he views their attempts to undermine the faith of believers in the Triune God as an assault on new creation. He writes, “…they blaspheme the Creator, and disallow the salvation of God's workmanship, which the flesh truly is…(4.preface.4)” His allusion to Eph 2.10 is especially illuminating, “For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.” Note that his understanding of “workmanship” is grounded in the creation/redemption imagery of Ephesians 2, which includes redemption of the flesh and the spirit, saved by grace to do good works!<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn52" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn52" name="_ftnref52">[52]</a> Therefore, if we understand just how closely Irenaeus views creation and redemption, we will begin to understand both the gravity of his argument and the greatness of his God. <br /> Interestingly, Irenaeus’ “two hands” metaphor does not reappear until the last chapter of Book IV, forming an inclusio. After a sustained argument from Scripture regarding the centrality and deity of Christ and his pivotal role in redemptively recapitulating the human story as the fulfillment of the Law and the Prophets, Irenaeus returns to trinitarian creation as the basis for creation ex nihilo. Because the Father is trinitarian, relating to the Son and the Spirit, the Word and Wisdom, he can create all things without the need for an angelic mediator, just as the title of his final section implies:<br /><br />THAT ONE GOD FORMED ALL THINGS IN THE WORLD, BY MEANS OF THE WORD AND THE HOLY SPIRIT: AND THAT ALTHOUGH HE IS TO US IN THIS LIFE INVISIBLE AND INCOMPREHENSIBLE, NEVERTHELESS HE IS NOT UNKNOWN; INASMUCH AS HIS WORKS DO DECLARE HIM, AND HIS WORD HAS SHOWN THAT IN MANY MODES HE MAY BE SEEN AND KNOWN. <br /><br />Irenaeus elaborates:<br /><br />“And this is He of whom the Scripture says, ‘And God formed man, taking clay of the earth, and breathed into his face the breath of life.’<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn53" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn53" name="_ftnref53">[53]</a> It was not angels, therefore, who made us, nor who formed us, neither had angels power to make an image of God, nor any one else, except the Word of the Lord, nor any Power remotely distant from the Father of all things. For God did not stand in need of these [beings], in order to the accomplishing of what He had Himself determined with Himself beforehand should be done, as if He did not possess His own hands. For with Him were always present the Word and Wisdom, the Son and the Spirit, by whom and in whom, freely and spontaneously, He made all things, to whom also He speaks, saying, ‘Let Us make man after Our image and likeness;’<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn54" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn54" name="_ftnref54">[54]</a> He taking from Himself the substance of the creatures [formed], and the pattern of things made, and the type of all the adornments in the world. (4.20.1)<br /><br />Why are Gnostics wrong in supposing that some sort of intermediary being created all things? According to Irenaeus there are at least four reasons. First, this is a contradiction of Gen 1.26, which informs the reader that God created man with the help of the Son and the Spirit (inclusio with preface). This assistance can not come through the agency of angels since, as finite and created beings, they could not create the image of the infinite and uncreated God.<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn55" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn55" name="_ftnref55">[55]</a> Second, and related, there is no such power outside of the Trinity to perform creation, especially that of the imago Dei. Third, God had no need for any help since he is eternally self-sufficient as a Triune God. Fourth, creation was decreed before the existence of angels and was the product of intra-trinitarian counsel, “He himself had determined with Himself beforehand…For with Him were always present the Word and Wisdom, the Son and the Spirit, by whom and in who, freely and spontaneously, He made all things…” Therefore, trinitarian creation ex nihilo implies the omnipotence, self-sufficiency, and freedom of God to create as he wills, springing from no deficiency but rather from the overflow of his creativity and sovereign will. As Gunton has observed via Irenaeus, this implies a freestanding value for the created order, affirming the goodness of creation: “It is accordingly his trinitarianism which gives Irenaeus the confidence and the reason to affirm the doctrine of creation out of nothing. The economy of creation and salvation as it takes its centre in Jesus Christ’s redemptive recapitulation of the human story demonstrates God’s total sovereignty in and over against all the created order.”<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn56" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn56" name="_ftnref56">[56]</a><br /> As summarized above, Irenaeus’ trinitarian theology of creation has contributed to our understanding of the being of God in several key areas. Therefore, before examining the Trinity proper, we will reflect with Gunton on one of the “attributes” of the Trinity who creates ex nihilo, the attribute of omnipotence. <br /><br /><br />Divine Personal Omnipotence: Implications of the Two Hands<br /> Gunton points out that Irenaeus was the first to systematically develop the omnipotence of God in the history of dogmatics.<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn57" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn57" name="_ftnref57">[57]</a> How? Gunton writes: “The doctrine was a specifically theological coining, a side-effect so to speak of Irenaeus’ development of the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo, which, as he rightly saw, implied omnipotence.”<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn58" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn58" name="_ftnref58">[58]</a> Moreover, contrary to contemporary formulations of omnipotence, Irenaeus’ understanding took on a more personal tone. Citing an often misinterpreted passage from Heresies, Gunton corrects the interpretation and points out that God’s omnipotence is not merely an action but an attribute of his personal being, namely the powerful actions of his two hands in creation. This section is worthy of full citation not only to exegete Irenaeus but also as an example of Irenaeus’ exegesis:<br /><br />“Truly, then, the Scripture declared, which says, ‘First of all believe that there is one God, who has established all things, and completed them, and having caused that from what had no being, all things should come into existence:’<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn59" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn59" name="_ftnref59">[59]</a> He who contains all things, and is Himself contained by no one. Rightly also has Malachi said among the prophets: ‘Is it not one God who hath established us? Have we not all one Father?’<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn60" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn60" name="_ftnref60">[60]</a> In accordance with this, too, does the apostle say, ‘There is one God, the Father, who is above all, and in us all.’<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn61" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn61" name="_ftnref61">[61]</a> Likewise does the Lord also say: ‘All things are delivered to Me by My Father;’<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn62" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn62" name="_ftnref62">[62]</a> manifestly by Him who made all things; for He did not deliver to Him the things of another, but His own. But in all things [it is implied that] nothing has been kept back [from Him], and for this reason the same person is the Judge of the living and the dead; ‘having the key of David: He shall Open, and no man shall shut: He shall shut, and no man shall open.’<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn63" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn63" name="_ftnref63">[63]</a> For no one was able, either in heaven or in earth, or under the earth, to open the book of the Father, or to behold Him, with the exception of the Lamb who was slain, and who redeemed us with His own blood, receiving power over all things from the same God who made all things by the Word, and adorned them by [His] Wisdom, when "the Word was made flesh;" that even as the Word of God had the sovereignty in the heavens, so also might He have the sovereignty in earth, inasmuch as [He was] a righteous man, ‘who did no sin, neither was there found guile in His mouth;’<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn64" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn64" name="_ftnref64">[64]</a> and that He might have the pre-eminence over those things which are under the earth, He Himself being made ‘the first-begotten of the dead;’<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn65" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn65" name="_ftnref65">[65]</a> and that all things, as I have already said, might behold their King; and that the paternal light might meet with and rest upon the flesh of our Lord, and come to us from His resplendent flesh, and that thus man might attain to immortality, having been invested with the paternal light (4.20.2).”<br /><br />The particular phrase which has been misinterpreted as pantheistic is “He who contains all things, and is Himself contained by no one.” Gunton comments, “Although ‘contain’ is the usual translation for this passage (panta cwrwn monoj de acwrhtoj wn), Irenaeus’ theology as a whole suggests that ‘enclose’ might be a better translation. ‘Irenaeus can speak of God “enclosing” his creation and yet only be misinterpreted as a pantheist. In both the cosmic and christological case there is a distinct ontological divide functioning that only avoids collapse into monism by virtue of the fact that God himself prevents such a collapse through the mediating activity of the Son and the Spirit. By mediating his own being with that of his creation through his “two hands”, God created an ontological space in which duality does not collapse into dualism.’”<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn66" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn66" name="_ftnref66">[66]</a> Through this explanation we perceive that God is personally involved in creation without necessitating pantheism or panentheism. To construe God’s creative activity as a transcendent, bare display of his raw power apart from the distinctly relational aspect of his immanence is to miss what trinitarian creation is meant to be and convey! Accordingly, Gunton writes: “Irenaeus’ God is ontologically transcendent, as creator of everything else that exists. But by virtue of his triune nature, God the Father is able to enter into personal relations with the created order by the mediating activity of his two hands, the Son ad the Spirit. Who are as truly God as he is God. Irenaeus’ God is thus ontologically transcendent of the world – he is a different kind of being, creator as distinct from creation – but by virtue of his triune being able to enter into relations with that world.”<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn67" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn67" name="_ftnref67">[67]</a> <br /> This personal dimension of the omnipotence of God is observable in Irenaeus’ generous use of Scripture, particularly in his link between the sovereignty of God “in heaven and on earth” through the incarnation. Irenaeus’ exegesis of Revelation is particularly insightful. In Revelation 5.1f John witnesses a problem in the heavenly court, posed by the angel’s question, “Who is worthy to open the book and to break its seals?” In halakak fashion, Irenaeus interpretively summarizes the heavenly solution, “For no one was able, either in heaven or in earth, or under the earth, to open the book of the Father, or to behold Him, with the exception of the Lamb who was slain, and who redeemed us with His own blood, receiving power over all things from the same God who made all things by the Word, and adorned them by [His] Wisdom, when "the Word was made flesh;" that even as the Word of God had the sovereignty in the heavens, so also might He have the sovereignty in earth…” Irenaeus argues that the only ontologically sufficient solution for the book of redemptive history to be opened is Christ, the God-Man, who has the authority to open the book and execute its decrees of judgment and salvation precisely because he became man and conquered sin, death and hell. Thus, as the one who secured his sovereignty through his own birth, life, death, resurrection and ascension, Jesus Christ received power from the Father enabling him to exercise universal sovereignty or “omnipotence”! Note that, according to Irenaeus, this omnipotence is directed towards the glorification of the elect, “and that the paternal light might meet with and rest upon the flesh of our Lord, and come to us from His resplendent flesh, and that thus man might attain to immortality, having been invested with the paternal light.”<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn68" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn68" name="_ftnref68">[68]</a> This is no instance of absolute power corrupting absolutely. Instead, Jesus harnesses his power for the good of people and creation. <br /> Such personal omnipotence is also demonstrated in the latter half of Revelation 5 where the 24 elders, representative of Israel and the Church (the whole people of God), sing a new song of salvation, “Worthy art Thou to take the book, and to break its seals; for Thou wast slain, and didst purchase for God with Thy blood men from every tribe and tongue and people and nation. And Thou hast made them to be a kingdom and priests to our God; and they will reign upon the earth.” Trinitarian omnipotence is here opened up to the elect in that they will reign with Christ forever in the new creation, bringing Irenaeus’ theology of trinitarian creation full circle.<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn69" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn69" name="_ftnref69">[69]</a> Situating Irenaeus’ theological insight in his historical context Gunton writes: “The doctrine of omnipotence is a new arrival on the scene of history, at least so far as Irenaeus’ cultural context is concerned. Greek gods were not omnipotent, but subservient to fate, chance and necessity. Irenaeus’ God is known to be omnipotent for Christian reasons: by virtue of what happened in the incarnation, life, death and resurrection of Jesus.”<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn70" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn70" name="_ftnref70">[70]</a> Thus, we observe that Irenaeus’ trinitarian theology of creation gave rise to the Christian understanding of omnipotence as an equally personal and powerful “attribute” of God.<br /> <br />Trinitarian Theology for Systematic Theology<br /> In his posthumously published work, Act & Being: Towards a Theology of Divine Attributes, Gunton laments the detrimental influence of Hellenistic philosophy upon the manner in which the doctrine of the Trinity has been historically conceived. In particular, he critiques the disconnected way in which many theologians have described God via “attributes” in distinction from God as Trinity, stating at the outset of his book: “To speak of the Trinity is already to say something of God’s characteristics, while to speak of the attributes apart form the Trinity – as is often done – is a mistake, and one which we shall be exploring below.”<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn71" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn71" name="_ftnref71">[71]</a> Accordingly, Gunton asserts that many systematic theologies begin in the wrong place. Instead of beginning with the Trinity, which is itself characteristic of God, the majority of systematic theologies begin with Theology proper and extended discussions on God’s attributes, often to the neglect of the triune God. Gunton notes this problem in Hodge’s Systematic Theology, quoting a lengthy description of God which makes no reference to God as triune.<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn72" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn72" name="_ftnref72">[72]</a> In agreement with Gunton regarding Hodge’s oversight, Robert Letham writes: “he does not get around to suggesting that God is triune until after 250 pages of detailed exposition of the doctrine of God…”<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn73" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn73" name="_ftnref73">[73]</a> Thus, in the tradition of Lombard, Aquinas, Barth<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn74" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn74" name="_ftnref74">[74]</a> and Rahner, <a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn75" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn75" name="_ftnref75">[75]</a> Gunton proposes that discussion about God should begin with his threeoneness.<br /> Regarding the doctrine of the Trinity, a variety of insights have already been woven throughout our comments thus far, in particular Irenaeus’ contribution of the two hands of the Father. However, despite the innovation and contribution of the “two hands,” Irenaeus failed to sufficiently elaborate upon this metaphor’s implications for the immanent Trinity. To be sure, Irenaeus was not so radically economic in his trinitarianism that it warranted the accusation of subordinationist.<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn76" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn76" name="_ftnref76">[76]</a> In Heresies 4.20.1 Irenaeus plainly affirms ontological unity within the Godhead: “…that the Word, namely the Son, was always with the Father; and that Wisdom also, which is the Spirit, was present with Him anterior to all creation.”<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn77" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn77" name="_ftnref77">[77]</a> Nevertheless, the economic emphasis in Irenaeus led to an obscuring of the Son and the Spirit as “Persons,”<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn78" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn78" name="_ftnref78">[78]</a> which is, in part, what Gunton has attempted to improve upon in The Promise of Trinitarian Theology by paying particular attention to the work of the Cappadocian fathers. But first, some introductory comments.<br /> Before and after the East-West split over the filoque clause, vigorous deliberation and, at times, violent debate characterized ecclesiastical concern regarding the doctrine of the Trinity. However, in recent years Western attention to the doctrine of the Trinity has been in steady decline. To be sure, Christian orthodoxy has consistently affirmed the doctrine of the Trinity, but that is the problem; it has merely been affirmed. The doctrine of the Trinity has increasingly become an affirmation that good, orthodox Christians slide onto the shelf of their mental libraries where, unfortunately, it has remained to collect dust. As a result, the Trinity has been fossilized into Christian consciousness as concept, not as praxis. This trend of viewing the Trinity as a problem or not at all is precisely what Gunton sought to overturn. He writes:<br /><br />“…there has for long been a tendency to treat the doctrine as a problem rather than as encapsulating the heart of the Christian gospel. It is as if one had to establish one’s Christian orthodoxy by facing a series of mathematical and logical difficulties rather than by glorying in the being of God whose reality as a communion of persons is the basis of a rational universe in which personal life may take shape.”<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn79" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn79" name="_ftnref79">[79]</a><br /><br />For Gunton, the Trinity was not a problem but a priority. In lieu of approaching the Trinity as a “problem solving device”, he viewed the doctrine as central to the Christian faith, as a relational reality soliciting praise and affecting every facet of life.<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn80" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn80" name="_ftnref80">[80]</a> Thus, he proceeded in his trinitarianism with the assumption that by understanding the kind of being that God is we can begin to understand what kind of beings we are and the world we inhabit.<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn81" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn81" name="_ftnref81">[81]</a> Profoundly moved by the pervasive power and relevance of the Trinity, Gunton sought to view everything through this doctrine: “Because God is triune, we must respond to him in a particular way, or rather set of ways, corresponding to the richness of his being…In turn, that means that everything looks – and, indeed, is – different in the life of the Trinity. (emphasis added)”<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn82" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn82" name="_ftnref82">[82]</a><br /> <br /><br />The Immanent Trinity<br /> How did Gunton view the Trinity? Much could be said and has been said on this topic;<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn83" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn83" name="_ftnref83">[83]</a> therefore, what follows is an attempt to distill Gunton’s trinitarian theology. In our lengthy examination of the two hands of the Father, we explored the economic work of the Trinity via the Father’s work in creation through the Son and the Spirit. By reflecting on the Trinity’s work of creatio ex nihilo, we discerned a number of things about the being of God, his sovereignty, omnipotence and personal agency, gaining a glimpse into the immanent Trinity. Here we are further concerned with the immanent Trinity. However, lest we draw a line too sharply between the economic and immanent Trinity (even the manner in which these two approaches are often expressed is problematic, implying two “Trinities,” one economic and one immanent), it is important to affirm Rahner’s familiar aphorism, “The ‘economic’ Trinity is the ‘immanent’ Trinity and the ‘immanent’ Trinity is the ‘economic’ Trinity.”<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn84" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn84" name="_ftnref84">[84]</a> Alternatively put in Guntonian form: “God is what he does, and does what he is.”<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn85" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn85" name="_ftnref85">[85]</a> Therefore, it will not do to speculate upon the inner life of the Trinity apart from who God has revealed himself to be in his actions through history. As a result, “economic” insight will serve our “immanent” reflections. To that end, we turn once again to Irenaeus.<br /> Quite frequently Irenaeus’ comments on the being of God are grounded in the action of God. This is observable in a familiar passage: “For with Him were always present the Word and Wisdom, the Son and the Spirit, by whom and in whom, freely and spontaneously, He made all things…(4.20.1)”<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn86" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn86" name="_ftnref86">[86]</a> Here the co-eternal existence of the three persons is affirmed in conjunction with their creating activity. Therefore, if the Son and the Spirit are, as the two hands, God the Father in action, they are the eternal God.<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn87" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn87" name="_ftnref87">[87]</a> As full members of the Godhead, neither the Son nor the Spirit are to be misconstrued as ontologically subordinate to God the Father. In some sense, they are God the Father and are not some sort of semi-divine beings that bridge the ontological divide between Creator and creature. Therefore, each person of the Trinity is constitutively God, warranting study as individual persons, if we are to understand just who the Trinity is. Yet, in our aim to understand the immanent Trinity we do well to heed Gunton’s warning: “The point of the doctrine of the immanent Trinity is to provide a ground for the theology of the economy, but to go no further than is licensed by his revelation.”<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn88" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn88" name="_ftnref88">[88]</a> <br /> Yet, what does revelation hold out for us? Leaning upon the Cappadocian fathers, Gunton observes that Jesus’ historical identity is determined by his relation to the Father – being sent, returning to and remaining with the Father. Thus, the Son is the eternally begotten one (Jn 1.14, 18), limiting the human analogy of Father and Son to relation, not including origination.<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn89" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn89" name="_ftnref89">[89]</a> Similarly, yet distinctly, the Spirit is to be understood in relation to the Father, not as another Son but as one who “proceeds” (evkporeu,etai, present middle) from the Father: Otan e;lqh o` para,klhtoj o]n evgw. pe,myw u`mi/n para. tou/ patro,j( to. pneu/ma th/j avlhqei,aj o] para. tou/ patro.j evkporeu,etai( evkei/noj marturh,sei peri. evmou/ (Jn 15.26). In addition to the Son and the Spirit’s relation to the Father, this text informs us of a relationship between the Son and the Spirit, completing the triune community. The Spirit is also, in some way, sent by the Son while also testifying concerning the Son. <br /> By maintaining this relational conception of the Trinity, Gunton follows the contributions of St. Basil of Caesarea, who drew the distinction between the Trinity as essence and as persons.<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn90" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn90" name="_ftnref90">[90]</a> To this Gunton adds the eschatological work of the Spirit as the perfecting presence of God not only in creation, but also in the Trinity.<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn91" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn91" name="_ftnref91">[91]</a> Gunton writes: “Suppose that we were to infer from this the suggestion that in eternity the Spirit is the one who similarly perfects the being of God, so as first to enable the relation between the Father and the Son to be properly described as one of love; and second to provide the basis for God’s movement out into the world in his Son to create and redeem.”<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn92" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn92" name="_ftnref92">[92]</a> By expanding upon Basil’s articulation of the Spirit as the perfecting cause, Gunton echoes the Augustinian analogy of the Trinity as Lover, Beloved and Love.<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn93" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn93" name="_ftnref93">[93]</a> Thus, Gunton underscores the perichoretic and personal nature of the Trinity:<br /> <br /> “…the being of God is describable as love, but love of a particular kind. To say that God is love means, first, that God is constituted, made up without remainder, of a personal structure of giving and receiving. Internally, God is a fellowship of persons whose orientation is entirely to the other. The notion of there being three persons in God is problematic for us, because we think that person means individual in the modern sense of one whose being is defined over against, even in opposition to, other individuals.”<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn94" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn94" name="_ftnref94">[94]</a><br /><br />Indeed, love does get at the “heart” of the Trinity and is indicative of an eternal self-sufficiency and happiness shared by the three divine persons in communion, reminding us that God did not create out of deficiency or need- he is constituted without remainder. However, care must be taken when describing the Holy Spirit as “Love.” This emotive yet rather impersonal description comes dangerously close to downgrading the third person of the Trinity. Alternatively, Gunton proposes conceiving of the Holy Spirit as the mediator or agent of love, a hypostasis in his own being.<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn95" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn95" name="_ftnref95">[95]</a> <br /> To summarize in Gunton’s own words, God’s being is known in and through his action, his triune act.<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn96" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn96" name="_ftnref96">[96]</a> He writes: “His action is triune in the sense that it is the action of the Father, Son and Spirit, whose opera ad extra are inseparable from one another, though they are distributed, so to speak, between the three persons: the Father being the originating source of action, which he performs through the Son’s involvement in the world and the Sprit’s perfecting of created things in anticipation of the Last Day.”<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn97" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn97" name="_ftnref97">[97]</a> <br /><br />Engaging Culture and Worship: Implications for a Trinitarian Theology of Creation <br /> The action of the Trinity in creation compelled Gunton to explore not only the depths of the immanent Trinity but also its impact on culture. In his zeal to develop a more concrete trinitarianism, Gunton devoted significant space in his writings to engagement with the ideals and issues of modern culture, most notably his The One, the Three and the Many: God, Creation and the Culture of Modernity.<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn98" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn98" name="_ftnref98">[98]</a> Commenting on the relevance of the Trinity to culture he writes: “Modernity is like all cultures, in being in need of the healing light of the gospel of the Son of God, made incarnate by the Holy Spirit for the perfecting of the creation.”<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn99" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn99" name="_ftnref99">[99]</a> Gunton even goes so far as to say, “…the value of the theology of the Trinity lies more in enabling a rethinking of the topics of theology and culture than in offering a privileged view of the being of God.”<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn100" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn100" name="_ftnref100">[100]</a> However, Gunton’s perception of the value of trinitarian theology should not be perceived as radical orthopraxy or in some way at odds with doxological orthodoxy. On the contrary, like many other theologians in the Reformed tradition, he views theology, more specifically, trinitarian theology, as a means to doxology. He writes: “And as soon as we begin to look at worship in the Christian church, the importance of the trinitarian dimension immediately becomes apparent. Worship is not activity in which we contemplate or observe a being who is over and against us – though in a sense God is that also – but it is relational, something that happens between persons. And the happening between persons is worship in the Son and through the Spirit.”<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn101" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn101" name="_ftnref101">[101]</a><br /> <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />All contributions should be sent to:<br />Dr Steve HolmesDepartment of Theology and Religious StudiesKing's CollegeStrandLondonWC2R 2LSUK<br />North American contributors may send them if they prefer to:<br />Professor Ralph Del ColleDepartment of TheologyMarquette UniversityCoughlin Hall 100PO Box 1881MilwaukeeWI 53201-1881USA<br />Books for review should be sent to:<br />Dr Murray RaeDepartment of Theology and Religious StudiesKing's CollegeStrandLondonWC2R 2LSUK<br />or to Professor Del Colle<br />Articles will not be considered for publication if they have been previously published in English or are being currently considered for publication elsewhere.<br />Articles should normally be 5-7500 words in length, including notes, though longer articles may sometimes be considered.<br />Three copies of contributions should be submitted, typed double-spaced on one side of the paper, along with a diskette. Contributions should include a word-count, and a 100 word abstract of the article. Contributions will not be returned.<br />Notes (preferably footnotes) should be numbered sequentially throughout the article.<br />Submissions will be blind reviewed; the name of the author should therefore not appear on the submitted manuscript.<br />Submissions may follow either UK or US spelling conventions, provided that they are consistent.<br />References should follow these formats:<br />(i) Gerald O'Collins, Christology. A Biblical, Historical, and Systematic Study of Jesus (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p 29.<br />(ii) John P. Galvin, 'Before the Holy Mystery: Karl Rahner's Thought on God', Toronto Journal of Theology 9 (1993), pp. 229-37.<br />(iii) Werner G. Jeanrond, 'Hans Knng', in David F. Ford, ed., The Modern Theologians. An Introduction to Christian Theology in the Twentieth Century (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), pp 162-78.<br />The use of 'op. cit.' and 'ibid.' should be avoided.<br />Copyright Assignment FormAuthors will be required to assign copyright in their paper to Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Copyright assignment is a condition of publication and papers will not be passed to the publisher for production unless copyright has been assigned. To assist authors an appropriate copyright assignment form will be supplied by the editorial office. Alternatively, authors may like to download a copy of the form <a href="http://www.blackwellpublishing.com/pdf/ijst_caf.pdf">here</a>. Government employees need to complete the Author Warranty sections, although copyright in such cases does not need to be assigned.<br /><br /><a href="http://www.blackwellpublishing.com/submit.asp?ref=1463-1652#top"></a><br /><br />Online access<br />View <a href="http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/rd.asp?code=ijst&goto=journal" target="_blank">online</a> content.<br /><br /><br /><br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn1" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref1" name="_ftn1">[1]</a> Augustine, The Confessions of Saint Augustine, translated by John K. Ryan (New York: Doubleday, 1960), 138.<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn2" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref2" name="_ftn2">[2]</a> Confessions, 138.<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn3" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref3" name="_ftn3">[3]</a> According to Edmund Hill, Augustine derived this phrase from Isaiah 7.9 LXX, “unless you believe, you will not understand.” St. Augustine, The Trinity, trans. and intro. by Edmund Hill (O.P. Brooklyn, NY: New City Press, 1991), 22. In De Trinitatae, Augustine expands upon the meaning of fides quorum intellectum while commenting on the challenge and promise of understanding the Trinity, especially in conjunction with his exegesis of Mt 5.8. Ibid., VIII, 3. <br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn4" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref4" name="_ftn4">[4]</a> In agreement Gunton writes, “God is incomprehensible in not being graspable; but not incomprehensible in the sense of being entirely beyond our understanding.” Colin Gunton, Act & Being: Towards A Theology of the Divine Attributes (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2002), 112.<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn5" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref5" name="_ftn5">[5]</a> Gunton uses the specific phrase, “trinitarian theology of creation”, in a variety of places including, The Promise of Trinitarian Theology (London: T & T Clark, 1997), 142 and The Triune Creator: A Historical and Systematic Study (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1998), 10.<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn6" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref6" name="_ftn6">[6]</a> Gunton, Triune Creator, ix.<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn7" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref7" name="_ftn7">[7]</a> Gunton’s commitment to integrating systematic and historical theology is recognizable throughout his work, the least of which is certainly not The Triune Creator. In this vein and of particular interest is Gunton’s chapter on “Historical and Systematic Theology,” in The Cambridge Companion to Christian Doctrine, ed. Colin E. Gunton (Cambridge, England: Cambridge U. Press, 1997) and Theology through the Theologians: Selected Essays from 1972-1995 (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1996).<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn8" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref8" name="_ftn8">[8]</a> Jaroslav Pelikan, Credo: Historical and Theological Guide to Christian Creeds and Confessions of Faith in the Christian Tradition (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), 35.<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn9" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref9" name="_ftn9">[9]</a> Aquinas, Summa Theologicae, 1a.2, as cited in Gunton, Triune Creator, 6.<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn10" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref10" name="_ftn10">[10]</a> Ibid., 8.<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn11" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref11" name="_ftn11">[11]</a> Ibid., 14-24. Although Gunton justifies his meager exegesis (see above), this is certainly one of the deficiencies in his work. His aim to develop a trinitarian theology of creation has been done at the expense of a biblical theology of creation. However, it appears that Gunton sought to rectify this deficiency in some of his later writings. For instance, in “The Spirit Moved Over the Face of the Waters: The Holy Spirit and the Created Order,” International Journal of Systematic Theology 4, no. 2 (July 2002): 190-204, Gunton develops a significant exegesis of Gen 1.1-2 along with exegetical-theological reflection of various NT texts.<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn12" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref12" name="_ftn12">[12]</a> Ibid., 15.<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn13" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref13" name="_ftn13">[13]</a> Colin E. Gunton, "The Doctrine of Creation," in The Cambridge Companion to Christian Doctrine, ed. Colin E. Gunton (Cambridge, England: Cambridge U. Press, 1997), 145.<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn14" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref14" name="_ftn14">[14]</a> ?<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn15" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref15" name="_ftn15">[15]</a> Gunton, Triune Creator, 20-1. To be fair, Gunton also mentions the important role that Psalms and Job play in an OT theology of creation. He notes, “The Psalms, 104 and 139 for example, celebrate God’s creation of everything without the framework of days or an allusion to the first human couple. The famous speech of God from the whirlwind in Job 38-9 celebrates what is surely the main point of the Old Testament witness, the sheer freedom and sovereignty of God over all things that he has made, a note to be found nowhere outside of the Bible, for in all other accounts, certainly in those of the Greeks, there are always constraints on divine action.” Cambridge Companion, 145.<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn16" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref16" name="_ftn16">[16]</a> Ibid., 21.<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn17" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref17" name="_ftn17">[17]</a> For translations of the texts see, James B. Pritchard, Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament with Supplement 3rd ed. (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1969).<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn18" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref18" name="_ftn18">[18]</a> Hesiod is neither fully Homeric nor fully Pre-socratic, but functions as a kind of transitional figure in Greek cosmogony. For instance, he conceives of creation in terms of quasi-impersonal gods such as the Chasm (understood as void Chaos), which is later described as containing colliding atoms by the Atomists. The pre-Socratics become altogether impersonal, while depending upon the once personal and ancient conceptions of creation. The pendulum swings from the personal conception of the universe to the impersonal conception. Hesiod, Theogony, Works and Days trans. M. L. West (Oxford, England: Oxford, 1999).<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn19" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref19" name="_ftn19">[19]</a> Gunton, Triune Creator, 9.<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn20" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref20" name="_ftn20">[20]</a> Gunton, The Christian Faith, 17.<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn21" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref21" name="_ftn21">[21]</a> The Christian Faith, 18.<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn22" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref22" name="_ftn22">[22]</a> Friedrich E. D. Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith, 2 vols. Trans. Richard R. Niebuhr (New York: Harper & Row, 1963), 1:148-52, cited in Paul Copan and William Lane Craig, Creation Out of Nothing: A Biblical, Scientific and Philosophical Exploration (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2004), 10.<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn23" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref23" name="_ftn23">[23]</a> Gerhard May, Creatio ex Nihilo: The Doctrine of “Creation out of Nothing”: in Early Christian Thought, trans. A. S. Worrall (Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press, 1994) cited in Copan and Craig, Creation Out of Nothing, 24.<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn24" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref24" name="_ftn24">[24]</a> Copan and Craig, Creation Out of Nothing, 24.<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn25" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref25" name="_ftn25">[25]</a> Creation Out of Nothing, 9.<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn26" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref26" name="_ftn26">[26]</a> Gunton, Triune Creator, 65.<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn27" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref27" name="_ftn27">[27]</a> Most of the pre-Socratic evidence is fragmentary, courtesy of Aristotle. However, the philosophical centers of Heraclitus and Parmenides thought have been historically recognized as representative of the one and the many. Heraclitus is most well known for his statement, “You can’t step into the same river twice.” Hence his philosophy of flux, also present in his emphasis on the logos as the fiery, volatile substance that permeates all things. Reality is in fluctuation. For Parmenides, reality is “an undifferentiated continuum, with no past and no future. It just timelessly is.” Ibid., 27a.<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn28" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref28" name="_ftn28">[28]</a> Ibid., 22. Scholars have pointed out that the myth of Atlantis, which is a cycle of floods and drying out, surrounds the story of the Timaeus, leading them to suggest that Timaeus is mythical. Plato may have actually believed the Timaeus account, simply have recorded what Timaeus believed or employed a mythological genre to record his thoughts and develop his philosophy. Regardless, the principles contained in the Timaeus form a critical part of Platonic cosmology.<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn29" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref29" name="_ftn29">[29]</a> Plato, "Timaeus," translated by Benjamin Jowett, in The Collected Dialogues of Plato Including the Letters, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns, vol. LXXI, Bollingen Series (Princeton: Princeton Press, 1961), 1151-1211 (27c).<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn30" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref30" name="_ftn30">[30]</a> Ibid., 29.<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn31" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref31" name="_ftn31">[31]</a> Ibid., 32. <br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn32" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref32" name="_ftn32">[32]</a> J.N.D Kelly, Early Christian Doctrines (New York: Harper Row, 1960), 104.<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn33" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref33" name="_ftn33">[33]</a> Douglas Farrow comments, “Moreover, he is rightly regarded as the prototypical catholic theologian, an interpreter of the faith for his own troubled times who bequeathed to subsequent generations of Christians (eastern and western) a great store of theological resources, if not the discipline of church dogmatics per se.” See Douglas Farrow, “St. Irenaeus of Lyons: The Church and the World,” Pro Ecclesia 4 (1995), 333-55 (334).<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn34" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref34" name="_ftn34">[34]</a>St. Irenaeus of Lyons, Against the Heresies, ed. Rev. Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson, reprint 2001. The Apostolic Fathers with Justin Martyr and Irenaeus. October 2002. Eerdmans Philip Schaff, Christian Classics Ethereal Library <a href="http://www.ccel.org/">http://www.ccel.org/</a>, preface.<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn35" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref35" name="_ftn35">[35]</a> Gunton, Cambridge, 148.<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn36" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref36" name="_ftn36">[36]</a> Farrow comments on his pastoral concern: “Rather he thought out his theology form the standpoint of the church’s actual communion with God in the person of Jesus Christ, a communion established and maintained by the Holy Spirit.” Farrow, “St. Irenaeus of Lyons: The Church and the World,” 335.<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn37" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref37" name="_ftn37">[37]</a> Irenaeus’ exegesis is praised by Gunton, “…Irenaeus, a theologian whose theology was oriented rather to Scripture than to philosophy, and he achieved it on biblical grounds.” Act & Being, 25.<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn38" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref38" name="_ftn38">[38]</a> Gunton, The One, the Three and the Many, 120.<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn39" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref39" name="_ftn39">[39]</a> Irenaeus, Heresies, II.10.4 cited in Gunton, Triune Creator, 53. See also IV.38.3;<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn40" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref40" name="_ftn40">[40]</a> Ibid. Gunton notes that Theophilus of Antioch preceded Irenaeus.<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn41" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref41" name="_ftn41">[41]</a> Interestingly, Irenaeus makes this point by way of an axe illustration: “Wherefore, we do not say that it was the axe which cut the wood, or the saw which divided it; but one would very properly say that the man cut and divided it who formed the axe and the saw for this purpose, and [who also formed] at a much earlier date all the tools by which the axe and the saw themselves were formed. With justice, therefore, according to an analogous process of reasoning, the Father of all will be declared the Former of this world, and not the angels, nor any other [so-called] former of the world, other than He who was its Author, and had formerly been the cause of the preparation for a creation of this kind (II.2.3).”<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn42" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref42" name="_ftn42">[42]</a> Jn 1.3<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn43" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref43" name="_ftn43">[43]</a> Ps 33.9; 148.5<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn44" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref44" name="_ftn44">[44]</a> So Gunton, Triune Creator, 53.<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn45" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref45" name="_ftn45">[45]</a> Ibid., 54.<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn46" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref46" name="_ftn46">[46]</a> What follows is a personal exegesis of Irenaeus. Similar to Gunton’s dearth of biblical exegesis is his lack of patristic exegesis. Perhaps both his biblical and patristic exegesis would have been manifest in the originally envisioned two volume Triune Creator. In the preface he writes, “Ideally, this would have been a two-volume work, giving full space to history and dogmatics alike.” Ibid., ix.<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn47" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref47" name="_ftn47">[47]</a> Irenaeus, Heresies, 4. pref. 1.<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn48" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref48" name="_ftn48">[48]</a> “Two hands” texts in Heresies: 4.pref.1; 4.20.1; 4.33.4; 5.1.3; 5.5.1; 5.6.1; 5.17.4; 5.28.4; 5.35.2.<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn49" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref49" name="_ftn49">[49]</a> Additional ‘two hands’ texts regarding non-human creation: 5.35.2<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn50" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref50" name="_ftn50">[50]</a> Justo Gonzalez, A History of Christian Theology: From the Beginnings to the Council of Chalcedon Vol. 1 (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1970), 161.<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn51" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref51" name="_ftn51">[51]</a> E.g., Irenaeus, Heresies, 4.7.4; 4.38.3; 5.18.2; 5.28.4.<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn52" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref52" name="_ftn52">[52]</a> Interestingly, Ephesians 2.18 is a statement of trinitarian new creation, “For through him [Christ] we both have access in one Spirit to the Father.”<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn53" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref53" name="_ftn53">[53]</a> Gen 2.7<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn54" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref54" name="_ftn54">[54]</a> Gen 1.26<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn55" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref55" name="_ftn55">[55]</a> Some modern scholars have interpreted this text differently, stating that the plural hf,[]n: indicates God’s appeal to the angelic council (Ps 89.5-8). To be sure, a host of angels were present with God, marveling at his creation (Job 38.7); however, the rather involved argument given to support this position appears to force the text. While the plural subject is not commonly used in Scripture to designate the Trinity, to interpret it as such need not be an instance of affective fallacy. With the presence of the Spirit in Gen 1.2 and no immediate mention of angels until 3.24, the context would suggest that, in fact, Irenaeus is correct to identify the Trinity with the imago Dei. The notion that the angels were also called the sons of God and accordingly bear his communicable image, rendering them qualified participants in the creation of man is also questionable. While man’s purpose is to reflect God’s glory, as the angels do, his manner of glorifying God is altogether different from the angels in that he is given the command to be fruitful and multiply and rule over creation. Thus, Chrysostom likely interpreted this text correctly when he identified the imago Dei as a functionary vice-regent who is commanded to imitate the rule of his King.<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn56" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref56" name="_ftn56">[56]</a> Gunton, Triune Creator, 54.<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn57" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref57" name="_ftn57">[57]</a> Gunton, Act & Being, 25.<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn58" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref58" name="_ftn58">[58]</a> Act & Being, 26.<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn59" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref59" name="_ftn59">[59]</a> Shepherd of Hermas, 2.1<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn60" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref60" name="_ftn60">[60]</a> Mal 2.10<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn61" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref61" name="_ftn61">[61]</a> Eph 4.6<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn62" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref62" name="_ftn62">[62]</a> Mt 11.27<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn63" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref63" name="_ftn63">[63]</a> Rev 3.7<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn64" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref64" name="_ftn64">[64]</a> 1 Pt 2.23<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn65" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref65" name="_ftn65">[65]</a> Col 1.18<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn66" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref66" name="_ftn66">[66]</a> Ibid., fn.7 including citation from Paul Cumin, “Irenaeus, Gnostic Monism and the Strong Second Hand of God,” unpublished paper.<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn67" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref67" name="_ftn67">[67]</a> Gunton, Triune Creator, 60.<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn68" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref68" name="_ftn68">[68]</a> This intimates the more Eastern concept of theosis.<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn69" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref69" name="_ftn69">[69]</a> Irenaeus misses the reference to the third person of the Trinity in Rev 5.6 which is an allusion to Zech 3 and 4, “And I saw between the throne (with the four living creatures) and the elders a Lamb standing, as if slain, having seven horns and seven eyes, which are the seven Spirits of God, sent out into all the earth.” In agreement Beale comments, “…these spirits become Christ’s agents throughout the world, who figuratively represent the Holy Spirit himself.” G.K. Beale, The Book of Revelation, NIGTC (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1999), 355. Tying omnipotence to divine being-in-relation, Caird comments, “By this symbol John undoubtedly invests Christ with the attributes of deity, but he also does something more important still: he redefines omnipotence. Omnipotence is not to be understood as the power of unlimited coercion, but as the power of infinite persuasion, the invincible power of self-negating, self-sacrificing love (emphasis added).” G.B. Caird, The Revelation of St. John (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1993), 75.<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn70" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref70" name="_ftn70">[70]</a> Gunton, Triune Creator, 53.<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn71" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref71" name="_ftn71">[71]</a> Gunton, Act & Being, 1.<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn72" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref72" name="_ftn72">[72]</a> Act & Being, 7.<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn73" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref73" name="_ftn73">[73]</a> Robert Letham, “Review of Colin E. Gunton, The Triune Creator,” WTS 62 (2000): 148. Also quoted in Ibid. Renewed emphasis on the Trinity as suggested by Gunton would certainly go a long way in overturning evangelical modalist and monotheist tendencies. Moreover, renewed reflection on the trinitarian God holds immense “apologetic” value in contending with popular contemporary heresies and religions such as Open Theism and Islam. <br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn74" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref74" name="_ftn74">[74]</a> “In giving this doctrine [the Trinity] a place of prominence our concern cannot be merely that it have this place externally but rather that its content be decisive and controlling for the whole of dogmatics.” Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics I ed. G.W. Bromiley and T. F. Torrance (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1975), 303.<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn75" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref75" name="_ftn75">[75]</a> This critique is akin to the Rahnerian diagnosis of the theological bifurcation of De Deo Uno and De Deo Treno. Karl Rahner, The Trinity, 1970, trans. Joseph Donceel (New York: Crossroad, 2004), 16.<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn76" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref76" name="_ftn76">[76]</a> So Edmund Fortman, “For he does not regard the Son and the Sprit as creatures but as just as eternal and divine as the Father, for they are the very Word of God and the Wisdom of God who belong to the very life of God… But it was not Irenaeus’ intention to subordinate them to the Father but to tell the Gnostics that the Supreme God is the Creator, and none other, that the one true God who is the Father, Son and Spirit is the direct and immediate Creator of all that is and needs no mediating aeons or angels as His intermediary instruments of creation.” The Triune God: A Historical Study of the Doctrine of the Trinity (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1972), 106. Cited in the unpublished notes of Dr. Paul C-H Lim, assistant professor of Christian Theology at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, p. 5.<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn77" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref77" name="_ftn77">[77]</a> Ibid., 3.<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn78" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref78" name="_ftn78">[78]</a> Kelly, 108. Also cited in Lim, 6.<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn79" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref79" name="_ftn79">[79]</a> Gunton, Promise of Trinitarian Theology, 31.<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn80" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref80" name="_ftn80">[80]</a> Ibid., xxix.<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn81" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref81" name="_ftn81">[81]</a> Ibid., xi.<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn82" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref82" name="_ftn82">[82]</a> Ibid., 4. The italicized phrase, “everything looks different in the light of the Trinity” is a Guntonism and occurs three times within the first thirty pages of this book (cf. 7, 28).<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn83" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref83" name="_ftn83">[83]</a> See relevant works by Gunton mentioned above.<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn84" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref84" name="_ftn84">[84]</a> Karl Rahner, The Trinity, 22.<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn85" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref85" name="_ftn85">[85]</a> Gunton, Act & Being, 76.<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn86" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref86" name="_ftn86">[86]</a> Cited in Act & Being, 81.<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn87" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref87" name="_ftn87">[87]</a> Gunton, The Christian Faith, 184.<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn88" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref88" name="_ftn88">[88]</a> The Christian Faith, 185.<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn89" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref89" name="_ftn89">[89]</a> The Christian Faith, 185.<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn90" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref90" name="_ftn90">[90]</a> See Letter XXXVIII<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn91" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref91" name="_ftn91">[91]</a> Basil writes, “And in the creation bethink thee first, I pray thee, of the original cause of all things that are made, the Father; of the creative cause, the Son; of the perfecting cause, the Spirit…” De Spiritu Sancto, XVI.38<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn92" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref92" name="_ftn92">[92]</a> Ibid., 185-6.<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn93" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref93" name="_ftn93">[93]</a> However, in distinction from Augustine he writes: “This would be in some way similar to Augustine’s characterization of the Spirit as the bond of love between the Father and the Son, but with a correction of its tendency to turn the deity into an eternal inward turning circle rather than a being from eternity directed outwards to the other.” Gunton, The Christian Faith, 186. Whether or not this is a fair assessment of Augustine is in question. Augustine, The Trinity, trans. and introd. Edmund Hill (O.P. Brooklyn, NY: New City Press, 1991), VIII.14. Gunton reminds the reader that Augustine points to Hillary of Poitiers for his popularized analogy, Act & Being, 135.<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn94" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref94" name="_ftn94">[94]</a> Act & Being, 135.<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn95" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref95" name="_ftn95">[95]</a> Act & Being, 135, 104 fn. 18.<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn96" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref96" name="_ftn96">[96]</a> Act & Being, 113.<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn97" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref97" name="_ftn97">[97]</a> Act & Being, 113.<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn98" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref98" name="_ftn98">[98]</a> Interestingly, this work started out as a theology of culture which, unforeseen by Gunton, was quickly expanded to include a theology of creation. Gunton writes, “As the argument developed over more than a year, it became increasingly evident that this work is a theology of creation as much as, if not more than, a theology of culture.” See Gunton, The One, the Three and the Many (Cambridge: Cambridge, 2002), 2.<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn99" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref99" name="_ftn99">[99]</a> Ibid., 1.<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn100" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref100" name="_ftn100">[100]</a> Gunton, Promise, xxix.<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn101" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref101" name="_ftn101">[101]</a> Ibid., 5-6.</div>nate sudahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01381339742322848085noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15575864.post-1139872236594579672006-02-13T15:07:00.000-08:002006-02-13T15:11:23.173-08:00Bibliography - Primary WorksGunton, Colin. 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"The Biblical Understanding of Reconciliation. Paul and Jacob before God." <i>Free Church Chronicle</i> XXXII (1977): 17-22.<br />———. <i>Becoming and Being. The Doctrine of God in Charles Hartshorne and Karl Barth</i>. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978.<br />Gunton, Colin. "The Political Christ. Some Reflections on Mr Cupitt's Thesis." <i>Scottish Journal of Theology</i> 32 (1979): 521-540.<br />———. "Transcendence, Metaphor and the Knowability of God." <i>Journal of Theological Studies</i> XXI (1980): 503-516.<br />———. "The Truth of Christology." In <i>Belief in Science and in Christian Life. The Relevance of Michael Polanyi's Thought for Christian Faith and Life</i>, edited by T.F. Torrance, 91-107. Edinburgh: Handsel Press, 1980.<br />———. "Time, Eternity and the Doctrine of the Incarnation." <i>Dialog</i> 21 (1982): 263-268.<br />———. <i>Yesterday and Today. A Study of Continuities in Christology</i>. London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1983.<br />———. "Barth and God's Story." <i>Scottish Journal of Theology</i> 37 (1984): 375-380.<br />———. <i>Enlightenment and Alienation. An Essay Towards a Trinitarian Theology</i>. London: Marshall, Morgan and Scott, 1985.<br />———. "Christus Victor Revisited. A Study of Metaphor and the Transformation of Meaning." <i>Journal of Theological Studies</i> XXXVI (1985): 129-145.<br />———. "Creation and Recreation. An Exploration of Some Themes in Aesthetics and Theology." <i>Modern Theology</i> 2 (1985): 1-19.<br />———. "The Justice of God." <i>Free Church Chronicle</i> XL (1985): 13-19.<br />Gunton, Colin. "Barth and the Western Intellectual Tradition. Towards a Theology After Christendom." In <i>Theology Beyond Christendom. Essays on the Centenary of the Birth of Karl Barth, May 10, 1886.</i>, edited by John Thompson, 285-301. Allison Park, Pennsylvania: Pickwick Press, 1986.<br />———. "The Christian Doctrine of God: Opposition and Convergence." In <i>Heaven and Earth. Essex Essays in Theology and Ethics</i>, edited by Andrew Linzey and Peter J. Wexler, 11-22. Worthing: Churchman Publishing, 1986.<br />———. "Barth, the Trinity and Human Freedom." <i>Theology Today</i> XLIII (1986): 316-330.<br />———. "Christ the Sacrifice: Aspects of the Language and Imagery of the Bible." In <i>The Glory of Christ in the New Testament</i>, edited by L.D. Hurst and N.T. Wright. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987.<br />———. "Reinhold Niebuhr: a Treatise of Human Nature." <i>Modern Theology</i> 4 (1987): 71-81.<br />———. "Revelation." In <i>A Dictionary of Pastoral Care</i>, edited by Alastair V. Campbell, 240-241. London: SPCK, 1987.<br />———. "No Other Foundation. One Englishman's Reading of Church Dogmatics, Chapter V." In <i>Reckoning with Barth. Essays in Commemoration of the Centenary of Karl Barth's Birth</i>, edited by Nigel Biggar, 61-79. London: Mowbray, 1988.<br />———. "Christianity Amoung the Religions in The Encyclopedia of Religion." <i>Religious Studies</i> 24 (1988): 11-18.<br />———. "The Spirit as Lord: Christianity, Modernity and Freedom." In <i>Different Gospels</i>, edited by Andrew Walker, 169-182. London: Hodder and Stoughton for the C.S. Lewis Centre, 1988.<br />———. "Two Dogmas Revisited: Edward Irving's Christology." <i>Scottish Journal of Theology</i> 41 (1988): 359-376.<br />Gunton, Colin. "Christianity Amoung the Religions in the Encyclopedia of Religion." <i>Religious Studies</i> 24 (1988): 11-18.<br />———. <i>The transcendent lord: the spirit and the church in Calvanist and Cappadocian</i>: Congregational Memorial Hall Trust, 1988.<br />———. <i>The Actuality of Atonement. A Study of Metaphor, Rationality and the Christian Tradition</i>. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1989.<br />Gunton, Colin and Daniel W. Hardy, ed. <i>On Being the Church. Essays on the Christian Community</i>. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1989.<br />Gunton, Colin. "The Church on Earth. The Roots of Community." In <i>On Being the Church. Essays on the Christian Community</i>, edited by Colin and Daniel W. Hardy Gunton. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1989.<br />———. "The Triune God and the Freedom of the Creature." In <i>Karl Barth: Centenary Essays</i>, edited by S.W. Sykes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.<br />———. "When the Gates of Hell Fall Down: Towards a Modern Theology of the Justice of God." <i>New Blackfriars</i> (1989): 488-496.<br />———. "A Far-Off Gleam of the Gospel. Salvation in Tolkien's Lord of the Rings." <i>King's Theological Review</i> XII (1989): 6-10.<br />———. <i>Service Book</i>. Edited by The United Reformed Church in the United Kingdom. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989.<br />———. "Newman's Dialectic: Dogma and Reason in the 73rd Tract for the Times." In <i>Newman After a Hundred Years</i>, edited by Alan G. Hill and Ian Ker, 309-322. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990.<br />Gunton, Colin. "Augustine, the Trinity and the Theological Crisis of the West." <i>Scottish Journal of Theology</i> 43 (1990): 33-58.<br />———. "Used and Being Used. Scripture and Systematic Theology." <i>Theology Today</i> 47 (1990): 248-259.<br />———. "The Sacrafice and the Sacrafices: from Metaphor to Transcendental?" In <i>Trinity, Incarnation, and Atonement</i>, edited by Ronald J Fenstra and Cornelius Plantinga, 210-229: Notre Dame University Press, 1990.<br />———. "Baptism and the Christian Community." In <i>Incarnational Ministry. The Presence of Christ in Church, Society, and Family. Essays in Honor of Ray S. Anderson</i>, edited by Christian D Kettler and Todd H Speidell, 98-109. Colorado Springs: Helmers and Howard, 1990.<br />———. "The Idea of Dissent and the Character of Christianity." <i>Reformed Quarterly</i> 1, no. 5 (1990): 2-6.<br />———. "Mozart the Theologian." <i>Theology</i> 94 (1991): 346-349.<br />———. <i>The Promise of Trinitarian Theology</i>. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1991.<br />———. "The Spirit in the Trinity." In <i>In The Forgotten Trinity, 3</i>, edited by Alastair I.C. Heron, 123-135. London: BCC/CCBI, 1991.<br />———. "Immanence and Otherness: Divine Sovereignty and Human Freedom in the Theology of Robert W. Jenson." <i>Dialog</i> 30 (1991): 17-26.<br />———. "Knowledge and Culture. Towards an Epistemology of the Concrete." In <i>The Gospel and Contemporary Culture</i>, edited by Hugh Montefiore, 84-102. London: Mowbray, 1992.<br />Gunton, Colin. "Proteus and Procrustes. A Study of the Dialectic of Language in Disagreement with Sallie McFague." In <i>The Triune God and the Challenge of Feminism</i>, edited by Jr Alvin F. Kimel, 65-80. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1992.<br />Gunton, Colin with Christoph Schwoebel, ed. <i>Persons, Divine and Human. King's College Essays in Theological Anthropology</i>. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1992.<br />Gunton, Colin. "Trinity, Ontology and Anthropology: Towards a Renewal of the Doctrine of the Imago Dei." In <i>Persons, Divine and Human. King's College Essays in Theological Anthropology</i>, edited by Colin with Christoph Schwoebel Gunton. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1992.<br />———. "Universal and Particular in Atonement Theology." <i>Religious Studies</i> 28 (1992): 453-66.<br />———. "An English Systematic Theology?" <i>Scottish Journal of Theology</i> 46 (1993): 479-496.<br />———. <i>Christ and Creation. The 1990 Didsbury Lectures</i>. Carlisle: Paternoster Press, 1993.<br />———. <i>The One, the Three and the Many. The 1992 Bampton Lectures</i>. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.<br />———. "All Scripture is Inspired?" <i>The Princeton Seminary Bulletin</i> XIV (1993): 240-253.<br />———. "Foreward." In <i>In the Likeness of Sinful Flesh. An Essay on the Humanity of Christ</i>, edited by Thomas Weinandy, ix-xi. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1993.<br />———. "Marriage Address." In <i>As Man and Woman Made. Theological Reflections on Marriage</i>, edited by Susan Durber, 148-151. London: United Reformed Church, 1994.<br />Gunton, Colin. "Relation and Relativity: The Trinity and the Created World." In <i>Trinitarian Theology Today: Essays on Divine Being and Act</i>, edited by Christoph Schwobel. Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1995.<br />———. "The Being and Attributes of God. Eberhard Jungel's Dispute with the Classical Philosophical Tradition." In <i>The Possibilities of Theology. Studies in the Theology of Eberhard Jungel</i>, edited by John Webster, 7-22. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1995.<br />———. <i>A Brief Theology of Revelation. The 1993 Warfield Lectures</i>. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1995.<br />———. "The Trinity." In <i>A Companion Encyclopedia of Theology</i>, edited by Peter Byrne and Leslie Houlden, 937-957. London: Routledge, 1995.<br />———. "The Real as the Redemptive: P.T. Forsyth on Authority and Freedom." In <i>Justice the True and Only Mercy. Essays on the Life and Theology of P.T. Forsyth</i>, edited by Trevor Hart. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1995.<br />———. "God, Grace and Freedom." In <i>God and Freedom: Essays in Historical and Systematic Theology</i>, edited by Colin Gunton. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1995.<br />———, ed. <i>God and Freedom: Essays in Historical and Systematic Theology</i>. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1995.<br />———. "Editorial Introduction." In <i>God and Freedom: Essays in Historical and Systematic Theology</i>, edited by Colin Gunton. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1995.<br />———. "Universal and Particular in Atonement Theology." In <i>Readings in Modern Theology</i>, edited by Robin Gill, 147-162. London: SPCK, 1995.<br />———. "The Community of the Church in Communion with God." In <i>The Church in the Reformed Tradition</i>, edited by Colin Gunton, Paraic Reamonn and Alan P.F. Sell, 38-41. Geneva: World Alliance of Reformed Churches, 1995.<br />Gunton, Colin, Páraic Réamonn and Alan P.F. Sell, ed. <i>The church in the reformed tradition: discussion papers prepared byt a working party of the European Committee</i>. Edited by World Alliance of Reformed Churches (Presbyterian and Congregational). Geneva: World Council of Reformed Churches, 1995.<br />Gunton, Colin. <i>Theology Through the Theologians. Selected Papers 1975-1995</i>. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1996.<br />———. "Christology." In <i>Dictionary of Ethics, Theology and Society</i>, 133-137. London: Routledge, 1996.<br />———. "Persons." In <i>Dictionary of Ethics, Theology and Society</i>, 638-641. London: Routledge, 1996.<br />———. "Pneumatology." In <i>Dictionary of Ethics, Theology and Society</i>, 644-647. London: Routledge, 1996.<br />———. "Toleration." In <i>Dictionary of Ethics, Theology and Society</i>, 826-829. London: Routledge, 1996.<br />———. "Atonement and the Project of Creation: An Interpretation of Colosians 1:15-23." <i>Dialog</i> 35 (1996): 35-41.<br />———. "The Indispensability of Theological Understanding. Theology in the University." In <i>Essentials of Christian Community. Essays for Daniel W. Hardy</i>, edited by David Ford and Dennis Stamps, 266-277. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1996.<br />———. "The indispensible God? The sovereignty of God and the problem of modern social order." In <i>Beyond Mere Health. Theology and Health Care in a Secular Society</i>, edited by Rod Horsfield Hilary Regan, Gabrielle McMullen, 1-21. Kew, Australia: Australian Theological Forum, 1996.<br />———. "Sin, Death and the Resurrection of the Body. Towards an Ontology of Personhood." In <i>Beyond Mere Health. Theology and Health Care in a Secular Society</i>, edited by Rod Horsfield Hilary Regan, Gabrielle McMullen, 22-37. Kew, Australia: Australian Theological Forum, 1996.<br />Gunton, Colin. "Response to 'Hard Copy or Good News? Genetic Engineering and the Gospel', by John Henley." In <i>Beyond Mere Health. Theology and Health Care in a Secular Society</i>, edited by Rod Horsfield Hilary Regan, Gabrielle McMullen, 22-37. Kew, Australia: Australian Theological Forum, 1996.<br />———. "Indispensible Opponent. The Relations of Systematic Theology and the Philosophy of Religion." <i>Neue Zeitshrift für Systematische Theologie und Religionsphilosophie</i> (1996): 298-306.<br />———. "Article Review. Karl Barth's Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology. Its Genesis and Development 1909-1936. Bruce L. McCormack." <i>Scottish Journal of Theology</i> 48 (1996): 483-491.<br />———. "Forward." In <i>Christ and the Spirit: the doctrine of the incarnation according to Edward Irving</i>, edited by Graham McFarlane. Cumbria: Paternoster Press, 1996.<br />———. <i>The Promise of Trinitarian Theology</i>. 2nd enlarged ed. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1997.<br />———. "The Trinity, Natural Theology and a Theology of Nature." In <i>The Trinity in a Pluralistic Age</i>, edited by Kevin Vanhoozer, 88-103. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997.<br />———, ed. <i>The Cambridge Companion to Christian Doctrine</i>. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.<br />———. "Historical and Systematic Theology." In <i>The Cambridge Companion to Christian Doctrine</i>, edited by Colin Gunton. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.<br />———. "Creation." In <i>The Cambridge Companion to Christian Doctrine</i>, edited by Colin Gunton. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.<br />———. <i>Yesterday and Today. A Study of Continuities in Christology</i>. 2nd ed. London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1997.<br />Gunton, Colin, ed. <i>The Doctrine of Creation</i>. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1997.<br />———. "Introduction." In <i>The Doctrine of Creation</i>, edited by Colin Gunton. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1997.<br />———. "Between Allegory and Myth. The Legacy of Spiritualising of Genesis." In <i>The Doctrine of Creation</i>, edited by Colin Gunton. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1997.<br />———. "The End of Causality? The Reformers and their Predecessors." In <i>The Doctrine of Creation</i>, edited by Colin Gunton. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1997.<br />———. <i>The Triune Creator. A Historical and Systematic Study</i>. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1998.<br />———. "The Atonement." In <i>Encyclopaedia of Philosophy</i>, 536-541. London: Routledge, 1998.<br />———. "Martin Kahler Revisited: Variations on Hebrews 4.15." <i>Ex Auditu</i> 14 (1998): 21-30.<br />———. "Dogma, the Church and the Task of Theology." In <i>Doctrines and Dogmas</i>, edited by Victor Pfitzner and Hilary Regan, 1-22. Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1999.<br />———. "Christ the Wisdom of God. A Study in Divine and Human Action." In <i>Where Shall Wisdom be found? Wisdom in the Bible, the Church and the Contemporary World</i>, edited by Stephen C. Barton. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1999.<br />———. "A Rose by any other Name? From 'Christian Doctrine' to 'Systematic Theology'." <i>International Journal of Systematic Theology</i> 1 (1999): 4-23.<br />Gunton, Colin. "Editorial: Orthodoxy." <i>International Journal of Systematic Theology</i> 1 (1999): 113-118.<br />———. "Aspects of Salvation: Some Unscholastic Themes from Calvin's Institutes." <i>International Journal of Systematic Theology</i> 1 (1999): 113-118.<br />———. "The Cross and the City. R.W. Dale and the Doctrine of the Atonement." In <i>The Cross and the City. Essays in Commemoration of Robert William Dale</i>, edited by Clyde Binfield, 1999.<br />———. "A far-off gleam of the Gospel: salvation in Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings." In <i>Tolkien: a celebration: collected writings on a literary legacy</i>, edited by Joseph Pearce. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1999.<br />———. "Martin Kähler revisited: variations on Hebrews 4:15." Paper presented at the North Park Symposium on Theological Interpretation of Scripture, North Park Theological Seminary, Chicago, Illinois 1999.<br />———. <i>Incarnation and imagery: words, the world and the triune God</i>, <i>Farmington papers.; Philosophy of religion; 4</i>. Oxford: Farmington Institute for Christian Studies, 1999.<br />———. <i>Intellect and Action. Elucidations on Christian Theology and the Life of Faith</i>. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2000.<br />———, ed. <i>Trinity, Time and Church. A Response to the Theology of Robert W. Jenson</i>. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000.<br />———. "Creation and Mediation in the Theology of Robert W. Jenson: An Encounter and Convergence." In <i>Trinity, Time and Church. A Response to the Theology of Robert W. Jenson</i>, edited by Colin Gunton. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000.<br />———. "Dogmatic Theses on Eschatology." In <i>The Future as God's Gift</i>, edited by David Fergusson and Marcel Sarot. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2000.<br />Gunton, Colin. "Election and Eschatology in the Post-Constantinian Church." <i>Scottish Journal of Theology</i> 53 (2000): 212-227.<br />———. "The Church as a School of Virtue? Human Formation in Trinitarian Framework, Faithfulness and Fortitude." In <i>In Conversation with the Theological Ethics of Stanley Hauerwas</i>, edited by Mark Thiessen Nation and Samuel Wells. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2000.<br />———. "Salvation." In <i>Cambridge Companion to Karl Barth</i>, edited by John Webster, 143-158. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.<br />———. "Authority." In <i>Oxford Companion to Christian Thought</i>, edited by Adrian Hastings, 2000.<br />———. "Holy Spirit." In <i>Oxford Companion to Christian Thought</i>, edited by Adrian Hastings, 2000.<br />———. "Protestantism." In <i>Oxford Companion to Christian Thought</i>, edited by Adrian Hastings, 2000.<br />———. "'Response' to 'Are you Saved? Receiving the Full Benefits of Grace' by Cynthia L. Rigby." <i>Insights. The Faculty Journal of Austin Seminary</i> 115 (2000): 27-29.<br />———. "The atonement and the triune God." In <i>Theology after liberalism: a reader</i>, edited by George P Schner J B Webster. Oxford: Blackwell, 2000.<br />———. "Preface." In <i>Dogmatics in Outline</i>, edited by Karl Barth, pp. vii-xi. London: SCM Press, 2001.<br />———. "'Until He Comes': Towards an Eschatology of Church Membership." <i>International Journal of Systematic Theology</i> 3, no. 2 (2001): 187-200.<br />Gunton, Colin. <i>Becoming and Being. The Doctrine of God in Charles Hartshorne and Karl Barth</i>. 2nd ed. London: SCM Press, 2001.<br />———. <i>Theology Through Preaching. Sermons for Brentwood</i>. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2001.<br />———. <i>The Christian Faith. An Introduction to Christian Doctrine</i>. Oxford: Blackwell, 2001.<br />Gunton, Colin with S.R. Holmes and M.A. Rae, ed. <i>The Practice of Theology. A Reader</i>. London: SCM Press, 2001.<br />Gunton, Colin. "Creeds and Confessions, Introductory Essay." In <i>The Practice of Theology. A Reader</i>, edited by Colin with S.R. Holmes and M.A. Rae Gunton, 101-105. London: SCM Press, 2001.<br />———. "The Place of Reason in Theology, Introductory Essay." In <i>The Practice of Theology. A Reader</i>, edited by Colin with S.R. Holmes and M.A. Rae Gunton, 149-153. London: SCM Press, 2001.<br />———. "Can we know anything about God anyway?, Introductory Essay." In <i>The Practice of Theology. A Reader</i>, edited by Colin with S.R. Holmes and M.A. Rae Gunton, 219-223. London: SCM Press, 2001.<br />———. "Doing Theology in the University Today." In <i>The Practice of Theology. A Reader</i>, edited by Colin with S.R. Holmes and M.A. Rae Gunton, 441-455. London: SCM Press, 2001.<br />———. "And in one Lord Jesus Christ... Begotten not Made." <i>Pro Ecclesia</i> 10 (2001): 261-274.<br />———. "Introduction." In <i>Protestant Theology in the Nineteenth Century</i>, edited by Karl Barth, xv-xx, 2001.<br />Gunton, Colin. "Being and Person: T.F.Torrance's doctrine of God." In <i>The Promise of Trinitarian Theology: theologians in dialogue with T.F.Torrance</i>, edited by Elmer M Colyer. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001.<br />———. "And in one Lord, Jesus Christ . . . begotten, not made." In <i>Nicene Christianity: the future for a new ecumenism</i>, edited by Christopher R. Seitz. Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2001.<br />———. "The Spirit Moved Over the Face of the Waters: The Holy Spirit and the Created Order." <i>International Journal of Systematic Theology</i> 4, no. 2 (2002).<br />———. "Trinity and trustworthiness." In <i>The trustworthiness of God: perspectives on the nature of Scripture</i>, edited by Paul Helm and Carl R Trueman. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002.<br />———. "Theology in communion." In <i>Shaping a theological mind: theological context and methodology</i>, edited by Darren C. Marks. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2002.<br />———. "We believe in . . . the Holy Spirit, who with the Father and Son is worshiped and glorified." In <i>Fire and Wind: the Holy Spirit in the church today</i>, edited by Joseph D Small. Louisville, Ky: Geneva Press, 2002.<br />———. <i>Act and Being. Towards a Theology of the Divine Attributes</i>. London: SCM Press, 2002.<br />———, ed. <i>The Theology of Reconciliation</i>. London: T&T Clark, 2003.<br />———. "Introduction." In <i>The Theology of Reconciliation</i>, edited by Colin Gunton. London: T&T Clark, 2003.<br />———. "Towards a Theology of Reconciliation." In <i>The Theology of Reconciliation</i>, edited by Colin Gunton. London: T&T Clark, 2003.<br />Gunton, Colin. <i>Father, Son & Holy Spirit. Toward a Fully Trinitarian Theology</i>. London: T&T Clark, 2003.<br />———. "A Sermon: The Almighty God." In <i>Exploring and proclaiming the Apostles' Creed. Vol. 1</i>, edited by Roger Van Harn. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004.<br />———. "Preaching from the Letters." In <i>Exploring and proclaiming the Apostles' Creed Vol 2.</i>, edited by Roger Van Harn, 621-626. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004.<br />———. "Sermon: 1 Corinthanians 15:51-58." In <i>Exploring and proclaiming the Apostles' Creed Vol 2.</i>, edited by Roger Van Harn, 228-231. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004.<br />———. "The truth . . . and the spirit of truth: the trinitarian shape of Christian theology." In <i>Loving God with our minds: the pastor as theologian: essays in honor of Wallace M. Alston</i>, edited by Michael Welker and Cynthia A Jarvis. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004.<br />nate sudahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01381339742322848085noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15575864.post-1137590745452731032006-01-18T05:20:00.000-08:002006-01-18T05:25:45.523-08:00Gunton on Divine ProvidenceTerry was kind enough to email me his paper on Gunton's theology of divine providence, and gave me permission to post it here. Questions, comments, and critiques are very welcome!<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><strong>Destined for Perfection: Divine Providence in the Theology of Colin Gunton</strong><br /><br /><br />Introduction<br />According to John Calvin, ‘nothing happens except what is knowingly and willingly decreed by [God].’<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn1" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn1" name="_ftnref1">[1]</a> As God holds strict rule over events in creation ‘according to a sure dispensation’, there is no such thing as a chance or a fortuitous occurrence, even if to us that seems to be the case.<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn2" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn2" name="_ftnref2">[2]</a> Though this theological determinism suggests that all things essentially unfold from an initial act of God, Calvin’s emphasis – and that of the Reformed tradition that followed him – falls on God’s constant effecting of things: God is the first cause of each instance, not the first cause of some chain of instances. He is not some abstract power standing aloof at creation’s primeval edge, but rather is intimately and continually involved with it.<br /><br />Nonetheless, the idea of an all-determining God seems to conflict with the idea of a genuinely free creation: if God decrees all things, then surely creation is not as free as it appears. Calvin himself wrestled with this problem: his plea to ‘give attention to the secondary causes in their proper place’<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn3" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn3" name="_ftnref3">[3]</a> is an attempt to hold together the apparent contradiction between a sovereign God and an ostensibly free creation. The problem, says Colin Gunton, is that Calvin ‘equate[d] the concepts of contingency and chance’,<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn4" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn4" name="_ftnref4">[4]</a> meaning that he ‘is able to give a more satisfying account of the universal providential care of God than of the correlative thesis that human agents are responsible for their actions.’<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn5" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn5" name="_ftnref5">[5]</a> Gunton further notes that here in Calvin’s thought there is ‘little substantive part played by Christ and the Holy Spirit.’<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn6" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn6" name="_ftnref6">[6]</a> For Gunton, the issue of determinism centres on the relation of the eternal God to creation’s temporality<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn7" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn7" name="_ftnref7">[7]</a> and is ‘best avoided’ by focussing instead on the way in which the Father acts in the world by his Son and Spirit.<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn8" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn8" name="_ftnref8">[8]</a><br /><br />If, as Gunton suggests, theological determinism arises from a unitarian conception of God, then the appropriate response is to bring an explicitly trinitarian leaning to the doctrine of providence. Gunton does this without distancing himself too far from his Reformed heritage. My aim here, then, is simply to explore his thoughts on the matter in a little more detail and to advocate it, admittedly with a reservation, as a way forward for future discussions.<br /><br />Creation, the Project of God<br />One of the claims of a truly Christian doctrine of providence is that the universe is not ‘closed’ to God’s interaction. Enlightenment-era mechanistic conceptions depicted the universe as a vast machine running according to its pre-programmed laws rather than to God’s personal involvement. However, post-Newtonian physics allows for more flexibility, and so Gunton argues that there is no reason why God, a ‘spiritual’ being, cannot interact with ‘material’ beings – not least because he is the one who gives being to all things.<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn9" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn9" name="_ftnref9">[9]</a> Gunton writes, ‘Thus the creator’s love – his energy at work through the mediating action of the Son and the Spirit – not only made the universe… but also shows itself in the day to day upholding and directing of what has been made.’<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn10" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn10" name="_ftnref10">[10]</a> This, at its most elementary level, is how God’s providence may be understood, and Gunton stresses that divine action does not violate the natural order. ‘God’s action… may be conceived to shape the day to day life of the world, even sometimes miraculously – in anticipation of its eschatological destiny – without violating that which is “natural”, because what is natural is that which enables the creation to achieve its promised destiny.’<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn11" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn11" name="_ftnref11">[11]</a> All this means that, for Gunton, the conventional distinction between general and special providence must be understood in the light of God’s overall providential purpose: that creation – human and non-human – is redirected to its proper goal through the life of the incarnate Son of God.<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn12" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn12" name="_ftnref12">[12]</a><br /><br />Mention of a goal or a destiny reveals Gunton’s idea that ‘creation is a project – that is to say, it is made to go somewhere… Creation is that which God enables to exist in time, and is in and through time to bring it to its completion, rather like an artist completing a work of art.’<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn13" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn13" name="_ftnref13">[13]</a> Gunton thus denies the common view within Western theology that creation’s original perfection was absolute. In doing so, he does not mean that creation was flawed, as though it was the faulty product of some demiurgic figure. Rather, creation’s perfection was relative, having ‘a temporality and directedness to an end which is greater than its beginnings’;<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn14" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn14" name="_ftnref14">[14]</a> in much the same way, we would consider a newborn baby to be ‘perfect’ even though we expect it to mature over time.<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn15" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn15" name="_ftnref15">[15]</a> To understand creation as a project means to see God creating not ‘a timelessly perfect whole, but… an order of things that is planned to go somewhere; to be completed or perfected, and so projected into time.’<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn16" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn16" name="_ftnref16">[16]</a><br /><br />All this gives creation an ‘eschatological orientation’; the act of creation was ‘not simply the making of a world out of nothing, not even that world continually upheld by the providence of God, but the making of a world destined for perfection.’<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn17" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn17" name="_ftnref17">[17]</a> Gunton notes from Genesis 1:28 that even prelapsarian creation needed to be subdued if it was to reach its destiny: we ‘must be aware that creation is not yet completely as God would have it be; that in eschatological perspective there is something still to do, and that this involves at least the overcoming of a measure of continuing disorder or at least absence of what we can call eschatological order and freedom.’<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn18" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn18" name="_ftnref18">[18]</a> For Gunton, this is no problem, for ‘[t]he world is of such a kind that it requires obedient human activity to enable the achievement of that for which it was created. Creation is perfect – “very good” – but remains to be perfected, in part by faithful human action.’<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn19" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn19" name="_ftnref19">[19]</a> Needless to say, the fall – which Gunton describes succinctly as ‘a rebellion against God’s gracious promise’<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn20" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn20" name="_ftnref20">[20]</a> – affected creation’s direction towards its proper goal; but still the fall does not thwart God’s purposes – it simply requires him to work in a different way, a way that reconciles as well as directs. God’s ‘providence takes shape in a fallen world which God purposes both to continue to uphold, and, indeed, to perfect, so that providence takes the form both of conservation and of a movement towards redemption.’<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn21" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn21" name="_ftnref21">[21]</a> Insofar as the fall is a cancer that spreads through time and space, this redemption also is worked out similarly.<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn22" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn22" name="_ftnref22">[22]</a> Accordingly, salvation must be understood not as ‘a going back to something already achieved’, that is, to a creation in its prelapsarian condition,<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn23" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn23" name="_ftnref23">[23]</a> but ‘the achievement of the original purpose of creation. It only then takes the form of redemption… because of sin and evil.’<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn24" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn24" name="_ftnref24">[24]</a> Providence, then, inasmuch as it refers to God’s action in created time and space, is historical;<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn25" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn25" name="_ftnref25">[25]</a> but this interaction of the divine with the created itself poses an important problem, that of mediation.<br /><br />God’s Two Hands<br />Though Gunton refuses to accept any theology that has traces of pantheism,<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn26" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn26" name="_ftnref26">[26]</a> that is, traces of anything that confuses God with creation, he also rejects conceptions of God’s relationship with the world that deny his real and actual involvement with it. However, as God and creation are not to be identified, there is still the question as to how the two do relate. The problem is one of mediation, which ‘denotes the way we understand one form of action – God’s action – to take shape in and in relation to that which is not God; the way, that is, by which the actions of the one who is creator take form in a world that is of an entirely different order from God because he made it to be so.’<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn27" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn27" name="_ftnref27">[27]</a> A properly trinitarian theology is the only way to resolve this problem, Gunton argues, for it presupposes ‘that God the Father is related to the world through the creating and redeeming action of Son and Spirit, who are, in Irenaeus’ expression, his two hands.’<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn28" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn28" name="_ftnref28">[28]</a> Christ’s resurrection from the dead is the spur for thinking about divine action in christological and pneumatological terms, as this shows both God’s freedom to act ‘in and toward’ creation and that its ‘fate or destiny… is in some way bound up with Jesus of Nazareth.’<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn29" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn29" name="_ftnref29">[29]</a> Consequently, christology and pneumatology invite further discussion of matters such as providence and redemption;<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn30" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn30" name="_ftnref30">[30]</a> they ‘encourage us to conceive God as personally involved in the creation, not simply a machine-maker operating “from without.”’ Gunton qualifies this by saying that he means ‘without’ in the sense of ‘other’,<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn31" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn31" name="_ftnref31">[31]</a> for though God is ‘creator and not creation’, he is also ‘one who in Christ becomes part of that creation, freely involved within its structures, in order that he may, in obedience to God the Father and through the power of his Spirit, redirect the creation to its eschatological destiny.’<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn32" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn32" name="_ftnref32">[32]</a><br /><br />Accordingly, creation’s redirection occurs only in Christ. Citing Colossians 1, Gunton contends that ‘the redirection of creation to its end finally takes shape only in so far as Jesus Christ makes “peace by the blood of the cross”, and thus only as the particular historical figure who can die upon the cross.’<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn33" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn33" name="_ftnref33">[33]</a> That this is so is due to Christ’s status as both creator and a human: ‘Because he is Christ the mediator of creation, he is of universal significance. But because he is Jesus of Nazareth, who lived, taught, acted as the agent of the eschatological kingdom, suffered, died and was raised, his universal significance is realised in a particular way’, as the one in whom redemption is achieved.<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn34" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn34" name="_ftnref34">[34]</a> This redemption is not a divine extraction from fallen reality but reality’s christological transformation; as such, ‘the atonement is seen to be that historical action in which, by overcoming in the human activity and suffering of Jesus the enemies of creation’s true flourishing, God enables the creation to achieve that which was purposed for it, the reconciliation of all things in Christ.’<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn35" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn35" name="_ftnref35">[35]</a><br /><br />Connected with this is the idea of election, whereby God’s conserving, redemptive action occurs through the particular instances of calling people – or a people – to his service in time and space. First, God ‘provid[es] for the fulfilment of his purposes’ by calling Abraham to be the one through whom he will bless all others, even though this calling itself is unremarkable: essentially, God tells Abraham ‘to leave home and go somewhere else.’<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn36" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn36" name="_ftnref36">[36]</a> From Abraham, this providing continues through Isaac, Jacob and then the nation of Israel proper, until the meaning of Israel’s election finally is realised in Jesus Christ.<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn37" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn37" name="_ftnref37">[37]</a> ‘In him,’ Gunton writes, ‘God’s providence becomes particular in a decisive and personal way. The offices of the prophets, priests and kings of Israel, those through whom God variously called and held Israel to her vocation, are concentrated in him, so that he is the one in whom providence now finds its primary focus.’<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn38" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn38" name="_ftnref38">[38]</a> Indeed, the New Testament often sees Christ as developing and fulfilling various Old Testament themes and images, Genesis 22’s account of God’s provision of a ram an excellent case in point.<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn39" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn39" name="_ftnref39">[39]</a> Christ’s ministry – which ‘must be understood as God’s personal action in his world’<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn40" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn40" name="_ftnref40">[40]</a> – indicates, therefore, that providence ‘takes shape historically’ and ‘embraces… all creation’, as God works out the world’s destiny ‘in and through time.’<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn41" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn41" name="_ftnref41">[41]</a><br /><br />There seems, therefore, to be a link between the project of creation and humanity: if humanity fails to keep at-one-ment, the project likewise fails. That Jesus is the image of God both divine and human means that he alone is able to mediate God’s saving action and thus rescue the project from disaster.<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn42" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn42" name="_ftnref42">[42]</a> Gunton describes the life of Christ as both human act and ‘an act of the eternal God, which is, so to speak, stretched out in time.’<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn43" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn43" name="_ftnref43">[43]</a> God is pleased not only to be involved economically in creation’s affairs,<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn44" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn44" name="_ftnref44">[44]</a> but also to allow his own action to be subject to the creaturely limitations of time and space insofar as this grants space to creation to be itself.<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn45" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn45" name="_ftnref45">[45]</a> As creation is to be perfected, God allows things to take their course; temporality ‘is not a defect of being, but part of its goodness.’<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn46" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn46" name="_ftnref46">[46]</a> Human life in particular demonstrates this diachronic perfecting: ‘by its very nature… [it is] directed to a completion that takes time. And so divine action centred in the death of Jesus is action which is fully appropriate to human fallenness and to its need of time in order to be itself. For the cross,’ Gunton continues, ‘is where God engages with the human condition as it actually is, respecting both its temporal structures and the nature of those who are in need of being redirected to their proper course.’<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn47" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn47" name="_ftnref47">[47]</a> True redemption ‘consist[s] in enabling things to come to their due perfection in and through the process of time’.<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn48" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn48" name="_ftnref48">[48]</a><br /><br />Providence, then, must first be interpreted as God’s action in Christ. ‘Divine providential action takes place in a world which can be perfected only through the death of the mediator of creation on the cross of Calvary… [T]he death and resurrection of Jesus is the model for all providential action, as those acts which enable the world to become itself by action within, and over against, its fallen structures.’<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn49" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn49" name="_ftnref49">[49]</a> Yet Christ’s work cannot be understood in isolation; the eschatological tone and direction of providence is safeguarded by the Spirit’s activity in tandem with the Word. According to Gunton, the Spirit is ‘the upholder of the everyday’,<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn50" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn50" name="_ftnref50">[50]</a> the one who ensures that ‘there is summer and winter, seedtime and harvest’; but he does so only through ‘the one in whom all things were and are created.’<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn51" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn51" name="_ftnref51">[51]</a> Similarly, insofar as providence is God’s action in Christ, the Spirit forms a body for the Son in Mary’s womb, enables the incarnate Son’s obedience that leads him to the cross, raises him from the tomb and calls a people to act as a witness to others.<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn52" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn52" name="_ftnref52">[52]</a> Everything that the human Jesus is and everything he does in obedience to his Father is through the power of the Spirit. This work of the Spirit is seen especially in Christ’s resurrection, for ‘[t]he one who breathed into Adam the breath of life now raises the second Adam to new life’; the Spirit is ‘the Lord and giver of life, and this means both the everyday life of the mortal and the transformed life of the one whose mortality has put on immortality.’<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn53" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn53" name="_ftnref53">[53]</a> Thus the Spirit, in the Word, both sustains creation and ensures that it heads towards the destiny God has for it. Following Basil of Caesarea, Gunton contends that ‘the distinctive function of the Spirit is to perfect the creation, and we can interpret this as meaning to bring to completion that for which each person and thing is created.’<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn54" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn54" name="_ftnref54">[54]</a> If creation is a project, its completion is realised only insofar as the Spirit ‘liberates things and people to be themselves, as, paradigmatically, the Spirit’s leading enabled the human Jesus to be truly himself in relation to God the Father and the world.’<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn55" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn55" name="_ftnref55">[55]</a> Indeed, ‘the Spirit’s peculiar office is to realise the true being of each created thing by bringing it, through Christ, into saving relation with God the Father.’<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn56" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn56" name="_ftnref56">[56]</a> Though the Son unifies creation as the one in whom all things hold together, the Spirit is the one who ‘maintains the particularity, distinctiveness, uniqueness, through the Son, of each within the unity.’<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn57" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn57" name="_ftnref57">[57]</a><br /><br />Freedom, Divine and Human<br />However, as with all theologies of providence, there remains the question of creaturely freedom: may creation avoid God’s perfecting action should it so choose? Gunton’s starting point for a discussion of freedom is the act of creation itself. The doctrine of creatio ex nihilo shows that God is not compelled to create; that creation exists at all is due to God’s sovereign decision to create. Nonetheless, creation is made ‘free according to its own order of being’,<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn58" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn58" name="_ftnref58">[58]</a> and this freedom itself is a gift from God.<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn59" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn59" name="_ftnref59">[59]</a> Though Gunton affirms both God’s sovereign freedom<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn60" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn60" name="_ftnref60">[60]</a> and creaturely, limited freedom, he is keen to stress that issues of freedom do not revolve around a battle of wills. For humanity, freedom is not an absolute; it is ‘a mediated relation to other people and the world which is the realm and object of free human action. Our freedom… is in part mediated to us by our fellow human beings and by God.’<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn61" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn61" name="_ftnref61">[61]</a> In particular, freedom ‘is that which I do with my own particularity, that which enables me to be and do what is truly and distinctively myself’; it is ‘that which others do to and with my particular being, in enabling me to be and do, or preventing me from being and doing, that which is particularly myself.’ Consequently, ‘[i]f we are free, it is in large measure because others enable or empower us to be free.’<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn62" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn62" name="_ftnref62">[62]</a> This conception of freedom is primarily relational and not volitional: essentially, the relationship between God and creation is characterised not by a battle of wills but by divine grace, which is ‘best understood as a mode of God’s action towards, or relatedness to, the creature and not as some kind of substance that God imparts to the creature.’ Thus it is ‘not something reserved for sinners, … but the fundamental form of God’s relation to the creature.’<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn63" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn63" name="_ftnref63">[63]</a><br /><br />In our fallen world, God’s grace manifests itself in at least two ways. First, ‘speaking christologically, we can say that the grace of God is the action of God in Christ meeting sin and evil with a particular form of action, namely that paradigmatically shown in the death of Jesus on the cross, but also in the ministry of Jesus.’<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn64" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn64" name="_ftnref64">[64]</a> Secondly, speaking pneumatologically, ‘we can say that by relating human beings to the Father through the Son, the Spirit is the one who graciously liberates people and things to be themselves.’<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn65" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn65" name="_ftnref65">[65]</a> For Gunton, divine grace is that free action of God that enables him freely to relate benevolently towards his creation and permits and constitutes it in its own freedom to act similarly.<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn66" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn66" name="_ftnref66">[66]</a> Grace may only be grace in relation to another; the idea of community is vital, for a person is who he or she is only by virtue of his or her relations to others within that community,<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn67" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn67" name="_ftnref67">[67]</a> in much the same way as the three persons of the Trinity are who they are only in relation to one another.<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn68" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn68" name="_ftnref68">[68]</a> Though the particularity of the individual is realised in community, ‘it must be free community in the sense of being unconstrained and entered into voluntarily.’<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn69" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn69" name="_ftnref69">[69]</a> Gunton stresses that freedom enabled by divine action is still ‘the exercise of the free human will. But it is a will whose direction is given shape by the patterns of relation in which it is set… Only in relation to God and to others can we be particularly who and what we are, and therefore only so can we be free.’<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn70" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn70" name="_ftnref70">[70]</a> Crucially, divine action is gracious action that ‘does not deprive the [creaturely] agent of personal integrity, but constitutes it in its freedom, and thus in turn makes possible gracious forms of human action.’<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn71" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn71" name="_ftnref71">[71]</a><br /><br />Given the relational nature of freedom, Gunton is careful to base his theology of providence specifically in God’s triune action in the world rather than on attributes such as power and foreknowledge. ‘That is to say, we should consider providence not in its meaning as seeing in advance but as providing for. The reason is that a stress on foreknowledge is difficult to disentangle from suggestions of determinism.’<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn72" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn72" name="_ftnref72">[72]</a> Gunton argues that ‘a conception of providence centring on act rather than knowledge… leave[s] room for the free “space” between one thing and another.’<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn73" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn73" name="_ftnref73">[73]</a> Insofar as God’s two hands are involved in redirecting creation to its proper destiny, divine action ‘enables something to move from an uncompleted or unsatisfactory present to a completion that is destined, but not fully determined in advance.’<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn74" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn74" name="_ftnref74">[74]</a> Although creation will be perfected, the specific path it takes towards that perfection is less than sure. To explain providence, Gunton likens God to ‘a great playwright’ who ‘will “create” characters which then to an extent create themselves.’ These characters ‘take on their own life within the imagination of the author’<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn75" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn75" name="_ftnref75">[75]</a> even as the play itself ‘conform[s] to the immanent or intrinsic development of character and plot.’<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn76" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn76" name="_ftnref76">[76]</a> Thus Gunton concludes that God’s ‘pen does indeed write the story, but in such a way as to allow the characters to develop according to its and their intrinsic logic.’<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn77" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn77" name="_ftnref77">[77]</a> Central to this story is the incarnation. ‘A christological structuring of divine providential action understands it in the light of the one who became human, identifying with the world’s structures in order to reshape them to their eschatological destiny.’<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn78" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn78" name="_ftnref78">[78]</a> For Gunton, salvation through incarnation ‘indicates contingency but not “pure” chance… There is nothing outside God’s ordering activity. But that divine determining is not deterministic, because the action of the Spirit defines the kind of order that there is, or can be.’ As such, ‘[p]rovidential action is thus that which enables particular human actions and worldly events to become what they will be.’<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn79" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn79" name="_ftnref79">[79]</a><br /><br />How, then, should we understand providence? Gunton himself offers two definitions. First, it is ‘that activity, mediated by the two hands of God, which at once upholds the creation against its utter dissolution and provides for its redemption by the election of Israel and the incarnation of the one through whom all things were made and upheld, and to whom, as the head of the church (Colossians 1:18), in the Spirit all things move.’<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn80" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn80" name="_ftnref80">[80]</a> Thus its meaning may be summed up, secondly, as ‘conservation in eschatological perspective. God’s providential purposes are realised only eschatologically, and that means, first of all, only through time; the creation needs time to be and become itself.’<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn81" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn81" name="_ftnref81">[81]</a><br /><br />Concluding Observations<br />As the aim of this essay is to suggest that Gunton’s approach to providence should positively inform future discussions of the doctrine, it seems somewhat inappropriate to attempt a critique. Nevertheless, I do have a reservation about Gunton’s choice of metaphor to describe God’s providential action and what it may imply about that action. Let me be clear: I have a reservation, not a fully developed criticism, for Gunton’s account of providence clearly is based on Scripture insofar as it follows its depiction of Israel’s calling and so on. It is disappointing, therefore, to see Gunton employing non-biblical metaphors of divine agency, such as ‘a great playwright’. Though I do not think it sensible or right to label Gunton a determinist, my suspicion is that his choice of metaphor here shows him not to have quite escaped the more traditional Reformed conceptuality of God’s sovereignty as something that determines or controls all that happens.<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn82" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn82" name="_ftnref82">[82]</a><br /><br />According to Gunton, God is like a playwright. Although the playwright pens the material, the plot and characters themselves develop according to the play’s intrinsic logic; but does the playwright retain the ‘sovereignty’ to start again from scratch if the play unfolds in a way not conducive to him? Importantly, the playwright needs to make a decision as to whether he will attempt to salvage – and, indeed, can salvage – anything from a wayward plot and non-responsive characters so that the play ends up resembling something like that which he envisaged originally. The ambiguity in Gunton’s thought emerges if we ask these same questions of the divine playwright, for a playwright surely does retain control of his play and determines all that happens in it.<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn83" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn83" name="_ftnref83">[83]</a> Even if the plot and characters do develop according to the play’s intrinsic logic, they cannot do so without the actual penmanship of the playwright; and so they are determined to do all that they do. It is legitimate, therefore, to ask whether Gunton can truly escape a conceptual framework of theological determinism, given his choice of metaphor. Gunton’s theology of providence mostly sidesteps the often-perceived conflict between divine and creaturely freedom by insisting that freedom concerns, for example, a human person’s right relations with God and with other creatures rather than that person’s ability to choose freely. Essentially, the chief problem with the playwright metaphor is that it contradicts this relational notion of freedom by dropping the matter of God’s providence as that sovereign, christological reorientation of creation; instead, it reaffirms the idea that God’s sovereignty is little more than an opportunity for him to flex his volitional muscles. Sadly, it is little more than a non-trinitarian sound bite unnecessarily injected into what is otherwise a thoroughly trinitarian doctrine of providence.<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn84" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn84" name="_ftnref84">[84]</a> This is regrettable, given that Gunton has implied – often quite strongly! – that determinism is something ‘best avoided’.<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn85" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn85" name="_ftnref85">[85]</a><br />Despite this reservation, there is still much to be commended in Gunton’s theology of providence, not least the absence of any aggressive echoes of more conventional debates on the matter. As is common in Reformed theology, Gunton, too, does not sever the link between providence and election;<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn86" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn86" name="_ftnref86">[86]</a> but whereas traditionally providence serves election insofar as it is the execution of God’s plan in time to save a set number of elected humans, Gunton’s emphasis is on the whole of creation being transformed – perfected – to praise its creator.<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn87" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn87" name="_ftnref87">[87]</a> Driving Gunton’s thought here is a conviction that the whole of creation, human and non-human alike, is good: not only did God design it to flourish and to mature by his action, but in doing so he approved of the specific spatio-temporal form given to his creation. The idea that God has specially predestined a group of humans for this privilege is not, for Gunton, a true interpretation of Scripture. Furthermore, that creation is creation and not God does not prevent God from involving himself with its affairs; the universe is not ‘closed’ to his activity. In fact, Gunton greatly stresses that God really is involved in creation because divine action is not primarily sovereign power – though God is sovereign – but the work of his two hands, the Son and the Spirit. This, and not that of the playwright, is surely Gunton’s key metaphor, for it shows that God’s providential activity is God’s triune activity, focussed in the life of the Son. <br /><br />My desire, then, is that Gunton’s focus on God’s trinitarian action within the whole of creation should inform any future theologies of providence. Gunton’s achievement is twofold. He plays down those aspects of God’s sovereignty that cannot first be elucidated with reference to Christ and the Spirit, something I think he achieves with astonishing consistency.<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn88" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn88" name="_ftnref88">[88]</a> From this, we see that he has set the foundation of a new, trinitarian conceptual framework that, despite his own lapses, may well lead to non-deterministic doctrines of providence. No doubt Gunton would have said even more about providence had he lived to publish his planned works on systematic theology; that he did not lends a certain poignancy to this essay’s closing quote, selected for its expression of hope and trust in God’s providence: ‘God has time for us, and goes at his own time, but also at ours. He will give us time to complete what he wants us to achieve, which may not be what we hope or plan to do. That is why we can live freely as his people in the time he has given us to do what he wants us to complete in our particular life-spans, however long or short.’<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn89" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn89" name="_ftnref89">[89]</a>, <a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn90" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn90" name="_ftnref90">[90]</a><br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn1" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref1" name="_ftn1">[1]</a> John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, 1:16:3, translated by Ford Lewis Battles, Philadelphia: The Westminster Press 1960, p. 201<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn2" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref2" name="_ftn2">[2]</a> Institutes, 1:16:4, p. 203; 1:16:9, p. 208<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn3" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref3" name="_ftn3">[3]</a> Institutes, 1:17:6, p. 218<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn4" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref4" name="_ftn4">[4]</a> Colin E Gunton, The Triune Creator: A Historical and Systematic Study, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press 1998, p. 151<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn5" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref5" name="_ftn5">[5]</a> The Triune Creator, p. 152<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn6" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref6" name="_ftn6">[6]</a> The Triune Creator, p. 152<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn7" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref7" name="_ftn7">[7]</a> The Triune Creator, p. 85<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn8" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref8" name="_ftn8">[8]</a> The Triune Creator, p. 86<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn9" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref9" name="_ftn9">[9]</a> The Triune Creator, pp. 175-176<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn10" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref10" name="_ftn10">[10]</a> The Triune Creator, p. 176<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn11" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref11" name="_ftn11">[11]</a> The Triune Creator, p. 176<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn12" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref12" name="_ftn12">[12]</a> ‘General providence is a name for that activity by which God is conceived to hold in being the order of creation: maintaining the order and teleology of the human and non-human realms. By contrast, particular and special providence are ways of speaking of saving or redemptive acts directed to restoring the right order, or, better, directedness, of creation.’ (The Triune Creator, p. 176)<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn13" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref13" name="_ftn13">[13]</a> The Triune Creator, p. 12<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn14" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref14" name="_ftn14">[14]</a> Colin E Gunton, ‘Atonement and the Project of Creation: An Interpretation of Colossians 1.15-23’, in The Promise of Trinitarian Theology (second edition), Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1999 impression, pp. 180-181<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn15" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref15" name="_ftn15">[15]</a> Colin E Gunton, The Christian Faith: An Introduction to Christian Doctrine, Oxford: Blackwell Publishers 2002, p. 19<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn16" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref16" name="_ftn16">[16]</a> ‘Atonement and the Project of Creation’, p. 181, italics original<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn17" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref17" name="_ftn17">[17]</a> Colin E Gunton, Christ and Creation, Carlisle: Paternoster Press 1992, p. 45<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn18" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref18" name="_ftn18">[18]</a> Colin Gunton, ‘The Spirit Moved Over the Face of the Waters: The Holy Spirit and the Created Order’, International Journal of Systematic Theology 4 (2002), p. 192; cf. The Christian Faith, p. 29. For an excellent, book-length elaboration of similar ideas, see G K Beale, The Temple and the Church’s Mission: A Biblical Theology of the Dwelling Place of God, Leicester: Apollos 2004.<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn19" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref19" name="_ftn19">[19]</a> ‘The Spirit Moved Over the Face of the Waters’, p. 192<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn20" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref20" name="_ftn20">[20]</a> The Christian Faith, p. 29<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn21" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref21" name="_ftn21">[21]</a> The Christian Faith, p. 29<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn22" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref22" name="_ftn22">[22]</a> The Christian Faith, p. 63<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn23" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref23" name="_ftn23">[23]</a> ‘Atonement and the Project of Creation’, p. 180<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn24" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref24" name="_ftn24">[24]</a> Christ and Creation, p. 94<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn25" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref25" name="_ftn25">[25]</a> The Christian Faith, p. 30; The Triune Creator, p. 84<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn26" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref26" name="_ftn26">[26]</a> If Gunton has an objection to evolutionary theory, for example, it is that all too often the processes of evolution displace God’s providence; evolution must be seen as divinely directed. See The Triune Creator, pp. 186-188; cf. p. 38.<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn27" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref27" name="_ftn27">[27]</a> The Christian Faith, p. 5<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn28" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref28" name="_ftn28">[28]</a> Colin E Gunton, ‘Relation and Relativity: The Trinity and the Created World’, in The Promise of Trinitarian Theology (second edition), Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1999 impression, p. 142<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn29" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref29" name="_ftn29">[29]</a> The Triune Creator, p. 23<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn30" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref30" name="_ftn30">[30]</a> The Triune Creator, p. 10<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn31" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref31" name="_ftn31">[31]</a> Elsewhere, Gunton suggests that whilst ‘the incarnation of the eternal creating Word in the human being, Jesus of Nazareth, betokens God’s freedom of action within the material world, … the Spirit’s sovereign action is the mark of God’s freedom toward or over against it – from outside, so to speak’ (The Christian Faith, p. 10, italics original). Assuming that he uses ‘from outside’ in the sense of referring to God’s transcendence, Gunton appears to indicate that the incarnation shows God’s intimacy with the world whilst the Spirit’s action demonstrates his lordship. If so, I would query the need to distinguish the different ways of divine mediation so acutely; the Spirit’s action is surely just as intimate as that of the Son.<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn32" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref32" name="_ftn32">[32]</a> The Triune Creator, p. 24<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn33" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref33" name="_ftn33">[33]</a> ‘Atonement and the Project of Creation’, p. 183<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn34" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref34" name="_ftn34">[34]</a> ‘Atonement and the Project of Creation’, p. 186<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn35" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref35" name="_ftn35">[35]</a> ‘Atonement and the Project of Creation’, p. 187<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn36" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref36" name="_ftn36">[36]</a> The Christian Faith, p. 30<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn37" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref37" name="_ftn37">[37]</a> The Christian Faith, p. 31<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn38" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref38" name="_ftn38">[38]</a> The Christian Faith, p. 31<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn39" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref39" name="_ftn39">[39]</a> The Christian Faith, p. 31<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn40" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref40" name="_ftn40">[40]</a> The Christian Faith, p. 79<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn41" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref41" name="_ftn41">[41]</a> The Christian Faith, p. 32<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn42" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref42" name="_ftn42">[42]</a> ‘Atonement and the Project of Creation’, pp. 185-186<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn43" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref43" name="_ftn43">[43]</a> The Triune Creator, p. 84<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn44" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref44" name="_ftn44">[44]</a> cf. Colin E Gunton, The One, the Three and the Many: God, Creation and the Culture of Modernity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000 reprint, p. 164<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn45" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref45" name="_ftn45">[45]</a> cf. The Christian Faith, p. 5: ‘It is noticeable that in the Genesis account God does not say: “Be”, but “let there be”. This is distinctive in maintaining a balance between the command and the being of that which is established. There is a greater stress on what we might call the giving of space to be to a reality that is other than God. The world is not simply a function of God’s action… but that action creates something that has its own unique and particular freedom to be.’<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn46" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref46" name="_ftn46">[46]</a> Colin E Gunton, ‘Christ the Wisdom of God: A Study in Divine and Human Action’, in Father, Son and Holy Spirit: Essays Toward a Fully Trinitarian Theology, London: T&T Clark 2003, p. 136; cf. p. 141<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn47" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref47" name="_ftn47">[47]</a> ‘Christ the Wisdom of God’, p. 136, italics original<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn48" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref48" name="_ftn48">[48]</a> ‘Christ the Wisdom of God’, p. 142<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn49" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref49" name="_ftn49">[49]</a> The Triune Creator, p. 190<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn50" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref50" name="_ftn50">[50]</a> The Triune Creator, p. 177; cf. ‘The Spirit Moved Over the Face of the Waters’, p. 193<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn51" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref51" name="_ftn51">[51]</a> The Triune Creator, p. 177<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn52" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref52" name="_ftn52">[52]</a> cf. The Triune Creator, p. 171<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn53" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref53" name="_ftn53">[53]</a> ‘The Spirit Moved Over the Face of the Waters’, p. 198; cf. The Triune Creator, p. 23<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn54" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref54" name="_ftn54">[54]</a> The One, the Three and the Many, p. 189<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn55" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref55" name="_ftn55">[55]</a> The Triune Creator, p. 184<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn56" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref56" name="_ftn56">[56]</a> The One, the Three and the Many, p. 189<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn57" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref57" name="_ftn57">[57]</a> The One, the Three and the Many, p. 206<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn58" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref58" name="_ftn58">[58]</a> ‘Relation and Relativity’, pp. 142-143<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn59" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref59" name="_ftn59">[59]</a> ‘Relation and Relativity’, p. 143<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn60" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref60" name="_ftn60">[60]</a> For Gunton, divine freedom is demonstrated by the incarnation: ‘that God creates the world through Christ, through the one who became flesh, implies that God is able to come into relation with the world while remaining distinct from it. It therefore bespeaks freedom in the relations of God to the world’ (Christ and Creation, pp. 76-77)<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn61" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref61" name="_ftn61">[61]</a> Colin E Gunton, ‘God, Grace and Freedom’, in Colin E Gunton (ed.), God and Freedom: Essays in Historical and Systematic Theology, Edinburgh: T&T Clark 1995, p. 121<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn62" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref62" name="_ftn62">[62]</a> ‘God, Grace and Freedom’, p. 122<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn63" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref63" name="_ftn63">[63]</a> ‘God, Grace and Freedom’, p. 126<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn64" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref64" name="_ftn64">[64]</a> ‘God, Grace and Freedom’, p. 128, italics original<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn65" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref65" name="_ftn65">[65]</a> ‘God, Grace and Freedom’, p. 128<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn66" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref66" name="_ftn66">[66]</a> cf. ‘God, Grace and Freedom’, p. 133<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn67" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref67" name="_ftn67">[67]</a> ‘God, Grace and Freedom’, p. 131<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn68" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref68" name="_ftn68">[68]</a> cf. The One, the Three and the Many, p. 164<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn69" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref69" name="_ftn69">[69]</a> ‘God, Grace and Freedom’, p. 132<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn70" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref70" name="_ftn70">[70]</a> ‘God, Grace and Freedom’, p. 132<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn71" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref71" name="_ftn71">[71]</a> ‘God, Grace and Freedom’, p. 133<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn72" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref72" name="_ftn72">[72]</a> The Triune Creator, p. 191, italics original<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn73" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref73" name="_ftn73">[73]</a> The Triune Creator, p. 183<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn74" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref74" name="_ftn74">[74]</a> The Triune Creator, p. 184<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn75" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref75" name="_ftn75">[75]</a> The Triune Creator, p. 192; The Christian Faith, p. 6<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn76" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref76" name="_ftn76">[76]</a> The Christian Faith, p. 6<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn77" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref77" name="_ftn77">[77]</a> The Christian Faith, p. 64<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn78" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref78" name="_ftn78">[78]</a> The Triune Creator, p. 192<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn79" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref79" name="_ftn79">[79]</a> The Triune Creator, p. 192<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn80" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref80" name="_ftn80">[80]</a> The Triune Creator, p. 192<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn81" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref81" name="_ftn81">[81]</a> The Christian Faith, p. 36<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn82" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref82" name="_ftn82">[82]</a> The problem of the interaction between divine and human freedom is, of course, a crucial element for any theology of providence if one wishes both to hold that God is sovereign and creation is free. My own view is that the biblical notion of God’s presence serves as a far better explanation of providence than any metaphors that parallel creaturely actions with God’s actions; see my ‘How is Christ Present to the World?’, International Journal of Systematic Theology 7 (2005), for further comment.<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn83" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref83" name="_ftn83">[83]</a> Of course, the playwright does not exercise the same kind of ‘sovereignty’ over the play’s interpretation!<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn84" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref84" name="_ftn84">[84]</a> There are further elements of determinism in other writings. As God directs the creation towards perfection, ‘everything that happens is already the result of divine action, so that everything is the action of God’ (Christ and Creation, p. 90, italics added). Elsewhere, citing Psalm 31:15, Gunton writes, ‘That is above all an expression of trust in the providence of God: that all our times, whenever, whoever, wherever, we are, are subject to God’s overruling’ (Colin E Gunton, Theology Through Preaching: Sermons for Brentwood, Edinburgh: T&T Clark 2001, p. 45).<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn85" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref85" name="_ftn85">[85]</a> The Triune Creator, p. 86; see also, for example, Gunton’s later comment that Jonathan Edwards ‘introduced disturbingly determinist elements into his own Reformed heritage’ (The Triune Creator, p. 154, italics added).<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn86" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref86" name="_ftn86">[86]</a> Arguably, Gunton’s chapter on providence in The Christian Faith would in others’ works be a chapter on election!<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn87" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref87" name="_ftn87">[87]</a> See, for example, Christ and Creation, p. 96.<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn88" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref88" name="_ftn88">[88]</a> I would argue that Karl Barth’s doctrine of providence, often taken as christological, fails to reach the same heights as Gunton’s thought on the matter.<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn89" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref89" name="_ftn89">[89]</a> Theology Through Preaching, pp. 47-48<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn90" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref90" name="_ftn90">[90]</a> I wish to thank John Colwell, Lincoln Harvey and Nate Suda in particular for their comments on this paper, which was also presented to the Research Institute in Systematic Theology at King’s College, London in July 2005.nate sudahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01381339742322848085noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15575864.post-1129635333657075052005-10-18T04:33:00.000-07:002005-10-18T04:35:33.676-07:00Starter Discussion Paper<p align="left">Foundationalism, Non-foundationalism, and Colin Gunton’s Proposal of ‘Open Transcendentals’<br /></p><p align="left">Delivered at the SST Annual Conference, 2005 </p><p align="left"><br />Nathaniel A. Suda<br /><br /><br />Introduction<br /><br />Despite the fact that some bemoan discussions of theological method, the discussion is there and needs to be addressed. It needs to be addressed not as some kind of prolegomena to the theological task, but because wrapped up in it are critical judgements about the nature of God and the structure of created reality. Gunton took part in this discussion frequently and fervently, but he never called it theological method – he called it ontology. What follows is Gunton’s contribution to the question ‘What is the basis for knowledge?’. First we start with his description of foundationalism and non-foundationalism with particular reference to the Enlightenment. Second we explore a few Christian doctrines by which Gunton lays the groundwork for an alternative response. Third we discuss Gunton’s proposal of ‘open transcendental’. Finally, fourth we respond and conclude. <br /><br />Foundationalism and Non-foundationalism<br /><br />Colin Gunton is well known, rightly or not, as not being always the most charitable reader of the history of Christian theology. Parts of his writing have something of a Harnackian ring to them; like Harnack he thought that early in the history of Christian theology things, to put it mildly, took an unfortunate turn. Harnack of course thought the unfortunate turn was the development of the doctrine of the Trinity. Gunton thought the turn was not developing it enough.<br /><br />It is a theme which appears consistently throughout Gunton’s writing: that by an underdeveloped concept of interpersonal Trinitarian relationships, much of Christian theology failed to adequately explain the relationship between the one God, the three divine persons and the human creation, with the result that theology had a strong drive towards monism. Simply, everything became subsumed in the eternal, one God. Gunton’s early book Enlightenment and Alienation<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn1" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn1" name="_ftnref1">[1]</a> is where this thesis first begins to take shape, and in that book another characteristically Guntonian thesis emerges. That thesis is, contrary to what has so often been the judgement by the church, the Enlightenment was a great blessing to theology. The Enlightenment succeeded in exposing an inadequacy of the form Christianity had taken: “its tendency to elevate the one above the many and make the eternal appear the enemy rather than the fulfiller of time.”<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn2" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn2" name="_ftnref2">[2]</a> With the Enlightenment came another way of looking at the world, and in particular a way of speaking of human subjects, with the prerogative to an independence and freedom proper to themselves. However, as the rest of the title, ‘and Alienation’, suggests, the move was not altogether to be applauded. In sharing the basic convictions of its predecessors, the Enlightenment set about to find a more adequate basis transcendentality than could be found in God. Kant despaired of the attempt to find transcendentality in the outside world, and so turned to the conceptual framework of the mind. In doing so he exacerbated two problems in the tradition:<br /><br />1.) through rational unification of everything he created a new kind of emphasis on the one<br />2.) he divided science, ethics and aesthetics, just as Plato and Aquinas fragmented truth, goodness and beauty<br /><br />The failure, Gunton says, was in exposing a weakness in its “renascent Hellenism” such that its “putative new certainties . . . collapsed under the weight of their own inadequacies”<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn3" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn3" name="_ftnref3">[3]</a>. The Enlightenment set out to show the particular freedom of the individual human mind, but ended up burying any concept of individuality in a monolithic concept of reason and truth. But this time the issue was further compounded by the introduction of a new kind of alienation and fragmentation, rehearsed so well in the classic problem of ‘god and other minds’.<br /><br />Post-modernism rejected the Enlightenment quest and “adopted a pluralism of indifference”<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn4" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn4" name="_ftnref4">[4]</a>, but as is often pointed out, it was really modernity all over again. Post-modernity “is in effect an imperious claim for truth which abolishes all other truth by a form of homogenization. It is, despite appearances, a form of universalism”<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn5" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn5" name="_ftnref5">[5]</a>. The Enlightenment thought Christianity was mistaken in direction, but not in form; post-modernism thought the presupposition both held, that there is some kind of unifying structure to reality, was bankrupt. Post-modernity questioned if the whole process of a search for universal truth was mistaken.<br /><br />The quest of the Enlightenment never really died out, but has found a renewal in more recent discussions on foundationalism and non-foundationalism. Generally speaking, foundationalism “holds that a discipline’s claim for rationality and truth must be based on some broadly accepted intellectual foundations, established by universal and certain reason”<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn6" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn6" name="_ftnref6">[6]</a>. The rational and the empirical compete for foundational status, but at least in some camps, neither approach succeeded in delivering what it promised – “there are no certain and indubitable set of concepts, no certain and agreed reports of sense experience”<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn7" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn7" name="_ftnref7">[7]</a>.<br /><br />Gunton was dissatisfied with most, if not all foundational attempts at describing the world, not on strictly epistemological grounds, which is where the battle is often fought, but on ontological grounds. It was a flawed ontology of the human which gave engine to the attempt to relate truth and human rationality in the forms we have described. Gunton sets out the issue well in a passage on Descartes:<br /><br />“The ontological question is the question about what kind of entity is the human, and has traditionally been answered in terms of a duality: of matter and spirit, body and soul, or the like; most radically perhaps in Descartes’ famous dualism of intellectual mind and mechanical body. In Descartes, the ontological dimension is apparent: the human constitution reflects the dual structure of the universe as matter and (divine) idea. Mind, the godlike part of the person, is able by virtue of its equipment with innate ideas to comprehend by the use of pure reason the rational structure of the machine.”<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn8" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn8" name="_ftnref8">[8]</a><br /><br />In an ontological framework of this sort, we almost always find some kind of distinction between divine and human reason, but what is to be noted is that this distinction is one of distance, not difference. Human reason is often described in like terms as divine reason, but like the light shining from a candle, is dimmer the further removed from the source.<br /><br />In theological and philosophical discussions, foundationalism often finds incarnation in naturalism. Sometimes the defence given by theology is a counter-foundationalism; think for instance of various forms of creationism. However, the approach often given more respect in intellectual circles is non-foundationalism. In parallel fashion to the reflex of post-modernity to modernity, non-foundationalism is a reflex to foundationalism and argues “that the basis and criteria of rationality are intrinsic to particular human intellectual enterprises, which should not have imposed upon them in a procrustean way the methodologies which are appropriate for other forms of intellectual life.”<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn9" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn9" name="_ftnref9">[9]</a> This creates various attractions to a theologian burdened by requests to appeal to an empirical (naturalist) truth. Again, there is some measure of value in such an approach, particularly in its attempt to take seriously the ability for particulars to be veracious. However, Gunton rejects non-foundationalism more swiftly than foundationalism. He writes that not only do they attempt to construct a barrier to outside critique, but they “run the risk of the rank subjectivism into which their extreme representatives have fallen. Theologically speaking, they evade the intellectual challenge involved in the use of the word ‘God’.”<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn10" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn10" name="_ftnref10">[10]</a><br /><br />Doctrinal Explorations<br /><br />Earlier we suggested that the root of the problem by Gunton’s analysis lay in ontology. In contrast to the various kinds of ontology which use the dualism of material and non-material as the basic term, Gunton begins his reading of ontology in the personal relations of the Trinity. Drawing heavily here on the Cappadocians and John Zizioulas, Gunton understood<br /><br />“God as a communion of persons, each distinct but inseparable from the others, whose being consists in their relationship with one another . . . [the] three persons are for and from each other in their otherness. They thus confer particularity upon and receive it from one another. That giving of particularity is very important: it is a matter of space to be. Father, Son and Spirit through the shape – the taxis – of their inseparable relatedness confer particularity and freedom on each other. That is their personal being.”<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn11" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn11" name="_ftnref11">[11]</a><br /><br />This notion of person which is the dynamic of otherness and relation is conceptually and ontologically primitive in Gunton’s thought – by that we mean it is not simplistic, but is a kind of primary building block for all further understanding of God and the world. Therefore it is very easy for Gunton to extend this notion of person to human beings. The taxis of human being as personal is explained with great reference to the doctrine of creation, incarnation and eschatology.<br /><br />On the doctrine of creation, Gunton writes:<br /><br />“What is the outcome when we turn in the light of such a doctrine of God to the theology of creation? Creation becomes understood as the giving of being to the other, and that includes the giving of space to be: to be other and particular . . . the world’s otherness from God is part of its space to be itself, to be finite and not divine. But it as such also echoes the Trinitarian being of God in being what it is by virtue of its internal taxis: it is, like God, a dynamic of beings in relation.”<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn12" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn12" name="_ftnref12">[12]</a><br /><br />The most basic of all Gunton’s assertions on the doctrine of creation is that that which was created was ‘very good’. It is ‘very good’ insofar as God willed creation by an act not bound by external necessity, and so as an ‘other’ distinct from God and created by him it has its own ‘relative independence’ and suitability for veracity.<br /><br />The Incarnation plays a leading role in this scheme as a kind of final vindication of the value of material existence. Because Christ became incarnate and assumed the limits of time and space, we can understand those limits to be a defining feature of human existence, and also good and proper to our human life. God’s processes are to be worked out in time and space, and each is integral to the other.<br /><br />Therefore eschatology features prominently. Similar to Irenaeus, Gunton argued that creation was a project. Creation was created good, destined to perfection. Wishing to contrast his own position form the Reformed doctrine of the eternal decrees, Gunton writes:<br /><br />“[B]ecause the Holy Spirit offers it, perfected, to the Father through the Son, the goodness of its extension in time is shown to be part of its essence. The eternity of the creator and the time of the creature meet in the incarnation, where in human time the ground of human time appears and its end anticipated.”<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn13" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn13" name="_ftnref13">[13]</a><br /><br />The perfection of the created world is not the same as God’s own perfection; perfection as it applies to creation refers to the coming to fullness of God’s purposes of creation, that which is ontologically other yet in relation with Him. The process of perfection takes place in time, but is only realized at the end of time by the Spirit, through the Son, to the Father.<br /><br /><br />Open Transcendental<br /><br />We have spend some time outlining Gunton’s doctrines of the Trinity, creation, incarnation and eschatology because in Gunton’s mind it is only by wrestling with these doctrines that both unity and plurality of being can be brought into relation. A renewed task for transcendentals must confront the fragmentation of truth, goodness and beauty which was a feature of past attempts. In Gunton’s writing there is a heady symbiotic relationship between the doctrines mentioned and what he calls an ‘open transcendental’:<br /><br />“An open transcendental is a notion, in some way basic to the human thinking process, which empowers a continuing and in principle unfinished exploration of the universal marks of being . . . it is also to find concepts whose value will be found not primarily in their clarity and certainty, but in their suggestiveness and potentiality for being deepened and enriched, during the continuing process of thought, from a wide range of sources in human life and thought.”<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn14" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn14" name="_ftnref14">[14]</a><br /><br />Gunton compares his own proposal to that of Coleridge’s notion of idea. Gunton summarizes the notion of idea as “not static, but dynamic, and are not abstracted or generalized so much as ‘given by the knowledge of [the] ultimate aim’ of something. They are ontological rather than merely regulative in character, but that does not mean than they are easily apprehensible.”<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn15" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn15" name="_ftnref15">[15]</a> These passages bring out the strong linguistic connections to other of Gunton’s doctrines, especially eschatology. So therefore, when Gunton defines open transcendentals as full of ‘suggestiveness and potentiality for being deepened and enriched during the continuing process of though’ and as ‘knowledge of [the] ultimate aim of something’ his is cashing out an eschatological concept. The created order, remember, is an eschatological movement towards perfection.<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn16" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn16" name="_ftnref16">[16]</a> The conceptual links with the doctrine of creation are also evident in his mention that they are ‘in some way basic to the human thinking process’, i.e. Gunton is suggesting a framework of created reality which is ontologically proper to created beings as created beings. Both the eschatological and protological comparisons are based on the possibilities of thought suggested by the incarnation of Christ.<br /><br />While modelled on the Trinity, that doctrine is not a transcendental; the order of our world is not Trinitarian in the sense that we might look around and see a mathematical triad in our beings and relations.<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn17" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn17" name="_ftnref17">[17]</a> Rather the structure of the Trinitarian relations, as disclosed economically, suggests that our world has a similar structure proper to it, and can be known. In Gunton’s words: “The expectation is that if the triune God is the source of all being, meaning and truth we must suppose that all being will in some way reflect the being of the one who made it and holds it in being.”<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn18" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn18" name="_ftnref18">[18]</a> The transcendentals, the concepts by which we can explore the structure of our world are relationality, particularity, and temporality.<br /><br />Gunton distinguishes his position from foundationalism primarily in saying that the certainty with which foundationalism and similar projects operate is mistaken. The program is then for non-foundationalist foundations. Gunton notes that may sound like “a characteristically English quest of a middle way”<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn19" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn19" name="_ftnref19">[19]</a>, but retorts the underlying intellectual question is too important to be construed in that way. Gunton says his project is something like a quest for foundations, but with the important proviso that it is a quest “engaged in by fallible, finite, and fallen human beings”<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn20" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn20" name="_ftnref20">[20]</a> In other words, “if we are finite and fallible human beings, should we not rather seek for a concept of truth that is appropriate to our limits, both in capacity and in time and space? For something that can be believed short of absolute certainty?”<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn21" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn21" name="_ftnref21">[21]</a><br /><br />So therefore, an open transcendental is a notion by which created being can be explored, and is suggestive in revealing truth of the created order. This order and our ability to relate to it are based on the nature of Trinitarian relations, yet our relationship to it is always defined by our ontological status as fallible creatures. Therefore, our knowledge must always be recognized as fallible, and like all forms of knowledge, based on a fiduciary claim. Open transcendentals are not static, but commiserate to God’s project of creation subject to an inner dynamic, pointed towards an ultimate aim.<br /><br />Response<br /><br />Gunton’s proposal of open trancendentals is interesting to say the least. A number of very positive features should not escape notice. First is the way in which Gunton takes what is ordinarily an epistemological discussion, and places it inextricably in a discussion of ontology. Gunton is by no means the first or only thinker to lament the dualism of mind and body or similar terms, and recognize the disastrous effect that scheme has had on a personal and interpersonal level. By making ontology the controlling concept and not one later brought into the discussion, Gunton is able to speak of both otherness and relation without recourse to dualism. He has done so by associating an understanding of ontology so closely which the doctrine of creation, which in turn must be understood Trinitarianly, and especially Christologically, that the creator-creature relationship becomes primary. In the years ahead, the ways in which Gunton gave the doctrine of creation such energy and theological robustness should not be overlooked.<br /><br />We have indicated the strong Christological emphasis in Gunton’s concept of ‘open transcendentals’. Despite some comments to the contrary, Christology is absolutely central to Gunton’s theological project. Speaking of Irenaeus, but in so doing disclosing his own position, Gunton writes:<br /><br />“The basis of Irenaeus’ affirmative attitude to the whole created order is Christological. If God in his Son takes to himself the reality of human flesh, then nothing created, and certainly nothing material, can be downgraded to unreality, semi-reality or treated as fundamentally evil, as in the Manichaean version of Gnosticism.”<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn22" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn22" name="_ftnref22">[22]</a><br /><br />Indeed, whenever Gunton needs to make a major theological move, he does so almost exclusively by appealing to Christology, and then nearly always to the incarnation. It is here we must voice a concern. As we have said before, on Gunton’s account God created the world by the Son and Spirit and pronounced it ‘very good’, destined to be perfect in the eschaton. The incarnation of Christ in human materiality further confirmed, contra Plato that truth and history are positively related. There are various permutations and subtleties to that argument, but with very few and less significant exceptions the doctrine of the incarnation, which is where Gunton concentrates so much of his Christological discourse, becomes a kind of confirmation of the goodness of the world, and a place to explore further ramifications along the same vein. There is a serious problem in using the incarnation in this way, and this is one of the most significant flaws in Gunton’s theological project. The problem in using the incarnation to dispel thoughts of “God’s embarrassment of a close involvement in matter” and support the Genesis judgement of ‘very good’ is that the doctrine of the incarnation does no work. It breaks no ground. What can be said about the incarnation has already been said in the doctrine of creation. There is in Gunton’s thought a certain eliding of the nature of the incarnation as creation-affirming and the incarnation as intentful mission whereby Christ came into the world to put to death the state of affairs whereby we are bonded to death. It seems that by suggesting the first, and so emphasising the eschatological vision for humanity Gunton believes he has sufficiently introduced the second.<br /><br />Relative to the notion of open trancendentals, the symptom we find is that references to the cross and resurrection are present by their absence. When we turn to the open transcendentals to explore the nature of reality, it is hard to recognize how these concepts can be related, and even more importantly worked out in the Christian life in relation to the work accomplished by Christ in his death and resurrection. Gunton often protested that he treated these themes in The Actuality of Atonement<a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn23" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftn23" name="_ftnref23">[23]</a>, but it is hard to see how they exercise a determinative effect on the large portion of his thought.<br /><br />We must ask why Gunton never talked about at any length or strength the ascension or post-resurrection appearances. These events would suggest even more strongly God’s positive esteem and relation to material creation, and further they give wide latitude to introduce themes of holiness and discipleship – themes which otherwise fall out almost completely in ontological discussions. Perfection – in the sense Gunton used the word, should be described in terms of holiness and discipleship, and brought into the ontological discussion a bit more fully. The incarnation on the other hand, should be described as a kind of renewed protology as intentful mission, which would lend great resources to the doctrine of recapitulation which Gunton loved so well.<br /><br />Conclusion<br /><br />Briefly then, by way of conclusion, we can say Gunton has opened doors to advance the discussion of foundationalism. We agree fully with Gunton that the quest for foundations is right and proper, and also that the most appropriate way to pursue that quest is through the doctrines of Trinity, creation, Christ, and eschatology. However, our seeking of knowledge of the structure of our reality, and the use of reason in theology can never venture far from the cross.<br /> <br /><br /><br /><br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn1" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref1" name="_ftn1">[1]</a> Gunton, Colin. Enlightenment and Alienation: An Essay towards a Trinitarian Theology. Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1985.<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn2" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref2" name="_ftn2">[2]</a> Gunton, Colin. The One, the Three and the Many: God, Creation and the Culture of Modernity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993., p. 130<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn3" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref3" name="_ftn3">[3]</a> Ibid.<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn4" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref4" name="_ftn4">[4]</a> Ibid. p. 131<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn5" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref5" name="_ftn5">[5]</a> Ibid.<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn6" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref6" name="_ftn6">[6]</a> Ibid. p. 132<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn7" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref7" name="_ftn7">[7]</a> Ibid.<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn8" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref8" name="_ftn8">[8]</a> Gunton, Colin. ‘Trinity, Ontology and Anthropology: Towards a Renewal of the Doctrine of the Imago Dei’. Persons, divine and Human. King's College Essays in Theological Anthropology, Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1992. p. 47<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn9" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref9" name="_ftn9">[9]</a> Gunton. The One, the Three and the Many. p. 133<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn10" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref10" name="_ftn10">[10]</a> Ibid. p. 134<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn11" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref11" name="_ftn11">[11]</a> Gunton. ‘Trinity, Anthropology’. p. 56<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn12" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref12" name="_ftn12">[12]</a> Ibid.<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn13" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref13" name="_ftn13">[13]</a> Gunton, Colin. The Triune Creator: A Historical and Systematic Study. Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 1998. p. (look on yellow pad)<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn14" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref14" name="_ftn14">[14]</a> Gunton. The One, the Three and the Many. p. 142-3<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn15" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref15" name="_ftn15">[15]</a> Gunton. The One, the Three and the Many. p. 143<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn16" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref16" name="_ftn16">[16]</a> It should be remembered that while Gunton drew many ideas from Hegel, their positions should not be confused. Of Hegel Gunton writes: “The theological root of the development is that for Hegel God is so displaced into time that time looses its own proper being” ibid, p. 87. The most significant difference for Gunton was how each described transcendentality.<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn17" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref17" name="_ftn17">[17]</a> Here Gunton’s comment on the vestigia trinitatis is instructive: “By being used as a kind of transcendental in the past the doctrine of the Trinity has been misused, so that ingenious minds have been led on a quest for vestigia trinitatis, traces of Trinity in created being. These have usually taken the form of patterns of threeness in the world which has been supposed to reflect the Trinity, but which have, by reason of their essentially impersonal nature and by calling attention to the mathematics of the Trinity, had the effect of obscuring the real possibilities for a relational ontology inherent in the doctrine.” Ibid, p, 144 n. 23.<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn18" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref18" name="_ftn18">[18]</a> Ibid. p. 145<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn19" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref19" name="_ftn19">[19]</a> Ibid. p. 134<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn20" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref20" name="_ftn20">[20]</a> Ibid. p. 135<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn21" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref21" name="_ftn21">[21]</a> Ibid. p.135<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn22" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref22" name="_ftn22">[22]</a> Gunton. The Triune Creator. p. 52<br /><a title="" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn23" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=15575864#_ftnref23" name="_ftn23">[23]</a> Gunton, Colin. The Actuality of Atonement. A Study of Metaphor, Rationality and the Christian Tradition, Edinburgh: T & T Clark</p>nate sudahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01381339742322848085noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15575864.post-1129635177879229412005-10-18T04:28:00.000-07:002005-10-18T04:32:57.880-07:00Starter Discussion - FoundationalismIt's been a long time since I last checked in; I'll save the excuses, but they are good ones. Since I'm not really sure what my take on my freedom question is, I'll follow Andy's suggestion and post a paper I gave at last year's Society for the Study of Theology (SST) in Dublin. The conclusion elicited some good discussion.nate sudahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01381339742322848085noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15575864.post-1125066238666151162005-08-26T07:18:00.000-07:002005-08-26T07:23:58.666-07:00FreedomIt's high time we started some actual discussion, so lets get started with freedom. There are a number of ways we could take this discussion, so lets start with with a question that has a little piece for everyone.<br /><br />For Gunton, is freedom an ontological concept, and how is that influenced by his Trinitarian (particularly pneumatological) reading of the doctrine?nate sudahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01381339742322848085noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15575864.post-1125065822721244652005-08-26T07:16:00.000-07:002005-08-26T07:17:02.723-07:00Ideas for discussionPost ideas for new discussion topics here . . .nate sudahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01381339742322848085noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15575864.post-1125065749145842052005-08-26T07:01:00.000-07:002005-08-31T03:48:29.266-07:00How we use this siteJust a little nettiquette to get us all started . . .<br /><br />There is really only one rule on this site: be polite (not to say anyone hasn't been, or that I suspect anyone won't be) . If this is your first time on this site, and you would like to contribute, first go to the 'Introductions' post and do as the title suggests (after all, aren't introductions polite?) After that, feel free to browse our postings, or add to one of our existing discussions. Have a new discussion idea? Note it on the 'Ideas for discussions' post, and hopefully you will see it appear as a new discussion soon. Share your ideas on Gunton; you'll probably get some valuable feedback, and we'll be polite in response.nate sudahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01381339742322848085noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15575864.post-1124443380723866302005-08-19T02:23:00.000-07:002005-08-19T02:30:56.296-07:00IntroductionsMost of you should know me from meeting in person or via e-mail. I'm currently writing a PhD on Colin Gunton's theology, provisionally entitled 'The Difference the Trinity Makes: Colin Gunton's Systematic Theology', under John Webster's supervision at the University of Aberdeen. There is a short list of related papers I have presented <a href="http://www.abdn.ac.uk/divinity/pgrad/CurrentPostgraduates.shtml">here</a>. You are probably reading this because you are interested in Colin Gunton's theology, so why don't you 'make a comment' on this post, and introduce yourself to like-minded people . . .nate sudahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01381339742322848085noreply@blogger.com