Divine Freedom and the Doctrine of the Immanent Trinity: In Dialogue with Karl Barth and Contemporary Theology
Overview
This book constructs a contemporary doctrine of the immanent trinity in dialogue with Karl Barth's theology and a selected number of prominent contemporary theologians. For Paul Molnar, human freedom can be properly understood only in the light of God's freedom, and any understanding of the immanent Trinity that is not fashioned from the economic Trinitarian self-revelation will lead toward a dualistic, monistic or agnostic view of divine/human relations. Therefore, any method that starts with experience and not explicitly the word of God revealed will be seen to threaten a proper perception of both divine and human freedom.
Molnar argues that a properly conceived contemporary doctrine of the immanent Trinity will enable theologians to say something positive about God and God's relations with us in history, without in any way making God dependent on history. In this book he analyzes and compares Karl Barth's view of the relationship between the immanent and economic Trinity with the views of other contemporary theologians in order to explore what a proper understanding of divine freedom should look like today, and how that view should develop in light of contemporary feminist and historicist approaches to the Trinity.
Top Highlights
“I will follow the view held by Karl Barth, and clearly articulated by Thomas F. Torrance, that theology must allow the unique nature of its object to determine what can and cannot be said about the triune God.” (Page 1)
“(2) Failure to recognize Jesus’ true deity means failure to recognize God as he really is for us.” (Page 28)
“(1) Christology must begin with Jesus Christ himself as attested in the New Testament.” (Page 28)
“(3) Jesus’ humanity as such does not reveal because he is veiled in his revelation and thus he causes offense.” (Page 28)
“‘It is more pious and more accurate to signify God from the Son and call him Father, than to name him from his works and call him Unoriginate.’1 This is one of the most pressing problems facing contemporary trinitarian theology: how do we speak accurately of God’s Fatherhood and Sonship, and about God’s relationality and temporality without projecting our limited human relations of fatherhood and sonship and created temporality into the divine life, thus compromising not only God’s sovereignty, but our genuine contingent freedom which is grounded in God’s freedom for us in the incarnation and at Pentecost? Or to put it another way, how may we know God in accordance with his nature rather than creating God in our own image?” (Pages ix–x)
Molnar sets out to place the doctrine of the immanent Trinity firmly back on the agenda of the Christian doctrine of God, and does so to considerable effect. In conversation not only with Barth but with many contemporary proposals in Trinitarian theology, he makes a persuasive case for the centrality of the doctrine and against the perils that attend its neglect. This is an essay in Christian dogmatics of a high order, learned, intellectually powerful and spiritually engaged; it deserves to be widely read and discussed.
—John Webster, Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity, University of Oxford
Although Trinitarian doctrine has enjoyed great attention in recent theology, not all of it has been as careful or as considerate as one might hope. Now by drawing upon classical theologians like Barth, Aquinas and Torrance, who are deployed in an outstanding way, Paul Molnar separates the wheat from the chaff. Masterful, fully documented and trenchant, the result is perhaps the most important work on the Trinity to appear in the last 20 years.
—George Hunsinger, Princeton Theological Seminary
- Title: Divine Freedom and the Doctrine of the Immanent Trinity: In Dialogue with Karl Barth and Contemporary Theology
- Author: Paul D. Molnar
- Publisher: T & T Clark
- Publication Date: 2002
- Pages: 384