Archive: May 16, 2013, 12:00 AM
The Cambridge Companion to the Trinity
The Cambridge Companion to the Trinity, ed. Peter C. Phan(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. xiv + 417pp. hb. £55).
This volume brought out the hidden statistician in me, and I found myself counting the proportions. Of the twenty-one contributors only one, Karen Kilby from the University of Nottingham, was working, at the time of writing, in the UK: a sombre reflection, surely, on the state of Systematic Theology in Britain. The provenance of the writers is not always clear, but at least fourteen are from the US. Three are from Korea; and the editor, Peter Phan, is originally from Vietnam, though now living in America.
Equally interesting is the denominational distribution. Nine appear to be Roman Catholic, with one each from the Lutheran, Greek Orthodox and Romanian Orthodox traditions, and another from the ‘Christian Church (Disciples of Christ)’. The stimulus given to Roman Catholic trinitarianism by the work of Karl Rahner has clearly not been matched by a corresponding stimulus to Protestant theology from the work of Barth and Moltmann. But then, the volume ignores both the late T. F. Torrance and the late Colin Gunton.