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.

The distribution of the material, too, is fascinating.  Under the heading, ‘Retrieving the sources’, one single chapter is devoted to ‘exploring the Trinity in/and (sic) the New Testament’.  This is exactly the same as is devoted to Bonaventure; and once this chapter is completed Scripture is to all intents and purposes set aside.  Theologians accustomed to taking biblical revelation as their starting-point will find themselves, I fear, in an alien world.  All would agree with the Editor’s comment that the New Testament does not contain ‘a full-fledged doctrine of the Trinity’, but too many seem to be taking this to mean that it contains nothing, and that the doctrine itself is a later, post-biblical development with only the most tenuous connection to primitive Christianity.

The chapter itself (by Elaine M. Wainwright) clearly reflects this point of view and is deeply disappointing, though it is not helped by the irritating habit of referring to God as ‘G*d’: the sort of thing that brings feminism into unnecessary disrepute.  If all human discourse is, as has been said, quotation, it’s going to be hard to find anything to say about G*d.  Professor Wainwright warns us not to read the New Testament in the light of later Nicene theology.  This is fair enough, but would that theology ever have emerged without the New Testament (which is the same sort of question as whether the Gospel of John would ever have been written if the Jesus of history had not been also the Christ of faith)?  The doctrine of the trinity may not appear ‘full-fledged’ in the New Testament, but the deity of Christ clearly does.  It was this which Athanasius and his successors were determined to defend (to protect the integrity of their worship); and it was this that cried out for a trinitarian understanding of God.  How did the being of God the Son relate to the being of God the Father (and of God the Holy Spirit)?  For Wainwright, however, the link between theology and scripture is extremely tenuous, as indeed is the link between theological discourse and reality.  We can speak of God only indirectly and Scripture (like theology) is only ‘a finger pointing to the moon’ (the sub-title of Wainwright’s contribution): a metaphor which itself highlights ‘the metaphoric nature of the task of naming and imagining the Divine.’  But if ‘Father’, ‘Son’ and ‘Spirit’ are only three of a multitude of images and metaphors, does this mean that God is ‘Father’ only in the same sense as he is a rock?

On the face of things, this is an approach which smacks of humility, honouring the age-old principles that the finite has no capacity for the infinite, and that  our critical reason can know nothing of the noumenon.  But even supposing that we cannot do for God what Adam did for the animals (naming them), can God not give himself a Name?  Not according to much contemporary theology, which is in principle agnostic and confuses our inability to discover God with an inability on his part to reveal himself.  This is why, throughout this ‘Companion’, revelation is discounted and the Trinity presented simply as a human attempt to make sense of certain experiences or to lay a foundation for certain practices (particularly liturgical practices).  Even then, the New Testament, which contains the germ of these attempts, is allegedly so obscure that we have to approach it through an elaborate hermeneutical labyrinth, only to discover in the end nothing more exciting than a finger pointing to the moon.  Silly of Arius and Athanasius to fall out over it!

There follows a series of erudite studies on ‘Recovering the tradition’ (the Trinity in Aquinas, Bonaventure, the Protestant Reformation, after the Reformation).  These highlight one of the peculiar features of this volume.  The Word ‘Companion’ suggests a work of reference, which is exactly the genre of the corresponding Oxford series.  For example, if you want a brief factual account of Logical Positivism you can turn to the Oxford Companion to Philosophy.  But this Companion to the Trinity is no reference work, but a symposium, and it’s hard to imagine crying out to it when suffering from information-deficit.  Its main value is as a montage of modern attitudes to the Trinity.

It also, particularly in these essays on recovering the tradition, highlights the extent to which the Logos concept quickly became a master principle in Christian theology: surely a mystery in view of the fact that it appears only in the Prologue to John’s Gospel; and fraught with consequences because it prompted a shift away from the cross to the incarnation, and from a pre-occupation with sin to a pre-occupation with meaning (where we all feel more comfortable).

The section on contemporary theologians covers Barth, Rahner, von Balthasar, Moltmann and Pannenberg (together), contemporary Orthodox theology, feminist theologies and ‘The life-giving reality of God from black, Latin American and US Hispanic theological perspectives’.  There is no corresponding article on ‘the life-giving reality of God from a white Anglo-Saxon perspective’, presumably either because it’s others who can offer only perspectives or because our perspective is not interesting.

Peter C. Phan’s article on Karl Rahner rightly devotes several pages to ‘Rahner’s Rule’ (‘The “economic” Trinity is the “immanent” Trinity and the “immanent” Trinity is the “economic” Trinity.’  The struggle here is to identify what Rahner means by the identity between the economic and the immanent Trinity.  Is it that there is but one Trinity (economic, immanent or both)?  Or is it that there are two trinities but they are the same in nature?  He concludes: ‘Rahner’s point is that there is not an immanent Trinity lying hidden behind or above the Trinity that we encounter in history.  On the contrary, there is only one Trinity who gives himself to us as Father, Son and Spirit, exactly as they are related to each other in themselves.’ (198)

Closely related to his ‘Rule’ is Rahner’s well-known theologoumenon that of ther the three persons only the Son could have become incarnated.  This verges on speculation, raising a question to which revelation offers no answer.  It seems to rest on the assumption that if the incarnation of the Son (rather than of the Father or the Spirit) was entirely matter of the divine discretion, then it did not arise out of the divine being and therefore tells us nothing about the divine reality.  The assumption itself, however, is arbitrary.  Is it only necessary acts that reveal character?  But eventually this, too, comes back to the preoccupation with the Logos preoccupation: God can reveal himself only through his Word, therefore only the Word could come.  But the key trinitarian word is ‘Son’, not Word.  Can God speak only through his Son?  I am not convinced.  The thesis imperils the freedom of the Son to volunteer to come forth and become the world’s Saviour.  And in any case, according to the doctrine of (en)perichoresis, in the One the Three come.

The chapter on feminist theologies of the Trinity instantly raises the question why we always fall into the trap of such tokenism.  The premise of coherent feminism is that women are not different from men.  Can we imagine, then, a chapter on masculine theologies of the trinity?  When Mary Magdalene said, ‘My Lord’ to Jesus, was she saying something different from what it meant on the lips of Thomas (John 20)?  And do the contributions of the other five women scholars not constitute ‘feminist theology’?  They certainly show us women theologians going about their proper business; and if anything more specific were needed, Feminist theology would have been better served by an article on the trinitarian theology of Catherine Mary La Cugna.

The section on dialogue between trinitarian theology and other religions covers Confucianism, Hinduism, Pure Land Buddhism, and Judaism and Islam (taken together).  Here again, the proportions are startling.  There is a long history of dialogue between Christian Trinitarianism and both Judaism and Islam.  Surely, then, each of these deserves a chapter to itself?  As for the interest in the Confucianism and the rest, it is remarkable that a volume which can see scarcely a trace of the Trinity in the New Testament (and probably not even its shadow in the Old) can nevertheless see it everywhere in the religions of East Asia.  Presumably the ‘faith position’ of this volume is that all roads lead to God.  Even so, it takes a very special imagination to see connections between Hindu polytheism and trinitarian monotheism; and an even more special imagination to see hints of the Trinity in non-theistic Buddhism.  Granted, evangelism implies dialogue.  But if I arrange a dialogue with a Buddhist, do I begin with the Trinity?  It is certainly not what Paul did at Corinth; and this volume being witness, the only light Buddhism has shed on the trinity has apparently been to show that ‘a metaphysic of substance’ (that is, the homoousion) has ‘contributed in no small way to the defeat of the doctrine’ of the Trinity.

The comments (by David B. Burrell) on dialogue between Trinitarianism on the one hand and Christianity and Islam on the other are somewhat more illuminating, if only for a timely reminder that Rabbinic Judaism developed largely in reaction to the Jesus movement among Jews, and is thus a post-Christian development, which (to impinge on a quite different discourse) makes it hazard for the New Perspective to argue against the Old Perspective on the assumption that what Paul was familiar with was Tannaitic Judaism.

Even more interesting is the warning against comparisons between Jesus and Mohammed, built on the slender foundation that both were ‘prophets’: ‘the salient comparison,’ Burrell suggests, ‘is rather between Jesus and the Qur’an.’  He adds, by way of elucidation, ‘Christians believe that Jesus is the Word of God made human, while Muslims believe the Qu’ran to be the Word of God made “book”.’  Yet, for Evangelicals, the Book is the word of God written.  The Logos concept is again causing ambiguity.

These various sections are prefaced by an Introduction consisting of two chapters written by the Editor: one on ‘Developments of the doctrine of the Trinity’; the other on ‘Systematic issues in the doctrine of the Trinity’.  These raise interesting methodological issues, such as whether theology, following the pattern set by Aquinas, should begin by laying a philosophical foundation for belief in God and only then proceed to discuss the ‘truths of revelation’.  Time-honoured though it is this approach supposes that theology is incapable of laying its own foundation.  The Editor also takes up Rahner’s protest against the practice (again following Aquinas) of beginning theology proper with the treatise De Deo (on the divine attributes) and following this with a separate, and largely unconnected, treatise on the Trinity (De Trino Deo); which, Rahner alleges, once concluded is forgotten and plays no further part in the Summa or system.  Phan alleges that Barth and Rahner have solved this problem, Barth in particular by setting his discussion of ‘The Triune God’ at the head of his Dogmatics  (though it is preceded by three hundred pages of virtual Prolegomena).  It could be argued, however, that Scripture itself begins with De Deo.  The Old Testament has little, if anything, to say on the Trinity.  Only in the New Testament does God’s triune-ness come to light, incidentally to the work of redemption, as God shows himself Redeemer in a three-fold way as the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.  The doctrine of the Trinity is a modification of Old Testament monotheism demanded by the incarnation and the salvation-history which flowed from it.  Besides, the seminal element in Trinitarian theology is John’s statement that the Word was ‘God’.  That predicate could have had no meaningful content had not the New Testament been preceded by a long earlier treatise, De Deo.  When we say that the Word was ‘God’ we are saying that he is this God: YHWH, the God of the Old Testament.

The three remaining chapters deal with ‘Systematic connections’: specifically, the link between the Trinity and other loci such as Christology, between the trinity and liturgy and between the Trinity and socio-political ethics.  Of these, Anne Hunt’s contribution on ‘Trinity, Christology and pneumatology’ is notable for taking scripture and tradition somewhat more seriously than is typical of the volume as a whole.  She stresses that Jesus was what he was because of the ministry of the Holy Spirit, and reinforces with a quotation from Yves Congar: ‘there can be no Christology without pneumatology and no pneumatology without Christology.’  But no less significant was the Father’s ministry to Jesus; and, equally clearly, all three are together at Calvary as the triune God acts perichoretically to save the world.

Hunt rightly stresses the triadic nature of New Testament worship, and this leads to  a reminder that, Christian faith in ‘the mystery of the Three was first expressed in prayer and worship before it was to find expression in dogma.’  True as this is, however, we must remember that before prayer and worship came revelation.  The Trinity is disclosed in the baptism of Jesus before it is expressed in Christian baptism.

Hunt also proposes that the interconnectedness between Trinitarian theology, Christology and pneumatology could serve as a useful way forward for inter-religious dialogue, which is hindered rather than helped by creeds and doctrinal formulations.  Drawing on the work of another Roman Catholic scholar, Raimando Panikar, she suggests that the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit are related, respectively, to three different varieties of global spirituality: the Father to the apophatic spirituality of Buddhism, the Son to the personalistic spirituality of Christianity and the spirit to the immanentist spirituality of Hindusim.  From this perspective the Trinity is the junction where all three spiritualities meet.

But does it not border on the perverse to take a distinctively biblical doctrine like the Trinity and put it to a use which flouts the Bible’s most fundamental command, ‘Thou shalt have no other gods beside me’?  In any case the value of inter-religious dialogue depends on whether these spiritualities are going anywhere.  Are they ends in themselves, without a future?  Or do they lead to eternal life?  If they do, then dialogue quickly founders, as Joseph Ratzinger once pointed out, on the fact that the different spiritualities have never been able to agree what they mean by eternal life.  Historical Christianity has been umambiguously clear about its own understanding: ‘This is life eternal, to know you the only true God and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.’  Is it to this that Buddhism and Hinduism lead?

On the whole, a disappointing book, and not likely to be my Companion.  It is to be hoped that ‘the widespread revival of the doctrine of the Trinity’ will bequeath a more confident and more preachable legacy than this.



This review first appeared in the Evangelical Quarterly (Vol. 85, No. 1 [April 2013]), pp. 152-156.