The
Open Social Trinity
Moltmann
incorporates a good deal of theological reflection and historical exegesis in
his concept of the open, social Trinity.
The primary focal points include the nature of God’s character, the
relationship between what Karl Rahner has described as the “economic” and
“immanent” Trinity, and a constitutive/relational contrast on the formation and
operation of the Trinity. Democratic
politics and feminist and liberationist theologies provide some of the not
difficult to discern sub-text that gives shape to Moltmann’s Trinitarian
vision, in which one might hear the echo of
the intercommunicative social theory of Jurgen Habermas.[i]
Moltmann’s
critique of what he interprets as static definitions of God’s substance and
absolute subjectivity has been discussed.
In short, Moltmann maintains that:
[T]he trinitarian
Persons are not ‘modes of being’; they are individual, unique,
non-interchangeable subjects of the one common, divine substance, with
consciousness and will. Each of the
Persons possesses the divine nature in a non-interchangeable way; each presents
it in his own way.[ii]
Each
Person “possesses the same individual, indivisible and one divine nature” in
which there is intrinsic unity, yet each “possess[es] it in varying ways.”[iii] This largely accords with a great deal of
classical orthodox Trinitarian theology.
What is more novel is the distinction Moltmann makes between the Trinitarian
relationships, which diverge in function and in consequence of world historical
contingency in which God acts in time, and the underlying substance of God
which remains the same regardless as to person or contingency within the
fundamental constancy of the triune God.
As Moltmann puts it, “[t]he trinitarian Persons subsist in the common divine nature; they exist [original italics] in their relations to one another.”[iv]
The first reflects the constitutional makeup of God in which the Father
precedes the Son and the Spirit; the second, the manner of their interaction in
human history.
Both
of these expressions are critically important and dialectically
intertwined. Yet, the heart and soul of
Moltmann’s Trinitarian theology is the manner of their radical egalitarian and
diverse interaction (perichoresis) within the context of God’s fundamental
purpose in bringing creation to its ultimate consummation. In Moltmann terms, “through the concept of
perichoresis, all subordination in the doctrine of the Trinity is avoided”
notwithstanding the acknowledgment of the constitution of God “the Father as
starting point.”[v] This “starting point” has traditionally has
been viewed as God’s unequivocal and unremitting sovereignty, the latter
concept of which Moltmann attenuates a great deal as fundamentally
contradictory to any notion of God as love. His critique of Barth and Rahner’s modalistic
representations, which he doubts has never “really been overcome,” provides an
important critical baseline in contemporary theology through which Moltmann
launches his own Trinitarian thesis.[vi] It is this which warrants additional
commentary.
Our
main entry point is Moltmann’s probing into the relationship between the
economic and immanent Trinity. The
former has at its basis a soteriological function as the means through which
God reveals himself to humankind, while the latter, to which Moltmann gives
little sustained focus, is the embodiment of God’s innate being beyond
creation. In contrast to the classical
vision of God’s “impassibility, immutability, and nonsuccessive eternity,” Moltmann’s
depiction of the divine revelation seldom extends beyond the apocalyptic moment
of new heaven and new earth.[vii] While not deeply examining the relationship,
Moltmann rejects as utterly speculative any radical disjunction between the
economic and immanent Trinity. He
stresses instead their continuity in the ineradicable nature of the suffering
God, an incarnational deity, seemingly without transcendent remainder beyond
history even as hope extends to the eschaton, the red thread pulling human and
natural history to its ultimate destiny.
In
a formal theological sense, Moltmann does give credence to God’s utter
incomprehensibility, hence, transcendence as an outer, and even when pushed, an
impassible boundary. Nonetheless, the
brunt of his theological vision gravitates toward the utter trustworthiness of
the God who suffers, who cannot by his own innate nature as incarnational love
deny his fundamental purposes and basic character. With an exceedingly strong proclivity toward
divine passibility in the image of the crucified God, there is, on Moltman’s
account an ultimate singularity between the economic and immanent Trinity in
that “[t]he triune God can only appear in history as he appears in himself, and
in no other way.” While there are depth
dimensions to the fullness of God’s reality well beyond our own
comprehensibility, there is a quintessential consistency wherein God as
revealed to human beings “‘cannot deny himself,’”[viii]
and in any fundamental way be radically different than what such unveiling discloses. Thus:
Statements about the immanent Trinity must
not contradict statements about the economic Trinity. Statements about the economic Trinity must
correspond to doxological statements about the immanent Trinity (original
italics).[ix]
The nub of Moltmann’s argument is that “[t]he economic Trinity completes and perfects itself to immanent Trinity” as part of the emergent soteriological process that comes to fruition “when history and experience of salvation are completed and perfected.”[x] The process of unveiling within the history of human and creational time as the red thread pulling the eschaton toward its cosmic destiny depends on the viability of God’s perpetual self revealing, however fragmentarily and ambiguously perceived. Any notion of an impassible God and a suffering Son as somehow reconcilable is, on Moltmann’s reading, fundamentally contradictory on its face. Whether in the process Moltmann collapses too much of what Hart describes as God’s “incomprehensibility, absolute power, simplicity, eternity,” and “uncircumscribab[ility], elusive of every finite concept or act” in his quest for comprehensibility and coherency is an issue further explored below.[xi]
Hart hits very close to Moltmann’s core project if the convergence of the economic and immanent Trinity “is taken to mean that “God depends upon creation to be God and that creation exists by necessity (because of some lack in God).” In such an interpretation, “God is robbed of his true transcendence and creation of its true gratuity.”[xii] It is true that for Moltmann, God’s passibility, his vulnerability is a voluntary self-limiting, but by this he also presses the point that given his very nature as creator, a God of love could do no other than to give to humanity and the created order “its time” in the economy of God’s kingdom, which, on Moltmann’s interpretation has a retroactive impact on the very nature and substance of God’s triunity. To this, McDougall raises a core challenge that, despite the emphasis he places on biblical foundations, “Moltmann’s theological move to postulate such an eternal self-limitation is certainly a highly speculative move that lacks any direct support in the biblical witness.”[xiii] This is so, one might argue, even as it possesses a certain explanatory power in shedding light on Moltmann’s effort to attain an underlying coherency in his broader theological project.
It is also worth emphasizing at this point Moltmann’s rejection, and perhaps caricature, of any notion “about ‘the mystery of the Trinity’…pointing to some impenetrable obscurity or insoluble riddle.”[xiv] However much there may be some convergence in their perspectives, Moltmann and Hart exhibit profoundly different emphases in their Trinitarian theologies, ultimately over the passibility and impassibility of God’s need to suffer in order to be the God whose Son went to the cross, and the role of God’s transcendence even in the midst of his incarnational indwelling within the created order. Hart, for example, does not deny the importance of a dynamic vision of the Trinity, one of Moltmann’s major concerns. What he wants to assure is that “[t]he insuperable ontological difference between creation and God—between the dynamism of finitude and an infinite that is eternally dynamic” is maintained.[xv] This, he believes is viable through the capacity of “creatures [hence of, creation as well], embracing” God’s infinity “in an endless sequence of finite instances,” which for Moltmann is the Spirit’s work of deification in bringing creation toward its ultimate destination;[xvi] what McDougall, in turn, refers to as “drawing creation into” the “life of fellowship” of the divine Trinity itself. “In so doing, the Spirit acts to consummate the original intention of creation, that is, to make all things [in Moltmann’s words,] ‘the home of the triune God’” through which the creation itself participates in God’s triune being even as the distinction between the creation and the creator is maintained.[xvii]
For Hart, the persisting gulf between God and
humankind is not an intrinsic barrier toward living a life that is increasingly
attuned to God. He maintains, rather,
that the gap between that which can be attained, “the presence of the infinite
God” within human flesh, and the creation itself, can never fully realize the
desirable (total union with God) because the desirable is infinite in its
capacity to transcend every achievable human incarnation in which God existed
fully complete in his triune plenitude before the creation and will exist
similarly even after the consummation comes to fruition.[xviii] For Hart, God will be all in all because God is all in all even before the creation,
which on his view adds nothing to the plenitude of God even as the bestowal of
the gift of creation was an overwhelming expression of his desire. There is nothing static about this as Hart
has it in the ever present possibility of going from glory to glory in the
infinite embodiment of the indwelling spirit and power of God to infuse and
transform human reality within the context of its own finitude and historicity
“in an infinite display of analogical differentiation.”[xix]
Continuing
with his words, creation is infused with “the infinite plenitude of the
transcendent act in which all determinacy participates” wherein “God is the
being of all things, beyond all finite determination, negation and dialectic,
not as the infinite ‘naught’ which all things are set off.”[xx] Rather, through what he describes as “the
analogy of [God’s] being—the actual movement of analogization, of our likeness
to God within an always greater unlikeness,” we have the capacity, that is, the
possibility of participating in God’s triune identity in and through the
various finite manifestations that characterize our lives in which the specter
of non-being as false identity is
also an ever present existential possibility.[xxi]
In
short, for Hart the gap between our finite being and God’s ever infinite
splendor is never overcome even as “deification” can be experienced in the here
and now embodying in analogical plenitude God’s glory in an infinite array of
display in concrete manifestations as diverse as the universe itself. For Hart, this “gap” is the basis of God’s apatheia, which if diminished results in
a rhetorical attenuation of nothing less than God himself even ultimately in
his fully incarnated manifestation. It
is in this latter respect, the reflection of God’s incarnational glory even
onto deification, that Moltmann and Hart share a common aspiration. For Hart, however, the viability of God’s
incarnation depends on the depth and range of his transcendent beauty, which
Moltmann does not conceptually deny, but dramaturgically underplays throughout
the passion of his theological narrative.
By
contrast, for Moltmann God is eternally wounded in his triune being as a result
of Golgotha in a manner that resonates
with rather than in any way inviolates his fullness. For Moltmann, there is something profoundly
suspect about any claim of God’s eternal glory that itself is not a dynamic
process of perpetual agonistic overcoming in the very midst of the history of God himself in the unfolding of human
and creational time. As Moltmann has it,
therefore, in contrast to Hart, the crucified God in his triune fullness
unequivocally embraces the pain and shame of the cross as the provocative and
exceedingly risky means of its transcendence in the resurrection and ultimate
promise of the final eschaton that on his reading the Spirit brings to
fruition. This persisting dialectical
dynamic within the stream of time as
well as in the diversity of the divergent Trinitarian functions in the midst of
its interactions in history is crucial to Moltmann, without which in the most
fundamental sense, there would be no triune God as revealed most fully in the
New Testament. In contrast, Hart
emphasizes at least the possibility of a perpetual indwelling of the infinite
Spirit of God manifested within creation (deification) in which God’s apatheia
does not result in dialectic
contradiction as a result of human suffering and evil. This is so on Hart’s reading even as
contradiction in creation is a
consequence of an all-too-common occurrence of human sin, but not of the
intrinsic nature of creation, itself.
The
difference between the two can also be parsed in that Moltmann focuses primarily
on what he refers to as “the history of God” within the context of human and
creaturely time leading to, but not, extending in his theology, in any dynamic
sense beyond the eschaton (1 Cor 15:28).
For Hart, by contrast, the starting point is the eternal significance of
God’s ontological reality and the appropriation of his glory in human and
creaturely time. The difference in
emphases has a great deal to do with how the transcendent/immanent
manifestations of God’s revelation are perceived in which neither Hart nor
Moltmann take a strictly polar approach even as each pulls very strongly toward one pole (apatheia) or the other
(pathos) as theological starting point
for very compelling reasons that go to the heart of their respective projects.
[i] Jurgen
Habermas, The Theory of Communicative
Action: Volume One: Reason and the Rationalization of Society (Boston:
Beacon Press, 1984); Jurgen Habermas, The
Theory of Communicative Action: Volume
Two: Lifeworld and System: A Critique of Functionalist Reason (Boston:
Beacon Press, 1987).
[ii]
Moltmann, The Trinity and the Kingdom of
God, p. 171.
[iii] Ibid.,
p. 172.
[iv] Ibid.,
p.173.
[v] Ibid.,
pp. 175, 76.
[vi] Ibid.,
p.136.
[vii] David
B. Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth (Grand
Rapids, MI: William B. Eesrmann’s Publishing Company, 2003), p. 166.
[viii]
Moltmann, The Trinity and the Kingdom of
God, p. 153.
[ix] Ibid.,
p. 154.
[x] Ibid.,
p.161.
[xi] Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite, p. 192.
[xii] Ibid.,
p.157.
[xiii] Joy
Ann McDougall, Pilgrimage of Love: Moltmann and the Trinity and Christian Life
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 84.
[xiv]
Moltmann, The Trinity and the Kingdom of
God, p. 161.
[xv] Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite, p. 193.
[xvi] Ibid.
p.194.
[xvii]
McDougall, p. 86.
[xviii]
Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite, p.
196.
[xix] Ibid.,
p.141.
[xx] Ibid.,
p.242.
[xxi] Ibid.,
p. 243.
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