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This review was published by RBL 2001 by the Society of Biblical Literature. For more information on obtaining asubscription to RBL, please visit http://www.bookreviews.org/subscribe.asp.

RBL 03/12/2001

Davis, Stephen T., Daniel Kendall, and Gerald

O’Collins, eds.

The Trinity: An Interdisciplinary Symposium on the

Trinity

New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Pp. xxviii +393, Cloth, $39.95, ISBN 0198269935.

Augustine CasidayUniversity of Durham

Durham DH1 4EW, UK

The collection of essays here published results from the Trinity Summit, convened inDunwoodie, Yonkers, New York, at St. Joseph’s Seminary during Eastertide, 1998. Boththe summit and the book are younger siblings of an earlier project on resurrection.

Characteristic of both is an effort to address some primary aspect of Christian theologyfrom a variety of perspectives and with a range of methodologies. Thus, there were NorthAmerican, European and Asian participants, Jewish, Catholic and Protestant scholars,engaging aspects of triadology on aesthetic, historical, philological, philosophical and (ofcourse) theological bases. Because the quality and length of the contributions are notuniform, it would be best to list and describe each before offering a few general remarkson the book as a whole. This will be done in the order the essays appear and the spacedevoted to each will be proportional to its length.

In the first chapter, O’Collins offers a comprehensive and extremely useful overviewof the status quaestionum that concisely relates the essays here presented to the broader

scholarly discussion. He does this by identifying twelve issues that recur in the literature,while making some penetrating observations along the way (see esp. pp. 13-18). The nextchapter introduces a discussion of the “Biblical Witness” that includes three essays. Thefirst of these essays is Craig Evans’s “Jesus’ Self-Designation ‘The Son of Man’”. Evans begins with epigraphic evidence ascribing godhood to ancient kings and emperors. Thenhe quickly moves to a standard rehearsal of scriptural evidence about the epithet ‘Son ofMan’. Because Evans does not integrate these two parts very tightly, the essay as a whole

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seems quite disconnected. In the next essay (“Paul and the Trinity”), Gordon Fee arguesfor a reading of Paul that is sensitive to an emergent trinitarian theology in the form oftacit Pauline christology and pneumatology. This is a controversial claim for which Fee

mounts a lucid and impressive case. Alan Segal’s “Two Powers in Heaven” is the thirdessay in this section. His discussion of binitarian heresy ranges from Paul and Philo toMidrashic literature and beyond. He concludes with a tantalizing suggestion that philosophical and hermetic speculation about the “second god” are at back of theChristian and Jewish controversies.

The second major section of the book is devoted to the “Patristic Witness”. The firstessay is Joseph Lienhard’s assessment of ‘The Cappadocian Settlement’. Against thestandard glosses in the patrologies that overstate the uniformity of the Cappadocians’ position and underemphasize opposition to it, he argues for the vitality of a counter perspective he calls miahypostatic theology and associates with Marcellus of Ancyra.

Lienhard has since published a full-length book on Marcellus, so further remarks on thisessay would be redundant. Next is Sarah Coakley’s breathtakingly ambitious “‘Social’Doctrine of the Trinity”, in which she address a host of philosophical, patristic andfeminist theological concerns in reference to Nyssa’s triadology, especially his over-emphasized ‘three man’ analogy. Her deft command of the array of material isastounding. In the end, she leaves us well poised to further the reassessment of Nyssa.The last of these essays is Michel René Barnes’s brilliant “Rereading Augustine on theTrinity”. By tending to Augustine’s responsiveness to Nicene triadology, Barnes offers a persuasive counter-narrative to the endlessly rehashed arguments about the influence of Neoplatonism in Augustinian triadology. These essays share in the current trend in patristics of returning to the sources, and their surprising results (it may be hoped) will

encourage further efforts along these lines.

The fourth part of the book addresses “Systematic Issues”. In “Substance and theTrinity”, William Alston returns to Aristotle’s Categories and Metaphysics todemonstrate how groundless a host of modern objections to substance metaphysics (andhence to classical trinitarian formulae) actually are. The nub of Alston’s case is thatAristotle regularly and happily applied his notion of substance to living, finite, interactiveorganisms. Neither Aristotle on the one hand, nor Basil, Nyssa, Damascene or Aquinason the other are obliged to regard substances as necessarily static and inert – which is precisely the claim often lodged against the substance metaphysics of classical trinitariantheology. Brian Leftow’s “Anti Social Trinitarianism” attempts to adjudicate between the

claims of social trinitarianism, which starts with the threeness of the Trinity, and those ofLatin trinitarianism, which starts with the oneness of the Trinity. It comes as no surprisethat Leftow argues against social trinitarianism (he claims it fails to offer a coherentaccount of the Trinity that is both monotheist and orthodox). What comes as a greatsurprise, however, is how tendentiously Leftow argues his case—particularly in light ofthe fact that he never argues for or even properly describes Latin trinitarianism.Intermittent remarks, such as “the right concept of deity” being the one that “embodies

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the standards by which one would judge correctly what things are divine” (p. 245), leavethe reader with the apprehension that Leftow’s preferred understanding of the Trinity isreplete with unexamined idealizations. In the end, this essay inspires no confidence at all

in his claims.

This is followed by Stephen Davis’s “John Hick on Incarnation and Trinity”. Thisessay offers sober and searching criticisms of Hick’s sometimes ostentatious claims aboutChristian theology in a pluralistic world. Next, in “Trinitarian Speculation”, David Tracydiscusses the importance of form in theology, notes the christological cast of trinitarianmonotheism and concludes with observations about the trinitarian speculation of MeisterEckhart and Jan van Ruuesbroec. The chief drawback of this essay is that after somesweeping statement Tracy periodically inserts a reference like “(B. Lonergan)” (p. 286),which is no help for the reader who only knows that Lonergan wrote a number of massivegreat books. The fifth and final contribution in this part is Frans Jozef van Beeck’s

“Trinitarian Theology as Participation”, a tremendously engaging essay that is chieflyindebted to Lévinas (but also to Newman, Chaucer, Dante, Evagrius…) and, surprisingly,written in a rhythmic style very much like Don DeLillo’s.

The book’s final part, “The Trinity Depicted and Proclaimed”, features only twoessays. The first is David Brown’s “The Trinity in Art”. Brown skillfully traces threemajor versions of visual depictions of the Trinity, which he calls “triadic”, “societal” and“incarnational”. His constant concern throughout is to note how careful attention to the painters’ medium regularly neutralizes anxiety about perceived conflicts with doctrinal(that is, verbal) propositions. He provides a fine instance in discussing the depiction ofthe Father in the medieval Gnadenstuhl image (pp. 342-350). The final essay, Marguerite

Shuster’s “Preaching the Trinity”, reports her analysis of trinitarian theology in modernProtestant sermons contained in some 45 volumes. Shuster found only twenty sermons,many of which contain blunders of the sort that would make for easy comedy if thesituation were not as bleak as it is. Her incisive judgement that the Trinity ought to be preached more regularly and more correctly is complimented by a number of concretesuggestions to that end.

Now some general remarks about the book are in order. One commendable feature ofthe whole is how successfully the essays, representing a great range of methodologies, perspectives and subjects, are integrated. Part of this is no doubt attributable to the factthat participants were encouraged to communicate beforehand. In fact, a website was

provided to facilitate this. Far from producing a homogenized collection, this means thaton the whole the arguments here advanced have been refined by comments and criticismfrom other participants. Moreover, as the editors are quick to point out, the collaborationthat resulted in this book is far more “ecumenical” in scope than any comparable projectto date has been (p. vi). But this brings me to my only source of real dissatisfaction withthe book. Despite appreciative remarks from Brown (p. 338), van Beeck (p. 314), Tracy(p. 278) and especially O’Collins (pp. 11-13) on various aspects of the Christian East, the

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book contains no contribution from a representative of eastern theology. This can only beregarded as a serious deficiency, particularly since most of the discussions take placecompletely within the framework of western Christian thought. In the preface, the editors

mention that “we invited some other scholars who, for a variety of good reasons, couldnot come to contribute and participate” (p. xii). It is worth just noting that Easter week,1998, when the summit was held, coincided with Orthodox Holy Week, the most solemnand sacred week on the ecclesiastical calendar. This may well have been one of the goodreasons for not attending, had any Orthodox participants been invited. In any case, it is to be hoped that any future summits of this sort will be arranged at such a time thatOrthodox contributions are possible. This could only further enrich what can only beconsidered an enormously stimulating forum.

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