The Shape Of Human Life

Perspectives in Religious Studies 41 no 1 Spring 2014

Since her 2001 book, Jesus, Humanity and the Trinity ‫ﺀل‬ Kathryn Tanner has shifted significantly toward the incarnation, and thus toward Christology, as the ordering principle in her systematic theological work. This brief text concisely orders a number of the specific connections Tanner hopes to make between her earlier emphasis on "non‫-‬contrast‫؛‬ve relationships between God and creation"^ and a constructive theology of grace founded upon foe universal extension of God's gifts to the world. Tanner places herself sp a re ly within the ongoing anthropological "gift" debate in order to formulate her theology of grace and in so doing denies the conceptions of "exchange" and "return" as applicable models of her grace economy.

Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2015

This book acknowledges and celebrates the salient contributions to contemporary constructive Christian theology by Kathryn Tanner, and engages a wide range of topics reflective of the scope of Tanner's theology. Tanner's work is invaluable for theology today due to its unique combination of gifts: logically clear-headed argumentation, commanding grasp of the depth and possibilities of Christian thought and practice, and a transformative incorporation of contemporary interdisciplinary insights springing from ethics, theories of culture, social and political sciences, economics, and gender studies. The aim of the book is to articulate these multiple gifts. To this end, we bring together essays by Tanner's former students and colleagues, who themselves have become leaders in the field of theological and religious studies. Among the many reasons to honor and celebrate Tanner's work, the immediate occasion for our book is that Tanner is named the 2015-2016 Gifford lecturer. The essays in this book, thus, seek to acknowledge this important moment by articulating the xxv

" 'God, The Trinity, and Latin America Today", en Journal of Reformed Theology 3 (2009), pp. 157-173.

The notion of koinonia or communio is at the heart of contemporary ecclesiology, and trinitarian theology has become its necessary presupposition. This article argues that the way many contemporary theologians have envisaged this link between divine and human communion is deeply problematic. Hilary of Poitiers was the first theologian of communio, and he offers a bold critique of contemporary discussions. Hilary gives eucharistic priority to trinitarian theology, that is, there is a movement from Eucharist to Trinity in his thinking on the relation between divine and human communion. A retrieval of Hilary's eucharistic priority in trinitarian discourse can provide constructive avenues in trinitarian theology which avoid the anthropocentric tendencies of contemporary social doctrines of the Trinity and reject the misdiagnosed problem of trinitarian 'relevance' in current discussions. Such a retrieval recovers trinitarian doctrine as a practised, performed reality, lived out in human communio itself through the eucharistic life of the Church.

This project engages the topic of "gift" as a theological problem, in regard to both God's gifts to creation and gift-giving among human beings. It particularly explores how the gift can be both (a) freely-given, unearned, and thereby distinct from contract, and also (b) bound up with relationships of exchange whose continuance depends on the giving of return gifts. It does so by detailing and evaluating the theological ontology and concomitant social-political thought of British Anglican theologian John Milbank (b. 1952), which revolves to a great degree around gift. This project argues that Milbank demonstrates that the gratuity of the divine gift is not vitiated, but rather ensured, by the necessity of a creaturely return gift and a divine-creaturely "exchange." Further, he establishes that insofar as all intra-human gift exchange participates ontologically in this cosmic exchange, human social life-including the political-economic order-must be structured to facilitate the sorts of relationships in which gift exchange can take place. Nevertheless, it is also argued that Milbank's exclusive focus on gift as exchange pertains to humankind's ultimate ontological destiny, and that his ecclesiology and broader social-political thought must be modified to give greater focus to the penultimate, finite human situation in which not all gifts are properly returned.

Cultural Encounters: A Journal for the Theology of Culture, 2016

Trinitarianism has become less about the Trinity and more about how the Trinity overcomes "this problem" or "that history" thereby often distorting the doctrine for the sake of application. This becomes even worse when some of the problems and histories are misunderstood, or caricatured. This essay looks at three categories used liberally in recent Trinitarianism in order to make the case that many of the constructive moves made are based on the fear of misunderstood histories: Classical theism, Rahner's Rule, and the so-called "De Regnon Paradigm."

Catherine Mowry LaCugna's God for Us: The Trinity and Christian Life (1991) constitutes a paradigm shift in present-day trinitarian theology. LaCugna was convinced that the standard paradigm of the economic and immanent Trinity was fraught with a variety of limitations. She offered as an alternative framework the principle of the inseparability of theologia and oikonomia, and within this structure she developed a relational ontology of persons-in-communion. Her approach is a major contribution to the present renewal of the doctrine of the Trinity.]

Synopses of the decline and reascension of Trinitarian theology abound, but their prevalence is often only matched by their superficiality. In this paper I argue that historiographical "readings" of Trinitarian theological history are not extrinsic to many contemporary Trinitarian projects, but often ballast and serve as implicit or explicit justification for constructive moves made. Following recent research (sometimes called "Third Wave" Trinitarianism) a question must be asked: if traditional interpretations of figures like Augustine and Thomas Aquinas are faulty in certain respects, just how did these readings become plausible? As a response I argue that certain shifts in traditional terminology in post-nominalist lines of Augustinian and Thomistic tradition are being improperly "read-back" into the Bishop of Hippo Regius, and the Angelic Doctor themselves, producing the caricatured portraits of them so routinely lambasted in contemporary Trinitarianism. I argue in addition that if these histories of the Trinity's decline turn out to be deficient, the concomitant constructive moves in theology predicated on overcoming categories like "Western Trinitarianism," "Classical Theism," "Substance metaphysics," "Psychological analogies," (etc. ...) likewise become suspect precisely to the degree they want to sharply distinguish themselves from these caricatured aspects of the tradition.

A chasm has formed dividing Evangelical Christians on the topic of authority within the intra-Trinitarian fellowship. The debate hinges upon the question: Does the Trinity embody an eternal hierarchical structure with the Father established in a position of supreme authority over the Son and the Spirit, or does the Trinity share authority coequally? The dynamic responses to this question are represented in two distinct views. One view argues that the persons of the Trinity are equal in essence and being, but Jesus is eternally subordinate to the Father in role and function. Furthermore, this view argues that women must maintain a subordinate role in Church and family in order for God’s community to properly bear the image of God as a hierarchical community. The opposing view maintains complete coequality within the Trinity in both essence and functionality and seeks to reject all notions of subordination within the Trinity. This paper surveys Nicene Trinitarian theology and demonstrates how contemporary subordinationist ideologies are a departure from classic Nicene Trinitarian theology. It also demonstrates how contemporary subordinationist ideologies were developed in response to the women’s movement in an effort to maintain theological grounding for female subordination. It is argued that subordinationist ideologies should be dissolved in an effort to return to the root system of Nicene Trinitarian theology.