454. Concerning the Trinity

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Concerning the Trinity

Isn't it possible that arguing from the economic to the immanent trinity, as I have sometimes done, is analogous to the (in my view, misguided) procedure of arguing from the meaning of Jesus to the being of Jesus in himself, so as to be able to apply to Jesus either a classical or a revisionary a priori christology? In other words, if I am right that Jesus could be the Christ, in the sense that he could be what the constitutive christological assertion asserts him to be, whether or not either classical or revisionary a priori christologies were true, why couldn't I also be right in holding -- in agreement with Roger Haight -- that God could be triune, in the sense that God could be who the doctrine of the trinity asserts God to be, whether or not either a unitarian or a trinitarian doctrine of the being of God in Godself were true?

This presupposes, obviously, that one could affirm "the point of trinitarian theology" by affirming (1) that God is one; (2) that what happens to us through Jesus and the witness of the apostles is nothing other or less than the one God's own authorization (i.e., entitlement and empowerment) of an existence of faith active in love; and (3) that the one God, therefore, is not accidentally or contingently, but essentially and necessarily, the God who saves as well as the God who creates (emancipates) and consummates (redeems). But this is presumably analogous to my christological claim that one can affirm "the point of christology" by affirming (1) that Jesus is the decisive re-presentation of the meaning of ultimate reality for us; and (2) that the meaning of strictly ultimate reality for us is none other than the meaning that Jesus decisively re-presents.

22 September 1989; rev. 1 September 2003