These Three Are One: The Practice of Trinitarian Theology (Challenges in Contemporary Theology)

Rating:
Summary: The title is too good to be true
Review: A point that I am sure is lost on the majority of readers of this book is that the title is a quote from 1 John 5:7 KJV. What is interesting is that this text is one of the best documented cases of textual corruption in the NT. If this is an example of the so-called "scholarship" of the author, what are the chances that the myriad applications made to varied areas of life will prove to be of any benefit? The latin expression "falsum in uno, falsum in toto" definitely applies here.

Rating:
Summary: Is there anything this book isn't about?
Review: Cunningham's scope in These Three Are One is breathtaking. He covers thinkers as diverse as Augustine, Wittgenstein and Toni Morrison. He shows the Trinity to be pivotal to our understanding of issues as diverse as sexuality, parenting and worship space. Yet despite the breadth, depth does not suffer - and there is a lightness of touch that should please both non-specialists and specialists alike. I suppose Cunningham's all-inclusive outlook makes perfect sense in a book which aims to show the doctrine of the Trinity to be "the central claim of the (Christian) faith, in which all other elements find their center".

Rating:
Summary: Some Insights, Lots of Huge Problems and Inconsistencies
Review: This book is in many ways a web of disparate strands of theological reflection, some of which are very insightful and others being incredibly disappointing and problematic. The book is very well structured in three sections, the first dealing with the content of the doctrine of the Trinity, the second dealing with Virtues that Characterize the trinitarian (and the ecclesial) life and the third section dealing with ecclesial practices that derive from the doctrine of the Trinty.

Some of the worst problems in this book are in the first section where Cunningham attempts to formulate a doctrine of the Trinity over against other contemporary proposals. He starts to go wrong right away in his arguments agaist Colin Gunton and others. His reading of his theological interlocutors is very narrow (he interacts only with one or two books by Gunton) and his readings of them are careless. He eschews the idea that we should use the idea of realtionality to describe the Trinity, rather he proposes that we use the term 'participation' to emphasize that none of the members of the Trinity can exist without one another. He fails to note, however the way in which relationality is understood and defined by theologians like Gunton. They don't use the term 'relationality' to mean voluntary relations that can be entered into or dissolved at will, rather for them relationality is ontologically constitutive of what it means to be a person. Cunningham is simply knocking down a straw man in his attempt to be nitpicky in his use of the term 'participation' over 'relation.' Incidentally, even if there are semantic problems with the way relationality is understood, those problems aren't avoided with the term participation anyway. If two 'somethings' are requried to be realted to one another, so also two 'somethings' are required to participate in one another. Cunningham's semantic dance simply doesn't give us any helpful or necesary innovations.

Commensurate with this problem is his definition of the trinitarian persons as relations. This understanding has been taken apart by Gunton in his book, "The Promise of Trinitarian Theology" so I won't repeat that information here. Suffice it to say that this understanding radically undermines that personality and particularity of the trinitarian persons. Moreover, the notion of person as relation simply has never been coherently set forward. What does it actually mean for a person to be a relation? Is not a relation something that takes place between concrete particulars? We do far better to agree with Gunton, Torrance, Moltmann, Jenson, Pennenberg and other that the Trinitarian persons are not relations, but particular persons whose identity and existence are constituted by their relations with one another.

Cunningham also makes an ill-fated attempt at arguing for the Augustinian notion of vestiges of the Trinity in nature. He claims that certain patterns of threeness in nature reveal the Trinitarian nature of God. His attempt to reckon with Barth's critique of this notion is simply far to truncated and simplistic to be persuasive. Also, his adoption of the psychological account of the Trinity simply adds to the incoherence of Cunningham's work. Cunningham claims that Augustines analogies for the Trinity (which see the Trinity reflected on the inner constitution the human soul) are not individualistic, since these characteristics of the soul are only discovered in community. However, these gymnastics simply aren't persuasive. If the Trinitarian persons are best understood as facets of the soul of a person, regardless of how such qualities are manifested, they relate ultimately to the unitary oneness of the person, rather than being constituted by others. This wierd individualistic strand in Cunningham's work offers a strange contradiction to the rest of his participatory model that tends to do the reverse and flatten out the particularites of the persons and collectivize them into a conglommerate whole.

Cunningham attempts to save the particularity of the persons by arguing for a convulatuted understanding of particularity within the idea of classical rhetoric. However, the idea of rehtorical particularity is simply to immaterial and amorphous to ground any sort of substantial notion of particularity. Ultimately, Cunningham's trinitarianism ends up flattening out the trintarian persons such that they simply become a unitary vortext of collective rhetoric that is unintelligible and incoherent.

Cunningham also made an annoying an artificial attempt to redefine the trinitarian names from Father, Son and Holy Spirt to Source, Wellspring, Living Water. This I found simply artificial and absurd. Cunningham seems to simply be adopting Salie McFauge's model of metaphorical theology, rather than even considering the idea that the Trinitarian name could be the product of revelation rather than projection. While I'm sensitve to feminst concerns about masculine names for God (for a what I take to be a good treatment of the economic Trinity from a feminst perspective, see Catherin Mowry LaCugna, "God For Us"), I don't think simply changing the names solves anything on the one hand and moreover, it millitates against a biblical understanding of the doctrine of revelation on the other. A better approach is to see what the natmes Father, Son and Spirit mean in relation to one another in the biblical narrative and understand them in that light rather than importing patriarchal and oppressive meanings into those names ourselves. I think if we understand what calling God 'Father' meant to Jesus, then we simply won't be dealing with terms that are oppressive and patriarchal. The key is not what we take terms like father and son to mean, but what they mean in the biblical revelation of the Triune God. But Cunningham doesn't seem to think of this and instead attempts to simply rename the Trinitarian persons with terminology that is ultimately impersonal an vague.

The best chapter in the book is the one on Peacemaking where Cunningham (despite his incoherent model of the Trinity) draws out the implications of the inter-Trinitarian life for how the church responds to violence and war. The inter-Trinitarian life which is the paradigm for the church (cf. Jn. 17) is on of peace and super-abundant donation in which there is no violence or strife. This understanding informs the proper stance toward peacemaking in which the church refuses to be complcit in violence but rather follows the way of Christ (which is the revelation of the Trinitarian love in the world) in which suffering rather than domination is the church's response to the world. This chapter is by far the high point of the book, and was ultimately what made the book worth reading for me (even though there are far superior treatments of this issue by Milbank and Volf).

While the Renaissance of Trintarian Theology is likely to be the most important theological movement of the 20th and 21st centuries, I doubt this book will ever occupy more than a footnote, if that in the contemprary theological scene. There are simply so many trinitarian theologians that are more faithful to the biblical narrative, more innovative and more intelligent out there. This book is simply bottom-shelf Trintarian theology.

If you get this book, you might as well skip everything but the chapter on peacemaking. I can't say I recommend this book, but I does at least stir some thought, even if only in opposition to many of its claims.