Divine Freedom and the Doctrine of the Immanent Trinity: In Dialogue with Karl Barth and Contemporary Theology (T&t Clark Studies in Systematic Theology)

610 Pages·2017·3.614 MB·English

by  Paul D. Molnar

i
DIVINE FREEDOM AND THE DOCTRINE OF
THE IMMANENT TRINITY
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‘Th e fi rst edition of this book in 2002 was a now-classic account of the freedom of
God as understood in the doctrine of the immanent Trinity. Th e second edition is
not just a reprint but a thorough revision with a reconfi gured preface, a new chap-
ter on Divine Freedom, and many revisions and updates to material on Jenson,
Moltmann, Pannenberg, Jüngel and Schleiermacher. In clarity, power and eff ective-
ness, it takes its place at the heart of contemporary discussion of the doctrine of God.
I thoroughly recommend this new edition.’
Iain R. Torrance,
President Emeritus of Princeton Th eological Seminary, USA
‘Th e reissue of this weighty tome in revised and expanded form is welcome news indeed.
It had already established itself as one of the two or three most important English-
language treatises on the doctrine of the Trinity in recent theology. In its new form it
includes rich and detailed discussions of theologians like Moltmann, Pannenberg and
Jenson, not to mention McCormack and his followers, that are sure to generate inter-
est. Molnar is one of the most distinguished interpreters of the Trinity in our time. His
powerful book is indispensable for anyone interested in these questions.’
George Hunsinger,
Princeton Th eological Seminary, USA
‘Th e fi rst edition of Paul Molnar’s Divine Freedom and the Doctrine of the Immanent
Trinity was one of the most signifi cant books to appear in trinitarian theology in a
generation. In this new edition, Professor Molnar has enhanced the case made in that
study, demonstrating with even greater depth, clarity and nuance why it is that the
doctrine of the essential Trinity must hold material primacy if Christian theology is
to confess the God of the gospel well. Th is is an even more powerful book than its
predecessor, enriched by further engagement with contemporary debates on freedom,
election and history. Th e central argument concerning God’s antecedent plenitude in
himself remains of crucial importance for theology today. More than ever: Take, read!’
Ivor J. Davidson,
University of Aberdeen, UK
‘Paul Molnar in his D ivine Freedom and the Doctrine of the Immanent Trinity illu-
mines in refreshingly clear prose the errors in method in many contemporary theol-
ogies by his resolute insistence that God is the only fi t witness to Who He is. Molnar
adroitly opens for the reader the understanding that theology to be truly theological
must start from and be normed by what is unfolded in the doctrine of the Immanent
Trinity, that is, an account of the eternal life of the Father-Son-Holy Spirit. Th erein
theology is poised to hear the divine direction for our creaturely lives, attitudes and
actions. Molnar, critical of theologies which proceed from a centre in ourselves and
our own experiences, is yet careful and judicious in his description of these various
contemporary Roman Catholic and Protestant theologies. Th is book is a bright bea-
con bringing clarity to current theological discussion.’
David Demson,
Wycliff e College, Toronto School of Th eology, Canada
‘In the face of several challenges, Paul Molnar off ers us a robust defence of the doc-
trine of the immanent Trinity. With his characteristically clear and robust style, he
outlines the intellectual and existential reasons for maintaining the classical position.
Th is new expanded edition should be widely studied and cited.’
David Fergusson,
University of Edinburgh, UK
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iii
DIVINE FREEDOM AND THE DOCTRINE OF
THE IMMANENT TRINITY
In Dialogue with Karl Barth and
Contemporary Th eology

Second Edition
Paul D. Molnar
Bloomsbury T&T Clark
An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
LONDON (cid:129) OXFORD (cid:129) NEW YORK (cid:129) NEW DELHI (cid:129) SYDNEY
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First published 2017
© Paul D. Molnar, 2017
Paul Molnar has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs
and Patents Act, 1988, to be identifi ed as Author of this work.
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ix
PREFACE
In the preface to the fi rst edition of this book I stated that ‘all Christian
theologians realize that the purpose of a doctrine of the immanent
Trinity is to recognize, uphold and respect God’s freedom’. 1 By this
I meant to assert the importance of what Karl Barth described as the
‘antecedent’ existence of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit such that the
inner life of God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit is the free life of God
and is so in such a way that God did not and does not need to relate
with us in any way in order to be or to become who God eternally is.
When I stated that all Christian theologians realized the importance of
acknowledging this freedom of God, I meant that even those who sim-
ply paid or might pay lip service to the truth affi rmed in this doctrine
at least understood that Christians must be able to recognize and dis-
tinguish God from the world in order to speak coherently about God’s
relationship with us and about our r elationship with God from within
history. Th is was a crucial issue when the fi rst edition of this book was
published since some theologians argued that it was downright impos-
sible to say anything at all about the immanent Trinity while others
claimed that the doctrine referred to nothing more than God’s involve-
ment with us in history. While some maintained that to speak of the
immanent Trinity was nothing more than speaking of our experience
of God in the economy, others asserted that the economic Trinity must
in some way have a retroactive eff ect on the immanent Trinity such that
there is a mutually conditioning relationship between the immanent
and economic Trinity. Still others claimed that the point of the doctrine
of the Trinity was not to provide objective or literal information about
God but only to protect our experience of God in the economy of sal-
vation. Today, there are some who claim that it is pure speculation to
assert that the God who meets us in the economy could have been God
without us. Yet, as I will continue to claim in this second edition, it is
just that thinking that undermines the proper function of the doctrine
of the immanent Trinity. It does so because such a perspective always
1 Paul D. Molnar, Divine Freedom and the Doctrine of the Immanent
Trinity:   In Dialogue with Karl Barth and Contemporary Th eology (London: T &
T Clark/ Continuum, 2002), ix.
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x xi
x Preface
leads those who embrace it to argue that in some sense God’s creative
function has absorbed his essence.
By analyzing and comparing the views of a number of promi-
nent theologians on these issues I attempted to explain why a prop-
erly understood and properly functioning doctrine of the immanent
Trinity was crucial for theologians then as it was in the early church.
My main thesis was that without such a doctrine, anything said about
God merely became little more than an attempt to discuss our religious
experiences using theological categories. It was my claim that, in the
end, such an approach to theology turned out to be little more than
mythology or the projection of human conceptuality onto what is imag-
ined to be the divine being. My goal in the book was to engage in what
Th omas F. Torrance has called ‘scientifi c theology’ or theology that
allows the reality of what is being refl ected on to determine the truth of
what is said.2
In this sense I followed Karl Barth’s view that God’s eternal being
and act as Father, Son and Holy Spirit ‘is the basis of His whole will
and action even ad extra , as the living act which He directs to us’.3
Put another way, I held that ‘the antecedent eternal Trinity was, in his
[Barth’s] eyes, the necessary and suffi cient condition of God’s trinitar-
ian self- revelation . . . As such, the antecedent Trinity was in fact not
“abstract” but the e ns concretissimum . It was not “speculative” but the
essential guarantee of revelation’s freedom, veracity and reliability’. 4
Th is is why Barth could say:
2 For Torrance, ‘precise, scientifi c knowledge was held to result from
inquiry strictly in accordance with the nature (κατὰ ϕύσιν) of the reality being
investigated, that is, knowledge of it reached under the constraint of what it
actually and essentially is in itself, and not according to arbitrary convention’,
Th e Trinitarian Faith: Th e Evangelical Th eology of the Ancient Catholic Church
(hereaft er:  Th e Trinitarian Faith ) (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1988), 51. See
also Paul D. Molnar, Th omas F. Torrance:   Th eologian of the Trinity (hereaft er:
Torrance: Th eologian of the Trinity) (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), chapter one
and passim.
3 Karl Barth, C hurch Dogmatics , 4 vols in 13 pts (hereaft er:  CD ). Vol. IV, pt
2:  Th e Doctrine of Reconciliation , trans. G. W. Bromiley, ed. G. W. Bromiley and
T. F. Torrance (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1958), 345.
4 George Hunsinger, R eading Barth with Charity:   A Hermeneutical Proposal
(hereaft er: R eading Barth with Charity) (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic,
2015), 36.
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Preface xi
God is love in Himself. Being loved by Him we can, as it were, look
into His ‘heart’. Th e fact that He loves us means that we can know
Him as He is. Th is is all true. But if this picture- language of ‘the heart
of God’ is to have any validity, it can refer only to the being of God
as Father, Son and Holy Spirit . . . We cannot say anything higher or
better of the ‘inwardness of God’ than that God is Father, Son and
Holy Spirit, and therefore that He is love in Himself without and
before loving us, and without being forced to love us. And we can say
this only in the light of the ‘outwardness’ of God to us, the occurrence
of His revelation. 5
Here Barth clearly explains that our only access to the immanent
Trinity (God’s inwardness) is through the economic Trinity (God’s
outwardness) and that it is the revelation of God the Father through
his Son and in the Spirit that enables and guarantees our knowledge of
God in himself. Th us, there are not two trinities, the economic (God’s
actions for us within history) and the immanent (God’s eternal exist-
ence as Father, Son and Spirit – the One who loves in freedom), but
only one Trinity who lives in freedom and acts for us in the freedom of
his love. Nonetheless, one can never suggest, imply or openly advocate
the idea that who God is as triune is contingent on his relations with us
in history. In the words of T. F. Torrance: ‘We cannot think of the onto-
logical [immanent] Trinity as if it were constituted by or dependent on
the economic Trinity, but must rather think of the economic Trinity
as the freely predetermined manifestation in the history of salvation
of the eternal Trinity which God himself was before the foundation of
the world, and eternally is.’6 In the sovereign freedom of his love God
did of course decide to create us and to relate with us. However these
relations are ‘external relations’ in that God did not and does not need
creation or incarnation in order to exist as the one who loves. Th e God
with whom we are related is none other than the eternal Father, Son and
Holy Spirit; thus, as Barth put it, this is not merely ‘picture language’
with no content – this is the revealed name of God as disclosed in the
history of Jesus Christ and through the power of the Holy Spirit and
understood within faith.
5 CD I/ 2, 377.
6 Th omas F. Torrance, Th e Christian Doctrine of God , One Being Th ree
Persons (hereaft er:  Th e Christian Doctrine of God (Edinburgh: T & T Clark,
1996), 108– 9.
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xii xiii
xii Preface
My statement about the purpose of the doctrine of the immanent
Trinity and the assertions concerning the freedom of God’s love were
as important then as they are today. If anything, these descriptions of
God’s freedom, which were made against the background of the many
attempts to understand the Trinity in ways that seemed to undermine
that freedom, are even more important to recognize today. It is now
assumed that the doctrine of the immanent Trinity is indeed important
and that it has something crucial to say since it is for certain gener-
ally recognized by Christian theologians as the ‘ground and grammar
of theology’. T. F. Torrance thus affi rms that ‘it is fi nally in our under-
standing of the trinitarian relations in God himself that we have the
ground and grammar of a realist theology’.7 However exactly what that
is remains the subject of continued debate since so- called social or rela-
tional trinitarians continue to base their understanding of the Trinity
in generally understood religious experience instead of in revelation,
as they should. Even sophisticated theologians who claim to be bas-
ing their thinking on revelation actually allow history and experience
rather than God himself as disclosed to us in history and experience
to shape what is said about God and our relations with God. In this
second edition I signifi cantly expand the discussion in the fi rst chapter
to make my position clear. I argue that, while we cannot say anything
about the triune God without an experience of God in faith, since it
is by grace and revelation and thus through the Holy Spirit that this
God is known with what Barth termed ‘apodictic certainty’, 8 we imme-
diately and necessarily realize that it is God himself and never our expe-
rience that is the basis for our understanding God. Th at is why Barth
and Torrance repeatedly assert that it is only through God that God is
known. Hence, I agree with Barth that because it is by God that God is
known, therefore, a proper theological starting point for understanding
God can ‘neither be an axiom of reason nor a datum of experience. In
7 Th omas F. Torrance, Th e Ground and Grammar of Th eology (Charlottesville:
University Press of Virginia, 1980), xi and 158– 9, where Torrance explains that
he thinks of the doctrine of the Trinity ‘as the ultimate ground of theological
knowledge of God, the basic grammar of theology, for it is there that we fi nd our
knowledge of God reposing upon the fi nal Reality of God himself, grounded in
the ultimate relations intrinsic to God’s own Being, which govern and control
all true knowledge of him from beginning to end’.
8 Cf. C D II/ 1, 162.
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xiii
Preface xiii
the measure that a doctrine of God draws on these sources, it betrays
the fact that its subject is not really God but a hypostatised refl ection
of man’.9
As I argued in the fi rst edition, a doctrine of the immanent Trinity is
an attempt to say something about who God actually is based on the rev-
elation of God in history. Th is assertion also has become a particularly
thorny issue today even among Barth scholars, as we shall see, because
those who think it is appropriate to ‘correct’ Barth by logically reversing
the doctrines of election and the Trinity have in reality undermined the
proper function of a doctrine of the immanent Trinity. Hence, this is
not just a problem in relation to more radical views of the Trinity that
explicitly argue against the doctrine of the immanent Trinity or merely
pay lip service to the doctrine. It is a much more subtle problem today
because those Barth scholars who seek to advance their so- called revi-
sionist thesis (revisionist because they are attempting to revise Barth’s
actual stated position to meet the demands of their thesis that elec-
tion logically should precede Trinity), do so precisely by marginalizing
God’s eternal freedom as the one who loves. We will consider this issue
at various points along the way in this second edition. Unfortunately, as
we shall see, even those so- called revisionists who realize that logically
reversing these doctrines is something Barth himself would reject, end
up caught in the problematic thinking that gave rise to that original
proposal in the fi rst place.
Th erefore it is still extremely important to realize that without theo-
retical and practical awareness of the freedom of God recognized in
and through a properly formulated doctrine of the immanent Trinity,
all theological statements about the signifi cance of created existence
become ambiguous and constitute merely human attempts to give
meaning to creation, using theological categories. At issue in a proper
understanding of a doctrine of the immanent Trinity is the fact that,
although we obviously have no alternative but to understand God in the
categories available to us in our human experience, it is not anything
9 CD II/ 2, 3. Th is is why Barth claimed that the Gospel must be respected
such that ‘Jesus Christ is the fi rst and the last word of Christian faith’ (C D II/ 1,
162). All theological certainty is grounded in Jesus Christ himself as the one who
has reconciled us to God and mediates true knowledge of God to us through
his Holy Spirit. Apodictically certain knowledge of God is lost, however, ‘when
from an object of faith the Gospel becomes the object of our own experience of
faith’ ( CD II/ 1, 141).
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