Cultural Encounters: A Journal For The Theology Of Culture Volume 12 Number 1 (Winter 2016) | Page 10

Volume 12, Number 1 A JOURNAL FOR THE THEOLOGY OF CULTURE giving them one or another wide-lensed rationalization for both their fears and aspirations. As such, history and theology reinforce one another. “Those who narrate the story of God clearly wield no little authority,” as Kevin Vanhoozer rightly summarizes the matter. “The same can be said for those who narrate the story of the doctrine of God.”4 To challenge these histories is no mere academic trifle, but strikes at the beating historiographical lifeline of current Trinitarian theology—indeed, “an appeal to reconsider classical Christian resources that have been rejected on the basis of misapprehensions cannot but also involve reconsideration of the histories of theology implicit in all of these recent proposals.”5 While we contend the Trinity still has immense significance for all aspects of life, how this has been implemented must in many cases now be reevaluated in light of recent scholarship. In particular, our concern for this essay is to observe how historiographical descriptions of something generally termed “classical theism” and the common juxtaposition of “Eastern” and “Western” Trinitarianism (referred to in the shorthand— illicitly, as we shall see—as the “de Regnón paradigm”) often converge to create a sort of standardized working model or “received story” of theological (and philosophical) history. Variations of this “received story” then, in turn, justify, and often ground, constructive decisions made in the task of systematic theology. Our argument is that we can account for much of the creation of the “received story” 6 of “classical theism” and “Eastern vs. Western Trinitarian theology,” and the specific nature of what an increasing number of diverse scholars argue are their misrepresentations of the earlier sources. To do this, we will demonstrate how many participated in, modified, or rejected Kevin J. Vanhoozer, Remythologizing Theology: Divine Action, Passion, and Authorship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 82. 4 Lewis Ayres, “(Mis)Adventures in Trinitarian Ontology,” in The Trinity and an Entangled World: Relationality in Physical Science and Theology, ed. John Polkinghorne (Grand Rapids: Eerdman’s Publishing, 2010), 131. 5 Michael Hanby, Augustine and Modernity (London: Routledge, 2003), nicknames this caricature Augustine’s “grim paternity” for Western thought. He remarks: “In its theological guise, the reassessment of Augustine is part and parcel of Christianity’s ongoing selfassessment, especially in the West,” and, “in its philosophical and political guise, it is part of culture’s ongoing reassessment of Christianity, in relation to new, secular forms of life and thought” (6). These connections of modern systematic theology’s historical narratives “have provided the architecture for a grand story of modern origins now taken as axiomatic by thinkers with little in common. And Augustine’s place within them is crucial as one of the West’s great metaphysical pillars” (135). Karen Kilby, “Aquinas, the Trinity, and the Limits of Understanding,” International Journal of Systematic Theology 4, no. 7 (October, 2005): 415–416, also rightly acknowledges how this narrative spills into readings of Thomas Aquinas (or vice versa, backwards to Augustine). She writes: “The need for this [Trinitarian] rehabilitation stems from the fact that, in the broader revival of Trinitarian theology over the last forty years or so, Aquinas has often been presented as a classic example of thinking about the Trinity gone wrong, Trinitarian theology done in such a way as to make the doctrine seem sterile, confusing, and irrelevant. . . . Thomas is rarely censured in isolation: most often the context is a criticism of the whole Western tradition of Trinitarian reflection. The pattern was set by Augustine, and it is his influence . . . that is the root of the problem, a problem which, according to many, is seen today in the fact that the doctrine of the Trinity so easily appears to be an intellectual puzzle with no relevance to the faith of most Christians.” 6 4