There seems to be something about recent North American theologies that the most orthodox among them feel they have to engage in full prolegomena, that they do dogmatics in the style of apologetics. Thus we get a definition of theology as ‘the essential business of faithful reflection on human life lived consciously in the presence of God’ (17). A symptom of this ‘making theology relevant’ is in citing Athanasius as if his theology were a Barthian one of revelation, making the divine known in the world, or to allude to Bonhoeffer in the neat but almost trite re-phrasing of ‘What is theology?’ as ‘Who is theology?’. Then there is the slightly embarrassing tendency to think that jazz music is now ‘cool’ for Christian theologians: ‘jazz and blues performances are best for understanding the doctrine of perichoresis, although a good string quartet will do the trick’ (93) and there is a name-checking of Miles Davis for good measure. We also get sound-bitey theology: ‘God, as the Orthodox theologian John Zizioulas has said, has his being in communion’ (172), which then gets too simply associated with Barth’s ‘analogia relationis’. How this fits with the approval of T.F. Torrance’s Barthian view that ‘Spirit’ ‘applies to the whole being of God’ is not spelled out.
In some ways this works better as pastoral theology, and that is probably the right place for it. Henri Nouwen’s idea of the Trinity as like a circle containing a cross has a nice symbolism. There is a kind of soft evangelical triumphalism: for example in the reproduction of J.B. Torrance’s theological diagrams from his Aberdeen lectures, along with the references to J. McLeod Campbell—the point being that there is not just a gospel offered, but an envelopment of humanity into God. However this is not made very clearly—in general, there is all too often a mass of historical side-tracking and rhetorical flourishes at the expense of clarity.
Another example of hyperbole is on page 202: ‘Clearly the centuries-old and bitterly divisive filioquecontroversy pales in significance in contrast to the stunning recent developments in the ecumenical dialogues on the Trinity’, meaning the WARC-Orthodox dialogue. The author claims a Western victory in what sounds like T.F. Torrance’s terms ‘that the Holy Spirit proceeds ultimately from the triune Being of the Godhead’.
There are helpful moments throughout this book: the reminder from Kierkegaard that faith is more ‘subjective’ the more it surrenders to the divine Object. The position of Schweitzer’s criticism of liberal theologies is handled well. The Fatherhood of God is stressed and helps this theology to feel confident, assured, reassuring. However I’m not sure it really helps the would-be theologian to wrestle, fight, pray, let alone get back to the Bible’s expression of the great truths. Themelios readers would do better with Migliore or Gunton.
