T&T Clark Handbook of Colin Gunton 9780567673381, 9780567673411, 9780567673404

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T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF COLIN GUNTON

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Forthcoming titles in this series include T&T Clark Handbook of Analytic Theology, edited by James M. Arcadi and James T. Turner, Jr T&T Clark Handbook of Theological Anthropology, edited by Mary Ann Hinsdale and Stephen Okey T&T Clark Handbook of Christology, edited by Darren O. Sumner and Chris Tilling T&T Clark Handbook of Christian Prayer, edited by Ashley Cocksworth and John C. McDowell

Titles already published include T&T Clark Handbook of Pneumatology, edited by Daniel Castelo and Kenneth M. Loyer T&T Clark Handbook of Ecclesiology, edited by Kimlyn J. Bender and D. Stephen Long T&T Clark Handbook of Christian Theology and the Modern Sciences, edited by John P. Slattery T&T Clark Handbook of Christian Ethics, edited by Tobias Winright T&T Clark Handbook of Thomas. F. Torrance, edited by Paul D. Molnar and Myk Habets T&T Clark Handbook of Christian Theology and Climate Change, edited by Ernst M. Conradie and Hilda P. Koster T&T Clark Handbook of Edward Schillebeeckx, edited by Stephan van Erp and Daniel Minch T&T Clark Handbook of Political Theology, edited by Rubén Rosario Rodríguez T&T Clark Companion to the Theology of Kierkegaard, edited by Aaron P. Edwards and David J. Gouwens T&T Clark Handbook of African American Theology, edited by Antonia Michelle Daymond, Frederick L. Ware and Eric Lewis Williams T&T Clark Handbook of Asian American Biblical Hermeneutics, edited by Uriah Y. Kim and Seung Ai Yang T&T Clark Handbook to Early Christian Meals in the Greco-Roman World, edited by Soham Al-Suadi and Peter-Ben Smit

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T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF COLIN GUNTON

Edited by Andrew Picard, Myk Habets and Murray Rae

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T&T CLARK Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, T&T CLARK and the T&T Clark logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2021 Copyright © Andrew Picard, Myk Habets and Murray Rae and contributors, 2021 Andrew Picard, Myk Habets and Murray Rae have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Editors of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. xii constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design: Terry Woodley Cover image © Ryan J. Lane/Getty All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-0-5676-7338-1 ePDF: 978-0-5676-7340-4 eBook: 978-0-5676-7339-8 Series: T&T Clark Handbooks Typeset by Newgen KnowledgeWorks Pvt. Ltd., Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

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CONTENTS

N otes on C ontributors   F oreword   Andrew Walker A cknowledgements  

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I ntroduction   Murray Rae

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PART ONE  Theological themes 

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1 Gunton on revelation  Paul Louis Metzger

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2 Gunton on theological language  Sue Patterson

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3 Gunton on the Trinity  Paul D. Molnar

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4 Gunton on creation  Christoph Schwöbel

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5 Gunton on Christology  Oliver Crisp

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6 Gunton on atonement  Murray Rae

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7 Gunton on theological anthropology  Marc Cortez

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8 Gunton on pneumatology  Myk Habets

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9 Gunton on eschatology  Terry J. Wright

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10 Gunton on ecclesiology  Uche Anizor

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11 Gunton on modernity  John C. McDowell

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CONTENTS

12 Gunton on culture  Andrew Picard

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13 Gunton on community  Lucy Peppiatt

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14 Gunton on theology, ministry and the Christian life  Andy Goodliff and Paul Goodliff

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PART TWO  Theological figures 

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15 Gunton and Irenaeus  Douglas Farrow

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16 Gunton and the Cappadocians  Demetrios Bathrellos

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17 Gunton and Augustine  Joshua M. McNall

269

18 Gunton and Western philosophy  Randal Rauser

285

19 Gunton and Calvin  Mark D. Thompson

301

20 Gunton and Coleridge  Stephen R. Holmes

315

21 Gunton and Irving  Graham W. P. McFarlane

327

22 Gunton and Owen  Kelly M. Kapic

339

23 Gunton and Barth  Peter S. Oh

359

24 Gunton and Jenson  Jeremy Ive

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25 Gunton and Zizioulas  Paraskevè (Eve) Tibbs

387

26 Gunton and Jüngel  Ivor J. Davidson

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B ibliography I ndex  

419 427

of

G unton ’ s W orks  

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CONTRIBUTORS

Uche Anizor is Associate Professor of Theology, Talbot School of Theology, Biola University. Demetrios Bathrellos is Visiting Professor at Candler School of Theology, Emory University, Atlanta, USA, and at the Institute for Orthodox Christian Studies, Cambridge, UK. Marc Cortez is Professor of Theology at Wheaton College and Graduate School. Oliver Crisp is Professor of Analytic Theology at the Logos Institute, University of St Andrews, Scotland. Ivor J. Davidson is Honorary Research Professor in Divinity, King’s College, University of Aberdeen. Douglas Farrow is Professor of Theology and Christian Thought at McGill University, Montreal. Andy Goodliff is Minister at Belle Vue Baptist Church, Southend-on-Sea, UK. Paul Goodliff is the general secretary of Churches Together in England. Myk Habets is Head of Theology and Senior Lecturer in Systematic Theology, Laidlaw College, Auckland, New Zealand, and Senior Research Fellow, Australian College of Theology. Stephen R. Holmes is Head of School of Divinity and principal of St Mary’s College, University of St Andrews. Jeremy Ive is Church of England Vicar at Capel United Church, Kent, UK. Kelly M. Kapic is Professor of Theological Studies at Covenant College, Georgia, United States. John C. McDowell is Academic Dean at St Athanasius College in Melbourne, Professor of Philosophy, Systematic Theology and Moral Theology. Graham W. P. McFarlane is Director of Research and Senior Lecturer in Systematic Theology, London School of Theology, London, UK. Joshua M. McNall is Associate Professor of Pastoral Theology and Ambassador of Church Relations at Oklahoma Wesleyan University. Paul Louis Metzger is Professor of Christian Theology and Theology of Culture and director of the Institute for Cultural Engagement: New Wine, New Wineskins, Multnomah University & Seminary.

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CONTRIBUTORS

Paul D. Molnar is Professor of Systematic Theology, St. John’s University, Queens, New York. Peter S. Oh is senior pastor at Ochang Central Church and an associate dean and Professor of Cheongju Theological Seminary. Sue Patterson is Senior Lecturer in Theology and Dean of Courses at Bishopdale College, Nelson, New Zealand. Lucy Peppiatt is the Principal of Westminster Theological Centre in the UK, where she also teaches Systematic Theology. Andrew Picard is Director of Carey Graduate School, Lecturer in Systematic and Public Theology at Carey Baptist College, New Zealand. Murray Rae is Professor of Theology at the University of Otago, New Zealand. Randal Rauser is Professor of Historical Theology at Taylor Seminary in Edmonton, AB Canada. Christoph Schwöbel is Professor of Theology at the University of St Andrews, Scotland. Mark D. Thompson is the Principal of Moore Theological College in Sydney and Canon of St Andrews Cathedral Sydney. Paraskevè (Eve) Tibbs is Affiliate Associate Professor of Theology at Fuller Theological Seminary. Andrew Walker is Emeritus Professor of Theology, Culture and Education at King’s College, London, and Ecumenical Canon of St Paul’s Cathedral. Terry J. Wright is an associate research fellow and tutor at Spurgeon’s College, UK.

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FOREWORD ANDREW WALKER

It is a great pleasure to write the foreword to this handbook to Professor Colin Gunton’s work. When he died so unexpectedly in May 2003 at the age of 62, he left behind him a legacy of theological significance that people are still discovering. This legacy is to be found not only in his publications but also in the teaching and writings of many of his colleagues and students. Colin Gunton was totally lacking in pomposity and self-regard. He was happy to be a conduit of the Christian tradition aware that he was standing, as he often put it, on the shoulders of theological giants. It is helpful to remember that Colin Gunton may have formally been a systematic theologian, but he was also an ordained member of the United Reformed Church. Writing in the book The One, the Three and the Many: God, Creation and the Culture of Modernity – which was based on the Bampton lectures at Oxford in 1992 – he states, ‘theology is a practical not a merely theoretical discipline’.1 I think we are unlikely to go astray in our understanding of Colin if we regard him as an ecclesial theologian. He care more for the gospel and its faithful transmission through the ages than for the study of theology per se. It was inconceivable to Colin Gunton that you could teach theology as if it was disconnected from the church. Colin Gunton was passionate about the gospel and the Apostolic Faith of the New Testament, but he also had very strong dislikes. He thought Augustine of Hippo was the source of most of the ills of the Western Christian tradition and he favoured the Cappadocian theologians2 of the fourth century over their Western counterparts.3 Colin Gunton was also opposed to the introduction of the filioque clause into the Nicene– Constantinopolitan Creed (ad 381) and he preferred the Eastern approach to the Holy Trinity which focused on the three persons or hypostases – Father, Son and Holy Spirit – rather than the oneness of God’s being (homoousion). It was not the case, however, that Colin Gunton went over wholesale to Eastern Orthodoxy; he had little interest in the liturgical practices of the Eastern half of Christendom and remained indifferent to Orthodox iconography. Colin Gunton not only became a mentor to many of his students, he was himself indebted to mentors from both past theologians and living contemporaries. He was a follower of Karl Barth (1886–1968), but like T. F. Torrance (1913–2007) he was not an uncritical student. He also had deep regard for the Puritan John Owen (1616–1683) and the Romantic sage Samuel Coleridge (1772–1834), as well as a delight – bordering on an obsession – with Caledonian theologian Edward Irving (1792–1834). Theological contemporaries who have personally influenced his views include Robert Jensen, John Zizioulas and Christoph Schwöbel. Schwöbel, probably the greatest influence on Colin

Colin E. Gunton, The One, the Three and the Many: God Creation and the Culture of Modernity. The 1992 Bampton Lectures (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 7. 2 Basil of Caesarea (ad 330–379), Gregory of Nyssa (ad 335–395) and Gregory of Nazianzus (ad 229–309). 3 Augustine of Hippo (ad 354–430) and Jerome (ad 347–420). 1

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FOREWORD

Gunton, greater than either Jenson or Zizioulas, softened some of his polemicism and stretched him intellectually while reminding him that Western Christianity was not yet totally moribund. Schwöbel’s support for Colin was most visibly apparent in their joint running of the weekly seminar in Systematic Theology at King’s College, London, which remains as one of Colin’s most important contributions to theology. Following Barth, Colin Gunton was unhappy with the German Liberal School of Theology and especially of its most influential members, Albrecht Ritschl (1822–1889) and Adolf von Harnack (1851–1930). Never one to hide his dislikes, he was less than happy also with much of Anglican theology which he found feeble. I recall him in particular saying that he found little to agree with in the works of Maurice Wiles (1923– 2005) or John Hick (1922–2012). In the light of the fact that he was not an original thinker and was quite happy to say so, why has Colin Gunton attracted so much attention in recent years? A plausible answer would be that, like Edward Irving, he rejected the critical thinking of the philosophical Enlightenment of the late eighteenth century and stood for a conservative gospel and hence gathered around him fellow tutors and doctoral students of like mind. This looks like a plausible explanation, but although there is some truth in this assertion, it is misleading. Colin Gunton was not an evangelical for example, and he was certainly no biblicist. Nor was he a traditionalist. His ecclesiology was rooted in congregationalism, not bishops and liturgy. The students and colleagues he did attract were on the whole classically orthodox in their theology but not necessarily conservative by modern standards. This holds for John Zizioulas, Murray Rae, Alan Torrance, Steve Holmes and Christoph Schwöbel, all of whom were colleagues of Gunton at King’s at one time or another.4 The reason that Colin Gunton gathered round him so many ‘open evangelicals’ and ‘neo-orthodox’, as they were often referred to, is because one of the most important and attractive aspects of Colin Gunton’s modus operandi was his openness to dialogue. Personally, I think Colin Gunton was a theologian who did his best work through conversation. This handbook to Colin’s work reflects his conversational and engaging approach: the chapters have all been written with respect and gratitude but avoid the pitfall of hagiography which so many authors writing about their theological teachers find hard to avoid. Colin Gunton and I became mutual friends during the seven-year theological commission of the Holy Trinity from 1983 to 1990.5 Colin was always good company, with a mischievous sense of humour. He was also, I was to discover, subject to enthusiasms. These enthusiasms usually centered on a book he was reading or a theologian/philosopher he had come across. I recall, for example, his fascination with John Zizioulas both in listening to him – he was the senior member of the Orthodox contingent in the Holy Trinity study group – and in reading his book Being as Communion.6 Colin was someone who put his money where his mouth was: he was so taken with John Zizioulas that he invited him to King’s as a visiting professor and he became a welcome participant of the research seminar. Colin Gunton’s team at King’s has virtually reassembled itself in St Andrew’s University, Scotland, where Alan Torrance, Christoph Schwöbel and Stephen Holmes are all currently employed. 5 The main ecumenical body in Britain at that time was the British Council of Churches and the study took place under the auspices of the Division for Ecumenical Affairs. 6 John D. Zizioulas, Being as Communion: Studies in Personhood and the Church (New York: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1985). Zizioulas later jumped straight from layman to bishop, becoming titular Metropolitan John of Pergamon in 1986. 4

FOREWORD

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In 1990 the Holy Trinity Commission, under the generic title The Forgotten Trinity, published three volumes.7 Ostensibly we all wrote the main report for the church leaders and religious practitioners, but it was in fact written by Colin Gunton and affirmed by the rest of us. During this time Colin Gunton became a key executive member of my independent research organization – The C. S. Lewis Centre for the Study of Religion and Modernity – a commitment which he continued after I had become a full-time member of King’s in 1990. Colin Gunton was also 100 per cent behind the initiative to begin a taught MA in Theological Education in 1994. We spent some years team-teaching systematic theology to these students who were registered in the Education Department not in Theology. Colin Gunton always turned up and never missed an external examiner’s meeting; his participation was a major reason for the success of the new MA. Students who applied were all impressed by the interdepartmental aspect of the degree as well as the interdisciplinary approach. I had one unexpected influence on Colin Gunton which was long-lasting and as it is an example of one of his enthusiasms, I will include it here. As I was preparing for my first published book in 1985,8 I came across Edward Irving – known incorrectly as the founder of the Catholic Apostolic Church and whose members were nicknamed ‘Irvingites’ (which I discovered was an offensive term for Church members). I shared my interest in Irving’s radical view on the humanity of Christ – calling his human nature peccable – harking back to Gregory Nazianzen’s memorable phrase ‘that which he has not assumed he has not healed’ – and his stress on the Holy Spirit’s influence on the Church as the body of Christ. Colin Gunton – as was his wont – decided to check Irving out for himself. He became excited about Irving and considered him a missing link with the Eastern tradition and, if anything, even superior to them. Over the next twelve months – from 1983 to 1984 – Colin Gunton made considerable progress in coming to grips with Irving’s flamboyant and romantic style (so different from his own). The Scottish theologian’s sermons appeared to his congregations to be extempore, but Irving painstakingly wrote them all out in full. His writing reads like high puritanism on speed.9 It did not take long for Colin Gunton to know more about Irving than me. He spoke very positively on BBC Radio 4 about Irving in December 1984 (it was the 150th anniversary of Irving’s death) and committed the Systematic Theology seminar to a day on his life and work. In the Autumn of 1995 Colin Gunton invited me to his office at King’s and showed me a picture on his wall. It was Irving’s favourite likeness of himself. It showed him as handsome with no hint of the squint which earned him the nickname ‘Dr Squintum’ by his traducers in a popular satirical song. More importantly, however, was the position of the picture in Colin’s gallery of great theologians – he had placed him between Coleridge and Barth.10 For these reasons and more, Colin Gunton is a theologian worth remembering and engaging. I hope the chapters in this volume will introduce Colin’s work to a new generation of theologians who can pick up where he left off. The three volumes were published as follows: British Council of Churches, The Forgotten Trinity: 1. The Report of the BCC Study Commission on Trinitarian Doctrine Today (London: BCC, 1989); The Forgotten Trinity: 2. A Study Guide on Issues Contained in the Report of the BCC Study Commission on Trinitarian Doctrine Today (London: BCC, 1989); and The Forgotten Trinity: 3. A Selection of Papers Presented to the BCC Study Commission on Trinitarian Doctrine Today, ed. A. I. C. Heron (London: BCC, 1991). 8 Andrew Walker, Restoring the Kingdom: The Radical Christianity of the House Church Movement (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1985). 9 The colloquial name for amphetamine. 10 Colin’s obituary in The Guardian newspaper mentions the pictures of Coleridge and Barth but Irving is omitted. It was precisely this kind of invisibility that so annoyed Colin. 7

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Unless otherwise indicated, all Scripture quotations are taken from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989 National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.

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Introduction MURRAY RAE

The Bible is replete with stories of people being formed in faith and of learning to speak of God’s dealings with the world. A notable instance is the story told in Luke 24 of the risen Christ speaking with two of his disciples on the road to Emmaus and sharing bread with them following his passion and resurrection. Having listened to the disciples’ story of despair concerning ‘all that had happened in Jerusalem’, Jesus explained to the disciples, who did not yet recognize him, all the things about himself in the Scriptures. When evening came, the three shared a meal. Jesus took bread, blessed and broke it, and gave it to them. Then the disciples’ eyes were opened and they recognized him. The two disciples returned at once to Jerusalem to tell the news that Jesus had been raised. ‘They told what had happened on the road, and how he had been made known to them in the breaking of the bread’ (Lk. 24.35). The story captures well Colin Gunton’s understanding of the theological task. Christian theology is the thinking and the speaking done in the light of encounter with Christ. It is done best in community, in companionship with others who, like the first disciples, are eager to explore all that went on in Jerusalem and to explore as well how the world has been changed because of the resurrection of Jesus from the dead. Theology for Gunton was always a joyous matter. It is the speech of those whose hearts have burned within them as they too have encountered the risen Christ – on the road, in the breaking of bread and throughout the Scriptures. What went on in Jerusalem, and in the surrounding regions through the course of Jesus’ life among us, is the decisive clue, so Gunton believed, to the nature of reality itself. The theologian’s task, in service to the church, is to explore the whole of reality in the light of Christ. That exploration begins with God himself, with the Triune Creator of all things who gathers his creatures into reconciled communion with himself, and who will, at the last, bring all things to their true end and purpose. All things, therefore, are ultimately to be understood in terms of the fulfilment of their divinely created purpose. That fulfilment is brought about through the work of the divine Word and Spirit, who Gunton liked to describe, following Irenaeus, as the two hands of God. The fulfilment of creation’s purpose is divine work in which by grace all humankind is called to share. Colin Gunton loved the task to which he devoted his life of exploring theology’s subject matter. The exploration never ceased for him. It was pursued in the academy, to be sure, but not only there. No less important was the theological understanding developed through active engagement in the life of his local church. His two collections of published sermons testify to that as does his own advice that ‘the ministry of the church is an inescapable context for the work of the theologian … Outside of it the discipline

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of theology becomes rootless and loses its reason for being.’1 The church is, after all, the community that attempts to live by the truth disclosed to those disciples on the road to Emmaus. It is precisely through the attempt to live by it that the truth is probed and understood more deeply, including by those one finds in all church communities who have no great capacity for eloquent theological speech but who through their faithful service are teachers nevertheless of the deep things of the Gospel. There was theological interest too in Gunton’s passion for gardening understood as an exercise in stewardship and an opportunity for delight in the goodness of creation, in his love of music and no doubt also in his enthusiasm for the game of cricket. All of human culture was theologically interesting for Gunton, precisely because in and through all things the story of God’s creative and redemptive purposes for the world is being pieced together. A title of one of his published articles testifies to this fascination with culture: ‘A Far-Off Gleam of the Gospel. Salvation in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings’.2 Likewise, it was common when sharing morning coffee with Gunton in the staff room at King’s College, London, to hear him speak with enthusiasm about points of theological interest in a concert or a play he had recently attended or in a choral performance that he had participated in. Gunton spent the whole of his teaching career at King’s College, beginning as a Lecturer in the Philosophy of Religion in 1969 and then moving to an appointment in Systematic Theology in 1980. He became Professor of Christian Doctrine in 1984 and held that position until his untimely death in 2003. In 1988, along with Christoph Schwöbel, Gunton established the Research Institute in Systematic Theology at King’s College. The Institute became internationally renowned and attracted numerous postgraduate students from around the world, a number of whom, having gone on to academic careers in theology, are contributors to this volume. Gunton played an enormous role in the theological formation of those students and in their formation as a community of scholarship. Theology, Gunton advised, and confirmed through his own practice, ‘is best done in communion’.3 His commitment to the pursuit of theology in communion has been for many of us who shared in the life of the Research Institute at King’s College an enduring cause for gratitude. The days of the Research Institute were exciting times, principally because they were distinguished by a recovery of confidence in the content of the Christian gospel. After a generation of theology in England which had largely capitulated to the insistence that the biblical world view is no longer tenable and that the task of modern theology was to identify and articulate that slim residue of the biblical proclamation that can still be believed, Gunton reintroduced into English theology a confidence that the gospel rests upon an authority that is not our own, namely God’s word of address to us in Christ. The task of Christian theology, therefore, was not to fashion a gospel that was acceptable to the modern mind but to allow the Gospel itself, as proclaimed in Scripture, to shed its true light into every aspect of reality. The pursuit of that constructive task and attentiveness to the one who speaks with genuine authority (cf. Mt. 11.27; 28.18) expose the poverty of certain habits of mind that have been cultivated in modern Western thought. Chief

Colin E. Gunton, ‘Theology in Communion’, in Shaping a Theological Mind: Theological Context and Methodology, ed. Darren C. Marks (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), 31–6, 31. 2 ‘A Far-Off Gleam of the Gospel. Salvation in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings’, King’s Theological Review 12 (1989): 6–10. 3 Gunton, ‘Theology in Communion’, 35. 1

Introduction

3

among these habits of mind is the presumption of a detached, objective and supposedly scientific relation between our minds and the world ‘out there’. This estimation of the objectivity of rational human enquiry carried with it a disparagement of faith and the relegation of theology, classically regarded as faith-seeking understanding, to the realms of subjective private opinion which have no bearing on the truth.4 Within this climate of thought, theology often found itself scurrying about the cultural landscape trying to salvage something from the biblical testimony that could command respect. At the liberal end of the theological spectrum, that typically took the form of some ethical commitment or other. Fundamentalist theology, at the other end of the theological spectrum, but, ironically, a very close relation to liberal theology in its comparable capitulation to modern thought forms, tried to play Modernity at its own game by positing as its own objective source of truth an infallible and inerrant biblical text. The casualty of both attempts to render theology credible in the modern age is the living Word of God sounded in Jesus and made known to us through the Spirit. Christ becomes, as Kierkegaard put it, a ‘vanishing point’. He is replaced by a set of ethical convictions, on the one hand, or by the dead letter of an inerrant text on the other. The proceedings of the Research Institute in Systematic Theology were invigorating precisely because the Institute resisted the shackles of Modernity and these misguided reactions to it and sought instead to recover a proper confidence in the living Word of God made known to us through the Spirit. Those who participated in the Institute through its weekly seminars and regular conferences learned much from Gunton not only about the content of theology but also about the humility that is properly engendered by the subject matter. Gunton genuinely regarded all participants, staff and students alike, as equals and he meant it when he wrote that the Institute provided ‘a forum in which teacher, student and guest contribute and receive in equal measure’.5 In the same spirit of collaborative inquiry, Gunton always welcomed critiques of his own work – genuine critiques, that is, those offered in the spirit of shared inquiry after the truth rather than the kind that emerge from professional rivalry and a concern to show off one’s own intellectual prowess. Gunton had no time for such nonsense. He welcomed genuine critical engagement, however, precisely because he knew that none of us are masters of the truth. All of us stand in need of the enrichment, critique and correction of others who are likewise committed to the theological task of prayerful attentiveness to the Word of God. There are important implications that flow from this understanding of the collaborative nature of theological inquiry. Gunton himself sought always to contribute to a conversation that he hoped would be ongoing, rather than to have the last word. As Christoph Schwöbel has put it, Gunton never thought of himself as a solitary virtuoso.6 His works should not be read, therefore, as complete and definitive systematic accounts of a particular doctrine or theological theme now made available to critics to pick holes in or point out lacunae. Critique may be warranted, but if we are to honour the spirit of Gunton’s own theological endeavours, we should seek, as true theological companions, to listen carefully first and then, in response, join Gunton in seeking to reach more deeply into the subject matter with which he was concerned. That spirit of shared inquiry is what we have tried to encourage in this volume. On which see Colin E. Gunton, Enlightenment and Alienation: An Essay toward a Trinitarian Theology (London: HarperCollins, 1985). 5 Gunton, ‘Theology in Communion’, 35. 6 Personal correspondence form Christoph Schwöbel, August 2019. 4

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The conversational character of the theological enterprise, as Gunton saw it, is reflected in the structure of the volume itself. In Part One there are chapters devoted to the main doctrinal loci which occupied Gunton’s attention, but Part Two is devoted to the exploration of Gunton’s conversations with key theological interlocutors. Irenaeus, the Cappadocians and Augustine appear; so too do Calvin, Coleridge, Irving and Owen, and then from a more recent era, Barth, Jenson, Zizioulas and Jüngel. Gunton himself wrote that ‘the best way to enter on the study of systematic theology is by a study of some of its leading proponents’.7 However long ago they wrote, Gunton further contends, these are ‘living voices to which we must listen, even if finally to disagree’.8 While Gunton’s interactions with some of these voices have specific chapters dedicated to them, the names of many others of his theological companions also appear in chapters throughout the volume. The point here is not to track key influences upon Gunton’s thought, but rather to listen in to and learn from the conversations Gunton had with these theologians. Readers might find themselves objecting to this or that judgement that Gunton offers, as many have done with respect to his assessments of Augustine’s theology, for instance. It is certainly important that the views of interlocutors in theological conversation be represented accurately and fairly; objection and correction will therefore be appropriate at times, and yet we have also to consider carefully the theological pitfalls or the promising lines of enquiry that Gunton explores through his conversations with the theological tradition. Whether or not, for example, a faulty doctrine of creation can fairly be attributed to Augustine, and more particularly to the residue of Neoplatonism in Augustine’s thought, we should be encouraged through Gunton’s engagements with Augustine to explore more seriously what the consequences have been of the widespread failure in Christian tradition to take seriously enough the biblical affirmation of the divinely bestowed goodness of the created order. We should then explore further how our thinking may have to change if we are to address and set right the consequences of that failure. This is surely the theological subject matter requiring urgent attention, important though it may also be to offer correction, if needed, of Gunton’s reading of Augustine. Or if, as has recently been common, one wants to take issue with Gunton’s critique of Augustine’s commitment to the doctrine of divine simplicity and the damaging impact of that commitment upon Augustine’s doctrine of the Trinity, then one should not allow a defence of Augustine to deflect attention from what, for Gunton, was really at stake. What mattered above all was that Christian theology should be faithful to ‘Scripture’s portrayal of the works and relations of Father, Son and Spirit as they appear in saving history’.9 Failure to treat Scripture’s witness to the works of the Triune God as the proper starting point for theology is yet one more instance of the idolatry to which theologians are especially vulnerable, the idolatry in which a conceptual frame of our own devising is preferred to the Word addressed to us by God in person. This same attention to what is really at stake will be required wherever Gunton’s conversations with the theological tradition are attended to. Our primary concern must

olin E. Gunton, Theology through the Theologians (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1996), ix–x. C Ibid.,  ix. 9 Colin E. Gunton. A Christian Dogmatic Theology. Volume One: The Triune God. A Doctrine of the Trinity as Though Jesus Makes a Difference, 2003, unpublished typescript, ch. 5. Cited in Robert W. Jenson, ‘A Decision Tree of Colin Gunton’s Thinking’, in The Theology of Colin Gunton, ed. Lincoln Harvey (London: T&T Clark, 2010), 8–16, 10. 7 8

Introduction

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always be the theological subject matter. Attending to the subject matter, to the works and relations of the triune God, is the service theology seeks to offer in feeding the church and engaging the world today. That was always the most important task for Gunton. Scholarly virtuosity for its own sake held no appeal for him. The task of theology is always to explore afresh for every new day how the church can faithfully exercise its calling to bear witness to the reality of the triune God and of that God’s work in the world. The editors of this volume hope that its contents will provide encouragement and stimulation for that task.

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PART ONE

Theological themes

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CHAPTER ONE

Gunton on revelation PAUL LOUIS METZGER

INTRODUCTION Colin Gunton’s novel doctrine of revelation bears import for so many other doctrines in his theology. This chapter will first position the doctrine of revelation in Gunton’s work in terms of its distinctive qualities in relation to other models of revelation; second, delimit its merits in proper relation to other doctrines; and third, highlight its overarching import for Gunton’s entire theology. In conclusion, brief consideration will be given to the relevance of Gunton’s doctrine of revelation including mediation in addressing the perennial challenge posed by Gnostic thought forms.

A NOVEL DOCTRINE OF REVELATION What is revelation according to Gunton, and how is it different from other models of revelation? In short, in Gunton’s mature thought, revelation centres on God the Father’s saving activity of the whole creation through the mediation of the Son and Spirit. It will prove instructive to position Gunton’s doctrine of revelation on the theological spectrum in dialogue with Avery Dulles’s classic Models of Revelation.1 Dulles provides five models of revelation: revelation as doctrine, history, inner experience, dialectical presence and new awareness.2 He readily acknowledges and seeks to safeguard his fivefold typology from the assumption that ‘every living theologian can be neatly pigeonholed within one and only one of the five types’. He adds, ‘Some of the greatest modern theologians have developed highly personal positions that are difficult to classify.’3 Moreover, even when viewed as representative of the models, it should be noted that the models do not reflect them in all their specificity, as Dulles’s intent is to move from ‘the particular to the universal’ or ideal.4 With these caveats in mind, one could make a case for Gunton’s position being a unique combination and creative synthesis of the doctrinal, historical and dialectical. Gunton would be averse to ‘revelation as inner

Though older, Dulles’s work remains a standard-bearer. See Matthew Levering, Engaging the Doctrine of Revelation: The Mediation of the Gospel through Church and Scripture (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2014), 9: ‘Dulles’ book remains the best known Catholic study in English of the doctrine of revelation.’ 2 Avery Dulles, Models of Revelation (New York: Doubleday, 1983), 33. 3 Ibid.,  29. 4 Ibid.,  30. 1

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experience’ and would lack appreciation for ‘revelation as new awareness’ given his attentiveness to the theme of mediation. In what follows, brief consideration will be given to the dialectical, historical and doctrinal, in that order. Then a short account will be given of Gunton’s suspicion of revelation as inner experience. The following statement in Gunton’s A Brief Theology of Revelation will prove instructive for the comparison: The centre [of Scripture] is not divine self-identification, but divine saving action. Thus it is preferable to say that revelation is first of all a function of that divine action by which the redemption of the creation is achieved in such a way that human blindness and ignorance are also removed. To that extent the doctrine of revelation should be understood to be a function of the doctrine of salvation.5 For Gunton, divine self-identification or self-disclosure is not the principal focus of revelation but, rather, God’s saving action. Gunton takes issue with Ronald Thiemann’s claim in Revelation and Theology that revelation should be construed in some manner as ‘a function of the doctrine of God’.6 In claiming that revelation plays a functional role in the economy of salvation, Gunton does not intend to ‘limit’ revelation but to ‘delimit’ it, that is, ‘to centre it on the saving action of God in Christ who is the mediator also of creation’.7 As will be noted shortly, revelation as a function of salvation signifies for Gunton a Barthian approach. Just prior to his account of Thiemann, Gunton specifies, that the primary content of the Christian gospel is not a doctrine of revelation, but doctrines of creation, salvation and life in the church. All these suggest in different ways the limits which our concept must keep if the faith is not to be reduced to knowledge, or the conditions for theology confused with that of which we must speak.8 In a footnote at this juncture, Gunton references Barth in a cautionary tone: ‘That is why there is always some truth in accusations that Barth reduces Christianity to revelation. He does not, but gives too many hostages to fortune in making it so prominent that it always threatens to usurp the place of the mistress of the house.’9 In later lectures, which were posthumously published as Revelation and Reason, Gunton argues that a Barthian approach entails viewing revelation as ‘a function of the doctrine of salvation’.10 In this same context, Gunton references Thiemann again as privileging revelation as a function of the doctrine of God rather than viewing revelation as a subject of ‘independent interest’. While Thiemann’s approach is ‘in some ways’ Barthian, as revelation is connected to the doctrine of God, more is required. Going further, Gunton makes ‘a more general Barthian point’, claiming that ultimately ‘revelation is a function of the doctrine of salvation’.11

Colin E. Gunton, A Brief Theology of Revelation. The 1993 Warfield Lectures (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1995), 111. 6 Ibid., 110. Thiemann claims that ‘A doctrine of revelation is an account of God’s identifiability.’ Ronald Thiemann, Revelation and Theology: The Gospel as Narrated Promise (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1985), 153; quoted in Gunton, A Brief Theology of Revelation, 110. 7 Ibid.,  111. 8 Ibid.,  110. 9 Ibid., 110 n.4. 10 Colin E. Gunton, Revelation and Reason: Prolegomena to Systematic Theology, ed. P. H. Brazier (London: T&T Clark, 2008), 33. 11 Ibid. 5

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It is certainly true that one finds in Barth a significant emphasis on divine selfidentification or divine self-disclosure. But there is more, namely, transformation. Dulles draws attention to this transformative aspect of revelation in his association of Barth with the ‘revelation as dialectical presence’ model. The latter involves ‘a powerful, transforming word’.12 Dulles goes on to say that ‘since revelation comes through the word’ for representatives of this model such as Barth, ‘its proper form is Christ, the Word in person’.13 However, Christ does not stand alone. Take, for example, the well-known claim: God reveals God by God.14 Dulles unpacks this threefold dynamic of revelation involving the Father, Son and Spirit in this way: Revelation, according to Barth, is never complete with the objective element of God’s self-disclosure through his Son, for the fact of that disclosure is not apparent without the subjective transformation by which the Holy Spirit renders us capable of acknowledging what has happened. ‘Therefore this receiving, this revealedness of God for us, is really itself revelation.’15 Barth gives attention to God’s reconciling work and sees revelation as reconciliation: ‘To the extent that God’s revelation as such accomplishes what only God can accomplish, namely restoration of the fellowship of man with God … revelation is itself reconciliation.’16 Like Barth, Gunton champions the saving activity rather than self-identification of the God who saves as the focal point of revelation. And yet, Gunton would never discount God’s self-identification in divine saving action. Divorcing God’s self-identification from divine saving action, or dismissing the former as irrelevant, could easily give rise to the charge of modalism and undermine the divine activity in creation as truly representing God as triune. Gunton would seek to avoid the modalist charge and threat at all cost, as will be highlighted later in this chapter. For all their similarities, there are (at least) three emphases in Gunton where he distances himself from Barth with a bearing on the doctrine of revelation. They are: first, an emphasis on the particularity of the divine persons in relation to the divine essence; second, the humanity of Jesus in relation to God; and third, the work of the Holy Spirit.17 All three of these points relate to the theme of mediation and leave their impact on the doctrine of revelation. These items will be addressed more fully in the following section on the doctrine of revelation’s relation to other doctrines. Due to spatial limits, attention will only be given at this juncture to Jesus’ historical, temporal reality in relation to the Spirit. According to Gunton, Barth failed to maintain ‘the full temporal reality of the revelation event’. He had Dulles, Models of Revelation, 33. Ibid.,  92. 14 See Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics: The Doctrine of the Word of God, I/2, trans. G. T. Thompson and H. Knight; ed. G. W. Bromiley and T. F. Torrance (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1956) (hereafter CD), 203. 15 Dulles, Models of Revelation, 89. Dulles’s quotation from Barth is taken from CD I/2, 249. 16 Karl Barth, CD I/1, 409. 17 See John Webster’s treatment of Gunton’s concerns of Barth set forth as early as Becoming and Being. These concerns overlap with the ones noted here. According to Webster, they are an overemphasis on a privileging of the past that undercuts the ‘future divine history’; a neglect of the Holy Spirit; and a ‘lack of interest in the human history of Jesus’. For Webster, many of these concerns will surface throughout Gunton’s career. Not only do they reflect his wariness of aspects of Barth’s thought, as he understood it, but Becoming and Being also foreshadows dimensions of what would become ‘the major motifs of his own constructive work’. John Webster, ‘Gunton and Barth’, in The Theology of Colin Gunton, ed. Lincoln Harvey (London: T&T Clark, 2010), 21. 12 13

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‘a persistent tendency … to contaminate the temporality of revelation with a conception of revelation as timeless theophany’.18 John Webster weighs in on Gunton’s criticism of Barth on Jesus’ humanity and connects it to Gunton’s judgement of the deficient role of the Spirit in constituting Jesus’ humanity in Barth’s corpus: Barth – on Gunton’s reading – allows his Christology to be dominated by the efficient causality of the Word, thereby eclipsing Jesus’ humanity as an historical enactment, grounding it in advance in its unity with the divine Word and so, in effect, undermining it as an achievement in time. Once again, this weakness is to be traced to a deficient pneumatology. Barth compacts divine action and the humanity of Christ together, so that ‘incarnation’ becomes ‘immanence’, with the result that Jesus’ freedom and identity as agent in space and time are compromised.19 For Gunton, it is certainly the case that God reveals God by God. However, Jesus’ humanity also participates in revelation, in a manner that adds to the revelation of God. Barth would write later of the ‘humanity of God’,20 but for Gunton, it is also necessary to speak of the humanity of the man, something which Barth could not do.21 Speaking of humanity and history, consideration now turns to revelation as history. One of the representative figures of this position according to Dulles is Wolfhart Pannenberg.22 Pannenberg is critical of those like Barth whom he believes separate salvation history from universal history. Revelation takes place within the history of the entire world. Pannenberg writes, ‘It belongs to the full meaning of the Incarnation that God’s redemptive deed took place within the universal correlative connections of human history and not in a ghetto of redemptive history, or in a primal history belonging in a dimension which is “oblique” to ordinary history.’23 Dulles writes of Pannenberg: ‘Revelation, he holds, is not to be found in a special segment of history but rather in universal history – the history of the whole world as it moves to its appointed consummation.’24 According to Dulles, for Pannenberg, God reveals God’s self indirectly through history, never through direct means. And yet, revelatory events are understandable apart from some special historiography when viewed in their entirety and from the end of history, which Jesus’ resurrection anticipates.25 Gunton would likely affirm Pannenberg’s emphasis on the indirectness of revelation involving history given his increasing conviction regarding the mediated nature of

Colin E. Gunton, Becoming and Being: The Doctrine of God in Charles Hartshorne and Karl Barth, 2nd edn (London: SCM Press, 2001), 181. 19 Webster, ‘Gunton and Barth’, 26. 20 See Karl Barth, ‘The Humanity of God’, in The Humanity of God (Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1960), 37–68. 21 On the need to emphasize the humanity of Christ, and its relation to a developed pneumatology, see: Colin E. Gunton, ‘Two Dogmas Revisited: Edward Irving’s Christology’, Scottish Journal of Theology 41, no. 3 (1988): 359–76. In an equal but opposite manner to Gunton’s criticism of Barth’s inability to properly emphasize Christ’s humanity, Gunton also criticizes those who place too much emphasis on Christ’s humanity without also emphasizing the pneumatological aspects. See: Colin E. Gunton, ‘The Community, The Trinity, and the Being of the Church’, in The Promise of Trinitarian Theology, 2nd edn (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2001), 70–1. 22 Dulles, Models of Revelation, 58–60. 23 Wolfhart Pannenberg, ‘Redemptive Event and History’, in Basic Questions in Theology, vol. 1 (Philadelphia, PA: Fortress, Press, 1970), 41–2. See also the introduction to Pannenberg’s Revelation as History (New York: Macmillan, 1968). 24 Dulles, Models of Revelation, 59. 25 Ibid.,  59–60. 18

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revelation.26 Moreover, given that for Gunton salvation occurs in history in and through the incarnate reality of Jesus in the Spirit,27 and given his creedal affirmation that God redeems the creation through Jesus in the Spirit,28 it is also likely that he would resonate with Jesus’ resurrection anticipating the consummation of all creaturely life. Given his lack of interest in prolegomenon that is often presented as apologetical justification for constructive theology,29 Gunton would not be enamoured with Pannenberg’s attempt to place theology among the other sciences on a historical basis. For Pannenberg, while his notion of history is tied to his view of the Trinity, universal history is itself part of the mediated nature of revelation, whereas for Gunton, mediation involving history is narrowed to the Trinitarian confession of creedal Christianity. Gunton combines consideration of dialectical presence and history in an Irenaeus-like manner. Consideration of Irenaeus will appear later under the discussion of mediation. For now, it will be pertinent to discuss briefly the other model presented in Dulles’s volume with which Gunton would resonate to a degree: revelation as doctrine. Dulles describes the revelation as doctrine model in the following manner: ‘According to this view revelation is principally found in clear propositional statements attributed to God as authoritative teacher.’30 This model according to Dulles includes both a Protestant emphasis on Scripture as inspired and inerrant revelation as well as a Catholic emphasis on the church’s official teaching as ‘God’s infallible oracle’.31 While Gunton values propositions, he does not believe in propositional revelation.32 He sides with Barth in viewing Scripture as a witness to revelation.33 Moreover, he affirms the creeds for highlighting the core elements of Scripture’s witness, as they focus on the triune God’s saving work in creation.34

On page 116 of A Brief Theology of Revelation, we find Gunton affirming Pannenberg’s treatment of the historical event of the resurrection as well as the indirect or mediated nature of revelation involving the darkness of the cross:  26

there seems little doubt that the resurrection is, from an epistemological point of view, the revelatory event par excellence, confirming as it does the revelations of the previous narratives. Despite all the appearances, despite the offence and the apparent failure, this is the Son sent for the salvation of the world. Here we can draw upon some of the things that Pannenberg has said about the resurrection as divine declaration of the significance of Jesus. It is an eschatological event, and as such an anticipation of final revelation … the resurrection is not revelation which in some way overturns the darkness of the cross, but rather establishes that, too, as revelation. This is important, for it maintains the secondary character of revelation. Colin E. Gunton, Act and Being: Towards a Theology of the Divine Attributes (London: SCM Press, 2002), 31, 107, 127 and passim. 28 Gunton, The Christian Faith, 173–91. 29 Regarding apologetical justification, Webster states that one of the major takeaways from Barth for Gunton was ‘both a lack of anxiety about the intellectual integrity of Christian theology and a willingness to see what happens when the explanatory and critical power of Christian dogmatics is let loose. Barth did what the doctrinal criticism school assumed could not be done: inhabit the modern world with Christian intellectual freedom,’ Webster, ‘Gunton and Barth’, 17. For Gunton, like Barth, revelation has an intrinsic, compelling, explanatory power, which is to be respected in its own right and without need of prior justification. 30 Dulles, Models of Revelation, 27. 31 Ibid. 32 Gunton, Revelation and Reason, 17. 33 Ibid.,  77. 34 This is a key theme of Colin E. Gunton, The Triune Creator: A Historical and Systematic Study (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1998). See, as well, Colin E. Gunton, ‘Creation and Mediation in the Theology of Robert Jenson: An Encounter and a Convergence’, in Trinity, Time, and Church: A Response to the Theology of Robert Jenson, ed. Colin E. Gunton (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2000), 80–93. 27

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For Gunton, propositions do not constitute revelation, though they have a revelatory role to play. Propositions are not autonomous and self-referential in their revelatory function. Rather, the propositions refer beyond themselves to God whose saving, personal presence in the world is revelation and on which they depend for their authority.35 In Gunton’s words, Certainly, revelation does not consist in, as is sometimes suggested, the transmission of authoritative propositions. Rather, Christianity is a revealed religion in the sense that essential to its being what it is, is its articulation by means of affirmations and confessions in which are implicit certain claims about what is true of God, the world, and human life.36 But if propositions are secondary and therefore dependent for their truth on the personal presence of God to the world which is revelation and, further, if their form at any given time is also dependent upon the gift of the Spirit who mediates the revelation in words appropriate to different historical contexts, we need not be afraid of them. What is necessary is that the propositions should be understood to be both secondary and in intrinsic relation to that which they articulate.37 Propositions may not be revelation, but they may in a derivative sense be revelatory.38 Elements of each of the three models noted above (revelation as dialectical presence, history and doctrine) surface in Gunton’s novel treatment of revelation. However, none of them encapsulate his doctrine. What they have in common, which Gunton’s model also accounts for, but with important differences, is some level of emphasis on mediation: God’s self-disclosing Word as Jesus Christ, history, as well as Scripture and tradition are not direct but mediatory agents that disclose God. Gunton would certainly resonate far more with these models than Dulles’s model labelled ‘revelation as inner experience’. Gunton’s rejection of this model is important to consider at this juncture, since it will be with us for the rest of the chapter. Dulles describes ‘revelation as inner experience’ in the following terms: For some modern theologians, both Protestant and Catholic, revelation is neither an impersonal body of objective truths nor a series of external, historical events. Rather it is a privileged interior experience of grace or communion with God. Although this perception of the divine is held to be immediate to each individual, some proponents of this position say that the experience of grace depends on the mediation of Christ, who experienced the Father’s presence in a unique and exemplary way.39

Thus Gunton does not want to dispense with propositions, as it seems George Lindbeck does. Revelation is more than propositions, but not less: 35

George Lindbeck’s critique of what he calls the cognitive-propositional conception of theology is in effect an attack on the notion of revealed religion … . Against the implicit suggestion that propositionalism is a kind of optional and vaguely reactionary or disreputable position, it must be protested in the name of logic that it is as a matter of fact the case that once something is true it is always true. That is not, however, the same as believing, as its statement also appears to suggest, that doctrines, once formulated, must always be expressed in the same precise form of words. A Brief Theology of Revelation, 7–8. 36 Gunton, A Brief Theology of Revelation, 17. 37 Ibid.,  100–1. 38 Ibid.,  105. 39 Dulles, Models of Revelation, 27–8.

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Dulles lists ‘liberal Protestantism’ which he associates with Friedrich Schleiermacher, Albrecht Ritschl and Wilhelm Hermann as representative of this position.40 For Gunton, like Barth before him, there is no place for revelation as an unmediated, inner experience, including such notions as the feeling of absolute dependence associated with Schleiermacher, that Barth jettisoned early on in his career. Here’s Gunton on an existential view of revelation: Christianity is a revealed religion in the sense that without the creedal mediation of its contents, we should not know what it is … here I am emphatically not limiting or reducing revelation to that mediated through the creeds and confessions … There is [also] no intention to deny that God the Father reveals himself personally through his Son and Spirit … What is being denied is that revelation is primarily to be understood as an unmediated experience.41 While not highlighted above under the comparison involving Gunton with Dulles’s model of ‘revelation as doctrine’, it is worth pointing out the significance of tradition and community for Gunton’s understanding of revelation. We do not acquire revelation in a vacuum through independent reasoning prowess or private experience. It is always mediated through persons, through history, through texts and tradition. It is not necessary to entertain further the existential view of revelation at this juncture, as it will resurface when consideration turns to Gunton’s concern over Gnosticism.

REVELATION’S DOCTRINAL NEXUS What is the proper relation of Gunton’s doctrine of revelation to other doctrinal themes in his theology? It is worth referencing Dulles one last time, as he considers the modern emphasis on revelation and its import for theology. It will help to set the stage for revelation’s relative importance as a doctrine in relation to other doctrines in Gunton’s theology: To some readers the disputes about revelation may seem excessively abstract and arid. They might be tempted to think that theology would do better not to become embroiled in these questions. The term ‘revelation’ does not appear in the creeds and is not central in the Scriptures. Treatises on revelation did not begin to be written until the Enlightenment period, in controversies with the Deists. But since that time theologians have recognized that an implicit doctrine of revelation underlies every major theological undertaking. The great theological disputes turn out, upon reflection, to rest on different understandings of revelation, often simply taken for granted. The controversies that have raged in our own century about the divinity of Christ, the inerrancy of the Bible, the infallibility of the Church, secular and political theology, and the value of other religions would be unintelligible apart from the varying convictions about revelation.42

Dulles, Models of Revelation, 69. Kevin Hector challenges the general reception of Schleiermacher’s Christology as low, claiming it fails to acknowledge ‘the crucial role that actualism plays in [Schleiermacher’s] theology’. Kevin W. Hector, ‘Actualism and Incarnation: The High Christology of Friedrich Schleiermacher’, International Journal of Systematic Theology 8, no. 3 (2006): 307. While accounting for faults in Schleiermacher’s theology, such as his reluctant Sabellianism, Hector claims there is nothing in Schleiermacher’s Christology that demands the repudiation of a vigorous form of Trinitarianism. 41 Gunton, A Brief Theology of Revelation, 16. 42 Dulles, Models of Revelation, ix. 40

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Gunton is certainly aware of the modern preoccupation with the doctrine of revelation. Gunton shows himself to be both modern and anti-modern at the same time in his treatment of the doctrine. As already noted, Gunton does not wish to limit revelation’s importance, but rather delimit it. The aim of such delimitation is for revelation and other doctrines to receive the attention they rightly deserve. Gunton states, ‘There is no desire to detract in the least from the priority revelation plays in our knowledge of God, but rather to delimit such considerations from other central systematic topics, particularly perhaps soteriology.’43 It is essential to conceive of the right relation of revelation to other doctrines in order to affirm revelation’s rightful import for theology and thereby give due consideration to other theological themes. If the doctrine of revelation is not carefully circumscribed, ‘revelation is given too prominent a role in the wrong place, so that other aspects of the relationships between God and the world are crowded out, and so are systematically distorted’. Overemphasis on revelation in the modern world has the appearance of a certain Gnostic tendency:  Another way of putting the matter would be to say that the tendency of theology in the modern world is to become too dominated by questions of knowing, and this leads to a consequent gnosticising tendency, or at least to a seeing of the problem too much in the light of modern developments and preconceptions [such as the priority of epistemology].44 For Gunton, the problem he is addressing is not inherent to the doctrine of revelation itself. Rather, the problem stems from a modern concept of truth: ‘A major reason is to be found in the fact that the main intellectual trends in our era have replaced a concept of revelation with a concept of truth as something lying within the control of the human rational agent.’45 Proper delimitation of the doctrine of revelation will require seeing it as a second-order rather than first-order doctrine. Second order should not suggest secondary importance but rather functional importance.46 Gunton provides an example of the indispensability of the doctrine of revelation while showing its inseparability and relative importance in relation to the doctrine of creation. Just prior to the statement on revelation being a second-order doctrine, Gunton argues, [There is] an apparent circle. The doctrine of revelation … depends upon the doctrine of creation, for it is an implication of that doctrine’s affirmation of the reality and meaningfulness, both in reality and in the human mind, of the world as God’s world. Yet the doctrine of creation is itself the product of revelation for, according to the logic of these lectures, without revelation we should not have a doctrine of creation. Is the circle a vicious one? … The solution is to realize that the two doctrines of creation Gunton, A Brief Theology of Revelation, 17–18. Ibid. 45 Ibid., 21. This is a key theme not only of Colin E. Gunton, The One, the Three and the Many: God, Creation and the Culture of Modernity. The 1992 Bampton Lectures (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), but also of Gunton’s work, Enlightenment and Alienation: An Essay towards Trinitarian Theology (London: Marshall, Morgan and Scott, 1985). 46 At one point, Gunton claims Barth awarded revelation misplaced importance: ‘[revelation] is … a second order doctrine, in contradiction of the recent tendency – for example, in Barth – to make revelation, or its equivalent, a first order doctrine, and to relegate the material doctrines, like those of Nicaea, to being second order’. See Gunton, A Brief Theology of Revelation, 58. 43 44

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and revelation are to be understood at different levels. The doctrine of creation is a material teaching, which, if we are orthodox Christians, we have come to hold, not irrationally, but not on the basis of autonomous reason either. By contrast, the doctrine of revelation tells us where the belief in creation has come from: that is to say, it gives some reasons for holding beliefs that cannot be discovered by ourselves.47 Just as the doctrine of revelation is integrally related to the doctrine of creation, so, too, revelation is vitally connected to other doctrines. In fact, all doctrines are interconnected. For example, since the doctrines of revelation and creation are intimately connected, and the doctrine of creation is closely associated with the doctrine of salvation, since the creation awaits salvation, the doctrines of revelation and salvation are inseparably related. In fact, revelation serves as a function of the entire divine economy: But if salvation is redemption of the creation, the center cannot be divorced from that which circles about it. Accordingly, the focusing of revelation on the economy of salvation, if that is understood in a Trinitarian matrix, involves necessary reference to the economy of creation, salvation, and the final redemption of all things. Broadening the conspectus, it must therefore be said that revelation is a function of the divine economy as a whole.48 Moreover, the divine economy in the Trinitarian matrix involves mediation at every turn. There is no exception when it comes to revelation: ‘Whatever it is, revelation in Christian theology is mediated.’49 The doctrines of creation, salvation and revelation entail mediation. This brings us back to the discussion of immediacy. As noted above, Gunton rejects the idea that revelation is ‘unmediated’.50 Now while it will be argued by ‘some proponents’ of ‘revelation as inner experience’ that ‘the experience of grace depends on the mediation of Christ, who experienced the Father’s presence in a unique and exemplary way’,51 it is very difficult to make the case for such mediation as indispensable if Jesus is only quantitatively greater than we are (e.g. God-consciousness) and not qualitatively different. Jesus’ experience of the Father’s presence may be ‘exemplary’, but how is it truly ‘unique’? Here I call to mind Kierkegaard’s critique of Hegel and ‘the Socratic view’: ‘Every human being is himself the midpoint, and the whole world focuses only on him because his self-knowledge is God-knowledge.’52 In contrast, for Kierkegaard, the learner only ‘discovers his untruth’ when looking in himself, ‘for the learner is indeed untruth’.53 In contrast to the ‘Socratic’ or Hegelian view of Jesus who only serves as an occasion for one’s own discovery of the truth residing within, Kierkegaard sets forth the teacher who is ‘the god himself ’.54 This teacher provides the truth and even the condition for comprehending the truth. This teacher of whom Kierkegaard speaks is ‘savior’, ‘deliverer’, ‘reconciler’, ‘judge’.55 This teacher, Jesus, is foolishness to Gnostics old and new. Ibid. Ibid.,  112. 49 Ibid.,  18. 50 Ibid.,  16. 51 Dulles, Models of Revelation, 27–8. 52 Søren Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), 11. 53 Ibid.,  14. 54 Ibid.,  15. 55 Ibid.,  17–18. 47 48

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It is no coincidence that Gunton draws attention to Hegel and the problem of immediacy in the modern period: ‘Since Hegel’s time, theology has been dominated by the quest for different forms of immediacy.’56 One of the questions that arises at this point is why mediation matters other than that it appears to make Jesus indispensable. Other than preserving Jesus’ uniqueness, how does it uniquely preserve our creaturely reality? In what follows, the discussion will focus on mediation of the divine in revelation and how this novel emphasis in Gunton’s thought assures us of the preservation of the creation in all its redeemed relational particularity through the Son and Spirit. In the conclusion, attention will be given to the Gnostic problem bound up with immediacy, old and new.

REVELATION’S NOTEWORTHY CONTRIBUTIONS Gunton was always concerned for the relation of divine being and becoming/divine action. However, over time, Gunton moved from consideration of the relation of being and becoming (Becoming and Being) with appreciation for Barth’s event ontology and notion of Seinsweise to an increasing emphasis on divine being disclosed in divine action involving the personal particularity and relations of the three persons of the Trinity and mediation of the Father through the Son, including his humanity, and the Spirit in the creation (Act and Being).57 Webster highlights this move away from Barth’s event ontology in Gunton’s work: In the first edition of Becoming and Being, Gunton found Barth’s event-ontology of the divine to be of real service in responding to process pantheism; but after 20 years of developing an ontology centered on personal action and relation, he was no longer convinced. Such talk, he feared, calls attention away from ‘the priority of persons in the being of God’; like the notion of ‘substance’, which it is supposed to replace, it conceives of being as underlying the act and communion of persons; and in terms of pneumatology it can result in ‘an essentially introverted conception of the Trinity’ in which, as the bond of union between Father and Son, the Spirit ‘closes the circle’ of God’s life rather than opening that life to creaturely reality.58 How do such important developments manifest themselves in Gunton’s theology of revelation? Revelation is always personal and relational for Gunton. He seeks to guard against any sense in which divine being stands behind, overshadows or undermines personal particularity and relationality, including in creation. Thus, not only does Gunton increasingly emphasize personal particularity and relationality within the divine being, but he also progressively affirms God’s interpersonal activity involving the mediation of the Son and the Spirit in the creaturely domain.59

Gunton, A Brief Theology of Revelation, 3. For developments in Gunton’s thought concerning the move towards Trinitarian personal particularity and mediation, see Stephen R. Holmes: ‘Towards the Analogia Personae et Relationis: Developments in Gunton’s Trinitarian Thinking’, in The Theology of Colin Gunton, 32–48. See also Webster’s discussion of the movement away from Barth’s event ontology in favour of personal particularity and relations in ‘Gunton and Barth’, 17–31. 58 Webster, ‘Gunton and Barth’, 24. 59 See Colin E. Gunton, ‘The End of Causality? The Reformers and Their Predecessors’, in The Doctrine of Creation: Essays in Dogmatics, History, and Philosophy, ed. Colin E. Gunton (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1997), 63–82. For example: ‘I do not wish to suggest that understanding of the attribution of personal agency to God the Creator is a straightforward matter, but rather that without such an affirmation we should be no longer in the realm of recognizably Christian doctrine’, ibid., 63. 56 57

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Take, for example, Gunton’s move to highlight the connection of the divine logos with Jesus’ humanity. Gunton writes, ‘We must not divorce our conception of the Son’s office of the Logos, as the basis of all rationality and truth, from his material humanity.’60 Moreover, on Gunton’s view, the Spirit makes it possible for Jesus’ humanity to participate in revelation, as well as for all creaturely truth to participate at some level in revelation.61 The following claim taken from The One, the Three, and the Many is suggestive of this growing sense in Gunton’s thought of the role the Spirit has in constituting divine and human agency in the world: ‘Theologically [the Holy Spirit] is a way of speaking of the personal agency of God towards and in the world; anthropologically a way of speaking of human openness to the world and the world’s openness to human knowledge, action, and art.’62 Moreover, he moves from particular or what is called special revelation to the general when he writes in A Brief Theology of Revelation: The fact that there is revelation of and through the other; that ‘all Truth is a species of Revelation’; that there is mediation of revelation – all this requires not only a doctrine of creation, but involves us in a particular teaching about ourselves, the kind of beings we are, and about the way God the Spirit works toward and in the world.63 To reiterate, for Gunton, the Spirit makes possible Jesus’ human participation in revelation. Moreover, the Spirit makes possible humanity’s participation in revelation. The Spirit enables Jesus’ humanity to participate in revelation without being equated with revelation. Moreover, the Spirit makes possible our witness to divine revelation in that our knowledge in all domains is gifted to us without such knowledge being equated with revelation.64 The Spirit does not make Jesus’ humanity or our humanity something it is not but ‘enables things truly to be themselves’.65 Gunton’s particular emphasis on the Spirit safeguards pneumatology from being made redundant either through overemphasis on Jesus’ deity or through a doctrine of revelation that allows for the Spirit’s work to be supplanted by a revealed text.66 Gunton appears to prize a concept of humanity not as an occasion of the divine’s realization in history, whereby the humanity of Jesus or human text of Scripture becomes divine. Rather, revelation is a

Colin E. Gunton, unpublished manuscript; quoted in Robert W. Jenson, ‘A Decision Tree of Colin Gunton’s Thinking’, in The Theology of Colin Gunton, 14. 61 Colin E. Gunton, ‘One Mediator … The Man Jesus Christ: Reconciliation, Mediation, and Life in Community’, Pro Ecclesia 11, no. 2 (2002): 356: ‘The Spirit is the one who enabled Jesus to be the true human being, the one who as the second Adam – another Adam of flesh and blood – recapitulated our human life in the way it was meant to be.’ 62 Gunton, The One, the Three and the Many, 187. 63 Gunton, A Brief Theology of Revelation, 34. In Revelation and Reason, Gunton writes in affirmation of the doctrine of general revelation and Paul’s discussion in Romans that ‘there is everywhere a trace of the creator’s presence’, ibid., 71. 64 For Gunton, God’s revelation is not some unique epistemological category. Gunton is insistent throughout A Brief Theology of Revelation that virtually all our knowledge at some level must be gifted to us. 65 Colin E Gunton, The Christian Faith: An Introduction to Christian Doctrine (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), 178. 66 Gunton writes, 60

The distinction between inspiration and revelation opens the way for a doctrine of the divine inspiration of scriptures which can allow for the fully human character of its writers, and dispense with the need to wring equal meaning out of every text. We can, indeed, go further, and argue that much of the history of the doctrine of inspiration is in large measure an attempt to equate inspiration and revelation in such a way that the text in some way or other replaces or renders redundant the mediating work of the Spirit. Gunton, A Brief Theology of Revelation, 66.

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relational and holistic dynamic in which the Spirit effects participation of Jesus’ human nature and the humanity of the biblical text in revelation but without the human taking on the perfections of the divine nature, a point of resonance with Gunton’s Reformed tradition:  finitum non capax infiniti.67 However, Gunton differs from his Reformed counterpart Barth on the doctrine of creation, which would be reflective of Gunton’s understanding of the role of creation in revelation: ‘The divine action towards the creation’, is emphasized in Barth ‘at the expense of this action within the structure of time and space’.68 Certainly Barth’s Trinitarian theology was central to Gunton’s development as a Trinitarian thinker. However, such notions as Seinsweise and Barth’s perceived overemphasis on Jesus’ deity to the detriment of his humanity coupled with undue preoccupation with revelation at points,69 which gave the appearance that Christianity is reduced to revelation,70 could be seen to inhibit the critique of Gnosticism. Gnosticism was a growing concern for Gunton. Gunton’s increasing affirmation of Irenaean mediation would help him in his quest to challenge the modern, Gnostic danger of immanentism.

CONCLUSION: REVELATION AND GNOSTICISM OLD AND NEW Gunton defines Gnosticism in the following terms: ‘Gnosticism is simply, perhaps too simply, the possession of a knowledge perhaps hidden from others and involves at the same time a claim to a sort of esoteric or superior knowledge transmitted by a secret tradition.’71 Gunton offers this Irenaean critique: ‘The heart of the Irenaean counter to all, or partial, Gnosticisms is that salvation is not by the possession of some knowledge, but only by the publicly proclaimed Incarnation: the objective content of the gospel rather than the hold of the subject upon it.’72 Gunton’s reference to the public nature of the incarnation as the ground of salvation takes us to the heart of mediation. Mediation is of critical importance for combatting Gnostic trajectories old and new. As Gunton suggests, Gnosticism focuses on a superior and secretive saving knowledge, often under the control of a select group of individual subjects. The following definition of mediation counters Gnostic immediacy of various kinds: Technically mediation has to do with how something mediates the Word or Act of God. This is not so much the subjective reception of it … mediation has to do with God’s engagement with the world or the text in such a way that the world or text obeys the divine reality at its own level, or an instrument of God’s action which conforms to our understanding. That is why it has to be mediated: for God is God and we are the world. Obviously, if we are to know God there has to be mediation, unless we are going to know God immediately. Christianity has always been a religion of mediation

See Heinrich Heppe’s discussion of this topic in Reformed Dogmatics: Set Out and Illustrated from the Sources, with a foreword by Karl Barth, ed. Ernst Bizer; trans. G. T. Thomson (Great Britain: George Allen & Unwin, 1950; reprint, Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House, 1978), 432–3. 68 Colin E. Gunton, Christ and Creation. The 1990 Didsbury Lectures (Carlisle: Paternoster Press, 1993), 51. 69 Consider again Gunton’s critique of Barth’s perceived overemphasis on the doctrine of revelation. A Brief Theology of Revelation, 58. 70 See again ibid., 110n4. 71 Gunton, Revelation and Reason, 16. 72 Ibid.,  17. 67

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rather than of immediacy – you don’t know God immediately … Therefore, God has to be mediated to you, classically through Christ.73 The incarnate Jesus is the basis of knowledge and salvation, not a subjective, private and immediate apprehension of the truth. As noted at the outset of the chapter, revelation is a function of salvation for Gunton. Salvation involves the redemption of the whole creation. The mediation of God through Jesus and the Spirit, what Irenaeus referred to as God’s two hands, is critical to creation’s redemption. Unlike Gnosticism, which questions the goodness of creation, the triune operations in the creation affirm the worth of the creaturely order. The declaration that Trinitarian mediation involves God’s involvement within the creaturely order is critical. Without such confidence, our own creaturely activity loses meaning. Gunton illustrates this concern in his critique of Schleiermacher’s Sabellian orientation in The Christian Faith.74 Gunton intentionally employs the same title and structure for his onevolume systematics as Schleiermacher’s masterpiece. Yet Gunton employs a very different method leading to quite different conclusions. As with Schleiermacher, Gunton structures his volume in view of the ancient creed’s three sections: God the Father, who made heaven and earth, Jesus Christ, God’s Son who is the saviour of the world, and God the Spirit, who is the giver of life and guides Jesus’ church. However, in Gunton’s estimation, the lack of sufficient particularity awarded the three persons undermines Schleiermacher’s venture. Given Schleiermacher’s Sabellian trajectory, Gunton reasons that what we see is not ultimately what we get. The God who appears before us as Father, Son and Spirit is not triune, neither in eternity nor in history. Contrary to this Sabellian framework, Gunton claims that the God who is revealed to us in history is indeed the triune God of all eternity. Following Irenaeus’s lead, Gunton maintains that the key difference between his and Schleiermacher’s theology centres on mediation. Gunton claims that for Schleiermacher, we experience God in a threefold manner. Contrary to this perspective, Gunton argues that we experience God through the mediation of his two hands – the Son and Spirit. What bearing do these two perspectives have on the Christian life and broader culture? In Gunton’s estimation, given Schleiermacher’s view, who God is may be quite different in reality than how we experience God. Such lack of assurance undermines our confidence in the gospel, ‘the structures of our world’ and ‘the course of our history. Only if God is unconditionally the Lord of the world, life and history are we able to engage in the dayto-day tasks of life in the confidence that they are worthwhile.’75 One contemporary figure who manifests a lack of confidence along these lines is acclaimed biologist and atheist Richard Dawkins. On the one hand, he experiences wonder and a deep sense of satisfaction in his work as a scientist: The feeling of awed wonder that science can give us is one of the highest experiences of which the human psyche is capable. It is a deep aesthetic passion to rank with the finest that music and poetry can deliver. It is truly one of the things that make life worth living and it does so, if anything, more effectively if it convinces us that the time we have for living is quite finite.76

Ibid.,  81. See Gunton, The Christian Faith, 176. 75 Ibid.,  179. 76 Richard Dawkins, Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion, and the Appetite for Wonder (New York: Mariner Books, 1998), x. 73 74

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On the other hand, Dawkins pointedly and matter-of-factly writes of the universe as a meaningless and indifferent home: ‘The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.’77 At the beginning of The Christian Faith, Gunton addresses what he takes to be the fundamental crisis of our culture. This crisis ‘is essentially a crisis of belief in the reality of creation’.78 In order to address this crisis, Gunton provides a reappraisal of the Christian doctrine of creation, including providence, moving on towards the ultimate redemption of the creation from an Irenaean vantage point. God enters history to re-establish his sovereign care in the creation through the Son and Spirit. Through God’s Spirit, the Son clothes himself in this world’s ‘tired and soiled matter’79 to inaugurate the creation’s transformation. The Trinitarian work of mediation through the Son and Spirit will result in the recapitulation or perfection of all creaturely life at the close of the age. Although not offered as an ‘apology’ for the Christian faith, Gunton’s Trinitarian theology of mediation addresses the Christian faith’s present-day ‘cultured despisers’. Enlightenment thinkers – Christendom’s ‘cultured despisers’ – put forth a notion of truth that is under the ‘control of the rational human agent’ rather than hegemonic others.80 While their concerns over absolutism were legitimate, their undue emphasis on autonomy, immediacy and epistemology (involving a ‘consequent gnosticising tendency’81) was not able to guard against the problem they perceived. In effect, the moderns replaced one form of absolutism with another, namely, the absolutizing individual. This calls to mind a recurring theme in Gunton: ‘When God is displaced as the focus of the unity of things, the function he performs does not disappear, but is exercised by some other source of unity – some other universal. The universal is false because it does not encompass the realities of human relations and of our placing in the world, and so operates deceptively or oppressively.’82 What many moderns failed to see is that ultimately revelation involves relational mediation, which has import for all truth. Truth is a form of revelation rather than revelation being a form or subset of truth.83 All truth requires the other for us to know anything at all.84 In other words, revelation and, with it, truth require mediation. Closer to home, in Christian circles, it might be tempting for some to resort today to an affirmation of an unmediated Jesus. While Jesus is a historical particular who embodies universal truth, we may think we can have unmediated access to him presently. Once again, this fails to account for mediation in the fullest sense of the term. Gunton writes, ‘Wherever Jesus is now … we do not have a direct, unmediated relation to him, at least in Richard Dawkins, River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life (New York: Basic Books, 1995), 155. A similar pessimism is present at the close of Edward O. Wilson’s Sociobiology: The New Synthesis, 25th Anniversary Edition (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, [1975] 2000), 575. 78 Gunton, The Christian Faith, x. 79 Ibid.,  32. 80 Gunton, A Brief Theology of Revelation, 21. 81 Ibid.,  17–18. 82 Gunton, The One, the Three and the Many, 31. 83 Holmes raises the question of the meaning of revelation in Gunton’s thought and provides an answer with assistance from Coleridge to whom Gunton was often indebted: ‘What do we mean by “Revelation”? Coleridge shows the way: [Gunton] means knowledge that is received as a gift, and so all truth is a species of Revelation.’ Stephen R. Holmes, ‘Introduction’, in Colin E. Gunton, Revelation and Reason: Prolegomena to Systematic Theology, ed. P. H. Brazier (London: T&T Clark, 2008), 6. 84 Gunton, A Brief Theology of Revelation, 22. 77

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the sense that the words which communicate his reality are firmly anchored in the past … Revelation is mediated by tradition as well as by propositions.’85 Words that bear witness to revelation also require mediation. Their truthfulness is dependent on ‘the personal presence of God to the world which is revelation’. Moreover, their form is ‘dependent upon the gift of the Spirit who mediates the revelation in words appropriate to different historical contexts’.86 Contrary to those of an Enlightenment era bent, who think that tradition and Scripture automatically function in domineering terms in the church, they need not. In fact, those who claim to have an unmediated saving knowledge of Jesus can position themselves as salvific mediators of that knowledge to others and operate oppressively. As to whether tradition and propositions function repressively, it all depends on whether those who mediate and articulate these witnesses to revelation do so in a condescending, objectifying manner. If, however, they indwell the world and communities entrusted to their care sacrificially (rather than standing over and in control of them), they participate in the reality of God’s incarnate revelation. They participate in God’s transformation of the world from within the creaturely order through Jesus’ cruciform and resurrected life in the Spirit.87 Colin Gunton was such a participant, indwelling the theological tradition and Christian community, mentoring his students as colleagues with undying, patient and thoughtful care.88

Ibid.,  108–9. Ibid.,  100–1. 87 Here I call to mind Gunton’s reflection on Irenaeus and Polanyi on the role of humanity in making nature articulate while indwelling the world coupled with his emphasis on our dependence on the Spirit for our knowledge. See Gunton, A Brief Theology of Revelation, 34–5. 88 I wish to thank my research assistant Derrick Peterson. Our robust discussions and his excellent background work in Gunton’s corpus proved very beneficial as I crafted this chapter. 85 86

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CHAPTER TWO

Gunton on theological language SUE PATTERSON

The issue of theological language – how we are to speak truly of God – underpins the entire task of theology and is, accordingly, a major preoccupation in Gunton’s writing. There is a tracing and retracing of problematic historical and philosophical perspectives on theological language back to their origins in certain understandings of God and human personhood in order to revisit the present with greater understanding and set the whole endeavour on a sounder footing. Gunton’s focus on theological language is evident in an early paper: ‘Rudolph Bultmann and the Location of Language about God’,1 in which he critiques Bultmann’s belief that it is possible to conduct our God-talk from a foundation of human experience without compromising biblical truth. His doctoral thesis was published as Becoming and Being in two editions which nearly embrace the entire corpus of his work.2 This work, and the writing subsequent to the first edition which develops and extends its treatment of theological language, will be considered both chronologically and thematically.

ANALOGY AND THEOLOGICAL LANGUAGE Gunton’s doctoral research generated some important insights into the nature of theological language,3 focusing on the problematic aspects of analogy as an aspect of theological language classically and neoclassically considered to be indispensable for speaking about God. Classical and neoclassical analogies depend on an a priori conceptual framework into which language about God and God’s relation to the world must fit, belonging as they do to a system of thought which develops its account of the divine attributes relatively independently of biblical revelation.4 For instance, Hartshorne argues

Colin E. Gunton, ‘Rudolph Bultmann and the Location of Language about God’, Theology 75, no. 628 (1972): 535–9. 2 Colin E. Gunton, Becoming and Being: The Doctrine of God in Charles Hartshorne and Karl Barth, 2nd edn (London: SCM Press, 2001). The first edition of Becoming and Being was published in 1978. All references in this chapter are to the second edition published in 2001 unless otherwise stated. The second edition differs little from the first, except for a new preface and epilogue. 3 Ibid.,  xi. 4 Ibid.,  242. 1

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that he knows, on the basis of his metaphysical insight and construction, what kind of language is appropriate to God, and in what sense. It is a final step, and little more than a rounding off of the system [given that he ascribes necessary existence to God], to establish the real existence of the kind of God that the metaphysical world-view requires.5 Gunton contrasts this approach to Barth’s, which starts with revelatory proof and then moves to analogy. God’s self-revelation precedes our God-language. We do not use reason as an a priori method of working out what God must be like; instead, reason is used in the articulation of God’s self-revelation. Gunton traces this approach back to Anselm’s dictum of ‘faith seeking understanding’.6 Whereas Anselm begins with his cosmological proof ‘that than which no greater can be conceived’, Barth begins with the essentially equivalent ‘God reveals himself as the Lord’.7 What Gunton sees Barth doing is making ‘what might almost be called analytic a posteriori statements grounded in God’s proof of himself in revelation, which consists of a number of concrete, individual events in which he is God and which therefore must (rationally must) by the theologian be so described’.8 There are no conceptual structures operating as a platform on which to express the God-creature relation and any words used in this expression are accordingly provisional. Gunton sees this ‘proof from revelation’ as being at the root of Trinitarian doctrine. It has the virtue of being rational without being rationalistic: ‘The doctrine of the Trinity is what must be true if the biblical witness to revelation is indeed witness to the event that is God.’9 So, what sort of language are theologians able to use in speaking of God? It must be ordinary human worldly language or it would be inaccessible to us, but how do human beings decide which words describe the reality of revelation? Are some words and concepts inherently revelatory and enable God to be understood in terms of their a priori terms and categories or do words and concepts become true of God only through gaining their true descriptive power from outside and then becoming the basis of rational understanding? The former is the classical and neoclassical rationalist approach; the latter is Barth’s view. On Barth’s account, God gives God-self to be known. Our analogies, metaphors, terms and categories all get their proper expression from him as they are impowered to do so by him. They are not revelatory in themselves but divinely empowered to be so. Yet God’s revelation of God’s three-ness entails a three-ness of relation in the Godhead which is unique and unable to be read off anything else – there is no analogy for it. This does not mean that analogies for God are impossible; it does mean that they are necessarily incomplete and partial. Analogies are made possible by revelation, but revelation also sets their limits and must be their basis. Accordingly, the revelation of God’s three-ness of relation analogically provides the true meaning to human relationships.10 Ibid.,  84. Ibid., 119. See also Colin E. Gunton, Revelation and Reason: Prolegomena to Systematic Theology, ed. P. H. Brazier (London: T&T Clark, 2008), 177. 7 Ibid., 125; Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, ed. G. W. Bromiley and T. F. Torrance (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1956–75) (hereafter CD), I/I, 306. 8 Ibid., 130. ‘So there is strict hierarchy of descent: our words must depend upon, say, the authority of scripture, which in turn must depend upon the authority of God as truth … Proper theological method depends on the downward movement so that our words must be conformed to Revelation – that is certainly how Barth sees it’, Gunton, Revelation and Reason, 180. 9 Ibid.,  130. 10 Ibid., 152–3, 155; Barth, CD I/I, 390. 5 6

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While Barth promises to achieve a breakthrough in understanding and speaking of God and God’s relationship to humanity, Gunton, following Jenson, considers that he fails at least in part to reach this point. The move from a static analogy of being to a correspondence of acts (becoming) promises much, and the ‘much’ it promises is more than simply a correspondence of acts. Eberhard Jüngel’s analysis of what Barth is doing identifies the critical difference between the sort of structural analogy entailed in the classical analogy of being and the Barthian analogy in which God’s ‘Yes’ addressed to God’s triune self is compared with God’s ‘Yes’ which utters forth creaturely reality.11 Jenson suggests that the ‘Yes’ which God speaks to the creature which interprets the self-addressed ‘Yes’ in which God chooses to be God-self12 renders our creaturely selfunderstanding the ‘echo’ we make to God’s promise. Gunton considers that this notion of ‘echo’, if followed through on, would dispense with the notion of resemblance, imitation and reflection and offer a radical criticism to the whole notion of analogy as a basis for understanding God, but Barth does not go that far. Instead (Jenson suggests) he is substituting ‘Jesus as historical event’ for ‘changeless Being’ in what remains essentially the classical analogical structure.13 There is some consensus that Barth’s weak pneumatology is behind the lack of openness to the future in his concept of God, for ‘It is the Spirit that ensures the openness and provisionality of our ways of speaking about God.’14 In other words, Barth has not been Trinitarian enough in this aspect of his thinking. This conclusion suggests the direction that Gunton will take in the development of his own theology of language.

THEOLOGICAL LANGUAGE AND INSPIRATION In his next book, Enlightenment and Alienation,15 Gunton returns to the issue of pneumatology as he begins to build his own answer to the deficiencies in Barth’s approach. He makes a case for a doctrine of inspiration which he will revisit later in A Brief Theology of Revelation. He regards such a doctrine as mandated by the role of the Holy Spirit in enabling God to speak through the human words of Scripture. The Enlightenment, in denying the world an inherent meaning, viewed the human mind as the source and imposer of meaning and its linguistic expression. Theologically, however, it may be argued that it is God who confers rationality on the world and enables our human words to fit its reality, however partially and provisionally.16 Accordingly, given its origin, this knowledge of the world takes a personal form. Gunton adopts the Polanyian insight that knowledge is inherently personal and achieved through indwelling in the way that an artisan indwells his tools in the exercise of a skill. Applying this insight Gunton, Revelation and Reason, 173, 175; Eberhard Jüngel, ‘Die Möglichkeit theologischer Anthropologie auf dem Grund der Analogie: Eine Untersuchung zum Analogieverständnis Karl Barths’, Evangelische Theologie 22 (1962): 535–57; 546. 12 Gunton, Revelation and Reason, 184. 13 Ibid., 185. Robert W. Jenson, Alpha and Omega: A Study in the Theology of Karl Barth (New York: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1963), 140. 14 Gunton, Revelation and Reason, 218. 15 Colin E. Gunton, Enlightenment and Alienation: An Essay toward a Trinitarian Theology (London: Marshall, Morgan and Scott, 1985). 16 Ibid., 130. It appears here that Gunton is replacing Barth’s Anselmian ‘faith seeking understanding’ epistemology with its implicit Platonism (God gives language so we may think and conceive of God) with a more comprehensive non-dualistic epistemology. Colin E. Gunton, The Barth Lectures, ed. P. H. Brazier (London: T&T Clark, 2007), 63. 11

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to language, we do not choose words like detached tools which we select according to our notions of suitability, although they are in part our creation and are subject to our distortion and misuse. Their capacity to be truth-bearers – their rationality – ‘derives from our indwelling of reality … [for] the world’s rationality is prior to ours, and our words gain their meaning from the world’.17 If we adopt Polanyi’s post-critical realist perspective and see our language as somehow fitting the way things are, it changes our view of Scripture. To a degree it removes the contextual barrier between its time and ours, for if its writers were able to indwell reality in the same way as we are able to, the words they used, however different from ours, nevertheless ‘fit’ the same reality. The ‘inspired’ meaning of their words comes from the same source (the inherent rationality conferred on the created order by its Creator) and draws on the same pool of human language. Therefore, there is no special or privileged access to meaning, as with the notion that only believers can understand Scripture. Obviously, there are different levels of understanding, but these participate in the same conferred rationality. Through the Bible’s ordinary human words, God may come to speech, and as this occurs the words have authority which is not imposed from outside, as it were, but through the Spirit’s empowering us to speak the truth in our own words. Here Gunton has employed the explanatory insights of Polanyi’s post-critical realist epistemology to explain the way in which the Holy Spirit enables reality to come to speech in a way that arguably remedies the pneumatological deficiencies of Barth’s Trinitarian analogy identified in Becoming and Being.

METAPHOR AS BASIC TO THEOLOGICAL LANGUAGE In The Actuality of Atonement,18 Gunton continues another programme begun in Becoming and Being: to rescue theology and theological language from the conceptual straitjackets of rationalism (language about God must be couched in philosophical abstractions and clear concepts) and idealism (language about God cannot have a real referent). As Gunton demonstrates, both of these approaches are disastrous for theological truth. He insists that it is possible for theology to be both rational and faith-grounded and that the language which best (and indispensably) conveys this is metaphor. Gunton considers that it is no use simply challenging the products of Enlightenment thinking without proposing an alternative approach. Here he focuses on rescuing one key doctrine – atonement – from its radical undermining at the hands of rationalist criticism. Conceptual rationalism both overvalues the abstract logic that connects ideas and undervalues everything else, in particular anything ‘fuzzy’, pictorial or imaginative. Such an approach effectively rules out many of the ways in which the Bible understands salvation in terms of Jesus’ life, death and resurrection through objecting to the irreducible metaphorical content which may be the only means of conveying this theological truth.19 Gunton’s aim is to find a better rationality – one that is not rationalistic – that can express the truth of the doctrine in a way that preserves all its historical concreteness and

Gunton, Enlightenment and Alienation, 144–6; Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge (London: Routledge, 1958), 114. 18 Colin E. Gunton, The Actuality of Atonement: A Study of Metaphor, Rationality and the Christian Tradition (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1988). 19 Ibid.,  17. 17

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theological depth.20 To this end, he examines various definitions of metaphor, identifying their common feature as the use of words in a new or unusual way. This feature is precisely why metaphor is rejected by the rationalist tradition, which insists that truth can only be obtained by way of unambiguous semantics and assigns metaphor to the category of rhetoric.21 Yet contrary to this view, recent science regards the semantic change instigated by metaphors and other figures of speech as an essential component of any new knowledge. Applying the insights from Polanyi’s epistemology discussed in Enlightenment and Alienation, Gunton suggests that metaphor as a device through which language comes to fit the ‘causal structure of the world’ is not simply a tool at the disposal of the user ‘but a subtle instrument whose meaning is in part the gift of the (indwelt) world to which it seeks to refer’ – a gift which renders it ‘world-shaped’.22 Accordingly, metaphor is at the heart of what language is and does. It is both a ‘new mapping of the world’ and the growing edge of language.23 This approach transforms our understanding of the relation between words and things. The ways in which our language fits the world are provisional and partial, with metaphor always at the leading edge of our understanding. The metaphorical commandeering of words to new uses dispenses with the notion that some words are always literal in use, and others not. The whole idea that there are two classes of word, literal and figurative, breaks down. Instead, suggests Gunton, we must see the metaphorical use of language as the key to the relation between language and world, the ‘world-ready’ language which ‘enables the world to come to speech’, through which there is ‘the Geschehen von Wahreit (the taking place of truth’, as Jüngel puts it).24 Implicit here are the pneumatological insights from Enlightenment and Alienation. Modern theologies with an idealist perspective inherited from the Enlightenment have tended to view metaphor simply as a literary device, employing biblical metaphors as largely freewheeling figurative expressions of human worldly experience because it is thought that language about God cannot have a real referent.25 Beginning with the supposedly known world … an attempt is made to use language of the known to cross a gulf to a supposedly unknown God. The stress falls not, as it does in the case of scientific language, on the creation of new language in conversation with the world, but on the projections by analogy of familiar terms on to the (supposedly) unfamiliar.26 However, God has chosen to speak to us through the things of this world. The scientific insights into the way language is able to grasp new things about the world by way of metaphor apply all the more to theological language, grounded as it is in the biblical narratives illuminated by various key metaphors.27 The telling of these stories with their embedded metaphors in relation to their history of Christian use is the primary way in which we fix our reference of God. In what sense are we able to speak of God apart

Ibid.,  24–5. Ibid.,  29. 22 Ibid., 48. See Enlightenment and Alienation, 144–6; Polanyi, Personal Knowledge, 114. 23 Gunton, The Actuality of Atonement, 33, 49–50. 24 Ibid., 34–8; Eberhard Jüngel, ‘Metaphorisches Wahreit. Erwägungen zur theologishen Relevanz der Metapher als Beitraz zur Hermeneutik einer narrative Theologie’, in Metapher, Zur Hermeneutik religiser Sprach, ed. P. Ricoeur and E. Jüngel (Munich: Chr. Kaiser, 1974), 71–122; 107. 25 Gunton, The Actuality of Atonement, 42. 26 Ibid.,  43. 27 Ibid.,  46. 20 21

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from the God-descriptions in these narratives and metaphors? These must be primary. There is no independent access to God-knowledge behind or apart from the biblical narratives – no ‘neutral foundation’ of rational thought that might authenticate them.28 Therefore we must start with theological language and how it has been used – successfully or unsuccessfully. And the place to start discussions on theological language is not with theories of analogy, symbolism and metaphor, with the aim of applying their (abstractionpromoting) generalities to the particular case of theology. Instead, the place to start is with the way in which theological language has been used biblically and to understand along with this the creation of metaphorical language in general, but particularly in theology, as at least in part God-initiated. As such, metaphor may be an agent of revelation,29 and if this is the case, the theological use of words may be the primary use from which other uses gain their true meaning. In The Promise of Trinitarian Theology,30 Gunton explores the deep, Patristic roots of the semantics of theological language and highlights the crucial step taken by the Cappadocian Fathers through their distinguishing between two metaphors previously taken to be virtually synonymous terms for divine ‘being’ or ‘substance’: ousia and hypostasis. In his analysis Gunton draws on Coleridge’s thinking, as developed by Stephen Prickett, that there is a process of semantic change, ‘de-synonymy’, in which two synonyms diverge in meaning and thereby become capable of different functions, thus increasing the capacity of a language.31 The implications of the de-synonymizing of ousia and hypostasis, in which ousia retained the sense of essential being or substance and hypostasis came to denote an individual reality or person, created room for a distinction in meaning while holding together the unity and plurality of God. Divine oneness ceases to be the sort of mathematical oneness of Arian and Greek theology, but the inseparable oneness-inrelation of the three hypostases of Father, Son and Spirit.32 To return to Actuality of Atonement: As the way God reveals truth through changing the use of language is always particular and therefore can only be shown in particular cases, Gunton turns to atonement metaphors such as ‘sacrifice’, ‘victory’ and ‘justification of the sinner’ and offers a methodology.33 To begin with, a particular theological term is first tested against biblical teaching to establish its support. In the case of the traditional conception contained in the metaphor, Christus Victor, the biblical witness’s tradition of using a group of metaphors throughout scripture is able to broaden and deepen this doctrinal statement against its purporting to be by itself a theory of atonement that might exclude other alternatives.34 This process also involves, in reverse, a testing of the Ibid.,  46–7. Ibid., 51. In my discussion of Gunton’s approach to metaphor in my doctoral work (see Sue Patterson, Word, Words and World (Bern: Peter Lang, 2013), 155–9) I suggested that he did not go far enough in his consideration of the revelatory agency of metaphor in The Actuality of Atonement, but when this is placed within the wider context of his work on theological language, this objection largely disappears. 30 Colin E. Gunton, The Promise of Trinitarian Theology, 2nd edn (London: T&T Clark, 1997). The sequence in the development of Gunton’s thought is reflected in the 1991 dating of the first edition of this work. 31 In his later book, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, Gunton comments on the way metaphorical language shapes theology: ‘By expressing the significance of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus in terms of the language of sacrifice, a certain way of expressing the reality of salvation – authentic human life under God – has taken shape.’ Colin E. Gunton, Father, Son and Holy Spirit: Toward a Fully Trinitarian Theology (London: T&T Clark, 2003), 188. 32 Gunton, The Promise of Trinitarian Theology, 67. Stephen Prickett, Words and the Word. Language, Poetics and Biblical Interpretation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 1986. 33 See also Gunton, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, 183. 34 Gunton, Actuality of Atonement, 62. 28 29

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biblical language to establish whether this is translatable into other terms without loss of meaning or whether it is instead irreducibly metaphorical and must be retained as a ‘thick description’ which holds in tension its various elements. Meanwhile, however, the issues of the role of concepts in theological language will not go away. Gunton will prise open the distinction between a priori concepts that are used as foundations and a posteriori concepts that are contingent on a different foundation – that of revelation that is biblical and spirit-inspired.

TRINITY, ANALOGY AND RELATIONALITY IN THEOLOGICAL LANGUAGE In his series of lectures published as The One, the Three and the Many, Gunton returns to the issue of analogy and the ongoing challenge of reforming and extending Barth’s Trinitarian theology. Gunton identifies a common thread running through antiquity and modernity in the form of a defective conception of relationality in which Parmenidean and Heraclitean ontologies are offset. It is like a zero-sum game where the oneness held to be primary is offset against the many. Due to the belief that only the one is transcendent, both eras have downplayed particularity and failed to develop a truly relational account of being. Modernity has added to this what seems on the face of it to be an opposing theme: a denial of transcendent reality, which results in God’s being displaced from transcendence into immanence and location ‘in various aspects of this-worldly reality’.35 In addition, this thinking goes with a fact-value dualism that separates truth from goodness and beauty, which, as Gunton pointed out in Actuality of Atonement, questions the truth claims of theological language, either literalizing what cannot and should not be literalized or moving all theological discourse into the realm of the mythical, the experiential and the evaluative. A corollary of the second theme above is that creation becomes a function of human agency and the historical process becomes the framework within which all reality is contained and explained.36 In much modern theology, the ‘principle of analogy’ is employed in the service of historical method to explain what cannot be explained within the terms of its world view. However, the ideological foundation of this historical method is itself quite ahistorical: an a priori conceptual system which determines what can be deemed to be historical and what counts as evidence for such, and which rules out accepting as historical fact such miraculous events in the past as the resurrection, and also determines what could be acceptable as historical fact in future. Anything that does not fit inside this system must find an analogy within it which renders it intelligible in those (immanent) terms.37 In seeking a solution to the modern captivity of theological language, Gunton will produce some of his most complex theology. He will argue for the employment of Trinitarian concepts and what he terms ‘transcendentals’ to map the integrity of the divinely conferred rationality of reality,38 but first he returns to the consideration of analogy which was his focus in Being and Becoming. Aquinas’s analogy of being, which is Ibid.,  6. See also Colin E. Gunton, The Triune Creator: A History and Systematic Study (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1998), 39. 37 Gunton, The One, the Three and the Many, 89–90. 38 Ibid.,  7. 35 36

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the basis of his doctrine of God, describes how the world reflects God’s being. It posits a conceivable relation between finite and infinite while at the same time preserving their otherness. Gunton considers that some approach of this kind is unavoidable if we are going to speak of the relation of the one God to the plural world – in other words, we cannot do away with analogy – and he appreciates the care with which Aquinas has developed his doctrine. However, as he noted in the earlier discussion, it has some serious flaws. A theological structure is erected on a concept (‘being’) which assumes a monadic view of God and is independent of Christology and pneumatology: ‘a system of transcendentality is developed independently of the historical becoming on the basis of which Christian theology is distinctively what it is’ [and] ‘independently of considerations of the Trinity’.39 However, as Gunton concluded in Becoming and Being, Barth’s alternative also fails to reach the mark. His construction of a new type of analogy based on a revealed Trinitarian foundation goes no further than formulating a theory of how language may be predicated of God. Gunton now commences the programme signposted in Becoming and Being: to revise and extend Barth’s theology of language: to ‘develop a Trinitarian analogy of being (and becoming): a conception of the structures of the created world in the light of the dynamic of the being of the triune creator and redeemer’.40 As an analogy of being, this analogy resembles Aquinas’s, but is unlike his in being Trinitarian. As Trinitarian in its basis, it resembles Barth’s, but extends his analogy of faith beyond speaking of God-qualities into speaking of the being-qualities of all reality. This is a complex task and its articulation is equally complex. Gunton begins with the suggestion that the key to achieving it is to ignore the modern demand for clear distinct concepts critiqued in his earlier work and adopt an approach that would provide the necessary openness and provisionality to encompass the scope of ‘speaking of all being’. Can we find a place for both the unity and plurality of being; for both the unity and plurality of the human cultural enterprises that would be true to the world of our experience? A beginning can be made by noting that the picture looks very different if we eschew the expectation of certainty, universality and infallibility in favour of something more limited, open and tentative; something more appropriate to the character of human being.41 This does not involve simply a return to Polanyian epistemology, as it may imply. Instead, Gunton advances the idea of ‘open transcendentals’, which he defines as notions operating at a basic level of human thinking which empower ‘a continuing and in principle unfinished exploration of the universal marks of being’. The value of these notions will lie ‘not primarily in their clarity and certainty, [because that would foreclose their scope] but in their suggestiveness and potentiality for being deepened and enriched, during the continuing process of thought, from a wide range of sources in human life and culture’.42 As such these open transcendentals – perhaps a difficult handle to grasp – seem akin to gestalts and fuzzy concepts that may accommodate new insights through lateral accretions or mining of hidden depths. Gunton next turns to Coleridge’s concept of ‘idea’ which is ‘concerned more with common ways in which the human mind interacts with reality than with fixed or static

Ibid.,  138–9. Ibid.,  141. 41 Ibid.,  142. 42 Ibid.,  142–3. 39 40

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concepts  … dynamic, and … not abstracted or generalized so much as “given by the knowledge of [the] ultimate aim” of something’.43 Gunton concedes that these Coleridgean ideas are not necessarily easy to apprehend and may initially seem paradoxical; however to foreclose on meaning too early will limit the scope. There are two other things Coleridge says about his ideas: First, they mediate – for instance, as particularly pertinent to the present investigation, they reveal the particular in the universal, or the universal in the particular. Second, Coleridge refers to the Trinity as the ‘idea of ideas’ because it is ‘at once basic to the human mind, most fertile of relevance and of deep impenetrability’.44 It is important to grasp that these Coleridgean ideas are not the same thing as transcendentals (as always, the introduction of new terminology takes some getting used to). Herein lies the distinction: Whereas ideas make known the character of something, transcendentals are a ‘mark of all being’ – something all members of the set {being} have in common. Ideas may generate transcendentals, but they are not themselves transcendentals because they are not universal aspects of being. Thus, the idea of the Trinity, which is unique to God’s being, generates transcendentals such as perichoresis and particularity, which may be construed as universal features of the world in which we live. As human beings created in God’s image, it follows that we are in some way perichoretic beings, ‘perichoretically bound up with other human beings and the nonpersonal universe’.45 Used analogically, perichoresis may describe human being in the light of divine perichoresis. It may ‘indwell’ the doctrine of imago Dei to produce the insight that just as the divine persons of the Trinity mutually constitute one another, so too do human persons. Where the notion of perichoresis helps to flesh out this close relatedness is in showing that mutual constitution is not at the expense of particularity, however human beings are inextricably bound up with one another and however sin distorts these relationships.46 Through the analogy of perichoresis, a further idea, the economy of the divine action, may inform our understanding of yet another ‘idea’, sociality, in relation to human community.47 However, as this example makes particularly clear, when we reflect on our limitations in time and space and the distortions in relationality caused by human sin, the use of perichoresis as an analogical concept must be done with the same careful qualifying exhibited by Aquinas. Distinctions between divine and human being are made not simply through negative comparisons which are a limiting feature of classical analogy (nor are they a matter of degree, as with the via eminentia); the distinction is also a qualitative one. There is a difference in the quality of divine temporality and spatiality which is yet demonstrated by God’s free and transcendent relationality revealed in the incarnation of the Son and the work of the Spirit. Nothing finite so completely shares in the being of other finite realities without the subversion or dissolution of its own or the others’ proper being.48

Ibid., 143. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, On the Constitution of the Church and State: The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, vol. 10, ed. John Colmer (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1976), 12. 44 Gunton, The One, the Three and the Many, 143–4. 45 Ibid., 144–5, 170. ‘The expectation is that if the triune God is the source of all being, meaning and truth we must suppose that all being will in some way reflect the being of the one who made it and holds it in being’, ibid., 144–5. 46 Ibid.,  169. 47 Ibid., 214–15. 48 Ibid.,  165. 43

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The indispensable characteristics of the ideas that Gunton proposes are their open-ended inexhaustibility and their biblical groundedness. As made clear in earlier discussions,49 the Trinity is not an a priori conceptual foundation which creates a procrustean bed for all we may say about God and, by extension, the world. It is an a posteriori, Spirit-inspired, distillation of biblical descriptions of God which are taken to be truly revelatory. In this context, Gunton’s programme is again manifestly the extension and revision of Barth’s theology of language. Finally, Gunton identifies another transcendental in the Johannine concept of the Logos – transcendental (rather than idea) in being able to express the almost universal conviction that there is something which holds all things together, a structure of meaning and rationality to our worldly existence, and to the cosmos as a whole.50 All things, sustained in being by the Spirit, dwell in Christ who is their coherence and who as God’s intelligibility in worldly terms indwells a world also constituted in relationality. Whereas without Christ there is no coherence, a theology of the Spirit gives due weight to the particular, for the ‘Spirit’s peculiar office is to realize the true being of each created thing by bringing it, through Christ, into saving relation with God the Father’.51 It is to Paul and other New Testament writers that we owe the confession that all things cohere in Christ … God comes into relation with that which is not himself through his Son, the mediator between himself and the creation, and the Son is rightly conceived as Logos, not only the Word spoken to time from eternity, but the immanent dynamic of meaning which holds time and space together.52 In Logos, the Word in whom all things cohere, human words participate in the rational structure of reality. This takes the understanding of theological language beyond the issues of analogy and reference to a qualitatively different place.

THEOLOGICAL PROPOSITIONS AS MEDIATORS In A Brief Theology of Revelation, Gunton returns to concerns with some modern theologies of language addressed in passing earlier, in particular the role of theological propositions as mediators of revelation. He argues for the traditional view that the revelation upon which Christian faith depends is mediated in propositional terms. He does so against various theologies that advocate immediacy of revelation. In particular he argues against the notion that revelation is primarily an unmediated experience.53 Gunton identifies an implicit ‘quest for immediacy’ in postmodern narrative theologies where these suggest that the reader is created or constituted by the text. To say that the biblical text is ‘the primary reality which subsumes all human experience’, however true this may seem at face value, is paradoxically to negate the mediated nature of the Christian revelation.54 More widely, he takes issue with various modern theologies which owe some allegiance to

See Gunton, Becoming and Being, 130. Gunton suggests that creation’s intrinsic rationality ‘might be called a semiotic system … a system whose intrinsic, not extrinsic, rationality, is a sign of its createdness’, Colin E. Gunton, A Brief Theology of Revelation. The 1993 Warfield Lectures (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1995), 61. 51 Gunton, The One, the Three and the Many, 189. 52 Ibid.,  178–9. 53 Gunton, A Brief Theology of Revelation, 16. 54 Ibid.,  5–6. 49 50

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Bultmann in suggesting that God’s self-revelation occurs through some kind of immediate experience that eliminates the need for mediation via theological propositions. Gunton views theological propositions as having come under particular attack from George Lindbeck, who claims in his influential book, The Nature of Doctrine,55 that doctrines have no propositional (truth-claiming) function. Lindbeck describes those theologians who maintain their propositional status as ‘cognitive-propositionalists’, naïve realists who maintain a one-to-one correspondence theory of truth. He defines a cognitive-propositionalist approach as ascribing to church doctrines the function of informative propositions (truth claims) about reality.56 Lindbeck claims it is not possible to state the objective truth about God in definitive propositional form. Instead, doctrines are to be regarded as ‘intra-systemic truths that indicate consistency within a given story, within a given religion’. Their function is as rules regulating how we speak of God.57 However, there is a much subtler way of describing the correspondence between language and reality than that of naïve realism. To uphold the reliability of doctrines as mediators of revelation is not necessarily to regard their descriptions as other than partial and revisable. Doctrinal reliability allows, even requires, that propositions may be partial and revisable, how else are they to attempt to fit a divine reality whose revelation is able to be articulated by us only as it is given to be known within our human limitation? Hence Gunton’s insertion of a condition: If it was once true that Jesus died for our sins on the cross, then it is always true. I take that sentence to be propositional, cognitive, in that it makes claims for the truth of that which lies beyond its formulation in words, and for one dimension of what it is to claim that Christianity is a revealed religion.58 ‘Once true, always true’ indicates that what we take to be centrally true of Christian faith does not change in essence over time, although its articulation may. Propositional theological statements have also been criticized as ‘intellectualist’ in that they reduce the biblical teaching of salvation to abstract concepts.59 While this may have been the case with various theological propositions during the history of Christianity, it has not been the case with those biblically grounded propositions central to Christian theology. Gunton argues that in order for faith to be taught, it requires some distillation of the biblical narrative into propositional form and we see this going on in the Bible itself.60 (It is worth noting at this point how this discussion on the theology of revelation nests within Gunton’s previous analysis of the role and place of concepts in theology.) The summarizing and organizing function of a posteriori propositions or concepts is essential to catechesis and becomes reductionist only if separated from the biblical accounts from which they draw their meaning and to which they are inseparably linked. The real culprits in abstract concepts not addressed here (but thoroughly elsewhere) are the ones employed in a priori conceptual frameworks that determine in advance what and how we are able to speak of God. A further criticism of theological propositions is that they are ‘static’ in that George Lindbeck, The Nature of Doctrine: Religion and Theology in a Postliberal Age (Philadelphia, PA: Westminster Press, 1984). 56 Ibid.,  16. 57 Gunton, Revelation and Reason, 86–7; Lindbeck, Nature of Doctrine, 78. See also Gunton, Revelation and Reason, 87–9. 58 Gunton, A Brief Theology of Revelation, 8. 59 Ibid., 9–10. See F. G. Downing, Has Christianity a Revelation? (London: SCM Press, 1964). 60 Gunton, A Brief Theology of Revelation, 9–10. 55

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anything that is claimed to be truth once must be true always, meaning that faith becomes straitjacketed. This may occur, but it may also happen that the language in which they are articulated changes and different points emerge in the process. It is possible to maintain a balance between continuity and innovation in theological language.61 Gunton considers that the fuss about propositions in theology is due to ‘our tenuous hold on the tradition’.62 What is needed is to reground theology in tradition through retrieving credal confessional statements from their modernist relegation to ‘mere’ doxological affirmations and to rehabilitate them as propositions which claim that certain things are true. It is integral to what Christianity is as a revealed religion that confessional statements such as creeds hold to be true certain beliefs about God and, at least implicitly, about the world and human life. As truth claims or propositions, confessions of faith lack the tightness of doctrinal formulations and may contradict one another because they are not complete in the way systematic theology aims to be, but necessarily and vitally they cohere with biblical revelation and are consistent ‘with the earliest rule of faith and the later ecumenical councils’.63 If we hold that these confessional statements were once true, then they are always true, but this is no propositional straitjacket because their articulation is inevitably partial and revisable, requiring glossing, expansion and explanation in various ways from time to time. (For example, there is the need to contextualize them for different Christian cultures, and the insights afforded by these contextualizations, in turn, feed back into others’ understanding.) Confessions, by their very nature, have never been ‘static’ in the sense of being timeless principles written in stone. ‘They are confessions made in response to revelation, and so become, or may become, mediators of it.’64 That is, as bearers of truth, creeds and confessions are mediators of revelation and are as such revelatory, while not in themselves being revelation. ‘There are varieties of mediation, but there is one Lord. When we speak of revelation, we are speaking first of all of Jesus Christ, who thus forms the focus of all that we have to say.’65 Returning to the role of the Spirit in empowering theological language to be truly what it is, Gunton suggests that the wider revelatory work of the Holy Spirit enables various things to serve as vehicles of revelation, as the Spirit leads us into all truth. However, he considers Barth’s metaphor of Scripture as witness to be too external a way of describing the way in which God the Spirit enabled members of a community in a particular time to articulate what it was about that particular configuration of events that is uniquely significant for the salvation of the world … There is … an intrinsic relation between revelation and the words used to enable it to come to expression. And [this has a] communal dimension  … Revelation thus takes shape in an ecclesial relation between inspired teacher and inspired taught.66 Ibid.,  11. Ibid.,  12. 63 Gunton writes, 61 62

The making of confessions began early in the church, and is continuous with the practice of ancient Israel. Paul’s writings, we are told, from soon after the death and resurrection of Jesus, contain numerous confessions which are almost certainly citations of words predating him … In early times these confessions came together in what Irenaeus called the rule of faith (or, significantly, the rule of truth). (Ibid., 13–14) I bid., 14, italics original. Ibid.,  125. 66 Ibid.,  77. 64 65

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Implicit in this discussion is Gunton’s earlier insight that the Spirit mediates between the rational structure of reality and rational structure of human language, enabling language to fit reality and revelation to come to speech, and this discussion, too, forms part of the pneumatological fleshing out of Barth’s Trinitarian ‘analogy of faith’, which has now become Gunton’s own.

PREDICATION IN THEOLOGICAL LANGUAGE In Act and Being,67 Gunton returns to the critique of traditional theological language, examining more closely the Patristic origins of the problems that peaked in so-called ‘modernity’, identifying a dissenting medieval voice in Duns Scotus, again seeking a more adequate approach to theological language and analogical predication as the issue that will not go away. Patristic theology had, by the time of John of Damascus, become dominated by a kind of Platonism derived from the Greek critique of the Homeric gods, which ruled out speaking of God in language that had any material reference. As discussed earlier by Gunton, this dualistic ontology located God in the superior (more real) intellectual realm and this in turn carried assumptions about the sort of theological language capable of expressing the divine attributes. Obviously, these attributes relate to a monadic God as such an ontology is inimical to the notion of an incarnate Jesus.68 Aquinas’s doctrine of analogical predication assumes this Platonic ontology (as a Christianized form of Neoplatonism) within its causal structure of reality. As Gunton comments in Being and Becoming, this method succeeds on its own terms, but when another metaphysic is substituted for the way of causality, the predicated divine attributes become mere projections. In addition, and most fatally for Christian doctrine, its dependence on a pagan metaphysic which determines what sort of things might be said about God rules out ascribing incarnation to God; however, the doctrine may be presented as Trinitarian. In place of a knowledge of God the Father mediated through his Son, we are offered intuitive or unitive knowledge of an essentially unitarianly conceived God reached by a process of unmediated ascent – unmediated, at any rate, by anything material like the human Christ; that is to say, it is a process which is begun mediately, but ultimately reaches for the immediate, and kicks away the ladder of mere material things once the summit of the hierarchy is reached.69 All this has serious implications for theological language. It rules out any description of ‘God’s actual historical engagement with material reality, and particularly in the humanity of Jesus Christ’. For instance, all metaphors for God in terms of created things have to be rationalized and demythologized by a process of negation (God cannot be like any of these things) until all that remains are ‘philosophically construed abstractions’. The narrowness of the negative tradition of theological language (we know God only through what he is not) has effectively cut out any consideration of ‘the work of the Holy Spirit in empowering language to be what it is created to be’.70 It is not the use of analogy as such that is at fault, but the hierarchical metaphysic of reality that determines what we olin E. Gunton, Act and Being: Towards a Theology of the Divine Attributes (London: SCM Press, 2002). C Ibid.,  48–9. 69 Ibid.,  63. 70 Ibid., 67, 71–2. 67 68

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can say analogically about God. As it is, Gunton, following Duns Scotus, suggests that this particular method of analogy is not really analogy at all because it does not allow for any univocal bridging concepts as the basis for predication of attributes in common between God and creatures.71 Gunton proposes employing such a univocal bridging concept as the way forward to a broader conception of theological language: the divine attribute of love which is arguably used in the same sense of God and human agents and can be defined in terms of the same kinds of attitude and action whether divine or human, thus enabling divine love to be a pattern for human love.72 Yet more than this, if then we replace the via negativa classical rule for theological language with a rule requiring that ‘we construe all our theological terms as functions of God’s involvement through his Son in this created world, in person in Jesus of Nazareth and anticipatorily – but really – in his presences as they are recorded in the Old Testament’, what might such a non-rationalist pneumatological approach mean for our speaking of God? Gunton offers three propositions in relation to this: first, that all words are created realities, and none are more qualified than any other to describe divine being; second, words are enabled by the Holy Spirit to articulate the truth of the creator and his creation. (Quintessentially, this articulation occurs through and in the acts and words – especially parables – of the ministry of Jesus.) Third, because human beings are fallen beings, they can only articulate the truth about God and the world through a redemption of their cognitive faculties. The distortion of sin produces idolatries due to its disruption of our relationship with God. We are unable to express in words the witness to the Creator of the created world. Our language must be redeemed. To think this can be done through the via negativa is to think that we can sidestep the distortion of sin. This redemption of language is bound up with God’s redemptive work in Christ. Again, to revisit the insights of Becoming and Being in conversation with Jüngel: ‘revelation enables a gain to language of such a kind that it is empowered by God to speak of him’.73

NARRATIVE AS THEOLOGICAL LANGUAGE Narrative as theological language has been a sub-theme in Gunton’s work, addressed critically in terms of the way narrativist theologies eschew reference (regarding a divine reality beyond language as ineffable), so that biblical meaning becomes an entirely intratextual matter and the text becomes epistemologically primary. In Revelation and Reason: Prolegomena to Systematic Theology, which is a transcript of notes relating to a student seminar, Gunton refers again to the loss of mediation which occurs in reducing the gospel to narrative, or even regarding it as belonging to the genre of a realistic novel as has been the case with some postliberal theology. Against some of his school, postliberal theologian Hans Wilhelm Frei makes a positive case for narrative as the primary theological language, arguing that while the gospels do not belong to the genre ‘realistic novel’, they do resemble realistic novels as their meaning is conveyed through a combination of character, circumstance and plot. Therefore, to abstract from these

Ibid., 69. John Duns Scotus, The Oxford Commentary, citations taken from The Practice of Theology: A Reader, ed. Colin Gunton, Stephen Holmes and Murray Rae (London: SCM Press, 2001), 295. 72 ‘The two trinitarian “definitions” of God to be found in scripture [are] that he is spirit and that he is love.’ Gunton, Act and Being, 70, 108. 73 Ibid., 73–4. Jüngel, Gottes Sein ist in Werden, 22. 71

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narratives is to falsify them because understanding is lost. Frei maintains that ‘the reality of Jesus is only accessible through the mediation of an irreducible textuality’.74 Returning to Act and Being: Gunton notes the way a biographical narrative provides the grounds for an account of character and sees this as analogous to the way the doctrine of the Trinity is grounded in Scripture. He suggests that the Trinity, as a kind of identification in indicating what makes God distinctively God, resembles biographical definitions which indicate the characteristics of a person. Like them, it is open and provisional. Generalising, we can say that in scripture God is present both narratively and creedally: in narratives of actions and in creedal summaries of the meaning of those actions, summaries which were developed and systematized in the early centuries of the church’s life. To neglect the first is to risk taking the definition out of its historical setting; to neglect the second is to risk losing any account of the being of God.75 Embedded propositions, or those firmly related back to their originating narratives, retain flexibility in the mutual and inseparable interpretation of proposition and narrative which is the work of the Spirit. Thus, a more narrative approach is another way of guarding against the tendency to develop an a priori conception of God’s being. The systematizing of doctrine which occurs later in the process is thereby able to embrace a greater harmony of divine being and act. We may infer from the insights of The One, the Three and the Many that there is a mutual indwelling of the biblical narratives of action and the creedal summaries, where each needs the other to be what it is. Rational theology requires both, and both are due to the agency of the Spirit.

CONCLUSION Gunton’s aim was to produce a truly Trinitarian theology of language. There are various threads or themes running through his discussions on this topic: theological language as analogical, inspired, metaphorical, propositional, predicative and narrative. In particular he addresses the role of the Holy Spirit in the theology of language, an area neglected by Barth’s theology. Serving these discussions are insights from epistemology, philosophy and the theory of language. In this work there is a constant revisiting of earlier topics to dredge up further insights and apply new ones which means that although some discussions may seem circular, they progressively cut new ground. As to be expected, the collections of transcribed lectures which appeared posthumously under the editorship of a former student have the value of being elucidatory rather than presenting new thinking, and these have been noted where relevant. However, Gunton’s writing on this subject needs to be read as a whole if the reader is to gain a proper understanding of Gunton’s theology of language. Due to the complexity of the task, it is not always easy reading, but the resulting deepening and stretching of the reader’s understanding is more than rewarding.

Gunton, Revelation and Reason, 79. See Hans Wilhelm Frei, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative: A Study in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Hermeneutics (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1974); and Hans Wilhelm Frei, The Identity of Jesus Christ: the Hermeneutical Bases of Dogmatic Theology (Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press, 1975). 75 Gunton, Act and Being, 95–6. 74

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CHAPTER THREE

Gunton on the Trinity PAUL D. MOLNAR

Thomas F. Torrance, who is generally regarded as the most significant twentieth-century dogmatic theologian in the English-speaking world, once referred to Colin E. Gunton as an ‘authority on the doctrine of the Holy Trinity’ and as ‘one of the leading theologians in Britain’.1 These remarks are surely justified by the fact that Colin Gunton wrote extensively and well about the doctrine of the Trinity. He certainly saw and understood that the doctrine was the central doctrine of the church such that all other doctrines would be distorted if they were not rightly structured by a proper understanding of the Trinity. That is why he maintained that ‘it is only through an understanding of the kind of being that God is that we can come to learn what kind of beings we are and what kind of world we inhabit’.2 Like T. F. Torrance, Gunton maintained that to understand creation properly, one had to ‘hold together creation and redemption’. That implies that ontology, as applied to divine and human being and action, could not function properly if such ontology were discussed ‘apart from the reconstitution of our being and that of the world through the cross and resurrection of Jesus’.3 Gunton believed that a proper view of atonement contributes to Trinitarian theology just as a proper view of the Trinity contributes to a better understanding of atonement. He argued that such an understanding might actually help us ‘to understand the relation of economic and ontological Trinity more systematically than seems to be the case in much recent theology’.4 Thomas F. Torrance, The Promise of Trinitarian Theology: Theologians in Dialogue with T. F. Torrance, ed. Elmer M. Colyer (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001), 314. 2 Colin E. Gunton, The Promise of Trinitarian Theology (London: T&T Clark Continuum, 2006), xi. See also ibid., xvi, where Gunton welcomes Christoph Schwöbel’s remark that ‘Trinitarian theology therefore appears to be a summary label for doing theology that affects all aspects of the enterprise of doing theology in its various disciplines.’ 3 Ibid. That is why Gunton rightly held that he preferred to refer to a proper theology of nature rather than a ‘new’ or transformed natural theology as proposed by Torrance, when discussing the parallel rationalities of ‘created and uncreated intelligibilities’, A Brief Theology of Revelation. The 1993 Warfield Lectures (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1995), 63. It is also why he maintained that ‘we cannot know the creation apart from its redemption’, Father, Son and Holy Spirit: Essays toward a Fully Trinitarian Theology (London: T&T Clark, 2003), 112. 4 Ibid., 178. Indeed, Gunton thought that atonement might help us speak of God in himself and in relation to the world more precisely than ‘either Barth’s stress on the freedom of God or the more recent fashion for speaking of a suffering God’ (ibid.). Gunton believed that focusing on the suffering of God might reduce atonement to theodicy, thereby obviating the fact that it was an act of God in the incarnate Word which overcame our sinfulness as those at enmity against God. If, however, atonement is seen as a work of the Trinity, then a focus would also have to be on the work of the Spirit uniting us to the Son and thus to the Father, thereby enabling us to live as God’s good creatures. Thus ‘Redemption must also be an authentically human action – a true and unpolluted sacrifice of praise to God. Here it is that Jesus, taking flesh from the polluted whole, must – through the Spirit – become perfect’ since it is only in this way that ‘his gift is acceptable to God and so in turn is able to become the means of the cleansing of the whole, though only at the end will this be complete’ (ibid., 189). 1

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Hence, Gunton maintained that ‘the doctrine of atonement … functions to prevent trinitarian theology from becoming a kind of problem solving device rather than theology bound up with repentance and worship’.5 That is precisely why he could also say, ‘It is part of the pathos of Western theology that it has often believed that while trinitarian theology might well be of edificatory value to those who already believe, for the outsider it is an unfortunate barrier to belief, which must therefore be facilitated by some non-trinitarian apologetic, some essentially monotheistic “natural theology”.’6 It is this bifurcation in the doctrine of God, that is, the separation of the doctrine of the one God from the doctrine of the triune God, that Gunton rightly sought to overcome at every turn. It led him to relentlessly criticize Augustine, sometimes quite rightly, and at other times overlooking some of Augustine’s own important insights.7 Most importantly, however, Gunton believed that ‘because the doctrine of the Trinity has so much to teach about the nature of our world and life within it, it is or could be the centre of Christianity’s appeal to the unbeliever, as the good news of a God who enters into free relations of creation and redemption with his world’.8 That is precisely why he could also assert that ‘In the light of the theology of the Trinity, everything looks different.’9 Significantly, however, Gunton realized, as many of his contemporaries did not, that unless God is recognized as having his own self-sufficient existence as the eternal Father, Son and Holy Spirit, and unless our understanding of God is genuinely grounded in God’s revelation of himself, then anything said about God’s free relations of creation and

Ibid.,  xxx. Gunton, The Promise of Trinitarian Theology, 7. 7 Gunton for instance held that Augustine and many Western theologians ‘failed to appropriate the ontological achievement of his Eastern colleagues’ and thus ‘allowed the insidious return of a Hellenism in which being is not communion, but something underlying it’ (ibid., 10). This thinking is rejected by Lewis Ayres in Nicaea and Its Legacy: An Approach to Fourth-Century Trinitarian Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 385–6 and passim; and Luigi Gioia, OSB, The Theological Epistemology of Augustine’s De Trinitate (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 11, 29. For Ayres, ‘Augustine consistently and specifically rules out the idea that the divine essence is prior to the divine persons’, Nicaea and Its Legacy, 381 since ‘We do not find the unity [of God] by focusing on something different from the persons … The triune communion is a consubstantial and eternal unity – but there is nothing but the persons’ (ibid., 380). Bradley G. Green, Colin Gunton and the Failure of Augustine: The Theology of Colin Gunton in Light of Augustine (Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2011), also rejects the idea that ‘Augustine posited a divine “essence” ’ undergirding the three persons, 137. While Karl Barth rejected Augustine’s notion of the vestigia which were supposedly available for reflection directly in creation and recognizable apart from faith in the biblical revelation, he also embraced many of Augustine’s important insights on the Trinity. Even T. F. Torrance, who frequently criticized Augustine’s ‘dualistic’ separation of the ‘sensible’ and ‘intelligible’, also mentioned Augustine’s doctrine of the Trinity in a positive light more than a few times. In connection with baptism, however, Torrance thought Augustine conceptualized grace as ‘a healing medicine’ poured into ‘the wounds of humanity’ so that he ‘shifted the gravity from the mighty acts of God in Christ to what goes on in the human soul’ in such a way that baptism came to be understood as the ‘washing away of past sins’ and the impartation of an ability to ‘fulfil the law of God’ which then would enable the baptized person ‘to wipe out post-baptismal lapses through repentance and righteousness’, Theology in Reconciliation: Essays towards Evangelical and Catholic Unity in East and West (London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1975), 97–8. Barth criticized Augustine when he explicated our experience of God’s Word. Such experience for Barth ‘always takes place in an act of human self-determination. But it is not experience of the Word of God as this act’ because ‘No determination man can give himself is as such determination by God’s Word’, CD I/1, 199. Barth rejected the implication that in such experience ‘we have a simultaneity, interrelation and unity in tension between divine and human determining’ (ibid.), because that thinking ascribes to us a possibility for experiencing God. However, that possibility can only be given and received by and from the Word and can never be found within our experience as such. For Barth, Augustine mistakenly made human and divine determining ‘secretly identical’ (ibid., 200). 8 Gunton, The Promise of Trinitarian Theology, 7. 9 Gunton wrote: ‘everything looks – and, indeed, is – different in the light of the Trinity’, 4–5. 5 6

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redemption becomes meaningless; it leads to the kind of confused thinking one finds in the reflections of theologians such as Sallie McFague. In relation to McFague’s overt desire to focus ‘on God’s activity in relationship to the world and our talk about that activity’ in a way that ‘makes no claims about the so-called immanent or intrinsic trinity’ since she saw ‘no way that assumptions concerning the inner nature of God are possible’,10 Gunton described her theology as one of projectionism. Instead of allowing God’s revelation to shape her view of the creator/creature relationship, she projected metaphors for God from those experiences that mattered most to her and ended up embracing both dualistic and pantheist views of our relations with God. Such views make it impossible to speak about a genuine relationship between God and us. Gunton captured the danger of projectionism perfectly by noting that Professor D. Z. Phillips once commented on a book of essays ‘by a group of celebrated individuals entitled The God I Want’ and said that ‘he could not imagine a sillier enterprise: “It is not the God I want, but the God you are damn well going to get.” ’11 Gunton identified one of the key difficulties in McFague’s thinking as her failure to realize that Christianity as a religion depends on ‘authority in the sense that its realization of salvation – and so the constitution of true personhood – is embodied in a community of worship and belief centered on the Jesus of Scripture’.12 That authority, far from being authoritarian however, is an ‘authority of grace’ which refers to the personal self-giving of the ‘Father and of the incarnate Son’ such that the ‘pattern of divine-human action realized in Jesus of Nazareth is personal also in the sense that it recognizes the otherness and individuality of those toward whom it is exercised. There, and not in flirting with immanence and pantheism, is the key to structures of personal life in which the uniqueness and yet interrelatedness of persons is recognized and reinforced.’13 What Gunton stressed here and elsewhere was the fact that ‘The basis of community, as we learn from the theology of the Trinity, is otherness in relation. Both are crucial.’14 That certainly meant that there is otherness within the immanent Trinity and because of God’s grace and love towards us, there is otherness in our relations with God through union with Christ and by means of the action of the Holy Spirit. Although Gunton’s Trinitarian theology has been referred to as a type of social doctrine of the Trinity,15 his thinking is far removed from the social Trinitarian thinking we find in Jürgen Moltmann and others such as Catherine LaCugna. Gunton himself was quite critical of LaCugna’s work in particular because he understood her work on the Trinity in God for Us to be a polemic against the doctrine of the immanent Trinity such that ‘any doctrine of an immanent Trinity, even one derived from the economy, is to be rejected’.16 Sallie McFague, Models of God: Theology for an Ecological, Nuclear Age (Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press, 1987), 224. 11 Colin Gunton, ‘Proteus and Procrustes: A Study in the Dialectic of Language in Disagreement with Sallie McFague’, in Speaking the Christian God: The Holy Trinity and the Challenge of Feminism, ed. Alvin F. Kimel, Jr. (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1992), 69. 12 Ibid.,  76. 13 Ibid. 14 Ibid.,  79. 15 See, for example, Gijsbert Van Den Brink, ‘Social Trinitarianism: A Discussion of Some Recent Theological Criticisms’, International Journal of Systematic Theology 16, no. 3 (July 2014): 337. Nonetheless, Van Den Brink did note that Gunton considered such a label ‘highly inadequate’ (ibid., 335). 16 Colin Gunton, Review of Catherine LaCugna’s God for Us: The Trinity and Christian Life (New York: Harper Collins, 1991), Scottish Journal of Theology 47, no. 1 (1994): 136. See also, The Promise of Trinitarian Theology, xviii–xx. 10

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Importantly, Gunton concludes that her work ‘runs the danger of losing the fundamental distinction between creator and creation. In the face of the book’s polemic against the doctrine of the immanent Trinity, it can be argued that on the contrary the doctrine serves as a foundation for the relative independence and so integrity of worldly reality, and thus for human freedom.’17 Here we see a key feature of Gunton’s impressive work on the Trinity. He realized that unless what is said about God acting in the economy is grounded in who God eternally is as Father, Son and Holy Spirit, then the twin dangers of dualism (separating God and creation in deistic fashion) and pantheism (confusing God and creation) loom large. The only result of adopting either of those perspectives would be the inability to speak accurately and properly about both divine and human freedom. Gunton was clear that unless there is a proper distinction in the relation between God and creatures and unless that relation was seen to be irreversible, then the doctrine of God becomes nothing more than our conversation with ourselves using theological categories. In other words, theology becomes mythology; it loses its ontological ground in God himself. Indeed, he explicitly held that it was a mistake ‘to remain concretely relevant by casting doubt on the necessity of an immanent, or, better, ontological Trinity – of any doctrine of who and what kind of being God is in himself, in the eternal taxis or order of persons in relation’.18 That is why he was critical not only of LaCugna’s approach to the Trinity but also of Ted Peters’ approach, in his book God as Trinity, in which Peters concluded that ‘all we need to affirm is that “God is in the process of self-relating through relating to the world he loves and redeems. God is in the process of constituting himself as a God who is in relationship with what is other than God.” ’19 It is this confusion of the immanent and economic Trinity which Gunton steadfastly sought to avoid because he realized that a dependent deity could not be distinguished from us and thus could not act freely on our behalf as our reconciler and redeemer. Gunton wisely maintained that the problem with those whose views tend towards pantheism is to be found in their view of ‘selfcommunication, with its emanationist and neoplatonic – and thus ultimately pantheist – overtones’.20 In such thinking Gunton held that ultimately there is ‘only one reality, the divine-wordly emanation, which constitutes the world and then swallows it up’.21 For Gunton the outcome of ‘such a process’ ends in destroying the relevance of Trinitarian categories rather than supporting their relevance. The proof that he is correct in this assessment can be seen in LaCugna’s view that God’s love ‘spills over into what is other than God, giving birth to creation and history … we become by grace what God is already by nature, namely self-donating love for the other … To be God is to be the Creator of the world.’22 The very idea that God’s love simply spills over into creation is indeed an emanationist idea and it leads LaCugna to reduce God to his creative function and finally to conclude that ‘The doctrine of the Trinity is not ultimately a teaching about “God” but a teaching about God’s life with us and our life with each other.’23 That is just the Ibid.,  136–7. Gunton, The Promise of Trinitarian Theology, xvii. 19 Ibid. 20 Ibid.,  xix. 21 Ibid. 22 LaCugna, God for Us, 353–5. 23 Ibid., 228. LaCugna’s problem is that she confuses the missions with the eternal being of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Thus, she writes: ‘The images of “begetting” and “spirating” express the fruitfulness or fecundity of God who is alive from all eternity as a dynamic interchange of persons united in love. The temptation is to think that all of this happens “inside” God. Rather, the eternal begetting of the Son and the breathing forth of the Spirit 17 18

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pantheism that Gunton rightly sought to avoid and did indeed avoid by making a clear distinction without separation of the immanent and economic Trinity.24 One other critical point is worth mentioning here. In a real sense, Gunton was ahead of his time in arguing some twenty-two years ago that ‘the current fashion for political correctness in theological language, like so many other well-meaning modern enterprises, has the effect of making the cure worse than the disease’.25 He was referring to the increasing tendency to speak of ‘Godself ’ rather than of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. It should be remembered that, among contemporary theologians, both Barth and Torrance refused to think of God as anyone other than the eternal Father, Son and Holy Spirit confessed in the Nicene creed. They could do this because neither of them thought about God by negating human experience; rather they thought about God based on God’s naming himself to us by revealing himself to us as attested in the Bible and in the tradition. That of course is why Barth could insist that ‘We cannot say anything higher or better of the “inwardness of God” than that God is Father, Son and Holy Spirit’26 and that ‘It is not true that in some hidden depth of His essence God is something other than Father and Son.’27 Following his mentor, Robert W. Jenson, and also following Barth and Torrance in this regard, Gunton rightly held that such a linguistic change (calling God ‘Godself ’) has ‘polytheistic overtones’ and ‘indeed it implies the presence of something other than the subject in a way that the true reflexive pronoun does not’.28 Gunton then goes on to comment on LaCugna’s assertions: (‘ “The Father gives the Father’s self to the creature  …”. Really? But, we are still bound to ask, does he truly give himself, or are we being presented with a thing that is not the personal God in personal relation to his creatures?)’.29 The outcome of this linguistic change is, according to Gunton, ‘both modalistic and impersonal, so that “The Son is named Son according to its procession take place in God’s economy’ (ibid., 354). Thus, we have the pantheist conclusion that ‘God gives rise to the world just as God gives rise to God’ (ibid., 354–5). This thinking simply cannot distinguish God from creation and so leads LaCugna to claim that ‘Trinitarian life is also our life’ (ibid., 228). Moreover, she believed that ‘The mystery of existence is the mystery of the commingling of persons, divine and human, in a common life, within a common household … Our relationship to others, which is indistinguishable from our relationship to Jesus Christ, determines whether we are or are not finally incorporated into God’s household’ (ibid., 383–4). It hardly needs to be stated that our lives are not ‘commingled’ with God’s life and that our relationship to others must never be confused with our relationship to Jesus Christ which is the relation that enables us to relate properly with others in the first place. Indeed if it were true that our relationship to others determined whether or not we were in proper relation with God, that would surely be another version of self-justification; the fact that this is indeed a version of self-justification comes clearly into view in her remark that ‘Entering into divine life therefore is impossible unless we also enter into a life of love and communion with others’ (ibid., 382). Emphasis in the original. 24 Gunton was consistently adamant in arguing against ‘post-Rahnerian programmes’ that ‘collapse the immanent Trinity into the economic’, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, 71. 25 Gunton, The Promise of Trinitarian Theology, xix. 26 CD I/2, 377. Cf. also CD IV/2, 345 where Barth asserts, referring to God’s triune life, that since God ‘is Spirit’, therefore this means that before all earthly history, yet also in it, He is the One who is also for us (in His own history) transition, mediation and communication … It is He Himself who does this, and He does it out of His own most proper being. He is always active in Himself in His action among us. In what He does on earth He reveals Himself as the One he is in heaven, so that not only on earth but in heaven we have no reason to expect anything higher or better or more sure. D I/1, 432. C Gunton, The Promise of Trinitarian Theology, xix. 29 Ibid., with Gunton’s own emphasis. Gunton, referring to God for Us, 157. 27 28

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from the Father …”.’30 Gunton shrewdly concludes by asking: ‘Does even the Son lose his personal pronoun? What, then, finally, of yours and mine?’31 Gunton here raises a very significant question (also raised by Barth and Torrance) and it concerns the fact that unless we recognize that what God is towards us in his personal actions in his Word (Son) and Spirit, he is eternally in himself, then we conceptually cut ourselves loose from the reality of the triune God acting personally in relation to us in our attempt to reconstruct the doctrine of the Trinity. And this occurs by modalistically suggesting that in his inner being, and thus for us, God is not intrinsically personal as the Father who begets and knows and loves the Son and the Son who is begotten and knows and loves the Father in the unity of the Holy Spirit. Interestingly, LaCugna frequently refers to ‘Godself ’ in her book, God for Us. And her explanation of this is instructive. She says she wants to ‘engage the tradition on its own terms’ so that she might ‘come to a fresh and more adequate doctrine of the Trinity’, that is, to one that avoids speaking of God’s ‘Fatherhood’ because that has become ‘confused and divisive’ and this in itself ‘points to the need for a radically revised and revitalized trinitarian theology of God’.32 For that reason she asserts, ‘I have used the construction “God in Godself ” instead of “God in Him/Herself ” though ultimately, if what I am suggesting in this book has merit, we could eliminate these awkward reflexive pronouns by focusing on “God with us” instead of probing an intradivine realm (“God in se”).’33 This is a modalistic viewpoint first because it refuses to locate God’s eternal being and act as Father, Son and Holy Spirit in an ‘intradivine realm’ in distinction from his being with us in history. Second, it is pantheistic just as Gunton believed, because it reduces ‘Godself ’ to God’s relations with us. Finally, it is impersonal in conceptualizing God as an ‘it’ as when she writes, ‘The Son is named Son according to its procession from the Father,’34 instead of as the eternal persons in relation who draw us into relation with the Father, in, with and through his Son Jesus Christ and through his Holy Spirit. Gunton knew better than many that unless Jesus is acknowledged in his uniqueness as the one mediator between us and God the Father (because he is himself the eternal Son of the Father), Christology and Trinitarian theology will always falter.35 This is indeed very strange since LaCugna’s main argument was that person and not substance is the root of reality.36 But in using the expression ‘Godself ’, instead of referring to God the Father’s sending his Son and both the Father and Son sending the Holy Spirit to unite us to the Son and through him to the Father, does indeed open the door to an impersonal view of God. Hence, LaCugna says, following Roger Haight, that ‘we may again affirm that God, in giving Godself to us, truly bestows divine life in its fullness. God I bid., referring to God for Us, 156. Ibid. 32 LaCugna, God for Us, 18. 33 Ibid. 34 Ibid., 156, emphasis mine. 35 Gunton, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, 174–5, 180. That is why, holding atonement, Christology and the Trinity together, he asserted that if we lose the fact that ‘the Word became incarnate at a datable time and specifiable place’ then ‘we lose everything’ (ibid., 174). Hence, through his cross and resurrection we are reconciled with the Father. However, Gunton insisted that ‘the very heart of the Christian faith’ involved ‘the cross and its outcome’ so that there can be no true reconciliation ‘without the price paid by Christ on the cross and the consequent cost to those who live by it’ (ibid., 175). Gunton went on to observe that unfortunately, ‘We live in an era of cheap reconciliation, when the word comes to mouth too lightly and we assume that it is something we achieve’, 175. 36 LaCugna, God for Us, 398. Of course, this could never be true since God is three persons, one being. His personal being does not obviate his substance or ousia as the one being of God. 30 31

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who is revealed to us in the modalities of grace and redemption is none other than who God really is.’37 She does, however, wish to support an important point in recognizing and maintaining God’s freedom by asserting that ‘God’s presence to us does not exhaust without remainder the absolute mystery of God.’38 Yet, what she gives with her left hand is immediately taken away with her right hand as she states that ‘there is a practical reason to resist equating the “immanent Trinity” with “inner life of God”. The life of God is not something that belongs to God alone. Trinitarian life is also our life.’39 When this thinking about God’s life as ‘something’ rather than as the act of God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit is coupled with her statement noted above that ‘The doctrine of the Trinity is not ultimately a teaching about “God” but a teaching about God’s life with us and our life with each other’40 and her further remark that ‘the mystery of existence is the mystery of the commingling of persons, divine and human, in a common life’,41 there can be little doubt that these comments do indeed exhaust the mystery of God ‘without remainder’ into the economy. That is the pantheism Gunton quite properly objected to in her thought. And it is easy to see that this confusion follows directly from her refusal to acknowledge the reality of the immanent Trinity as God’s own life, God’s inner life as the eternal Father, Son and Holy Spirit. In stark contrast, Gunton repeatedly insists that ‘if God is truly revealed in Jesus Christ, then that is what he is like eternally’. Additionally, he insisted that ‘a distinction between God’s reality and that of the world serves the world’s interest. The doctrine of the eternal Trinity serves as a foundation for the relative independence and so integrity of worldly reality also, and thus for human freedom.’42

GUNTON AND BARTH Gunton had a long and interesting relationship with the theology of Karl Barth. In his book, Becoming and Being, which began its life as a doctoral thesis at Oxford, Gunton distinguished himself as an important commentator on Barth’s theology. In that work Gunton demonstrated the importance of a systematic theology properly grounded in the reality of God by comparing Karl Barth’s view with that of Charles Hartshorne. As Gunton himself noted, these were two very different approaches to the doctrine of God. Much can be learned from such a comparison. In the preface to the second edition of that work, ‘more than ten books later’ than his first edition, Gunton stressed that with a ‘hindsight’ of around thirty years he still realized how important it was to be introduced ‘to the question of God … especially in a decade when the very reality of God had been called into question even by theologians’.43 In that volume, Gunton clearly held that Barth was a ‘master teacher’ by contesting both what he characterized as the ‘classical concept of God’ which was dependent on ‘a hierarchical ordering of reality’44 in which entities exist on a higher and lower plane of being. This meant that Thomas Aquinas’s Five Ways illustrated this classical view of God, according to Gunton, so that ‘Nature Ibid.,  228. Ibid. 39 Ibid. 40 Ibid. 41 Ibid.,  383. 42 Gunton, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, 23. 43 Colin E. Gunton, Becoming and Being: The Doctrine of God in Charles Hartshorne and Karl Barth, 2nd edn (London: SCM Press, 2001), xi. 44 Ibid.,  3. 37 38

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contains motion, it is moved, and by negation it emerges that God is the sole unmoved mover; nature is caused, God the causeless cause, untouched by finite cause and effect; nature is contingent, God the timeless necessity.’45 Gunton explained that each of the Five Ways consisted of ‘a version of the classical Greek quest to find the timeless in the midst of time’.46 Gunton focused especially on Thomas’s Third Way which was dependent ‘upon a hierarchy of beings, from the purely contingent, through the conditionally necessary, to God, the absolutely necessary’.47 However, as Hume noticed, without that supposed hierarchy, there was ‘no reason why … the universe should not be the necessary being’. And this is precisely the problem in the classical view of God that both Hartshorne and Barth opposed for very different reasons. Importantly, Gunton concluded that Aquinas appeared to have confused logical and ontological necessity in his exposition of those proofs with the result that it seemed difficult to see how ‘contingency is possible at all’ since such logic seemed to lead directly to a pantheistic view in which ‘everything takes place through the necessity of a timeless logic’.48 This last alternative might or might not have been part of Aquinas’s thought, but in Gunton’s estimation, it was certainly the view of the ‘forthright rationalism’ combined with certain suppositions from modern science employed by Hartshorne. What was the key problem? It was that ‘Classical theology, with its doctrine of analogy and its negative theology, sees nature as being semi-independent of God.’49 Few contemporary theologians offered clearer ideas about the developments of modern theology in relation to this classical approach than did Colin Gunton. He noted the influence of Hume and Kant in demonstrating that the existence of God cannot be proven from the world, explaining that for modern Protestant and secular thought there were only two possible directions: (1) idealism which followed Hegel so that ‘God is increasingly understood in terms of the cosmic process’50 and (2) the ‘path taken by Karl Barth’ which was to find the point of departure for theology in revelation. Hartshorne’s process theology exemplified his starting point ‘in pure reason’51 while Barth’s theology exemplified his in revelation, in its identity with Jesus Christ. Of course this did not mean that Gunton was uncritical of Barth. Far from it. He criticized Barth for not having a proper doctrine of the Holy Spirit and for a tendency towards modalism even though Gunton firmly asserted that Barth was no modalist.

Ibid. Ibid. 47 Ibid.,  4. 48 Ibid.,  4–5. 49 Ibid.,  5. 50 Ibid., 6. In case anyone might suppose that Gunton missed the mark in this regard, just consider the fact that Gordon Kaufman for instance wrote that ‘The symbol “God” suggests a reality, an ultimate tendency or power, which is working itself out in an evolutionary process … God – this whole grand cosmic evolutionary movement – is giving birth, after many millennia, to finite freedom … God is here understood as that ecological reality behind and in and working through all of life and history.’ Gordon Kaufman, Theology for a Nuclear Age (Philadelphia, PA: Westminster Press, 1985), 43–4. Consider also the view of John F. Haught who explicitly sought to understand revelation in light of evolution and asked ‘What does revelation mean in terms of the evolutionary nature of the cosmos? If we look at it in the context of an evolutionary universe, revelation is the full unfolding and blossoming forth of the universe itself ’, The Revelation of God in History (Wilmington, DE: Michael Glazier, 1988), 24. These remarks support Gunton’s view that understanding God in terms of the cosmic process always leads towards a pantheistic confusion of God and revelation with the world itself. 51 Ibid.,  7. 45 46

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Gunton held that ‘Barth is always at his weakest when it comes to the Spirit.’52 Thus, since Barth held that God could only be known through God, he was, according to Gunton, unable to ‘specify an action of the Spirit except in terms of “God Himself in His freedom exercised in revelation to be present to His creature.” ’53 In Gunton’s view, the problem here concerns the fact that Barth did not stress that the Holy Spirit is ‘the one enabling the creation truly to be itself.’54 The problem, however, with Gunton’s presentation is that he follows Edward Irving and claims, for example, that Jesus did escape indefectibility but not ‘through some inbuilt divine programming … but by virtue of his free acceptance of the Spirit’s guidance’.55 Yet, the very idea that Jesus was sinless only because of his free acceptance of the Spirit’s guidance tends to separate the Spirit from the Word. And, as Thomas F. Torrance noted with regard to Irving’s position, he ‘held that the sinlessness of Jesus Christ was not due to his own nature but to the indwelling of the Spirit’.56 Torrance rightly rejected that thinking because in a real sense it does not take the hypostatic union seriously enough; if it had, Irving and Gunton both would not have

Colin E. Gunton, The Barth Lectures, ed. P. H. Brazier (London: T&T Clark International, 2007), 82. See also ibid., 90. 53 Gunton, Christ and Creation. The Didsbury Lectures, 1990 (Carlisle: Paternoster Press 1992), 51. In actuality, of course, Barth held that the Holy Spirit was Holy precisely as the Spirit who was and remains homoousios with the Father and the Son. As such the Spirit never acts independently of the Word but rather attests what the incarnate Word did to accomplish our salvation in his own life, death and resurrection. As such the Spirit here and now enables us to attest this and to live in union with Christ (see George Hunsinger, ‘The Mediator of Communion: Karl Barth’s Doctrine of the Holy Spirit’, in Cambridge Companion to Karl Barth, ed. John Webster [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000, 177–94.]). Thus, Hunsinger explains that believers become ‘members of one another’ as ‘the Holy Spirit unites them with Christ by faith’ (ibid., 179). And they receive an ‘indirect share in the primordial communion that obtains between the Father and the Son to all eternity’ through this union with Christ (ibid.). The Spirit also ‘plays a role in originating and maintaining the incarnation, or the communion between Christ’s deity and humanity’ and ‘in sustaining through time the primordial communion between the incarnate Son and his heavenly Father’ (ibid.). In Barth’s theology therefore, ‘the saving work of the Spirit is trinitarian in ground, Christocentric in focus, miraculous in operation, communal in content, eschatological in form, diversified in application, and universal in scope’ (ibid.). For these and other reasons, I agree with John Webster who claimed that Gunton ‘associated Barth rather too quickly with what he took to be the features of Augustine’s theology’ with the result that he did not do justice to Barth’s Reformed stress on ‘the strictly non-reversible yet utterly real relation of God and God’s active human creatures’, ‘Gunton and Barth’, in The Theology of Colin Gunton, ed. Lincoln Harvey (London: T&T Clark International, 2010), 17–31, 28. Webster noted that Barth’s view of divine freedom did not equate this with some ‘pure transcendence’ which would overlook the Christology and the human life of Jesus as the incarnate Word as Gunton suggested Barth did. Rather, while Gunton thought there were docetic tendencies in Barth’s Christology because of a lack of emphasis on the Spirit and a ‘prioritising of the divine nature of the incarnate one’, Webster properly asserted that these criticisms of Barth by Gunton were largely ‘misplaced’ just because they ‘rest on a separation of Word and Spirit which gives little room to the Word’s continuing activity in the history of the incarnate one’, 28. Indeed Webster forcefully and rightly asserted, against Gunton’s view, that one really had to search hard to find any serious interest by Barth in Jesus’ human action as free action, that that was ‘an extraordinary judgement … and one which surely cannot be sustained from a reading of the doctrine of reconciliation’ (ibid., 25). Gunton was also critical of Barth’s handling of the virgin birth. For a full discussion of Gunton and Barth, see Paul D. Molnar, Divine Freedom and the Doctrine of the Immanent Trinity: In Dialogue with Karl Barth and Contemporary Theology, 2nd edn (London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2017), 483–527. Gunton was not always as careful as he might have been in handling Barth’s theology. Thus, on the one hand he could rightly say that for Barth it is ‘because God loves us in time’ that ‘we know that he is love’ and that ‘love characterizes the being of God to the very heart’, The Barth Lectures, 100. On the other hand, he could also say, incorrectly, that ‘Because God is love in time he is love in eternity’ (ibid.). It is exactly the other way around for Barth – because God is love in himself, therefore he is the one who loves us in time. 54 Ibid. 55 Gunton, The Promise of Trinitarian Theology, 67–8. 56 Thomas F. Torrance, The Doctrine of Jesus Christ (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2002), 122. 52

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traced Jesus’ sinlessness only to the action of the Spirit, and not to the fact that the union of the sinful humanity that Christ assumed into union with his divine being as the Word was such that ‘In this Union the flesh of Christ becomes Holy though it is a member of humanity under the curse of the law, under the ban of God’s wrath. Thus we are to think of Christ’s flesh as perfectly and completely sinless in his own nature, not simply in virtue of the Spirit as Irving puts it.’57 What Torrance meant was that because there was a real union of our sinful human nature with the Word in the incarnation, therefore God could not come into conflict with himself as would happen if Jesus were to will to disobey his Father and not live out his mission for us.58 He was not pre-programmed as Gunton fears. Torrance was not advocating any sort of docetic Christology, but a Christology which did not separate the Spirit from the Word so that Christ himself never even willed to sin because of who he was and not just because of the Spirit – that latter idea functionally implies a separation of Jesus’ humanity and divinity. And that is the very thinking that undermines the power of Christ’s revealing and reconciling activity which did indeed take place in the power of his Holy Spirit there and then and is actualized in us here and now through the power of his resurrection as the Spirit enables our union with Christ through faith. Karl Barth argued in a similar way that because Jesus himself was the Word acting as revealer and reconciler in his humanity, the revealing and reconciling power of the human Jesus did not come from his humanity as such but from the power of the Word acting in union with the Holy Spirit. Another disagreement can be seen in the way each theologian understood analogies. Barth was adamant and consistent in rejecting any notion that there were analogies for speaking about God and God’s relations with us that are true in themselves, insisting that ‘no anthropological or ecclesiological assertion is true in itself and as such’.59 By comparison and in spite of his rejection of the analogia entis, Gunton flirted with the idea that there were indeed analogies which were true in themselves as when he wondered whether ‘there are concepts without which we cannot make sense of our world – or rather, more positively, that enable us to think our world? Put more carefully, may it not be suggested that inherent within certain words there lies the possibility of conceiving things as they are?’60 Ibid. Torrance puts it this way:

57 58

He [Jesus] could not sin against what he was, the very Love of God incarnate. The fact that Christ is one with God in Will and Purpose and Love means that he could not have sinned any more than God could have sinned; though by the very fact that he became man he was subjected to temptation in a way that God is not in himself, for God cannot be tempted … as one with the Word … Christ could not have moved against God; that is an absurdity. Christ could not be what he was not. He was the Word of God and could not be anything else than the Word of God become man; thus even in temptations which were so fearfully real, he was always the Word of God, the Son, the Express image of God; for him to have sinned would have meant that he was not the Christ, Doctrine of Jesus Christ, 129. 59 CD II/1, 149. 60 Gunton, The Promise of Trinitarian Theology, 138. For Gunton, ‘An open transcendental is a notion, in some way basic to the human thinking process, which empowers a continuing and in principle unfinished exploration of the universal marks of being’, The One, the Three and the Many: God, Creation and the Culture of Modernity. The Bampton Lectures 1992 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 142. For Gunton ‘the heart of the difference between idea and transcendental’ is found in the fact that ‘God is spirit by virtue of the unqualified openness of the triune persons to each other and his free and unnecessitated movement outwards in creation and redemption to that which is not God’ (ibid., 188). Further, he says that ‘human beings have spirit because they are open to God, each other and the world in the peculiar although limited way that characterizes personal

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By contrast Barth insisted that while we really do know God with our views and concepts as God enables such knowledge in revealing himself to us, nevertheless ‘real knowledge of God’ means that we apprehend God ‘in His hiddenness’ and thus comprehend him in his incomprehensibility. This, because ‘it is by God Himself – namely, by His revelation – that we are led to the knowledge of Him’.61 For this reason, this must never mean ‘that our human viewing, conceiving and speaking possess their own capacity for God – even a capacity awakened and actualised by revelation and faith’.62 Barth here firmly rejects the idea that even the possibility of knowing the Trinity or even the fact that God is Spirit is resident ‘within certain words’ as Gunton supposes. Barth insists that when we really know God ‘It is not a deification of man and of a human word if we ascribe this correctness to it and consequently take it upon our lips. We are not trusting in a power of apprehension and therefore of correctness immanent in us or in this word.’63 In his embrace of the Eastern tradition as he understood that, Gunton opposed the Western view, especially as that came to expression in Thomas’s thinking, that the relations within the Trinity of begetting and spiration were identified with the persons. This, because he held that ‘the persons in relation to one another constitute the “being” of God’ such that ‘what it is to be, for God to be is to be Father, Son and Spirit in certain relationships’.64 So for Gunton, Western theologians such as Calvin and Thomas who spoke of ‘three “relations” subsisting in the “being” of God’ were finally in danger of modalism since he thought that ‘If you say that persons are subsistences in the “being” of God, then you are implying that the “being” of God is different from the “persons”.’ One could then ask: ‘If something “subsists” in God then what is this “being”?’65 As Gunton

beings’ (ibid.). Here we see two assertions that Barth would regard as more than a little problematic: (1) Gunton’s analogy here, based on his view of transcendentals, does not in fact make the kind of clear distinction between the immanent and economic Trinity that he himself stressed as important since he claims that God is Spirit not only because the persons of the Trinity are open to each other but because the Trinitarian persons are freely open to the world. For Barth, God is Spirit simply because God eternally exists as the one who loves in freedom in himself and certainly not because he freely relates with the world of his creation. (2) He claims that humans have spirit because they are open to God, each other and the world. But for Barth human beings have spirit since they are God’s creatures; but revelation discloses that, since the Fall, they are not open to God but closed to God and in need of reconciliation to become open to God. Of course Gunton would agree with this last point as he rightly insists elsewhere when he says, ‘After the Fall, the Spirit works only in the context of opposition’, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, 112; the choice in this context is not between the idea that grace either perfects nature or abolishes it, but the realization that ‘something more than a mere perfecting is needed’ (ibid.), and that something concerns the fact the fallenness of the world’s human inhabitants requires ‘redemption before they can be perfected’ (ibid.). However, his view of transcendentals leads him into conflict with his own assertions regarding reconciliation. 61 CD II/1, 192. 62 Ibid.,  194. 63 Ibid., 226. Hence, in his view of God’s grace Barth held that its form within the immanent Trinity is indeed real but hidden from us since in God himself where it is not yet a special turning, not yet condescension, not yet an overcoming of opposition, where it is manifest in the pure love and grace which binds the Father with the Son and the Son with the Father by the Holy Spirit – from this sphere and source alone can it become what in our experience we know it to be: a turning towards the creature, a condescension, an overcoming of resistance. (Ibid., 358) Importantly, however, since our knowledge of God is always a question ‘of our continually making clear to ourselves how God gains control over us’ therefore ‘we must not cling to any of our ideas. For this reason we must constantly be prepared to allow our ideas to be qualified and expanded’ (ibid.). Indeed, we ‘must not cling to our idea of grace as though our understanding of God had no need to grow, as though this idea of ours enabled us to acquire control over God’ (ibid.). 64 Gunton, The Barth Lectures, 86. 65 Ibid.,  87.

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saw it, the Eastern view was that the persons constituted the being of God while the Western view was that God’s being was ‘something underlying the “persons” ’.66 In a way this is an odd position for him to have taken since for Athanasius and those following his thinking each person of the Trinity is fully God and yet fully God in relation to the other persons of the Trinity in such a way that, perichoretically, there was a complete interpenetration of the persons so that one could never envision God’s oneness without the three persons in view. That is one reason why Athanasius famously held that it was more godly and more accurate to think of the Father through the Son instead of from the things God has made. In any case, Gunton says of Barth’s view of the Trinity that ‘he is uncomfortable with the three persons of God’ and this illustrates that ‘he is a typical Westerner’.67 Barth, he says, thinks of God as one person in three modes of being. Gunton notes that ‘Barth is not a modalist in the old way because he wants to say that all of these are God.’68 Gunton rightly asserts that modalism traditionally meant that God only appeared in history as Father, Son and Spirit but that we really do not know who the real God is. And while he says that Barth’s thinking comes near to this, he also admits that, for Barth, God finally is God only as the eternal Father, Son and Spirit, as Barth repeatedly insists throughout the Church Dogmatics. Strangely, Gunton embraced the traditional idea that ‘Western theologians tend to begin with the one as the God and tend to fit the three in whereas the Eastern theologians begin with the three and the fact that the Father, Son and Spirit make themselves known and then try to show how that can be one.’69 The danger they faced was the danger of tritheism. Yet the danger faced by Augustine and subsequently by Barth, Gunton held, is the danger of modalism ‘because the oneness is given and then the three are fitted in’.70 In relation to Barth’s theology, however, this is indeed an odd position to have taken because if anything is certain about Barth’s thinking, it is that he insisted and consistently carried through his point, that theology must always begin and end with Jesus Christ himself as the incarnate Word. That is why he vigorously asserted that ‘One need not expect that the dogma and dogmatics of the Church will simply confirm any monotheism or let itself be measured by any monotheism.’71 For Barth ‘Only the substantial equality of Christ and the Spirit with the Father is compatible with monotheism.’72 For this reason Barth maintained that the point from the very first and self-evidently [regarding Christian monotheism] is both the oneness of God and also the threeness of God, because our real concern is with revelation, in which the two are one … all anti-trinitarianism feels it must confess the threeness on the basis of Scripture and the oneness on the basis of reason, that it must then combine them, which it naturally cannot do because it is prevented already by the difference in the sources from which and the sense in which it speaks of the two.73

Ibid. Ibid. 68 Ibid.,  88. 69 Ibid., 96. This is an idea that T. F. Torrance rejected (The Christian Doctrine of God, One Being Three Persons [Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1996], 29) and that, as noted above, has been discredited by Lewis Ayres. 70 Ibid. Gunton adds at this point that he thinks Augustine is ‘the fountainhead of our troubles’ (ibid.). 71 CD I/1, 354. 72 Ibid.,  353. 73 Ibid.,  352. 66 67

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It was precisely for this reason that Barth held that there was only one root for the doctrine of the Trinity, which could not be found in a vestigium within human memory, understanding and will, for instance, but only in Christ himself in his essential unity with the Father and the Holy Spirit. In a proper Trinitarian theology one must affirm both the revelation of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit and the unity of this God; they are not in conflict with each other.

GUNTON AND TORRANCE Let us briefly consider Colin Gunton’s relationship with Thomas F. Torrance. As noted above, Torrance thought very highly of Gunton’s Trinitarian theology. And Gunton regularly cited Torrance’s theology in a positive way, especially as it related to Torrance’s view of the Atonement. However, Gunton also offered some criticisms of Torrance that are worth considering. Gunton mentioned that his first memory of T. F. Torrance was from a gathering of students in 1963 in Bristol where Torrance stressed ‘the necessity for scientist and theologian alike to obeise themselves before the reality which they served’.74 Gunton noted that in his doctrine of God Torrance stressed that ‘God’s objective truth’ had to be allowed to determine our subjective apprehension as well as the limits of human understanding since ‘the truth is prior to our appropriation of it’.75 Gunton then mentioned a later conference where Karl Rahner’s doctrine of the Trinity was discussed. Some present were considering their ‘profound disquiet with some of Rahner’s theology’ and they took their concerns to Torrance ‘who placed the whole thing in somewhat wider context, before spending the night writing a response to the conference which summed its proceedings up magisterially’.76 Gunton himself presents a magisterial summary of Torrance’s thinking which opposed ‘the modalist temptation to posit a God lying behind his acts’ instead of allowing for the

Colin Gunton, ‘Being and Person: T. F. Torrance’s Doctrine of God’, in The Promise of Trinitarian Theology, ed. Colyer, 115–37, 115. 75 Ibid. 76 Ibid. That paper, entitled ‘Toward an Ecumenical Consensus on the Trinity’, was originally published in Theologische Zeitschrift, 31, 1975, 337–50 and later in Torrance’s book, Trinitarian Perspectives: Toward Doctrinal Agreement (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1994), 77–102. This was a summation of the 1975 colloquy held in Switzerland from March 18 to 21 which discussed Rahner’s volume, The Trinity (New York: Herder and Herder, 1970). Torrance once told me that he deliberately did not invite Rahner to the conference because he was concerned that he might take over the discussion and that might inhibit a candid consideration of his position. For my own assessment of Torrance’s analysis of and critique of Rahner, see Thomas F. Torrance: Theologian of the Trinity (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009) and Divine Freedom and the Doctrine of the Immanent Trinity, 2nd edn, ­chapters 6 and 7. In sum, Torrance supported Rahner’s stated approach which was to begin with revelation, that is, with the incarnation so that ‘the Economic Trinity’ would be ‘the norm for all our thought and speech about God’ in a way that would eliminate ‘the isolation of the treatise On the Triune God (De Deo Trino) from the treatise On the One God (De Deo Uno)’ since such an approach would, among other things, bring Roman Catholic and Evangelical theology together ‘especially as represented by the teaching of Karl Barth’, Trinitarian Perspectives, 77–8. However, he also noted that the way in which Rahner expressed ‘the Economic Trinity as immanent, that is, as it is in God’ was presented ‘in such a way that it precinds (sic.) from God’s free selfcommunication, and so a moment of abstraction appears to be introduced between what God is in himself and the mode of his self-revelation and self-communication to us’ (ibid., 79). That is a nice way of saying that Rahner had introduced what Torrance would later call a logical necessity into his understanding of the Trinity. In effect, what that meant was that instead of actually beginning his theology exclusively with the revelation of God in the incarnation, Rahner began elsewhere, that is, with his transcendental analysis of human knowledge of God. That starting point in fact was antithetical to Barth’s own theology which insistently held that Jesus Christ must be both the first and final word in theology. 74

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fact that God’s being and acts are one in virtue of the homoousion.77 In this, Torrance followed Athanasius and Barth. Gunton mentions the influence of Michael Polanyi as well as Torrance’s strong opposition to every form of dualism, especially Kantian dualism, with its idealist bent. Torrance was a realist who held that ‘theological concepts must have a corresponding empirical purchase if they are not to fly dualistically off into a theology which is not rooted in the Gospel’.78 In many ways Torrance and Gunton are at one in holding that all theology must begin with the economic Trinity and avoid every form of projectionism. They also agreed on distinguishing without separating the immanent and economic Trinity in ways that would avoid reading logical necessities back into the immanent Trinity and thus confusing history and eternity.79 There is no space here to give an extensive analysis and critique of Gunton’s assessment of Torrance’s theology. I have offered that elsewhere.80 Here I will simply mention several noteworthy concerns. First, Gunton quite rightly and helpfully explains that Torrance followed Athanasius to insist that while God was always Father, he was not always creator ‘because while the Son comes from his being, the world is, ex nihilo, the product of his will’.81 By linking both creation and incarnation equally together as ‘works of the divine will’ Athanasius was able to ‘demonstrate the freedom of God’. Insightfully, Gunton maintains that this stress on God’s freedom became especially clear in Torrance’s discussion of Rahner’s so-called rule concerning the identity of the immanent and economic Trinity. Gunton writes that Torrance ‘justifiably accuses Rahner of abstraction, an abstraction which takes the form in this case of the classic idealist mistake of confusing the order of knowing with the order of being so that “there is being confused a movement of logical thought from one doctrine of the Trinity to another” ’.82 Torrance was accusing Rahner of confusing the factual necessity of God communicating himself to us in the incarnation (a fact which once it occurs is said to be necessary in the sense that it is done and cannot be undone) with a logical necessity, that is, a necessary movement of thought which fails to respect God’s freedom as depicted by Athanasius. Second, Gunton rightly praises Torrance’s major contribution to discussion of the issue of the Filioque which to this day divides the Orthodox from the Western churches. Gunton noted that Torrance was able to bring the two together ‘by adopting a position which precedes and so relativizes their differences’.83 If the Orthodox and Roman Catholic church had followed the teaching of Athanasius and held that ‘the procession of the Spirit from the Father is inextricably bound up with “the generation of the Son from the Father which exceeds and transcends the thoughts of men”,’ then ‘the procession, coming as it Ibid.,  116. Ibid.,  117. 79 Ibid.,  123. 80 Many issues are raised by Gunton such as the Filioque, the element of subordinationism in Barth’s Trinitarian theology as well as the issue of modalism. Fuller discussions of these issues may be found in Molnar, ‘The Obedience of the Son in the Theology of Karl Barth and of Thomas F. Torrance’, Scottish Journal of Theology 67, no. 1 (2014): 50–69; ‘Thomas F. Torrance and the Problem of Universalism’, Scottish Journal of Theology 68, no. 2 (2015): 164–86; ‘Theological Issues Involved in the Filioque’, in Ecumenical Perspectives on the Filioque for the 21st Century, ed. Myk Habets (London: T&T Clark, 2014), 20–39 and, specifically regarding Gunton, ­chapter 10 of Divine Freedom and the Doctrine of the Immanent Trinity, 2nd edn, and regarding Gunton and Torrance, the Appendix. 81 Gunton, ‘Being and Person’, 123. 82 Ibid. 83 Ibid.,  129. 77 78

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does from the being of the Father rather than from his person, involves the whole of the Godhead in such a way that a choice between the two positions should not be required’.84 Finally, it would be helpful to conclude this brief consideration of Gunton and Torrance by mentioning a number of Torrance’s own rejoinders to Gunton’s essay on his theology of the Trinity. First, regarding Gunton’s positive view that Barth read an economic subordination back into the immanent Trinity, Torrance replied that the economic subordination of the Son was to be understood properly ‘of the incarnate Son, but may not be read back into the eternal Godhead unless one operates with the altogether dubious idea that the Father is the “cause” of the being of the Son, as both Basil and Gregory Nyssen held, a notion which Gregory of Nazianzus rightly rejected in line with the teaching of Athanasius’.85 It may have been this dubious idea that also led Torrance to assert that his disagreements with Gunton likely stemmed from the different approach to ‘Greek patristic theology’ offered by Gunton, which Torrance suggested was ‘due in part to his friend John Zizioulas’. Against this, Torrance noted that his view was ‘closer to that of the Greek Orthodox theologians in the University of Athens who disagree with him [Zizioulas] quite radically’.86 Torrance strongly rejected reading subordination back into the immanent Trinity because he also firmly rejected any introduction of causality into the immanent Trinity. Torrance maintained that ‘it was and is a grave mistake to import aitia, or causality, into our understanding of Triune relations in God’ since that leads to the mistaken ideas that the Father is ‘uncaused’ or ‘underived Deity’ while the Son and Spirit are ‘caused or derived Deities’.87 Second, Torrance objected to Gunton’s claim that his notion of perichoresis was derived primarily from the economy and not from the persons of the Trinity within the eternal being of God. The truth is that Torrance did indeed ground his view of perichoresis within the immanent Trinity, as when he wrote that the persons of the Trinity must be understood as ‘more than distinctive relations, for they really subsist, and coexist hypostatically, in the one Being of God without being confused with one another, for they are other than one another’.88 Indeed, for Torrance the doctrine of perichoresis, when transferred from Christology to the doctrine of the Trinity, does not simply indicate the oneness of the persons, but it also deepens and strengthens our understanding of the hypostatic distinctions within the Trinity … it does not dissolve the distinctions between the three divine persons unipersonally into the one Being of God … it establishes those distinctions by showing that it is precisely through their reciprocal relations with one another … that three divine Persons constitute the very Communion which the one God eternally is, or which they eternally are … They [the Persons] all coexist enhypostatically in the Communion of the Holy Trinity without being confused with one another, and without differing from one another in respect of their homoousial Being and homogeneous nature.89

Ibid. Thomas F. Torrance, ‘Thomas Torrance Responds’, in The Promise of Trinitarian Theology, 316. See also Molnar, ‘The Obedience of the Son’, for additional references to this issue in Torrance’s writings. 86 Ibid.,  315. 87 Ibid.,  317. 88 Torrance, Trinitarian Perspectives, 28. 89 Torrance, The Christian Doctrine of God, 175. 84 85

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Third, in light of the lengthy citation just presented, one can easily see why Torrance thought that Gunton’s criticism of him for so stressing the homoousion that he ran the risk of ‘flattening out the particularities, so that divine being tends to be stressed at the expense of the divine persons’90 was mistaken. Torrance believed Gunton misinterpreted his use of the terms ousia and hypostasis with regard to the objective relations of the persons of the Trinity.91 Gunton claimed that Torrance read the homoousion back into the theology of Athanasius in a way that compromised the ‘particular being of the three persons of the Godhead’,92 as when he wrote that ‘ “the fullness of the Father’s Being is the Being of the Son and of the Spirit” ’.93 However, all Torrance intended to stress with that remark was that each of the persons of the Trinity is fully divine so that no idea of partialism or subordinationism could be read back into the Trinity. Indeed, he wanted to emphasize that it really is more accurate to think of the Father through the Son just because the persons of the Trinity are perichoretically one in being in their personal relations. Finally, while Gunton thought that Augustine misunderstood the theology of the East, Torrance sought to remind him that Augustine was in fact influenced by Gregory Nazianzus’s conception of relation.94 One further item should be mentioned. Above we noted that there was a disagreement between Torrance and Gunton with regard to the function of the Holy Spirit. Gunton sided with Edward Irving while Torrance criticized Irving’s view for essentially separating the Spirit from the Word. It is worth noting here that there are practical consequences to that problematic move. While Gunton quite properly wished to maintain the perfection of the one being of God in three persons within the immanent Trinity, his overemphasis on the Spirit led him to make statements that seemed to undermine that perfection. Thus, Gunton wrote, because the Holy Spirit is the agent of the Father’s perfecting and transforming work as it is realised by relating the creation to God through Jesus Christ, it follows that we can cautiously draw conclusions from the Spirit’s perfecting work to a speculation that he may, similarly, perfect the being of God, in a way parallel to, but distinctly different from, Augustine’s teaching that the Spirit is the bond of love between the Father and Son.95 But if God simply exists as the one who loves in freedom and is perfect in himself, then God’s inner being does not need perfecting; what needs perfecting is the fallen creation which God reconciles to himself in Christ through the Spirit in his actions ad extra. This is not an isolated remark. It seems to follow the overemphasis on the Spirit in Gunton’s thought as he is indebted to the views of Edward Irving. Thus ‘the Spirit’s distinctive inner-trinitarian being is oriented not on inwardness, but on otherness: as perfecter both of the eternal divine communion … and of God’s love for the other in creation and redemption.’96 Does the Holy Spirit really need to perfect the divine communion within the immanent Trinity? Gunton clearly thought so when he wrote that ‘the Spirit is the

unton, ‘Being and Person’, 129. G Ibid., 316–17. 92 Ibid.,  131. 93 Ibid. Torrance made that statement in The Christian Doctrine of God, 116. 94 Ibid.,  317. 95 Gunton, The Promise of Trinitarian Theology, xxvii. 96 Gunton, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, 86. 90 91

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perfecting cause not only of the creation, but also of the being of God … the Spirit perfects the divine and holy Trinity’.97 Interestingly, Paul Cumin interprets Gunton with the claim that ‘the Father “causes” and the Spirit “completes” the divine life’.98 All of this thinking is more than a little problematic because in reality the Father is not the cause of either the Son’s being or the being of the Spirit. Introducing such a notion of causality into the divine being compromises God’s self-sufficiency. It also opens the door to some type of subordinationism within the Trinity with ideas that the Son and Spirit are ‘derived’ deities, as Torrance rightly observed, following Calvin. In reality, the Holy Spirit is the bond of perfect love within the Trinity simply because God, as Father, Son and Holy Spirit, is love in himself from and to all eternity. God’s inner life does not need any completion and it certainly does not need to be caused because it already and always was and is what it is in the freedom of God’s transcendence as the one who loves simply because he loves. While Gunton clearly and rather consistently wanted to avoid any idea that God needed relations with us to be God, he occasionally made fuzzy statements such as that it is the function of the Spirit ‘to perfect the love of the Father and the Son by moving it beyond itself’.99 This remark unfortunately leaves the door open to such problematic ideas. This seems to be confirmed by Gunton’s statement that there is a ‘(small) moment of truth in claims, made from Origen onwards, that God is in some way necessarily creator, and so must create’.100 To his credit, Gunton immediately and properly asserts that this ‘claim must be rejected, because if God must create there is a loss of freedom both for God and for the created world’.101 Still, the very notion that there is an element of truth in the idea that God is in some way necessarily creator, perhaps inadvertently, opens the door to such thinking. Gunton’s laudable goal of course was to avoid the idea that in creating God was acting arbitrarily. But it seems unnecessary to have to try to find the reason for God’s creating the world in the idea that God’s love required him to create, rather than in the fact that God simply loves and chooses to love us in the freedom and self-sufficiency that is his alone.

CONCLUSION By way of conclusion, we may say that while certain emphases and questions could be raised to some of Gunton’s reflections, especially his unrelenting attacks on Augustine, and his suspicions about Barth’s tendency towards modalism, as well as his criticisms of Torrance discussed above, the fact remains that his writing on the doctrine of the Trinity offers much that is substantive, especially today when theologians continue to follow the thinking of those who regularly separate or confuse the immanent and the economic Trinity. His most important contribution to Trinitarian doctrine is his consistent insight that unless we recognize and assert God’s freedom in a properly theological way, we will also undermine any true perception of human freedom. He stressed this consistently and brilliantly, not only in connection with the relations between creator and creature but

Gunton, cited by Paul Cumin, ‘The Taste of Cake: Relation and Otherness with Colin Gunton and the Strong Second Hand of God’, in The Theology of Colin Gunton, 78. 98 Ibid.,  79. 99 Colin E. Gunton, Theology through the Theologians: Selected Essays, 1972–1995 (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1996), 127; emphasis in the original. 100 Ibid. 101 Ibid. 97

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also in our relations with each other. He also held together reconciliation and revelation in ways that many of our contemporaries do not. Spending time therefore on Gunton’s Trinitarian theology is well worth the effort.

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CHAPTER FOUR

Gunton on creation CHRISTOPH SCHWÖBEL

THE PLACE OF THE THEME OF CREATION IN COLIN GUNTON’S THEOLOGY If one surveys Colin Gunton’s wide-ranging corpus of writings, from his doctoral thesis at Oxford to his last book Father, Son and Holy Spirit,1 from research papers, scholarly monographs to his sermons,2 one quickly gains the impression that the theme of creation was an ongoing theological concern for him, to which he turned in almost every context of theological reflection. While, also from the very beginning of his theological writing, the doctrine of the Trinity provides the framework for Gunton’s theological thought, the doctrine of creation is one of the most important places to show what difference this Trinitarian mode of doing theology makes to all aspects of Christian theology.3 The distinction and relation between the triune creator and the creation as the outcome, goal and ‘project’ of the triune creator’s act and being shape all other aspects of Gunton’s theology. In one sense, this is an implication of the comprehensive character of the distinction and relation between the triune God’s creative act and being and the being and act of created being. If this relationship is correctly summarized in the formula of ‘creation out of nothing’, this must necessarily have a bracketing function for the whole of Christian teaching and living. The view that God’s free and sovereign creativity has no other ground than the triune being of God and its corollary that therefore the beginning, meaning and consummation of created existence depend unconditionally on God is mirrored in all areas of doctrine. It is the focus of the doctrine of creation itself, where ‘out of nothing’ expresses not only the character of the original act of creation and the status of everything that as creation is not God but also prefaces everything that has to be said about the conservation of creation in God’s continued creative activity and its consummation and perfection in communion with the triune God. The distinction and relation of the triune creator and creation also shape the understanding of the human destiny and misery by underlining both the dependence of the human creature on the freedom of the creator, precisely for its own creaturely freedom, and the effect of desiring to usurp God’s place in creation. The

olin E. Gunton, Father, Son and Holy Spirit: Toward a Fully Trinitarian Theology (London: T&T Clark, 2003). C Cf. the sermon ‘The Doctrine of Creation (Genesis 1.14–16)’, in Colin E. Gunton, Theology through Preaching: Sermons for Brentwood (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2001), 35–42. 3 Cf. Christoph Schwöbel, ‘The Shape of Colin Gunton’s Theology: On the Way towards a Fully Trinitarian Theology’, in The Theology of Colin Gunton, ed. Lincoln Harvey (London: T&T Clark International, 2010), 182–208. 1 2

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distinction and relation are again reflected in the view of redemption as God’s initiative to save human creatures from the effects of their contradiction against the creator by saving them in a free and sovereign act, not dependent on the creature’s merits or works. The incarnation can only be given full significance if it is clearly stated that the Creator-Logos becomes incarnate in the human person Jesus of Nazareth, so that God’s freedom and sovereignty take the form of a servant, taking the failure of human freedom in its attempts to realize itself by contradicting its ground and goal in God’s creative being upon himself and bringing humans back onto the way to the perfected communion of the triune creator with his reconciled creation. The emphases of the theology of the Reformation expressed in the so-called exclusive particles that we are justified by grace alone, through Christ alone and by faith alone are in Colin Gunton’s theology reassertions and applications of what is first asserted in Scripture about God’s free and sovereign creative act. The church whose creatureliness was expressed by the Reformers in the formula of the church as the creature of God’s creative and redeeming word finds its place in the economy of salvation as witness and instrument of God’s free and sovereign will and love. Everything that can be said about the fulfilment of God’s ways with the world in the eschaton again stresses the freedom and sovereignty of God’s love in giving his creation a perfection in communion with the triune God which it could not achieve for itself and by itself. In Gunton’s theology creation is both a focal doctrine in the doctrine of creation and a doctrine whose main emphases on the triune creator and the character of God’s creative act out of nothing are also disseminated in all other doctrines. Furthermore, one can also see that Gunton’s main concerns regarding the doctrine of creation are already adumbrated in his early work and step by step fleshed out as his theology developed. The emphasis on the freedom of God the creator and of the creature is as prevalent in his first book as the emphasis on the person and work of the Spirit ‘as the mode of being of the one God by whose activity is anticipated the future redemption of man and the whole created order of which he is part’.4 What is presented in this early work as ‘the lesson of Barth’s doctrine of the Trinity’, that is, ‘that if God and so also the creature are to have freedom proper to their natures, the conception of God as triune, and fully triune, is going to be instrumental in ensuring it’,5 becomes the counterpoint of Gunton’s own theology, even where in the execution of this insight he felt compelled to go beyond Barth.6 It is no accident that these early insights were developed in the critical engagement with Charles Hartshorne’s ‘neo-classical theism’, which formed the background for calling the tradition from which process philosophers and theologians wanted to distinguish themselves ‘classical theism’. Such insights instilled an enduring weariness with the attempt of both classical and neoclassical theists to make ‘absolute in any conceptual structure the relation between God and the creature’.7 Instead, Gunton’s theology is based on ‘the belief that certain events, described, remembered and promised in the biblical books, are correctly attributable to the agency of God and are such as to illumine consistently both human life and the world in which they happen’.8 Declining to develop the Christian view of reality on the basis of ‘a priori conceptual edifices’,9 however, Colin E. Gunton, Becoming and Being: The Doctrine of God in Charles Hartshorne and Karl Barth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), 218. 5 Ibid. 6 Cf. Colin E. Gunton, ‘Barth, the Trinity and Human Freedom’, Theology Today 43, no. 3 (1986): 316–30. 7 Gunton, Becoming and Being, 219. 8 Ibid. 9 Ibid. 4

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implied for Gunton the passionate commitment to the task of developing theology in an a posteriori fashion. Based on the biblical witnesses and the creedal traditions of the church, Gunton formed conceptualities that could spell out what a Christian view of reality might have to say in conversation with other views of reality within the Christian traditions and with the views of reality in other religious and philosophical traditions. This is evidenced in a particularly evocative form in Colin Gunton’s Bampton Lectures The One, the Three and the Many (1992) with the programmatic subtitle God, Creation and the Culture of Modernity.10 In the elegant chiastic structure of the book, the symptoms of the ‘Displacement of God’, charted in part I, provide the occasion for ‘Rethinking Createdness’ in part II that again considers the aspects of the culture of modernity which would look decidedly different, if viewed from the perspective of Christian faith in the triune creator. How could we interpret createdness, if the relationality of the triune persons in a relation of love were the basic dimension shaping our view of the world? How could we value the particularity of the ‘disappearing other’, if we would, from a pneumatological perspective, develop an understanding of creation which opens the possibility for an ‘ontology of the material particular as that which is destined to achieve a distinctively finite completeness or perfection in space and through time’?11 How would we understand the rational structure of creation, if we were not to search for underlying timeless patterns of rationality, but see in terms of Christ ‘not only the Word spoken to time from eternity, but the immanent dynamic of meaning which holds time and space together’?12 How would the question of the relationship of the One and the Many, of unity and diversity, be answered, if we could avoid the choice between an abstract monism or an unrelated pluralism by understanding reality in terms of the Trinity, understood with Coleridge as the idea idearum, and the trancendentals it generates and so see it as ‘a conversation between the idea of ideas and the open transcendentals it generates’?13 A Trinitarian theology of creation is in Gunton’s theology a powerful tool for the diagnosis of the present in which we live, particularly in its modern and late modern transformations, and a guideline for a therapy in learning to understand reality differently and so act differently in it – once we no longer see it etsi deus non daretur, as if God were not there, but understand it, quod deus triunus daretur, because the triune God is there.

MEDIATION – THE HINGE ON WHICH CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE TURNS All of Colin Gunton’s theological reflections on creation emphasize three starting points.14 Understanding the world as creation is, first of all, an article of the creed, ‘part of the fabric of Christian response to revelation’,15 and so it is a doctrine that connects with all other articles of faith Christians confess in the creed. Because faith has the personal and Colin E. Gunton, The One, the Three and the Many: God, Creation and the Culture of Modernity. The Bampton Lectures 1992 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). 11 Ibid.,  206. 12 Ibid.,  179. 13 Ibid.,  154. 14 Cf. Colin E. Gunton, ‘The Doctrine of Creation’, in The Cambridge Companion to Christian Doctrine, ed. Colin E. Gunton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 141–57. 15 Colin E. Gunton, The Triune Creator: A Historical and Systematic Study (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1998), 8. 10

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communal form of ‘I believe’ or ‘we believe’, creation is a radically self- and communityinvolving doctrine. It concerns our place in relation to God and in relation to one another in the world God created. Second, the distinctively Christian understanding of creation is for Gunton summarized in the formula of creation ‘out of nothing’. Creatio ex nihilo is ‘not a belief that can be found unambiguously in the Bible, or in the earliest theologians, but emerged as the result of a conflict with a philosophical tradition which held different versions of the belief that there has always been a universe of some kind’.16 The distinctiveness of the Christian belief in creation only becomes clear when God’s creating is understood in the most radical sense as a bringing into being something that did not exist before and has no other presuppositions but the triune being of God. The emphasis on a contingent creation, not a necessary presupposition for or emanation of the divine, with a beginning (and an end) in time, which is nevertheless, in all its materiality, ‘very good’, could in Gunton’s view only be emphasized in this provocative form through ‘the trinitarian shape of early theology’: We shall understand the distinctiveness of the Christian theology of creation only if we realise that these three themes – creation as an article of the creed; creation out of nothing; creation as the work of the whole Trinity, Father, Son and Holy Spirit – are in some way bound up with each other, both historically and systematically.17 This is a statement of the ‘depth grammar’ of Gunton’s theology, both with regard to his reading of the history of Christian theology in the context of Western thought and with regard to the systematic exposition of the theology of creation. Creation is not a doctrine of natural theology. As a doctrine of the creed it can neither be developed from a priori reflection on the concept of God or creation nor inferred from certain general features of the ordered structure of the world. In the context of Christian faith, the constitution of faith itself is an example of the understanding of creation, if faith is not a human, creaturely work but God’s work in us. By emphasizing this aspect, Gunton also wants to underline that belief in creation is not the result of general revelation, somehow evidenced in all cultures, but constituted in and through the special revelation of God in Israel, in Jesus and through the Spirit. The understanding of creation out of nothing can in Gunton’s view not simply be based on a view of the superabundance of God or on God as the universal cause of all being. Moreover, he remains sceptical about the possibilities of expressing the Christian emphasis on creation out of nothing in terms of the participation of all being in being itself. Neither the otherness of creation nor the value of particular created beings can for him be expressed in this framework. Spelling out all the implications of the understanding of creation out of nothing requires for Gunton a fully Trinitarian understanding of God the creator, of the act of creating and of an ontology of created being that reflects its being as the project of the triune creator and the object of the love-in-relation which the triune God is. That God creates out of nothing rules out both a view of creation through eternal ideas, and by participation of the Many in the One, as well as a view of created reality as the emanation from the fullness of the divine being. It requires for Gunton a fully Trinitarian theology of creation.

Ibid. Ibid.,  9.

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In Gunton’s numerous attempts to offer an exposition of the doctrine of the Trinity this is the crucial question he set himself: How does the Trinitarian being of God shape the world as the creation of this Trinitarian God? In The One, the Three and the Many he employed the notion of ‘open transcendentals’ to answer this question, specifying the conditions of the possibility in the being of God the triune creator that can account for the actuality of the world as creation.18 The ‘open transcendentals’ were never understood as a metaphysical conceptuality that would allow us to bypass the particularities of the being and act of the triune God, but they were an attempt to spell out how the triune being of God is enacted in God’s Trinitarian action to account for the structure of the world we live in. In his later writings, Gunton uses predominantly the concept of mediation to account for the way in which the triune being of God shapes the Trinitarian action of God so as to create the world which is destined to find its fulfilment in communion with the triune God. Mediation becomes the category that explains how the immanent being of the Triune God and the Trinitarian economy are related. The focus on mediation in this way avoids both the complexities and ambiguities of Karl Rahner’s apparent identitystatement the economic Trinity is the immanent Trinity and vice versa and a disjunction of the immanent Trinity from the economic Trinity where the immanent Trinity can be defined in terms of metaphysical principles which can only be related to the divine economy by seeing the economy of salvation as a temporal illustration of the eternal being of God. Similarly, the concept of mediation is used to avoid radical forms of negative theology weakening theology’s foundation in God’s revelation.19 It is, however, also used as the theological concept that helps to avoid forms of projecting finite characteristics of being into the eternal being of God and in this way violating the radical distinction between the creative being of God and the created being of his creation. How then is ‘mediation’ to be understood? In one of his latest writings on the doctrine of creation, the introductory chapter to his The Christian Faith: An Introduction to Christian Doctrine (2002), Gunton not only begins with ‘§1 The Mediation of Creation’, thus underlining the importance of the concept, but also defines it in the following way: Mediation denotes the way we understand one form of action – God’s action – to take shape in and in relation to that which is not God; the way, that is, by which the actions of one who is creator take form in a world that is of an entirely different order from God because he made it to be so.20 In his interpretation of paradigmatic texts on creation in the Old Testament, Colin Gunton shows that the language of God’s creating, for all its emphasis on the divine freedom and sovereignty of God’s creating, nevertheless creates space and time for the creature to be as something entirely different from God, so that it is granted space and time for its own particular creaturely flourishing. Gunton finds in the Old Testament texts emphases on mediation that are later ‘to be filled out by the New Testament’21 in such a way that such

Cf. Gunton, The One, 136–54, especially the section on ‘Trinitarian Transcendentals’, 149–54. This question is at the centre of Gunton’s passionate critical engagement with Augustine in Colin E. Gunton, The Promise of Trinitarian Theology, 2nd edn (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1997), 30–55. 20 Colin E. Gunton, The Christian Faith: An Introduction to Christian Doctrine (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), 5. 21 Gunton, Christian Faith, 8. As the example for this reading of the Old Testament from the New Testament Colin Gunton regularly refers to Frances Watson, Text and Truth: Redefining Biblical Theology (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1997). 18 19

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passages (e.g. Prov. 8.27, 30 or Ps. 33.6) can be read in the light of Jesus Christ, whereas other passages (e.g. Ezek. 37.9-10) are suggested to be read in the light of the Spirit of the one who raised Jesus from the dead. In its use in Christian worship, Bible passages about God’s creating by the Word and God’s enlivening action in the Spirit would then be understood in terms of the Trinitarian God Christians confess in the creed. Conversely, the creedal phrases are in this way open to being interpreted in the light of these biblical passages. Gunton’s great ideal for this form of mediation is, of course, Irenaeus of Lyon, ‘the church’s greatest theologian of creation’22 who presents creation as the work of God the Father by his ‘two hands’, the Son and the Spirit. The mediation of creation has therefore this form: ‘For with Him were always present the Word and Wisdom, the Son and the Spirit, by whom and in whom, freely and spontaneously, He made all things.’23 If, following Irenaeus, creation is to be understood as mediated by the Son and the Spirit in such a way that the form of mediation points to particular ways in which the being of the creator relates through his action to that which he creates, we can see that certain aspects of created being are also highlighted by this form of Christological and pneumatological mediation. If it is the Son who mediates the creative work of God the Father, the Son who became incarnate in Jesus of Nazareth, then the transcendent intelligibility of the Logos-Son’s being and work expresses itself in the contingent rational structures of creation exactly in such a form that is fitting with the statement that the Creator-Logos became flesh and lived among us. The creative rational order granted by the creator through the Son to his creation is one that is expressed in the created, material and historical means of embodied communication and experience and so challenges us to see the divine and the created in the incarnate Son not as mutually exclusive, nor as simple logical complements. And similarly, if the Holy Spirit as the giver of life is the one who also breathes on the dead matter of bones and brings them to life (Ezekiel 37), the finite, mortal life of creatures acquires through the Son and in the power of the Spirit a future that finds its consummation in communion with the eternal God. What is achieved by this emphasis on the mediation of creation through the Trinitarian work of the triune God? On the one hand, the mediated form of God’s creative action points forward to God’s action in the incarnation and reconciliation in Christ and to God’s action in the Spirit in the church as the dynamic that leads to the eschatological goal of creation. The pattern of mediation in this way pervades the whole of the history of salvation and underlines its eschatological destiny. Furthermore, the modes of the action of the ‘two hands’ of the Son and the Spirit in doing the work of the Father will shape the way in which the person and work of Jesus Christ will have to be developed. No account of the unity of the divine and the human nature in the person of the incarnate Son will be satisfactory that does not give space to the action of the Spirit in the incarnation. No account of what the classic dogmatics of the seventeenth century called the operation of the grace of Holy Spirit in its application (de gratia Spiritus Sancti applicatrice) will be sufficient that does not spell out the relation of that work to the act and being of the Son and the Father. The focus on this form of Trinitarian mediation emphasizes, as it did already in Irenaeus, the differentiated unity of the divine economy. It is this form of mediation that, in Gunton’s theology, is

Gunton, Christian Faith, 10. Irenaeus, Against the Heresies, 4.20.1, quoted in Gunton, Christian Faith, 10. For the varieties of application of the image cf. Christoph Schwöbel, ‘God’s Two Hands: Beyond Fundamentalism and Spiritualism’, in Word and Spirit: Renewing Christology and Pneumatology in a Globalizing World, ed. Christoph Schwöbel and Anselm K. Min (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2014), 13–27. 22 23

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indispensable for a ‘fully trinitarian theology’, and in this way it presents the distinction and relation of the immanent and the economic Trinity. By specifying the relationship between the immanent and the economic Trinity, Gunton’s view of mediation is the hinge on which, in his theology, the whole history of salvation turns. But there is more. If it is part of this understanding of the mediation of God’s being in his creative action, that ‘the actions of one who is creator take form in a world that is of an entirely different order from God because he made it to be so’,24 then the way in which God’s creative action takes form gives this ‘taking form’ a particular significance: time, space and matter as the form of the incarnation, already prepared in creation, life, dynamism and directedness towards a future perfection as the characteristics of the operation of the Spirit from the creation onwards, gives the created order a distinctive value and significance that must be reflected in a Christian view of reality. Therefore, mediation is not only the ‘hinge’ on which the relationship between the immanent and the economic Trinity turns but also the hinge on which the understanding of God’s being and act and the act and being of the created world turn. This is the reason why in Gunton’s theology of creation, the emphasis on mediation stands against all forms of theological and philosophical theorizing that he regarded as the deadly vices of Christian theology: dualism, monism, pantheism, temporalism, eternalism, intellectualism and individualism. It also underlines his concern for what he regarded as the distinctively Christian emphases of the understanding of God and the world: a positive appreciation of time and space, a positive view of the material character of creation and of processes of creaturely development and growth and, most of all, a positive appreciation of creaturely freedom. How does this stress on mediation shape Gunton’s theology of creation? In his chapter on creation in The Cambridge Companion to Christian Doctrine (1997) and then again in The Triune Creator (1998) Gunton described seven characteristic features of a distinctively Christian understanding of the doctrine of creation.25 We shall follow his example here and summarize briefly what he regarded as characteristic for the being and act of the triune creator on the one hand and of the being and act of the creation on the other hand, taking the last three points together.

A FREE AND SOVEREIGN CREATOR – A FINITE, YET FREE CREATION The first point underlines the significance of the doctrine of creation ‘out of nothing’, according to which creation must be understood as an act of ‘divine sovereignty and freedom’,26 relying on nothing outside God. The creativity of the triune God presupposes neither an already existing material for creation nor is it a necessity that is implied in being God. As the result of a divine act of will, not as an emanation of the divine being, the world God created is truly other than God; it is finite, with a beginning in time and space, and contingent, neither necessary nor impossible. This emphasis on the divine will is one of the decisive inspirations that Gunton takes from John Duns Scotus. If creation is not understood in terms of the divine intellect as first cause but as an act of the divine will, eternal ideas by means of which God creates no longer threaten the sovereignty of God’s

Gunton, Christian Faith, 5. Cf. Gunton, ‘The Doctrine of Creation’, 141–57, 141–4; and Gunton, Triune Creator, 9–13. 26 Cf. Gunton, Triune Creator, 9. 24 25

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creative act. He quotes approvingly Scotus’s central objection against the rationes aeternae in the mind of God.27 If they are eternal, God’s mind would be passive with regard to them. If then knowledge of created things is not placed on a vertical logical hierarchy, descending from the eternal ideas, but on their vertical ordering within the created world, because they share the common predicate of createdness, knowledge can be oriented towards particulars, Scotus’s famous category of haecceitas, ‘thisness’. If there are no intermediate beings between God and the world, because all ontological relations between God’s infinite being and the finite being of the world are radically contingent, then the relation between God and the world must be conceived in terms of God’s eternal Word. This, for Gunton, not only emphasizes the radical character of creation from nothing, but it ‘at least opens up the possibility of a return to a Christological mediation of creation’.28

OUT OF LOVE, FOR A PURPOSE – THE VALUE OF CONTINGENT OTHERNESS With the emphasis that creation is an act of divine will, Gunton must protect this understanding of creation against the charge of arbitrariness. If creation is not firmly rooted in the being of God, can it have value as a result of divine willing? Gunton is keen to show that the divine will in creating cannot be understood as another example of ‘a rootless will’ as he characterizes the modern notion of the will in his Bampton Lectures.29 There is, of course, a tradition of genealogical blame being laid at the feet of John Duns Scotus and William of Ockham that Scotus’s emphasis on the divine will and Ockham’s idea of the absolute power of God are the matrix for the autonomous will of the modern human. The most often prescribed antidote against this form of voluntarism is to root the divine will firmly in God’s being as the highest good, following the Dionysian understanding of goodness as the bonum diffusivum, the superabundance of the good. Gunton, in contrast, tries to protect the understanding of creation against the charge of arbitrariness by emphasizing ‘that it derives from the love of God, not simply his will’ and by specifying this notion of love by an understanding of God ‘as a communion of persons existing in loving relations’.30 If God is eternally a tri-personal communion of love, it can be excluded that he creates out of a need, the fulfilment of which is necessary for God. Creation is eternally rooted in God’s being as triune love, but it is contingently created by the divine will as ‘a realm of being in its own right’.31 This specification qualifies the notions of freedom and sovereignty that Gunton emphasizes as the first feature of creation. The freedom of the Trinitarian God is eternally a freedom in relation, freedom of persons in loving communion, and not the abstract freedom of an absolute subject.32 Furthermore, creation is created for the

Scotus writes on the assumption of rationes aeternae: ‘This seems to vilify the divine intellect, which in this case becomes passive in regard to the objects known through these rationes. The knowledge of these rationes on the part of the divine intellect would be determined by the presence of the objects.’ Oxford Commentary I.35, q. unica n. 5. 28 Gunton, Triune Creator, 121. 29 Chapter 4 of The One, the Three and the Many has the title ‘The rootless will. The problem of meaning and truth in modern life and thought’, 101–25. 30 Gunton, Triune Creator, 9. 31 Ibid.,  10. 32 We can here see the systematic connection between an understanding of God as tri-personal and the enablement of created freedom. If God were an absolute subject, created freedom could only be possible if God ‘backs off a little’. Fundamentally, God’s freedom and human freedom exist in a competitive relationship, trapped in a 27

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purpose of being ‘very good’ as created being over against God in relation to God. It is this created otherness, distinguished from the creative being of God, that is called ‘very good’. If according to the Christian understanding, creation is brought about by free personal agency, out of the generosity of love that the three Trinitarian personas are, it cannot be understood as having only a derived goodness, lesser in degree, because it exists by participation in the great chain of being. With this second characteristic Gunton prepares the ground for a form of the mediation of creation which is different from derivation from the highest being and different from being caused by the universal first cause. The emphasis on the ontological ‘otherness’ of creation safeguards for Gunton the possibility of science: ‘only a theology which distinguishes God from the world ontologically justifies the practices of science without succumbing to a pantheism or crypto-pantheism which effectively divinises the temporal’.33 For science to be possible, not as an exercise of deduction from first principles, but as an exercise, based on the empirical and experimental observation of the spatio-temporal world, another implication of the ontological otherness of the created world from God the creator must be emphasized. It is that, if the world, the whole world, is truly, ontologically other than God, it must also be understood as having ontological homogeneity which does not allow for the Aristotelian view of the eternity of heavenly bodies. Gunton credits Basil with having first grasped the ontological homogeneity of the whole of creation in all its diverse richness.34 It is, in Gunton’s view, Johannes Philoponos who gives this insight its decisive form that the created universe is composed of the same sort of matter, and subject to the same rules, which overcomes the ontological division of the superlunary and sublunary realms, ingrained into Aristotelian physics, together with the view of the animate character of the heavenly bodies.35 This has surprising implications for the interpretation of the history of science, most conspicuously with regard to one episode which has shaped the view of the ‘warfare of religion against science’: Galileo Galilei’s conflict with the curia in Rome. Gunton’s bold thesis concerning Galileo is that ‘from one point of view it is he, and not the authorities, who is defending the Christian theology of creation’.36 He furthermore emphasizes that Galileo’s argument for the superiority of mathematics over logic documents his view of the contingent, that is, observable rational laws of the cosmos.37 How, then, should the conflicts between the emerging sciences and the ecclesiastical authorities be interpreted? In Gunton’s view they derived from the distortions of Christian teaching through the inclusion of an explanatory philosophy which contradicted the main tenets of the biblical views on creation. They derived from its ‘Babylonian captivity’ to a non-trinitarian theology in which God the Son and God the Spirit were crowded out by a pagan ontology, so that God

zero-sum game. The more freedom in the one, the less freedom in the other. In consequence, this leads to the modern atheism for the sake of human freedom. If freedom is fundamentally relational, in the tri-personal God and in the creation of the triune God, it can be conceived as person granting one another freedom in relation-in-difference. 33 Gunton, Triune Creator, 39. 34 Cf. ibid., 68–73. 35 Cf. ibid., 72–3. With regard to the interpretation of Philoponos, Gunton relies always on the interpretation of his King’s College colleague Richard Sorabji, Time, Creation and the Continuum (London: Duckworth, 1983), in a condensed survey in Richard Sorabji, ‘John Philoponos’, in Philoponos and the Rejection of Aristotelian Science, ed. Richard Sorabji (London: Duckworth, 1987), 1–40. 36 Ibid.,  113. 37 Cf. ibid., 115.

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the Father was transmogrified into a monistically conceived deity owing much to Greek negative theology.38 What can liberate the theology of creation from this Babylonian captivity? If the ‘otherness’ of creation is asserted in ontological terms, if difference replaces degrees, it becomes necessary to provide a clear picture of how God the Son and God the Spirit can provide a theologically authentic account of the relationship between the Trinitarian God and creation. It is here that the mediation by the ‘two hands’ of God introduces further specifications in the Christian understanding of creation.

THROUGH, IN AND TO CHRIST, BY THE SPIRIT – DYNAMIC UNIVERSALITY AND RELATIONAL PARTICULARITY The descriptions of creation in the Old Testament create the theological space in which the New Testament speaks more fully by understanding creation as being created through the Son and to the Son and in the Spirit.39 The goodness-in-otherness which characterizes the creation is emphasized this way because God remains in relation with creation through the Son who will become incarnate in creation. The mediation of creation through the Son guarantees the Christofocal unity of creation and its destiny to be taken up into the filial relation which the Son enjoys in his relation to the Father. This emphasis on the mediation of creation through Christ has as its counterpart the role of the Spirit in creation which Gunton describes with Basil of Caesarea as ‘the perfecting cause’ of creation.40 Gunton interprets this phrase in the sense that it is the work of ‘God the Spirit to enable the created order to be truly itself ’.41 The perfecting work of the Spirit achieves unity through the perfecting of the particular by relating it to the embrace of the many in their incorporation in the one Christ. The Christological mediation is strongly asserted throughout Gunton’s theology of creation. That the world is created through the Word and to the Word replaces the intermediary beings that had blurred the distinction and relationship in Gnosticism. The philosophical view that God creates by means of eternal ideas, be they firmly located in the divine mind, raises questions for Gunton about whether, on the one hand, creation is strictly out of nothing. Creation presupposes nothing, not even eternal ideas, apart from God’s triune being. On the other hand, the concept of eternal ideas is also in danger of displacing the mediation through the Son and in the Spirit. From Athanasius Gunton takes the principle that if creation is created by the Word, then the incarnation of the word in Jesus must be the ‘epistemic basis’ for understanding the difference between God and the world and their relationship.42 Gunton comments, ‘Our understanding of God’s free creating of that which is not God is based upon his free relation to it in Jesus.’43 It is this emphasis on Jesus which prevents Christ from becoming a principle, dangerously close to

Ibid.,  116. For this interpretation of the connection between the New Testament and the Old Testament Colin Gunton regularly refers to Francis Watson, Text and Truth: Redefining Biblical Theology (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1997). 40 Cf. Basil of Caesarea, On the Holy Spirit, 15. 38. 41 Gunton, Triune Creator, 10. 42 Cf. Athanasius, On the Incarnation of the Word, in the context of Gunton, Triune Creator, 67. 43 Gunton, Triune Creator, 67. 38 39

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the platonic forms, as Robert Jenson has argued in criticism of Barth’s Christological view of creation.44 If, however, the whole doctrine of creation is to be developed as though Jesus makes a difference, then reference to the Spirit becomes unavoidable. It is the Spirit who is sent by the Father, to form a body for the Son out of the matter of fallen humanity, not as a creation from nothing, to make God the Son present in the materiality of a fallen creation.45 It is the Spirit who at each moment of Jesus’ life maintains him in free obedience to God the Father and ultimately raises the dead Jesus, who had given himself to death for the salvation of a broken creation, to new life in the glory of God. The radical character of this assertion is not to be missed: The statements of Christ as the mediator of creation refer in Gunton’s theology of creation not primarily to the logos asarkos, but to Jesus, who as the divine Son lives, dies and is raised from the dead by the power of the lifegiving Spirit.46 Jesus is then not only the revelation of the work of the Son in creation but also the one in whom we can see the work of the Spirit who establishes God’s presence in creation in the very particularity of created existence, to let it be itself, by bringing it on the way to its eschatological perfection. Gunton is keen to emphasize that the coherence of the world in the Son and its eschatological perfection in the Spirit do not stand in the way of an equally strong stress on the relation of every creature in its particularity and quotidian existence to the triune God which is the gift of life and freedom to the creature. The world does indeed cohere in the Son, but is diversified and particularised as the second hand of the Father enables things to be what they are created to be in the Son, even before the end and even despite the chaos and disorder inserted into the good order of things by sin … It is a function of the diversity of the creation that its perfection is realised in a diversity of ways through the work of the particularising Spirit.47 How is this view of the mediation of creation through the Son and in the Spirit grounded in the eternal Trinity? Gunton here engages in overall agreement and specific dissent with the theology of creation in Wolfhart Pannenberg’s Systematic Theology. Gunton agrees with Pannenberg that the personal distinction of the Son from the Father is the basis for the ontological distinction of creation from the creator. This personal distinction becomes clear when the Son is understood as the primary object of the Father’s love which makes the Son the origin of all that is different from the Father. Gunton differs from Pannenberg in not wanting to give too much weight to the Son’s self-distinction, but rather adheres to the traditional notions of the Son being eternally begotten by the Father and being sent to do the Father’s will in free obedience.48 With regard to the understanding of the Spirit, Colin Gunton alludes to Robert Jenson, Alpha and Omega: A Study in the Theology of Karl Barth (New York: Nelson, 1963) in Gunton, Triune Creator, 163. 45 Here Colin Gunton’s engagement with the Christology of Edward Irving is significant. Cf. Colin E. Gunton, Theology through the Theologians: Selected Essays 1972–1995 (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1996), 151–68. 46 Also Colin E. Gunton, Christ and Creation. The Didsbury Lectures, 1990 (Carlisle: Paternoster Press, 1992). 47 Gunton, Triune Creator, 161–2. 48 Colin Gunton raises the question whether Pannenberg’s notion of the ‘self-distinction’ of the Son from the Father places too much emphasis on the Son’s action in distinguishing himself from the Father and so making creation possible. Is the Son not the one through whom God creates all that is not God? In brackets Colin Gunton notes ‘Is there a touch of tritheism?’ (Triune Creator, 159). This points to an important difference in Pannenberg’s and Gunton’s theology of the Trinity. Whereas Pannenberg feels free to speak of three ‘subjects of action’ which is indeed required if one talks about self-distinction, Colin Gunton determinedly sticks to the language of persons in relation. 44

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Gunton criticizes both that Pannenberg understands the creative presence of the Spirit in creation as a ‘divine field of force’ and as the ‘medium of the participation of creatures in the divine life’. The latter is challenged by the question: But must life be understood as participation in the life of God? The danger here is that something will be taken away from the creature’s enjoyment of life in itself, as other than God. We must beware, having made the Son the basis of the distinction-in-relation of God and the world, of taking away with the left hand what is given with the right.49 Gunton clearly feels that the notion of participation may introduce Neoplatonist elements with their corollaries of an ontological continuity between the creator and creation and suggest a hierarchical order of being which diminishes the freedom of the creator and the value of the relative independence of the creature. Pannenberg’s interpretation of the Spirit as a field of force, for all the advantages it has in Faraday’s view of uniting the different forces of nature, derived from his belief in the unity-inTrinity in God,50 cannot do justice in Gunton’s view to the person of the Spirit who in his eschatological action perfects the created order through the Son, as is paradigmatically shown in the resurrection of Jesus. Gunton is careful neither to introduce notions of an independent action of the Son in his self-distinction from the Father, which in Pannenberg is underwritten by his view of the Trinity as three subjects of action, which Gunton avoids by speaking of persons in a relation of love, nor to return to views of the Oneness of God somehow transcending the Trinity. This is his suspicion with regard to Pannenberg’s reception of Plotinus’s view of the eternity of God. Here Gunton, the outspoken critic of misplaced apophaticism, is emphatically apophatic: In sum, we should accept neither the timelessness nor the temporality of the being of God. We cannot but be apophatic, because no more is shown to us. The work of Christ and the Spirit indeed indicate God’s positive relation with time demonstrating both his freedom and sovereignty over it and the fact that it is not entirely foreign to his being. But anything beyond that is necessarily mere speculation.51

A FAITHFUL CREATOR – CREATION PRESERVED AND SAVED FROM DISSOLUTION After Gunton’s view of the mediation of creation through the Father’s ‘two hands’, the Son and the Spirit, have been reconstructed in detail we can summarize other aspects of ‘Gunton on creation’ more briefly. God’s faithfulness to creation, a powerful theme in biblical theology, is conceived by Gunton as the constitutive interrelatedness of creation, redemption and eschatological perfection in the work of the triune God. It is here that we can clearly perceive the advantages of his Trinitarian account of creation. If Christ and the Spirit, who take centre stage in Christian dogmatics when discussing the work of redemption and the work of sanctification, are already involved in creation, the links that would have

Gunton, Triune Creator, 160. Cf. ibid., 139. 51 Ibid., 92. I have, carefully, I hope, tried to go beyond this apophaticism in Christoph Schwöbel, ‘The Eternity of the Triune God: Preliminary Considerations on the Relationship between the Trinity and the Time of Creation’, Modern Theology 34, no. 3 (2018): 345–55. 49 50

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to be established by other theological concepts are already in place. Gunton can in this way see the connection between creation, redemption and the consummation of the triune God’s relationship with his creation – so powerfully expressed in Martin Luther’s ‘For this very purpose he created us, so that he might redeem us and make us holy’52 – in terms of the inherent connectedness of the Son’s and the Spirit’s action in creation, rooted in the personal communion of love of the Trinity. Creation is from the beginning a ‘project’ which God realizes in the incarnation of the Son and the eschatological perfection wrought by the Spirit. How divine providence can be placed within Christian dogmatics has been the subject of passionate debate from the early church until today. The danger is that the understanding of providence follows a different pattern than that of the history of salvation. This is one of the reasons why the Reformers consistently rejected the determinism of the Stoics as an alien intrusion into Christian doctrine. Will Gunton’s ‘trinitarian placing’ offer a solution for this difficulty? Gunton is keen not to collapse the doctrine of providence simply into the assertion of a persistent ontological dependence of everything that is and occurs on God. This would risk losing the emphasis on time and space, central to Gunton’s insistence on creation ‘in the beginning’. Gunton therefore distinguishes providence and creation. ‘Providence is what God makes of the created world which has been given its own being distinct from him. There is a different form of relationship: interaction as distinct from origination.’53 How should the interaction be expressed theologically? It is no surprise that Gunton again turns to ‘the mediation of providential action’.54 Consequently, Gunton suggests that providence should be conceived ‘in terms of two models: the Son as the giver of structure, and the Holy Spirit as the one who gives the world space to become within but not apart from that structuring’.55 For Gunton, the incarnation is the moment where the divine structuring of creation becomes evident in its reshaping of the structures of the world to disclose and realize their orientation towards their eschatological destiny. Evil on this account must then be understood as ‘that which prevents the created order from fulfilling its proper purpose’.56 Confessing Faith in God the maker of heaven and earth implies in Gunton’s interpretation: ‘There is nothing outside God’s ordering activity.’ However, the order is not to be conceived as deterministic, if the Spirit’s eschatological action liberates whatever there is to be itself. In this sense Gunton can write: ‘The future is “open” because the Holy Spirit is the one who enables things to become what they are made to be by relating them to the Father through the one who became incarnate.’57

THE HUMAN CALLING – LIVED RESPONSIBILITY No theology of creation would be complete that did not include a theological account of the human creature. Here Gunton can refer to other attempts that he has made to reformulate the doctrine of the image of God against the background of a Trinitarian understanding of God in The Promise of Trinitarian Theology and in Christ and

M. Luther, The Large Catechism, in The Book of Concord, ed. Robert Kolb and Timothy J. Wengert (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2000), 439. 53 Gunton, The Triune Creator, 179. 54 This the heading of the sections 182–4 in ibid. 55 Ibid.,  192. 56 Gunton, ‘Doctrine of Creation’, 143. 57 Gunton, Triune Creator, 192. 52

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Creation. The first is devoted to establishing personal relationality as the character of the human creature as the image of God. This involves refraining from locating the image of God in a particular capacity humans possess in comparison to the nonhuman creation where reason was most often seen as the decisive characteristic. It is also concerned not simply to identify the image of God with the human stewardship for creation which, while capturing important aspects, seems too narrow, given the Christological definition of the image of God language in the New Testament. Barth’s attempt to reframe the understanding of the image in terms of the relationship between man and woman is also criticized for seeming to suggest a binitarian understanding of God and for being overtly anthropomorphic. Imaging the Trinity as a communion of persons invites us to understand the image of God in human persons as being persons-inrelation, emphasizing the particularity, uniqueness and distinctness of persons through understanding them as constituted in mutual relations of otherness. Again, Gunton is clear that this is not simply an imaging relation where a particular understanding of God as Trinity is projected back onto humanity. ‘To be in the image of God is to be created through the Son, who is the archetypal bearer of the image. To be in the image of God therefore means to be conformed to the person of Christ. The agent of this conformity is God the Holy Spirit, the creator of community.’58 It is this constitutive point, the Christological and the pneumatological aspect of being in the image of God, that is further developed in the second contribution on the image of God in Christ and Creation. ‘As Christology is concerned with meaning and redemption, pneumatology brings us to the realm of transformation.’59 This is also the ethical dimension of being created in the image of God which Gunton here applies to the ecological dimension. ‘The promise is not of solutions, but of freedom sometimes to share through the Spirit in particular transformations of the world which are signalled by the resurrection of Jesus from the dead.’60 In The Triune Creator these aspects are drawn into a fuller picture in which the different aspects already mentioned are now integrated. It is focused around the mediation of God’s two hands, oriented as God’s ‘project’ towards the eschatological fulfilment which now enables us to live our lives ‘as a living sacrifice of praise’ and so to live ‘in responsibility under God for the good ordering of the creation’. While personality, freedom and creativity are located on this level of human interrelationship they are nevertheless ordered towards an ‘ethic of createdness’,61 ‘according to which human life is ordered appropriately to both the personal and the non-personal creation’.62 Gunton’s theology of creation ends in the concluding chapter of The Triune God on ‘Eschatology and Ethics’ with a section ‘From Eschatology to Worship’. This conclusion is entirely fitting, since Christian worship to the Triune God, as it is enabled through the work of God the Son and God the Spirit, brings together the different dimensions of the Christian understanding of creation, the bodily and the spiritual, the eschatological and the ethical, in the dedication of our bodily life as a ‘living sacrifice of praise’.63 Gunton Gunton, The Promise of Trinitarian Theology, 113. Gunton, Christ and Creation, 123. 60 Ibid.,  126. 61 Gunton, The Triune Creator, 228–9, refers to Christoph Schwöbel, ‘God, Creation and the Christian Community: The Dogmatic Basis of a Christian Ethic of Createdness’, in The Doctrine of Creation: Essays in Dogmatics, History and Philosophy, ed. Colin Gunton (Edinburgh: T&T Clark 1997), 149–76, 150. 62 Gunton, The Triune Creator, 210. 63 Ibid.,  235. 58 59

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interprets this in the widest possible sense. Worship focuses and brings together what is in all dimensions enabled and destined to be perfected in the eschaton in one act which anticipates the consummation of everything in God’s Kingdom. In this sense, he can write: In the broad sense, to present them as a sacrifice is so to engage with the whole of reality as to enable – or not – that part of the creation with which we interact to be offered perfected to God the Father though the Son. Every human act, routine or not, is either a response to the action of the perfecting Spirit, or it is not. Every act is either offered to the Father, though the Son, or it is not.64

THE LEGACY OF COLIN GUNTON’S THEOLOGY OF CREATION What is the legacy of Gunton’s theology of creation? What remains as an inspiration and a challenge for our engagement with the theology of creation today? Since Gunton’s death the theological scene has changed in more ways than one. One of the surprising effects of the debates on modernity, late modernity or postmodernity which dominated the last two decades of the last century, in which Gunton participated in a passionately theological way with his Enlightenment and Alienation65 and with The One, The Three and the Many, is that the principles of modernity have lost their canonical authority. The debates on postmodernity have liquefied and relativized the normative canons which governed the philosophical and theological debates over much of the twentieth century. The effect is that for the theologian the numerous prohibition signs of what one was not allowed to think, do or say in modernity have fallen. The ‘ugly broad ditch’ that separated modern from pre-modern ways of thinking and of doing theology has been bridged by many bridges if it has not, at least in part, been drained and filled up. Today, theologians and philosophers work with the riches of the theological and philosophical traditions without first offering apologies to the culture of modernity. Gunton’s theology has certainly contributed to bridging the gap, separating modernity from pre-modern and postmodern times, not only by his critical efforts to identify what has been lost in the culture of modernity but even more so by his constructive proposals to regain what had been lost. Even more, he contributed to the bridging of the gap by freely making use of the whole of the theological and philosophical traditions in the West to sharpen his theological questions and to seek for ways of answering them. If there is one thing that makes Gunton’s theology unusual in the current theological debate it is the ease with which he adduced concepts and thoughts from Heraclitus to Vaclav Havel both for diagnosis of our theological, societal and ecclesial predicaments and for his attempts at making therapeutic suggestions. The way in which he charted the course of the development of Christian doctrine in its intellectual and cultural contexts has drawn a lot of criticism, perhaps most in the case of his critical engagement with Augustine and Thomas Aquinas.66 However, one thing has to be conceded to Gunton’s

Ibid. Colin E. Gunton, Enlightenment and Alienation: An Essay towards a Trinitarian Theology (Basingstoke: Marshall, Morgan & Scott, 1985). 66 On Augustine cf. Bradley G. Green, Colin Gunton and the Failure of Augustine: The Theology of Colin Gunton in the Light of Augustine (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2011) and the in-depth exegesis and refutation Denys Turner offers of Colin Gunton’s remarks on Thomas Aquinas in The Triune Creator, 99–101, under the heading 64 65

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critical engagement with the theologians of the past and present: He always took them seriously as theological conversation partners, as fellow travellers on the quest for truth – so seriously that he dared to criticize them, often with arguments based on the witness of Scripture that the theologians so criticized, especially the two examples just mentioned, would have taken with utmost seriousness. One element of de-canonization of the principles of modernity has been the emergence of theologies of retrieval67 which attempt to respond to the challenges of the present by reclaiming theologies of the past as guidelines for the constructive work of theology today. Such theologies of retrieval are often combined with intellectual genealogies which interpret the genesis of modernity as a history of decline, variously associated with turning points in intellectual history where rise turned into fall, for instance, Duns Scotus, William of Ockham, the Reformation, Descartes, the ‘Enlightenment’, etc. Because of that it is important that the candidate for retrieval is securely located at a place in time before the decline sets in. The current orientation of theologians towards, to name but a few examples, the theology of Thomas Aquinas or the Reformed scholastics of the seventeenth century (preferably Thomists) are the most prominent examples for this tendency. Not only are theologians from the historical past candidates for theologies of retrieval but also theologians from the most recent past. Would Gunton’s theology and his theology of creation be a candidate for such retrieval? I am convinced that Gunton would have resisted such an attempt. The whole ethos of Gunton’s theology is not one of restoring an order of the past but of developing new ways towards the future, rooted in the promise that is already contained in the creative act and being of the triune God. The ethos of his theology is ‘to establish possibilities’, as Stewart Sutherland, whom he was fond of quoting, puts it.68 What then are the possibilities that Gunton’s theology of creation helps to establish? The commitment to a theology of creation that is truly a theology of the triune creator is most clearly expressed by Gunton’s focus on the mediation of creation, which he takes as his guiding inspiration from Irenaeus of Lyon whom, as we have seen, he regarded as ‘the greatest Christian theologian of creation’. What are the possibilities for a theology of creation opened up by understanding the creative work of the triune God as the work of the Father by his ‘two hands’, the Son and the Spirit? Gunton uses Irenaeus’s understanding of God’s creative agency, first of all, to prevent God’s creative act and the structure of creation from being expressed in terms of a pre-established metaphysical conceptuality. Understanding creation in the Irenaean way opens up a possibility of working theologically a posteriori from what the triune God does in creation, in close contact with the biblical witnesses and through the narrative structures which the biblical witnesses suggest. The significance of time and space can in this way be prioritized for the understanding of creation and is not submerged under timeless metaphysical concepts. Second, interpreting creation as the work of God the Father through the Son and the Spirit invites the theologian to understand God’s creative agency in terms of personal agency, more precisely, as communal interactive personal agency, and so also prioritized attention

‘Thomas on Creation: A Skirmish with Gunton’, in Faith Reason and the Existence of God, ed. Denys Turner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 29–36. 67 Cf. the excellent collection Theologies of Retrieval: An Exploration and Appraisal, ed. Darren Sarisky (London: T&T Clark, 2017). 68 Gunton, Enlightenment and Alienation, 3.

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for the particularity, distinction, otherness and relatedness in understanding the world as creation. This approach offers richer possibilities for paying attention to the abundance and diversity of creation than interpreting creation reductively in terms of ontological participation or causal connections. Third, the Irenaean view of the mediation of creation through the Son and Spirit in its narrative form offers the possibility of specifying the Christian understanding of creation in terms of the ‘narrative particularity’69 of the story of Jesus, which in this story and its events discloses the universal promise for all humanity, indeed for the whole creation. This particular narrative is not an exemplar of universal metaphysical categories but is the particular narrative from which the universal scope of the promise for creation must be construed. Fourth, following Irenaeus, it is the Spirit’s eschatological agency as perfecting creation in its very particularity by allowing everything that is created to be itself in the process of its eschatological perfection which actualizes the universality of the person and work of Christ. The triune creator achieves the universal by working through the particularities of creation. The very particularities of the biblical witness retain in this way their significance for understanding the ‘project’ of creation. Viewed in this way, the legacy of Gunton’s theology of creation is not so much a completed corpus of teaching that needs to be retrieved but rather an inspiration that has established possibilities that need to be followed up, debated, revised and modified in the work of theologians who are inspired in their theological tasks by Gunton’s theology.

This is the term Gunton uses to express the way in which the narrative of Jesus discloses the universality of God’s ordering of creation through the incarnate Son in Gunton, Christ and Creation, 46–59. 69

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CHAPTER FIVE

Gunton on Christology OLIVER CRISP

To understand the shape of Colin Gunton’s theology one must grasp the fact that he was a contrarian and a dissenter, in the English ecclesiastical sense of that term. This theological sensibility, I shall argue, shaped his Christology in a fundamental way. It meant that he engaged the tradition with passion and a real desire to understand and appropriate what he found useful there. But it also meant he felt free to depart from the consensus where he believed it needed to be corrected or amended – and we shall see that he thought it needed to be corrected and amended in important respects. Only when we understand that both of these things are true of Gunton will we understand the puzzling tension in his thought between sympathetic, though eclectic, retrieval on the one hand and doctrinal revision and construction on the other.1 This may come as a surprise to some readers of Gunton. However, it is part of my contention about his being a dissenting theologian that Gunton was, in fact, much more revisionist in his theology than is sometimes believed. Gunton is usually thought of as a theologian of the Trinity and a contributor to the revivification of Trinitarian theology in the last third of the twentieth century.2 Nevertheless, he did in fact spend quite a bit of time thinking about matters Christological and had a fairly worked-out understanding of the person and work of Christ in the various places in which he developed his views over the course of his long and productive career. His Christology is of a piece with his broader dogmatic concerns about Trinitarian theology, though there are important ways in which what he says about Christ also develops themes not present elsewhere in his work. This chapter provides a critical engagement with four central dogmatic issues in Gunton’s Christology. We shall not deal with his soteriology, which warrants a separate

Others have suggested similar things about Gunton’s theology. For instance, Bruce L. McCormack questions whether Gunton really counts as a Reformed theologian at all, despite his denominational affiliation (he was ordained and served as an associate minister in the United Reformed Church in Great Britain while teaching at King’s College London). It is ‘a real question just how “Reformed” Colin’s theology was – or was even intended to be’ McCormack writes. His ‘published criticisms of the Augustinian-Calvinist tradition on the one hand, and of Barth on the other, on matters ranging from election and original sin to eschatology are so profound that it is not easy to make a case for the “Reformed” character of Colin’s theology. Instead, Gunton’s theology is better characterized as a kind of older (pre-Roman) Catholicism.’ Bruce L. McCormack, ‘The One, the Three and the Many: In Memory of Colin Gunton’, Cultural Encounters 1, no. 2 (2005): 13–14. Similarly, John Webster judges that ‘Gunton was seriously sceptical about aspects of classical Reformed Christology.’ John Webster, ‘Gunton and Barth’, in The Theology of Colin Gunton, ed. Lincoln Harvey (London: T&T Clark, 2010), 28. 2 For a sophisticated and nuanced account of Gunton’s theological development by a student and colleague at King’s College, London, see Stephen R. Holmes, ‘Towards the Analogia Personae et relationis: Developments in Gunton’s Trinitarian Thinking’, in The Theology of Colin Gunton, 32–48. 1

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treatment.3 Nor shall we consider his views on method in Christology, though he devoted some attention to these matters earlier in his career. There are two reasons for this latter omission. First, methodological questions raise meta-theological, not dogmatic issues. That is, they are concerned with philosophical questions about how to go about the task of Christology, not about the substantive theological claims of Christology. In this chapter, I shall be concerned with the dogmatic issues in particular. The philosophical issues that arise are questions raised by the dogmatic issues, not questions about method as such.4 Second, other recent discussions of Gunton’s Christology have provided some account of the methodological issues, making another such treatment otiose.5 We proceed as follows. The first section of this chapter considers Gunton’s understanding of divine and human persons as these notions bear upon the person of Christ and his understanding of kenosis. The second section deals with Gunton’s Spirit Christology. The third section concerns his claim that Christ had a fallen human nature. The fourth section deals with his understanding of Christ’s two wills. The chapter ends with a summary and conclusion in which I offer a brief assessment of the dogmatic shape and implications of these central theological structures in Gunton’s Christology.

DIVINE PERSONS, HUMAN PERSONS AND KENOSIS It might seem strange to begin with Theology Proper in a chapter devoted to Christology. However, Gunton’s theological project is driven by his doctrine of God, and what he says about divine persons, which he takes to be a kind of blueprint for understanding human persons. Given that Christ is the paradigmatic divine-human person, this has an important bearing on his Christology, as we shall see. Beginning with his views of divine persons, we will then consider some important aspects of his treatment of human persons before applying our findings to his Christology. Gunton’s views on divine personhood developed over the course of his career as part of a larger Harnackian polemic against the baleful effects of Greek metaphysics upon the development of Christian theology, and the derailing of fully Trinitarian theology by Augustine and his epigone with their over-emphasis upon divine unity at the expense of triunity. In Act and Being, which was one of his final works, he remarks, ‘it is one of the tragedies – one could almost say crimes – of Christian theological history, that the

For helpful treatments of this topic, see Justyn Terry, ‘Colin Gunton’s Doctrine of Atonement: Transcending Rationalism by Metaphor’, in The Theology of Colin Gunton, 130–45; and Murray Rae, ‘Gunton on Atonement’, in this volume. 4 The same is true of Alan Spence’s recent treatment of Gunton’s Christology, which is even more narrowly focused than mine. See Spence, Alan Spence ‘The Person as Willing Agent: Classifying Gunton’s Christology’, in The Theology of Colin Gunton, 49–64. 5 See, for example, Uche Anizor, Trinity and Humanity: An Introduction to the Theology of Colin Gunton (Milton Keynes: Paternoster, 2016), ch. 5. Gunton’s views on method in Christology can be found in his monograph, Yesterday and Today: A Study of Continuities in Christology (London: Dartman, Longman, and Todd, 1983). There is clear development in Gunton’s work from his earlier understanding of Christology in his study Yesterday and Today, to his later work in Christ and Creation. The Didsbury Lectures, 1990 (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1992); and The Christian Faith: An Introduction to Christian Doctrine (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002). In between these works is a period of change in Gunton’s thought that includes his engagement with the Scottish pastortheologian, Edward Irving, and the great puritan divine, John Owen. Consequently, there are good reasons to focus on Gunton’s mature thought, especially on the dogmatic content of his Christology, which is what we shall do here. For discussion of Gunton’s intellectual development, see Holmes, ‘Towards the Analogia Personae et Relationis’. 3

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Old Testament was effectively displaced by Greek philosophy as the theological basis for the doctrine of God’.6 Here is not the place to discuss the merits or demerits of this larger theological metanarrative in detail. Suffice it to say that Gunton’s views about the influence of Greek metaphysics, which he shared with his first doktorvater, Robert Jenson, have been subjected to serious challenge. And his views on Augustine are, to say the least, tendentious.7 Nevertheless, it is important to understand that Gunton’s view of the doctrine of God, and the Holy Trinity in particular, were part of a larger revisionist programme in which he saw himself, along with other representatives of the revival of Trinitarian theology, as offering an important corrective to Western theology, which (so he thought) owed much to the insights of the theology of the Cappadocians, which preserved the right understanding of divine triunity over and against the Western predilection for a divine monad. His mature position was a form of social Trinitarianism. He maintained that the three divine persons are three distinct centres of will and action that are bound together via the relation of perichoresis or mutual indwelling. This perichoretic relation prevents the Trinitarian persons from becoming distinct deities so as to avoid tritheism.8 But the distinctions in the Godhead must be understood to be much more than merely subsistent relations, as with traditional Thomism. This is clearly on display in an essay engaging T. F. Torrance’s reading of the Cappadocians. There Gunton writes, ‘For Basil the persons are not relations; rather, persons are constituted by their relations to one another.’ And later in the same passage, Without a distinction between persons – as the ones who are each particularly what they are by virtue of their relations (schesis) to one another – and the relations between them, the danger is that their particularity will be lost, as has been the case notoriously in the West with its excessive stress on the principle that the acts of God ad extra are undivided.9 Gunton’s account of human persons takes its theological cues from his views about divine personhood. For, as he writes in Act and Being, ‘what it is to be a human person in this case is identical with what it is to be a divine person, and therefore the word means the

Colin E. Gunton, Act and Being: Toward a Theology of the Divine Attributes (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2002), 3. For discussion of this point, see Anizor, Trinity and Humanity, ch. 2; Holmes, ‘Towards the Analogia Personae et Relationis’; and Christoph Schwöbel, ‘The Shape of Colin Gunton’s Theology: The Way towards a Fully Trinitarian Theology’, in The Theology of Colin Gunton, 182–208. 7 See Lewis Ayres’s forthright review of Gunton’s book, The Promise of Trinitarian Theology (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1991), in Journal of Theological Studies 43, no. 2 (1992): 780–2. More sympathetic critical accounts can be found in Bradley G. Green, Colin Gunton and the Failure of Augustine: The Theology of Colin Gunton in the Light of Augustine (Cambridge: James Clarke, 2012); and Joshua McNall, A Free Corrector: Colin Gunton and the Legacy of Augustine (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2015). 8 See Gunton, The One, the Three and the Many: God, Creation and the Culture of Modernity. The Bampton Lectures 1992 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), where he says that perichoresis ‘enables theology to preserve both the one and the many in dynamic interrelations. It implies that the three persons of the Trinity exist only in reciprocal eternal relatedness … . The three do not merely coinhere, but dynamically constitute one another’s being …’, 163–4. 9 Gunton, ‘Eastern and Western Trinities: Being and Person. T. F. Torrance’s Doctrine of God’, in Father, Son and Holy Spirit: Toward a Fully Trinitarian Theology (London: T&T Clark, 2003), 47. In an illuminating essay, Paul Cumin traces how Gunton’s understanding of the ontological Trinity changed over time so that he ended up affirming the monarchy of the Father like his erstwhile colleague, the Orthodox theologian John Zizioulas. See Cumin, ‘A Taste for Cake: Relation and Otherness with Colin Gunton and the Strong Second Hand of God’, in The Theology of Colin Gunton, 77–8. 6

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same at the levels of creator and creation’.10 What is true of divine personhood is mirrored in creaturely persons. Thus, personhood is a univocal concept. Gunton understands this Christologically. That is, he claims that it is because Christ is God incarnate that we can truly, if partially, and falteringly, understand things about God as Christ reveals them and as they are communicated to us by his Spirit. Earlier in Act and Being he writes, ‘Through him [Christ] and through him alone, the Spirit enables us to speak truly of God’s eternal being.’ And he goes on to say that it is on this particular matter ‘that we find some purchase for a Scotist claim about the univocity of language in speaking of both the creator and the creation’.11 Because personhood is a univocal concept, rooted in a particular understanding of the divine persons of the Trinity, it is natural for Gunton to think that personhood is essentially relational as well. Indeed, relationality is, as Paraskevè Tibbs puts it, a ‘primary’ and ‘essential concept’ for Gunton’s theological anthropology.12 Thus, Gunton maintains, ‘to be a creature is to be constituted, to be made what one is, by and in a network of relationships’.13 This constitutive relationally has both a horizontal and vertical axis in relation to other creatures and to God, respectively. Although he acknowledges that notions of personhood are fraught and contested, Gunton is willing to say that ‘to be a person is to be distinct from other persons, and yet inextricably bound up with them; to be “other” only in “relation.” Just as God is who he is in the extricable fellowship of the Father, Son and Spirit, so for us to be personal is to be what we are in relation to other persons.’ And later in the same passage: ‘we are what we each particularly and uniquely are in large measure by virtue of our particular connections with people, who have made and continue to make us who we are’.14 There seem to be (at least) two distinct claims being made here, which Gunton doesn’t always clearly distinguish. The first of these is the thought that the relations persons have with others are formative in important respects, a notion that is difficult to contest. The second, and stronger, metaphysical claim is that being persons-in-relation is constitutive of who we are. This stronger claim is itself grounded in the idea that personhood is rooted in the Trinity and then applied or extended to include creatures.15 Having sketched out some salient aspects of his understanding of divine and human persons, let us now consider their application to Christology. In keeping with the tradition, Gunton is clear that Christ is a divine person with a human nature, although how he understands this is unusual in various respects, as we shall see in due course. Nevertheless,

Gunton, Act and Being, 147. Ibid.,  73. 12 Paraskevè Tibbs, ‘Created for Action: Colin Gunton’s Relational Anthropology’, in The Theology of Colin Gunton, 126. 13 Gunton, Christ and Creation, 36. 14 Gunton, The Christian Faith, 43. 15 ‘The roots of the notion lie in trinitarian theology.’ Gunton, The Christian Faith, 43. Gunton’s idea that (at least some) relations we have with other people are constitutive of who we are is a controversial notion, though it is characteristic of his broader Trinitarian theology project. It is contentious for a number of reasons. For one thing, it appears to have counterintuitive consequences. Suppose that relations I bear to members of my immediate family are constitutive in the sense Gunton intends. Then it would appear that any world God created where, say, I didn’t have a youngest brother would not be worlds that contained me. Rather, such a world would contain my counterpart – that is, some entity that looks and sounds like me, but who cannot be me on account of the fact that at least one of the constitutive relations he bears to another person (my youngest brother) is significantly different from mine. If that is right, then it seems to be a high price to pay for the kind of relational anthropology Gunton favours. 10 11

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this claim does pose a problem, to which Gunton addresses himself in several different contexts. This is the issue of how God may become human without relinquishing some of his divine prerogatives in order to do so. This is the challenge posed by kenoticism, the idea that (somehow) God the Son ‘empties’ himself in order to become human, based on the great Christ hymn of Philippians 2. In order to understand his position on this matter, let us distinguish between ontological and functional kenoticism.16 Ontological versions of kenoticism involve God the Son setting aside certain divine prerogatives in order to become human, like a monarch setting aside her royal status were she to abdicate the throne. Functional versions of kenoticism have to do with refraining from the use of certain prerogatives, but not abandoning them altogether. This is like the monarch deciding she will lay aside her power to dissolve parliament for some period due to political upheavals. The important thing to see here is that ontological kenoticism involves a substantial change to the divine person in question, whereas functional kenoticism need not involve a substantial change. Gunton distances himself from ontological kenoticism, but seems willing to contemplate a weak version of functional kenoticism. Against ontological kenoticism, he writes, ‘the difficulties of such a theory have been much rehearsed. The chief of them only needs to be repeated. If it is not God, one fully God, but a depotentiated divinity that meets us, then the gospel is void, for that holds that in Christ the fullness of the Godhead dwells bodily’.17 But, if the kenoticism in question is seen as ‘the expression of the divine being rather than its depotentiation’18 that is a different matter. The incarnation is kenotic, he thinks, inasmuch as it is an expression of the fact that in Christ God acts in a fully human way.19 In this connection he also has something to say about the historic debate concerning the communication of idioms (communicatio idiomatum). This has to do with whether the attributes of Christ’s humanity are communicated to his deity, and vice versa. Put concretely: Is Christ omniscient in his human nature? Is his human flesh omnipresent in creation in virtue of the hypostatic union? When his human body expires on the cross, does God die too? Gunton thinks that these questions are misplaced. He distances himself from the language of two distinct natures that interact or share qualities, preferring instead to speak of a communication of actions. Christ’s actions are always the acts of God incarnate. So they are always fully divine and fully human actions.20 However, language of the communication of actions doesn’t really address the underlying issues. For one can still ask Gunton whether Christ is omniscient in his humanity or whether his humanity is everywhere present. Claiming that Christ’s actions are always wholly human and wholly divine does nothing to settle the substantive question, a question which is really about the relation between Christ’s divinity and humanity. But there are more significant questions in the neighbourhood that Gunton’s views on divine and human personhood do not really address either. For instance, can a divine person whose relations are constitutive of who he is enter into new relations with creatures without changing in some substantive sense? Can such a divine person become

A distinction I have elaborated elsewhere. See Oliver D. Crisp, Divinity and Humanity: The Incarnation Reconsidered. Current Issues in Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), ch. 5. 17 Gunton, Christ and Creation, 83. 18 Ibid., emphasis original. 19 Ibid.,  85–6. 20 See Gunton, The Christian Faith, 95. 16

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human without changing in some substantive sense? Gunton does have a place for divine immutability in his Theology Proper, construing it in terms of a constancy of character that cannot be affected by action from without the Godhead.21 But if that is right, then how can we affirm (a) that God is immutable in his character and being (in the relevant sense), (b) that God’s relations are constitutive of his being and (c) that God is able to enter into new relations with creation and supremely in the incarnation in becoming human? The traditional Thomist way out of this triad of claims is to affirm that God has no real relation to creation.22 But, given his relational ontology, that is not an option open to Gunton. On his view, God is really related to his creatures. But somehow, his relation to his creatures does not substantively change him – not even in the incarnation. It is difficult to see how both of these claims can be true, and sadly, Gunton does not address himself to the question of their compossibility.

SPIRIT CHRISTOLOGY The Holy Spirit has a prominent place in Gunton’s theology in general and in his Christology in particular in what is often referred to as Spirit Christology. This is a rather plastic term, encompassing a variety of different views about the agency of the Holy Spirit in the life and ministry of Christ. For some, like Geoffrey Lampe, it provides a way of explaining how the human Jesus of Nazareth was empowered by the indwelling Holy Spirit so that he might perform his ministry.23 The result is what is sometimes called a degree Christology because the Holy Spirit is said to indwell Christ to a greater degree than other human beings. What sets Christ apart from the mass of humanity is the extent to which he is empowered by the Spirit, not (or not necessarily) the fact that he is God incarnate. Gunton was critical of the term ‘Spirit Christology’, which he associated with Lampe’s position.24 He was opposed to liberal theology and its anaemic understanding of the person and work of Christ, and appears to have associated Lampe with this sort of approach.25 Gunton’s understanding of the role of the Spirit in Christology was a substantive one and was an aspect of his broader commitment to a much more robust pneumatology than he saw at work in some of his interlocutors – particularly, Karl Barth. It is this concern to recover a more prominent and thoroughgoing pneumatology that led Gunton in his Christological work to read and appropriate ideas from Edward Irving and the puritan divine, John Owen.26 But the position at which he arrived on the basis of this study was Ibid.,  93. Thus Thomas Aquinas:

21 22

As the creature proceeds from God in diversity of nature, God is outside the order of the whole creation, nor does any relation to the creature arise from His nature; for He does not produce the creature by necessity of His nature, but by His intellect and will … . Therefore there is no real relation in God to the creature; whereas in creatures there is a real relation to God; because creatures are contained under the divine order, and their very nature entails dependence on God. Summa Theologiae 1. 28. 1. ad 3. (Translation of the Fathers of the English Dominican Province.) 23 See Geoffrey Lampe, God as Spirit: The Bampton Lectures 1976 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977). 24 See Colin E. Gunton, ‘Two Dogmas Revisited: Edward Irving’s Christology’, Scottish Journal of theology 41, no. 3 (1988): 359–76; 373–4. Reprinted in Gunton, Theology through the Theologians: Selected Essays, 1972–1995 (London: T&T Clark/Continuum, 1996), 151–68. I will refer to the version in the Scottish Journal of Theology. 25 See Gunton, Yesterday and Today, ch. 8. 26 See the concluding comments of Gunton, ‘Two Dogmas Revisited’ on this point. A useful comparison can be made in this connection with the work of Alan Spence, Incarnation and Inspiration: John Owen and the Coherence

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not a degree Christology like Lampe. Instead, like Irving and Owen, he favoured a view according to which Christ was indeed God incarnate, but was empowered by the Holy Spirit to carry out his messianic mission. Gunton is clear that Christ is a divine person incarnate. Appropriating the ancient theological distinction between the anhypostatic human nature of Christ (i.e. the idea that his human nature does not form a person independent of the incarnation) and the enhypostatic human nature of Christ (the idea that Christ’s human nature is personalized, to speak, in being assumed by God the Son in the incarnation), he argues that ‘Jesus’ humanity is the humanity of the eternal Son. Jesus is the eternal Son become incarnate.’27 In other words, the human nature of Christ is united to the person of the Son; the Son is the person ‘in’ Christ, as it were (though Gunton does not use such language). His human nature is not a second person alongside the person of the Son. To this traditional claim Gunton adds an emphasis on the full humanity of Christ28 and on the agency of the Spirit in the virginal conception, incarnation, baptism and ministry of Christ.29 The Spirit not only brings about the incarnation by means of the virginal conception of Christ. He also perfects the frail, fallen humanity of Christ (about which, more presently). ‘Jesus, a man in need of divine support and guidance like all human beings, shares in human flesh in all its weakness and need.’30 He is capable of sin, says Gunton, but is enabled not to sin by the agency of the Spirit.31 For those who are enamoured of this sort of pneumatological Christology, Gunton proves an ally even though his view is rather underdeveloped. Nevertheless, what he does say raises some concerns. As I have pointed out elsewhere32 Spirit Christologies like that

of Christology (London: T&T Clark/Continuum, 2007). Spence was one of Gunton’s doctoral students at King’s College, London, and this was the published version of his doctoral dissertation. 27 Thus Gunton: ‘Anhypostasia does not teach … the impersonality of Christ’s humanity, but the fact that his hypostasis, his person, does not have its basis in the way that ours do in the processes of the finite world alone.’ He goes on to say, ‘Enhypostasia, on the other hand, supplements the negative – not the same basis as our persons – with a positive: that the person of Christ – his unity historic being – has its basis in the Son and in the new act of the Father in him.’ Gunton, Christ and Creation, 47, 48. Compare, The Christian Faith, 79, where he makes the much stronger claim that the heart of the Christian faith is that the historical Jesus is identical with the person of the Son of God. 28 For example: ‘unless Jesus is also fully human salvation is … not guaranteed’. And: ‘For whatever reasons, and there have been a range of them, theology has found it difficult to do full justice to the humanity of Christ.’ Gunton, The Christian Faith, 87, 98. 29 See Gunton, Christ and Creation, 46–59. Compare The Christian Faith, 99, where he writes, ‘If we are to understand what is going on first with Jesus and then with the human response to him, the central place of the Spirit cannot be ignored.’ 30 Gunton, The Christian Faith, 102. He goes on to say in the same passage that the Spirit renews and makes perfect the fallen humanity of Christ. 31 Ibid., 105–6. Rather unhelpfully, Gunton goes on to say that Christ did have sinful impulses if being tempted to worship the devil is a sinful impulse. Nevertheless, he did not have an already broken relationship with the Father out of which such temptation arose. Yet somehow he as redeemer does not need redemption from this state of affairs. (The Christian Faith, 108.) This form of words is unfortunate. For plainly, if Christ does have sinful impulses then he is in a state of sin and does require redemption. Given Gunton’s unequivocal commitment to the sinlessness of Christ, it may be most charitable to put this down to conceptual infelicity rather than clear theological conviction. 32 See Oliver D. Crisp, ‘John Owen (1616–1683) on Spirit Christology’, in Revisioning Christology: Theology in the Reformed Tradition (Abingdon: Routledge, [2011] 2016), 91–110. For criticism of my account, see Myk Habets, ‘Spirit Christology: The Future of Christology?’, in Third Article Theology: A Pneumatological Dogmatics, ed. Myk Habets (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2016), 207–32, and Lucy Peppiatt, ‘Life in the Spirit: Christ’s and Ours’, in The Christian Doctrine of Humanity: Explorations in Constructive Dogmatics, ed. Oliver D. Crisp and Fred Sanders (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan Academic, 2018), 166–82.

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of Gunton, which attempt to stick closely to the biblical tradition while giving more room for the agency of the Third Person of the Trinity, face a dilemma. Either God the Son takes a back seat in the incarnation because Christ is empowered and enabled to act in his human nature by the Third Person of the Trinity. In which case, the agency of God the Son in his human nature appears to be in jeopardy.33 Or, both the Son and the Spirit are at work in the human nature of Christ simultaneously. This latter point might not be regarded as a problem. For, so it might be thought, there is nothing in principle objectionable about the claim that God in the persons of the Son and Spirit is at work in the human nature of Christ. For aren’t all the works of God in creation Trinitarian works? However, this is to mistake the nature of the concern. The worry is that this appears to overdetermine Christ’s actions if, for any given act of Christ, the action in question depends on the agency of two divine persons. The doctrine of inseparable operations, according to which all the external works of God are Trinitarian works, does not necessarily help Gunton in this regard. For many external works, the incarnation included, are said to be the particular preserve of one divine person, upon whom they terminate. In the case of the incarnation, this is God the Son. Although all three divine persons are involved in the incarnation, it is the particular work of God the Son to become incarnate. Claiming that the Holy Spirit is the agent that sustains the incarnation after God the Son assumes his human nature appears to jeopardize this. But perhaps the thought is that the Spirit indwells Christ as he indwells the believer, where such indwelling is something distinct from the general agency of the Spirit in sustaining and conserving the creation. Suppose that is right. Even if it is, there are at least two problems with this. First, it suggests a kind of division in the external works of God that is unsustainable. It is not as if one divine person brings about the incarnation, and another sustains it independently of the first. Rather, all God’s external works are triune works: the persons are inextricably united so that in acting in creation, all act.34 Strange as it may seem, to claim that the Spirit indwells Christ in a manner similar to his indwelling of the believer fails to acknowledge the fact that the Spirit is not some entirely distinct agent at work in Christ in addition to the Son, but the Third Person of the one triune God. A second and related problem with this claim about the indwelling of the Spirit in Christ is that it is difficult to see how the human Christ has more of the Spirit than any other creature if this is understood in quantitative terms. For the Spirit is everywhere present, sustaining and conserving creation. That is just an implication of divine omnipresence. Thus, whatever analysis we give with respect to the indwelling of the Spirit in the believer or in the human nature of Christ, it cannot be one that implies some greater quantity of presence or some greater amount of the Spirit coagulated in a particular place. For the doctrine of omnipresence by definition excludes this option.35 It seems theologically simpler and more satisfactory to say that God the Son is incarnate by the fiat of the Father, and with the Spirit’s help, though it is God the Son who is the divine person particularly at work, as it were, in and through his human nature. For although the incarnation,

Similarly, John Webster argues that Gunton’s position rests ‘on a separation of Word and Spirit that which gives little room to the Word’s continuing activity in the history of the incarnate one’. Webster, ‘Gunton and Barth’, 28. 34 This is the notion that the external works of God are all Trinitarian works (opera trinitatis ad extra indivisa sunt). 35 A suggestion: indwelling is an epistemic matter, not an ontological one. That is, it is a matter of perceiving and understanding the agency of the Spirit in the life of the believer rather than in some ontological change in the believer. 33

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like all of God’s external works, is a triune action, it terminates upon the person of the Son. (After all, it is the Son who is incarnate, not the Father, and not the Spirit.) This will not convince advocates of Spirit Christology like Gunton. But it does provide some theological reason to push back against this aspect of his Christology.36

A FALLEN HUMAN NATURE? The debate about whether Christ had a fallen human nature continues apace, though the lines of demarcation between the different views are at this point clearly drawn. Gunton was one of those who thought that Christ had a fallen human nature. Here too he was influenced by Edward Irving.37 Gunton maintained that in becoming incarnate God the Son must assume a fallen human nature in order to identify with those whom he came to save, as a member of the same race, bound together through personal relations. He is clear that it is persons who sin, not natures.38 Thus, Christ may have a fallen human nature and yet not sin if God the Son is the person ‘in’ Christ, so to speak (though this is probably not language Gunton would have approved, since he did not like ‘dividing up’ Christ in this way). For, as Gunton puts it, ‘the matter from which the Spirit builds a body for the Son is that same corrupt matter as that which constitutes the persons of other human beings’.39 It is his flesh that is fallen, not his person. But, as is sometimes true of other theologians who take this view, he is never entirely clear what he thinks fallenness refers to in his various forays into the topic.40 For instance, if all he means to suggest is that the matter that composes Christ’s human body is the same matter of which every other fallen human being is composed, this is a fairly tame theological claim, and one that defenders of the view that Christ’s human nature is ‘unfallen’ could also make. (Though how matter is ‘corrupt’ is a little more difficult to understand.) But if there is something more substantive at issue – if, for example, the idea is that the human soul or mind of Christ is somehow tainted with original sin – then matters are more complicated. Unfortunately, it is not clear from what he does say which of these views (if either) he defends.41 Gunton cites John Owen on this with approval in ‘Two Dogmas Revisited’, 375n20. When one turns to the passage from which Gunton quotes, one is immediately confronted with Owen’s formidable and dialectically agile intellect. He anticipates the worries I raise here and has a ready response, namely that the Trinitarian operations safeguard rather than undermine Spirit Christology (though he doesn’t refer to it as Spirit Christology). See John Owen, Pneumatalogia (originally published in 1674), in The Works of John Owen, Vol. 3, ed. William Goold (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, [1862] 1966), bk. II. ch. III, 160–2. There is not the space to pursue this here. But it is indicative of the fact that this is a complex and difficult area of Christology that raises important issues that are hard to nail down. 37 See especially, Gunton, ‘Two Dogmas Revisited’. 38 See Gunton, Christ and Creation, 53n13; The Christian Faith, 102. 39 Gunton, The Christian Faith, 102. 40 Thus, E. Jerome van Kuiken writes, ‘Regarding the term “fallen”, Gunton is even vaguer, affirming nebulously that Christ “in some way shares our fallen condition.” ’ (The reference here is to Gunton, The Christian Faith, 101.) See van Kuiken, Christ’s Humanity in Current and Ancient Controversy: Fallen or Not? (London: T&T Clark, 2017), 47. 41 This is a problem for the right interpretation of Gunton’s views. For instance, Uche Anizor, in glossing Gunton’s treatment of Edward Irving’s Christology in his ‘Two Dogma’s Revisited’ paper, writes that ‘in his human nature Christ was subject to the effects of the fall. However, in his personhood, Christ was entirely sinless.’ That seems true of Irving and Gunton. However, he goes on to say ‘Christ, then, took to himself the sin common to all humanity, creation even, and obtains victory over it by giving himself (and creation in him) fully over to the Father’s will.’ That may be true of Irving, but it is not clear that it is true of Gunton. See Anizor, Trinity and Humanity, 117. 36

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Gunton does argue that Christ remains sinless through the agency of the Holy Spirit. The Spirit’s work in the incarnation recapitulates or mirrors his work in the inner life of the Trinity as the one who enables the Son to be the Son by perfectly realizing the love that exists between Father and Son.42 I am not entirely sure what this means, for it is not clear to me how any one divine person can enable another divine person to be that particular divine person. But perhaps this is no more opaque than the traditional Trinitarian claim that the Son is eternally generated by the Father. Similarly, it is not clear to me how the Spirit enables Christ to be Christ unless what is meant is that the Spirit brings about the miracle of incarnation by means of the virginal conception – which Gunton explicitly endorses. But this is not sufficient to motivate the stronger claim about the Spirit enabling Christ to be Christ, or the Son to be the Son, unless this means something like: the Spirit is the means by which the Son becomes incarnate and in that sense ‘enables Christ to be Christ’ in the work of the virginal conception. But since (to repeat) all the external works of God are Trinitarian works, this doesn’t really amount to very much more than the idea that the manner by which the incarnation obtains is an external divine work that terminates upon the Holy Spirit in the virginal conception.

CHRIST’S TWO WILLS We come to perhaps the most challenging aspect of Gunton’s Christology, namely, his account of Christ’s two wills. After a brief preamble about classical Christology, which is the background against which Gunton develops his own position, we shall focus on three doctrinal claims Gunton makes about Christ’s two wills. These are: his apparent Monothelitism; his unease about the two natures doctrine; and whether he conflates divine and human action in the one theandric operation of Christ. First, some background. Following the teaching of Maximus the Confessor, the Fathers of the Third Council of Constantinople in AD 681 canonized the view that Christ had two wills, one human (according to his human nature) and one divine (according to his divine nature). This is the doctrine of Dyothelitism. The alternative, Monothelitism, is the claim that Christ had only one will. The presumption was that wills are aspects of a person’s nature, not the person as a hypostasis or fundamental substance. For, so the Constantinopolitan Fathers thought, without a human will Christ cannot be said to be fully human because wills are aspects of natures, not persons. Christ is not a human person, strictly speaking, on pain of Nestorianism (roughly: the idea that there are two persons in Christ). But neither can he be a divine person with a divine will who wills as a divine person via his human nature (which is tantamount to Apollinarianism). He must have a human nature that has a human will as well. Gunton denies this, affirming what appears to be a version of Monothelitism.43 His reasons for this are complex and must be pieced together from various things he says across

Gunton, The Christian Faith, 101–2. This is puzzling. For in his ‘Two Dogma’s Revisited’ essay on Edward Irving’s Christology written in mid-career, Gunton writes with seeming approval, ‘The radical self-involvement of the Son in the person of Christ thus enables Irving to share the rejection of monothelite christology, and to show why such an apparently obscure heresy must be resisted.’ Gunton, ‘Two Dogmas Revisited’, 364. However, as we shall see presently, it may be that Gunton misconstrues Dyothelitism in such a way that his position implies Monothelitism though he was not fully cognizant of this. 42 43

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his writings.44 In Act and Being Gunton makes the point that although a will is something a person is said to possess, ‘to … hypostasize will as a kind of distinct entity within a person … has been the cause of insuperable theological difficulties in understanding the relation between the doctrine of the Trinity and christology’.45 He focuses upon Dyothelitism as a particular problem in this regard, using the example of Christ’s prayer in Gethsemane (Mt. 26:36–56; Mk 14:32–42; Lk. 22: 39–46). Against the dyothelite position, Gunton argues two things. First, the traditional Christological claim that the ‘will is an attribute of nature and not of the hypostasis or person leads to saying that natures have wills, with an inevitably Nestorian outcome. A human nature and a divine nature cannot will anything. Only persons have wills, especially if by “will” we mean that which initiates or brings about action directed to an object or end.’46 Second, he maintains that his own position is supported by Scripture. He writes, ‘What we read in the gospel accounts of Gethsemane is an interaction between the will of the incarnate Christ – the eternal Son become man – and the will of the Father.’ He goes on, ‘Jesus is praying in the Spirit to the Father.’47 This latter point is rather less clear, because it is consistent with more than one way of construing what is going on in the Gethsemane story. Matters are not helped by the fact that later in the same passage Gunton admits that some of the confusion has been caused by different conceptions of will. For, considered in terms of divine intention, God has one will for his creation, whereas (by implication, at least) considered in terms of an attribute, God has three wills: of the Father, of the Son, and of the Spirit.48 Gunton approves of the modern psychological view that persons will actions; natures do not. But if that is the case, then it appears that on Gunton’s reading of the Gethsemane narratives we have an interaction between the will of person of the eternal Son and the will of the person of the Father. The reasoning seems to be this: wills belong to persons not natures; Christ is ‘the eternal Son become man’; Christ wills as a (divine) person; and Christ prays in the Spirit to the Father, concerning the will of the Father. Thus we have two divine persons in conversation. Not only that, but Christ has only one will: his divine will, as a divine person. He does not also have a human will other than that of the divine Son of God willing as a human. This amounts to an eccentric understanding the Gethsemane narratives. Such a way of understanding Gunton is reinforced by what he says in The Christian Faith, another of his last works, and a short summary of Christian doctrine. There he seems to misconstrue Dyothelitism in the context of the Gethsemane narratives of the canonical Gospels. ‘Clearly, there are two wills involved’ in Gethsemane, he avers. And ‘one accepts the decision of the other’. But there are not two wills within Christ, but only ‘two at work in his career, his will and the will of his Father’.49 But this is clearly not the same as historic Dyothelitism because it means Christ has only one will, namely, the will of God the Son. He has no human will in addition to his divine will as the Son. In addition to this, as Alan Spence has recently point out, Gunton was rather uneasy about the Chalcedonian two natures doctrine.50 In The Christian Faith, he writes that the two natures doctrine ‘has sometimes led to the appearance of a kind of hybrid being, two I am indebted in this section to Alan Spence ‘The Person as Willing Agent: Classifying Gunton’s Christology’. A more general account of Gunton’s Christology is given in Anizor, Trinity and Humanity, ch. 5. 45 Gunton, Act and Being, 28–9, emphasis original. 46 Ibid.,  29. 47 Ibid. 48 Ibid.,  30–1. 49 Gunton, The Christian Faith, 109–10. 50 Spence, ‘The Person as Willing Agent’, 52. 44

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contrary entities stitched together, like a centaur, suggesting two persons rather than one person in two natures’.51 What he says next is also perplexing: ‘That this teaching has since early times been labelled “Nestorianism” and officially rejected has not prevented some from speaking and writing as if it were true.’52 I take it that this is a case of Gunton being less careful than he ought to have been. A caricature of the two natures doctrine might well lead a person to think that Christ is a hybrid entity. But no serious theologian would make that mistake. Even those with only a passing knowledge of the history know that the two natures doctrine was developed at least in part in order to combat this sort of worry. Nor does the two natures doctrine entail Nestorianism. Suppose we think of Nestorianism as the claim that in Christ coexist two distinct persons, one human, the other divine. Plainly, this is inconsistent with the two natures doctrine, because the two natures doctrine denies there are two persons in Christ. It affirms one divine person subsisting in two natures. So if these were Gunton’s reasons for being uneasy about the two natures doctrine, they are not very good reasons because they are based on a straw man. Spence provides a trenchant critique of Gunton on this topic in his essay on aspects of Gunton’s Christology.53 But I judge that he goes beyond the evidence when he claims that although Gunton affirms a single operation in Christ – one source of action – he appears to ascribe this one operation to both the human Christ and to the Father. In support of this claim, Spence cites several key passages from The Christian Faith. Gunton writes that in Christ ‘there are not … two natures in the sense of rival principles. His action is God’s action only as the action of one who was fully human, and nothing must be said which might undermine that humanity.’54 And, ‘there are not two wills within Jesus, only two at work in his career, his will and that of the Father. … The Father’s will is fulfilled by the free human willing of the incarnate Son in the power of the Spirit.’55 But against this must be set other passages (also cited by Spence) that seem to qualify these statements. For instance: ‘we have a single personal action – that of Jesus Christ, the Son of God in the flesh – which is at once God’s action and that of one who is fully human’.56 This suggests that Gunton believed that there is one principle of action in Christ that is God the Son acting humanly. The language is unclear and at times unhelpful. But it does not amount to ascribing the one divine operation to two distinct agents. Nevertheless, Gunton does seem to be confused about the metaphysics of Christ’s agency, as well as mistaken about the implications of the classical Christological consensus on the metaphysics of the incarnation, and these are not minor issues. At least part of the problem is that Gunton does not seem to think of will as an attribute in the traditional sense, but as an action. He writes in Act and Being, ‘underlying all this is the point which must be made: that will is not an attribute but a description of a personal agent engaging in a certain form of action’.57 However, it is not clear to me how this more actualistsounding account of Christ’s will(s) is supposed to help Gunton avoid the charges of Gunton, The Christian Faith, 78–9. Ibid. 53 Spence, ‘The Person as Willing Agent’. 54 Gunton, The Christian Faith, 105. 55 Ibid., 109–10. 56 Ibid.,  95. 57 Gunton, Action and Being, 30. Gunton says similar things in The Christian Faith, 95. Compare Spence who writes, ‘I now understand him [Gunton] to be suggesting that he natures of Christ are to be viewed as actions or operations rather than substantial entities.’ Spence, ‘The Person as Willing Agent’, 53. 51 52

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Monothelitism and conceptual confusion about the two natures doctrine. Those who are not independently motivated by a social account of the Trinity will find little in what Gunton says here that is attractive.

SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION In the last paragraph of Yesterday and Today, which was his most sustained engagement with Christology, Gunton writes, Christology, like all theology, is a difficult and demanding discipline. In it, some attempt is made to think about the living Jesus of the Church’s worship and of the New Testament confession. It cannot be done without the assistance of the past, nor without the great labour of exercising thought and judgement as to where the past was right and where it was wrong. But that is to reaffirm, not to deny, that it is the same kind of discipline as that engaged in by Ignatius, Athanasius and Anselm.58 This could almost be a summary statement of his approach to theology in general, and to Christology in particular. Gunton’s attempt to wrestle honestly with the tradition, in critical engagement with the past in pursuit of a better theology for today, represents much that is appealing. But his method did not prevent him from embracing conclusions about the person of Christ that must be troubling to those who are committed to a broadly classical, orthodox Christology. In this chapter I have offered a critical account of the dogmatic shape of Colin Gunton’s Christology according to four central dogmatic themes. For those committed to a social doctrine of the Trinity, there will be much in Gunton’s understanding of the person of Christ with which they can sympathize. And for partisans of moderate kenoticism, Spirit Christology and the claim that Christ had a fallen human nature, Gunton proves an ally as well. But even for those who are sympathetic to these important aspects of Gunton’s Christology what he says about the two natures doctrine, and about the wills of Christ, are troubling if not (frankly) unorthodox. Of course, this is just to express a view about Gunton’s approach relative to a dogmatic standard, in this case, the standard of classical Christology expressed in the canons of the great ecumenical councils of the undivided Church. Taking the tradition seriously is certainly one aspect of Gunton’s project. But it is not the only relevant aspect. As he says at the end of Yesterday and Today, there are places at which the theology of the past was wrong as well as places where it was right. Those who wish to emphasize the more critical and constructive aspects of Gunton’s project can point to this with approval. According to this way of thinking, there are important ways in which classical Christology needs to be corrected. Gunton’s reassessment of the person of Christ and the will(s) of Christ in the context of a fully social Trinitarianism and (something like) an incipient actualist ontology is conducive to a revisionist project critically engaged with the great tradition of theology. This will not be to every reader’s liking. But, importantly, such a revisionist-constructive way of thinking about Gunton’s work is a view that – perhaps surprisingly – makes sense of his Christology. In this respect, and like his theology more generally, his is the work of a contrarian. And this is just what one might expect of an English systematic theologian who self-identified as a dissenter.

Gunton, Yesterday and Today, 208–9, emphasis original.

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CHAPTER SIX

Gunton on atonement MURRAY RAE

One of the strengths of Colin Gunton’s theology is the attention given to the interrelationality of things. Doctrines are not treated in isolation from one another but in terms of their contribution to the big story of God’s creative and redemptive purposes for the world. It is not uncommon to find treatments of the atonement that focus almost exclusively on the cross of Christ, but Gunton’s exposition, by contrast, involves consideration of how the atonement bears upon the whole order of creation, of the relation between creation and redemption, of how the three persons of the Trinity share in the work of atonement, of the kind of community called forth and made possible on account of the atoning work of Christ and of the final purpose towards which atonement is directed. Gunton’s most substantial treatment of the doctrine, found in The Actuality of Atonement, certainly has this broad scope, but, in accordance with Gunton’s attention to the interrelation of things, the doctrine of the atonement also appears in his work on the doctrines of creation, the Trinity, the Spirit, eschatology and the Church. Without diminishing the once-for-all nature of the work of Christ on the cross, Gunton’s careful articulation of ‘the actuality of atonement’ stresses the pervasiveness of the triune God’s continuing work of atonement throughout creation. The gathering of all things into reconciled relationship with God, thus overcoming through atonement all opposition to God’s purposes, is the purpose to which the work of the divine Word and Spirit is directed throughout history and through all creation. In a brief article on the atonement in the Concise Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Gunton explains that the doctrine of atonement ‘articulates the acts by which relations between God and creatures, disrupted by human offence, can be restored’.1 Gunton does not have in mind here a restoration to some lost ideal state. Taking his lead from Irenaeus, Gunton insists that we need to understand creation as a project: it is something ‘God creates not as a timelessly perfected whole but as an order of things that is planned to go somewhere; to be completed or perfected, and so projected into time.’2 Restoration, therefore, is not to be understood as a return to some supposed ideal beginning but rather as the restoration of creation’s divinely ordained trajectory towards the reconciliation of all things with God and with one another. The need for restoration arises because God’s project encounters opposition, and in consequence, the relationships for which we are created are variously disrupted. That opposition and the resultant disruption of

Colin E. Gunton, ‘Atonement’, in Concise Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Professor Edward Craig and Edward Craig (New York: Routledge, 2000), 63. 2 Colin E. Gunton, The Promise of Trinitarian Theology, 2nd edn (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1997), 181. 1

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relationships remain a tragic feature of our existence and so it is clear, Gunton explains, that ‘full and universal at-one-ment happens only at the end’.3 We therefore have to ask, ‘What is the place of the historical atonement achieved by Jesus Christ in realising the project?’4 That will take us to the cross, but not only there. We shall have to consider the full history of Christ’s atoning work undertaken during the course of his earthly ministry and continuing through his present reign as the risen and ascended Lord until that day when ‘he has put all his enemies under his feet’ (1 Cor. 15.25).

THE PROJECT OF CREATION Although a fuller treatment of the doctrine of creation is provided elsewhere in this volume, it is necessary to remind ourselves briefly of the context within which the work of atonement takes shape. Whatever may be said by science about the mechanisms by which the world was established and through which it continues to evolve, it is the unique insight of the biblical writers that creation should be understood as ‘personal and divine action’.5 Two features of this action are to be noted: it is both sovereign and free, and it is mediated.6 The sovereignty of the Creator means that he is Lord of all and will see to it in the end that his purposes in creation are brought to fulfilment. That he is free entails that he is not bound to create. The biblical tradition attests that God creates out of no necessity but solely as an act of love. Atonement, as we shall see, is also to be understood as the free and sovereign action of the loving God. To speak of the mediation of God’s creative action is to speak of the means by which God creates. The account of creation given in the Bible’s opening chapter indicates that God speaks and it comes to be. Creation is mediated through the Word and Spirit of God. And yet there is an important detail of God’s creation through the Word to which Gunton draws attention. God does not say ‘Be’ but ‘Let there be’. There is in the divine action of creation, Gunton explains, a mysterious accommodation to the nature of the reality that God’s creative action brings about. This is apparent too in the further creative words: ‘Let the waters bring forth’ (Gen. 1.20) and ‘Let the earth bring forth’ (Gen. 1.24). ‘The world is not simply a function of God’s action, though that remains in the centre, but that action creates something that has its own unique and particular freedom to be.’7 The divine gift of freedom to the creature is the basis of creation’s capacity to flourish and grow and also of human creativity, in science, ethics and art.8 But it also enables the creature to act in defiance of God’s command. A scan of human history reveals the consequences of that defiance, and the biblical prophets tell of it. This from Isaiah: The earth dries up and withers. the world languishes and withers; the heavens languish together with the earth. The earth lies polluted under its inhabitants; for they have transgressed laws, violated the statutes, Gunton, The Promise of Trinitarian Theology, 182. Ibid. 5 Colin E. Gunton, The Christian Faith: An Introduction to Christian Doctrine (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), 4. 6 On which, see ibid., 4–5. 7 Ibid.,  5. 8 See ibid., 8. 3 4

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broken the everlasting covenant. (Isa. 24.4-5) And this from Hosea: There is no faithfulness or loyalty, and no knowledge of God in the land. Swearing, lying and murder, and stealing and adultery break out; bloodshed follows bloodshed. Therefore the land mourns, and all who live in it will languish; together with the wild animals and the birds of the air, even the fish of the sea are perishing. (Hos. 4.1b-3) The consequences of defiance are cosmic in scope. The whole of creation is disrupted; it is thrown off course. Gunton explains: ‘Salvation is to do with relationships; with God, other people and the world. Its necessity arises from the fact that in various ways our relations with our creator, our world and one another have gone awry.’9 ‘The theological term for this is sin.’10 The atonement that is needed, the reordering and the ‘setting right of that which has been disrupted’,11 has also therefore to be cosmic in scope. How might this ‘setting right’ take place? Clearly for Gunton, as indeed for any theology claiming to be Christian, the answer lies in attending to what happens in Jesus. The one ‘in whom all things in heaven and earth were created’ and in whom ‘all things hold together’ (Col. 1.16-17) comes into the midst of the disruption in order to restore the world to its true order and purpose. What is achieved in Jesus’ ministry is accordingly the work of the one through whom the creation was made returning to his realm in human actuality, in such a way that by means of his action and passion, and what God achieves through them, the project of creation is redirected to its proper end – the at-one-ment of all things with God.12

THE PERSON AND WORK OF CHRIST We turn then to consider the action and passion of Christ and the identity of him who acts and suffers to affect the reconciliation of all things with God. To begin with the identity of Christ, we may say simply that everything Gunton has to say about Christ’s action and passion rests on a credal Christology according to which Jesus is the unique, divine Son of God and second person of the Trinity. Everything Jesus does, he does in concert with the Father to whom he is obedient and with the Spirit by whom he is guided and empowered. Equally, and again in faithfulness to the Church’s creedal tradition, all that Jesus does is the action of a fully human being who acts in our place and on our behalf. Atonement is a divine act and necessarily so for sin is so serious a disruption of the created order that only the Creator can restore it, but it is also a human act for if it is not, then we are not reconciled; we remain turned away from God. Gunton made this point in the course on Colin E. Gunton, Theology through the Theologians (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1996), 172–3. Gunton, The Christian Faith, 59. 11 Colin E. Gunton, The Actuality of Atonement: A Study of Metaphor, Rationality and the Christian Tradition (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1988), 150. 12 Gunton, The Promise of Trinitarian Theology, 185. 9

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Karl Barth taught regularly at King’s College in London.13 At every turn in our exposition of the doctrine of atonement we must attend to the fact that the action and passion of Jesus, our brother, is also the action of the triune God. We have already seen that the action of God in Christ and through the Spirit is directed towards the reconciliation of all things with God, thus bringing to fulfilment God’s purpose in creation. While the passion of Christ is decisive in this regard, atonement is not yet complete. The reconciled relation and thus the at-one-ment of God with his creatures will be completed only at the end. ‘Only when all things are reconciled to him will the world be finally in its projected relation to God.’14 What then, Gunton asks, ‘is the place of the historical atonement achieved by Jesus Christ in realising this project’?15 An answer to that question will go astray if it focuses on the cross alone. We must begin with the incarnation which is itself a realization of God’s declaration that he will dwell with his people.16 This act of love is the basis of atonement and the first necessary step towards its full realization. We may move then to Jesus’ own declaration, drawing upon the words of Isaiah, of what he is about in his dwelling among us: The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,   because he has anointed me    to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives   and recovery of sight to the blind,    to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour. (Lk. 4.18-19) Jesus here announces that he has come to do battle against those powers that impede the realization of God’s project. ‘They are the things’, Gunton writes, ‘which prevent the created order and its various components from achieving their destined perfection’17 – poverty, captivity of various kinds, blindness and oppression, to name but a few. It is against such disruptions of God’s ordering of things that Jesus contends throughout his ministry. He heals the sick, he forgives sin, he feeds the hungry and he makes companions of those who are marginalized and oppressed. The exorcisms are especially revealing here for they ‘show the human condition enslaved to forces beyond its control’.18 Atonement involves release from the bondage such forces impose. Those forces are gathered, of course, at Calvary where they seek to put an end to God’s claim upon creation. They seek to wrest control from the Creator by putting to death the one through whom all things came to be and in whom ‘God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things’ (Col. 1.20). This ‘unaccountable and irrational rejection of God by the creature’ entails that God’s gracious dealings with us necessarily ‘take the form of opposition and overcoming’.19 This is a point Gunton drew from Barth during the course of his doctoral study, and it remained central throughout his subsequent writing on the atonement. ‘On the cross God in Jesus Christ suffers the very opposition that God in his S ee Colin E. Gunton, The Barth Lectures, ed. Paul Brazier (London: T&T Clark, 2007), 175. Gunton, The Promise of Trinitarian Theology, 182. 15 Ibid. 16 See, for instance, Ezek. 37.27; Exod. 29.45-46; Zech. 2.10. 17 Gunton, The Promise of Trinitarian Theology, 184. 18 Ibid.,  182. 19 Colin E, Gunton, Becoming and Being: The Doctrine of God in Charles Hartshorne and Karl Barth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), 200. 13 14

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grace is concerned to overcome.’20 This struggle against evil, against creaturely opposition to God’s purposes, has just one end in view, namely, the restoration of God’s good ordering of things and the final realization of God’s purposes. Referring to the various metaphors of atonement, concerning which we will say more below, Gunton writes, in different ways the atonement is seen to be that historical action in which, by overcoming in the human activity and suffering of Jesus the enemies of creation’s true flourishing, God enables the creation to achieve that which was purposed for it, the reconciliation of all things in Christ.21 The question arises, of course, how does the human activity and suffering of Jesus overcome the enemies of creation’s true flourishing and enable the creation to achieve that which was purposed for it? In contrast with their pronouncements concerning the person of Christ, the ecumenical councils of the patristic era never issued a definitive account of the work of Christ or attempted to describe precisely how the life, death and resurrection of Christ effect atonement. They were content instead to let the multiple ways of speaking about the atoning work of Christ found in the New Testament bear their respective witness to the reality of atonement without supposing that any single account can exhaust the reality or fully plumb the depths of what God has accomplished in Christ. The New Testament’s ways of speaking about the atonement have commonly been described as metaphorical. Gunton takes up this tradition in The Actuality of Atonement, a work which sets out, first, to respond to the rationalistic trend in modern theology which has tended to reduce the reality of atonement to a change brought about in and by the believer, inspired somehow by the example of Christ and, second, to explore the capacity of the traditional metaphors of atonement to provide genuine insight into the nature and scope of God’s redemptive engagement with our world.

RATIONALISTIC CRITIQUES OF THEOLOGIES OF ATONEMENT I will not say much here about Gunton’s critique of certain currents in modern thought except to note a tendency Gunton observes among rationalist critics to argue that ‘many aspects of the theology of the atonement, as they were formulated in the centuries before the modern era … violate modern canons of morality, rationality, and truth’. While Gunton accepts the validity of some of these criticisms, ‘many of them derive’, he contends, ‘from a tendency to overstress the power of the human intellect’.22 The first manifestation of this excessive stress on the intellect, evident, for instance, in the thought of Immanuel Kant, is a failure to recognize the extent to which the human intellect itself stands in need of redemption. Kant acknowledges that reason is impaired, surely enough, but not so far as to preclude it from being the agent in its own redemption. ‘The outcome of this lack of realism’, as Gunton describes it, ‘is that the salvation ascribed by historic Christianity to the action of God in the person of Jesus Christ is transferred by Kant to the action of the rational moral agent’.23 Kant’s continued use of Christian vocabulary to describe this

Ibid. Gunton, The Promise of Trinitarian Theology, 187. 22 Gunton, The Actuality of Atonement, 2. 23 Ibid.,  6. 20 21

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‘transmogrification of Christianity into its opposite’24 is ironic. Kant ‘fundamentally alters the meaning of the language Christians had used until the modern era’. The upshot is that ‘if we are saved from radical moral evil by our innate capacity, we do not need to be saved by the cross because we save ourselves, albeit with the assistance of a God located within ourselves’.25 Here we have a succinct account of the soteriology that is widespread in contemporary Western culture. The second prevalent feature of the overemphasis on the power of the human intellect in modern critiques of traditional theologies of the atonement has been touched on already in what has been said about Kant’s theology. It is the tendency to change the meaning of theological terms to such a degree that the tradition is not maintained but broken.26 This brings us to the question of whether ‘the language of law, punishment and penalty provide[s]‌a suitable vocabulary in which to speak of the relationship between God and his people’.27 Gunton is referring here, of course, to language used in traditional accounts of the atonement. ‘To abandon it’, Gunton continues, ‘would be to lose not only a central theme of biblical witness – beginning with Paul’s great treatise in Romans – but also much of what the Christian tradition has made of it’.28 We must recognize, to begin with, that the language Scripture uses to speak of the atonement is mostly metaphorical. That does not diminish its capacity to speak faithfully of what really took place through the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, but it does mean that our understanding of such language must be developed through careful attention to the relationships to which the metaphors bear witness. We may endeavour by this means to avoid, on the one hand, those reductionistic accounts of atonement which pay little heed to the traditional language or, on the other, to a narrowly literal interpretation of the language. The rationalistic theory of what has come to be called penal substitution is an unfortunate instance of the latter.29 The common, but fallacious, assumption underlying both reductionism and narrow literalism is that ‘meaning and truth are successfully conveyed only by means of concepts of an intellectual kind which have been purified as completely as possible from all imaginative and pictorial content’.30 Gunton proceeds to explain how metaphorical language, so important in theology, resists such purification and yet enables us to tell the truth. The truth-telling capacity of metaphor, however, depends upon words being used in new and unusual ways. In the case of the atonement words that began life in the legal system, the altar of sacrifice, the battlefield and the slavemarket are ‘taught to do new tricks’31 when applied to the death of Jesus on the cross. That death is said to be an act of divine justice, a victory, a sacrifice and a ransom, but the cross is best understood not by the literal transference of meaning from one field to another but rather by allowing the reality of the cross to stretch and reshape our understanding of what justice, victory, sacrifice and the liberative power of ransom might involve. Following Gunton, let us explore how such metaphorical use of language may affect a transformation in understanding.

Ibid.,  7. Ibid. 26 On which see ibid., 15. 27 Ibid. 28 Ibid. 29 See ibid., 16. 30 Ibid.,  17. 31 Here Gunton draws on the account of metaphor given by Nelson Goodman in Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969). See Gunton, The Actuality of Atonement, 28–9. 24 25

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The cross as victory The idea that the death of Jesus on the cross is to be conceived as a victory over the forces of evil gained prominence in the twentieth century on account of the treatment given it in Gustaf Aulén’s renowned work Christus Victor.32 Aulén proposed in that work that while Christ winning victory over the forces of evil was the dominant idea of the atonement throughout the patristic period and indeed in the New Testament, it was, unfortunately, overshadowed in later years by the Anselmian and Abelardian accounts. While Aulén’s historical thesis concerning the development of the doctrine of atonement has been contested, by Gunton himself, among others,33 it is certainly true that the cross as a divine victory is an idea that has roots in the New Testament itself. After surveying the New Testament material, and noting important continuities in some cases with Old Testament motifs, Gunton concludes, however, that The language of victory does not then give us a theory, something final and fixed for ever, but one way into the many-sided reality with which we are concerned. It helps us, that is to say, to come to a measure of understanding of some aspects of the way in which the Bible sets forth in language the saving action of God in and towards his world.34 This conclusion is eventually extended across all of the traditional metaphors of atonement; none of them should be regarded as the definitive or principal way of speaking about the atonement, but each sheds some light on what has been accomplished for us through the death of Jesus on the cross. Justyn Terry, a former PhD student of Gunton’s who is otherwise appreciative of Gunton’s work, expresses misgivings at this point. ‘While Gunton helps liberate atonement from the confines of rationalism by his use of metaphors’, Terry writes, ‘he does not go far enough in bringing the metaphors together to show how Christ reconciles sinners to a holy God.’35 I am not sure that Gunton would be persuaded in the end, as Terry himself proposes with respect to the judicial metaphor, that any one of the metaphors can provide the organizing logic for a comprehensive doctrine of the atonement.36 Rather than seeking a ruling metaphor, Gunton’s preference is to set the various ways in which the New Testament speaks of atonement within the broader context of God’s purposes in creation. The overcoming of human sinfulness belongs within the larger story of God fashioning a community in and through which the creature is given life precisely by being Gustaf Aulén, Christus Victor: An Historical Study of the Three Main Types of the Idea of the Atonement, trans. A. G. Herbert (London: SPCK, 1931). 33 See Gunton, The Actuality of Atonement, 55, 57, 61, and for other recent instances, Adam J. Johnson, Atonement: A Guide for the Perplexed (London: T&T Clark, 2015), 167; Kevin J. Vanhoozer, The Drama of Doctrine: A Canonical Linguistic Approach to Christian Theology (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2005), 388. 34 Gunton, The Actuality of Atonement, 62. 35 Justyn Terry, ‘Colin Gunton’s Doctrine of Atonement: Transcending Rationalism by Metaphor’, in The Theology of Colin Gunton, ed. Lincoln Harvey (London: T&T Clark, 2010), 130–45, 130–1. Terry himself argues that the judicial metaphor should be given primacy for it offers an overriding logic within which the metaphors of sacrifice and victory have their place. See also Terry’s PhD thesis which was supervised by Gunton and published as The Justifying Judgment of God: A Reassessment of the Place of Judgement in the Saving Work of Christ (Milton Keynes: Paternoster Press, 2007). 36 Note, however, the point made in the introduction to this volume: Gunton relished the critique levelled against his own work by his students. Such critique served as a catalyst for his further thinking about the issues and was, even more importantly for Gunton, an expression of the communion in Christ that is the proper locus of the theologian’s work. 32

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drawn into the loving communion of God’s own triune life. Sin, the creature’s preference for death, must be overcome in this realization of God’s purposes and justice must be done but if anything stands as the ruling motif in Gunton’s theology of atonement, and in his theology as a whole, it is this gift of life to the creature, a gift which reveals the glory of the Giver.37 But let me return now to the metaphor of victory. The ‘classic’ idea of the atonement according to Aulén, that which is dominant in the New Testament and through the patristic era, is the idea of ‘the Atonement as a Divine conflict and victory; Christ – Christus Victor – fights against and triumphs over the evil powers of the world, the “tyrants” under which mankind is in bondage and suffering, and in Him God reconciles the world to Himself ’.38 In chapter three of The Actuality of Atonement Gunton explores what sense can be made of this claim and of the language associated with it, that of the devil, demons, principalities and powers and of a victory won over these agents of evil. Two common approaches are to be rejected, Gunton contends. The first is a ‘naively supernaturalist view’ of the forces of evil in which it is supposed that there are ‘superhuman hypostases trotting about the world’39 and the second is the reductionist approach according to which biblical talk of the devil and the demonic ‘is construed as a way of speaking of merely finite or psychological influences’.40 With a better understanding of the nature of metaphorical language we may steer a middle course, Gunton argues, between these two approaches. ‘The biblical writers mean us to understand the demonic realistically but in an appropriately indirect manner.’41 We are speaking not of earthly realities but of realities that cannot be adequately described in everyday empirical terms.42 Metaphorical language provides us with a means of speaking of moral cosmic, political and psychological realities that would otherwise defy expression. There are both personal and extra-personal aspects to those forces of evil which afflict and enslave us. If we are neither to give a purely psychological account, with the attendant danger of failing to do justice to the objective reality of evil; nor to understand the demonic of the Bible in such tendentious terms that it appears ridiculously primitive; then we must come to terms with the fact that in this area of discourse we meet an attempt to express the objectivity and irrationality of evil in the only way in which it can adequately be expressed: as a reality generating its own momentum and sweeping up human beings into its power.43 The metaphorical language of demonic forces, which has no satisfactory substitute, ‘is used to express the helplessness of human agents in the face of psychological, social and cosmic forces in various combinations. Theologically’, Gunton explains, ‘we must see the In the preface to The Christian Faith, Gunton writes,

37

When a first draft of this book was completed, I had a conversation with my colleague John Webster about whether one can say that there is a single leading idea in scripture. If there is, then ‘life’ – that indefinable word which is so central to our habitation of our world – has some claim to be it. In the beginning, God gives life; in the middle, he raises Jesus Christ from the dead, itself a promise of new life now and at the end, when God will be all in all. (p. x) Aulén, Christus Victor, 20. Gunton, The Actuality of Atonement, 66. 40 Ibid. 41 Ibid. 42 See ibid., 65. 43 Ibid.,  69. 38 39

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origins of the bondage in the idolatrous worship of that which is not God.’44 The language used in Scripture and in explication of the metaphor of victory over the devil, demons, sin and death helps us to recognize a crucial aspect of our human reality; we are in the grip of forces that are cosmic in scope and that cannot be defeated through a mere act of will. They are forces, in other words, from which we need to be saved; their defeat requires a power greater than our own. We come then to consider the language of victory; what might it mean to say that Jesus has defeated the forces of evil that are variously active in the world? The first important point to note, Gunton advises, is that the victory must be conceived ‘as being the outcome of the incarnation, life, death and resurrection taken as a narrative whole’.45 The cross represents the completion of a pattern that is established throughout Jesus’ life – in the temptations, the healings, the exorcisms and the many personal encounters through which, as a result of their meeting with Jesus, people are released from bondage. The resurrection, Gunton explains, ‘represents the completion and revelation of the cross as being of universal significance’.46 It is arguable that Gunton does not say enough here about the resurrection, nor indeed of the ascension, neither of which receive a great deal of attention in The Actuality of Atonement.47 Gunton gives a much stronger account of how Christ’s victory over the forces of evil takes shape through the course of his life. The temptation narrative is especially important here because it establishes a pattern in which Jesus refuses to exercise power demonically: ‘As the stories of temptation and trial are told, we can see the conquest of the demonic happening through the decision for obedience.’48 The healings and exorcisms are a continuation of this pattern in which the forces of evil are rebuked and the grip of evil that holds us in bondage is weakened. In cases such as the healing of the paralytic reported in Mk 2.1-12 there is a twofold release from physical suffering and from sin. ‘Just as bondage to the demonic is both moral and physical, so is release.’49 The victory takes place at different levels and in multiple ways, as noted above, through the course of Jesus’ ministry. But it is at the cross, of course, that the confrontation between the demonic forces of evil and the power of God, exercised undemonically in the man Jesus, reaches its climax. To speak of the cross as Christ’s victory over such forces is to use a metaphor, Gunton explains, in a bold way. It requires us to reconsider how victories are genuinely won and what true victory consists in. If the cross is to be regarded as God’s decisive victory over the forces of evil, then victory is not what we thought it was. Victory does not involve ‘butchering your opponent with weapons’. It is not won through violence or by beating one’s opponents into submission. Victory, according to the pattern established in Christ, involves ‘refusing to exercise power demonically in order to overcome evil with good (That is the point of Romans 12:14–21, whose climax is a clear reference to the cross: “Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good,” v. 21).’50 ‘A Ibid.,  70. Ibid.,  74. 46 Ibid.,  75. 47 This point is rightly made by Terry, ‘Colin Gunton’s Doctrine of Atonement’, 139. We shall see later in this essay, however, that Gunton recognizes elsewhere the importance of resurrection and ascension to the doctrine of atonement. 48 Gunton, The Actuality of Atonement, 75. 49 Ibid.,  76. 50 Ibid.,  77–8. 44 45

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real victory’, Gunton explains, ‘is the kind of thing that happens when Jesus goes to the cross.’51 The forces of evil are disarmed by the power of suffering love, and (going further than Gunton himself does at this point) in the resurrection of Jesus from the dead, those forces are shown to have no final power. It is abundantly clear of course that the forces of evil remain active among us. The death and resurrection of Jesus constitute a victory, however, because this particular involvement of God in our human sphere confirms that evil has no future. It cannot finally hold us captive. Death has lost its sting. The process of redemption begun in Jesus and continued through the work of the Spirit will be completed finally when all things are reconciled in Christ and the benefits of his divine victory are extended to all parts of the created order.52 We are enjoined to participate already in that victory, but we do so now, enabled by the Spirit, as a foretaste and anticipation of that day when, as Paul puts it, Christ will have put all his enemies under his feet (1 Cor. 15.25). To speak of what happened at Calvary as a victory over the forces of evil is to use language, Gunton contends, in a metaphorical way. This not only saves us from a narrowly literalistic interpretation of the language but also helps us to appreciate how the language gives genuine insight into the reality of the cross itself. It helps us to recognize the cross as the culmination of Jesus’ refusal throughout his life to wield power demonically or to yield to the temptation that variously presents itself in our fallen world. Jesus, enabled and sustained by the Spirit, rejected the claim that the principalities and powers have upon our human hearts and minds, and seeks in all his engagements with us to release us from their grip. That divine engagement with the world reaches its intense climax in the crucifixion where the principalities and powers, the demons we might also say, do their worst, yet still Jesus does not yield. He will not repay evil with evil but only with love. This is revealed above all in his dying prayer: ‘Father forgive them for they do not know what they are doing’ (Lk. 23.34). Jesus’ refusal to yield to the forces of evil, his refusal to play them at their own game, so to speak, reveals that they have no final power just as surely as the resurrection confirms that death has lost its sting. If it is appropriate to speak of this drama as a victory won, then we shall have to learn afresh what victory entails. Victory is not won when we return evil for evil, when we beat our enemies into submission or when we exact revenge. Victory is won, on God’s terms, when evil is repaid with love and the last word sounded is forgiveness and new life. We do not have the scope in this chapter to survey as extensively as we have done with the language of victory Gunton’s treatment of the metaphors of justice and sacrifice. I will make only a brief comment on each of these in what follows. Gunton himself advises, however, following his discussion of victory, that ‘other metaphors operate in distinctive but similar ways’.53

The justice of God Given that the doctrine of atonement is concerned with the righting of a wrong that has been done, namely humanity’s defiance of the Creator, it is not surprising that the language of justice and law should be invoked in explication of the doctrine. Such language includes centrally the concepts of satisfaction and penalty. But we get ourselves in trouble, Gunton

Ibid.,  79. See  ibid. 53 Ibid.,  82. 51 52

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contends, when discussion of the atonement is set primarily within a legal framework rather than within the framework of divine love. This is especially the case when the legal framework adopted is the retributive logic of just deserts symbolized in the balanced scales held by Lady Justice who also wields a sword. These two emblems of retributive justice take us a long way from the restorative justice that pervades the teaching and the practice of Jesus. While retributive justice concerns itself with determining what kind of punishment fits the crime, the divine justice exercised in and through Jesus is directed towards the restoration of right relationship – at-one-ment – between the offender and the offended against.54 That is what takes place in the justification of the sinner. It is again the case that the cross of Jesus Christ challenges commonly held assumptions and invites us to consider in a new light how justice may truly be done. Although Gunton wishes to proceed beyond Anselm’s account of how the justice of God is done, Anselm does help us to see that the justice of God is decisively different from the retributive justice on which most legal systems of the world are based. Gunton puts it this way: The justice of Zeus, as manifest in the literature of classical Greece, is ‘that “violent grace” by virtue of which he punishes, late or soon, a man who has done injustice to another, either in his own person or in that of his descendants’ (p. 161). Anselm’s God, in almost total contrast, although he too is responsible for the good order of the universe, operates not by punishing but by mercifully accepting the gift of infinite value given on behalf of the offender by the God-man.55 Gunton goes on to point out how contrary understandings of divine justice – and so of justification – lay at the heart of Luther’s protest against the prevailing theology and practice of his day. While Luther’s account of the matter has its own weaknesses, principally in its neglect of the cosmic and social dimensions of divine justice, Luther’s protest serves as a reminder that the mishandling of judicial language about the atonement can attribute to God an excessively punitive character.56 The language of justice serves us better when it points to God’s merciful handling of our wrongdoing and to the reordering of all that has been disrupted by sin.

Sacrifice The metaphor of sacrifice is commonly used in speaking of the atonement but is perhaps also the most difficult to handle.57 The difficulty is that our modern sensibility leads us to recoil at the idea of animal sacrifice which was commonplace in ancient religion, including the religion of Israel, and yet the language of sacrifice is thought to describe unproblematically, and perhaps literally, whatever is going on on the cross. It seems to be commonly supposed when the language of sacrifice is applied to the cross that the blood of Jesus offered up in much the same way as sheep and goats were once killed on an altar somehow makes amends for sin and appeases the God against whom the sin has been committed. The question of whether this fairly represents ancient Israel’s understanding

n justice as a relational concept, see ibid., 104. O Ibid., 99. The quotation embedded within this passage is taken from Hugh Lloyd Jones’, The Justice of Zeus (London: University of California Press, 1971). 56 On which, see ibid., 101. This is particularly the case, Gunton contends, in some versions of penal substitution. 57 Gunton suggests as much on p. 197 of The Actuality of Atonement. 54 55

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of how sacrifice works can be left aside for now.58 The important thing to begin with is to notice the differences between ancient sacrificial rituals and what takes place on the cross. The first difference is that the death of Christ does not take place in a liturgical setting. There is no altar and no ritual offering of the body of Christ to God, not, at least, by those responsible for putting him to death. This killing is not done because the perpetrators recognize their need of forgiveness or because they imagine that this ‘sacrifice’ will restore their relationship with God. A second difference, stressed especially in the letter to the Hebrews, is that the priest making this sacrifice offers up his own life: ‘Unlike the other high priests’, says the letter to the Hebrews, ‘[Christ] has no need to offer sacrifices day after day, first for his own sins, and then for those of the people; this he did once for all when he offered himself ’ (Heb. 7.27). This should put an end immediately to any notion that an offended God needed a death in order to be appeased.59 We see here instead a loving God giving up his own Son to bear the consequences of human sin. Penal language is out of place here. This sacrifice is made for the sake of the new covenant, a covenant in which God re-establishes his unconditional commitment to humankind come what may. In giving himself in the person of his own beloved Son (Rom. 8.32; cf. Rom. 3.25), God confirms once and for all that ‘neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord’ (Rom. 8.38-39). Christ himself has descended to the depths so that even there, where humanity does its worst, the world is not left bereft of divine love. Appealing to the parable of the prodigal son, Gunton here invokes the image of the Father ‘giving himself up to the rough treatment of the very ones who reject his fatherly rule, and for their sake’.60 The language of pollution and defilement commonly associated with concepts of sacrifice in the Old Testament is also appropriate here. Christ takes upon himself creation’s polluted state;61 he comes into the midst of our fallenness and defilement precisely in order to gather us up and return us to the outstretched arms of the Father who stands ready with a clean robe signifying release from the squalor and filth of the pigsty and restoration to one’s true place as a beloved child of God. Christ’s death on the cross is thus a divine sacrifice, a sacrifice that God makes for our sake, but it is also a sacrifice made from the side of humanity. The eternal Word of God has become flesh and from the side of humanity Jesus offers his life of perfect obedience and love to the Father. ‘Jesus as our representative offers to the Father a human life – the very sacrifice which the psalmist described as “a broken and contrite heart” and which, because of our sin, we refuse to give.’62 In this way Jesus takes our part, acts for us, in the covenant relationship. Through the Spirit, furthermore, he gathers us into his life of sacrificial self-giving to the Father and continues his work among us calling us towards

Gunton points out that there is much dispute in scholarly literature about how sacrifice was understood in the world of the Old Testament and there is indeed ‘a great variety of practice and interpretation’ evident in the Old Testament itself. See The Actuality of Atonement, 121. 59 On which, see ibid., 126. 60 Ibid.,  127. 61 Here Gunton draws approvingly upon the once rejected view of Edward Irving: ‘That Christ took our fallen nature is most manifest, because there was no other in existence to take’. The citation is from The Collected Writings of Edward Irving in Five Volumes, vol. V, ed. G. Carlyle (London: Alexander Strahan, 1865). Cited in Gunton, The Actuality of Atonement, 131. 62 Colin E. Gunton, Father, Son and Holy Spirit: Toward a Fully Trinitarian Theology (London: T&T Clark, 2003), 192; cf. Gunton, The Actuality of Atonement, 125. 58

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the appropriate response which is, as Paul puts it, ‘to present [our own] bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God’ (Rom. 12.1).

A final note about metaphorical speech None of the metaphors briefly surveyed here offers on its own a wholly sufficient or comprehensive account of how the atonement takes place, but each sheds light on the reality of the cross and invites us to understand not only the language used but also our world in radically new ways. Just to be sure the point is clear: the reality of the cross cannot be accommodated within our customary conceptions of what victory and justice and sacrifice involve – that is why literal interpretation of this language will always be inadequate – but the language understood, and so reshaped, in the light of the cross itself may help us to see the world anew and to recognize that what takes place through the life, death and resurrection of Jesus releases the world from sin and evil and sets the world again on its trajectory towards fullness of life in communion with the world’s Creator.

Eschatological orientation We referred above to Justyn Terry’s observation that more needs to be said about resurrection and ascension than Gunton offers in The Actuality of Atonement but noted also that Gunton takes up that task elsewhere, notably in Christ and Creation. In that work Gunton explains that atonement brings an end to the power of sin and death but it also makes possible a new beginning, not just for humanity but for the whole creation. Resurrection releases Christ, first of all, and finally all creation, from the grip that evil has upon the world. Final release is eschatological – it is realized in full only at the end – but through the Spirit we are enabled to make our first tentative steps into the new life established through the resurrection of Jesus from the dead. This is, Gunton explains, ‘a matter of relationality: of how the relations to God of this human life become through the agency of the Spirit, the means of restoring to right relation those who had sought their own way and thus gone astray’.63 But Christ remains active with the Spirit in enabling our steps into new life. The ascended Christ intercedes for us; he becomes ‘the eternal mediator between heaven and earth’,64 actualizing, we might say, the at-one-ment, the mended relation between God and his creatures. The atonement is thus to be understood in a dual aspect, first as accomplishing something, the reinstatement of prodigal children to right relationship with the Father, and second as setting something in motion, the new life inaugurated in and through the resurrection of Jesus from the dead. The crucified, risen and ascended Christ is the giver and mediator of this new reality. We must say something finally about the Church, for the Church, Gunton explains, is called to be that community in time and space where the mended relation takes shape and where its final realization is anticipated.65 It is called to be a community where, enabled by the Spirit and led by Christ, sinners are forgiven, strangers are welcomed, the broken are healed; it is that community in which those made new through grace gather in praise of their Creator. That is the form that our creaturely response to atonement finally

olin E. Gunton, Christ and Creation (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1992), 64. C Ibid.,  67. 65 See Gunton, The Actuality of Atonement, 170. 63 64

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takes. But as Gunton points out, the word praise is used here ‘to characterise not just the particular acts we call worship, but a whole way of being in the world’.66 These brief remarks on the Church as the community called to bear witness in its own life to the actuality of atonement remind us of the broad scope of Gunton’s account of Christ’s atoning work – it resounds through all areas of Christian doctrine – and also shows forth the intensely practical nature of the doctrine. The atonement establishes and calls for our participation in a new form of life, a form of life no longer held in the grip of sin and death but directed towards the right ordering of relationships between God and all that he has made.

Ibid.,  200.

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Gunton on theological anthropology MARC CORTEZ

A quick glance at the lengthy list of books and articles produced by Colin Gunton over his career might leave one with the impression that the doctrine of humanity was only a passing concern. None of his books were dedicated exclusively to that topic, and only a handful of articles have anthropology as their clear focus. Yet that initial impression would be quite misleading given that Gunton touched on anthropological themes in almost all of his numerous writings, whether talking about Trinitarian personhood, the atonement, revelation, the Holy Spirit or any of his many other interests. Indeed, it would be closer to the mark to say that the doctrine of humanity is a pervasive theme throughout his writings. Thinking theologically about what it means to be human consistently occupied his fertile mind. If that analysis is correct, an exhaustive analysis of Gunton’s anthropology would be a daunting task, one far beyond the scope of a single essay, requiring a comprehensive analysis of all his various writings. This chapter will set a rather more modest aim, that of highlighting five critical aspects of Gunton’s anthropology: (1) the Trinitarian ground of human personhood, (2) the Christological starting point for understanding humanity, (3) the pneumatological shape of human freedom, (4) the relational nature of the imago Dei and (5) the fundamental significance of human embodiment. Although we could certainly identify other themes and ideas that were important for Gunton’s vision of humanity, these five are among the elements that he most consistently emphasized in his anthropological writings. Understanding them will provide a scaffold for engaging the other many features of his complex vision of humanity.

THE TRINITARIAN GROUND OF HUMAN PERSONHOOD As with much of his theological thought, Gunton’s understanding of the human person begins with his doctrine of the Trinity. ‘To be a human being’, Gunton declared, ‘is to be related to the Father through the Son and in the Spirit.’1 Left on its own, such a statement might appear relatively innocuous, affirming no more than that we must recognize the

Colin E. Gunton, ‘Trinity, Ontology and Anthropology: Towards a Renewal of the Doctrine of the Imago Dei’, in Persons, Divine and Human, ed. Christoph Schwöbel and Colin E. Gunton (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1991), 58. 1

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significance of the Bible’s soteriological material for understanding its perspective on the human person. For Gunton, though, we do not merely see what it means to be human in and through the redemptive work of the triune persons. Instead, the truth of humanity is most fully revealed in the nature of triune personhood itself. ‘To be a person is to be made in the image of God: that is the heart of the matter.’2 The challenge with locating personhood at the centre of your account of humanity, as Gunton knew full well, is that the concept is notoriously difficult to define. The solution, according to Gunton, is to reflect on the concept of the person theologically, allowing the revelation of God as one who exists in ‘reciprocal eternal relatedness’ to inform our understanding of what it means to be a person.3 Only through careful Trinitarian reflection on the nature of personhood can we avoid the twin errors of individualism and communalism. Regarding the first error, Gunton famously maintained that a fundamental problem in Western thought has been the tendency to define personhood anthropologically, with the result that the person comes to be viewed in overly individualistic terms. On this approach, we see humans as ‘beings with certain shared characteristics, whose chief defining character is their distinction from other such beings’.4 Although such an account might still recognize the importance of relationships insofar as they shape the identity and existence of these personal individuals, such relationships come to be viewed as more volitional than constitutive. To combat this individualized notion of the human self, Gunton drew on the theology of personhood developed by the fourth-century Cappadocians to maintain the basic anthropological significance of relationality. According to Gunton, the perichoretic interdependence of the three persons in the godhead requires us to emphasize the fundamental relationality of divine personhood. As Uche Anizor explains, ‘In what Gunton will refer to as perichoresis, the Trinitarian persons are not individuals who then enter into relations, nor are they – contrary to Augustine – relations themselves, but rather they are constituted by their relations.’5 Consequently, any individualistic understanding of personhood is Trinitarianly inadequate. Less commonly appreciated is the fact that Gunton also sought to avoid a second worry with his understanding of personhood. According to Gunton, Augustine defined the persons simply as relations, thus risking the loss of the three persons as distinguishable particulars. Although we have just noted that Gunton derides the individuality in the Western notion of personhood, he maintains that the very notion of perichoresis requires that we maintain their distinguishable identity, their particularity, as persons in relation. As Najeeb Awad explains, ‘Perichoresis’ declares that God’s being is based on the reciprocal interpenetration of Father, Son, and Spirit. But this does not imply a reduction of divine being into a relational order. It means both ‘ordered and free interrelational self-formation,’ for only free relations can preserve the distinction of their parts and grant their togetherness

olin E. Gunton, The Promise of Trinitarian Theology, 2nd edn (London: T&T Clark, 1997), 58. C Colin E. Gunton, The One, the Three and the Many: God, Creation and the Culture of Modernity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 164. 4 Colin E. Gunton, ‘Persons’, in Dictionary of Ethics, Theology and Society, ed. Paul A. B. Clarke and Anthony Linzey (London: Routledge, 1996), 638. 5 Uche Anizor, Trinity and Humanity: An Introduction to the Theology of Colin Gunton (Milton Keynes: Paternoster, 2016), 41–2. 2 3

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despite it. Particularity is an expression of freedom, and freedom is the live reflection of particularity.6 In this way, ‘the uniqueness of each person is thus preserved, but without the destructive lapse into individualism’.7 This affirmation of particularity leads to two further claims. First, Gunton contends that it is the particular work of the Spirit to establish and maintain the free relationality of the triune persons. Although the Spirit is constantly ‘crossing boundaries’ and bringing things into more intimate relationship with one another,8 this work is also ‘that which, far from abolishing, rather maintains and even strengthens particularity’.9 Awad thus describes the Spirit as ‘the agent of freedom and particularity’ in Gunton’s theology.10 Second, Gunton also asserts that recognizing the importance of particularity leads to the notion of ‘personal space’.11 Thus, ‘To be a person is to be constituted in particularity and freedom – to be given space to be – by others in community.’12 And elsewhere, ‘That giving of particularity is very important: it is a matter of space to be. Father, Son and Spirit through the shape – the taxis – of their inseparable relatedness confer particularity and freedom on each other.’13 For our purposes, all of these Trinitarian moves matter because, as we saw above, Gunton maintains that a properly theological understanding of human personhood must be derived from a right understanding of divine personhood. Consequently, when Gunton turns his attention to the human person, he also emphasizes the significance of particularity, relationality and perichoresis. In The One, the Three and the Many, Gunton identifies these as the three ‘transcendentals’,14 which he maintains are three features of the divine reality that shape every aspect of creational existence. Created things are also constituted by relationality in a way that establishes and confirms their freedom as particular beings. For Gunton, then, perichoresis itself characterizes all of creation, albeit in a way that is only analogous to divine perichoresis.15 If we understand the entire universe as an ordered system in which everything is dynamically interrelated, then Gunton thinks it is reasonable to conclude that everything is perichoretic ‘in that everything in it contributes to the being of everything else, enabling everything to be what it distinctively is’.16 Given that Gunton’s understanding of creation as a whole thus presses in this perichoretic direction, it should not come as a surprise to discover that it plays a fundamental role in his anthropology as well. ‘We are able to use the concept of the person about human beings because we know something of the nature of a personal God.’17 Given the idea that Najeeb G. Awad, ‘Personhood as Particularity: John Zizioulas, Colin Gunton, and the Trinitarian Theology of Personhood’, Journal of Reformed Theology 4, no. 1 (2010): 19. 7 Gunton, The Promise of Trinitarian Theology, 96. 8 Gunton, The One, the Three and the Many, 181. 9 Ibid.,  182. 10 Awad, ‘Personhood as Particularity’, 19. 11 Gunton, ‘Trinity, Ontology and Anthropology’, 56. 12 Gunton, The Promise of Trinitarian Theology, 114. 13 Gunton, ‘Trinity, Ontology and Anthropology’, 56. 14 There he identifies the third transcendental as ‘substantiality’, but he frequently uses the term ‘particularity’ there and elsewhere to refer to the same idea (see esp. Gunton, The One, the Three and the Many, 180–209). 15 Gunton, The One, the Three and the Many, 170. 16 Ibid.,  166. 17 Colin E. Gunton, ‘Knowledge and Culture: Towards an Epistemology of the Concrete’, in The Gospel and Contemporary Culture, ed. Hugh Montefiore (London: Mowbray, 1992), 95. 6

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humans are created in the image of God, which will be the focus of our fourth section, ‘the idea that human beings should in some way be perichoretic beings is not a difficult one to envisage’.18 As created beings, the most basic of these constitutive relations is with our Creator. However, as we will see in what follows, Gunton also emphasizes the importance of creaturely relationality, both with other humans and with the non-human world. As perichoretic relations, though, these various relationships establish and maintain our discrete particularity rather than undermining it. It is in and through these relationships that we receive our ‘space’, the opportunity ‘to be both related to and other than those and that on which we depend’.19 In other words, ‘a space in which the human can be human’.20 Here as well, though, Gunton emphasizes the analogical nature of extending the idea of perichoresis to the creaturely level. As Roland Chia explains, ‘Human beings being external to each other cannot be said to indwell one another in the same way as the divine persons indwell each other.’21 Thus, human personhood is a mirror of divine personhood, mimicking its fundamentally perichoretic structure in creaturely form. For Gunton, then, ‘To be a person is to be constituted in particularity and freedom – to be given space to be – by others in community. Otherness and relation continue to be the two central and polar concepts here. Only where both are given due stress is personhood fully enabled.’22

THE CHRISTOLOGICAL STARTING POINT FOR UNDERSTANDING HUMANITY Although we will see in the next section that Gunton’s anthropology has a distinctively pneumatological shape, he nonetheless affirmed throughout that a properly theological understanding must begin with the person and work of Jesus Christ. Avoiding any speculative attempts at defining the ‘essence’ of humanity in terms of the properties and capacities that may or may not make us distinct from other creatures, Gunton identified Jesus himself as the proper starting point for theological anthropology: ‘We are not seeking a timeless essence, but attempting to characterise what kind of reality it is that has a beginning, a middle and an end of the kind which Jesus of Nazareth makes known by making real.’23 Although we will address his view of the imago Dei more directly in a moment, it is worth noting here that Gunton finds much of the support for his Christocentric anthropology in the Christological reorientation of the imago Dei in the New Testament. Theologians have long sought to understand the imago Dei by finding some way of explaining how finite human creatures can be said to be like, or to resemble, the infinite being of God, most famously by focusing on ways in which human rationality serves as a ‘mirror’ of divine wisdom. According to Gunton, such an approach is misguided from the beginning because it fails to appreciate that the imago involves our resemblance,

Gunton, The One, the Three and the Many, 168. Gunton, ‘Trinity, Ontology and Anthropology’, 53. 20 Ibid.,  54. 21 Roland Chia, ‘Trinity and Ontology: Colin Gunton’s Ecclesiology’, International Journal of Systematic Theology 9, no. 4 (October 2007): 465. 22 Gunton, ‘Trinity, Ontology and Anthropology’, 59. 23 Colin E. Gunton, The Triune Creator: A Historical and Systematic Study (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1998), 200. 18 19

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not directly to the infinite divine being but to Jesus. He alone is the true image of God, which means that ‘he is not only the one of whom we are copies – the prototype – but also the one who actualizes the true human destiny by what he achieves’.24 Here it is important to note that when Gunton describes Jesus as the true imago Dei, he clearly has in mind the incarnate Christ and not simply the Son in his eternal divine nature. Although Gunton affirms that the Son is in some way the eternally perfect image of the Father, he follows Irenaeus in arguing that the biblical language of the imago Dei refers to the incarnate Christ as the archetype for all other humans.25 We will see a bit later that this has significant implications for Gunton’s theology of the body, but for now it is enough to note that this claim requires us to orient our vision of humanity around the humanity of Jesus. Like Karl Barth, then, Gunton draws the methodological conclusion that we must ‘derive anthropology from christology’.26 Unlike Barth, though, Gunton never offers any extended discussion of precisely how this methodological commitment works.27 Can we simply move from the details of Christ’s particular humanity to conclusions about what is supposedly normative and essential for the humanity of all other human persons? If so, that would be a bold claim, one that differs notably from Barth’s own anthropological vision. Although Gunton does not answer these questions directly, a closer look at the precise role of Christology in his anthropology would suggest that he has something more nuanced in mind. First, it is worth noting that despite arguing that Jesus is the archetype of humanity, Gunton never (as far as I am aware) moves directly from specific details about Jesus’ life to conclusions about what must be true of all human persons. For example, Gunton does not conclude from his Christological starting point that Jesus’ gender reveals that maleness is somehow more central to imaging God, nor does he argue that we should view particular actions performed by Jesus as offering a normative standard that all Christians should simply imitate. Instead, Gunton’s Christological anthropology tends to work at a rather more general level. For example, we will see that Gunton seems perfectly comfortable arguing on the basis of the incarnation that embodiment generally is fundamental for understanding what it means to be human, but he does not focus on particular details of Christ’s embodied humanity as having the same kind of normativity. This would suggest that Gunton’s Christological method works with at least some level of abstraction, the goal of which is to understand humanity in light of ‘what kind of reality it is that has a beginning, a middle and an end of the kind which Jesus of Nazareth makes known by making real’.28 Second, according to Gunton, any anthropology that begins with Christology will have an inevitably teleological focus. Following Irenaeus, Gunton maintains that humanity was created ‘good’ but not ‘perfect’.29 From the very beginning, humanity was created for a

Gunton, The Promise of Trinitarian Theology, 186. Gunton, The Triune Creator, 200. For more on Irenaeus’s distinctively Christological understanding of the imago Dei, see Marc Cortez, ‘Nature, Grace, and the Christological Ground of Humanity’, in The Christian Doctrine of Humanity: Explorations in Constructive Dogmatics, ed. Oliver Crisp and Fred Sanders (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2018), 23–40. 26 Ibid.,  199. 27 For more on Barth’s Christological method, see Marc Cortez, ‘The Madness in Our Method: Christology as the Necessary Starting Point for Theological Anthropology’, in The Ashgate Research Companion to Theological Anthropology, ed. Joshua Farris and Charles Taliaferro (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2015), 15–26. 28 Gunton, The Triune Creator, 200. 29 Ibid.,  201. 24 25

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higher telos, one that could only be received in Christ through the power of the Spirit. We see this most clearly in Paul’s argument that Christ is the ‘second Adam’ (1 Cor. 15.49), which shows that ‘the destiny of the created human being – the first Adam – is in some sense bound up with him’.30 However, given that humanity fell from this divinely intended telos into the state of sin, we must also recognize that the eschatological orientation of a Christological anthropology will be fundamentally soteriological.31 This means that Gunton’s anthropology focuses more on ‘the restoration and completion’ of human nature than making specific claims about its creational shape.32 We might expect from this that Gunton’s anthropology will operate with a kind of Christological exclusivity. If we see true humanity only in Christ, and if this requires us to focus on that which we see revealed about humanity in redemption and the eschatological consummation towards which we are being drawn in the Spirit, this would seem to leave remarkably little room for appreciating the Old Testament’s own anthropology, not to mention insights about humanity that we might glean from non-theological sources. However, Gunton’s overall doctrine of creation affirms the importance of recognizing both continuity and discontinuity between creation and redemption. Although there is an important sense in which the telos towards which creation is moving transcends its original state in creation, Gunton rejects any attempt to tear the two apart and view redemption as overturning God’s original creative purposes.33 In his anthropology as well, then, it would follow that since Jesus is the agent of both creation and redemption, and since humanity was ordered towards its telos in Christ from the very beginning, we can certainly benefit even from approaches to anthropology that are not explicitly Christological. Finally, this soteriological and eschatological emphasis may also explain a fourth feature of Gunton’s Christological anthropology. Although Gunton insists that the incarnate Jesus is the revelation of true humanity and the starting point for any truly theological anthropology, Gunton spends remarkably little time considering the actual details of Jesus’ historic existence. None of his explicitly anthropological essays focus any significant attention on the life of Christ, and his most important claims about what it means to be human flow primarily from his broader theological ontology or from discussions about how humanity is being transformed in redemption. Indeed, one rarely encounters references to any of the Gospels in these writings.34 This may result from the kind of abstraction noted in the first point, but it seems more likely that it stems from his emphasis on salvation and consummation as the true loci of anthropological reflection, more so than the historical particularities of Christ’s lived existence. Gunton does make periodic references to the life of Christ in his anthropology, as we will see in what follows, but unfortunately such comments are rarely (if ever) accompanied by any close attention to the details of those accounts.

Ibid.,  202. Ibid. 32 Ibid. 33 See esp. the lectures in Colin E. Gunton, Christ and Creation. The Didsbury Lectures, 1990 (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1992). 34 This is not to say that Gunton neglects the Gospels or the life of Christ generally, only that they do not feature prominently in his anthropological arguments. 30 31

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THE PNEUMATOLOGICAL SHAPE OF HUMAN FREEDOM Gunton has three important reasons for emphasizing the centrality of the Holy Spirit for understanding what it means to be human: his Trinitarian ontology of personhood, the doctrine of creation and the importance of the Spirit in the life of Christ. As we have already seen, the Spirit plays a vital role in his Trinitarian ontology of personhood. Consequently, any anthropology that is properly grounded on this theological ontology will also need to recognize the pneumatological constitution of human personhood. The second flows from Gunton’s conviction that all of God’s works ad extra should be construed pneumatologically as well as Christologically: ‘In sum: all divine action whether creation, salvation or final redemption is the action of God the Father; but it is all equally brought about by his two hands, the Son and the Spirit.’35 Consequently, one cannot understand any aspect of creation theologically apart from understanding the role of the Spirit in establishing and perfecting the created order,36 which includes the human dimension. Finally, Gunton also emphasizes the Spirit’s role in Jesus’ own person and work. ‘The Spirit works through the Son, paradigmatically as Jesus’ ministry was empowered by the Spirit.’37 Given Gunton’s Christological starting point, this demands that we recognize the significance of pneumatology for humanity in general. ‘Christology which is abstracted from a discussion of the relation to it of pneumatology is not Christology rooted in the actual human career of the incarnate Lord.’38 Although much could be said about how pneumatology shapes Gunton’s anthropology, as in the prior section I will restrict our attention to just a few specific areas. First, as we saw in his Trinitarian ontology, the Spirit is the one who grounds the perichoretic relationality that constitutes true personhood, and Gunton maintains this emphasis on relationality when he connects pneumatology to anthropology as well.39 Here it is particularly important to notice the link between the Spirit, humanity and the church. The Spirit is ‘the creator of community’,40 and this community only truly becomes ‘concrete’ in the Church.41 Thus, the relationality that constitutes us as human persons is something achieved only in and through the work of the Spirit. Second, just as the Spirit is the one who grounds triune particularity, so the Spirit is the one who grounds the particularity of the human person: As Gunton says, ‘it is the Spirit who enables all things to be what they are particularly created to be’.42 This holds for human persons in two ways. The Spirit grounds my particularity both as a distinctively human person and as a distinctively human person. In other words, he is the one who

Colin E. Gunton, Father, Son & Holy Spirit: Toward a Fully Trinitarian Theology (London: Continuum, 2003), 80. 36 Ibid.,  81. 37 Ibid.,  80. 38 Paul Cumin, ‘The Taste of Cake: Relation and Otherness with Colin Gunton and the Strong Second Hand of God’, in The Theology of Colin Gunton, ed. Lincoln Harvey (London: T&T Clark, 2010), 66. 39 See esp. Gunton, Father, Son & Holy Spirit, 164–80. 40 Gunton, ‘Trinity, Ontology and Anthropology’, 59. 41 Gunton, The One, the Three and the Many, 217. 42 Colin E. Gunton, The Christian Faith: An Introduction to Christian Doctrine (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), 14. 35

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makes me to be both a particular kind of creature and an individual human person. The first commitment grounds human uniqueness in the work of the Spirit rather than in putatively distinct sets of human capacities, while the second avoids the danger of communitarianism, what Gunton refers to elsewhere as ‘the destructive forces making for homogeneity’. The Spirit does this by maintaining my distinct identity even as it is simultaneously grounded in my relationships with other human persons.43 Intimately related to this second point, Gunton’s third pneumatological move highlights the way the Spirit constitutes human freedom. ‘If the Son is the content of God’s redemptive movement into the world, the Spirit is its form, and that form is its freedom.’44 Freedom thus stands out as one of the more important concepts in Gunton’s anthropology, which he defines in two directions. First, ‘Freedom is that which I do with my own particularity, that which enables me to be and do what is truly and distinctively myself.’45 In other words, by establishing me as a particular creature, the Spirit simultaneously grounds my freedom to operate as the creature that I am. These two concepts, particularity and freedom, are inseparably related in Gunton’s pneumatological anthropology. At the same time, though, Gunton does not want this emphasis on our particular freedom to lapse into the kind of unbridled individualism that has plagued Western anthropologies. Consequently, the second half of his definition affirms, ‘Freedom is that which others do to and with my particular being, in enabling me to be and do, or preventing me from being and doing, that which is particularly myself.’46 In other words, particularity-in-relationship characterizes Gunton’s view of freedom as well. The Spirit frees me to become the particular creature that I am, but this freedom is operative in and shaped by the nexus of relationships that constitutes my identity. As in his account of the Trinity, then, his understanding of human personhood requires the concept of personal space. Done properly, the community provides the space in which persons are ‘for and from each other in their otherness’.47 Finally, this perichoretic freedom requires a related emphasis on the eschatological orientation of humanity. ‘The Spirit is God’s eschatological transcendence, his futurity, as it is sometimes expressed. He is God present to the world as its liberating other, bringing it to the destiny determined by the Father, made actual, realized, in the Son.’48 Given the pneumatological ground of human personhood, this entails that ‘person is an eschatological concept’.49 Gunton draws extensively from his broader doctrine of creation at this point, arguing that creation as a whole is a work in progress: created good but for the purpose of growing into a greater goodness. There is thus a sense in which we need to affirm ‘the necessary imperfection of creation’ and ‘an element of directedness’ in our understanding of all created things.50 This will be even more the case with the human person and its pneumatologically grounded freedom-in-relation.

Gunton, The One, the Three and the Many, 196. Colin E. Gunton, ‘The Spirit in the Trinity’, in The Forgotten Trinity, 3: A Selection of Papers Presented to the BCC Study Commission on Trinitarian Doctrine Today, ed. Alasdair C. Heron (London: British Council of Churches, 1991), 130. 45 Colin E. Gunton, ‘God, Grace and Freedom’, in God and Freedom: Essays in Historical and Systematic Theology, ed. Colin E. Gunton (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1995), 122. 46 Ibid. 47 Gunton, ‘Trinity, Ontology and Anthropology’, 56. 48 Colin E. Gunton, ‘The Forgotten Trinity’, Perichoresis 1, no. 1 (2003): 130. 49 Gunton, ‘Trinity, Ontology and Anthropology’, 60. 50 Gunton, The Triune Creator, 102. 43 44

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THE RELATIONAL NATURE OF THE IMAGO DEI We have already seen that Gunton thinks his Trinitarian ontology leads ineluctably to a relational interpretation of the imago Dei, and we have also seen how his Christological and pneumatological moves similarly support viewing the human person as a perichoretic being-in-relation. Yet, it remains to see how Gunton deals with the biblical language of the imago Dei itself, particularly in light of other ways of interpreting those texts. According to Gunton, there are three primary options for understanding the image of God: (1) the classic view that grounds the image in some capacity or set of capacities that makes us like God and unlike other creatures – most famously, rationality; (2) a more recent approach that focuses on dominion, maintaining that we image God by exercising stewardship over his creation; and (3) the relational view made famous by Karl Barth in which we image God through our relationships, most fundamentally in the male–female relationship. Although Gunton’s view will obviously come rather close to this third option, Gunton offers reasons for rejecting or significantly refining each of them. Regarding the classic view, although Gunton understood the importance of such capacities as rationality and volitionality for understanding the shape of human existence, he consistently denied that this is the appropriate way to define the image itself. Interestingly, unlike a number of contemporary critics, Gunton does not focus his critique on the worry that such a view undermines the full humanity of those who do not seem to manifest the relevant capacities.51 Instead, Gunton’s fundamental concern is that such a view ultimately privileges a disembodied and individualistic anthropology.52 Traditionally, theologians have argued that such capacities are possessed by individual human persons. In other words, I am a human person in virtue of having a rational human nature, and this is true irrespective of whether any other humans exist, leading to the conclusion that Adam was fully in the image of God even before the creation of Eve.53 This view has similarly affirmed that these capacities are capacities of the soul, which is why we remain human even when the soul is separated from the body in the intermediate state. However, when we combine these two convictions, we have a view that seems to marginalize the kind of embodied community that Gunton thought was so vital for a theologically informed vision of humanity. Gunton also worried about the more recent emphasis on dominion or stewardship as comprising the nature of the image.54 Although this view has frequently found its most ardent supporters among biblical scholars, Gunton’s primary worries about this view had to do with the nature of the biblical argument supporting it, specifically its overly narrow focus. Given that the concept is used only infrequently in the biblical texts, and never with clear definition, Gunton argued that any approach focused narrowly on only those texts that explicitly use the terminology of the image would be inherently inadequate for understanding the broader theological significance of the image. Thus, he maintained, ‘We need more than an extended exegesis of Gen. 1.26f, and in particular a broader treatment of the topic, if we are really to make more satisfactory use of the concept of the

E.g. Hans S. Reinders, Receiving the Gift of Friendship: Profound Disability, Theological Anthropology, and Ethics (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2008). 52 See, for example, Gunton, ‘Trinity, Ontology and Anthropology’, 48–9; and Gunton, The Triune Creator, 193–6. 53 Gunton criticizes Augustine’s interpretation for precisely this reason (Gunton, The Triune Creator, 208). 54 For more recent scholarship on the subject, see J. Richard Middleton, The Liberating Image: The Imago Dei in Genesis 1 (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos, 2005). 51

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imago Dei.’55 And he was specifically concerned that the dominion view failed to account for the Christological reorientation of the image in the New Testament.56 The ultimate problem with each of the first two views is that they fail to build their understanding of the imago Dei on the foundation of a theological ontology. Instead, they focus primarily on questions about human uniqueness in relation to other creatures or biblical exegesis narrowly construed. The third alternative, on the other hand, takes a different approach. Beginning with the I–Thou nature of the divine being, Barth argued that we find its most fundamental creaturely correspondence in the male–female relationship, which explains why the creation narrative singles out this aspect of human existence in direct relation to the imago Dei (Gen. 1.27).57 The relational nature of humanity then finds its ultimate revelation in Jesus Christ who is the ‘man for other men’.58 According to Gunton, this approach is superior because it appreciates the fact that a Christological vision of humanity necessarily reorients the conversation theologically. Gunton also agrees with Barth’s emphasis on the male–female relation as the fundamental creaturely echo of triune relationality.59 This does not mean that Gunton thought the male–female relationship simply defined the image, only that it was one fundamental and distinctive expression of the creaturely relationality that stands as an analogy to divine relationality.60 However, in one extended reflection on Barth’s approach, Gunton also identified two concerns that will point the way towards his own contribution. First, Gunton worried that Barth’s view has a ‘tendency to be binitarian’.61 A perceived overemphasis on the Father–Son relation in Barth’s theology corresponds to the duality of the male–female relationship in anthropology, which runs the risk of downplaying the significance of the broader community in our understanding of humanity. Second, Gunton thought that Barth’s approach also had ‘a tendency toward anthropocentrism’.62 The concern here is that Barth’s theology focuses too much on the divine–human relationship and ‘underplays the way in which Genesis brings the non-human creation into the covenant’.63 Like Barth, then, Gunton argued for a thoroughly relational definition of the image. In Jesus, we see that fundamentally what it means to be human is ‘to be placed in a dynamic of relationships’,64 which entails that being made in the image entails being ‘endowed with a particular kind of personal reality’.65 Yet he also understood himself to be modifying Barth’s account in two important ways. First, as we have already seen, Gunton emphasized the vital importance of the Spirit in his anthropology as the one who maintains our perichoretic existence as particulars-in-relation. For Gunton, this clearly avoids the binitarian worries that have plagued Barth’s theology. Gunton’s second Gunton, The Promise of Trinitarian Theology, 112–13. Gunton, ‘Trinity, Ontology and Anthropology’, 57. 57 CD III/1, 182–206. 58 CD III/2, 203–21. 59 Gunton, Christ and Creation, 101. One weakness of Gunton’s argument at this point is that, although he indicates that he is aware of the important criticisms that have been raised against Barth’s relational view of the Trinity, particularly as it has to do with the male–female connection, he embraces the heart of Barth’s interpretation without addressing those critiques (see Gunton, ‘Trinity, Ontology and Anthropology’, 57–8). 60 Gunton, The Triune Creator, 205–8. 61 Gunton, ‘Trinity, Ontology and Anthropology’, 58. 62 Ibid. 63 Ibid. 64 Gunton, Christ and Creation, 102. 65 Gunton, ‘Trinity, Ontology and Anthropology’, 58. 55 56

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modification comes with his attention to the rest of the created order. Like Barth, Gunton maintains that we need to understand humanity as being constituted by a web of relationships that unfolds along two axes: both vertically and horizontally. However, unlike Barth, who tends to focus exclusively on the way that humans image God through I–Thou relationships with one another, Gunton maintains that humanity’s relationship to the rest of creation is fundamentally part of what it means to image God. Gunton has two ideas in mind here. The first involves a movement from creation to humanity. Here creation serves as a fundamental part of the overall relational network that constitutes our identity as human persons. It is ‘the context within which we become persons,’ such that ‘we are not human apart from our relation with the non-personal world’.66 The second idea involves a reverse movement from humanity to creation. This is where Gunton returns to the idea that humanity has been given a fundamental stewardship or dominion over creation, though he prefers more priestly or mediatorial language. For Gunton all of creation has the basic purpose of offering praise to the creator. However, ‘creation’s nonpersonality means that it is unable to realise its destiny, the praise of its creator, apart from persons. It is not personal, but requires persons in order to be itself.’67 Gunton draws a clear distinction between humans, who are personal and thus able to freely offer praise to the Creator, and the rest of creation, which is non-personal by virtue of its inability to do so. The non-personal thus requires the personal to speak for it, to represent it to the Creator as the mediator of its praise. In this way, ‘the whole of the created order becomes articulate: is enabled to speak’.68 This is the priestly function of the image: ‘To be in the image of God is therefore to be called to represent God to the creation and the creation to God, so enabling it to reach its perfection.’69

THE FUNDAMENTAL SIGNIFICANCE OF HUMAN EMBODIMENT The final area of Gunton’s anthropology that we will address is his focus on the fundamental significance of human embodiment. Gunton routinely expressed concern about the low view of the body he found in much of Western theology, a view that flowed from a hierarchical dualism in which the soul is higher than the body and is the locus of human identity. Gunton associated such a view with a number of ills – most importantly individualism, a hierarchical view of the male–female relation and a tendency to downplay the rest of the created order. All three flow not just from distinguishing between the body and the soul but through construing the relationship hierarchically, with the soul viewed as superior to the body and as the seat of human identity. Given the historical tendency to associate ‘man’ more with our inner, mental life and ‘woman’ more with the embodied aspects of human existence, Gunton worries that this kind of dualism carries with it an almost irresistible temptation towards viewing men as superior to women.70 His repeated concerns about individualism in this context arise from the way we often view the body as something that interferes with true community. When I relate to another in this embodied state, all they have access to is my external presentation, my body, which Ibid.,  60. Ibid.,  56. 68 Gunton, The Triune Creator, 197. 69 Gunton, Christ and Creation, 102–3, emphasis original. 70 Ibid.,  103. 66 67

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can and often does conceal the real self lurking within. This ‘inner’ self thus remains locked away from the other, isolated in its individualistic existence.71 And although there is nothing about a greater/lesser hierarchy that inherently devalues that which is lower on the scale,72 Gunton maintains that this kind of mind/body dualism at least positions us to view the entire material order as having significantly less value, especially eternal value, thus contributing to Christianity’s fraught relationship with ecological concerns.73 Gunton rejects this kind of hierarchical dualism on Christological grounds. As we have already seen, Gunton maintains that it is the incarnate Christ who is the true image of God. We are images of an embodied image. Insofar as Christ is the archetype for true humanity, then, we must affirm that embodiment is both good and essential for being human. That is ‘the christologically guaranteed physical likeness’ without which we cannot rightly understand the human person.74 Consequently, the body is not just the material means by which Jesus reveals an essentially disembodied truth about what it means to be human. Instead, the body is inseparable from the meaning of the imago itself. Gunton thus rejects the notion that the body is a problem for relationality, an obstacle to be overcome. Instead, Gunton argues that I can only be in relation to another as the whole, embodied being that I am. ‘Relations are of the whole person, not of minds or bodies alone.’75 Consequently, rather than being a problem for relationality, Gunton does not think it likely that one could even construct a truly relational understanding of the imago Dei apart from recognizing that the body is fundamental to humanity.76 This is our ‘concrete relatedness’.77 Gunton concludes from all of this that ‘we are material, bodily beings, and are so essentially’.78 Indeed, there is a sense in which ‘in certain respects, however much that has to be qualified, we are our bodies’.79 The reference to qualification is important here since Gunton is careful to avoid the potentially reductionistic implications that such a claim might inspire. Such a move would seemingly make the opposite mistake of hierarchical dualism, privileging physicality at the expense of other important dimensions of human existence. If relations are true to be of the whole person, we cannot lapse into a reductionism in either direction.80

REVISITING THE PERSONAL, THE NON-PERSONAL, AND THE IMAGO DEI Throughout his various writings, Colin Gunton offers a vision of humanity with a number of important strengths. Fully invested in the ‘turn to relationality’ that characterized so much of theology in the latter part of the twentieth century,81 Gunton offered a robustly Gunton, The One, the Three and the Many, 48–9. For example, I can value my wife more than my car without suggesting that I am somehow denigrating my car in doing so. 73 Gunton, Christ and Creation, 104–5. 74 Gunton, The Triune Creator, 205. 75 Gunton, ‘Trinity, Ontology and Anthropology’, 60. 76 Gunton, The Triune Creator, 195. 77 Gunton, ‘Trinity, Ontology and Anthropology’, 52. 78 Gunton, The Triune Creator, 205. 79 Ibid. 80 Paraskevè Tibbs, ‘Created for Action: Colin Gunton’s Relational Anthropology’, in The Theology of Colin Gunton, 118–20. 81 F. LeRon Shults, Reforming Theological Anthropology: After the Philosophical Turn to Relationality (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2003). 71 72

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theological framework within which to consider precisely why relationality is so important for understanding what it means to be human. At the same time, though, Gunton was far more sensitive than many to the dangers that lay on the other side of that turn, those ‘homogenizing’ forces that subsume the freedom and identity of the human person into the community. Constantly weaving together the themes of particularity and relationality, freedom and community, Gunton recognized the theological importance of a personal space that is constituted by the community for the full flourishing of the particular human person. Even more fundamentally, Gunton modelled a way of thinking about humanity that is clearly theological at every turn. Indeed, the Trinitarian shape of his argument is so pronounced that one might legitimately wonder if the real concern lay with whether he provides enough space for non-theological perspectives. Although I have raised questions about whether Gunton paid adequate attention to the particular details of Christ’s historic life, his commitment to a Christological vision of humanity is exemplary. And there is considerable space for more theologians to follow Gunton’s example in thinking about the significance of pneumatology for theological anthropology. Despite these many strengths, and I could easily list others, there is also room for critical dialogue with a number of Gunton’s ideas. I have already commented briefly on the question of whether Gunton paid adequate attention to Jesus’ historic life, but a similar question might be raised in his discussion of the imago Dei. Although I appreciate Gunton’s argument for interpreting the image in light of its broader canonical and theological context, I still wonder if he has paid adequate attention to the details of the Old Testament texts themselves. Given his own argument that we should not separate creation from redemption, we should not understand the Christological reorientation of the image in the New Testament as a complete overturning of the meaning provided in the original texts. Yet Gunton’s failure to provide any meaningful interpretation of those texts alongside his appeal to the Christological meaning of the New Testament texts might well suggest that such a separation of creation and redemption looms in this instance. Additionally, Gunton’s use of patristic theology to support his Trinitarian ontology is almost certainly open to the same kinds of objections that have been raised against the theology of John Zizioulas.82 Although these concerns are worth exploring further, I would like to conclude by looking a bit more closely at Gunton’s view of the imago Dei as it relates to disability, personhood and the non-human creation. Although I mentioned earlier that Gunton does not critique the traditional view out of any concern that it undermines the full humanity of those persons who are unable to manifest the requisite capacity (e.g. those with severe intellectual disabilities), he is aware that any discussion of the imago Dei must address questions about whether the image remains true of human persons universally after the Fall, as well as whether the consequences of the Fall are such that we should exclude certain human beings from the category of the imago Dei. To respond to these questions, Gunton turns again to his relational ontology. If the image is defined in terms of the threefold relationality noted above, then it seems clear that humans are still imago Dei creatures even after the Fall. Although our relationship to God, one another and the rest of creation Many have critiqued Gunton’s reading of Augustine, but his interpretation of the Cappadocians warrants closer consideration as well. For a nuanced discussion of similar concerns with Zizioulas’s theology, see Alexis Torrance, ‘Personhood and Patristics in Orthodox Theology: Reassessing the Debate’, Heythrop Journal 52, no. 4 (2011): 700–7. 82

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may have become distorted, we still stand in and are defined by those relationships. This is particularly true of the fundamental Creator–creature relationship: ‘What God has created stays created unless he chooses to annihilate it, so that we cannot deny even to the perpetrators of monstrous evils the fact that they are made and, in some respects remain, in the image of their creator.’83 In this sense, ‘the image is indelible’.84 And he offers a similar response when addressing the question of whether we should exclude any human beings from the category of the imago Dei on the basis of disability – or really on any basis. Here as well we must say that regardless of whether someone’s body is ‘deformed or not yet fully formed’, we must still affirm that they ‘retain the intrinsic dignity conferred by virtue of their inextinguishable relation to God the Father through Christ and in the Spirit’.85 Insofar as they are constituted by these fundamental relations, they remain human persons. But a complicated question arises at this point. We have also seen that although Gunton emphasizes the interdependence between humanity and the non-human world, he also maintains a sharp distinction between the two: ‘Human beings are persons, while the remainder of the created world is not.’86 And we have also seen that he appears to ground that distinction in the fact that humans are able to offer praise to God, thus mediating creation’s own act of praise. If this is the case, though, one wonders precisely what it means to refer to certain groups of human beings as persons in the requisite way. Does a human being born without any discernible cognitive function qualify as a person on Gunton’s account? When he responds specifically to the question of disability, it would seem that the answer is yes. But when he explains what it is that differentiates between human persons and non-human (i.e. non-personal) creatures, another answer suggests itself.87 We could respond to this concern by leaning even more heavily on Gunton’s relational ontology, maintaining that personhood only requires having one’s being constituted by perichoretic relationality. In this way, we might affirm that even the most severely disabled among us remains fully personal by virtue of these constitutive relationships. However, down this road lie some challenging questions about whether we can still maintain the distinction between the human and the non-human on this basis. Recall that Gunton has also argued that all of creation is constituted by this kind of perichoretic relationality. If that is the case, and if that kind of relationality is adequate to ground the full personhood of a human being, why would it not play a similarly personalizing role for the rest of creation? Alternatively, we could appeal to the teleological orientation of Gunton’s anthropology. As Uche Anizor summarizes, ‘It remains to be said, finally, that human personhood is an eschatological concept. We are persons-in-becoming, called to grow into maturity until the full realization of our personhood.’88 If this is the case, then maybe we could appeal to the eschaton to solve our problems. All human beings are persons regardless of whether they are currently capable of carrying out the requisite mediatorial functions but because they are the kind of creature who will ultimately do

Gunton, The Triune Creator, 203. Ibid.,  207. 85 Ibid. 86 Ibid.,  208. 87 A similar problem arises if we follow Parskevè Tibbs’s proposal and locate human action at the heart of Gunton’s proposal (‘Created for Action’, 116–29). 88 Anizor, Trinity and Humanity, 71. 83 84

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so in the eschatological state. Once again, though, we encounter problems. First, it is not at all clear to me how such an account would differ from the classic view of the imago Dei, which defines the human person in terms of some capacity or set of capacities – here whatever capacities are necessary to render praise. Second, this would still leave us with questions regarding the non-human world. On what basis could I maintain that a non-human animal like a chimpanzee is fundamentally non-human? Could it not be the case that the chimpanzee simply has capacities that will not be fully actualized until the eschaton, capacities that will render the chimpanzee eschatologically personal? If not, why not? Without further explanation, Gunton’s relational account of personhood seems caught between choosing to minimize the difference between humans and non-humans, on the one hand, and minimizing the full participation in the imago Dei by certain kinds of human beings, on the other. He clearly intends for his theology to avoid both of those conclusions, for which he should be commended, but questions remain. Despite these lingering questions, however, Colin Gunton offers us a robustly theological account of humanity that is richly Christological, thoroughly pneumatological and deeply appreciative of our embodied existence. Much remains here that is well worth exploring further as we reflect on what it means to be human in our own times and places.

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CHAPTER EIGHT

Gunton on pneumatology MYK HABETS

INTRODUCTION: A MORE SECURE PLACE FOR THE HOLY SPIRIT For the better part of fifteen years Colin Gunton led what is widely considered to be one of the most successful theological research institutes of the modern period. In 1988 Gunton and his then colleague Christoph Schwöbel co-founded RIST – The Research Institute in Systematic Theology – at King’s College London.1 At the RIST seminars Gunton would often present his own work for interrogation. From his position as Professor of Christian Doctrine, Gunton established himself as one of the most important theologians of his generation, writing over a dozen monographs, many essays and book chapters, and supervising a cadre of young academics who have since gone on to become senior scholars. Gunton is best known as a Trinitarian theologian, one who sought to articulate a Theology Proper and apply the doctrine of the Trinity to other theological loci, especially the doctrine of creation. In the foreword to the last book Gunton prepared before his death, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, Steve Holmes describes Gunton’s ‘central intellectual endeavour’ as ‘articulating and applying a doctrine of the Trinity’.2 It seems more appropriate to me that Gunton’s corpus works in the opposite direction: he applied the doctrine of the Trinity in his earlier work before more clearly articulating what a doctrine of the Trinity actually is in his later work. This raises an important methodological point in the study of Gunton’s theology, namely, the acknowledgement that we have to treat his work in two general phases: the work of the early Gunton and that of the later Gunton. While there is more continuity than discontinuity between these two phases, the generalization still holds.3 In what follows I am assuming the argument that there is development in Gunton’s theology and endeavour to make these shifts explicit only when and where required.4 I am more interested in presenting Gunton’s mature pneumatology

While co-founded by Gunton and Schwöbel, RIST only had one director at a time; Gunton was director from 1998 to 2003. 2 Stephen R. Holmes, ‘Preface’, in Colin E. Gunton, Father, Son and Holy Spirit: Towards a Fully Trinitarian Theology (London: T&T Clark, 2003),  ix. 3 A different but related methodological claim is made by Andrew Picard, ‘Has Colin Gunton’s Laudable Trinitarian Project Failed? A Hauptbriefe in Gunton Reception’ (Unpublished conference paper, Auckland: Laidlaw College Trinity Conference, 2014), 1–9. Picard argues that Gunton moves from a Trinitarian theology of analogy to a Trinitarian theology of mediation. See further Andrew Picard, ‘Gunton on Culture’, in this volume. 4 Gunton’s theology developed significantly as a result of the critique of the first edition of his work Yesterday and Today by Geoffrey Nuttall, who wrote to Gunton pointing out that ‘it was an odd book on Christology that 1

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than chronicling shifts in his thinking. For this reason, his later works (those written after 1993) take precedence over his earlier ones.5 While Gunton is known for his Trinitarianism he is less appreciated for his pneumatology, even though much of his work is taken up with pneumatological themes.6 In his 2003 work Father, Son and Spirit, pneumatology is central in Gunton’s thought, as exhibited by the introductory paragraph of the preface: This set of papers, which forms part of a continuing project of trinitarian theology, might well be entitled ‘Father, Son and Holy Spirit’, for it contains an account of the work of the triune God in which a more secure place is sought for the doctrine of the Holy Spirit than has often been the case … Almost all of the papers seek to show that a theology of divine action that does not incorporate the distinctive work of the Spirit as well as that of the Son fails in some way to encompass the breadth of the biblical economy.7 This was a fundamental conviction of Gunton’s – that to be properly and robustly Trinitarian, a thoroughgoing articulation of pneumatology was required. In his later works we thus see a predominance of talk about the Holy Spirit. Gunton once remarked that ‘the underdetermination of the person of the Holy Spirit in almost all areas of dogmatics’ is the Achilles’ heel of the Western theological tradition.8 He did not think the East had the answers either! In a summary of Gunton’s entire pneumatological correction to the tradition we read: No trinitarian theology is adequate without attention first to the particular shape taken by the life, death and resurrection of the second person of the Trinity incarnate, Jesus of Nazareth, and second to the characteristic form taken by the work of the Spirit who, by relating people and things to Jesus, brings about their proper perfection.9 On this basis Gunton presents a theology of Word and Spirit that is in keeping both with Patristic theology, notably Irenaeus of Lyons and Basil of Caesarea, and with his own

contained so few references to the Holy Spirit’, Colin E. Gunton, Yesterday and Today: A Study of Continuities in Christology, 2nd edn (London: SPCK, 1997), 221. Gunton’s turn to Irving’s work changed all that. 5 As is well known, Gunton was in the throes of completing volume one of his projected three-volume dogmatics. Unfortunately, this manuscript is not publicly available, though he did present and discuss the material at RIST. One wishes we had the completed Systematic Theology Gunton was working on, or even volume one, drafted and discussed at RIST but not as yet published or more widely disseminated. 6 Gunton’s pneumatology has been the direct subject of at least three doctoral theses. See Naomi Noguchi Reese, ‘Seeking the Welfare of the City: Toward an Evangelical Appropriation of the Pneumatology of Colin Gunton for Public Theology with Special Reference to U.S.A Context’ (PhD diss., Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, 2016); Michael D. Stringer, ‘The Lord and Giver of Life: The Person and Work of the Holy Spirit in the Trinitarian Theology of Colin E. Gunton’ (PhD diss., University of Notre Dame Australia, 2008); and I. Leon Harris, ‘Holy Spirit as Communion: Colin Gunton’s Pneumatology of Communion and Frank Macchia’s Pneumatology of Koinonia’ (PhD diss., University of Aberdeen, 2014), published as I. Leon Harris, The Holy Spirit as Communion: Colin Gunton’s Pneumatology of Communion and Frank Macchia’s Pneumatology of Koinonia (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2017). 7 Gunton, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, xiii. 8 Colin E. Gunton, ‘The Being and Attributes of God: Eberhard Jüngel’s Dispute with the Classical Philosophical Tradition’, in The Possibilities of Theology: Studies in the Theology of Eberhard Jüngel, ed. John B. Webster (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1994), 21. 9 Colin E. Gunton, ‘The Indispensable God? The Sovereignty of God and the Problem of Modern Social Order’, in Beyond Mere Health: Theology and Health Care in a Secular Society, ed. Hilary D. Regan, Rod Horsfield and Gabrielle L. McMullan (Kew, VIC: Australian Theological Forum, 1996), 15.

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Reformed tradition, notably John Owen and Edward Irving.10 He also characteristically distinguishes the work of the Spirit in relation to the Trinity and in relation to the world.11 It is not surprising, therefore, that the five central themes developed in Gunton’s final volume prepared before his death – Father, Son and Holy Spirit – are all influenced by a robust pneumatology: the Spirit and God, the Spirit and Christ, the Spirit and creation, the Spirit and Church, and the Spirit and eschatology.12 In each of these areas it was Gunton’s goal to identify and name ‘a more concrete persona for the Spirit’.13 The primary ways Gunton seeks to achieve this are via the theological impetus of Irenaeus and his analogy of the ‘two hands’ of God at work in the economy, and Basil’s suggestion that the Spirit is the ‘perfecting agent’ in creation. What follows is a dogmatic sketch of Gunton’s mature pneumatology that broadly follows the outline he set himself,14 and throughout to affirm, as Gunton once noted, ‘the central place of the Spirit cannot be ignored’.15

THE SPIRIT AND GOD The doctrine of the Trinity has been at the forefront of Gunton’s theological endeavours from the start of his long career. From the beginning Gunton’s Theology Proper was Trinitarian in a distinctive way, and it only became clearer as his corpus grew. For Gunton the doctrine of the Trinity was the ground and grammar of theology, the starting point and the goal of all dogmatics. The Trinity was not a species of scholasticism, clearly and neatly packaged in a logico-deductive syllogism; instead, Gunton believed that the God revealed in Scripture is ultimately relational and as such theological accounts of God’s being have to follow the lead of what he believed the Cappadocian Fathers spoke of as a distinction between ousia and hypostasis.16 While Gunton’s reading of the Fathers has been routinely challenged, what is clear is how he used his sources and what he wanted to use them for. Reading the Fathers as contemporary theological voices and seeking to follow the tenor of their theology rather than penetrate to the letter of their works, Gunton understood the Trinity to consist of

This is not to imply these are the only influences on Gunton. It is merely to suggest they are the most important in this area of his theology. Stringer, ‘The Lord and Giver of Life’, 44–92, lists the following as key influences on Gunton: Irenaeus of Lyons, the Cappadocian Fathers, Augustine of Hippo, John Calvin, John Owen, Edward Irving, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Karl Barth, Eberhard Jüngel, John Zizioulas and his King’s College colleagues. It is obvious from Gunton’s writings that his foremost contemporary influence was his one-time colleague and good friend, Christoph Schwöbel. Another influential ­figure – if only, but no less importantly in terms of encouragement – is the friend, one-time student and oft-thanked Shirley Martin. 11 Colin E. Gunton, ‘Pneumatology’, in Dictionary of Ethics, Theology and Society, ed. Paul Barry Clarke and Andrew Linzey (London: Routledge, 1996), 647. 12 Gunton, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, xiii–xviii. 13 Ibid.,  xv. 14 Given the pervasive and integrative theme of eschatology, this will be incorporated throughout the chapter rather than being addressed in a distinct section. 15 Colin E. Gunton, The Christian Faith: An Introduction to Christian Doctrine (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), 99. 16 Colin E. Gunton, The Promise of Trinitarian Theology, 2nd edn (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1997), 10. (All references to The Promise of Trinitarian Theology are to this second edition.) Gunton calls this distinction an ‘intellectual revolution’ (ibid., 9) and a ‘theological revolution’ (ibid., 10) on the part of the Cappadocians. Citing the influence of Coleridge, Gunton makes the argument that while ousia and hypostasis were originally synonymous for being, over time language and concepts developed to the point that through a process of ‘de-synonymy’ the two words came to perform different functions. Both speak of the unity of God but not in a strict mathematical sense, as the Arians mistakenly proclaimed, but a oneness ‘consisting in the inseparable relation of Father, Son and Spirit, the three hypostases’ (ibid., 10). 10

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mutually constitutive relations of Father, Son and Holy Spirit whereby the particularity of each person is only established and revealed by such relations. For Gunton, this theology is most clearly evident in the work of Basil of Caesarea. Each person of the Godhead equally shares the one divine ousia so as to constitute and establish each other as a unique hypostasis.17 The three persons are thus coordinate realities in Gunton’s theology or, as David Höhne phrased it, ‘the responsive action of the Son and the particularising action of the Spirit are as important, though consequent, to the constituting action of the Father in deriving the distinctive personhood of each’.18 The point of speaking of Father, Son and Spirit and not merely of ‘God’ in the abstract is, Gunton asserted, that the theologian must say something of that in which their differences consist and of their identification with the Godhead.19 The Western tradition had, in Gunton’s considered opinion, overlooked the work of the Spirit and, to that extent, introduced modalist forms of thought into its theology. In the West substantialist notions of the Godhead had been developed that lacked a clear Trinitarian articulation, and so Gunton sought to rectify this situation by turning to a more robust account of pneumatology in his theology. Central to Gunton’s theology was the concept of the mediation of the Spirit: within the immanent Trinity the Spirit is the mediating bond between the Son and the Father, and in the economy the Spirit mediates between the divinity and humanity of the Son. Logically for Gunton, the Spirit also then becomes the mediating bond between the incarnate Son and all humanity, and then creation as a whole. It is not surprising to find that Gunton turns to people in the tradition who had made this point before him: namely the Cappadocians (especially Basil), John Owen and Edward Irving. Gunton’s Spirit Christology is discussed below, here his relational ontology will be the focus.20 Gunton sees the Spirit as the fundamental key to understanding the relationship between the immanent and economic Trinity and adopts the language of Irenaeus that the Son and the Spirit are the two hands of God at work in the economy. He writes, Because the Son and the Spirit are God the Father in action, it has been argued from the beginning of Christian theology that they are intrinsic also to God’s eternal being. What God is in his relations with the world, he is also in his eternal being, because

Gunton identifies Basil’s 38th Epistle as the source of this idea in Gunton, The Promise of Trinitarian Theology, 94. This idea is developed initially in Colin E. Gunton, ‘The Lord Who Is the Spirit: Towards a Theology of the Particular’, in The One, the Three and the Many: God Creation and the Culture of Modernity. The 1992 Bampton Lectures (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 180–209, and repeated many times since. 18 David A. Höhne, Spirit and Sonship: Colin Gunton’s Theology of Particularity and the Holy Spirit (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), 28. 19 Colin E. Gunton, ‘We Believe in the Holy Spirit, Who with the Father and the Son Is Worshipped and Glorified’, in Fire and Wind: The Holy Spirit in the Church Today, ed. Joseph D. Small (Louisville, KY: Geneva, 2002), 26. 20 By treating Theology Proper before Christology or creation in this chapter I do not imply this is how Gunton orders his theology or that one loci must naturally flow into the other in a dogmatics. For Gunton, the closest we get to a systematic theology is The Christian Faith, an introduction to Christian doctrine structured on the Nicene Creed. Here the first article explicates God the maker of Heaven and earth, and thus God and creation are treated together. Then follows the second article on the Son, which is also grounded in creation. For Gunton, as for all Reformed theologians, all theology is grounded in the incarnation of the Word; it is a response to revelation. For our purposes, however, it makes no material difference whether we start with Christ, creation or the Trinity, given we are explicating Gunton’s theology and not attempting to construct a dogmatics of our own. As Gunton once remarked, ‘Christology is the basis of the doctrine of God, but once that is established, the enriched doctrine of God enables us, by a kind of returning movement, to show that the claims of Christology are indeed rooted in the way that God is,’ Gunton, Yesterday and Today, 224. 17

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there is no breech, as there is with fallen creatures, between what God is and what he does. Because the Father’s action is mediated by the Son and the Spirit, the Son and the Spirit are correspondingly intrinsic to God’s eternal being. It would follow that the relation of the Son to the Father in God’s inner being is in some way mediated by the Spirit. The Son is – we might say – enabled to be the Son by virtue of the way the Spirit realizes and perfects the love between him and the Father. Only so are the three truly one God.21 As the quote above highlights, Gunton dismissed a form of substantialist metaphysics in favour of a personal or relational ontology in which personal/relational thinking is prioritized. Rightly or wrongly, he, along with a number of like-minded thinkers such as Georges Florovsky and John Zizioulas, owes this insight to the Cappadocians. It was Gunton’s wish to give the Spirit due recognition as a Divine person and that this should be done both with reference to the Godhead and in relation to Christ. The way Gunton sought to do this was to explicate the person and work of the Spirit whereby the person of the Spirit was identified in Trinitarian theology and he is seen at work in Christology. Gunton was not shy of affirming the hypostasis of the Spirit and thought that Western theology had all but overshadowed the Spirit. An adequate Trinitarian theology is one which gives due place to Father, Son and Spirit and, in regard to the latter, is prepared to speak directly of the Spirit as person. When the Spirit is identified in the ontological Trinity in this way, the tendency in the West to reduce the Spirit to an immanent causal force within the church, either as a function of the church (Roman Catholicism) or to the individual (Protestantism), is removed and the transcendence of the Spirit can be recovered. Gunton’s conception of the Holy Spirit as a person is a critique of what he sees as an ingrained Western problem of depersonalization. Instead of ousia or substance being the concrete particular from which we derive hypostases or persons, Gunton believes the Cappadocian ‘solution’ is to be adopted whereby the persons/hypostases are the concrete particulars. Contrary to Western individualism, Gunton believes substantial personhood is constituted by relations with others. As such the Spirit is the Spirit because of his relations with the Father and the Son, and vice versa. It is not, as some like Paul Fiddes have argued,22 that the relations are the thing – they aren’t – but rather a person is a concrete particular in relation to another. Thus, the Father is Father for he has a Son and a Spirit, and so forth. At this point the important question has to be asked: Is Gunton a social Trinitarian as some have argued? The answer is ‘No’. According to social Trinitarianism, each person of the Godhead has his own centre of consciousness, will and agency.23 Gunton merely wishes to affirm that each divine person has relationality and particularity, that each person does ‘not simply enter into relations with one another, but [is] constituted by Gunton, The Christian Faith, 101. See Paul S. Fiddes, Participating in God: A Pastoral Doctrine of the Trinity (London: Darton, Longman, & Todd, 2000); and The Creative Suffering of God (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988). Gunton was critical of Fiddes’s Trinitarian theology of relations, see Colin E. Gunton, Being and Becoming: The Doctrine of God in Charles Hartshorne and Karl Barth, 2nd edn (London: SCM Press, 2001); epilogue and The Promise of Trinitarian Theology, 39. 23 Gunton’s Trinitarian ontology was complex. For instance, Gunton does not agree with the tradition that a will is an attribute of nature. Rather, will is ‘a description of a personal agent engaging in a certain form of action’, Gunton, Act and Being, 30. Gunton can thus affirm ‘God has one will’ and simultaneously there are ‘three wills in utterly concerted action’ (ibid., 30–1). 21 22

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one another in the relations’.24 This is something encapsulated in the developed Patristic notion of perichoresis, a term Gunton used often in his early works as a way to speak of God’s triune action in the world. Gunton was merely wanting to emphasize the mutuality and complementarity of the Divine missions, a form of ‘divine agency in relation’,25 and not, as some have argued, to put forward a form of social Trinitarianism. Furthermore, Gunton repeatedly, although critically, affirmed the orthodox theologoumenon: opera ad extra trinitatis sunt indivisa26 and repeatedly declared that the divine persons ‘are not individuals, for none of their actions can be identified except as it takes place in relation to the other two’.27 What Gunton did object to, and forcefully so, was any temptation to locate divine action (being?) in some substance/ousia behind the three persons/hypostases, something he thought was endemic to Western Trinitarianism and accounts for his correct or otherwise critique of the theology of Augustine.28 Gunton regards appeals to a social analogy for the Trinity as ‘premature’. Ontological Trinitarianism cannot, he argues, be used as an immanent principle of reality.29 So far so good, but that is not all there is to it. Gunton did argue for an idea he found so profound and pervasive in Irenaeus’s doctrine of God, that while the Trinity is one and undivided we must be specific which person is doing what action. To speak of God the Father working in the world through his two hands was the image Irenaeus used and Gunton seized upon. In Act and Being he returns to the distinction between ousia and hypostasis that is a hallmark of his theology and writes, ‘If the persons are functionally indistinguishable – that is, indistinguishable in their modes of action – there seems little point in the doctrine of the Trinity.’30 As such, it is a consistently argued point in Gunton’s theology that the particular persons – Father, Son and Spirit – ‘must each have their own attributes, their own distinctive characteristics’.31 It is clear Gunton knows this is a maximally Trinitarian position as compared with the tradition which is, at this point, minimalistic; but he is convinced it is only right to make the point. This is a radical move, but to call this ‘social trinitarianism’ would be a grave mistake. It is simply, according to Gunton, biblical Trinitarianism.32 Gunton was an ardent critic of the doctrine of the filioque, as he saw this as necessarily affirming the subordination of the Spirit. This forms a key part of his constant polemic against Augustine’s Trinitarianism.33 Gunton wishes to always respect the ontological

Gunton, The One, the Three and the Many, 214. Höhne, Spirit and Sonship, 29. 26 Gunton, The Promise of Trinitarian Theology, xxviii; Gunton, Act and Being, 139. Without doubt, in Gunton’s use of this concept it is always a phrase coordinated in a Trinitarian way: ‘All divine action … begins with the Father, takes shape through the Son and reaches its completion in the Spirit,’ Gunton, Act and Being, 113. For Gunton all the actions of God are triune in the sense that they are acts of the Father mediated by his two hands – the Son and the Spirit. 27 Gunton, Act and Being, 143. 28 See Gunton, The Promise of Trinitarian Theology, xix–xx. 29 Ibid.,  xxi. 30 Gunton, Act and Being, 27. 31 Ibid. 32 Augustine is said to divorce the immanent from the economic Trinity through his use of the psychological analogy (and later he is accused of ‘obliterating’ or at least ‘obscuring’ the particularity of the persons, Gunton, The Promise of Trinitarian Theology, xxiv), and Eastern orthodoxy does the same by replacing the work of the Son and Spirit with the divine energies. See ibid., xxii. It is the exclusive focus on the ‘relations of origin’ that Gunton objects to, in sympathy with Wolfhart Pannenberg, ibid., xxiv; and Gunton, Act and Being, 28; 134–58. 33 For but two examples see Gunton, The Promise of Trinitarian Theology, 199; and Gunton, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, 72–3. 24 25

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oneness of the triune God while always being attuned to their hypostatic distinctness. The filioque does a poor job on both counts in Gunton’s way of thinking. Gunton favours Thomas Smail’s conclusion: We would need to say about the Spirit that ‘he proceeds from the Father through the Son’: but we would also need to say about the Son that he is ‘eternally begotten of the Father through the Spirit’. In that way what we say about the relationships of Father, Son and Spirit in God would more faithfully reflect what the New Testament obliges us to say about the relationships revealed in the life and in the resurrection of Jesus.34 Gunton argues that in the economy the Son comes as a gift of the Spirit as much as the Spirit is a gift of the ascended Christ,35 and so the filioque misses more than it hits. Gunton wants to keep the two hands of God together here, as elsewhere in his theology. Gunton’s Trinitarian ontology whereby the Spirit plays a central role is extended naturally into his Christology, detailed in the following section. What is true of the immanent Trinity is true of the economic too, when it comes to the work of the Divine persons.

THE SPIRIT AND CHRIST In response to the Socinian challenge in the seventeenth century, John Owen and then, after him, Edward Irving developed accounts of the life of Christ that gave due weight to the presence of the Holy Spirit within him.36 Gunton tells a story about the recovery of Christology in the modern period, especially one that gives due weight to the humanity of Christ, whereby Owen and Irving are the heroes.37 Both develop and enhance insights Gunton sees redolent in Irenaeus and Basil. Gunton sees a parallel, of sorts, with Basil’s notion of the Spirit as perfecter of creation with Irenaeus’s notion of the Spirit as the completer of the works of God, as when he cites Irenaeus’s Against the Heresies IV, 36, 2: ‘The Father approves and commands, the Son carries out the Father’s plan, the Spirit supports and hastens the work.’38 These four theologians, almost uniquely for Gunton, are the leading lights in Christology and pneumatology and form the conceptual foundation for his own work. What Gunton argues for is the ability and necessity to maintain doctrines of both incarnation and of the Spirit-led humanity of Christ, instead of seeing these as alternatives. Gunton acknowledges that unfortunately, ‘the mainstream tradition has revealed an incapacity at once to give due weight to the humanity of Christ and to locate conceptually the distinctive nature and activity of the Spirit’.39 This has resulted in the institutionalization or individualization of the Spirit as an immanent causal force, in Roman Catholicism and Protestantism, respectively.

Thomas Smail, ‘The Holy Trinity and the Resurrection of Jesus’, cited in Gunton, The Promise of Trinitarian Theology, 200. 35 Gunton also raises the question over whether it is appropriate to ‘at least ask whether it is right to suggest that, because the Spirit is the agent of the begetting of Jesus in the womb of Mary, he is also the agent of his eternal begottenness’, Gunton, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, 73. 36 Colin E. Gunton, ‘Christology’, in Dictionary of Ethics, Theology and Society, ed. Paul Barry Clarke and Andrew Linzey (London: Routledge, 1996), 135. 37 Gunton, ‘Pneumatology’, 646. 38 Ibid.,  645. 39 Ibid.,  646. 34

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Gunton repeatedly credits Irving as his source of inspiration and even as his teacher when it comes to his (Spirit) Christology.40 What Gunton most appreciated in Irving’s work was the explicit connection between Christology and pneumatology (its Trinitarianism) along with his stress upon the representative nature of Christ’s humanity. Gunton also follows Irving’s lead in affirming the Son’s assumption of fallen humanity. Gunton was one of the first in the modern period to call for such a radically Trinitarian view of the Incarnation, one that laid the stress upon the person of the incarnate Son and the mediation of the Spirit at work in and through him. In an essay in which Gunton offers a critical appreciation of the theology of the Reformers he seeks to update the tradition which attributes ‘creation to the Father, salvation to the Son and life in the church (etc.) to the Spirit’41 with an enlarged and more biblically faithful role for the Spirit of God. The Reformers tended towards modalism when they articulated the economic work of God this way and restricted the work of the Spirit to applying the benefits of Christ. The remedy to this theological illness is, for Gunton, to recover the proper mission of the Spirit in relation to that of Christ: in short, to appreciate the way God works in the world by his two hands. In his theology ‘creation, reconciliation and redemption are all to be attributed to the Father, all realised through the work of his two hands, the Son and the Spirit, who are themselves substantially God’.42 As Michael Stringer rightly concluded, The principle of trinitarian mediation therefore provided Gunton with a way of speaking about the pneumatological equipping and empowering of Christ’s humanity. That concept, taken over from Irving, became a central tenet of Gunton’s thought because he held that the ‘humanity of the Word is most satisfactorily articulated where attention is given to his relation to his Father as it is mediated by the Spirit’.43 Where the Spirit is almost only ever conceived as applying the benefits of Christ he loses his own proper mission and, in the process, his own person or hypostasis is occluded. This form of ontological subordination of the Spirit is what Gunton continually reacted against and accounts for why the Spirit plays such a central role in his theology. It is not that Gunton adopted a radical, and now popular, egalitarian view of the Divine persons whereby they are indistinguishable. Rather, upholding the revealed taxis of the Trinity and affirming some form of economic subordination of Son and Spirit, Gunton affirms with the early church the utter equality of the three persons and their distinct but never separate missions in the world.44 This emphasis on the work of the Spirit in the life of Christ marks Gunton’s Christology out from those of his contemporaries. ‘Gunton contended that we must attend to the Spirit’s activities in the human career of Jesus in order to characterise who he is as divine.’45 Höhne later correctly calls this Gunton’s ‘Spirit Christology’.46 The only Gunton, Yesterday and Today, 221. Colin E. Gunton, ‘The End of Causality? The Reformers and Their Predecessors’, in The Doctrine of Creation: Essays in Dogmatics, History and Philosophy, ed. Colin E. Gunton (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1997), 76. 42 Colin E. Gunton, The Triune Creator: A Historical and Systematic Study (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1998), 153–4. 43 Stringer, ‘The Lord and Giver of Life’, 119, citing, Gunton, ‘God the Holy Spirit’, 110. 44 Consult, for instance, Gunton, Father, Son and Spirit, 39, 82; and The Promise of Trinitarian Theology, 197–8. 45 Höhne, Spirit and Sonship, 20–1. 46 Ibid., 23. 40 41

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time Gunton uses the term ‘Spirit Christology’ is negatively, when defending Irving’s Christology from charges that it is a form of Spirit Christology such as that put forward by G. W. H. Lampe, a form of Unitarianism and Adoptionism.47 Since Gunton wrote these words in 1996, however, Spirit Christology has come to mean a full recognition of the connection between Christology and pneumatology, emphasizing the very features of Christology Irving and Gunton sought to advocate. The contention here is that Gunton would approvingly use the term were he writing today.48 In an axiomatic statement Gunton writes, In Jesus of Nazareth, as he had done with Israel, God lays out his own logic within the frame of ours, and by his Spirit enables us to understand it, according to his and our limits. The reference to the Spirit is crucial, for everything happens only by the Spirit’s action and is made understandable in its own way by his gift. If we are unable to understand what is going on first with Jesus and then with the human response to him, the central place of the Spirit cannot be ignored.49 Before the renaissance of Spirit Christology in the first part of the twenty-first century, Gunton was attuned to the need to give an account of Christ’s life that looked to the Holy Spirit for its driving force and inner logic. Gunton believed the Chalcedonian Definition was a significant achievement of the early church and had no qualms with it as such, although he did repeatedly note how subsequent Chalcedonian theology tended to place all the emphasis on the divinity of Christ at the expense of his humanity.50 Gunton was especially concerned that the salvific humanity of Christ played no or little part in much theology. And yet, as Gunton pointed out, ‘the humanity of Christ is the concentrated – and so representative – offering through the Spirit of true humanity to the Father’.51 The extent of Gunton’s commitment to a form of Spirit Christology can be seen in this extended citation from Intellect and Action: The Holy Spirit is the agent of otherness and particularity, the one who realises the relation to one another of Father and Son in their very otherness. The Spirit is the Spirit of otherness in being the agent of the Son’s movement out of the life of the Trinity to become the mediator of the Father’s creating and redeeming action towards and in the world. The Spirit is the mediator of a particularity in being the one who forms a body for the Son – this Jewish child of this Jewish mother – comes upon him in baptism, drives him into the wilderness to be tempted and there supports him so that he may become the particular Israelite that he was called to be and become. The Spirit is the one by whom the Father enables him to speak the truth, heal the sick and endure

Gunton, Theology through the Theologians, 164–8. Gunton is aware of one of the first modern works in Trinitarian Spirit Christology, that of Ralph Del Colle, Christ and the Spirit: Spirit Christology in Trinitarian Perspective (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), and cited it approvingly. 49 Gunton, The Christian Faith, 99. 50 Colin E. Gunton, ‘Newman’s Dialectic: Dogma and Reason in the 73rd Tract for the Times’, in Newman after a Hundred Years, ed. Alan G. Hill and Ian Ker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 319. 51 Gunton, ‘The Sacrifice and the Sacrifices: From Metaphor to Transcendence’, in Trinity, Incarnation and Atonement: Philosophical and Theological Essays, ed. Ronald J. Feenstra and Cornelius Plantinga (Notre Dame: Notre Dame University, 1990), 225–6. In his later writings Gunton establishes this same point, often drawing on biblical texts such as the Gospel of Luke and the Epistles to the Hebrews. 47 48

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Gethsemane. It is not until his death that the Spirit is withdrawn, only to raise him from the dead and set him at the Father’s right hand to be, until the end of time – but not of the kingdom – the mediator of the Father’s rule and conquest of death. In sum, the Spirit is the mediator of the Son’s relation to the Father in both time and eternity.52 In this citation Gunton offers a narration of the entire life of Christ, in his Jewish particularity, as one empowered and led by the Spirit. The Spirit becomes the determining force or energy within Christ’s life, from conception to ascension. In Christ’s ascension what began on earth is now extended through time and space for those united to the Son. ‘As risen and ascended, [Christ] mediates to his believers that same Spirit through whose endowment he was able to be authentically himself and offer to the Father the sacrifice of obedience.’53 The Spirit prepares a body for the Son and accompanies and empowers him throughout his incarnation, only to be sent by the ascended Christ to carry on the work of perfecting all creatures and creation. The mutual mediation of Son and Spirit is again on display in Gunton’s work as the Father brings created things to perfection through his two hands. Because the Spirit remains transcendent, other than the world and that which is in it, he is free to work within the world without being mistaken for a creaturely entity. This is seen no more clearly than in the Incarnation. The transcendence of the Spirit and the Spirit’s mediation are the keys to Gunton’s Christology. ‘If Jesus is able freely to do that which is his particular calling, is not the mediator of that calling best understood to be the Holy Spirit, who mediates to him the Father’s will, while – graciously – respecting his authentic humanity?’54 Today we would call this a Spirit Christology but twenty-five years ago, when Gunton was developing his theology, Spirit Christology designated a species of Adoptionism, a heresy Gunton rightly rejected.55 But when it comes to providing a theological narration of the life of Christ, Gunton goes to great lengths to explicate the role of the Spirit. Precisely because the Spirit remains transcendent, he is other than Christ and able to empower Christ through his incarnation such that ‘the whole of Jesus’ authentically human life is made what it uniquely is through the action of the Spirit’.56 The Spirit works paradigmatically in Jesus and his ministry, especially in his conception and birth, baptism, ministry and resurrection.57 The virgin conception of Christ, enabled by the presence of the creator Spirit, reaffirms God’s intentions for his creation, restates his pronouncement that it is good and signals the beginning of the end: the renewal of all things in Christ. The Spirit shapes a body for the Son of God in the womb of Mary, enabling this person, this Jesus of Nazareth, to be and to become that which he was intended to be. ‘The Spirit is the one who makes Jesus of Nazareth to be the particular human being that he is.’58

Colin E. Gunton, Intellect and Action: Elucidations on Christian Theology and the Life of Faith (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2000), 80. 53 Colin E. Gunton, ‘The Sovereignty of Jesus: Some Reflections on the Crown Rights of the Redeemer’, Theological Digest and Outlook 6, no. 1 (1991): 7, cited in Stringer, ‘The Lord and Giver of Life’, 131. 54 Colin E. Gunton, ‘God, Grace and Freedom’, in God and Freedom: Essays in Historical and Systematic Theology, ed. Colin Gunton (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1995), 130. 55 Gunton, Theology through the Theologians 117; and ‘Martin Kähler Revisited: Variations on Hebrews 4:15’, Ex Auditu 14, no. 1 (1998): 22. 56 Gunton, ‘Martin Kähler Revisited’, 27. 57 Gunton, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, 153. Gunton also includes the temptation, the passion of Christ/atonement (what he calls a ‘pneumatology of sacrifice’, ibid., 196) and the ascension in various works. 58 Gunton, The Christian Faith, 102. 52

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At the baptism we clearly see the identification and authentication of Jesus as the Messiah in the words of the Father from heaven: ‘You are my son, the beloved. In you I am delighted’ (Lk. 3.22). The Father designates Jesus the Messiah by the Spirit. The Spirit mediates knowledge of the Father as Father to the incarnate Son. Gunton stipulates the importance of Jesus’ baptism for his identification with humanity and recognizes the centrality of Jesus’ Spirit baptism as the power for his public ministry.59 In the baptism with the Spirit Jesus is ‘called and empowered by God to enter upon a particular career and to perform it humanly’.60 This is the purview of the Spirit’s work. Gunton is following Basil’s and Owen’s insights, developed by Irving, that after his baptism, every operation of Christ was with the cooperation of the Spirit.61 The temptations show Jesus’ willingness to do the will of the Father as our mediator, as one who stands within the stock of fallen humanity and yet does not sin. The temptation narrative thus represents for Gunton ‘the meaning and direction of this particular human life’.62 Gunton interprets this narrative as Jesus rejecting any form of autonomy for a form of heteronomy.63 How was it that Jesus was able to resist the temptations of the Devil? Gunton’s answer, derived from Tom Smail, is that Christ was ‘enabled’ not to sin by the Holy Spirit.64 Any other response is to posit a form of Docetism or Apollinarianism. In the ministry of Christ, empowered by the Spirit, we clearly see the eschatological work of God as Christ heals the sick, raises the dead, exorcises demons and forgives sins – all anticipations of the end, ‘the beginnings of the kingdom that will have no end’.65 In every area of Christ’s incarnation we see the Father’s work achieved by the Son in the power of the Spirit. In the resurrection of Christ in the power of the Spirit the life of the age to come has been realized proleptically, in Christ, for the world. ‘The Spirit is the Lord and giver of life.’66 In the resurrection of Christ we clearly see ‘God the Spirit is the mediator of God’s eschatological action over against and toward the order of his creation.’67 Christ is also the fundamental key to knowing the ends for all creation: As created, it is perfect, because it is God’s project: what he purposes for that which is not God but creation, and therefore, intrinsically finite and temporal. But it is not perfect in the sense of complete. It has somewhere to go, and that is one of the points of the doctrine of recapitulation. Jesus Christ recapitulates our human story in order that the project of the perfection of all things may be achieved.68 More will be said about the Spirit’s perfecting role in creation in a subsequent section. A full account of Gunton’s pneumatology would also have to deal with a host of other topics including but not limited to: the person, relation, otherness and freedom – four themes Gunton takes up in The Christian Faith. Space does not allow such a

olin E. Gunton, ‘Christology: Two Dogmas Revisited’, in Theology through the Theologians, 162–3. C Colin E. Gunton, Enlightenment and Alienation: An Essay towards a Trinitarian Theology (London: HarperCollins, 1985), 93. 61 Gunton, The Promise of Trinitarian Theology, 37, where he cites Basil, On the Holy Spirit, XVI.38. 62 Gunton, Enlightenment and Alienation, 93. 63 Ibid. 64 Gunton, The Christian Faith, 105. 65 Gunton, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, 117. 66 Ibid.,  118. 67 Gunton, The Christian Faith, 111, italics in original. 68 Gunton, Triune Creator, 202. 59 60

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comprehensive coverage in this chapter, but it is worth mentioning that anthropology is a subset of Christology in Gunton’s work, because Christ is the essence of what it means to be a human person, hence, what we say about Christ has some parallel to what we can say about humanity in general.69 A person, as opposed to an individual, is defined by their relations with others, and to this extent, person is a univocal term for Divine and human persons.70 The Father, Son and Spirit are who they are by virtue of their relations with each other. Jesus Christ is who he is by virtue of his relations with the Father and the Spirit (not to mention his human family).71 This also accounts for Gunton’s ecclesiology, persons in relation who form the one body of Christ. But more of that in a following section.

THE SPIRIT AND THE PROJECT OF CREATION Gunton recognizes two main features of pneumatology, namely, the Spirit in relation to the world and the Spirit in relation to the Trinity. Regarding the former, the Spirit’s work is entirely eschatological as he relates believers to the Father through the Son bringing people into community, especially into the church, ‘so that the Spirit’s distinctive mode of action is to realize in the present anticipations of the conditions of the age to come’.72 The same is true for the non-human world as the Spirit ‘enables the whole creation to anticipate its eschatological destiny … enabling a measure of perfection there, too’.73 What the Spirit of God initiated at creation will be consummated at the eschaton. As such, Gunton speaks of the Spirit as the Lord and giver of eschatological life. Gunton even categorically states that ‘very often for Scripture the Spirit is God being eschatological’.74 As such, ‘a theology of divine action that does not incorporate the distinctive work of the Spirit as well as that of the Son fails in some way to encompass the breadth of the biblical economy’.75 It is a hallmark of Gunton’s theology that he develops Basil’s insight that the Spirit is the perfecting cause of creation. By ‘perfecting creation’ Gunton means the Spirit makes things what they were intended to become.76 The final perfection of which Scripture speaks is for all things to be summed up in Christ (Eph. 1.10; Phil. 3.12; Col. 1.28). The outward or economic actions of the Spirit’s perfecting work loom large in Gunton’s theology. Michael Stringer has drawn attention to an important aspect of Gunton’s theology vis-à-vis the theology of Augustine: Where Augustine considered the action of the Spirit in uniting the Father and the Son as the closing of an eternal circle, Gunton argued that God’s purposes are completed by opening, not closing, the ‘circle’… It becomes clear that while Gunton’s conception of the Spirit was developed in dialogue with Augustinian trinitarianism, the two

or a summary see Gunton, The Christian Faith, 38–54. F See Gunton, The Promise of Trinitarian Theology, 83–99; and Gunton, Act and Being, 146–7. 71 For a concise summary see Gunton, The Promise of Trinitarian Theology, 11–12. 72 Gunton, ‘Pneumatology’, 647. 73 Gunton, Act and Being, 142. 74 Gunton, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, 76. The eschatological work of the Spirit is also the key for Gunton’s notion of doctrinal development, as seen in his argument in ‘The Development of Doctrine’, in Theology through the Theologians, especially pages 43–5. 75 Gunton, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, xiii. 76 See Gunton, The One, the Three and the Many, 189. 69 70

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schemes are to be distinguished by an opposite directionality. That is to say, while Augustine thought of the Spirit as acting centripetally … Gunton proposed that the Spirit’s orientation is directed outwards and toward the ‘other’ (i.e., centrifugally), though of course for the sake, finally, of drawing creation into the life of God.77 This perfecting work is first of all achieved in the humanity of the Son and then, through Christ, to all creation. Gunton rightly viewed the doctrine of creation as central for dogmatics; many of Gunton’s contemporaries were much slower to come to this conclusion. Gunton is critical of accounts of creation which lack a Trinitarian explication and as such he set out to right the record. While deeply appreciative of Calvin’s theology, especially of this Trinitarian theology and the place he accords the Holy Spirit, Gunton was critical of Calvin’s doctrine of creation precisely because he failed to follow through with his Trinitarian insights into this area.78 Gunton’s doctrine of creation was thoroughly Trinitarian as he repeatedly expressed the biblical idea that creation is both by and for the Son and so ‘it is structured by the very one who became incarnate’, and again adopting Basil’s language, the Holy Spirit is the perfecting cause of creation, ‘enabling us to say that it is the work of God the Spirit to enable the created order to truly be itself ’.79 Keeping the two hands of God together in such a way allowed Gunton to speak both of God’s immanence and transcendence without collapsing one into the other. In this way Gunton thought he had improved on Calvin’s theology of creation. Not only eschatology but also teleology is found in Gunton’s articulation of the perfecting work of the Spirit. The Spirit not only restores creation from the effects of the fall but reorders it and redirects it to its proper or intended end in Jesus Christ. As we have seen before we see again here, the work of the Spirit is distinct from that of the Son but never separate. This is seen no more clearly than in the resurrection of Jesus Christ: the inauguration of the age to come whereby the creation is perfected, completed and made fit for the presence of God. Henceforth all things will be made subject to the risen Christ as the Spirit acts as ‘the agent and mediator of the rule of Christ in both judgment and salvation until he hands over the rule to God the Father at the end of the age’.80 Under the tutelage of Irenaeus, Gunton affirms the contingency of creation and thus its goodness and freedom. Because the triune God is prior to creation, creation retains a certain relative independence or freedom, Selbständigkeit, as does God of course. This allows us to affirm the goodness of creation and to look for its perfection or its eschatological consummation. Because God is not static but is a dynamic of perichoretic relations, then creation too, according to Gunton, is dynamic. Irenaeus had in view the development of creation and Basil speaks of creation being perfected by the work of the Spirit. Gunton adopts these themes as his own and this is what he means by a Trinitarian ordering of creation. ‘God creates a world which needs time to become what it is created to be, and all his action is accommodated to this end.’81 Gunton conceives of the original creation as relatively, not absolutely perfect, hence salvation for humans and perfection

S tringer, ‘The Lord and Giver of Life’, 214–15. Gunton, ‘The End of Causality?’, 75. 79 Gunton, The Triune Creator, 83. 80 Gunton, ‘The Indispensable God’, 18. Stringer points out that Gunton’s work is a protest against those who think of the Spirit’s work merely as recapitulation and not also of teleological perfection. Stringer, ‘The Lord and Giver of Life’, 219. 81 Gunton, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, xvi. 77 78

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for creation is not about going back, it is not a restoration, but is, rather, being directed to an end.82 As the perfecting agent in creation, the Spirit’s function is to bring the world through Christ to a completeness, which it did not have in the beginning … The destiny of things on this account is to be presented before the throne in their perfection, not without the human creation, indeed, but transformed in such a way that their true otherness is not only respected but achieved.83 This is why Gunton, in his later writings, constantly refers to creation as a ‘project’ of God.84 ‘God creates not as a timelessly perfect whole, but as an order of things that is planned to go somewhere; to be completed or perfected, and so projected into time.’85 The great goal is, of course, the summing up of all things in Christ (Col. 1.20). How creation is to be perfected is still to be answered, of course. Gunton looks to the church as the place where the eschatological perfecting work of the Spirit most clearly takes shape in the present.

THE SPIRIT AND CHURCH ‘The key to ecclesiology as to eschatology is pneumatology.’86 This was Gunton’s repeated claim, more comprehensively stated as, the doctrine of the Trinity establishes ecclesiology as the distinctions between the modes of action of Father, Son and Spirit shape ecclesial thinking.87 Gunton wants to provide an ontology of the church that is thoroughly Trinitarian. If the nature of God is communion then so too the nature of the church.88 After detailing the ways in which the Trinity has not been foundational for ecclesiology in East and West, Gunton seeks to fill this lacuna with his own account. The way Gunton does this is to specify, alongside the church’s institution by Christ, a greater emphasis on its constitution by the Spirit:89 what Gunton has spoken of as ‘the Spirit-led Jesus in the past’ and ‘the Christ-shaped Spirit in the present’.90 Despite not using this language later in his career (after 1997), Gunton described the church as an ‘echo’ of the Trinity on earth.91 In reconsidering the church’s constitution by the Spirit, Gunton initially turns to Tertullian’s proposal: The church itself is, properly and principally, the Spirit himself, in which is the trinity of the one divinity, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. [The Spirit] gathers (congregat) that

Gunton, The Promise of Trinitarian Theology, 180–1. Gunton, ‘The End of Causality?’, 81. 84 See, for instance, Gunton, ‘Atonement and the Project of Creation’, in The Promise of Trinitarian Theology, 178–92. 85 Gunton, The Promise of Trinitarian Theology, 181, italics in original. 86 Gunton, Father, Son and Spirit, 230. 87 Gunton, The Promise of Trinitarian Theology, 56–7. 88 Ibid.,  71. 89 Ibid.,  68. 90 Ibid.,  73. 91 While not undermining these ideas, Gunton’s later work develops them differently. There is much less emphasis on drawing the ontological identity of the church from God’s being (and the use of cosmic ecclesiological texts like Colossians and Ephesians), and much greater emphasis upon the church’s election to be God’s eschatological community enabled by the Spirit (with a major emphasis on 1 Corinthians). 82 83

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church which the Lord has made to consist in ‘three’. And so … every number which has combined together into this faith is accounted a church by its author and sanctifier.92 As Christ was formed and led by the Spirit, so too the church. The motif of the Spirit’s leading is important for Gunton, given the eschatological orientation of the work of the Spirit. ‘The action of the Spirit is to anticipate, in the present and by means of the finite and contingent, the things of the age to come.’93 John Owen and Edward Irving are once again Gunton’s key informants as he constructs an argument for the Spirit as the motive force of the church analogous to the Spirit as the motive force of Jesus’ life. Much of Gunton’s work is set against the backdrop of that to which he objects. In Gunton’s opinion the Western church has sought to possess the Holy Spirit, in one way or another, and either institutionalizes the Spirit (Roman Catholicism) or subordinates the Spirit to human autonomy (Protestantism). Gunton’s proposal is to recognize the eschatological dimension of the Spirit’s mission in relation to creatures. He wrote that ‘it would be possible, as an exercise in cynicism, to write a history of the Church as the story of the misappropriation of the doctrine of the Holy Spirit’.94 One such criticism is levelled at Karl Barth. Gunton writes, ‘the weakness of Barth’s doctrine of the Spirit is that it gives rise to an underdetermination of the eschatological dimensions of theology’.95 Gunton argues that Barth has a tendency to assign to the Son actions that are more naturally assigned to the Spirit.96 The Spirit simply applies the objective salvation of Christ’s incarnation to the present-day believer, meaning the Spirit is limited to being the action of Jesus towards us. But, according to Gunton, Barth places much less emphasis on the present relationship of the believer with Christ, mediated through the church: ‘More weight is placed upon the miraculous transfer of what happened then to ourselves now, less on the relation mediated in the present by the Spirit of Christ through his body, the church.’97 The church is only understandable in light of the Trinity for it is a communion of persons in relation. Gunton often speaks of the church as the ‘echo’ on earth of the triune communion of heaven.98 Here Gunton’s Spirit Christology is transposed onto ecclesiology. ‘The church is what it is by virtue of being called to be a temporal echo of the eternal community that God is.’99 Gunton does not make this move too quickly, his theology of mediation is too strong for that, but the argument is essentially from the ontological Trinity to the church: both entail a communio ontology. How this is worked out in time and space is made explicit when Gunton writes, ‘[the church] becomes an echo of the life of the Trinity when it is enabled by the Spirit to order its life to where that reconciliation takes place in time, that is to say, to the life, death and resurrection of Jesus’.100

Gunton, The Promise of Trinitarian Theology, 61–2, citing Tertullian, De Pudicitia. Gunton is quick to distance himself from other ideas put forward by Tertullian. 93 Ibid.,  67. 94 Colin E. Gunton, ‘The Church: John Owen and John Zizioulas on the Church’, in Theology through the Theologians, 187. 95 Gunton, Being and Becoming, 240. 96 See ibid., 235. 97 Colin E. Gunton, ‘Salvation’, in The Cambridge Companion to Karl Barth, ed. John Webster (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2000), 152. 98 Gunton, The Promise of Trinitarian Theology, 12, 56–82. 99 Ibid.,  78. 100 Ibid.,  81. 92

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Proper eschatologically oriented community – church – is achieved primarily through the sacraments, the proclamation of the Gospel and the perfecting of the saints. In short, a properly broad definition of worship characterizes the church. Primarily in worship, but in other relations as well, the Christian community is brought to the Father by the Spirit through the Son; or similarly, but with a slight difference of emphasis, through the Son and in the Spirit … Believing the world to have been created and redeemed by God the Father, through the Son and in the Spirit, the Church responds with the particular mode of action and life which she believes to be appropriate to her belief.101 The church is that place and space in time where ‘the perfect image of Christ is, by word and sacrament, anticipated in distinct persons’.102 The Spirit’s work in and through the incarnate Son opens Jesus up for others and it is here that the church is constituted and reconstituted, in every Baptism, Eucharist, act of love, goodness and mercy. Here, as elsewhere, it is Gunton’s attempt to construct a fully Trinitarian theology that marks his work out from others. A Trinitarian ecclesiology is one in which all things and persons are rightly coordinated to Christ, established by the Spirit and presented to the Father.

CONCLUSION More could be said, of course, but I trust enough has been covered to expose the breadth (if not the depth) of Gunton’s pneumatology. Colin Gunton is primarily recognized for his contribution to two areas of theology: being a theologian of the Trinity and his work on the project of creation. In light of a close reading of his oeuvre he should also be known as a theologian of the Spirit or, more controversially, primarily known as a theologian of the Spirit – a view which seems to also have surprised Gunton himself.103 From his early works through to his last published volume, the person and work of the Spirit act as the leitmotif of his theology, providing a rationale for his particular type of relational Trinitarian ontology, his view of creation being perfected by the Spirit and his profound appreciation for select voices of the tradition, especially Irenaeus of Lyons, Basil of Caesarea, John Calvin, John Owen and Edward Irving. And the goal throughout, for Gunton, was that creation might worship God; or, in strictly Trinitarian terms: ‘God hears the world as praise in Christ, by virtue of his sacrifice. The church’s calling is to represent and realize, in the Spirit, the world’s praise of God.’104 As Gunton once remarked, ‘Talking about the Holy Spirit is an odd activity.’105 Odd because the Spirit is so self-effacing. And yet as odd as it may be, it is crucial that pneumatology be given its rightful place in any theology that would call itself Trinitarian. I trust this odd chapter on an odd topic would shed light on the work of an odd theologian.

Colin E. Gunton, ‘Knowledge and Culture: Towards an Epistemology of the Concrete’, in The Gospel and Contemporary Culture, ed. Hugh Montefiore (London: Mowbray, 1992), 98. 102 Höhne, Spirit and Sonship, 130. 103 In Theology through the Theologians, x, Gunton writes, ‘As I have read the collection through, what has struck me is how many of the chapters, including the earliest, raise the question of the doctrine of the Holy Spirit.’ 104 Gunton, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, 200. 105 Gunton, Theology through the Theologians, 204. 101

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Gunton on eschatology TERRY J. WRIGHT

Eschatology is the doctrine of the last things (ta eschata). While the doctrine covers a broad range of interconnected themes including the parousia or second coming of Jesus, millennialism and the beatific vision, its traditional focus is death, judgement, heaven and hell. On the standard account, even a popular one, a person dies, faces God’s judgement and is then either showered in heavenly pleasures or cast into the fires of hell. Such a framework surely shapes many forms of evangelism, which confront individual souls with the threat of an eternity apart from God’s presence with no hope of reprieve. The logic here is compelling, its elegant simplicity persuasive. Colin Gunton will have none of this. If this is what eschatology entails, he complains, then ‘it only shows how far traditional teaching has gone astray’. Indeed, ‘it has so many faults that it would take up much space to do justice to them all’.1 Problems lie in the doctrine’s presumed other-worldly orientation, in its apparent obsession with the emancipation of immortal souls from fleshly shackles, in the Almighty’s definitive ruling on their fates at the end of time – all the while neglecting teaching about resurrection that affirms the embodied overcoming of death.2 However, while there is much to criticize in these approaches to eschatology, insofar as they fixate on what happens at the end and only at the end, Gunton is sure that a properly Christian eschatology must still acknowledge its future dimension as long as it also recognizes a broader picture. Eschatology, after all, is not futurology,3 and ‘everything depends upon how we see the tenses [past, present, future] to be open to one another – interwoven, so to speak – through the Spirit’s action’.4 Indeed, the Holy Spirit, ‘the eschatological person of the Trinity’,5 is crucial for an account of the last things, so much so that in Gunton’s construal, it is sometimes difficult to know how far eschatology is in fact a subset of pneumatology, or an adjective qualifying the sorts of divine action in the world, than a doctrine in its own right.6

olin E. Gunton, The Christian Faith: An Introduction to Christian Doctrine (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), 157. C Ibid.,  157–8. 3 Colin E. Gunton, ‘Dogmatic Theses on Eschatology: Conference Response’, in The Future as God’s Gift: Explorations in Christian Eschatology, ed. David Fergusson and Marcel Sarot (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2000), 139; The Christian Faith, 158. On ‘the future’ more generally, see Jennifer M. Gidley, The Future: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). 4 Gunton, The Christian Faith, 157. 5 Colin E. Gunton, Father, Son and Holy Spirit: Essays toward a Fully Trinitarian Theology (London: T&T Clark, 2003), 81. 6 ‘We should perhaps not concentrate on eschatology either as a locus of dogmatics … or as a universal key to unlock the character of theology, but should rather give attention to the way in which eschatological dimensions 1 2

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Ultimately, this is inconsequential; but it does mean that for Gunton, eschatology cannot be explored apart from considering how God’s past and present actions contain within themselves an orientation towards a future that in some way characterizes everything that happens: ‘There are occasions in which … the “end” is anticipated in the middle of time’,7 particularly in the life of Jesus. The concepts of ‘perfection’ and ‘anticipation’ are essential, as is the notion, taken from Basil of Caesarea, of the Holy Spirit as ‘the perfecting cause’.8 Eschatology saturates Gunton’s theology. There are extended or focussed discussions of eschatology and its themes among his writings,9 but almost every theological issue is given at least an eschatological gloss somewhere. As such it is impossible to do justice to the intricacies of his thought in this area, not least because these cannot be detached easily from his Christology, his Trinitarianism and so on; Gunton is nothing if not a holistic, ‘big picture’ thinker. My aim in this chapter is therefore modest: it is simply to map the basic contours of Gunton’s eschatology. Thus, I shall discuss Gunton’s idea of creation as God’s project, as something that ‘exists for a purpose – to go somewhere’,10 a description that necessarily references the career of Jesus, as well as the perfecting action of the Holy Spirit. It is also important to recognize the role of the Church and the place of human culture in Gunton’s theology of perfecting, and I shall explore each of these in turn. After this, I shall look at Gunton’s views on death, judgement, heaven and hell; for despite his reservations about the content of traditional eschatology, he does not avoid discussing these four matters entirely, and I suppose that anyone exploring Gunton’s thoughts on eschatology would expect me to comment on these, even as Gunton himself interprets them in the light of the Father’s ‘two hands’.11 Finally, I shall make further are allowed to shape and interact with all the various loci with which theology is concerned.’ Colin E. Gunton, ‘Editorial: Eschatology’, International Journal of Systematic Theology 2, no. 1 (2000): 2. 7 Gunton, The Christian Faith, 157–8. 8 Basil of Caesarea, On the Holy Spirit, 16.38. As far as I can tell, the earliest instance where Gunton designates the Holy Spirit as ‘the perfecting cause’ is found in his 1988 Congregational Lecture, ‘The Transcendent Lord’, republished in Colin E. Gunton, Theology through the Theologians: Selected Essays, 1972–1995 (London: T&T Clark, 1996), 197. Other references include Christ and Creation: The 1990 Didsbury Lectures (Carlisle: Paternoster, 1992), 46; The Triune Creator: A Historical and Systematic Study (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1998), 86; and Father, Son and Holy Spirit, 114. See David A. Höhne, Spirit and Sonship: Colin Gunton’s Theology of Particularity and the Holy Spirit (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), 11–13, for reservations about Gunton’s appropriation of Basil’s phrase. 9 These are Colin E. Gunton, ‘When the Gates of Hell Fall Down: Towards a Modern Theology of the Justice of God’, New Blackfriars 69, no. 821 (1988): 488–96; ‘All Flesh is as Grass: Towards an Eschatology of the Human Person’, in Beyond Mere Health: Theology and Health Care in a Secular Society, ed. Hilary D. Regan and Rodney B. Horsfield (Melbourne: Australian Theological Society, 1996), 22–37; The Triune Creator, 212– 36; ‘Dogmatic Theses on Eschatology’, 139–43; ‘Second Lesson: 1 Corinthians 15:51–58’, in The Lectionary Commentary: Theological Exegesis for Sunday’s Texts. The Second Readings: Acts and the Epistles, ed. Roger E. Van Harn (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans; London: Continuum, 2001), 228–31; The Christian Faith, 157–72; and Father, Son and Holy Spirit, 216–34. See also the relevant sermons in Theology through Preaching: Sermons for Brentwood (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2001); and The Theologian as Preacher: Further Sermons from Colin E. Gunton, ed. Sarah J. Gunton and John E. Colwell (London: T&T Clark, 2007). Finally, there is also an article entitled ‘Christian Belief Today: God, Creation and the Future’, New Fire iii (1975): 434–41, which I have been unable to source. 10 Colin E. Gunton, ‘The Doctrine of Creation’, in The Cambridge Companion to Christian Doctrine, ed. Colin E. Gunton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 142. 11 Gunton frequently employs this second-century image in the course of his writings; see, for example, Christ and Creation, 52; The Triune Creator, 9; and Father, Son and Holy Spirit, 29–30. The earliest published occurrence I have found is in Colin E. Gunton, ‘The Church on Earth: The Roots of Community’, in On Being the Church: Essays on the Christian Community, ed. Colin E. Gunton and Daniel W. Hardy (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1989), 73, republished in The Promise of Trinitarian Theology, 56–82 (reference on page 76). He draws the image

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observations about the value or otherwise of Gunton’s eschatology. But before any of these, I shall propose some ideas about the development of Gunton’s thoughts on matters eschatological.

THE DEVELOPMENT OF GUNTON’S ESCHATOLOGY Robert Jenson observes that many of Gunton’s central concerns and ideas were already present in his doctoral dissertation, published as Becoming and Being in 1978:12 his antipathy towards so-called ‘classical theism’, his confidence in God’s self-revelation, his affirmation of the reality and goodness of created time and so on.13 The core conviction of Gunton’s thoughts on eschatology is also present: ‘The appropriate function of the Spirit is the anticipation in the present of that which belongs to the end of time, eschatological in the full meaning of the word.’14 Gunton had already intuited the inadequacy of the standard eschatology of the day, no doubt influenced by his engagement with Karl Barth’s theology, and perhaps also by an intellectual climate charged with the reassessment of the doctrine, stimulated particularly by Jürgen Moltmann and Wolfhart Pannenberg.15 Similarly, it is clear that the ‘full meaning’ of eschatology also included the concept of ‘anticipation’, of which Gunton has made much use. In subsequent, but still early, writings, Gunton recognizes how the resurrection of Jesus is ‘an event belonging to the future [which] has taken place, by anticipation … in the centre of time’;16 how human activity liberated by ‘the incarnation, cross and resurrection … anticipates the eschatological consummation’;17 and how various human ‘successes’, whatever these are, ‘are anticipations of the completeness at which they aim’, granted to be such by the Holy Spirit.18 On the basis of these sorts of statement, Gunton crafts a working definition: By ‘eschatological’ is meant belonging to the life of the age to come, which does not mean (though it may include) existence in a different sphere (‘heaven’). It means life according to the promise of that humanity which belongs in the divine future but may be realised, by anticipation, in the here and now.19

from Irenaeus of Lyons and, particularly, it seems, from Against Heresies, 4.20.1, the only cited location; see The Triune Creator, 54, The Christian Faith, 10; and Act and Being: Towards a Theology of the Divine Attributes (London: SCM Press, 2002), 81. But the ‘two hands’ metaphor is also found in Against Heresies, 4.pref.4, 5.1.3, 5.5.1, 5.6.1 and 5.28.4, as well as in Theophilus of Antioch, Apology to Autolycus, 2.18, which possibly antedates Irenaeus’s own use of the term. See William B. Whitney, Problem and Promise in Colin E. Gunton’s Doctrine of Creation (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 17–23, for a summary of Irenaeus’s influence on Gunton. 12 Colin E. Gunton, Becoming and Being: The Doctrine of God in Charles Hartshorne and Karl Barth, 2nd edn (London: SCM Press, 2001). First edition published in 1978 by Oxford University Press. 13 Robert W. Jenson, ‘A Decision Tree of Colin Gunton’s Thinking’, in The Theology of Colin Gunton, ed. Lincoln Harvey (London: T&T Clark, 2010), 8–9. 14 Gunton, Becoming and Being, 165. 15 Christoph Schwöbel, ‘Last Things First? The Century of Eschatology in Retrospect’, in The Future as God’s Gift: Explorations in Christian Eschatology, ed. David Fergusson and Marcel Sarot (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2000), 227–31. Moltmann features, albeit briefly, in Gunton, Becoming and Being, 105, 181. 16 Colin E. Gunton, Yesterday and Today: A Study of Continuities in Christology (London: DLT, 1983), 131. 17 Colin E. Gunton, ‘Creation and Re-Creation: An Exploration of Some Themes in Aesthetics and Theology’, Modern Theology 2, no. 1 (1985): 18. 18 Colin E. Gunton, Enlightenment and Alienation: An Essay towards a Trinitarian Theology (Basingstoke: Marshall Morgan and Scott, 1985; reprint, Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2006), 51. 19 Gunton, Enlightenment and Alienation, 104, original emphasis.

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Thus, the eschatological theme of anticipation and its connection to pneumatology are present in Gunton’s thought early on, although it seems to me that he is a little vague about precisely what is anticipated. This is nuanced somewhat during the mid1980s, when Gunton also begins to incorporate the idea of creation as something directed towards an end in Christ, as something to be completed or perfected, so that eschatological consummation is cast in terms of realizing that which God had always intended for the world, and this by Jesus and through the Holy Spirit: ‘Through him [Jesus] God re-establishes our life in its orientation to its promised perfection. The directedness of our life is now determined … by grace: by the pull of the Spirit to completion rather than the pull of sin to dissolution.’20 During the latter half of the 1980s, Gunton found inspiration in Basil of Caesarea’s notion of the Spirit as ‘the perfecting cause’ of creation. The motivation to draw from Basil is perhaps due to Gunton’s involvement at the time in ecumenical discussions on the doctrine of the Trinity, in which Eastern churches were also represented, as well as his new role teaching Christian doctrine at King’s College London.21 It is difficult to identify, and far easier to speculate about, how a person is influenced, when and by whom, but it seems likely that Gunton’s commitments at the time opened him to ecclesial traditions from which he could draw previously underappreciated ideas. Exposure to the Cappadocian Fathers, channelled through John Zizioulas, led Gunton most notably to articulate his theology of the Trinity using the vocabulary of communion and relationship, but Basil’s description of the Spirit as ‘the perfecting cause’ is just as significant for Gunton’s theology of creation and, consequently, eschatology.22 Apart from the description of creation as a project, the first recorded instance of which appears to be located in a sermon dated 1993,23 all the significant terminology and concepts Gunton deploys in his eschatology are in place relatively early in his career. Indeed, his 1990 Didsbury Lectures, published as Christ and Creation, is Gunton’s first sustained treatment of a doctrine of creation permeated by notions of perfection and anticipation; and his use of these terms and his stated positions in this book are for the most part rehearsed with varying degrees of progression and satisfaction in the remainder of his corpus. So with this in mind, and perhaps not before time, I shall now turn to the content of his eschatology, beginning with the idea of creation as a project destined for perfection.

CREATION AS GOD’S PROJECT While it seems that the specific designation of creation as God’s project dates from at least 1993, the underlying concept – that creation is ‘destined for perfection,

Colin E. Gunton, The Actuality of Atonement: A Study of Metaphor, Rationality and the Christian Tradition (London: T&T Clark, 1988), 167. 21 Colin E. Gunton, ‘Theology in Communion’, in Shaping a Theological Mind: Theological Context and Methodology, ed. Darren C. Marks (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), 34–5. Gunton’s use of the Irenaean ‘two hands’ metaphor (see note 11) also likely emerged around this time. 22 The observation about Zizioulas and the Eastern tradition’s influence on Gunton is common; see, for example, Stephen R. Holmes, ‘Towards the Analogia Personae et Relationis: Developments in Gunton’s Trinitarian Thinking’, in The Theology of Colin Gunton, ed. Lincoln Harvey (London: T&T Clark, 2010), 39–42; Bradley G. Green, Colin Gunton and the Failure of Augustine: The Theology of Colin Gunton in Light of Augustine (Cambridge: James Clarke, 2012), 28–9; and Uche Anizor, Trinity and Humanity: An Introduction to the Theology of Colin Gunton (Milton Keynes: Paternoster, 2016), 2, 18, 20–2. 23 Gunton, Theology through Preaching, 106. 20

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completedness’ – is found in earlier publications.24 Chief among these is Christ and Creation, where the ideas of Spirit-inspired, Christ-shaped direction, anticipation and perfection all find fuller expression and integration: ‘The conditions of the age to come may be anticipated in this one. The agent of all such anticipation is the Holy Spirit’,25 whose ‘distinctive work … is, through Christ, to perfect the creation’.26 Thus the ‘end’ or purpose of creation, for Gunton, is that ‘all things may through being perfected praise the one who made them’.27 The specific language of ‘project’, however, is found more frequently in texts from the mid-1990s onwards: ‘What is the project of creation? … God created the world so that the created order should be offered back to its creator, perfected, and perfected as the result of the true dominion exercised by God’s vice-gerent, the human creature.’28 Creation, as God’s project, is created perfect – ‘not as a timelessly perfect whole, but as an order of things that is planned to go somewhere’,29 in much the same way as a baby is born ‘perfect’ but nonetheless matures into adulthood.30 It already is something but, under the influence of God’s Spirit and through human activity,31 can and will become something more. There is therefore no return to some original, static state of perfection;32 for Gunton, the world has always had ‘an eschatological orientation’ that allows it to move towards ‘an end which is greater than its beginnings’.33 On this account, ‘God has two purposes in creation, and they are precisely coincident: to make something that is valuable in itself, and to make something valuable in itself because it is created to serve God’s glory.’34 Moreover, the fact that it takes time for the world to move towards its perfection is no bad thing. Time, for Gunton, is part of the goodness of the created order and not something to lament or escape.35 However, the fall of creation and the reality of sin and evil have affected the way this movement towards perfection transpires. Sin and evil are the ‘corruptions which impede the creation’s achievement of its promised perfection’,36 necessitating a form of divine action which brings redemption ‘by one able so to enter the network of slavery, evil and corruption as to free the good creation from its meshes’37 – that is, by the incarnate Son, Jesus. This is entirely apposite, for, according to Scripture, not only were all things created through the Son, but all things will find unity in him, too. ‘The purpose of God from eternity’, Gunton avers, is ‘to bring his creation to perfection through his relation to

See, for example, Gunton, ‘When the Gates of Hell Fall Down’, 494; The Actuality of Atonement, 150–1, 169; quotation from Christ and Creation, 45. 25 Gunton, Christ and Creation, 46. 26 Ibid.,  50. 27 Ibid.,  96. 28 Colin E. Gunton, The Promise of Trinitarian Theology, 2nd edn (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1997), 187. See also, for example, The Triune Creator, 12, and Theology through Preaching, 119. 29 Gunton, The Promise of Trinitarian Theology, 181. 30 Gunton, The Christian Faith, 19, 49. 31 See the next section, ‘Eschatology, the Church and Culture’. 32 Gunton, The Promise of Trinitarian Theology, 181; The Triune Creator, 11, 59–60; The Christian Faith, 24–5. 33 Gunton, The Christian Faith, 19; The Promise of Trinitarian Theology, 180–1. 34 Gunton, The Christian Faith, 19. 35 Colin E. Gunton, The One, the Three and the Many: God, Creation and the Culture of Modernity. The 1992 Bampton Lectures (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 81; The Triune Creator, 84; Father, Son and Holy Spirit, 136, 142. 36 Gunton, The Actuality of Atonement, 152; cf. ‘The Doctrine of Creation’, 143. 37 Gunton, The Actuality of Atonement, 151. 24

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it through his Son, independently of whether or not sin supervened.’38 Thus Christology is central, even a control,39 for a balanced account of eschatology, for creation’s teleology is ‘begun through [Christ], reordered to its end through his self-emptying, and directed to him as its end’.40 This Christological core is further evidenced by what the incarnate Son achieves, not just on the cross but in a life of obedience to his Father, through which his humanity is perfected in time by the agency of the Holy Spirit.41 In this way, by resisting and overcoming the corrupting powers of sin and evil, powers which held him to the cross but not within the tomb, Jesus succeeded where Adam failed,42 and in so doing became ‘the means of perfection in the senses both of restoration and completion’.43 On this account, Jesus’ acts of healing, exorcism and so on, all made God’s own acts by the Spirit,44 are instances where the triune God’s eschatological activity anticipates the age to come by orchestrating this future’s inbreaking into the present.45 Nowhere is this more apparent than in the resurrection of Jesus, whose body is ‘eschatologically transformed’46 and therefore ‘raised into the conditions of the life to come’.47 Indeed, Christ’s body is so ‘suffused by the Spirit of God’ that it has ‘become what it was created to be’48 – perfected, completed – and clears the way for the Spirit to incorporate others into the Son’s risen life.49 Gunton’s description of Jesus as ‘the means of perfection’ emphasizes the universal significance of Christ’s obedient life. While the Spirit acts to perfect Jesus’ humanity throughout the course of his ministry, Christ, as the one who recapitulates the life of Adam, shapes and secures the eschatological destiny of the world by assuming fallen human flesh and presenting it purified to the Father. Jesus’ humanity is thus representative of the whole created order; in him alone is anticipated and promised the eschatological completion of all things.50 Essentially, the eschatological transformation and completion that the risen Jesus presently enjoys as a particular and perfected human being is also promised for the whole world:51 that because of Christ, and by the Spirit, each thing becomes what it is by anticipating what God intended for it to be.52

Ibid. Gunton, ‘Dogmatic Theses on Eschatology’, 143. 40 Gunton, Christ and Creation, 97–8. 41 Ibid., 50; The Triune Creator, 223; The Christian Faith, 103. 42 Gunton, The Triune Creator, 202; Theology through Preaching, 105. 43 Gunton, The Triune Creator, 202. 44 Gunton, The Promise of Trinitarian Theology, 67. 45 Gunton, The Triune Creator, 176–7; The Christian Faith, 106–7; Father, Son and Holy Spirit, 117. 46 Gunton, Christ and Creation, 31. 47 Gunton, Theology through Preaching, 120; cf. The Christian Faith, 153. It is impossible to know precisely what ‘the conditions of the life to come’ are, either in Gunton’s thought or more generally, but if the biblical accounts of Jesus’ resurrection are determinative here, then I speculate that such eschatological conditions entail an entirely different sort of physics to that which we currently experience. 48 Gunton, The Theologian as Preacher, 24. 49 Gunton, ‘1 Corinthians 15:51–58’, 231; ‘Preaching from the Letters’, in The Lectionary Commentary: Theological Exegesis for Sunday’s Texts. The Second Readings: Acts and the Epistles, ed. Roger E. Van Harn (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans; London: Continuum, 2001), 624; Theology through Preaching, 122; Act and Being, 103. 50 Gunton, Christ and Creation, 59. The issue of universalism will be addressed in the section ‘On Heaven and Hell’. 51 ‘In the resurrection of Jesus, God shows us all we need to know about the meaning of our resurrection,’ Gunton, Theology through Preaching, 120, original emphasis. 52 Ibid., 149; cf. The Triune Creator, 86, 161. 38 39

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ESCHATOLOGY, THE CHURCH AND CULTURE Gunton’s desire to ground eschatology in the life of Jesus and the Spirit’s perfecting action enables him also to offer some ideas about how human life in all its variety and complexity may anticipate the world’s eschatological completion. In terms of human society, God elects the Church to form ‘the community of the last times’ and so anticipate and realize the life of the age to come in and through its various but particular relationships.53 Even here, it is the Spirit who acts to anticipate this age through these relationships. The Church is, to be sure, the body of Christ, but there is a very real sense in which the risen Jesus is absent – the ‘until he comes’ of 1 Cor. 11.26 – and somehow is only made present by the Spirit’s action.54 When this dynamic of Christ’s presence and absence is forgotten, too close an identification between Christ and the Church perhaps becomes inevitable and results either in an over-realized eschatology, where the Church sees itself as already perfected, or in forms of ecclesial hierarchy that militate against ‘the participation of the whole people of God in koinônia and mission’.55 Nonetheless, the age to come is genuinely anticipated in the Church’s relationships, both internal and external, when the Spirit makes the risen Jesus present, especially, perhaps, in sacramental worship.56 All this points to the fact that the Church is quite unlike other social or political entities,57 despite the fact that, as a body or institution in this world (which Gunton qualifies as ‘the world that is God’s creation’),58 its worship of the triune God ‘cannot be disentangled from its social and political matrix and outcome’.59 The Church is the eschatological community because it benefits occasionally – ‘from time to time’, says Gunton60 – from anticipating its perfected future, but it is also charged with unveiling to the world the sort of eschatological life towards which God is directing it. This the Church does primarily through its acts of worship, which are also political acts insofar as by the Spirit these display to the world another way of inhabiting the created order in relationship with the triune God.61 In doing so, the Church challenges, even confronts, the world’s various sociopolitical structures and powers with the reality of their true Lord, opening these up to the eschatological renewal anticipated, promised and guaranteed by the Father through his Son and the Spirit.62 However, for Gunton, the Holy Spirit’s action is not restricted to the Church. The Spirit is free and in that freedom enables anticipations of the age to come both inside and outside the Church.63 This is seen generally in human culture, ‘those human activities … by which men and women engage, both together and individually, with the world Gunton, The Promise of Trinitarian Theology, 81; cf. Intellect and Action: Elucidations on Christian Theology and the Life of Faith (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2000), 112. 54 Gunton, The Christian Faith, 121–2; Father, Son and Holy Spirit, 230–1. 55 Gunton, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, 230. 56 Ibid.,  231–2. 57 Ibid.,  222. 58 Ibid.,  223. 59 Ibid.,  228. 60 Gunton, The Actuality of Atonement, 170; Christ and Creation, 46; and Father, Son and Holy Spirit, 231–2. See John E. Colwell, ‘Provisionality and Promise: Avoiding Ecclesiastical Nestorianism?’, in The Theology of Colin Gunton, ed. Lincoln Harvey (London: T&T Clark, 2010), 100–15, for comment on this recurring phrase in Gunton’s ecclesiology. 61 ‘The call of the Church, her mission, is to remind the world that … human beings are called to enable the world to be itself – which means to praise the one who made it.’ Gunton, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, 90. 62 Gunton, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, 221–9; The Christian Faith, 127–31, 167–8. 63 Gunton, Theology through the Theologians, 120; The Christian Faith, 177–8. 53

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presented to their experience’.64 Such engagement is not simple interaction; it involves the intentional shaping of one thing into another, the turning of ‘wildernesses into gardens, empty land into housing, forests into deserts’.65 Gunton describes this transformative activity as the ‘cultural mandate … to make something of the world’ (Gen. 1.28),66 and it is the means by which the Spirit uses or acts through free human action to anticipate the world’s eschatological perfection. Thus human culture is a fitting extension of the logic that portrays God’s creation as God’s project, which Gunton likens in places to a work of art.67 In this context, Gunton’s notion of particularity appears to shape much of what is entailed by the concept of eschatological perfection.68 All things are held together as a unity in Christ, but each particular thing is distinct from every other thing due to the Spirit purposefully forming it as the particular thing it is.69 Each particular thing, animate or inanimate, human or non-human, depends on the Spirit’s action to free it to relate to other things, and in so doing the Spirit maintains and strengthens the particularity of each thing in its relations.70 As the ‘perfecting cause’, the Spirit brings ‘to completion that for which each person and thing is created’, by relating these through Christ ‘into saving relation with God the Father’.71 Moreover, Gunton claims, the Spirit can also be said to perfect the being of God, for the Spirit constitutes or particularizes the Father as the Father (and not the Son) and the Son as the Son (and not the Father).72 Thus Gunton appears to equate, or nearly equate, the Spirit’s acts of perfecting with constituting each person (including the divine persons) or thing in its particularity.73 When this aspect of the Spirit’s action is transposed into a cultural key, there is very much a sense in which humans, through engaging their surroundings, are seen to be ‘completing … God’s work of art’,74 God’s project of creation. This does not mean that everything found in human culture anticipates the end. For Gunton, the purpose of culture is to achieve ‘particular instances of the good, the true and the beautiful in anticipation of the eschatological completion of all things’.75 On this account, humans are called to indwell and engage their surroundings in ways that enhance but do not degrade the world; after all, Gunton notes, ‘every human action … must either anticipate or impede the movement of things to their perfecting’, and a person’s ‘right habitation of … time and space’ causes the world to flourish.76 The musician, the sculptor, Gunton, The Christian Faith, 50. Ibid. I find Gunton’s example of turning ‘forests into deserts’ curious, given the often negative portrayal of deforestation in ecological discussions. 66 Gunton, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, 123. 67 Gunton, The Triune Creator, 12; The Christian Faith, 7, 50; cf. The One, the Three and the Many, 81. 68 Gunton also describes such acts of eschatological perfecting as a ‘making holy’; see Act and Being, 118, 141. See also Höhne, Spirit and Sonship, and I. Leon Harris, The Holy Spirit as Communion: Colin Gunton’s Pneumatology of Communion and Frank Macchia’s Pneumatology of Koinonia (Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2017), 38–64, for extensive commentary on Gunton’s notion of particularity. 69 Gunton, The One, the Three and the Many, 173, 212; cf. Christ and Creation, 122. 70 Gunton, The One, the Three and the Many, 181–2; cf. The Promise of Trinitarian Theology, 153. 71 Gunton, The One, the Three and the Many, 189. The words ‘saving relation’ are important: in a fallen world, ‘perfection comes … only by being brought back into right relation with God through Jesus Christ’, Gunton, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, 90. 72 Gunton, Theology through the Theologians, 127–8; Father, Son and Holy Spirit, 86; Act and Being, 103–4. See Harris, The Holy Spirit as Communion, 41–52, for insightful commentary on Gunton’s use of Richard of St. Victor on this point. 73 Gunton, The One, the Three and the Many, 73, 205; The Triune Creator, 143. 74 Gunton, The Christian Faith, 50. 75 Ibid. 76 Ibid., 49–51; quotations from 50, 49. 64 65

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the scientist – all these and more style and refine aspects of the natural order, taking what already exists and transforming it into something new, and in so doing releasing the world to reveal and praise God. Gunton is not oblivious to the ethical issues raised here, not least those that involve the treatment of animals: ‘It can be argued that to eat a chicken is not necessarily to deprive it of its proper being, while to keep it in batteries, deprived of light, air and space, is.’77 But the point is that human culture is for the perfection of the world, whatever form that takes, whether through the arts, the sciences, politics or, indeed, anything else, from healings (miraculous or otherwise)78 to daily routine – so long as it enriches life and adds to the praise of God.79 And all this is, of course, ‘the gift of God the Spirit through Christ, and so the gift of God’s perfecting action’.80

ON DEATH As I have already noted, Gunton laments traditional approaches to eschatology. Where the tradition attends to the so-called ‘four last things’ – death, judgement, heaven and hell – Gunton himself prefers to categorize matters around the three eschatological realities of death, judgement and redemption.81 The logic in Gunton’s approach is not too dissimilar to the one underlying the conventional schema. In the latter, death is followed by judgement and then an eternity in either heaven or hell; Gunton’s slant is for redemption – ‘the promise that in God’s good time “the whole creation will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God” (Rom. 8.21)’82 – to succeed death and judgement. But while the logic is similar, the outcome is not: ‘heaven and hell, salvation and damnation’ are not ‘equal and opposites’, for Scripture hints at the ‘reconciliation of all things in Christ’.83 Much of what Gunton says in his section on redemption84 has already been covered in the previous sections. In my view, the freshest element is his emphasis on how Jesus’ resurrection ‘relativizes, and so, in the light of eternity, disempowers, all those sitting for the portrait of the Antichrist’, a title which Gunton interprets as referring to anyone whose actions are ‘truly wicked and idolatrous’ and who has ‘the pretension to rule history in place of the one who rules only as the crucified’.85 Christ’s lordship will be revealed definitively when he returns in glory ‘to perfect his finished work’.86 And so to the ‘four last things’ proper. Gunton’s understanding of death is both realistic and hopeful: ‘You rot’, he preaches, ‘and await the resurrection in God’s due

Gunton, The Triune Creator, 229; cf. Father, Son and Holy Spirit, 125. Gunton, ‘All Flesh is as Grass’, 36. 79 Gunton, The Triune Creator, 230, 234–5; cf. The Promise of Trinitarian Theology, 191; A Brief Theology of Revelation. The 1993 Warfield Lectures (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1995), 62, 124–5; Father, Son and Holy Spirit, 89–90. See Whitney, Problem and Promise, 162–88, for additional commentary on Gunton’s theology of culture. 80 Gunton, The Christian Faith, 51. 81 Ibid., 157–72. The term ‘eschatological reality’ in connection with these three elements is found on page 160, though it does not seem that Gunton is using it in any technical sense. 82 Ibid.,  166. 83 Colin E. Gunton, ‘Towards a Theology of Reconciliation’, in The Theology of Reconciliation: Essays in Biblical and Systematic Theology, ed. Colin E. Gunton (London: T&T Clark, 2003), 171. 84 Gunton, The Christian Faith, 166–72. 85 Ibid.,  168–9. 86 Ibid., 169–70; quotation from 170. These pages show that Gunton is hesitant to speculate on the precise circumstances or nature of Jesus’ return. 77 78

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time.’87 Behind this candour lies an appreciation of creation’s given finitude, its ‘gracious limiting’ in space and time on account of its not being God.88 Death, understood simply as mortality, is therefore part of creation’s goodness. Each creature is given a particular space and time in which to flourish, and death in and of itself does not detract from the value of life.89 ‘Is a piece of music pointless because it has a last note’, Gunton asks, ‘a life because it is bracketed by birth and death?’90 Of course not; but – and this is significant – ‘in the conditions of fallenness, death is no longer part of the good order of things, but meets us as judgement, destruction and defeat’.91 Thus death has two forms: death as part of the limiting of creaturely existence in space and time, and death as that which threatens to reduce creaturely finitude to futility and nothingness.92 In a fallen, sinful world, death is ‘the last and supreme enemy’ that aches to impede the completion of God’s project of creation, which is about ‘life in all its fullness’ and absolutely not about death.93 Death is the last enemy but not the last word. Even though death is currently an ever-present reality that no one, no matter their age, can avoid,94 resurrection is ‘a wholly eschatological act’, pointing to the graciousness of God who prevents death from evacuating creation of meaning or value.95 On death, our bodies return to the dust from which they came; but the gift of the eschatological Spirit is to reconstitute our bodies in such a way that they are perfected on the last day and so fitted for the life of the age God has already inaugurated. Thus, in resurrection, God issues ‘the divine yes, according to which human successes and failures are permitted variously to contribute to the reconciliation of all things’.96

ON JUDGEMENT While Gunton sees death in a fallen, sinful world as a form of judgement, such judgement is not primarily about punishment; it is more broadly, and favourably, concerned with justice, and this is conceived as the reconciliation of all things in Christ. ‘The justice of God is that whereby he restores, and leads to its destiny, the whole of the created order’;97 indeed, and in line with Gunton’s eschatology as a whole, God’s justice ‘is the action by means of which God re-establishes the direction of the creation’.98 Essentially, Christ’s cross instantiates justice, and in Christ the Church models how to live justly and worshipfully in relationship with God.99

Gunton, The Theologian as Preacher, 102. There are exceptions, Gunton claims. According to Rev. 20.4, martyrs go straight to heaven, insofar as they are raised ‘with Christ in advance of everybody else’. Gunton, The Theologian as Preacher, 104. 88 Gunton, ‘All Flesh is as Grass’, 26; cf. The Christian Faith, 47; The Theologian as Preacher, 9. 89 Gunton, ‘All Flesh is as Grass’, 26–7. 90 Gunton, The One, the Three and the Many, 98. 91 Gunton, The Actuality of Atonement, 152–3; cf. The Christian Faith, 104. 92 Gunton, The Triune Creator, 173; ‘Dogmatic Theses on Eschatology’, 142; ‘1 Corinthians 15:51–58’, 230. 93 Gunton, ‘1 Corinthians 15:51–58’, 229–30. The first quotation alludes to 1 Cor. 15.26, the second presumably to Jn 10.10. 94 Gunton, Theology through Preaching, 209–11; The Christian Faith, 160. 95 Gunton, ‘Dogmatic Theses on Eschatology’, 140; The Christian Faith, 159–60. 96 Gunton, ‘Dogmatic Theses on Eschatology’, 142. 97 Gunton, ‘When the Gates of Hell Fall Down’, 493. 98 Ibid., 494, my emphasis. 99 Ibid.,  495. 87

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This does not mean there will be no actual final judgement; Gunton is sure such judgement will happen, in much the same way as in the traditional scene: God will distinguish between good and evil, accepting the former and overcoming the latter. But Gunton also suggests that God’s judgement is not about making these sorts of distinctions simply to admit people into heaven or consign them to hell. Justice is restorative, and so God’s judgement is, in fact, ‘an eschatology of promise through judgement, not of promise and threat in equal balance’.100 Moreover, it is not God simpliciter who exercises judgement over creation but Jesus, who, through dying for us, demonstrated God’s love for the world and the divine desire that all things should be united in Christ.101 Gunton identifies two aspects of God’s judgement in Christ. First, Christ judges the elect communities, Israel (the people of God) and the Church (the body of Christ),102 presumably on the basis of the extent to which they anticipate and realize God’s eschatological purposes for the world in their lives (Gunton is not especially clear on this); and second, the crucified Jesus takes the Father’s judgement upon himself so that others might experience this judgement as discipline and training in virtue rather than as condemnation.103 Christ, says Gunton, ‘bears anticipatorily the eschatological judgement of death … in order that those who trust in God through him should be able to bear the judgement that cleanses rather than annihilates’.104

ON HEAVEN AND HELL According to traditional eschatology, heaven and hell are the final destinations of individuals, often as the result of God’s predestination.105 But Gunton is more reserved: ‘What are the implications’, he asks, ‘of the teaching of Revelation that the only named occupants of the lake of fire are death and Hades?’106 This, especially when connected to a notion of judgement as restorative and cleansing, raises the possibility of universal salvation. Christ’s death is for all, and his resurrection anticipates, promises and guarantees future perfection; but Gunton does not see this implied universality entailing universalism, if by this is meant the automatic salvation of each and every particular person. It remains possible, Gunton admits, that ‘some may finally exclude themselves from the kingdom’;107 for while God has taken steps in Christ to make universal reconciliation a possibility through the cross, the actual reconciliation of each and every person is, in practice, far from reality.108 Only the perfecting Spirit can realize this by incorporating ‘particular people into the community of the reconciled’.109 The election of Israel and the Church is pivotal here, as this election, while a privilege, is not for the benefit of Israel and the Church alone but for the sake of the whole world, with the implication that

Gunton, The Actuality of Atonement, 154. Gunton, ‘Dogmatic Theses on Eschatology’, 143; The Christian Faith, 162; The Theologian as Preacher, 105. 102 See Gunton, Intellect and Action, 147–8, for these descriptions. 103 Ibid., 109–18; The Christian Faith, 162. 104 Gunton, The Christian Faith, 162. 105 ‘For all are not created in equal condition; rather, eternal life is foreordained for some, eternal damnation for others.’ John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, 2 vols, ed. John T. McNeill, trans. Ford Lewis Battles (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1960), 3.21.5, 926. 106 Gunton, ‘Towards a Theology of Reconciliation’, 171. 107 Gunton, The Christian Faith, 164; cf. Intellect and Action, 120 n.25. 108 Gunton, The Christian Faith, 163. 109 Ibid.,  164. 100 101

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God’s dealings with the elect communities positively impacts all others through them.110 In short, Gunton declines to offer a definitive answer on the question of universalism one way or another: ‘It seems to be scripture’s teaching that all will be judged for what they make of what they are and have received; whether any will receive final condemnation must be left to the merciful justice of God.’111 Given all this, it seems there is very little in Gunton’s writings that specifically concerns heaven and hell, at least as distinct and identifiable realms. The eschatological end is not seen as a flight from the material world to one of disembodied bliss, as in some pictures of the soul’s immortality, but as the Spirit’s perfecting and transformation of this world into that of the age to come: the new heavens and the new earth.112 Thus the notion of heaven as a place of reward or ecstasy is, for Gunton, far from the biblical presentation, which envisages a new age delivered by the Spirit among the labour pains of the present age.113 When Gunton does speak of heaven, he describes it simply as God’s ‘own base of operations’, a place ‘from which our world is ruled’.114 Similarly, Gunton says little about hell. He affirms that Jesus, in bearing eschatological judgement, went to hell,115 and cautions that Scripture’s ‘images of eternal fire … do not refer to everlasting torment so much as to the notion of simply being discarded on the rubbish tip of history’;116 but for the most part, Gunton simply notes the possibility that some will exclude themselves from the perfected age to come. Beyond this, he remains silent.117

SOME OBSERVATIONS John Webster once noted that many of Gunton’s favoured terms – ‘mediation’, ‘communion’, ‘person’, ‘relation’ – are more suggestive than analytical.118 In connection with Gunton’s eschatology, I would add ‘enabling’, ‘perfecting’ and ‘particularity’ to the list of terms Webster finds imprecise. Some scholars have developed these in greater detail: David Höhne, for example, offers a study largely concerned with the issue of particularity, while William Whitney and I. Leon Harris attend, respectively, to the cultural and communal/ecclesiological aspects of the Spirit’s perfecting action.119 So while it is true that Gunton’s theology is more often evocative than exact, this is neither overly significant nor irreversibly damning. Gunton’s thoughts are seedlings that others will take time to tend and cultivate – or, to borrow a term, to perfect. That said, there remains a need for further detail. In the course of his writings, Gunton often mentions the Spirit ‘enabling’ something but rarely explicates its meaning. ‘To enable’, like ‘to cause’, is rather a loose verb, one adaptable for use in a variety of I bid., 166; cf. Intellect and Action, 148. Gunton, The Christian Faith, 165–6; cf. Intellect and Action, 159. 112 Gunton, ‘1 Corinthians 15:51–58’, 229; Theology through Preaching, 75; The Christian Faith, 152–3. 113 Gunton, The Christian Faith, 170. 114 Gunton, The Theologian as Preacher, 7; cf. 106. See also note 87. 115 Gunton, The Christian Faith, 162. 116 Ibid.,  164. 117 Gunton, The Theologian as Preacher, 106. 118 John Webster, ‘Systematic Theology after Barth: Jüngel, Jenson, and Gunton’, in The Modern Theologians: An Introduction to Christian Theology since 1918, 3rd edn, ed. David F. Ford and Rachel Muers (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), 261. 119 Höhne, Spirit and Sonship, 20–3; Whitney, Problem and Promise, 162–93; Harris, The Holy Spirit as Communion, 99–116. 110 111

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contexts. Thus, the question about precisely how or what the Spirit enables is always likely to arise. In some respects, the notion of ethical human actions anticipating eschatological completion is an appropriate response to this question. If a sculptor shapes a marble block into leonine form, then presumably the Spirit’s enabling action somehow inspires, guides or controls the human actions of chiselling, gouging and polishing. But still, there is need for more precision, especially when applied to a variety of good human activities. On the basis that the Spirit makes or allows anticipations of the eschatological age to come through particular human actions (or shapes particular human actions as eschatological anticipations), I see no reason why it should not be claimed that an association football winger dribbling, passing and crossing the ball is just as much an instance of the Spirit’s enabling action as the sculptor’s craft – but this example seems not to match Gunton’s theology as fittingly as the first. Similarly, the notion of particularity needs expanding. Höhne moves beyond Gunton’s deployment of this concept: the Spirit locates the incarnate Son within Israel’s history, enables Jesus to accept his status as God’s Son through Scripture and opens his filial relationship with the Father to others, all the while preserving his unique status as God’s Son.120 However, as Höhne’s focus is on humanity, there is space to discuss the diverse particularities of non-human creatures. I have already quoted Gunton’s comment about the ethical treatment of chickens in this respect,121 but he makes the same point elsewhere more directly: ‘How is a farm animal enabled to achieve its “proper perfection”?’122 It is a good question, and one Gunton himself does not answer. Furthermore, if the notion of a creature’s ‘proper perfection’ is also applied to other particular things, it could be argued that allowing, say, an oak tree to remain an oak tree accounts for and respects its particularity just as much as any transformation into a garden bench or a wardrobe. This raises the possibility that some things are already ‘perfect’ as the particular things they are, that some things already anticipate the eschatological age to come without any need for a process of amelioration, because they are already what they were created to be. In a fallen, sinful world, it is easy to see how and why a particular human person is moving towards perfection; it is less easy to see how and why a particular mountain or a particular hagfish or a particular cloud should be categorized in like manner. These are some of the sorts of matters arising from a close scrutiny of Gunton’s eschatology; no doubt more could, and will, be added.123 But the value of Gunton’s theology derives not so much from fine detail but from the grand landscapes he paints. This is certainly the case here. The eschatological tradition that focuses on death, judgement, heaven and hell attends too much to the salvation or damnation of individual humans and does little to suggest that God is concerned with the redemption of the universe as a whole. Gunton’s eschatology does precisely this, though some might argue that as a result he leaves the door ajar for the spectre – if spectre it is – of universalism to sneak in. Moreover, the conventional schema’s emphasis on individual salvation or damnation tends to reinforce eschatology’s supposed other-worldly character by depicting immortal souls in paradise or torment. Once more, Gunton’s achievement here is to prioritize the continuity between creation and redemption so that salvation is not regarded as the

Höhne, Spirit and Sonship, 173–6. See the earlier section, ‘Eschatology, the Church and Culture’. 122 Gunton, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, 125. 123 While I have no space here to explain why, I suspect Gunton’s ideas about eschatological perfection could affect contentious issues such as transgender identity and transhumanism. 120 121

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soul’s release from the material realm but as the eschatological transformation of the whole human person for the life of the age to come. In so doing, Gunton provides the intellectual space for others to extrapolate the specifics from within this wider framework. Such a framework also makes room for others to examine how eschatology affects the non-human creation in ways that Gunton himself never did. Finally, Gunton’s emphasis on the continuity between the old and new creations, and so between creation and redemption, leads him to suggest that a properly Christian eschatology results in people living normal, everyday lives. Each person or creature should do no more than live out his or her or its life rightly in relation to God. The eschatological outworking of creation is the responsibility of the Father’s ‘two hands’, the Son and the Spirit, and not our own. Thus any attempt to bring about the age to come through our human effort, political or otherwise, misses the mark, for the eschatological completion of all things is already anticipated, promised and guaranteed in the Spirit’s raising of Jesus from the dead. All that is required is ‘a patient living in the body’.124

CONCLUDING SUMMARY To conclude, I offer this summary of what I have labelled the contours of Gunton’s eschatology: Gunton sees creation as a project destined – in Christ, by the Spirit and through right human activity – for perfection, which is the Spirit’s enabling of each particular person and thing to be what it was created to be. This destiny is threatened by sin and corruption, but Jesus, the Son of God, whose humanity is perfected by the Spirit through his obedient life, corrects the course of creation. Christ’s physical resurrection is the age to come breaking into the present age of sin and corruption, anticipating, promising and guaranteeing the eschatological future. The Church, as the body of Christ, is called to anticipate the life of the age to come in its own relations, but in such a way that its orientation towards and worship of the triune God challenge and confront all the various sociopolitical powers and structures that resist the risen Christ’s lordship. More generally, human activity, inside and outside the Church, continues to anticipate the age to come when the Spirit opens it up to enhance the life of the world.

Gunton, Theology through Preaching, 121.

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CHAPTER TEN

Gunton on ecclesiology UCHE ANIZOR

The being and action of the triune God determine the nature and calling of the church. Rather than focusing on piecemeal reflections on metaphors, or marks, or attributes of the church, Colin Gunton drills down to the centre, to the core question of the nature of the church. In doing so, he reflects upon how the doctrine of the immanent Trinity, as well as the economic actions of the Godhead, decisively fund a basic account of what the church is. Gunton’s ecclesiology is characterized by a dogged commitment to thinking about God and church together, for to posit much about the latter without reflection on the former is to fail at the level of first principles. Now, his writings on the church can be broken roughly into two periods: 1988–90 and 1999–2002.1 His early work focused on developing a Trinitarian ontology of the church, while his later work centred on the eschatological dimensions of the church. It must be said that the ontological reflections of the earlier writings are found in the later works, as the eschatological emphases of later writings are already hinted at in the earlier treatments. Thus, a distinction between early and late Gunton should not be overblown. Nevertheless, there is a ‘development’, but it is not a development in terms of ‘moving on from’. Rather, it is an enrichment, an augmenting or a filling out of what was only hinted at in earlier works. We will explore Gunton’s ecclesiology, then, in two main parts – his ‘early’ and ‘later’ writings – before addressing his account of the sacraments.

‘EARLY’ WRITINGS (1988–90): AN ONTOLOGY OF THE CHURCH Diagnosing the problem In the early centuries (and throughout much Christian history), the church failed to bring its Trinitarian theology – its unique Christian ontology – into meaningful contact with its ecclesiology. This failure allowed rival and foreign ontologies to fill the void in helping to shape the church’s self-understanding.2 Gunton highlights two such ontologies. First is the neoplatonic view of reality as a graded hierarchy. If the world, even heaven itself, consists of graded levels of being, then the church (modelled after heaven) consists of an ‘ontological grading of persons’.3 Second, and most importantly, the church patterned

Portions of this chapter are adapted or taken from Uche Anizor, Trinity and Humanity: An Introduction to the Theology of Colin Gunton (Milton Keynes: Paternoster, 2016), 147–66. Used by permission. These are not necessarily the publishing dates, as some works written early were published quite late. 2 Colin E. Gunton, The Promise of Trinitarian Theology, 2nd edn (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1997), 56. 3 Ibid.,  60. 1

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itself after a political-legal empire, which resulted in an overemphasis on the clergy and the institutional nature of the church. This situation was further complicated in the postConstantinian era, when the church began to be seen as a mixed community comprised of the ‘saved and the lost’.4 As a result, there grew a stress on the institutional nature of the church (as that which preserves and embodies the true church), coupled with the view that the true church was located in some underlying reality like the ‘invisible church’ (often identified with the clergy), rather than in the people who constitute it. Both of these emphases resulted in the drive towards what Gunton calls an ecclesiastical ‘monism’: the use of political and legal constraints to try and preserve the church’s unity (or rather uniformity).5 ‘Compulsion and unity’, he says, ‘took the place of freedom and diversity.’6 Unfortunately, Gunton concludes, the concept of God as a triune communion ‘made no substantive contribution to the doctrine of the church’.7 Poor theology (or ontology) led to poor ecclesiology, which resulted in poor ecclesiastical practice.

Economic (Trinitarian) contributions: Christology Although Gunton’s early work is characterized by an attempt to sketch an ontology of the church rooted in the doctrine of the Trinity, he is aware that such a sketch cannot bypass the ‘ontic’, that is, the economic work of the Trinity. In this regard, he seeks to draw connections between Christology and ecclesiology, our understanding of the person and work of the God-man and our framing of the nature and work of the church. Any attempt to draw this connection must reckon with two factors, one historical and one dogmatic. First, we must make sense of Jesus’ historical relationship to the church, that is, his institution of the church and the ongoing effects of that act of instituting. On the one hand, if Jesus’ choosing of twelve disciples was a reconstituting of Israel, then the emphasis in ecclesiology would be on the creation of a historical community. On the other hand, if Jesus was setting up the disciples as first in a line of authoritative clergy, then a more clerical ecclesiology will emerge. Gunton opposes both options, eschewing the notion that we can easily draw a direct line between past historical occurrences and consequent ecclesiologies.8 The way forward lies in the second factor to be considered, namely, that of the significance of the doctrine of Christ for ecclesiology.9 A Christology that overemphasizes the divine Christ – an omniscient and infallible Christ – may result in an ecclesiology with an inflated self-understanding. Gunton wants to place a much-needed emphasis on the ecclesiological significance of the humanity of Jesus. He asks, ‘If our christology take [sic] on board the full implications of the contingency and fallibility of Jesus, what of the church?’10 Jesus, as a truly human being, partook of the same contingency, fallibility and defectibility as all humans, yet he did not sin. However, his sinlessness was not due to

Ibid.,  59. Ibid.,  60–1. 6 Colin E. Gunton, ‘The Community of the Church in Communion with God’, in The Church in the Reformed Tradition: Discussion Papers Prepared by a Working Party of the European Committee, ed. Colin E. Gunton, Páraic Réamonn and Alan P. F. Sell (Geneva: World Alliance of Reformed Churches, 1995), 38. This is a brief and slightly later writing that merely echoes earlier themes. 7 Gunton, Promise of Trinitarian Theology, 60. 8 Ibid.,  66. 9 Ibid. 10 Ibid. 4 5

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some ‘inbuilt divine programming’, but to his ‘free acceptance of the Spirit’s guidance’. Gunton then asks: ‘How far then may the church, consisting as it does of still sinful people, claim more for itself than it claims for him?’11 Following the Puritan writer John Owen, he limits the immediate operation of the eternal Word on Jesus to his assumption of human nature, thus preserving his authentic humanity.12 It is the Spirit, not the Word, who is the source of the particularity, freedom and contingency of Jesus’ humanity. This pattern has implications for our doctrine of the church. The same Spirit who constitutes the church (a theme we will come to later), granting it its own particularity and freedom, gives the church a ‘christomorphic direction’ that echoes Jesus’ true humanity and, thus, not the authoritarian and infallibilist shape of the past patterned after a docetic Christ.13 Thus, Christ institutes a very human church, which by the power of the Spirit will begin to look like Christ. These are some of the contributions of Christology that Gunton proposes for a better conception of the nature of the church.

Economic (Trinitarian) contributions: Pneumatology Chief among Gunton’s criticisms of traditional ecclesiologies is that they fail to give a proper account of the work of the Holy Spirit. He writes, ‘It would be possible, as an exercise in cynicism, to write a history of the Church as the story of the misappropriation of the doctrine of the Holy Spirit.’14 Christ promises the Spirit to the Church, yet too often in history, the works and judgements of churches and individuals have been identified with the work of the Spirit, expressed as an overblown institutionalism or an overblown congregationalism. Two issues lie at the heart of this misidentification. First, there has been a failure to adequately account for the particular identity and work of the Holy Spirit. Second, there has been a corresponding failure to ascribe transcendence and freedom to the Spirit.15 As a way forward, Gunton draws upon the Cappadocian Fathers who, in his view, developed a helpful way to distinguish between the types of action characteristic of each person of the Trinity without destroying the unity of divine action. In particular, it is Basil’s invaluable distinction of the Father as ‘original cause’ of all things, the Son as the ‘creative cause’ and the Spirit as the ‘perfecting cause’ that Gunton finds fruitful. Following this distinction, Gunton identifies the Son as representing God’s immanence in history and the Spirit as God’s transcendence. ‘He [the Spirit] is God’s eschatological otherness from the world,’ Gunton writes, ‘God freeing the created order for its true destiny’.16 The Spirit is he who distinctively brings creation towards its intended end(s). Although not a doctrine of the church, these distinctions help guard against too closely identifying church structures with the Spirit.17

Ibid.,  67–8. Ibid., 69–70. Although Gunton’s ecclesiological proposals make little mention of Edward Irving, his SpiritChristology is much indebted to Irving. See, for example, Colin Gunton, ‘Two Dogmas Revisited: Edward Irving’s Christology’, Scottish Journal of Theology 41, no. 3 (1988): 359–76. For a recent study of Gunton’s use of Irving, see I. Leon Harris, The Holy Spirit as Communion: Colin Gunton’s Pneumatology of Communion and Frank Macchia’s Pneumatology of Koinonia (Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2017). 13 Gunton, Promise of Trinitarian Theology, 70. 14 Colin E. Gunton, Theology through the Theologians: Selected Essays, 1972–1995 (London: T&T Clark, 1996), 187. 15 Ibid.,  189. 16 Ibid., 198–9. For Basil’s distinctions, see Basil, On the Spirit, 16.38. 17 Gunton, Theology through the Theologians, 196–7. See Zizioulas, Being as Communion, 129–30. 11 12

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An important and related ecclesiological point is that the Son institutes the church, while the Spirit constitutes it. This distinction is essential lest the Spirit be seen merely as the ‘fuel’ that drives the all-important institutional vehicle.18 What is meant by the Spirit’s constituting of the church? The church, according to Gunton, must be more than just the voluntary association of individual believers. The freedom to join the Christian community is wrought by the Spirit and is different from the autonomous notions of liberty so characteristic of secular society. The Spirit, as the ‘transcendent other’, liberates by calling people into relation with Christ through the medium of the church. He frees people by bringing them into community, enabling them to be with and for others whom they do not choose.19 The Spirit creates this community of free people, in and through the context of community.20 The church is furthermore constituted every time the Word of the gospel is proclaimed and the Holy Spirit, through that Word, calls the community into being – lifting them to the Father through the Son.21 In fact, every true act of worship in the community is a fresh forming of the church, since the church is a community ‘that must, ever and again, take place: it must be constituted in the present as the people of God’. When, by the Spirit, the church offers true worship, then it is truly the church.22 This is what John Colwell calls Gunton’s ecclesiological ‘occasionalism’: that the church must ever be constituted afresh by a free and sovereign work of the Spirit.23 Thus for Gunton it is fitting to say that whenever a new member is called into this community and this body worships through the proclamation of the gospel, the church is formed anew by the sovereign Spirit. In relation to the church, the Spirit calls it into existence by liberating people to freely exist for their Lord and one another.24 The Spirit is not a force helping an institution accomplish its agenda but a person who acts unfettered to bring the church to its intended end.

Towards a Trinitarian ontology of the church Returning to the theme with which we opened, Gunton’s early ecclesiological emphasis is to develop an ontology of the church that supplants inadequate (and foreign) ontologies that claimed the church’s ecclesiological imagination for centuries. For Gunton, the doctrine of the Trinity, as it appears in the Cappadocian Fathers, provides the ontology upon which to build a doctrine of the church. The Cappadocians (viewed through the lens of John Zizioulas) affirm that the being of God consists in free personal communion. Indeed, ‘communion’ is an ontological category.25 The being of God, Gunton writes, is ‘a community of energies, of perichoretic interaction’.26 The threefold koinōnia that is God is not a static hierarchy but a dynamic community.

Gunton, Theology through the Theologians, 199. See also Zizioulas, Being as Communion, 129. Gunton, Theology through the Theologians, 201. 20 ‘To be free is to be in community: anything else is a denial of what it is to be human’ (ibid.). 21 Ibid.,  202. 22 Ibid. 23 See John E. Colwell, ‘Provisionality and Promise: Avoiding Ecclesiastical Nestorianism?’, in The Theology of Colin Gunton, ed. Lincoln Harvey (London: T&T Clark, 2010), 100–15. 24 Gunton, Theology through the Theologians, 203. 25 Gunton, Promise of Trinitarian Theology, 71. See also Zizioulas, Being as Communion, 18, 134. 26 Ibid., 72. This appears to be Gunton’s earliest use of perichoresis in his ecclesiology, which plays a large role in his ecclesial ontology. 18 19

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More needs to be said about what it means for God to be a communion of persons. To help us, Gunton outlines the key concept of ‘relationality’.27 Relationality captures two inseparable realities about the Godhead. First, that the persons mutually coinhere and in doing so constitute the being and distinctiveness of each other (what he calls ‘perichoresis’). Second, the particularity of each person is not compromised by the communion but is both essential to and constituted by the relation (what he labels ‘substantiality’). Gunton puts the matter well in a later writing: Christian teaching about God, expressed as it is in the doctrine of the Trinity, conceives God as a community constituted, made what it is, by the relations of three persons. The one is only the one by virtue of the free giving and receiving of the three. Similarly, the three guarantee the uniqueness, otherness and particularity of each other by their mutual giving and receiving. The communion is not prior to the persons, nor the persons prior to the communion. Rather, the communion consists in what the persons are and do. There is no opposition of person and communion for they require each other.28 If God’s being is a communion of freely relating and mutually constituting persons, how might that inform our doctrine of the church? The ecclesiological implication is simple: the church is to reflect the being of God by displaying koinōnia. The church, Gunton notes, is to be a ‘finite echo or bodying forth of the divine personal dynamics’.29 To spell out this implication, Gunton contrasts the Trinitarian understandings of Augustine and the Cappadocians. The former is modalist in direction and tends to conceive of the persons of the Godhead as posterior to an underlying being of which they are ‘outcrops’, so to speak. What Augustine neglects is the Cappadocian contribution, which states that there is no being anterior to the persons. The being of God, in contrast, is the persons in relation to one another.30 These different accounts of the Trinity result in correspondingly different ecclesiologies. Augustine’s doctrine of the church views the being of the church as ontologically prior to the ‘concrete historical relationships of the visible community’. The real being of the church, in this scheme, underlies the relations of persons and is not a function of them.31 Gunton describes this difference as basic to that between an institution and a community. The former exists independently and is logically prior to the persons who become part of it; the persons who join it are at best secondary if not irrelevant to it. By contrast, the latter (i.e. the community) is ‘constituted by its members by virtue of their free relatedness to each other’.32 The main point is that the actual relations of concrete historical persons constitute the primary being of the church in the way that the persons-in-relation constitute the being of God.33

He later calls relationality, substantiality and perichoresis, ‘transcendentals’. See Colin E. Gunton, The One, the Three and the Many: God, Creation and the Culture of Modernity. The 1992 Bampton Lectures (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 229–30. 28 Gunton, ‘Community of the Church’, 40. 29 Gunton, Promise of Trinitarian Theology, 73. 30 Ibid.,  74. 31 Ibid. 32 Gunton, Theology through the Theologians, 198. 33 Gunton, Promise of Trinitarian Theology, 74. 27

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Gunton finds support for this view from John Owen, whom he deems to be the first to develop an ontology of the church-as-community.34 Owen writes, (1) The material cause of this church, or the matter whereof it is composed, which are visible believers. (2) The formal cause of it, which is their voluntary coalescency into such a society or congregation, according to the mind of Christ. (3) The end of it is, presential local communion, in all the ordinances and institutions of Christ.35 In a later work, Owen writes, ‘By the matter of the church, we understand the persons whereof the church doth consist, with their qualifications; by its form, the reason, cause, and way of that kind of relation among them which gives them the being of a church.’36 Actual believers in free voluntary relationships with one another is what constitutes the church of Christ. The community is the church. According to Gunton, Owen’s shift from Aristotelian terminology (i.e. material and formal cause) in his earlier work to traditional Trinitarian vocabulary (i.e. persons, relation) in his later work signals an ecclesiology shaped and understood in light of a doctrine of the Trinity. Owen’s great achievement, then, is his contribution to the understanding that the church is to (and does) reflect on its own level the kind of being God is eternally – a communion, a being-in-relation.37 This insight is the core of the doctrine of the church. In sum, the church is a creaturely reflection of the triune God. The distinctive works of both the Son and Spirit shape the church’s self-understanding. Being founded by the God-man the church is to see itself as an often weak, fallible and thoroughly human reality. However, being constituted by the Spirit means that those who comprise this body are given freedom by the same Spirit to conform to Christ and live for others. Most importantly, since God’s nature is persons-in-communion, the church echoes the divine being by simply being what it is – persons-in-communion called together by the sovereign Spirit. This emphasis on the ministries of the Spirit leads us to the second main period of Gunton’s ecclesiological writings – 1999–2002 – where he lays stress on the eschatological work of the Spirit.

‘LATER’ WRITINGS (1999–2002): AN ESCHATOLOGY OF THE CHURCH After what appears to be a hiatus in writing explicitly on the church, Gunton continues to explore the nature of the church, but this time through the lens of eschatology.38 While his focus is on how eschatology bears on the church’s self-understanding, he never truly leaves behind his ontological concerns. Indeed, just as the distinction between ‘earlier’ and ‘later’ Gunton should not be overblown, so a strict division between his ontological and

Gunton, Theology through the Theologians, 193–4. John Owen, An Inquiry into the Original, Nature, Institution, Power, Order, and Communion of Evangelical Churches. The Works of John Owen 15; ed. William H. Goold (Carlisle, PA: Banner of Truth Trust, 1976), 262. 36 John Owen, The True Nature of a Gospel Church and Its Government. The Works of John Owen 16; ed. William H. Goold (Carlisle, PA: Banner of Truth Trust, 1976), 11. 37 Gunton, Theology through the Theologians, 193–4. These reflections appear elsewhere in an abbreviated form in Gunton, Promise of Trinitarian Theology, 75–6. 38 Of course, his acclaimed The One, the Three, and the Many (1993) explores themes related to ecclesiology. His ‘The Community of the Church in Communion with God’ (1995) more or less restates in brief much of the earlier material on the church. His writings during this period on creation, personhood and freedom also bear on his ecclesiology. 34 35

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eschatological concerns should not be pressed too far. These two strands are interwoven throughout his work. The church is, by nature, eschatological. While there are a number of angles from which one may attempt to answer the question of what the church is, there are two in particular that receive attention from Gunton in this period: the church as the ‘elect’ and the church as an ethical community. He asks how an ecclesiology might be shaped for good if one’s view of the church’s election and ethics were more attuned to eschatology. We will explore those two themes on our way to describing Gunton’s eschatological account of the church’s being.

Election, eschatology and ecclesiology Historically, the doctrine of election has been intimately linked with the doctrine of the church. The connection is typically drawn as follows: the true church is comprised of those individuals chosen by God (or those foreseen to have chosen God) before the creation of the world, who are thus destined for heaven. Election is typically pre-temporal, focused on the individual, and concerned about the question of salvation. Barth attempts to chart a different course by claiming that all are in principle elect in Jesus Christ. Yet, according to Gunton, all these formulations fall short because they ‘overweight the protological and underweight the eschatological determinants of the doctrine of election’. He explains that in those schemas ‘eschatology is so determined by protology that the end is effectively determined by the beginning, and history is, apparently, closed to the recreating work of the Spirit’.39 This pattern is displayed by theologians like Origen and Anselm, who in their own ways see the eschaton as a return to a pre-Fall ideal where the elect exist to compensate for the number of fallen spirits or angels.40 While not entirely discarding notions of predetermination or foreordination, he nevertheless goes on to say, The proper interest served by the doctrine of election concerns not the numbers, but the purpose of the election of such quantities as there are … It is that God’s will should continue to be done in Israel and on earth. In other words, it is an ecclesial matter before it is concerned with the individual believer: with what Israel and the Church are here for rather than the fate of individuals within them.41 In other words, what God is primarily concerned about in ‘choosing’ is not the destiny (or, better, destination) of individuals but the purpose or telos of his elect community and, in fact, the whole creation. This is one reason why eschatology must bear on the doctrine of election. If election is about prescribing a telos, then eschatology is about the fulfilment of that telos. Furthermore, if we know that God’s ultimate purpose is the consummation and perfection of the created order, not the escape from it, then the church’s election must be for the same, this-worldly, purpose. Put another way, God elects particular peoples – Israel and the Church – to accomplish the universal purpose of reconciling all things to himself.42 The church’s election is inescapably bound to God’s cosmic purposes and their temporal outworking. Inadequate views of election effectively ignore the importance of human history as the arena in which God’s purposes are realized. This, in turn, fosters

Colin E. Gunton, Intellect and Action: Elucidations on Christian Theology and the Life of Faith (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2000), 141. 40 Ibid.,  142. 41 Ibid.,  146. 42 Ibid., 147–8, 154. 39

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static and stagnant conceptions of human destiny and the destiny of the church. Rather than point to possibilities for human engagement in God’s recreative work, these views of election limit our ecclesial imagination, so that we focus too much on individual otherworldly salvation as the only goal of the church’s life. To make sense of the proper relation between election, eschatology and ecclesiology, Gunton returns to John Owen, a trusted companion in his constructive ecclesiological project. He draws out two relevant insights that weave these various doctrinal threads together. First, Owen’s emphasis on the humanity of Christ and the Spirit’s work of enabling Christ to be who he is presents a pattern for the church. Jesus’ life is predestined by the Father, but only realized and enabled by the Spirit. Accordingly, while his path was in one sense predetermined, his actions are truly free. In the same way, the elect (or adopted, as Gunton uses the terms interchangeably) brothers and sisters of Christ are freed by the Spirit to live out what they are predestined to be. Part of this purpose is to be in reconciled relationships within the Christian community, which leads to Owen’s second contribution. Remember, Owen, a predestinarian, described the church as a voluntary community, a voluntary ‘coalescency’, as he puts it. He writes in The True Nature of a Gospel Church that ‘the formal cause of a church consisteth in an obediential act of believers’.43 Gunton asks, ‘What else is that obedience but response to an election to be in a particular form of relation to others?’44 How, then, do we relate the church as elect and the church as voluntary, the ultimate cause of the church as God’s goodwill and the formal cause as obedience? It is the Spirit who incorporates us into the body of Christ. Our freedom to voluntarily join the body is a gift. Coming into proper relation with God and others, in which our true being is found, is a foretaste of the new creation, the fullness of the resurrection of humanity and the cosmos. Thus, election helps set the parameters and ends of our ecclesiology, while eschatology is the fulfilment of that vision. And the connecting (or missing) link is the Spirit’s role in election, not as the predeterminer (per se) but as the actualizer of an election that is not other-worldly, but rather takes place in real time. Election is about the church living out its purpose both as a harbinger of the communion that will ultimately exist and as those called to participate in God’s recreative work.

Ethics, eschatology and ecclesiology One possible answer to the question of the nature of the church might be that the church is the place of virtue formation. It is a unique community whose practices and ways shape people to live out what is most true about themselves as those made in the image of God. In response to writers like Stanley Hauerwas and John Howard Yoder, who view the church this way, Gunton contends that while they are correct to an extent, they fail to put virtues (ecclesial virtues) in their proper context, which is the doctrines of God, creation, fall and salvation. The doctrine of the Trinity provides the grounding framework by which we might be able to understand what it means to be human. Gunton returns to the distinctions drawn earlier concerning the works of the Persons of the Godhead: the Father is the originating cause, the Son the creating cause and the Spirit the perfecting cause. It is the

Owen, True Nature of a Gospel Church, 29. Gunton, Intellect and Action, 151.

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Spirit’s function that is of particular interest. The Spirit as the perfecting cause brings creation to its fullness, its own perfection. This work of the Spirit, as we have seen, is eschatological. He imbues the created order with real purpose, a telos and destination.45 What of humanity in particular? What is our destiny? For an answer, Gunton points us to Christ as that one person who always was as he was created to be. What, he asks, makes Jesus Christ the particular person that he was? Every distinct feature of Christ’s life is a result of the Spirit’s working. Gunton writes, As the eternal Son of God he becomes the son of this particular mother by the Spirit’s recreating act; as this particular Israelite he is driven by the Spirit into the wilderness to test his messianic calling against other possibilities, and, by virtue of his obedient choice empowered by that Spirit to tell the truth, drive out the demons and in general re-establish God’s rule; and raised from the dead as the first born of many brothers and sisters who become the Church.46 The particular human life of Jesus derives from the Spirit’s perfecting and particularizing work. Even his obedience, culminating in his obedient self-offering, is empowered by the Spirit (see Heb. 9.14).47 So must it be for Christ’s brothers and sisters. Gunton next addresses the nature of virtue, particularly in a fallen world. God’s ‘virtues’ form the basis for our understanding of human virtue. Gunton provides a definition of the former: ‘God’s “virtues” are God in the perfect coincidence of being and act. This … is God’s character, the settled shape of what he is and does.’48 Accordingly, Jesus’ life of virtue consists in his settled disposition to relate to the Father in love and obedience by the Spirit’s help. For us, likewise, virtue is rooted in a fundamental orientation towards the good, towards God.49 Like God, we will act in accordance with our basic orientation. The problem, however, is that we are badly oriented and poorly formed because of sin. Our settled disposition is not Godward. Hence, Gunton maintains, ‘an ethic of virtue cannot be sufficient apart from a theology of redemption’.50 The formation of Christian virtue is dependent on one’s salvation in Christ. Before we can turn to God, he must turn to us. Virtue, so to speak, must be received before it is enacted. Relating this to the church, he writes, Accordingly, the Church cannot become a school of virtue unless she is first a community that lives and proclaims the forgiveness of sins achieved by the life and particularly the death of Jesus Christ her Lord as the sole basis of the reconstitution of the disabled human will. In traditional terms, justification is the precondition of sanctification.51 We must be decisively reconciled to God before we can make any progress in virtue. As Gunton puts it, there must be a ‘reforming’ before there is any talk of ‘forming’.52 To be truly virtuous, indeed fully human, is to display the perfect coincidence of right character

Ibid.,  105–6. Ibid.,  106. 47 Ibid. 48 Ibid.,  107. 49 Ibid.,  107–8. 50 Ibid., 109–10. 51 Ibid.,  113. 52 Ibid. 45 46

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and action. This is an eschatological reality, impeded in the here and now by sin, yet gradually made true of us by the comprehensive work of Father, Son and Spirit. In light of all this, what is the church? In what sense might it be called a community of virtue? The end of human life is the offering of the whole person to God, in conformity to Jesus Christ. According to Gunton, the virtues are one of the primary ways by which the Spirit enables anticipations of that particular end.53 However, he is careful to emphasize that virtues are not about self-development or self-realization. Rather, they are ‘exocentric’, that is, they have an outward orientation. They are formed and exercised within the context of Christian community, ultimately for the well-being of the world. Virtues are inherently social and relational; they do not exist from and for themselves. Rather, as John 17 highlights, love (virtue) is to mark the Christian community, so that the world would know Christ.54 The church is a school of virtue only in the sense that it has been justified through Christ, enabled by the Spirit to share in Jesus’ relation to the Father and freed by the same Spirit to be for one another and for the world in increasing measure. The Spirit will use the worship of the church, the relations within the church and the deliberate development of virtues therein to make us what we will fully be one day.55 This chastened and eschatological perspective is necessary, lest the church expect too much of itself in the present, paying insufficient attention to the eschatological tension that underlies all attempts at living virtuously. The church is an eschatological-ethical community; it is most virtuous when it bears in mind that it lives in the already-not yet of the triune God’s finished and unfinished work of perfecting creation.

Towards an eschatology of the church What, according to Gunton, often characterizes ecclesiologies throughout history is an over-realized eschatology that is evidenced in a number of ways, some of which we have seen already. For our purposes, one particular symptom is too close an identification of the church with Christ. This malady often results from what Gunton calls an ‘overweighting of the theology of the body of Christ’, or of Christ’s presence, specifically as it takes shape in some Lutheran theology.56 His response to these theologies provides a helpful way into his eschatologically sensitive ontology of the church. We must be careful about what we mean when we speak of the church as the ‘body of Christ’. According to Gunton, Lutheran theologies – which traditionally have undersold the significance of Christ’s bodily ascension – seem especially vulnerable to conflating Christ with his ‘body’, the church. Robert Jenson, in his Systematic Theology, presents a prime example of this tendency. One quote from Jenson is enough to illustrate Gunton’s concern: Although Paul clearly thinks of the Lord as in some sense visibly located in a heaven spatially related to the rest of the creation, the only body of Christ to which Paul ever actually refers is not an entity in this heaven but the Eucharist’s loaf and cup and the church assembled around them.57

Ibid., 116–17. Ibid.,  118. 55 Ibid., 119–20. 56 Colin E. Gunton, ‘“Until He Comes”: Towards an Eschatology of Church Membership’, International Journal of Systematic Theology 3, no. 2 (2001): 189. 57 Robert W. Jenson, Systematic Theology, vol. 1, The Triune God (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 204 (see also 206). 53 54

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The church does not merely extend Christ’s work, as is popularly understood, but it is the very presence of Christ, his real body. As such, the church, in a real sense, is the presence of the eschatological kingdom on earth. This, according to Gunton, fails to acknowledge in any meaningful way how the risen and ascended Christ is truly (and bodily) at the right hand of the Father.58 Jenson’s conflation of church and Christ risks two offences against eschatology. First, it claims too much about the church’s holiness. The actual church is fraught with issues both past and present; it has related to Christ and the world in a way that ill represents its Head. When we too closely speak of the church as his true body, we either risk making our faults his faults or deceive ourselves into thinking we have no faults. Christ must be strongly distinguished from the church, so that we do not unintentionally claim what we can never in good conscience claim about the actual church – at least as it exists prior to the eschaton. The second offence is that Jenson’s view claims an immediacy in relation to Christ that sometimes lends itself to a bloated sense of the church’s authority. If the church is Christ’s body, it is his authoritative presence in the world. According to Gunton, ‘this serves as a recipe for the clericalism and sacerdotalism which has historically militated, and still does militate, against the participation of the whole people of God in koinōnia and mission’.59 Christ’s authority becomes church authority, which often devolves into the authority of the few – priests, clergy, popes, and so on. Instead, we must view Christ’s unfettered reign in and through the church as an eschatological hope, rather than a present reality. To be sure, Gunton acknowledges that there are ‘two poles’ to Scripture’s treatment of the ‘body’ metaphor. On the one hand, there is the close identification of the church with Christ himself, especially in those passages that speak of Christ as the Head (e.g. 1 Corinthians 12, Colossians 1). On the other hand, and very importantly, there is an ‘equally strong movement to distinguish himself from the members of the church’.60 Gunton makes the case for this second pole through an engagement with Paul’s teaching in 1 Corinthians. For example, the ‘until he comes’ of 1 Cor. 11:26 suggests that there is actually a real absence of Christ and, thus, he remains distinct from (even transcendent over) the church as its Lord.61 If Christ and church are coterminous, it becomes difficult to see what meaningful space there is for the Spirit’s work in the church (besides affecting the communion elements). However, once we emphasize the body of Christ as spatially circumscribed, we can begin to imagine what the distinctive work of the Spirit might be.62 In addition, 1 Cor. 15:23 makes a distinction between Christ’s resurrection and our own, thus calling attention to the distinction between Christ and his church, his physical body and his ecclesial body.63 So, what does it mean to be the ‘body of Christ’? The answer lies in eschatology, and the key to a properly eschatological account of the church is the doctrine of the Spirit. Gunton writes, Christ’s presence in all its manifold forms is realized only through anticipation, and that means through the mediation of the eschatological Spirit, as anticipated eschatology.

unton, ‘ “Until He Comes” ’, 190. G Ibid.,  197. 60 Colin E. Gunton, The Christian Faith: An Introduction to Christian Doctrine (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2002), 132. 61 Gunton, ‘ “Until He Comes” ’, 193. 62 Ibid.,  189. 63 Ibid.,  193. 58 59

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Our eschatological membership of the body and bride of Christ belongs in that period of fulfillment and promise, in sure hope of the resurrection of the dead.64 Our being as the body of Jesus Christ is ultimately an (unfulfilled) eschatological truth. Our constitution as his body lies in the future. Yet, being the body is not solely a future reality that remains locked in the hereafter, inaccessible to the church militant. One of the most important functions of the Spirit in this period between the resurrection and return of Christ is that he mediates the risen Saviour’s presence to the church. Christ is present in the church ‘in so far as the Spirit enables it from time to time to be that which it is elected to be’.65 Thus, the Spirit’s constituting of the church has both a present and future reality to it: we are enabled now to be what we will be. As Gunton concludes, ‘In so far as the church’s mode of life does from time to time anticipate that of the age to come, it is enabled to do so by the Spirit who both makes present the life-giving death of Christ and will complete its eschatological perfecting on the last day.’66 The church – as the body, or bride, or finite echo of the triune Life – has failed and will fail to live up to its truest self. Yet, as we worship in truth, we are enabled to live out that holiness of life that will ultimately characterize the perfected body of Christ. The church is a creature of the inaugurated kingdom.

ON THE SACRAMENTS Gunton’s few substantive pieces on the sacraments span both of our ‘eras’ – baptism in the first, the Lord’s Supper in the latter.67 The common definition of a sacrament as ‘an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace’ is inadequate, according to Gunton, primarily because of its implicit dualism, which serves to diminish the material aspects in favour of the ‘spiritual’, the work inside the individual believer rather than the historical and communal. ‘Jesus’ life and death’, he writes, ‘are not the outward sign of something invisible, but the invisible become visible, God in action not only inwardly but also outwardly.’68 Jesus Christ is the only true sacrament – a created reality that is ‘unambiguously’ the presence of God – and our sacraments are derivative of this. The basis of both baptism and the Lord’s Supper, as we will see, is ultimately Christ’s life and death, which had as its aim the creation of a new people. Hence, to understand the sacraments correctly we must place them within the context of the cross and the community that flows from it. We begin our discussion with the initiatory sacrament of the church.

Baptism into Christ Gunton’s account of baptism is set forth as a response to increasing calls for believer’s baptism, or what he calls ‘rebaptism’. He contends, however, that while it is true that much traditional paedobaptism has had an air of institutionalism to it, ‘rebaptism’ theology often falls prey to several errors, the most important of which is that it displays an overly

Ibid.,  200. Ibid.,  198. 66 Gunton, ‘ “Until He Comes” ’, 198. Cf. Colin Gunton, ‘One Mediator … the Man Jesus Christ: Reconciliation, Mediation and Life in Community’, Pro Ecclesia 11, no. 2 (2000): 158. 67 Each sacrament is touched on in both eras but is elaborated more fully in its respective era. 68 Gunton, Christian Faith, 129–30. 64 65

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individualistic conception of the sacrament. Gunton writes, ‘While baptism is in part the concern of the particular person, it is not primarily a matter for the person as individual but for the person in relation to other people in the community of salvation, the covenant people of God.’69 Baptism is primarily an ecclesial, a communal act, rather than merely an individual’s concern. Given Gunton’s relational vision of God, the world and the church, it is not surprising that he views individualism as a chief enemy to a proper understanding of the sacraments. Moreover, when individualism is coupled with the church’s negative concept of the human condition (contaminated by Adam’s sin) and destiny (damnation in hell), baptism comes to be conceived in a negative light – as that which removes the stain of sin from the individual and frees him from damnation – rather than as that which brings him into a new relation with God and his covenant people.70 A positive account of baptism must go beyond merely appealing to specific Scripture texts or early church practice, which are inconclusive, according to Gunton. Rather, the doctrine derives from what he calls ‘the logic of the gospel’, namely, that which the gospel requires or invites, which may not be easily read directly off the pages of the Bible.71 The fundamental basis of baptism is the death of Christ on the cross: ‘We baptize because Christ died on the cross for the sins of the world.’72 We see baptism and cross connected in Jesus’ own acceptance of John’s baptism. His baptism, rather than being an act of personal repentance, is an anticipation of his death on the cross. Gunton observes, ‘The significance of this baptism is – among other things – that it signified Jesus’ identification of himself with Israel under the judgment of God represented and proclaimed by John, and that it points forward to his acceptance by death of the judgment of God on human sin.’73 Through this baptism that culminates in death, Jesus redeems and restores a new people to God. We are brought into a relationship with Christ by being a part of his people, and we are made a part of his people through baptism. We do not baptize because Jesus was baptized per se but because he died on the cross to receive God’s judgement on our behalf, and this is foreshadowed in his baptism and signified in our own. At least three conclusions follow from this. First, we must observe that the death of Christ is something that happened for us, apart from us. Accordingly, the objective nature of the death of Christ must help shape the context for understanding baptism.74 Second, just as the saving death of Christ (and baptism) was communal and public, so it is with our baptisms.75 Third, just as Christ died only once, so baptism can be received – and incorporation into the body of Christ can happen – but once.76 Baptism, thus, derives its validity from God’s work in and through Christ and not from the individual recipient. These conclusions form the Christological basis of Gunton’s baptismal theology. Now, the debate surrounding infant baptism centres on two questions: Who comprises the church and who, therefore, is permitted to be baptized? To argue that the church consists of only adult converts is to have an ‘impoverished’ view of the church, since we are making church membership dependent on those who have had a Colin E. Gunton, Father, Son & Holy Spirit: Toward a Fully Trinitarian Theology (London: T&T Clark, 2003), 203. 70 Ibid.,  204–5. 71 Ibid., 206, 211. 72 Ibid.,  206. 73 Ibid.,  207. 74 Ibid. 75 Ibid.,  208–9. 76 Ibid. 69

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particular experience or made a certain decision or who are of the ‘age of reason’.77 Yet, this ecclesiological question is really a pneumatological one: who are those brought into the body of Christ by the Spirit and, therefore, permitted to give and receive the Spirit’s gifts? Of course, through conversion the Spirit engrafts people into Christ, but he also moves Christian parents to bring their children to be baptized and brought into the covenant community. There the children give and receive the Spirit’s gifts ‘on the way’ to salvation in Christ.78 To restrict who may be baptized is to limit the manifold ways in which the Spirit works and to diminish the true catholicity of the church. In saying this, Gunton is not advocating that any and everybody be permitted to receive baptism. Rather, baptism is reserved for those children (and other exceptional cases) who are likely to enter into a living relationship with the Christian community. With each baptism the church becomes a new creation (2 Cor. 5.17), which consists in an ever-new set of relationships that include infants and children. These children are not ancillary but are one of the Spirit’s instruments of perfecting the new creation that the church is.79 This is the pneumatological basis of Gunton’s doctrine of baptism. So, whether we are talking about the Christological or pneumatological aspects of baptism, it is clear that the sacrament is chiefly about the Father’s work of constituting a new people in Christ through the varied work of the Holy Spirit, rather than merely an act of obedient confession on our part.

The Lord’s Supper Gunton’s most direct treatment of the Lord’s Supper takes place in conversation with Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, where the apostle’s chief concern is the way the congregation lives towards one another as those in Christ. Yet, incest, legal battles, meals in idol temples and arguments over spiritual gifts all betray the fundamental relational problems in the church. Reflecting on Paul’s eucharistic teaching in 1 Corinthians 10-11, Gunton argues, ‘The problem is not of failing to believe theoretically that the bread and wine are the body and blood of Christ; it is their behaviour to one another.’80 The blood and body (1 Cor. 10.15-16) refer to the cross and the church, respectively. Paul is exhorting the Corinthians to pursue fellowship, through the meal, with the church rather than with idols and those who worship them (10.14). Similarly, the body that is ‘discerned’ (11.29) is the church, rather than the bread (representing Christ’s physical body). The judgement that follows from not ‘discerning the body’ (10.29-31) has to do with members destroying churchly relationships rather than mistreating the elements.81 In order to avoid the complete moralizing of the Lord’s Supper, Gunton is at pains to remind us that the root of the meal is, first, the death of Christ. The action that brings us into relation with God and one another in the first place is the cross, which the Lord’s Supper is meant to proclaim.82 Second, communion is founded on the triune communion that God is in himself, which overflows into creation and the church. The meal is to represent reconciled and whole relationships that are a finite echo of the eternal koinōnia

e also applies these concerns to people with intellectual disabilities. See ibid., 211. H Ibid.,  209. 79 Ibid., 211–14. 80 Gunton, Christian Faith, 133. 81 Gunton, ‘ “Until He Comes” ’, 195. 82 Gunton, Christian Faith, 133. 77 78

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of the Trinity.83 Whatever ethical dimensions there are to the Lord’s Supper, they are rooted in the very being of God and are thus profoundly theological. What, then, of the elements? The bread and wine derive their significance from the eschatological and anticipatory features of the Lord’s Supper. Just as fellowship around the table anticipates the perfecting of human relationships that is to come, so the incorporation of created and cultural artefacts – bread and wine – foreshadows the time when the whole created order will be caught up into the praise of its Maker. The elements matter not because they are somehow transformed into or transfused by something else.84 Rather, they are critical as signs representing and anticipating the reordering of all things that began on the cross and culminate at the second coming. Thus, both sacraments have everything to do with cross and community, redemption and relationships. The decisive action is God’s, not immediately in the soul per se but mediately through the cross and by the various works of the Spirit in extending Christ’s benefits.

CONCLUSION: THE CHURCH AS AN ESCHATOLOGICAL COMMUNION As a way to place Gunton’s ecclesiology and its contribution in context, we will draw upon the insights of Avery Dulles’ analysis of five models of the church: the church as institution, mystical communion, sacrament, herald and servant.85 By rooting the nature of the church in the being and action of God, Gunton is able to integrate features from all of these models. The church is instituted by Christ (Institution model), as a visible representation to the world of the inner life of God (Sacrament), who – in its worship – proclaims the cross of Christ (Herald) and loves the world as an overflow of its inner life (Servant). Yet, it seems best (though not perfect) to place his ecclesiology in the category of ‘the church as mystical communion’. Rather than seeing the church as primarily a hierarchical society – an institution – governed by laws, the church is a community best captured by the biblical images of ‘the body of Christ’ and ‘the people of God’. The image of the body of Christ, found throughout Paul’s writing, stresses the mutual union, concern and dependence of the members of the church upon one another. The image of ‘the people of God’ captures the notion that the church is a new Israel, a people filled by the Holy Spirit and characterized by love.86 Both images capture the vertical and horizontal dimensions of our union – we are joined to Christ, as well as to one another in bonds of love and mutual service. Dulles highlights several weaknesses of this model of the church, two of which are relevant for our engagement with Gunton’s ecclesiology. First, this view tends to obscure the relationship between the spiritual and visible dimensions of the church. He writes, ‘If the Church is seen totally as a free and spontaneous gift of the Spirit, the organizational and hierarchical aspect of the Church runs the risk of appearing superfluous.’87 The concern

Gunton, ‘ “Until He Comes” ’, 195; Colin E. Gunton, The Actuality of Atonement: A Study of Metaphor, Rationality and the Christian Tradition (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1988), 199–200. 84 Gunton, Christian Faith, 134. 85 Avery Dulles, Models of the Church (expanded edn; New York: Image, 1987). In this later edition, he includes a sixth model: the church as a ‘community of disciples’. This seems to be a subtle variation on the ‘mystical communion’ model. 86 Dulles, Models, 50. 87 Ibid.,  59–60. 83

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here is that a kind of dualism is fostered where the true church, so to speak, is found in the spiritual aspect to the exclusion of its more human, organizational dimensions. The second weakness is that this model tends to exalt and even divinize the Church.88 Those versions that overplay the union between Christ and the church tend to view that union as ‘a biological and hypostatic one’, thus making the reality of sin in the church ‘unintelligible’.89 While propounding a communion ecclesiology, Gunton avoids these characteristic weaknesses. First, he strongly opposes any dualism that posits a division between ‘invisible’ and ‘visible’, a true church that somehow lies behind the actual church. The church is the visible communion of people drawn together in Christ by the Spirit. The church exists as a communion of persons, that is, its very being. This conviction does not have to result in a kind of flat democratic and egalitarian polity, nor does it necessitate the abolition of institutional elements. Rather, whatever hierarchical or organizational configurations that might exist are entered into freely, as the Spirit liberates people to come together to mutually serve one another. To one the gift of leadership is given, while to another it may not be. Each member’s service is unique to the member, for there are different kinds of gifts that the Spirit distributes to all (1 Cor. 12.4). To be sure, Gunton is concerned that institutional elements do not suffocate the communal dimensions of the church. However, his model allows for the visible and organizational (even hierarchical) aspects of the church to be partially constitutive of the being of the church, as long as we acknowledge that it is the Spirit who frees people to serve one another in these particular ways. Second, Gunton avoids the tendency to exalt the church beyond its due. We saw this in his discussion of the ‘body of Christ’ metaphor. We cannot speak of being the body of Christ as if the risen Lord has no actual body. It is popularly said that ‘we are the hands and feet of Jesus’, or as a recent song title puts it, ‘Christ Has No Body Now but Yours’.90 While the sentiment behind such slogans is understandable and even admirable, the theology is incomplete. The ascension of Christ must temper statements about his presence in or as the church, lest we conflate Christ’s actions with our actions, Christ’s authority with our authority and Christ’s holiness with our holiness. Gunton’s dual emphasis on the real absence of Christ and the transcendence of the Spirit combats these tendencies by creating space between Christ and church, as well as between the Spirit’s action and our own. The Spirit is a personal Other who sovereignly draws people together in Christ and thus constitutes the church. The church is united to Christ and is, thus, his body, his people. Yet, as Gunton reminds us, to fully be the body of Christ is an eschatological hope. To use a mathematical term, the church will only ever be the body of Christ ‘asymptotically’. In the eschaton, the church will as closely as possible mirror its Head, yet without ever becoming coterminous with him. This gesturing towards eschatology leads to another feature of Dulles’ analysis, where he observes how some contemporary ecclesiologies tend to radically separate the church from the kingdom.91 For example, Hans Küng, in his seminal work on the church, writes, ‘It is impossible to speak of Christian society or even of the Church as being “God’s

Ibid.,  60. Ibid.,  55. 90 Track 5 on The Porter’s Gate, Work Songs: The Porter’s Gate Worship Project, Vol. 1, The Porter’s Gate/Fuel Music, 2017. The title words are often attributed to Teresa of Avila. 91 Dulles, Models, 103. 88 89

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kingdom on earth” … The transcendental and eschatological character of the reign of God, as the reign of God, makes any identity or even continuity out of the question.’92 Gunton appears to sympathize with this concern to carefully distinguish between kingdom and church, yet he seeks to hold them closely together. Characteristic of communion ecclesiologies is the notion that the present church is a foretaste of the kingdom. In Dulles’ words: ‘The Church on earth, is not merely a promise or pledge of the heavenly Church, but it is an anticipation of it.’93 Gunton echoes this language, strongly emphasizing the worship and life of the church as a real (even if anticipatory) experience of perfected communion.94 Church and kingdom are not the same, but by the perfecting Spirit, the church experiences ‘a down payment’ of kingdom life in the here and now. Gunton’s writing on the church is characterized by what one might call an ‘ecclesiological realism’. On the one hand, he puts forth a lofty view of the church as a reflection of the inner life of the triune God. The church is a true vestigium trinitatis, whose creaturely being is constituted as God’s is, namely, as persons-in-communion. In this way, he provides the richest basis for a communion ecclesiology – the communion that is God’s own life. On the other hand, while the church is – in its nature – this echo of the divine life, it is in practice often a faint echo. In the present, it can only anticipate and experience foretastes of what it will assuredly be in the eschaton. What this ecclesiological realism highlights is not so much a tension between ideal church and real church. Rather, it may be best to view this ‘tension’ in terms of the church becoming more fully what it already is: a dialectic between the ontologically real and the eschatologically real. Even in its imperfections the church is a true church when it images the communion of freely given love that God is.95

Hans Küng, The Church (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1967), 92. Dulles, Models, 111. 94 See, e.g. Gunton, ‘ “Until He Comes” ’, 198. 95 For more critical reflections on Gunton’s ecclesiology, see Uche Anizor, Trinity and Humanity: An Introduction to the Theology of Colin Gunton (Milton Keynes: Paternoster, 2016), 162–6. 92 93

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CHAPTER ELEVEN

Gunton on modernity JOHN C. MCDOWELL

WHAT IS ENLIGHTENMENT? When theologians talk generally about ‘modernity’ it is often one of the things their discourse needs to be weaned from. The difficulty is that this involves collating a range of intellectual projects, some vastly different in scale and ambition, under a neat umbrella categorization that can be potentially dispensed with by a piece of theological rhetoric.1 As Alasdair MacIntyre argues, ‘The Enlightenment is … an historian’s construction.’2 There is a series of Enlightenments and no two are identical: ‘French, Scottish, and German, each complex and heterogeneous’. Colin Gunton accordingly admits that ‘There is therefore no single idea of modernity so much as a family of dogmas and practices.’3 Yet he continues to speak in the shorthand and rather too impressionistically and singularly of ‘the Enlightenment’ or of ‘modernity’, and he designs critical discussions that draw together the likes of the disparate René Descartes and John Locke without doing appropriate historically differentiating work. He even speaks on occasions of the Enlightenment as a ‘movement’ and succumbs to a reductionist argument regarding ‘Advocates of the modern view’.4 Even though Kant attempts to define the term Aufklärung in his essay of 1784, the notion of ‘the Enlightenment’ was largely a nineteenth-century imposition on, and conflation of, a range of intellectual developments offered for political effect. Kant develops the notion of ‘Enlightenment’ as a rational task that constitutes human beings’ coming to maturation against all the tutelage that diminishes that development in selfincurred immaturity (Unmündigkeit). The stark contrast between the enlightened and the unenlightened, the mature and the immature, the old and the new runs through the text. While there had been a long history of terms such as modernus, it was not until around 1460 that the term was used in a contemporary sense to separate ancient and modern, and until the sixteenth century before it was expanded to separate historical periods. The effect of this involved dispensing with that which came before, identifying unprecedented

harles Taylor speaks of ‘multiple modernities’ in A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2007), 21. C Alasdair MacIntyre, Ethics and Politics: Selected Essays, vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 172. 3 Colin E. Gunton, The One, the Three and the Many: God, Creation and the Culture of Modernity. The 1992 Bampton Lectures (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 12. 4 Colin E. Gunton, A Brief Theology of Revelation. The 1993 Warfield Lectures (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1995), 2, 25. 1 2

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work that moves with self-determination into a new time; the overcoming of the bonds of the political and religious traditions; and an exaggeration of ‘the significance of the change by a corresponding disparagement of times past’.5 In this regard, Gunton rightly explains that the use of the term ‘Enlightenment’ is fitting for this. ‘Enlightenment is essentially an eschatological concept, referring to the state of those who have achieved complete vision.’6 It would be a serious mistake to follow the implications of this rhetoric and suggest that ‘the Enlightenment’, and Gunton’s assessment of it, was undergirded by a process of intellectual and cultural ‘secularisation’ that theology needs to either reject or follow the irreversibility of, speaking of it with Max Weber as a disenchantment of the world or a death of God. Gunton recognizes that although ‘it [did] cast doubt … on the value of the Christian contribution to the making of modern Europe, and indeed the modern world’, ‘the situation is by no means as simple as it is sometimes made to appear’.7 So while Gunton does approvingly refer to Hans Blumenberg’s Legitimacy of the Modern Age, his is usually a less negative approach than that of the latter who identifies modernity with self-assertion. Nonetheless, he is occasionally partial to asserting things such as that ‘the Enlightenment’ involved an ‘over-realised eschatology’ regarding the capacity of human reason.8 In the first place, Gunton is aware that the Enlightenment does not pop up from a theological vacuum. Rather, certain currents prepare the way for it, particularly for the development of the modern sciences so that ‘modern science owes much to theological influences’.9 René Descartes, Isaac Newton, John Locke, G. E. Lessing, Immanuel Kant, George Berkeley, G. W. F. Hegel and Friedrich Schleiermacher in particular feature readily in his writing, and a little less frequently Francis Bacon, Baruch Spinoza, Thomas Hobbes and David Hume. Even these are inseparable from his critical engagement with the likes of Augustine, Aquinas and the late Medieval Nominalists as intellectual tributaries. Thomas Hobbes may have wanted to imagine that people are like mushrooms, but the Enlightenment as a ‘cast of mind which seems to be characteristic of an era of human selfconfidence’ does not arise in a vacuum.10 In the second place, he is aware that a good proportion of ‘Enlightenment’ intellectuals were themselves religious in a variety of ways. Therefore ‘modernity’ was not in and of itself necessarily anti-religious or indifferent to religion. So Gunton suggests on occasions that the likes of Locke and Kant were ‘religious’ and were certainly not anti-Christian thinkers. His genealogical surveys do not tend to deal with the more anti-Christian and post-Christian writers as much, however, with the likes of Ludwig Feuerbach, Karl Marx and Friedrich Nietzsche only very occasionally featuring in his discussions. Other particularly notable omissions are Denis Diderot, Paul Henri D’Holbach, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Max Weber, Sigmund Freud and Martin Heidegger. While this is conceptually odd, and it does not allow the critique of the Enlightenment to sufficiently bloom Colin E. Gunton, Enlightenment and Alienation: An Essay towards a Trinitarian Theology (Basingstoke: Marshall Morgan & Scott, 1985), 1. 6 Ibid.,  150. 7 Ibid., 1; Colin E. Gunton, Becoming and Being: The Doctrine of God in Charles Hartshorne and Karl Barth, 2nd edn (London: SCM, 2001), 1. 8 Colin E. Gunton, Intellect and Action: Christian Theology and the Life of Faith (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2000), 60. 9 Gunton, Becoming and Being, 5. 10 Gunton, Enlightenment and Alienation, 3. 5

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(on one reading, Nietzsche is the figure in whom the Enlightenment culminates), it at least does rhetorically permit Gunton to resist the cheap theological rejections of ‘the Enlightenment’ through aligning it with a deep-rooted form of secularization. In the third place, the range of critiques of Christian theology that emerge from modern philosophers Gunton explains to be largely the product, and subsequently the Enlightenment target, of a heretical theology. Pre-empting Michael Buckley’s study of the ‘theistic traditions [that] finally generated their own denials’, Gunton explains that ‘by and large only one concept of God has been under review’ and critique: that is, ‘the pattern of most discussion [that] was laid down in the Middle Ages, classically in the Summa Theologica of St. Thomas Aquinas. Modern philosophy of religion in the AngloSaxon world is still conducted largely against a background of Aquinas’s concept and the great critiques of its central doctrines and assumptions in Descartes, Spinoza, Hume, and Kant.’11 Likewise, ‘the disputes between scientists and the church at the end of the Middle Ages represent not so much a struggle between religion and science as one between a medieval and a more biblically oriented theology’.12 So where William Placher claims that ‘Some of our current protests … should not be directed against the Christian tradition, but against what modernity did to it’, Gunton wants to push this into what he identifies as the problematic theological pathways that earlier thought bequeathed to ‘modernity’.13 What ‘the Enlightenment’ critiques are particularly helpful for is exposing difficulties and distortions in Christian thought and practice that require significantly fitting repair, both those that undergird ‘the Enlightenment’ and those that have flowed from it and assumed that ‘certain questions about the relation of God to the world have been decided by the course of Western culture in the past few centuries’.14 Consequently, ‘The Enlightenment was right to attack credulity and superstition.’15 For example, Gunton praises Hume’s and Kant’s ‘radical critiques of theism’, in particular the manner of their dissolving of proofs for, and understandings of, God ‘by reasoning from the experienced world’.16 Accordingly, ‘the Enlightenment’ can aid theology in practicing a mode of proper repentance. Gunton’s reading at its best, then, appreciates the theological learning that emerges from reflection on ‘the Enlightenment’. Therefore, he emphasizes that ‘Modernity’s protest against bad theology is in large measure justified, although its displacement of the divine has been catastrophic in its effects.’17 By way of providing another example, Gunton admits that ‘The anti-Darwinian element in Christian AntiDarwinism may … in fact have had little to do with Christian doctrines. Perhaps, after all, what conflicted with Darwinism were the philosophical assumptions with which the Christian faith had been allied.’18 Gunton’s approach here drastically conflicts with that Michael Buckley, At the Origins of Modern Atheism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), 33; Gunton, Becoming and Being, 1. For an extension of several of Gunton’s concerns about Thomas’s doctrine of God into Augustine, see The Promise of Trinitarian Theology (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1991), ­chapter 3. 12 Gunton, Becoming and Being, 5. 13 William C. Placher, The Domestication of Transcendence: How Modern Thinking about God Went Wrong (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1996), 2. 14 Gunton, The Promise of Trinitarian Theology, 25. Gunton’s specific target with the cited claim is Don Cupitt. 15 Gunton, Enlightenment and Alienation, 4. 16 Gunton, Becoming and Being, 6. 17 Gunton, The One, the Three and the Many, 210. 18 Colin E. Gunton, The Triune Creator: A Historical and Systematic Study (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1998), 184–5, citing James R. Moore, The Post-Darwinian Controversies: A Study of the Protestant Struggle to Come to Terms with Darwin in Great Britain and America 1870–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 215. 11

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of the likes of de Maistre and Montalembert who, soon after the French Revolution in 1789, began to interpret the century’s radicalism as having calamitously generated Jacobin politics, Kantian philosophy and godless totalitarianism. Logically speaking, it is only at this point that Gunton admits the considerable difficulties that ‘the Enlightenment’ generates for even a theology chastened by penitential self-reflection.19 Theology is ‘positioned’ and therein becomes distortingly altered.20 Kant’s ‘Conflict of the Faculties’, for instance, which proved to have been so influential on the University of Berlin model of the modern Wissenschaftliche university, positioned Theology as a ‘positive’ faculty, the place for training clergy as state civil servants. Accordingly, it was free from making the kinds of rational claims about the nature of things. That role was overseen by philosophy in Kant’s account, the conditions for knowing and the interrogation of their possibility. Kant’s was a philosophical account that, in his famous phrase, intended to create space for faith. But, as Amos Funkenstein laments, ‘How much more deadly to theology were such helpers than its enemies!’21

WHAT HAS THE ENLIGHTENMENT EVER DONE FOR US? MULTIPLE ALIENATIONS! The work that emerges from his doctoral study, revised and published as Becoming and Being, studies the theological approaches to the doctrine of God by Charles Hartshorne and Karl Barth who are presented as contrasting representatives of the splitting of the path in two after Kant.22 The first way is the way of immanence given its fullest expression in Hegel. ‘The idealists, and notably Hegel, develop a concept of God that, in its essential immanentism, stands in marked contrast to the supernaturalism of classical theism. God is increasingly understood in terms of the cosmic process, rather than as being an external explanation of it.’23 This statement is full, of course, of the kind of generalizing categorizations that permeate Gunton’s writing thereafter. For instance, although he comes to dispense in the main with the term ‘classical theism’, Gunton does nonetheless persist in idiosyncratically sweeping up the likes of Augustine and Aquinas into a form of theologizing about God as an ‘external explanation’ of the world – ‘the one changeless, infinite, perfect, abstract absolute’ – that paved the way for theology’s own self-alienation and distortion that contributed to the occurrence of some of the more theologically problematic elements of the Enlightenment.24 Moreover, talk of ‘the Idealists’ betrays a lack of familiarity with the at times markedly different approaches of Fichte, Hegel and Schlegel, for instance, and his critique of figures like Hegel exhibits little critical attention to the various readings and re-readings of their work in the critical literature. The second path is the one taken by Karl Barth, Gunton explains, and this is one which involves ‘Kant’s lesson to modern theology … that it must stand on its own rational feet’.25

Gunton, The Promise of Trinitarian Theology, 2. John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), 1. 21 Amos Funkenstein, Theology and the Scientific Imagination: From the Middle Ages to the Seventeenth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986), 8. 22 Gunton, Becoming and Being, 6. 23 Ibid. 24 Ibid., 6, 4. 25 Ibid.,  7. 19 20

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Working out the implications of these developments for theology exercises Gunton’s energies over the ensuing years. In particular, it is in his important early study entitled Enlightenment and Alienation that he explicates not only the formal groundwork for much of his subsequent work on ‘the Enlightenment’ but crucially the material identification of a series of alienations that emerge from the work of the era’s thinkers. Despite the value of what we might call reading ‘Enlightenment’ critiques of Christianity for Lent, a reading conducive to ‘the process of healing the fragmentation which is so much a feature of our world’,26 Gunton does outline the self-subversion of Enlightenment claims. For him, it generates precisely the problems it hopes to solve and becomes conducive to a series of alienations and a ‘modern crisis of culture – its fragmentation and decline into subjectivism and relativism’.27 ‘Modernity promised us a culture of unintimidated, curious, rational, self-reliant individuals, and it produced …. a herd society, a race of anxious, timid, conformist “sheep”, and a culture of utter banality’, and has ‘let loose forces that may destroy the earth.’28 The reason for this in the end, he claims, is as William Morris puts it: the denial of Christ.29

Alienation from reality In his early work Gunton declares that ‘classical theism’ had postulated a form of ‘supernaturalism’ that was dualistically conceived. By this Gunton means ‘that first, “supernatural” reality begins where nature’s leaves off, and, second, and more important, it is defined in terms of its opposition to nature. It is precisely what nature is not, and therefore its relations with nature are necessarily problematic.’30 Gunton provides several examples of the impact this had on ‘Enlightenment’ thinkers later, and the double alienation. Preeminent is the alienation from ‘the Real’ and ‘the fragmentation of the realms of truth, goodness and beauty – a fragmentation begun with Plato – [which] has rendered the modern deeply uneasy in the world’.31 This goes hand in hand with the displacement of ‘God from the transcendent to the immanent sphere, so that the locus of the divine is to be found not in a God who is other, but in various aspects of this-worldly reality’.32 Gunton’s analysis races through a number of thinkers. In the first place is Descartes, ‘one of the fathers of modern scientific theory’, who ‘found it impossible to reach a satisfactory understanding of the relation between mind and matter precisely because he had begun by defining them in terms of their opposition to one another’.33 While animals are merely instinctively functioning machines, the mind or res cogitans is what the person is identified as being with bodies being only res extensa, and this is only loosely related in Descartes’s philosophical method to the circumscription of embodied materiality. Here Gunton approves of Gilbert Ryle’s characterization of deficient Cartesian metaphysics of ‘the ghost in the machine’ as being ‘not so far from the mark’.34 Where it is not on

Gunton, The One, the Three and the Many, 7. Ibid.,  2. 28 Ibid., 13, citing Robert Pippin, Modernism as a Philosophical Problem (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), 22. 29 Ibid.,  175. 30 Gunton, Becoming and Being, 2. 31 Gunton, The One, the Three and the Many, 6. 32 Ibid.,  6. 33 Colin E. Gunton, The Actuality of Atonement: A Study of Metaphor, Rationality and the Christian Tradition (London: Continuum, 1998), 164; Becoming and Being, 2. 34 Gunton, The Promise of Trinitarian Theology, 104. 26 27

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the mark, but is only ‘not so far from the mark’, Gunton does not reveal. Accordingly, in Descartes, ‘we are inescapably presented with the image of a mind pushing around a mechanical body’.35 It is here, in his account of reason, that Descartes locates ‘a kind of image of God and at the same time a criterion of radical discontinuity from the rest of creation’.36 Gunton’s fuller analysis of this alienation from the real, particularly the reality of embodied personhood, suggests that Gunton has elsewhere oversimplified ‘the positive force of the movement known as the Enlightenment’ when declaring ‘that it affirmed the objective and universal claims of truth and reason’.37 This aim, at least, is promoted to the audience of his Warfield Lectures, even if ‘the great Enlightenment ideal has come to be believed to represent’ ‘arrogant and self-serving ends’ and succumbed to a form of extrinsic epistemic foundationalism of Descartes or Locke that grounds reason arbitrarily on itself.38 When presented in this form, the description suggests that Gunton needs to be more careful when speaking of ‘the autonomous exercise of free enquiry’ since, at least, the enquiry is responsive to the appearance of the real. Descartes is equally important in Gunton’s critical engagement with ‘the Enlightenment’ for the development of a monocausally mechanistic conception of the operations of nature, part of a growing radicalization of what Gunton perceives to be traceable to Thomas’s teaching on the ‘interrelated chain of causality’ which is ‘symptomatic of the fact that in general in the Middle Ages, the Platonic forms or Aristotelian and Stoic rationes tend to displace Christ as the framework of creation’.39 ‘I have described the Earth and the whole visible universe’, Descartes claims, ‘as if it were a machine.’40 According to Gunton, while Descartes develops this as a metaphor, his successors were less nuanced.41 Gunton is, however, too generous to Descartes here. After all, Descartes’s God is somewhat idle, functioning as something of an epistemic deus ex machina guaranteeing the integrity of knowing. Funkenstein describes this ‘god’ as something of ‘a lazy gentleman who does not interfere in his creation’ and thereby leaves the causally self-contained world ‘simply godless’.42 Certainly it is true that the pressing of the metaphor more metaphysically was to have profound implications for the displacing of God by human subjects through causally self-containing and referring the mechanics of the universe, the triune gift of creation by the contingent sheer and arbitrary will, and the theologians by scientists as the modern ‘theologians’ of creation. It is hardly surprising, under these conditions, that God was easy to discard as French scientist Laplace (1749–1827) allegedly remarked to Napoleon: God, ‘I have no need of that hypothesis’.43 ‘Any historical activity of God’, when even conceivable, ‘will tend to take the form of an isolated intervention which is also a violation of the natural.’44 Gunton regards this displacement as the product of the Ibid.,  104. Ibid.,  105. 37 Gunton, A Brief Theology of Revelation, 20. 38 Ibid., 21. For Gunton’s critique of the modern epistemological anxiety expressed in epistemic foundationalism, see 48–52; Revelation and Reason: Prolegomena to Systematic Theology, ed. P. H. Brazier (London: T&T Clark, 2008), 33–40. 39 Gunton, The Triune Creator, 99, 102. 40 Cited in Gunton, The Actuality of Atonement, 30. 41 Gunton, The Actuality of Atonement, 64. 42 Funkenstein, Theology and the Scientific Imagination, 95; Buckley, At the Origins of Modern Atheism, 349. Cf. Michael Allen Gillespie, The Theological Origins of Modernity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 204. 43 Gunton, The Triune Creator, 133. 44 Gunton, Becoming and Being, 2. 35 36

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inversion of the hierarchical structure learned from the ancient Greeks’ concern with the reality of form which takes ‘the supernatural more seriously than it takes the natural’.45 In his Warfield Lectures, Gunton claims that pressure has been exerted on God’s preveniently revelatory action by virtue of the development of ‘a concept of truth as something lying within the reach control of the human rational agent. … We appear to be required to make a choice between revelation and autonomous reason.’46 This is an odd claim for a number of reasons. First, it is not the notion of controlling reason but of an intuition of what is rationally knowable that drives Descartes and his method of doubt. Revelation features little in his work more as the consequence of the way his account not of reason but of the rational subject comes to ontologically deduce the real – and of where a causally ordering God fits. An empiricist like Locke, moreover, attempts to support the notion of revelation precisely from the operations of sensible rationality. Certainly their attempts may, and theologically should, be theologically judged failures, and here William of Ockham’s shift of ‘meaning and truth from the divine to the human creator’ deserves attention.47 But it remains that they do not succumb to the narrow confines of an overblown apologetic rhetoric at this point that either displaces or replaces revelation with reason. It may be that ‘control’ is the wrong image, but it may also be that Gunton has reduced the complexity of a variety of causes of the dislocation of reason and revelation to a sound-bite. From here, however, he does turn with more justification to Fichte. Fichte’s critique of revelation ‘is not far from saying that the only revelation we can accept as being from God is one we already know to be true on the grounds of autonomous reason’.48 Yet there is a second difficulty in Gunton’s analysis, a theological one that he is more attuned to on other occasions: Gunton’s rhetoric has already set revelation and reason together in an inverse or agonistic relationship. So he declares that ‘the Enlightenment’ tended ‘to replace revelation by reason, or rather to displace it altogether’.49 (The exception is Hegel for whom ‘reason … is the place of the dynamic self-revelation of God’ and therefore succumbed to a problematic form of immediacy in the Phenomenology of Mind in which ‘revelation is the function of an immediate relation of God to the mind’ and ‘an ontological conflation of the divine and the human’.)50 With Descartes, Gunton claims, ‘We are shut up inside our heads.’51 If with Descartes and Locke emerges the kind of epistemic passivity that is aligned with ‘a breach … [that] is torn between knower and known, person and environment’, Gunton announces, ‘The alienation generated … is healed only by casting all the weight on the active rationality of the almost solipsistic mind.’52 It is at this point that he discusses the transcendental idealism of Kant. The Prussian philosopher’s significance for ‘the Enlightenment’, as both its rational culmination in making ‘the temporal order absolute’ and its cessation in indicating reason’s limits by denying ‘the possibility of a knowledge of eternity’, is manifold.53 In the context of the displacement of the real his significance lies for Gunton in several key areas. Most particularly, Kant intensified Descartes’s subjection of the real Ibid.,  5. Gunton, A Brief Theology of Revelation, 21. 47 Ibid.,  47. 48 Ibid.,  21–2. 49 Ibid., 2, my emphasis. 50 Ibid.,  3. 51 Gunton, Enlightenment and Alienation, 37. 52 Ibid.,  24. 53 Citations from Gunton, Yesterday and Today, 107. 45 46

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to reason and consciousness, inverting Plato’s project of discovering the real ‘objective and timeless ideas or forms’ in ‘shifting and temporal materiality’ to ‘the structures of human rationality. The human mind replaces exterior reality as the location of the concepts by means of which reality is understood.’54 As Bowie claims, ‘Kant tries to extend the certainty about the world to be derived from self-consciousness without using … theological support.’55 For Bowie’s Kant, The world as an object of truth is therefore actively constituted by the structures of the consciousness we have of it, which means that we cannot know how the world is ‘in itself ’. Instead of cognition following the object, the object comes to depend upon the subject’s constitution of it as an object by giving it a repeatable identity in a predicative judgement.56 This ‘subjective idealism’ is deeply consequential for a number of reasons in Gunton’s critique. For a start, it involves ‘calling into … question the very possibility of our being able to speak in our words of the world as it actually is’.57 Only phenomena can be known, things as they appear to sensibility, and therefore only things appearing within the limitations of the ‘this-worldly’.58 That results in a differentiation between phenomena and things in themselves, which reason cannot know. Gunton’s response is to question whether the ‘propriety for the quest for transcendentals’ is so dependent ‘on an expectation of final solutions’ that it prevents ‘the possibility of conceiving things as they are’, lambasting Kant as ‘rather arrogantly’ claiming ‘that he had himself found’ just such a final transcendental solution. The criticism of Kant is rather heavy-handed here, though, given that the Prussian philosopher does at least attempt to rationally demonstrate the very need of transcendental categories or regulative assumptions without which reason could not function (the categories of spatiality and temporality, and the necessity for the moral will to postulate the regulative ideals of God, freedom and immortality). Elsewhere Gunton modifies his complaint by recognizing that ‘the transcendent … could … be conceived not as it is in itself but only as the oblique implication of ethical reasoning’.59 Of course, this means, as Gunton correctly maintains, that the influence of Kant’s philosophical commitments leads theology to be ‘in fundamental disarray about the question’ ‘about the existence and knowability of God’.60 Gunton also regards Kant’s dualism of knower and real as paving the way for ecological disorder. This ‘can only be called a technocratic attitude to the world about us, encouraging attitudes of dominance and disparaging receptivity’.61 On one occasion Gunton explicates Kant’s epistemic account as involving a receptive having ‘to learn from nature’, since ‘Reason … must approach nature in order to be taught by it.’62 Yet Gunton

Gunton, The Promise of Trinitarian Theology, 142. Andrew Bowie, Aesthetics and Subjectivity: From Kant to Nietzsche, 2nd edn (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), 17. 56 Ibid. 57 Gunton, The Promise of Trinitarian Theology, 142. 58 Gunton, Yesterday and Today, 98. 59 Ibid. 60 Gunton, The Promise of Trinitarian Theology, 31. 61 Gunton, Enlightenment and Alienation, 25. Cf. Andrew Bowie, German Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 18. 62 Gunton, A Brief Theology of Revelation, 25; Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (London: Macmillan, 1933), B xiii, 20, cited in A Brief Theology of Revelation, 25. 54 55

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regards this inquisitorial role of reasoned enquiry to be ‘an appointed judge’ as a form of the domination of nature. (Kant’s claim at this point, nonetheless, may be couched as referring to a dialectic between sensible observation and hypothesizing, knowledge by the engagement together of discovery and theorizing.) In Gunton’s reading ‘Hegel is the heir to the Cartesian emphasis upon the self as the beginning of thought.’63 While he regards Hegel’s systematizing as postulating that ‘the knowledge of God’ be sought in ‘the rational states of the consciousness’, he reductively reads the idealist philosopher as having developed Kant in the direction of an immanentization of what is meant even by ‘God’ in the philosophy of history as the movement of world spirit.64 ‘God finally becomes lost in history.’65 Gunton claims that for Hegel ‘the God outside of us who saves us by his grace, is a misleading pictorial expression for saving forces intrinsic to self-conscious Spirit, wherever this may be present’.66 True, at least Hegel refuses Kant’s bifurcation of thought and being. Yet it is precisely this immediacy that Gunton traces through Schleiermacher’s sense that ‘revelation is a form of immediacy to experience’ into ‘a revelatory immediacy, a direct apprehension of the content of the faith that will in some way or other serve to identify it beyond all question’.67 Among other things, Gunton is concerned that this appeal to the immediacy of the history or movement of absolute spirit coming to subjectivity ‘by means of human cultural achievement’ ‘does not really take seriously the radical nature of evil or the transcendence of God’, and it collapses the absolute into the immanent without any possibility of appeal to a critical transcendence.68 What Gunton pays less attention to here is the notion of objective spirit in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit ‘in the sense of the contingent, socially-located historical manifestations of our conceptions’.69 It is precisely this that permits Hegel to develop his social ontology of the self as subject, of the self in the act of mutual recognition. Friedrich Schleiermacher sought to locate a space for theology after Kant’s critique within a broadly Kantian system [Lehrgebäude]. Accordingly, in him occurs an attempt to overcome Kant by means of Kant, repairing Kant’s ‘schizophrenic’ scientific and moral mind, the drastic reduction of what philosophy can do when reason reaches its limits, by means of the Critique of Judgment. This results in subjecting theology to a profound subjectivization in which ‘the knowledge of God’ is sought in ‘the affective … [state] of the consciousness’.70 In fact, it is precisely on religion that Schleiermacher’s ‘act of genius’ ‘brings together the otherwise sundered faculties of the human soul’.71 The problem, Gunton claims, is that ‘For all its creativeness, this solution was to concede the ontological case to Kant.’72 Building on Kant’s quest to articulate the conditions of the freedom of the will, Schleiermacher requires that the dependence on nature includes a transcendence of nature, particularly in the grounding of all consciousness in the feeling of absolute or utter dependence (Gefühl der schlechthinnigen Abhängigkeit). Gunton approves of

Gunton, Yesterday and Today, 42. Citation from Gunton, The Promise of Trinitarian Theology, 48. 65 Gunton, The One, the Three and the Many, 148. 66 Gunton, Becoming and Being, 6, citing J. N. Findlay, Hegel: A Re-examination (London: Routledge, 1958), 143. 67 Gunton, A Brief Theology of Revelation, 3, 4. 68 Gunton, The One, the Three and the Many, 87; Revelation and Reason, 158. 69 Bowie, Aesthetics and Subjectivity, 143. 70 Gunton, Revelation and Reason, 147; The Promise of Trinitarian Theology, 48. 71 Ibid.,  148. 72 Gunton, Yesterday and Today, 98. 63 64

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Barth’s famous critique that Schleiermacher’s is ultimately an anthropocentric theology, identifying Feuerbach’s atheism as the culmination of Schleiermacher’s employment of ‘dualistic axioms’ and the tradition he spawns.73 ‘For Barth, Schleiermacher is the great opponent.’74 Schleiermacher’s approach supposedly reduces doctrine [Lehre] to the structure of experience.75 For instance, in Schleiermacher’s hands creation is reduced to providence or preservation in that what is theologically interesting is creation really only ‘as a function of our present experience of absolute dependence’.76 This is ‘an inward-centred theology’.77 All theology is mediated, thereby, through the filter of the experience of God and the world, and is the articulation of that experience. By religious ‘experience’ Schleiermacher means ‘a feeling’.78 But a feeling of what? In posthumously published lectures Gunton’s frequently rather stylistically repetitive description moves to controversially claim that the early Schleiermacher had been a pantheist, but that he subsequently becomes more Christocentric in his account of the feeling of absolute dependence. This, at least, recognizes a form of Christological mediation, even though the basic relation is felt rather than thought, and indeed even comes at the expense of thought.79 Such a description, nevertheless, does not sufficiently distinguish Schleiermacher’s feeling (Gefühl) from that of pure affectivity, describe the content of Jesus Godconsciousness from The Christian Faith, nor explain that God-consciousness has an ecclesial context. In fact, Gunton resorts to crudely describing Schleiermacher’s Godconsciousness Christology as one of ‘spirituality or religiousness’.80 This is apparently entirely and ‘essentially a human quality, and is understood from below as something that developed, as with anyone else’.81 It is only elsewhere that Gunton admits that for Schleiermacher ‘Christianity … far from being the achievement of autonomous individuals, took shape only in a historical community’.82 Gunton has accordingly missed the way Barth spent considerable time wrestling with Schleiermacher, particularly given the Christological and ecclesial dimensions of his account of God-consciousness. So much so that the Swiss theologian reacted negatively to Emil Brunner’s rather dismissive attitude. Finally, while Friedrich Nietzsche makes only rare appearances in Gunton’s writing, when he is referred to it is for significant reasons. On one occasion Gunton, drawing on Eberhard Jüngel’s reading, announces that for Nietzsche ‘because claims for truth have an irreducibly metaphorical structure there can be no truth’.83 The world lacks any meaning in and of itself, with value, truth and meaning having their source in the constructions of the human mind or imagination, and thereby fragmenting ‘any kind of shared context

itation from ibid., 88. C Ibid.,  150. 75 Ibid.,  148. 76 Gunton, The Triune Creator, 180. 77 Gunton, Revelation and Reason, 150. 78 Ibid.,  149. 79 Ibid. 80 Gunton, Yesterday and Today, 98. 81 Ibid. 82 Gunton, The Actuality of Atonement, 9. 83 Ibid.,  33. 73 74

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for human society.’84 It is only here that ‘modernity’ comes to recognize the enormity ‘of [the] comprehensive intellectual and social significance’ of ‘the death of God’.85 Alienation from others  The question of the nature of the human person has been a preoccupation of ‘the Enlightenment’s anthropocentrism and Kant’s Copernican revolution’.86 The problem is that the way this is imagined generates a significant form of alienation that is a consequence of ‘a defective understanding and practice of … relationality’.87 Social contract theory in the hands of the likes of Hobbes and Locke founded ‘on a deficient sociality, a failure to consider the essentially social nature of human being’.88 Therefore Gunton moves from this philosophical trajectory into the political history of ‘modernity’, declaring that, as can be seen with the French Revolution, ‘modernity’ becomes repressive. Such a perspective loosely echoes the direction of Adorno and Horkheimer whose critique focused on ‘The unity of the manipulated collective [that] consists in the negation of each individual’ and ‘the triumph of repressive equality’.89 According to Gunton, the ‘unitary deity, whether theist or deist, is commonly seen to be at the root of totalitarian or repressive forms of social order’.90 While this is the kind of move that has been popularized by the likes of Jürgen Moltmann, it is deeply simplistic. A special case would need to be made to explain how the One has to repress the many as if the differentials cannot be maintained together. The danger is that couching things in this way enables Moltmann and Gunton, among others who work from a broadly construed form of social Trinitarianism, to construe the doctrine of the Trinity, despite the warnings of Gregory of Nyssa, in terms of a kind of numerical plurality that sustains the differentiation of the many. So Gunton observes that it is the practical detrinitarianization of the medieval imagination of God that eventuates in the appropriate modern association of ‘belief in God … with the suppression of the rights of the many’.91 Considerably more genealogical and theological work needs to be done to make this case of the One necessarily being absolutist and totalizing. Gunton is onto something, nevertheless, with the notion of the development of the problematic construal of divine and creaturely in contrastive terms, especially when the creative act is reduced to the potentia absoluta of God’s act of pure and arbitrary willing. Feuerbach, then, is in some ways the culmination of the protest against the absolutist One in the name of the freedom of the many for their flourishing. Feuerbach’s is the rejection of the contrastive logic ‘To enrich God, man must become poor; that God may be all, man must be nothing.’92 The voluntaristic contrastive terms take on particular force in the notion of a further form of alienation that Gunton gets closer to critiquing, that of the alienation of the self

Gunton, The One, the Three and the Many, 28–9. For Gunton’s critique of Don Cupitt in this vein, see The Promise of Trinitarian Theology, 25. Gunton notices Cupitt’s appeal to Nietzsche in The Promise of Trinitarian Theology, 16. 85 Ibid.,  28. 86 Gunton, The Promise of Trinitarian Theology, 94. 87 Gunton, The One, the Three and the Many, 6. 88 Ibid.,  220. 89 Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, The Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (London: Verso, 1979). 90 Gunton, The One, the Three and the Many, 25. 91 Ibid.,  26. 92 Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, trans. George Eliot (New York: Harper, 1957), 26, cited in Gunton, The One, the Three and the Many, 26. 84

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as subject from others. The case he makes less frequently is a crucial one, however. This is that the modern subject is construed as the maker of meaning in such a way as to lead to the instrumentalization and disposability of every and all things that cannot be used as a means to the end of the realization of the atomized self.93 So echoing the critique of ‘the Enlightenment’ in Adorno and Horkheimer, Gunton claims that Descartes’s philosophy is one of disengagement, and ‘instrumental’ logic and ‘technocratic attitude’, that treats ‘the world and … the other as external, as mere object’ or ‘as the means for realizing our will’.94 If individualism means that one does not need one’s neighbour to be oneself then it ‘encourages the development of a doctrine or system in which the other is or becomes subordinate or instrument to the I or the individual: the monism, we might say, of the finite individual’.95 The other becomes ‘a threat’, ‘our neighbour [who] meets us as one to be feared or dominated’.96 Politically what this amounts to is the mode of the singular one that attempts to secure domination of the world, and whose outcome is fascism.97 This pathway towards voluntarism is traced to a displacement of a Trinitarian account of creation which opens the way ‘for a conception of creation as the outcome of arbitrary will’, modern atheism with the contrastive construal of the divine and human will, and rejection of tradition (or the contributions of those past to the development of the self as subject).98 Gunton’s focus in The One, the Three and the Many is on the abstraction of the person from that which particularizes so that personhood is construed in terms of that which all persons abstracted from their differential particulars have abstractly in common, universally and homogenously, thus attributing ‘to all particulars essentially the same value’.99 ‘What is lost … is a recognition of the otherness-in-relation in which alone can particularity be truly preserved’.100 While Augustine and Boethius lurk in the background, a privileged place at the story’s origin is given to Descartes. ‘For Descartes, the person is the thinking thing, the intellectual reality to which all other human experiences ultimately reduce. I am a mind … alone in a world which is an illusion.’101 As remarked above, this is the crux of Cartesian dualism. Furthermore, the identification of the person with mind, ‘and in particular a mind rather loosely related to a body, is to generate a strongly individualist … view of what we are’.102 Consequently, being thrown back on the integrity of its own rational intuitiveness Descartes’s account ‘gives rise to a necessarily problematic relation with other persons’.103 In fact, for someone like Martin Heidegger in his critique of the Neuzeit, Descartes

It is poignant that Jürgen Moltmann begins his story of the Neuzeit with the conquest of the ‘New World’ in 1492 in God for a Secular Society: The Public Relevance of Theology, trans. Margaret Kohl (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1999), 6–7. 94 Gunton, The One, the Three and the Many, 14. 95 Ibid.,  32. 96 Ibid.,  37. 97 This is an odd way of reading fascism since the desire for domination comes not as the survival of the fittest of ones but the integration of all dominated ones into a homogeneous mass. 98 Gunton, The One, the Three and the Many, 54. For a reading of Descartes as influenced by a form of Augustinian inwardness, see Charles Taylor, Source of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), ­chapters 7–8. 99 Ibid.,  70. 100 Ibid.,  49. 101 Gunton, The Promise of Trinitarian Theology, 87. 102 Ibid. 103 Ibid. 93

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contributes to philosophy’s becoming ‘an expression of the “subjectification” of being, in which everything is regarded in terms of its relation to our consciousness’.104 At one point, Gunton asserts against Aristotle and Newton that ‘There are no unchanging substances which enter into relations.’105 Yet it was with Locke, Gunton argues, that it becomes evident just how ‘the seeds grew into the full plant of rationalist morality’.106 Of course, technically Locke was an Empiricist rather than a Rationalist, but by the shorthand ‘rationalism’ Gunton means ‘that all moral laws were discoverable by unaided reason’, a modern version of Pelagianism.107 While considerable fruit would be gained from assessing Fichte’s self-determining indexical ‘I’ that derives from itself, and the implication in which ‘the world of nature’ can become ‘merely the object of human activity’, Gunton’s philosopher of autonomy par excellence is Kant.108 According to Bowie, Kant’s separation of the spheres of epistemology and ethics into different aspects of ourselves mirrors the ways in which the spheres of science and technology have become separated from the sphere of law and morality in modernity … The actual historical result of the divisions Kant reveals can be seen in terms of the separation of a world of cold scientific objectivity from a world lacking in ethical certainty and intrinsic meaning.109 It is in Kant that Gunton identifies ‘the basis for the postmodernist subversion of community and rationality’, with the divorce of ‘the will from certain essential dimensions of relationality’.110 With him ‘each person is individually and completely responsible for moral action and should be free of all “external” authorities like tradition and the church’.111 Of course, the account of practical reason from Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals attempts not to free human beings from the very basis of their humanity, one could say, since human autonomy identifies what ‘in the face of apparent heteronomy of the mechanistic forces of the sensible world’ makes for freedom at all.112 Even so, the condition for moral autonomy is an individualistic one that, Gunton argues, ‘has made reason into God’ through relocating the source of moral legislation from God to the rational self.113 Kant encourages a trajectory that makes ‘the individual after the image of God: or rather of the powerful, lonely, solitary God of so much Western theological thinking’.114 Kant’s later text Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone provides an account of the moral agent ‘which is carefully qualified to avoid the pitfalls of a naïvely optimistic theory. In fact, due to his reading of the inscrutable radical evil, he is scornful of moral optimism … The facts speak for themselves: there is too much evidence to the contrary Citation from Bowie, Aesthetics and Subjectivity, 9. For a different reading of Descartes as maintaining a ‘subject’ that remains subjectus, see Étienne Balibar, Citizen Subject: Foundations for Philosophical Anthropology, trans. Steven Miller (New York: Fordham University Press, 2017). 105 Gunton, The Promise of Trinitarian Theology, 157. 106 Gunton, The Actuality of Atonement, 4. 107 Ibid. 108 Citation from Bowie, German Philosophy, 41. 109 Bowie, Aesthetics and Subjectivity, 25. 110 Gunton, The One, the Three and the Many, 118, 119. 111 Gunton, The Actuality of Atonement, 4. 112 Gunton, Enlightenment and Alienation, 59. 113 Gunton, The Actuality of Atonement, 61. Gunton understands Jean-Paul Sartre to be the culmination of this development, see The Actuality of Atonement, 63–4. 114 Ibid.,  84. 104

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for any naïve optimism about human capacity.’115 Even so, redemption is conceived through the exertions of the moral will, through moral perfection in which because one ought to do what is right one must be able to do what is right. ‘The teaching is not that of a religion of redemption, but of a moral philosophy – one of redemption, indeed, but of redemption achieved through the re-activation of the innate powers of the moral will.’116 This, Gunton observes, involves a form of Pelagianism for which the Medieval natural law tradition is a precursor of what he categorizes as ‘rationalism’ in which ‘unaided reason was able to discover universal moral truths’ has been realized.117 Gunton cites Hans Frei’s Eclipse of Biblical Narrative to the effect that ‘For Kant the meaning of the biblical narratives was strictly a matter of understanding the ideas they represent in story form… [H]‌e does his best to reinterpret … the concepts and stories derived from biblical and traditional Christian usage.’118 Gunton recognizes that while this is a legitimate move in and of itself, the difficulty is the way this task is conducted so that it ‘in effect translates Christianity into its opposite’.119 With Hegel, Gunton believes, comes a form of ‘conceptual rationalism’ that has the effect ‘of limiting and narrowing the way in which words may be conceived to express meaning and truth’.120 In fact, he is a good point from which to ‘examine the kind of damage that can be inflicted on the content of Christian theology’.121 Through Kierkegaard, Gunton’s reading of Hegel identifies a ‘tendency to make the human person the pawn of the process of history’.122 It was this direction that Marx took despite his ‘concern for the importance of right relations in our life together’.123 Accordingly, Marx ‘was to assert what Kierkegaard most feared, the priority of the universal. It is as a species-being that humankind is free. And that means insofar as he treats himself as a universal.’124 From Kierkegaard’s critique, Gunton declares that this collectivist account is ‘an impersonal abstraction’ and ultimately, then, inimical to ‘the freedom and society of persons’. This signals ‘the loss of the person, the disappearance of the one into the many’, the swallowing up of history into ‘God’, the displacement of God into time so that ‘time loses its own proper being’.125 Hegel’s is, by all accounts, prone towards providing ‘a finally demonic immanentism, the inability truly to find room for plurality’.126 What is no less troubling is the way in which Hegel tends ‘to treat evil as part of the order of things, a necessary if negative stage in the emergence of rationally self-aware beings’.127 This entails, Gunton observes, that in Hegel’s intellectualizing account of the opposition of the philosophical infinite and the finite ‘there are the seeds of modern progressive optimism’ and therefore a ‘defective eschatology … [which] tended to give modernity the status of the kingdom of heaven, of the finality that has been its undoing’.128 Ibid.,  5. Ibid.,  6–7. 117 Ibid., 3, 4. 118 Hans Frei, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative, 262–3. 119 Gunton, The Actuality of Atonement, 8. 120 Ibid.,  8–9. 121 Ibid.,  18. 122 Gunton, The Promise of Trinitarian Theology, 89. 123 Ibid. 124 Ibid. 125 Ibid., 90; The One, the Three and the Many, 87. 126 Gunton, The One, the Three and the Many, 148. 127 Gunton, The Actuality of Atonement, 19. 128 Ibid., 20; The One, the Three and the Many, 148. 115 116

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Alienation from scripture  One of the outcomes of Hegel’s immanentizing thought, Gunton explains, is ‘the stress it puts on time’.129 For Kant temporality was one of the two categories without which thought cannot occur. But with Hegel temporality takes on a different significance. ‘Time is not something that thought must escape, for it is at the heart of the way things are.’130 When pressed, Gunton thinks Hegel can gesture towards a repair of Kant’s transcendentalist thinking regarding the postulates of reason that condition the operations of reason. With Hegel’s turn to history, ‘They emerge, rather, in the commerce, the interaction, between’ ‘the structure of the world … [and] the shape of human rationality.’131 This, Gunton stipulates, not only makes more sense of the interaction between mind and world but permits the possibility of concepts being responsive ‘to something prevenient’, to the givenness of thereness, and this is more theologically appropriate for envisaging the relation between the prevenience of revelation and the receptiveness of reason.132 The turn to history, however, comes with a distinctive cost for scriptural reading for a number of reasons, largely since a recognition of the particularities of times and places emerges as a scepticism over the theological value of biblical times. ‘There is a radical discontinuity between our culture and that of the writers of the New Testament and creeds.’133 Chief expression was given to this in the work of Lessing and his ‘now almost mythical ugly broad ditch’.134 With him occurs ‘an epistemological dualism of the contingent and the necessary’.135 The former are the truths arrived at through the experience of sensible reasoning, whereas the latter are the necessary truths of reason. What ensues, then, is not merely ‘the Enlightenment’ ‘movement against authoritarianism. It undermines the dogmatic interpretation of Scripture by treating it, in the way Frei has shown, only as an object of historical criticism, prescinding, or attempting to prescind, from its theological content.’136 This method of historicized reading imposed on the collection of human texts of the Bible has the practical effect of dissociating or alienating the non-expert reader from the scriptural texts, with the interpretation of the Bible being restricted to the small groups of university and college academic specialists. ‘It becomes, in other words, an ideology through whose categories alone the texts may be viewed.’137 According to Buckley, ‘The shift in religious focus [in modernity] indicated a similar reassessment of Jesus.’138 The fate of Christology in the hands of the Enlightenment philosophers is one that reduces Jesus to a range of broadly overlapping functions but which is constituted by a series of alienations: of Jesus from his deity, of the Christ of faith from the Jesus of history and of Christ from the presence to believers in contemporaneity.139 What is lost, moreover, is not only the presence of God in the person Gunton, Becoming and Being, 6. Ibid. 131 Gunton, The Promise of Trinitarian Theology, 143. 132 Ibid.,  144. 133 Gunton, Yesterday and Today, 112. 134 Gunton, Intellect and Action, 60. 135 Gunton, Yesterday and Today, 139. 136 Gunton, Enlightenment and Alienation, 129–30. 137 Gunton, The Actuality of Atonement, 115. 138 Michael Buckley, At the Origins of Modern Atheism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), 41. 139 Gunton sees D. F. Strauss (1808–1874) in his epoch-making Life of Jesus as a good example of this tendency, with his reading of the Gospels in mythic terms that results from Strauss’s determinative deism, and the mind’s imposing of meaning on what appears to it [Enlightenment and Alienation, 115–18]. At least Strauss was careful not to follow H. S. Reimarus’s (1694–1768) sense that ‘the New Testament “myths” were a deliberate fabrication’. 129 130

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of Jesus but the very concrete particularity of Jesus himself. ‘The Jesus who was believed to be God incarnate becomes interesting not as the presence or revelation of God in person, but as a man pointing to God, providing an instance of religious experience or in some way symbolising a God who is essentially other than he.’140 In Hegel’s hands, Jesus becomes a cipher of symbolic significance in realizing ‘the consciousness that we are all God-men’, and this Gunton regards as ‘the complete Gnosticizing of Christianity’.141 For Schleiermacher, Jesus functions as the uniquely Godconscious man, the realization of the feeling of absolute dependence. Such an emphasis is developed later by one of Barth’s teachers, Wilhelm Herrmann, who ‘turns to the moral sublimity of Jesus’s inner life’.142 Salvation from sin becomes, then, a continuation of person-forming divine influence, so that Schleiermacher ‘throws the weight of his interpretation on the influence, mediated through the community, of the past Jesus of Nazareth’.143 Jesus’ sufferings, for instance, are more theologically interesting within a largely exemplarist interpretation, expressing an example for those persons being formed to follow, than struggles endured by the historical Jesus. For all the stress on Jesus as God-conscious man, Christology becomes an ideality that unwittingly ‘generates the very docetic or Monophysite Christology which it seeks to avoid’, displacing Jesus from his Jewishness, the concreteness of incarnation and crucifixion, and passion.144 Schleiermacher ‘was hurrying on to higher things’.145 A further moralistic step is evident in Albrecht Ritschl’s attempt to repair the Christian tradition through a Kantian ethicizing appeal to the moral performance of the historical Jesus. This has ‘reduced Jesus to a good moral teacher’ of the kingdom of God brought about by forgiveness and ethical behaviour.146 His is a constriction of the Lutheran tradition’s ‘tendency to elevate the significance of Christ “for me” over his significance in himself ’.147 Accordingly, while ‘this position allows Ritschl to go beyond the position of Jesus as just another ordinary man … [it] essentially packages Jesus as acceptable for a nineteenth century Liberal Protestant mentality: Jesus was remodelled to fit with bourgeois culture’.148 In broadly similar vein, Adolf von Harnack advocates an approach that entails little more than that Jesus is theologically useful as one who teaches about God without being divine.149

CONCLUSION In the published version of a conference paper delivered in Melbourne in an otherwise generally weak collection, Gunton addresses the issue of the indispensability of God and

[Enlightenment and Alienation, 119] Strauss paved the way for Rudolf Bultmann’s (1884–1976) hermeneutical demythologization programme. 140 Gunton, The Promise of Trinitarian Theology, 2. 141 Gunton, Revelation and Reason, 156. 142 Gunton, Yesterday and Today, 27. 143 Gunton, The Actuality of Atonement, 13–14. 144 Gunton, Yesterday and Today, 100. 145 Gunton, The Promise of Trinitarian Theology, 84 n.21. 146 Gunton, Revelation and Reason, 145. 147 Gunton, Yesterday and Today, 27. 148 Gunton, Revelation and Reason, 146. 149 Gunton argues that this line is later followed by the likes of Don Cupitt [Yesterday and Today, 190–1].

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the shape of the social order.150 The paper is replete with the kinds of generalizations and rhetorical overstretches of an apologetic mode that occasionally blight his writing. Nevertheless, even if the details are deeply contestable its methodology remains worth considering. The paper indicates a number of things common to Gunton’s work on the range of modernities and their impact upon the socio-political imagination. First, it is evidently concerned with resisting the seclusion of theology into a ‘positioned’ disciplinary specialism as if theology can displace its own proper business as an ordering of the response to the God from whom all things come, are sustained and eschatologically return. Second, Gunton is anxious to push secular reflections to work harder at interrogating themselves and to recognize the disordering that can and does result from a displacement of the God-given valuableness of all living things. It is here, however, that the limitations of the paper’s value as a critical theological study of ‘the problem of modern social order’ can be perceived, and this is something commonly evident in Gunton’s shorter writings for Christian audiences. He rather too quickly and incautiously shifts into apologetic mode, citing Calvin in the process: ‘Some divinity is indispensable …. [A]‌part from the Christian gospel, we all get our deity wrong, fabricating idols which far from saving us in fact enslave us.’151 Talk of the ‘indispensability of God’ is theologically troubling given that it comes perilously close to constructing a conceptualization of God as either a thing that can be dispensed with or retained. The paper does not, then, engage with a critical direction that his more valuable engagements with modernities do provide: that is, the capacity of secularities to hold a mirror up to the faith and life of the churches themselves. In this regard, Nicholas Lash’s distinction between the theologian and the apologist remains worth hearing, especially if theological claims are to refuse evasions of their irreducible historical situatedness. Here it is worth citing Lash at some length: the mood of apologetics is assertive, rather than interrogative. The apologist sets out to teach rather than to learn, to prove or to refute rather than to enquire, to give advice rather than to receive. Academic theology, on the other hand … is – or should be – fundamentally interrogative in character … It is not the theologian’s business to tell other people what, or how, to believe. His [and her] responsibilities are critical, interpretive or clarificatory rather than declaratory. And theological discourse is never more threatened than when corrupted by its own misconceived autonomy. It follows that a theology whose basic mood has shifted, under pressure from apologetic concerns, from enquiry to assertion, is exposed to the dangerous illusion … that it possesses its truth.152 This set of claims can function to chasten Gunton when he speaks in a premature apologetic mood. However, at its best, it can refer Gunton’s readers back into texts

Colin Gunton, ‘The Indispensable God? The Sovereignty of God and the Problem of Modern Social Order’, in Beyond Mere Health: Theology and Health Care in a Secular Society, ed. Hilary Regan, Rod Horsfield and Gabrielle McMullen (Kew: ATF, 1996), 1–21. 151 Ibid., 1, 5. 152 Nicholas Lash, A Matter of Hope: A Theologian’s Reflections on the Thought of Karl Marx (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1981), 5. 150

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such as Enlightenment and Alienation and The One, the Three the Many, books which exemplify a considerably richer form of intellectual attention. At its best, then, Gunton can represent a theological concentration that is considerably more interesting and fitting than what he claims in this Melbourne paper when asserting that ‘our challenge is to outlive and outthink decadent Western rationalism’.153

Gunton, ‘The Indispensable God?’, 11.

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CHAPTER TWELVE

Gunton on culture ANDREW PICARD

Colin Gunton is, among other things, a theologian of culture. His work is corrective and constructive, and its method and tone emerge from his particular British context of the mid-twentieth to early twenty-first century. Against the instinctive deism that dominated British theology at the time, Gunton sought to retrieve Trinitarian theology and restore confidence in the authority of the gospel as God’s address to us in Christ. John Webster credits Gunton as a major figure in retrieving Trinitarian theology from the periphery of British theology to its centre.1 Drawing from his philosophical training, Gunton sensed that theology had accommodated itself to modern intellectual fashions influenced by Enlightenment culture and its dualistic and immaterialist tendencies.2 To this nonconformist theologian, the bare scent of abstraction from embodied life threatens the revelation of God incarnate and undermines the goodness of materiality. Even the smallest yeast of abstraction threatens to leaven the entire dough of theology and unleash discarnate tendencies that wreak havoc in theology. The retrieval of Trinitarian theology, in Gunton’s assessment, provides resources to correct abstractionist influences and construct a more concrete theology that has suggestive power for a theology of culture. Initially, Gunton develops a sustained critical analysis of the influence of the Enlightenment and its elevation of objectivist epistemologies that detach rational knowing from physical reality. As an alternative, Gunton develops an engaged theological epistemology that rejects theology’s relegation to the private sphere of opinion and proffers a proper confidence in the gospel and Trinitarian theology to give insight into created reality. In his early writings, this develops in combination with an exploration of relational Trinitarian ontology and its implications for humanity and the created order. In his later writings, Gunton assumes his analysis of culture but develops a more sustained theological account of culture through his progression towards a Trinitarian theology of mediation and the creaturely fruit of divine action in the economy. Gunton’s analysis of the abstractive tendencies in philosophy and theology is not without its weaknesses, and his penchant for historiographical tropes causes questions regarding John Webster, ‘Systematic Theology after Barth: Jüngel, Jenson, and Gunton’, in The Modern Theologians: An Introduction to Christian Theology since 1918, 3rd edn, ed. David F. Ford (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005), 259–61. See also Murray Rae, ‘Introduction’, in this volume. Gunton himself notes the dominance of ahistorical philosophies and ‘secular’ theologies at the beginning of his theological formation. See Colin E. Gunton, ‘Theology in Communion’, in Shaping a Theological Mind: Theological Context and Methodology, ed. Darren C. Marks (Burlington: Ashgate, 2002), 32–3. 2 ‘Obituary: The Rev Prof Colin Gunton’, Stephen R. Holmes, The Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/ news/2003/jun/03/guardianobituaries.highereducation. See also ‘The Rev. Professor Colin Gunton’, The Telegraph, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/1430548/The-Rev-Professor-Colin-Gunton.html. 1

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his historical reconstructions and judgements. Gunton’s impressionistic accounts of philosophical and theological history are well known, especially his uncharitable reading of Augustine.3 Less well known is Gunton’s constructive biblical and Trinitarian account of human culture as the set of activities in which those created in the image of God share as sub-agents in the divine perfecting of the project of creation.4

THE ONE, THE THREE AND THE MANY Many scholars regard The One, the Three and the Many as Gunton’s most important work and a classic in the theological analysis of culture.5 In this analysis, which I, with Stephen Holmes, dispute, The One, the Three, and the Many represents the high point in Gunton’s work and is the culmination of his theological engagement with Western intellectual history that offers insight from Trinitarian theology for the healing of Western culture.6 Gunton utilizes the relationship of the one and the many as a heuristic device to enquire into the conditions of modernity and postmodernity. While noting the undoubted advances of the Enlightenment, he maintains that it bequeathed a variety of moral, intellectual and relational problems to Western culture. Not least is the consignment of truth to the realm of objective scientific enquiry and goodness and beauty to the realm of subjective human experience. While Modernity sought freedom and progress for the many, it bred new forms of totalitarianism, alienation, and cultural fragmentation that repress the many and enforce their assimilation to the one.7 Christendom’s heteronomous God and totalitarian forms of ecclesiastical institutions were, understandably, displaced as the unifying coordinates for reality in favour of the unifying power of the rational human mind.8 Yet, rather than providing individual freedom, secular orders of immanence and impersonal universals, such as technology, bred new forms of slavery of the many to the one. The homogenizing forces of modernity fail to offer the personal and relational context necessary for diverse forms of human being in the world, and the resulting individualism objectifies, instrumentalizes and suppresses the other.9 The result, in Gunton’s analysis, Many chapters in this volume raise important questions about Gunton’s historical reconstructions of various past figures who serve as critical foils or constructive springboards. For a helpful assessment of Gunton’s reading of Augustine, see Joshua McNall, A Free Corrector: Colin Gunton and the Legacy of Augustine (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2015); and Joshua McNall, ‘Gunton and Augustine’, in this volume. 4 Colin E. Gunton, ‘Reformation Accounts of the Church’s Response to Human Culture’, in Public Theology in Cultural Engagement, ed. Stephen Holmes (Milton Keynes: Paternoster, 2008), 80. Gunton stresses the need for a biblical and Trinitarian approach to culture that goes further than the Reformers. See Gunton, ‘Reformation Accounts’, 91. 5 See, for example, Christoph Schwöbel, ‘The Shape of Colin Gunton’s Theology: On the Way towards a Fully Trinitarian Theology’, in The Theology of Colin Gunton, ed. Lincoln Harvey (New York: T&T Clark, 2010), 199; Christoph Schwöbel, ‘A Tribute to Colin Gunton’, in The Person of Christ, ed. Stephen R. Holmes and Murray A. Rae (London: T&T Clark, 2005), 15; Bruce McCormack, ‘The One, the Three and the Many: In Memory of Colin Gunton’, Cultural Encounters 1, no. 2 (2005): 7; Webster, ‘Systematic Theology after Barth’, 261; David A. Höhne, Spirit and Sonship: Colin Gunton’s Theology of Particularity and the Holy Spirit (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), 2; and Stephen R. Holmes, ‘Obituary: Rev. Professor Colin E. Gunton’. 6 See Stephen R. Holmes, ‘Towards the Analogia Personae et Relationis: Developments in Gunton’s Trinitarian Thinking’, in The Theology of Colin Gunton, ed. Lincoln Harvey (New York: T&T Clark, 2010), 38–9; and Stephen R. Holmes, ‘Gunton on Coleridge’, in this volume. 7 Colin E. Gunton, The One, the Three and the Many: God, Creation and the Culture of Modernity. The 1992 Bampton Lectures (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 13. 8 Ibid.,  27. 9 Ibid.,  31–2. 3

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is the continued disengagement, abstraction and alienation of the individual from their relatedness to others and to the world in which we dwell. At root, Gunton’s critique of modernity is ontological. The malaise he identifies is the various expressions of Modernity’s failure to conceive and practice relationality.10 This failure may be rectified, Gunton contends, by a Trinitarian account of God who exists as being in communion and creates a relational world unified in its rich variety.11 Without the transcendent coordinates for life that are so central to the doctrine of creation, there is a weakening of the fundamental ontology in which created life exists in relation to its creator and the rest of creation. In the wake of his analysis, Gunton seeks a way to comprehend the world, culture and social order that enables us to understand reality ‘as both one and many, unified and diverse, particular and in relation’.12 For this, he turns to Trinitarian doctrine as a basis for theology to contribute towards the healing of modern fragmentation and develops his account of creation, truth and the open transcendentals. Gunton’s quest for an engaged and concrete Trinitarian theology finds inspiration in the work of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who is the presiding genius of The One, the Three and the Many.13 Coleridge sees things whole and Gunton is drawn to his conception of the Triune God as the one who unifies all things in their rich variety from his being that is marked by variety, richness and complexity.14 Gunton utilizes Coleridge’s notion of idea and assertion of the Trinity as Idea Idearum to develop a Trinitarian conception of ontology that upholds the one and many in dynamic personal relation and enables ways to conceive the creator and creature relation.15 It is a Trinitarian conception of God, Gunton argues, that provides the needed mediation between the one and the many: the one, the three and the many. Modernity’s false objectivity and postmodernity’s relativism contribute to the loss of a coherent sense of meaning and truth; Gunton proposes an account of meaning and truth that attempts to avoid their excesses.16 In place of modernity’s false objectivism and postmodernity’s capitulation to subjectivism, Gunton pursues a theological account of truth that is appropriate for created rationality and a Trinitarian theology of creation as a coherent unified reality. Rather than foundationalism’s impossible search for indubitable universal truths, or anti-foundationalism’s capitulation to subjectivities, Gunton seeks an account of truth that is accessible to fallible, finite and fallen human minds. His quest is for non-foundationalist foundations that maintain the universality and particularity of created reality in a reasoned approach to truth.17 The ancient quest for transcendentals proposes an account of the necessary notes of being that are found always and everywhere in their complexity and richness. Gunton offers a theological interpretation of transcendentals as non-foundationalist foundations that are appropriate to the rationality of created knowers. The transcendentals need to be set in a theological context that holds God as the source and ground of true being. ‘If Ibid.,  36. Ibid., 24. See also Colin E. Gunton, Theology through the Theologians: Selected Essays, 1972–1995 (London: T&T Clark, 1996), 10. 12 Ibid.,  124. 13 Ibid.,  15. 14 Ibid., 24. See also Gunton, Theology through the Theologians, 10. 15 Colin E. Gunton, The Promise of Trinitarian Theology, 2nd edn (London: T&T Clark, 1997), 28. 16 Gunton, The One, the Three and the Many, 129. 17 Ibid.,  134–5. 10 11

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there are transcendentals, they have their being in the fact that God has created the world in such a way that it bears the marks of its maker .… They are … notions which can be predicated of all being by virtue of the fact that God is creator and the world is creation.’18 In place of modernity’s false objectivity and universality, and postmodernity’s idealizing of the particular, Gunton proposes his open transcendentals. Open transcendentals are dynamic notions that are basic to human thinking and empower an ongoing and unfinished exploration of the universal marks of being. Their value is found in their suggestiveness, and potential for deepening and enrichment from a multiplicity of sources in human life and culture.19 If creation bears the marks of the creator, it is the marks of the Triune creator. The open transcendentals draw from the concepts the Cappadocian Fathers used to affirm God’s Triune being to throw redemptive light on concrete human thought, life and culture within God’s world.20 Christoph Schwöbel rightly reminds us that Gunton’s constructive open transcendentals are not metaphysical concepts that somehow enable us ‘to by-pass the particularities of the divine being and act of the Triune God’.21 They are instead an attempt to develop concepts rooted in the way that the unity of God’s being in relation is actualized in the economy to constitute creation’s structures as many-in-relation. The world is a revelatory kind of place for Gunton, because it bears the marks of its creator, and the open transcendentals attempt to capture the inner logic of the divine economy.22 Structurally, The One, the Three and the Many is written as a chiasm and utilizes chiastic couplets that bring soundings of modernity’s ailments into conversation with a constructive Trinitarian open transcendental. In his first couplet, Gunton notes that modern life is plagued by the tyranny of time that flees from the present into the future through the promise of progress. Fleeing into the future evacuates the present of meaning and creates a pathological inability to live happily in a creation structured by time and space.23 In response, Gunton suggests the divine economy as an idea that affirms the being and structure of the creation in its temporal and spatial createdness. The idea of economy invites a Christologically conditioned understanding of perichoresis as the open transcendental because it is laden with spatial and temporal conceptuality. God’s various actions in and towards the world imply that within the unity of God’s eternal being, as Father, Son and Spirit, there is a dynamic of mutual reciprocity, interpenetration and interanimation.24 If creation, though fallen, bears the analogical marks of the Triune God, we can affirm a relational universe where everything is what it uniquely is ‘by virtue of its relation to everything else’.25 In the second couplet Gunton observes that attempts to liberate individuals from unfreedom and constraint unwittingly produce homogenizing forces that turn particularities into abstractions and variety into homogeneity. Personal particulars

Ibid.,  136. Ibid.,  142–3. 20 Ibid.,  150. 21 Christoph Schwöbel, ‘Gunton on Creation’, in this volume. 22 Schwöbel, ‘The Shape of Colin Gunton’s Theology’, 201. For Gunton’s reflections on the world as a revelatory kind of place, see Colin E. Gunton, A Brief Theology of Revelation. The 1993 Warfield Lectures (London: T&T Clark, 1995), 39; and Colin E. Gunton, ‘Universal and Particular in Atonement Theology’, Religious Studies 28, no. 4 (1992): 461–2. 23 Gunton, The One, the Three and the Many, 99. 24 Ibid.,  163. 25 Ibid.,  173. 18 19

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are subsumed by modernity’s homogenizing forces that make all differences equally insubstantial and insignificant.26 As a counter to the loss of otherness and particularity, Gunton proposes hypostasis, understood as substantial particular, as an idea that gives insight into the relational constitution of personal being. What is required is an account of created substantiality that emerges from God’s substantial, instead of abstract, being. Such substantiality holds particularity and relationality in unity, as created beings have their distinct and particular existence ‘by virtue of and not in the face of their relationality to the other’.27 Gunton’s antidote to the incipient homogeneity that plagues Western life is an exploration of the practical implications of hypostasis as a transcendental. This exploration rejects the subordination of persons to impersonal political, ecclesial or consumer forces and enables particularity, established in and through perichoretic relatedness, to bulk large.28 The idea of hypostasis provides insight into a pneumatologically conditioned account of substantiality as an open transcendental. Substantiality is, for Gunton, a universal mark of being that is given by God in the creation. ‘ “Substances”, material particulars, are the most real things that there are, because the divine hypostases together constitute the being of God.’29 Substantiality is given as a gift from God and by the perfecting action of the Spirit achieves its particular eschatological perfection through time and in space. Creation’s inscape is formed in such a way that all created being, whether human or non-human, is given its own distinct and proper being, its haecceitas (thisness), by the particularizing action of the Spirit.30 In place of late modernity’s pluralism that makes everything equally insignificant, Gunton posits a theology of substantial particulars in relation as a healing alternative. The final chiastic couplet returns to the theme of the one and the many, and explores the notion of the one, the three and the many. In place of modernity’s homogenization of the many into the one, and postmodernity’s fragmentation of the many from the one, Gunton develops a Trinitarian sociality conditioned by ecclesiology. The concept of koinonia reminds us that God’s being is in communion, and, while upholding temporal and spatial limitations, Gunton explores the analogical constitution of human and non-human being in communion with God, one another and the created order.31 The centrality of koinonia in the New Testament suggests for Gunton that sociality is central to all personal being and is therefore a Coleridgean idea. In the New Testament, sociality finds particular concentration in the church’s calling in Christ, and enabled by the Spirit, to be a concrete expression of God’s eschatological community that exists in relation to God, one another and creation.32 Yet, sociality is not of transcendental significance as it does not pertain to the non-social world. The idea of sociality opens up to the suggestion of relationality as an open transcendental that marks all created being and in which perichoresis and substantiality are incorporated. Everything in its distinct particularity is what it is through its many and various relations with all else. ‘All created people and things are marked by

Ibid.,  191. Ibid., 194, italics original. 28 Ibid.,  204. 29 Ibid.,  207. 30 Ibid.,  196–8. 31 Ibid.,  216. 32 Ibid.,  217. 26 27

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their coming from and returning to God who is himself, in his essential and inmost being, a being in relation.’33 The open transcendentals do not give us a private view into God’s immanent being aside from the economy but emerge from God’s economic actions to reveal God as one being who exists as a dynamic of otherness in relation. Such a doctrine of God, derived from the economy, enables us, Gunton suggests, to see that creation bears the marks of its maker as contingent being in a diversity of free relations.34 Created being is eschatological being which is oriented to its particular end in time and space by loving relationships with God, human others and the non-human creation. This directedness to perfection is disoriented by participation in sinful patterns of relationship that subverts the ontological integrity of created being. Thus, for Gunton, redemption is the redirection of all created being to its particular telos in Christ by the Spirit. The calling and vocation of human persons is to serve a mediating function by participating with God in the redemption and perfection of creation. This mediating function comes through various forms of action in science, ethics and art (culture) that ‘enable to take place the sacrifice of praise, which is the free offering of all things, perfected, to their creator’.35 Worship is humanity’s true end, and such worship is the presentation of our embodied and particular lives in relation to God, one another and the creation that offers a sacrifice of praise. Created being becomes itself when it is presented, through Christ and in the Spirit, perfect before God. This sacrifice of praise, which is the due human response to creation and redemption, takes the form of culture that enables the personal and non-personal worlds to realize their true and particular being in relationship to God and all else.36 Gunton’s project in The One, the Three and the Many is ambitious; too ambitious for some. What appears to Gunton’s followers to be imprecise historical overviews are deemed by others, especially those who defend the integrity of Augustine’s work, to be ‘dead wrong’.37 Gunton often deploys historiographical tropes that are too cavalier with the historical, philosophical and theological sources, and universalize and essentialize variegated histories into sweeping ideal types.38 His tendency, as Holmes highlights, is to paint with heightened contrasts, stark colours and bold lines because it is the essential big picture that grips him more than the historical niceties. Distortions and exaggerations of

Ibid.,  229. Ibid.,  230. 35 Ibid. 36 Ibid.,  231. 37 See Lincoln Harvey, ‘Introduction’, in The Theology of Colin Gunton, ed. Lincoln Harvey (New York: T&T Clark, 2010), 7; and Michel René Barnes, ‘Rereading Augustine’s Theology of the Trinity’, in The Trinity: An Interdisciplinary Symposium on the Trinity, ed. Stephen T. Davis, Daniel Kendall and Gerald O’Collins (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 145. Gunton’s friends and critics agree that he is not an accurate source for historical philosophy or theology. See, for instance, Kelly Kapic, ‘Gunton on Owen’, in this volume; Schwöbel, ‘The Shape of Colin Gunton’s Theology’, 207–8 n.59; Lewis Ayres, ‘On Not Three People: The Fundamental Themes of Gregory of Nyssa’s Trinitarian Theology as Seen in To Ablabius: On Not Three Gods’, Modern Theology 18, no. 4 (2002): 446–7; and Sarah Coakley, ‘ “Persons” in the “Social” Doctrine of the Trinity: A Critique of Current Analytic Discussion’, in The Trinity: An Interdisciplinary Symposium on the Trinity, ed. Stephen T. Davis, Daniel Kendall and Gerald O’Collins (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 131. 38 ‘He prefers a simplistic narrative about ideal types – Aquinas is “aristotelian”, Augustine “neoplatonic” or “platonic”, there is the “Western” tradition and there is also something called a “cappadocian approach”.’ Lewis Ayres, ‘Recent Books in … Systematic Theology’, Reviews in Religion & Theology 4, no. 3 (1997): 76–7. 33 34

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various elements of reality serve to reveal the essence of the ideas under consideration and the trajectories in human culture with which Gunton is concerned.39 While Gunton’s historiographical tropes may be deserving of critique, his evaluation of discarnate and dualistic trajectories of thought, real or perceived, needs to be set in the context of the instinctive deism that dominated British theology in Gunton’s time, and which he fought to overcome. During this period, he was far from alone in utilizing historiographical tropes to promote Trinitarian insights for Western culture, and his analyses are best understood within the common interpretative mood of late-twentiethcentury theology.40 This does not exonerate Gunton, but it does remind us that his interest lies primarily in making constructive theological points. While not all elements that Gunton attributes to Augustine can be found in him, nor all the insights he develops from the Cappadocians be traced to their writings, Schwöbel reminds us that they serve as foils from which his constructive work commences.41 Legitimate criticisms of Gunton’s tropes tend to overwhelm Gunton reception to the extent that his constructive proposals, especially as they progress in his later writings, are overlooked or misrepresented. The critical reception of Gunton’s work is inclined to deem The One, the Three and the Many, along with the first edition of The Promise of Trinitarian Theology, as Gunton’s classic works and assumes they are indicative of Gunton’s entire project.42 As a result, there is a Hauptbriefe in Gunton’s reception that regards the open transcendentals, and their related conceptions, to be definitive of Gunton’s work. Yet Holmes recounts Gunton’s own self-assessment that ‘there was not much theology in it [The One, the Three and the Many]’.43 Holmes’s personal anecdote finds support in the fact that Gunton does not extend Coleridge’s idea or employ the open transcendentals after The One, the Three and the Many. There is a progression in Gunton’s thought in which many of the central concepts of his early work recede or are refined in later works while new concepts emerge. The deployment of Trinitarian concepts such a perichoresis as analogical bridge terms to establish insights into the relationality of created being recedes from his work. Claims of a perichoretic universe and finite echoes of divine being in the church community once dominated his thought, but the use of perichoresis

Stephen R. Holmes, ‘Introduction’, in Colin E. Gunton, Revelation and Reason: Prolegomena to Systematic Theology, ed. P. H. Brazier (London: T&T Clark, 2008), 5. See also Murray Rae, ‘Introduction’, in this volume. 40 Thomas Torrance, a contemporary of Gunton, also holds a dim view of Augustine. He ranks Augustine, with Descartes and Newton, among those that sponsor ‘the Latin Heresy’ and whose work is ‘inherently dualistic’. See Thomas F. Torrance, Theology in Reconciliation: Essays towards Evangelical and Catholic Unity in East and West (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1976), 285. See also the indicative examples of analyses of modernity and Western dualisms offered in Alasdair I. C. Heron, ed., The Forgotten Trinity: A Selection of Papers Presented to the BCC Study Commission on Trinitarian Doctrine Today (London: BCC/CCBI, 1991). See further, Robert Jenson’s admission that Gunton was not alone in his impressionistic evaluations of Augustine, and that he has often done the same. Robert Jenson, ‘A Decision Tree of Colin Gunton’s Thinking’, in The Theology of Colin Gunton, ed. Lincoln Harvey (New York: T&T Clark, 2010), 11. 41 Schwöbel, ‘The Shape of Colin Gunton’s Theology’, 207–8 n.59. 42 See especially Bernhard Nausner’s claim that while personhood and communion are the heart of Gunton’s project, the open transcendentals are the valves that make the heart of Gunton’s project beat. Nausner’s widely referenced assessment that Gunton’s laudable project is a failure is based upon the incorrect assumption that The One, the Three, and the Many and The Promise of Trinitarian Theology undoubtedly reveal Gunton’s project. See Bernhard Nausner, ‘The Failure of a Laudable Project: Gunton, the Trinity and Human Self-Understanding’, Scottish Journal of Theology 62, no. 4 (2009): 404–6. 43 Holmes, ‘Towards the Analogia Personae et Relationis: Developments in Gunton’s Trinitarian Thinking’, 38–9. See also Holmes, ‘Gunton on Coleridge’, who observes the lessening significance of Coleridge to Gunton’s theology. 39

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is later confined to descriptions of God’s immanent being, and the concept of an echo is no longer employed in relation to ecclesiology.44 What remains from The One, the Three, and the Many are the theological foci of creation, Christology, pneumatology and ecclesiology, but these are developed through a Trinitarian theology of mediation rather than the analogical approach of Trinitarian open transcendentals. Gunton’s theology progresses to a theology of mediation which stresses the centrality of divine action in the economy, by the two hands of God, as the starting point in theology. The result is that there is progressively less reliance upon philosophical sources to establish theological insights and a greater emphasis upon sustained engagement with biblical exegesis and theological sources in order to expound the creaturely fruit of divine action that is mediated in the economy.

A THEOLOGY OF MEDIATION Gunton’s later writings progress towards a theology of mediation that gives priority to divine action in the economy as the methodological starting point of theology and the fruit of that priority. Scripture’s God is oriented to action, not contemplation, and this determines the way we know God. While Gunton always held to this method, he indwells it in a more conscious and sustained way in his later writings. An indication of this is his frequent reference to the Irenaean motif of ‘the two hands’, the Son and the Spirit, who mediate God’s action in the world. Knowledge of God’s immanent being derives from divine action in the economy and in order to know God we must place ourselves where the action is: God’s action in the economy.45 In the second edition of The Promise of Trinitarian Theology, the new chapters reveal a more consistent emphasis on Trinitarian mediation through the action of ‘the two hands’ instead of analogical connections between the Trinity and the world.46 Likewise, the methodological structure of The Christian Faith, a precursor to his proposed multivolume Christian Dogmatic Theology, prioritizes divine action in the economy over speculations on the immanent Trinity in abstraction from divine revelation. The Christian Faith offers nine chapters devoted to the creating, redeeming and perfecting action of the Triune God in the economy before moving to a final chapter on the immanent Trinity as revealed in the economy.47 Where Gunton’s earlier work draws from a range of non-theological sources to buttress insight into a relational Trinitarianism, his later writings offer a much more sustained engagement with biblical and theological sources. In The One, the Three and the Many, Gunton suggests the work could be understood as an extended exegesis of

Colin E. Gunton, Father, Son and Holy Spirit: Toward a Fully Trinitarian Theology (London: T&T Clark, 2003), 23; 44–8; and Gunton, Act and Being, 107, 119–23, 129–31, 138, 143–5. In a chapter from 2000, Gunton nuances his use of perichoresis in relation to two-natures Christology by stating, ‘What is appropriate for the three persons of the Trinity is far less satisfactory when applied to the asymmetrical relation between God and man.’ Gunton, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, 98 n.13. 45 Ibid.,  26. 46 Gunton, The Promise of Trinitarian Theology, xxix–xxx. 47 Colin E. Gunton, The Christian Faith: An Introduction to Christian Doctrine (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), 180. The provisional title of the first volume of Gunton’s unpublished dogmatics gives an insight to his commitment to beginning with divine action in the economy: A Christian Dogmatic Theology. Volume One: The Triune God. A Doctrine of the Trinity as Though Jesus Makes a Difference. See Jenson, ‘A Decision Tree of Colin Gunton’s Thinking’, 8–16. 44

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Genesis; however, the exegetical meaning of the texts is implied rather than explored.48 It is Gunton’s later writings that offer more sustained reflections on Scripture and theology, which provide an internal strengthening of prior ideas and the rise of new articulations of creation and culture.

Creation and culture The doctrine of creation suffers, in Gunton’s assessment, from a Babylonian captivity to Greek dualism that deems the material to be ontologically inferior to the immaterial. These trajectories undermine the goodness of creation’s spatiality and temporality and promote a spiritual salvation from the world instead of salvation in and with the world.49 Whatever we make of Gunton’s historical analysis, his interest lies in a constructive Trinitarian account of creation, and this provides the theological context to explore human culture. Gunton draws from Francis Watson’s exegesis of Genesis and notes a threefold model of God’s pluriform creating action that gives rise to a complex pattern of mediation.50 First, God creates by command where God’s powerful word brings entities such as light and vegetation into immediate existence ex nihilo (Gen. 1.3, 11).51 Creation by command establishes the ontological otherness and aseity of God from contingent creation – a duality without dualism. God establishes creation with its own proper reality in relative independence (Selbständigkeit) from God and loves creation in its spatial and temporal createdness.52 Second, God creates by fabrication in which God accommodates divine action to creation’s spatial and temporal structures. The use of ‘make’ along with ‘create’ (distinct Hebrew verbs) in Genesis suggests that alongside creation by divine fiat, God decides and takes time to make. Entities such as the firmament do not spring immediately into being; there is a gap between the decision (‘Let there be’) and its fulfilment (‘And it was so’) that is bridged by an act of fabrication. It is only after God constructs the firmament and separates the waters that the fulfilment narration is given (1.6).53 Creation, therefore, is not a static timeless lump of matter formed only by instantaneous action but a project that God orders through time towards an end that is greater than its beginning.54 Theologies of Eden’s retrieval offer no room for human culture or openness to creaturely contributions to God’s redemption and perfection of creation. While ‘very good’, creation is not created fully ordered or perfect; there is work to do, soil to till, gardens to tend, animals to name, cities to build and families and communities to develop. Creation is a project that is oriented towards its perfection through time and in space, and human culture

Gunton, The One, the Three and the Many, 2, 53, 55, 185, 207, 216, 217. For criticisms of Gunton’s reading of Genesis 1 and 2, see Nathaniel Suda, ‘Gunton on Genesis 1 and 2’, http://guntonresearch.blogspot.com/2006/03/ gunton-on-genesis-1-and-2.html. 49 Gunton, The Christian Faith, 24. See also, Colin E. Gunton, The Triune Creator: A Historical and Systematic Study (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1998), 59–60; Gunton, Theology through the Theologians, 149. 50 Gunton, Revelation and Reason, 80. 51 Francis Watson, Text, Church and Word: Biblical Interpretation in Theological Perspective (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1994), 140–1. See also Gunton, The Christian Faith, 5; Gunton, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, 138–9; Colin E. Gunton, The Triune Creator, 61–2, 71 and 100–1; Colin E. Gunton, Revelation and Reason, 80; and Colin E. Gunton, The Barth Lectures, ed. P. H. Brazier (London: T&T Clark, 2007), 248. 52 Gunton, The Triune Creator, 145, 178. See also Gunton, The Promise of Trinitarian Theology, 202. 53 Ibid., 141. See also Gunton, The Christian Faith, 5. 54 Gunton, The Triune Creator, 197. 48

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participates in the divine redemption and perfection of that which was created very good in the beginning.55 Finally, Genesis offers an account of creation by ministerial action in which God employs existent creation to collaborate as a sub-agent in divine creating action. God commands creation to bring forth the living creatures (1.24), while the fulfilment narration (‘and it was so’ [1.24]) sets creation’s ministerial action within the frame of God’s creating action. The creation of the living creatures emerges ‘out of the matrix of prior plenitude’ and God enables the created world to participate as sub-agents in the mediation of divine creating action.56 The juxtaposition of ‘Let the earth bring forth’ with ‘God made the wild animals’ shows us that creation’s ministerial calling remains within the confines of God’s creative action, but it is a form of mediation. ‘Worldly agencies are enabled by divine action to achieve their own “subcreating”, not in the absolute way that God creates, but relatively, as creation from what already is.’57 These three models of divine creative action are, for Gunton, the theological basis for human culture and the ministerial calling of creation, and they set cultural action in the context of the divine perfecting of the project of creation. While all creation is capable of generating goodness, beauty and truth, it is humans in particular who are called to be God’s representatives and superintend creation’s sub-agency in God’s redeeming and perfecting action.58 Creation’s ministerial calling finds its most concentrated expression in human beings as those created in the image of God to be the chief priests of creation. In Genesis 1.28, humanity is commanded to make something of the world and to engage with the created order in such a way that creation is enabled to become what it was created to be in worship of God.59 Stewardship is not a calling to human domination of the world, as the Hebrew wordplay between human (‫ )אדם‬and non-human (‫ )אדמה‬creation stresses their organic relation and shared destinies.60 The right human habitation of creation participates in the divine perfecting of creation and engages with the created order in such a way that creation is enabled to join the human species in worshiping its creator. ‘Human beings shape their world, and Genesis appears not only to approve this, but to encourage it: indeed, Genesis 2 makes horticulture the primary task that Adam and Eve perform in the place in which they are set.’61 Humanity’s cultural mandate is given before the fall and it is not, therefore, a punishment for sin. Nor is it an interim measure to ward off the worst effects of sin before Christ supplants the earthly city with the New Jerusalem. Human cultural action is a calling to be sub-agents, under God’s prevenient agency, who participate with God in the redemption and perfection of creation.62 The perfecting of creation does not occur through humanity’s attempts to perfect the world apart from God through cultural progress. While some suggest Gunton’s theology of the perfection of creation establishes a creational soteriology, Gunton is clear that the

Gunton, The Christian Faith, 50. Watson, Text, Church and Word, 142. 57 Gunton, The Christian Faith, 8. 58 Gunton, ‘Reformation Accounts’, 80. 59 Gunton, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, 123. 60 Ibid.,  177. 61 Gunton, The Christian Faith, 50. 62 Gunton, ‘Reformation Accounts’, 80. See also Stephen R. Holmes, ‘Can Theology Engage with Culture?’, in Public Theology in Cultural Engagement, ed. Stephen R. Holmes (Milton Keynes: Paternoster, 2008), 8–11. 55 56

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realities of sin prohibit progressive eschatology.63 Given the universal and cosmic effects of the fall, there is no unambiguous human progress or progressive eschatology that avoids the narrow gate of the cross of Christ; there can only be a transformative eschatology.64 ‘The project of creation is achieved only through its redemption, not simply through its perfecting; or rather by its perfecting through redemption – by its release from its bondage to decay.’65 There is no perfection of the project of creation or right human habitation of creation aside from Jesus Christ’s human faithfulness and redemption that the Spirit enables.

Christology and culture The chief model of mediation is the incarnation, and if we are to understand how God works in our world, we ‘must go through the route that God has given us – the incarnation of the eternal Son and the life-giving action of the Spirit’.66 In Jesus Christ God’s being is oriented to creation’s spatiality and temporality that he takes to himself in the incarnation.67 There is nothing inherently evil with temporal and material being, and in the incarnation and human career of Jesus Christ we encounter creation’s eternal Lord returned to claim his own in human actuality. Through Jesus Christ’s faithful human action, the project of creation is redirected to its proper end – the reconciliation of all things with God.68 Redemption is not limited to Christ’s sacrifice on the cross but includes his sacrificial human life and career lived in obedience to the Father’s will by the Spirit’s enabling. Jesus Christ’s incarnation and human career are a triumphant recapitulation of Adam’s fallen humanity, a redemptive mediation of God through which Christ, the second Adam, enters the sorry story of human sin and emerges triumphant. ‘As Adam failed to be the human being made in the image of God, so Christ, by becoming human, not only corrects what is wrong, but brings to perfection what was begun in creation.’69 In Jesus Christ, the ministry of human stewardship and culture is truly exercised as the eschatological Adam offers the creation back to God, perfected as a result of the faithful exercise of humanity’s cultural mandate.70 As the eschatological Adam and the true Israelite, Jesus Christ fulfils humanity’s ministerial calling and offers us a view of true human culture and the right human habitation of the world. Gunton draws from the work of Robert Jenson to suggest that we should view Christ as culture.71 He is the eschatological Adam, the true Israelite, whose life is the obedient participation of creation in the divine economy, in fulfilment Gunton, The Promise of Trinitarian Theology, 183. For suggestions that Gunton holds a creational soteriology, see William B. Whitney, Problem and Promise in Colin E. Gunton’s Doctrine of Creation (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 104; and Uche Anizor, Trinity and Humanity: An Introduction to the Theology of Colin Gunton (Milton Keynes: Paternoster, 2016), 80–1. 64 Gunton, The Promise of Trinitarian Theology, 183. See also Gunton, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, 25; and Gunton, ‘Reformation Accounts’, 80. 65 Gunton, ‘Reformation Accounts’, 82. 66 Gunton, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, 11. 67 Ibid.,  140. 68 Gunton, The Promise of Trinitarian Theology, 185. 69 Gunton, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, 29, 162. 70 Gunton, The Christian Faith, 46. 71 Gunton, ‘Reformation Accounts’, 82. See Robert W. Jenson, ‘Christ as Culture 1: Christ as Polity’, International Journal of Systematic Theology 5, no. 3 (2003): 323–9; Robert W. Jenson, ‘Christ as Culture 2: Christ as Art’, International Journal of Systematic Theology 6, no. 1 (2004): 69–76; and Robert W. Jenson, ‘Christ as Culture 3: Christ as Drama’, International Journal of Systematic Theology 6, no. 2 (2004): 194–201. 63

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of humanity’s cultural mandate. It is only in Jesus Christ, the eternally creating Word become flesh and the true human being, that we know what right human habitation of the world and true human culture is, for his life is empowered and perfected by the eschatological Spirit.72 Jesus Christ’s humanity is particular. Through the concrete particularities of his own historical existence lived in obedience to the Father, Christ not only recapitulates and heals Adam’s fallen humanity but fulfils Israel’s call to covenant faithfulness. We cannot understand the nature and significance of Jesus Christ’s sonship and faithful humanity aside from his particular Jewish humanity, nor apart from his relationship to Israel and Israel’s God.73 Israel’s calling, covenants, law, offices and story are not abolished in the New Testament but concentrated in the one who is the telos of the law and God’s faithful Son eternally.74 In the New Testament, the election of Israel and the God-given offices are not abolished, they are concentrated in Christ and his eschatological action. ‘The offices of the prophets, priests and kings of Israel, those through whom God variously called and held Israel to her vocation, are concentrated in him, so that he is the one in whom providence now finds it primary purpose.’75 The office of Israel’s kings, who dispensed justice to uphold Israel in her distinct calling among the nations, is now concentrated through the cross of Christ and his subsequent ascended kingly rule.76 The office of the prophets, who spoke and embodied God’s truth to recalcitrant Israel and recalled her to her covenant responsibilities, is concentrated in Christ’s ministry of the kingdom. The office of the priests, who reordered Israel’s relationship with God and one another through the priestly sacrifice, is concentrated in Christ’s self-offering as priest and sacrifice. The ministry of the priesthood is especially important for Gunton, as sacrifice and worship are central to Christ’s life and calling. As priest and sacrifice, Jesus Christ offers his faithful human life as a sacrifice of praise to God from within the creation. The priesthood is realized eternally in Christ’s self-offering of his perfect humanity as a sacrifice of praise in obedience to the Father by the power of the Spirit.77 In the unity of his person, Jesus Christ is the great high priest who presents himself and his faithful humanity as the perfect sacrifice.78 As the great high priest, he brings humanity to God in a particular way – through his perfect sacrifice and eternal humanity. The sacrificial sphere draws us towards a theology of exchange; the one in whom the priesthood is concentrated substitutes himself in the place of sinners and offers his life as a sacrifice.79 This human life lived sacrificially is offered as a perfect sacrifice, the true image of God and the faithful exercise of humanity’s priestly calling. In this way he becomes the means for the sacrifice of praise of the whole of creation. ‘Jesus’ life as a whole is an expression of that priesthood over creation that is the human calling outlined

Ibid.,  93. Gunton, Intellect and Action, 106. 74 Gunton, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, 64–5. 75 Gunton, The Christian Faith, 31. 76 Ibid.,  70. 77 Ibid.,  70–1. 78 Gunton, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, 157. Gunton’s account of the death and resurrection is significantly determined by the book of Hebrews, and Calvin’s theology, and its stress upon the high priesthood of Jesus Christ and his perfect sacrifice as priest, victim and offering. 79 Gunton, The Christian Faith, 70–1. 72 73

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in Genesis 1.26-8 as the calling of those created in God’s image … In priestly fashion, as God made man, he brings together loving creator and hostile creature.’80 The resurrection is an eschatological act in which God raises Jesus Christ from the dead by the power of the Spirit as a vindication and validation of this particular human being. True human life is only found here in the one human who images God as the one just, truthful and free human being.81 ‘For others to realise the image and likeness of God now involves being brought into reconciled relation with God the Father through him; indeed, in Paul’s expression, being conformed to him.’82 The resurrection is God’s transformation of the creation through the faithful human action of creation’s Lord and his fulfilment of humanity’s cultural calling. God breathes the breath of life into the eschatological Adam and raises him to a new form of transformed bodily life in anticipation of the eschatological perfection of the created order.83 ‘The resurrection of the flesh, of the whole person, is the completion of the promise inherent in Genesis 1.26–28, because those created in the image of God are to be perfected in the context in which they were created.’84 The ascension is the realization of Christ’s eternal high priesthood and kingship that, in priestly fashion, brings together the loving creator and hostile humanity.85 In the ascension, the high priesthood and eternal kingship of Jesus Christ is realized and our humanity, and its priestly calling to steward creation, is brought before God through his eternal sacrifice.

Pneumatology and culture Any attempt to develop a concrete Trinitarian theology of culture requires a stronger pneumatology to counteract theology’s tendency towards abstraction and disembodiment.86 The Spirit is not an internal causal force who merely applies the benefits of Christ’s redemption but is God’s transcendent and eschatological action. ‘For the New Testament especially, wherever the Spirit is, there the conditions of the last times are anticipated.’87 As the perfecting cause, the Spirit empowers Jesus Christ to be the eschatological Adam; directs creatures to where God wants them to go; and leads and equips the church to be the community of Jesus Christ in anticipation of the communion of the last days.88 The Spirit’s perfecting action is universal, not merely ecclesial, and the enabling of finite human cultural perfections in the present is not restricted to the church. All right human culture, by whoever it is formed, is part of the universal lordship of Jesus Christ and the free work of the Spirit who enables it to worship God in its own particular way.89 Questions remain as to how we can assess human cultural contributions, because sin’s polluting effects mean that the Spirit’s perfecting work is only achieved against opposition,

Ibid.,  112. Ibid., 111–12. 82 Ibid.,  123. 83 Gunton, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, 118. 84 Gunton, The Christian Faith, 154. 85 Ibid.,  112. 86 Gunton’s early engagement with pneumatology is shaped by Geoffrey Nuttall’s early critique of his Christology. See Colin E. Gunton, Yesterday and Today: A Study of Continuities in Christology, 2nd edn (London: SPCK, 1997), 221. 87 Gunton, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, 76. 88 Ibid., 76–7; 81. 89 Gunton, The Christian Faith, 51. See also Gunton, ‘Reformation Accounts’, 90–3; and Gunton, The Promise of Trinitarian Theology, 191. 80 81

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ultimately displayed at Golgotha.90 What constitutes faithful human culture is not always obvious to human assessment. According to Paul, Christ’s crucifixion is a paradox in which the Spirit transforms the tragedy and blasphemy of the Son’s execution as a Roman criminal into the central means of human worship.91 Amidst the limitations that sin places on human knowing, Gunton proposes a Christological criterion for the assessment of human culture and its offer of worship to God. It is in Christ that the eschatological perfecting of human culture is truly revealed, and it is through the Spirit’s enabling that we are able to recognize this disclosure. ‘The central criterion will be whether an action, event or thing praises the One who made it, and praises it in the way he was praised by his incarnate Son.’92 While Gunton’s criterion does not offer detailed analysis for all human cultural contributions, it does provide a Christological framework for interpreting human culture, as it is in him that humanity and creation find their proper end in worship of the Father. Jesus Christ’s universal lordship and the Spirit’s enabling of true human culture find particular expression in the church as a concrete community of worship. Without an examination of the Spirit’s action in the church, and the formation of the church around Christ’s perfected life, any theology of culture will remain abstract.93

Ecclesiology and culture The church’s visible life in community is a form of human culture that, through the Spirit’s enabling, may be conformed to Christ and so becomes an anticipation of God’s eschatological purposes. Gunton is critical of abstract accounts of the church as an institution, and he emphasizes an account of the church as a dynamic visible community. His criticisms are no doubt influenced by his concerns about dualistic trajectories in the tradition that conceive the church’s true being in abstraction from its concrete life, as well as his commitment to, and ministry in, the dissenting and congregationalist tradition that stresses the visible community. While Jesus Christ institutes the church as a historically given reality, it is the Spirit who constitutes the church anew as a community in time. The church is not a historical institution to which community is appended; nor is the Spirit an immanent possession of the church. Instead, the Spirit’s eschatological action constitutes the church in the present through the visible gathering of believers as a community in anticipation of the renewal of all things.94 Gunton’s early ecclesiological writings are concerned with the ontology of the church and the need to root the being of the church as a creature of God in the being of the Triune God. The church’s visible life in community is a form of concrete culture that God the Spirit enables to be a ‘finite echo’ of the relational dynamics of the Trinity. This understanding is a corrective to abstract and institutional notions of the church.95 Gunton’s critics remain cautious that his use of analogical bridge terms, such as echo, effects the passage from God to the church too comfortably and does not adequately capture the church’s created existence and difference from God ‘who is the uncreated source of its life’.96 As we have noted, this is a hallmark of Gunton’s early analogical Gunton, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, 121. Gunton, ‘Reformation Accounts’, 92–3. 92 Ibid.,  93. 93 Ibid.,  82–3. 94 Gunton, Theology through the Theologians, 197–9. See also The Promise of Trinitarian Theology, 64–70. 95 Gunton, The Promise of Trinitarian Theology, 73. 96 John Webster, ‘ “In the Society of God”: Some Principles of Ecclesiology’, in Perspectives on Ecclesiology and Ethnography, ed. Pete Ward (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2012), 206. See also Anizor, Trinity and Humanity, 90 91

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approaches. Yet the cautions Gunton gives against any logical links between divine and human being are not always noted, nor the apophatic qualifications he places on analogical links between God and the church. There are no logical links that allow us to base the unity or diversity of the church on the unity or diversity of God, as we cannot claim such detailed knowledge of God’s inner being.97 God’s relation to the church is not logical or symmetrical but asymmetrical and personal. It is God’s free and personal action, through the frail humanity of the Son and the perfecting action of the Spirit, that makes the church a community of the Triune God. Any analogy between God and the church must be an indirect analogy or a finite echo that bodies forth the divine personal dynamics.98 Ecclesiology becomes increasingly important to Gunton in his later years, and yet, as Holmes notes, much of Gunton scholarship appears to be unfamiliar with this move.99 The progression in Gunton’s later ecclesiological writings leads to less focus upon ontological analogies between the Trinity and the church, and greater interest in the contours of the church’s concrete life as the creaturely fruit of divine action in the economy. Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians is especially important to Gunton, as in it ‘we see being hammered out before our eyes the distinctive form of culture that the Church was and is’.100 The church, like Israel, is an elect community who God calls to a particular way of being in the world; a form of redeemed human culture that the Spirit, from time to time, enables. Election is concerned with concrete life within time rather than merely abstract protological speculations. A pneumatological rebalancing promotes more sustained reflection on the Spirit’s eschatological action that brings about God’s purposes within time.101 Divine election is not God’s selection of one preferred group over another but the election of one particular group for the sake of and on behalf of all others.102 By calling people out of darkness and into the glory of God reflected in Jesus Christ, the Spirit gathers a people whose sole calling is to praise the one who made them. The church’s primary calling is to worship God, but the nature of that worship is shaped by the God who is worshiped. The centrality of the bodily incarnation of the Son and the Son’s redemptive love towards the created order demands that the church’s worship cannot abstract itself from embodied life.103 The church’s worship is the offering of its concrete life to God, such that the nature of the church is best understood by an exploration of the kind of social, political and ethical order that it represents: its culture.104 This worship is conceived in terms of humanity’s cultural mandate – the right

164–5; Justin Stratis, ‘A Person’s a Person, No Matter How Divine? The Question of Univocity and Personhood in Richard of St Victor’s De Trinitate’, Scottish Journal of Theology 70, no. 4 (2017): 388; Richard M. Fermer, ‘The Limits of Trinitarian Theology as a Methodological Paradigm’, Neue Zeitschrift für Systematische Theologie aund Religionsphilosophie 41, no. 2 (1999): 160; Karen Kilby, ‘Perichoresis and Projection: Problems with Social Doctrines of the Trinity’, New Blackfriars 81, no. 956 (2000): 438; and Sarah Coakley, ‘Afterword: “Relational Ontology”, Trinity, and Science’, in The Trinity and an Entangled World: Relationality in Physical Science and Theology, ed. John Polkinghorne (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2010), 190–1. 97 Gunton, The Promise of Trinitarian Theology, 71–3. 98 Ibid.,  73–4. 99 Stephen R. Holmes, ‘Foreword’, in Colin E. Gunton, Father, Son and Holy Spirit: Toward a Fully Trinitarian Theology (London: T&T Clark, 2003), x. 100 Gunton, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, 119. See Holmes, ‘Foreword’, x. 101 Colin E. Gunton, The Christian Faith, 127. 102 Ibid., 164. See also Gunton, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, 228; and Gunton, Intellect and Action, 147. 103 Ibid.,  129. 104 Ibid.,  128.

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human habitation of creation that anticipates the end and contributes to the perfecting of creation.105 The church does things differently as a social and political institution because it is an eschatologically different reality.106 God’s holiness is God’s difference from the world, and God sets Israel and the church apart to be different.107 Such difference does not imply a sectarian relocation from the world but a different way of being within the social and political structures of the world.108 The church’s way of being in the world is shaped by the Torah, which is best understood as a framework for liberated life, rather than laws by which to abide. The church’s life is an expression of God’s grace and forgiveness embodied in community life.109 The law is not abrogated for the church but remains a framework for eschatological life that is anticipated in the church’s present life.110 Paul’s social, political and ethical injunctions to the church at Corinth restate the Torah as the framework for the church’s embodiment of eschatological life in community as a form of worship (1 Cor. 6.9-10).111 The end in view in Paul’s ethical demands is the right social, political and ethical embodiment of the gospel in the church whose eschatological identity commands a different way of doing things than other institutions.112 In its concrete life, the Spirit enables the church’s worship to be a culmination of right human habitation of creation in fulfilment of the cultural mandate in Genesis 1, a distinctive social, political and ethical way of being in the world.113

Culture and the sacrifice of praise The forms of redeemed relationships that the gospel creates culminate at the church’s celebration of the Lord’s Supper. The Lord’s Supper unites humanity in relation to God, one another and the created order through the sacrifice of Christ and offers all things to God in worship evoked by the Spirit. The Supper focuses the cultic, liturgical, social, political and ethical dimensions of the church’s common life in worship offered in and through the sacrifice of Christ.114 The church’s eating and drinking together proclaims the cross and anticipates the future universal resurrection, so long as they do not undermine that witness by failing to live into their elected identity. In Gunton’s communitarian reading of 1 Corinthians 11, the body to be discerned is the gathered community of the church. The problems in the Corinthian church are not theoretical failures of belief about the consecration of the bread and the wine but failures of loving God and one another in forms of community life that give witness to the reality of the cross.115 ‘The Supper falls when the members of the community fail to adopt a due orientation to God’s redeeming action in Christ, and especially his death, as that is mediated by the Word and the Spirit in the life of the community.’116 The church’s Ibid.,  120–1. Gunton, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, 222. 107 Ibid.,  148. 108 Ibid.,  131. 109 Gunton, Intellect and Action, 89–90. See also Gunton, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, 229. 110 Gunton, The Christian Faith, 149–50. See also Gunton, Intellect and Action, 92–6; and Gunton, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, 228. 111 Gunton, Intellect and Action, 93–6. 112 Gunton, The Christian Faith, 131. 113 Ibid.,  140. 114 Gunton, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, 119. 115 Gunton, The Christian Faith, 133. 116 Ibid.,  132. 105 106

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celebration of the Supper is not only a remembering of Christ’s redeeming death, it also anticipates the true human community of the end and the eschatological banquet where all will be reconciled to God, one another and the created order. In Gunton’s account of the supper, humanity’s and creation’s universal fellowship with God is representatively anticipated in the congregation’s eating together.117 Among the polyvalent meanings of sacrifice in scripture, worship and thanksgiving are among the most important. Worship and thanksgiving in 1 Corinthians are fundamentally worship and thanksgiving for Christ’s sacrifice. In the unity of his person Christ is both priest and sacrifice: the one truly perfected human life, who fulfils humanity’s calling and, as the great high priest, offers his own self-offering of faithful humanity to the Father in the Spirit.118 This human life lived sacrificially is offered as a perfect sacrifice, the true image of God and the faithful exercise of humanity’s priestly calling to steward the creation. In this way he becomes the means for the sacrifice of praise of the whole of creation, and the church’s life emerges from his faithful human sacrifice. But, as Paul makes clear, right worship and right conduct belong together and form the church’s own sacrifice of praise to God, through Christ, for God’s wise purposes in creation.119 At the Supper the church’s right human habitation of the world is united by the Spirit to Christ’s self-offering. The church’s distinctive way of being together as Christ’s body is its own form of sacrifice that the Spirit enables from time to time, a sacrifice of praise in and through the church’s right human habitation of creation. Importantly for Gunton the Supper takes up the created order, and humanity’s cultural calling to steward the creation, into its representative worship. At the Supper, humanity’s calling to steward the creation in such a way that it is enabled to praise its creator is expressed in the bread and wine – nature transformed by human culture. The bread and the wine are manufactured by human hands from the fruits of creation, and the Spirit enables the bread and wine to give witness to the sacrifice of Christ. In Christ, humanity’s cultural mandate is redeemed and set under the promise that what human beings do in and with the world will be somehow taken up into the reign of God, and humanity and creation will be enabled to praise their creator.120 At the Supper, through Christ’s sacrifice and as the Spirit enables, the church offers a representative sample of humanity and creation redeemed to God and each other through the right human habitation of creation. Such a rightly ordered form of human life in communion is a living sacrifice of praise to God for God’s universal purposes in creation – a form of praise that contributes to the perfecting of God’s project of creation. The progression in Gunton’s theological engagement with culture broadly mirrors the progression of his career from philosophy of religion to Christian doctrine. While earlier writings offered an analysis of Western culture, his later writings develop a theological account of culture drawn from his Trinitarian theology of mediation that begins with divine action in the economy and explores its creaturely fruit. The broad constructive scope of Gunton’s theological account of culture is related to all other areas of his Trinitarian theology and invites ongoing reflection on the Triune God’s purposes for humanity and creation.

Ibid.,  134. Gunton, ‘Reformation Accounts’, 92. 119 Gunton, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, 228–9. 120 Ibid.,  233. 117 118

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Gunton on community LUCY PEPPIATT

The idea of Christian community is a strong theme that runs through Colin Gunton’s corpus and one that he develops throughout his work. His theology of community touches on the nature of God, the conditions under which we in the West live, the environment in which we are formed, how we witness to the world and who we are called to be as a community of praise, centred around the person of Christ and formed by the Spirit. It is a theology of community that encompasses and articulates dogmatic, ontological and ethical claims which, at its heart, centres around a narrative of freedom: freedom from the forces that enslave humanity, freedom to be the people we are meant to be and freedom for those committed to meaningful relationships with people one might consider as ‘other’. Naturally, there is some overlap between his theology of the Church and his theology of community; Gunton frequently elides the two concepts. However, he also often refers to the theme of koinonia, which he translates interchangeably as both ‘community’ and ‘sociality’, in relation to broader discussions of how human beings are formed as persons and how they should relate in the world.1 It is this emphasis that will be the focus of this chapter. His theology of community is central to what he describes as the ‘most important of all human skills, the art of living before God, with our neighbour and in the created world’.2 Woven through his work is the theme of constitutive relatedness – we are who we are only in relation to others. This phenomenon is first and foremost rooted in the being of God.3 The persons of the Trinity are constituted as persons in relation, and as God is the ground of our being, this tells us of something that is universally true of human existence: we too are beings in relation and are constituted in and through the relations that form us. So foundational to Gunton’s vision of community is the nature of God. ‘Human community is the gift of the God who is himself communion.’4 Accordingly, Gunton argues that Christian communities must be shaped by our concept of God as triune. The Trinity speaks to us both of oneness and threeness, unity and relation, and The term ‘sociality’ is one Gunton borrows early on from Daniel Hardy and continues to use throughout his corpus. See Colin E. Gunton, ‘The Church on Earth: The Roots of Community’, in On Being the Church: Essays on the Christian Community, ed. Colin E. Gunton and Daniel W. Hardy (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1989). 2 Colin E. Gunton, Father, Son and Holy Spirit: Toward a Fully Trinitarian Theology (London: T&T Clark, 2003), 6. 3 Colin E. Gunton, The One, the Three and the Many: God, Creation and the Culture of Modernity. The 1992 Bampton Lectures (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 70. 4 Colin E. Gunton, The Actuality of Atonement: A Study of Metaphor, Rationality and the Christian Tradition (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1988), 200. 1

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thus provides us with a framework for understanding how we should relate to God, the creation and one another. In this chapter, I focus on the connection that Gunton makes between the Trinity and community, how he sees this could and should be lived out and why his work carries the conviction that Christian communities are able to function as the means of healing for a broken and fractured society. I begin with the theological foundations of Gunton’s thinking on community and then discuss the ramifications of those theological foundations for concrete relations as they are developed in his work. In order to trace these themes, and to understand why Gunton argues that it is only through and within Christ-centred and Spirit-formed communities that human beings might find healing, restoration and freedom, it is necessary first to outline the problem of society, as Gunton saw it, and then to touch on his theology of atonement by way of background to his main argument.

THE MODERNIST MALAISE To understand the sense of urgency that shows through, at times, in Gunton’s work on community, it is necessary to understand his trenchant critique of modern Western society that colours much of his writing. This critique is expressed most explicitly in The One, the Three and the Many, in which he deals with what he sees as the fragmentation of modern society due to the displacement of God. In his view, this fragmentation is characterized specifically by the collapse of sociality, which has led to dislocation, disengagement, isolation and rootlessness. We in the West, enthralled as we are by extreme individualism and a libertarian view of freedom, have lost sight of our need of others as a foundational reality for healthy human existence. The pursuit of independence and self-fulfilment has usurped interdependence and the care of others as a primary goal. Gunton identifies a number of deleterious results of these developments. The result of living only for ourselves is that we are no longer present and available for others; ‘rather, we use the world and others as the route to our individual self-fulfilment’.5 The corollary of this mode of existence is the instrumentalizing of those with whom we are in relation. We use ‘the other as an instrument, as the mere means for realizing our will, and not as in some way integral to our being’.6 Another discernible effect of the modernist malaise is the collapse of diversity in contrast to the celebration of difference. The irony, as Gunton identifies early on in his writing, is that the liberal modernist project, which surely was at least partially intended to encourage society to tolerate otherness and difference, so often collapses into forms of intolerant totalitarianism. Thus, he deplores the state of the modern Western world where in our search for individualized freedom, we have submitted to the homogeneity of liberal totalitarianism, in which real difference and dissent are so often quashed.7 For Gunton, therefore, the modern crisis is, at heart, a theological one. He writes ‘that, by adopting the doctrine that freedom is freedom from

Gunton, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, 13. Gunton, The One, the Three and the Many, 14. On this point he refers to Charles Taylor’s theory of ‘disengagement’. See Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 155. 7 Ibid. 5 6

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God and our neighbour, the modern world has entered a slavery far greater than that ever experienced in the Christian era’.8 Once the problem has been framed in these terms, then the disintegration of community is not simply a societal problem to be remedied by the restitution of shared meals, clubs and social gatherings. It is a specifically theological problem for which there is a theological remedy. The antidote to the disorder, dislocation and fracturing of modern Western society lies in the restoration of Christian communities that are able to provide people with a theological understanding of why we need others to be ourselves, specifically why we need the constraints of the existence and care of others laid upon us by God in order to live a truly ‘free’ existence. As he states simply, ‘I need you – and particularly those of you who are nearest to me – in order to be myself.’9 Importantly, Gunton expands this further, beyond our nearest and dearest, to include our need of those who are truly different and other, and who, he argues, play a crucial role in establishing both unity and particularity within human communities. The solution, then, to the crisis of modernism is Christian community or sociality, and for this he appeals to the doctrine of the Trinity, which we will come to below. Before we do, however, I wish to highlight one particularly prominent aspect of his atonement theology, namely, the victory metaphor, as this serves as a foundational metaphor for how he understands human communities in Christ and the Spirit to be a source of healing and restoration.

A VICTORY METAPHOR As we have seen, closely connected to Gunton’s view of the modern disordered society is his perspective on freedom and where true freedom for humanity really lies. The irony for Gunton is that the modern person’s purported freedom is, in reality, a form of slavery. This enslavement is a spiritual problem with practical and tangible outcomes. The modern rejection of God is not a neutral development but is marked by the self-serving pursuits of extreme individualism, the instrumentalizing of others and a distorted or counterfeit account of freedom. Following George Caird, one of his teachers at Mansfield College in Oxford, Gunton describes this as a descent into idolatry that ultimately leads to the enslavement of humanity by forces of evil, by which he means the forces that ‘hold human life in subjection’.10 Once we worship that which is not God, we subject ourselves to powers that, because they are not divine, eventually operate demonically.11 These powers can be psychological, social, economic, political and cosmic. In Intellect and Action, Gunton discusses how this negative spiral into bondage to sin reaches its nadir with reference to the slavery of addiction, citing the example of Coleridge in his helpless addictive state where he finds himself literally enslaved, in a very real sense against his will, to the physical and psychological conditions of addiction.12 Thus with reference to the worst conditions that human beings can be thrown into, he writes, ‘We are speaking, then, of extreme cases of moral enslavement, alienation or depravity which

Colin E. Gunton, Intellect and Action: Elucidations on Christian Theology and the Life of Faith (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2000), viii. 9 Gunton, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, 14. 10 See Gunton, The Actuality of Atonement, 58–60. 11 Ibid.,  70. 12 Gunton, Intellect and Action, 164–5. 8

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are not adequately characterised by subjective, psychological or moral language alone. The demonic person is so bound up with the universe that there results a slavery which is metaphysical and not simply moral.’13 Crucially, Gunton explicitly makes the link between the rejection of God and the disintegration of community and the descent of humanity into destructive forces beyond itself, from which human beings then become unable to extricate themselves. In the light of the growing awareness in recent years of the link between addiction and loneliness, isolation and dislocation, as well as the visible slide in our culture into gaming, pornography and social media addictions, Gunton’s reading of Western society’s ills appears prophetic. This particular discussion in Gunton’s work, however, is conducted in relation to the saving acts of God and how God responds, in Christ, to the ‘helplessness of human agents in the face of psychological, social and cosmic forces in various combinations’.14 In this regard, Gunton stresses the victory that Christ has won for humanity over the forces that oppress us. One of the key elements of this victory is Jesus’ resistance to temptation that occurs in his humanity in the power of the Spirit, thus cementing Christ’s full identification with our human condition. In addition to this, the ultimate victory is not won by a show of might and power, but through the weakness and vulnerability of God in Christ, who suffers and is crucified for our sakes. It is through the cross of Christ, most specifically through the power exercised in weakness, that humanity is given victory over demonic forces and the human plight is healed.15 Critically for our discussion on sociality, Gunton sees this victory in Christ as only fully realized for humanity in and through concrete forms in community. In other words, the realization of this victory is not overly spiritualized, individualized or seen to be won somehow only in a cosmic sphere. It is only within the diverse community of believers that the renewed Christian existence can be lived out and only in that context that human beings are able to come to be what they are meant to be. Thus, we see that human beings are not simply passive recipients of God’s saving actions. The transformation of the human life begins with Christ, but men and women are called to become active agents in the dynamic of the Spirit’s renewing work in the world, mediating grace one to another. Gunton writes, ‘particularly in a culture which has for the most part rejected the Christian way, it is plausible to argue that only on the basis of the distinctive form of community can effective Christian life take shape in the world’.16

SIGNS OF A REDEEMED COMMUNITY Without idealizing Christian community, Gunton outlines the possibilities for a redeemed community in Christ to provide a healing place for all people, and so to be a witness to the world. In order to do this, he focuses on a few recurring themes that he enumerates as the marks of a Christian community. In order for these to be realized, the community must be centred around Christ and the Spirit. Thus, in terms of identity and calling, the community is called to be a people who continuously offer praise to their creator. In addition to this, it is a community of truth, where love and forgiveness of one another,

Ibid.,  69. Ibid.,  70. 15 Ibid.,  81. 16 Ibid. 13 14

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bearing with one another’s sins and reconciliation are lived out. This is the way of freedom. He sums up: How far is it possible for the church to be a community that both tells the truth and enables human people to live by the truth in the world, in at least relative freedom from the idols of our time? The calling of the community of reconciliation is to be those who learn to live in the creation as creation, as gift: in the space won for the life of the world by the victory of Jesus. Thus and only thus will it be able to open up space in which others may find freedom.17 Thus, we locate Gunton’s theology of community in his assessment of the modern problem for which Christian community is the solution. For Gunton, Christian community begins with salvation in Christ. This then has tangible implications for human being in relation and is completed by the work of the Spirit, who works through others for our formation into Christlikeness. This work of God both elicits and requires a response in the covenant commitment of God’s people, first to Godself and then to one another. It is in this context that Gunton’s Trinitarian mapping of the nature of God onto the nature of community makes sense, in that it cannot be divorced from the saving work of Christ, the forming work of the Spirit and the response of the people of God.

THE TRIUNE GOD AS THE FOUNDATION OF COMMUNITY We now turn to Gunton’s understanding of the Trinity as the foundation of his theology of sociality. This particular aspect of his work on community is not uncontroversial in that recent years have seen a questioning of the method of extrapolating patterns for community life from the inner life of God. Notwithstanding current discussions, Gunton’s appreciation of and emphasis on the tri-unity of God constitute in his own work a valuable springboard for a fruitful theology of Christ and the Spirit, which in turn underpins his theology of community in a generative and coherent manner. Gunton argues that the triune nature of God tells us something about who we are and the conditions under which we will flourish as human beings. This emerges early on in his thinking: ‘May not the actual relations of concrete historical persons constitute the sole – or primary – being of the Church, just as the hypostases in relation constitute the being of God?’18 It was the Cappadocians, according to Gunton, whose major achievement was to create a ‘new conception of the being of God, in which God’s being was seen to consist in personal communion’.19 As much as he celebrates the achievement of the Cappadocians, he bemoans the deficiencies of Augustine’s legacy within the Western tradition – and this on two counts. First, he sees Augustine’s Trinitarian theology as running the risk of implying that there is some being of God anterior to the three persons of God, rather than, as he sees it, the three persons in relation as God.20 Second, he believes Augustine’s

Ibid.,  182–3. Gunton, ‘The Church on Earth’, 70. 19 Colin E. Gunton, The Promise of Trinitarian Theology (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1991), 53. In this regard, Gunton’s appreciation of the Eastern tradition and his theology of communion is greatly influenced by John Zizioulas. 20 Gunton, ‘The Church on Earth’, 69–70. 17 18

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Trinitarian conception has contributed to a Western tendency to depersonalize the Spirit and serves to attenuate the Spirit’s personhood and role in Western theology.21 In contrast, it was the Cappadocians who, in his view, laid the foundations for understanding that the being of God consists in the persons in relation to one another. Thus, he borrows from the Eastern tradition, while also appealing to the theological anthropology of Barth to posit that the constitutive relatedness within the being of God as Father, Son and Spirit is the ground of human being and life. To be made in the image of God is to be endowed with the particular kind of personal reality. To be a person is to be made in the image of God: that is the heart of the matter. If God is the communion of persons inseparably related, then surely Barth is thus far correct in saying that it is in our relatedness to others that our being human consists.22 There are two strands to his thinking relating to the being of God and human being. The first is that being fully and freely human can only be realized in community in relation to others. This is an ontological claim rooted in what he believes to be true of God in his inner being. The second claim, however, is that God in Christ and the Spirit is the agent of transformation of communities so that they may become places of healing and freedom. ‘To be in the image of God therefore means to be conformed to the person of Christ. The agent of this conformity is God the Holy Spirit, the creator of community. The image of God is then that being which takes shape by virtue of the creating and redeeming agency of the triune God.’23 With regard to the first point, it is essential, for Gunton, that Christian community is constituted by distinct and freely related persons, as this mode of relation mirrors the being of God as a continuous and indivisible community of distinct and freely related persons.24 There are some questions as to the way in which the perichoretic unity of the three persons of the Trinity (that the three are one through mutual indwelling) relates to the way in which he describes the persons of the Trinity as relating to one another as ‘other’, but Gunton’s fundamental point is that the Trinity is a dynamic of persons in relation who constitute the other as other, and that this constitutive relatedness speaks to us of fundamental truths about human being.25 Having drawn this analogy, he is also aware that it may not be pressed too far; the analogy of divine to human life is of a certain indirect kind in which the church is a ‘finite echo or bodying forth of the divine personal dynamics’.26 The following passage from his early work represents ideas that he built on and developed throughout his writing: The ecclesiological outcome, so to speak, is that the work of Christ and the Spirit is to create, in time and space, a living echo of the communion that God is in eternity. There emerges a notion of the church as the community that is created and called to

Gunton’s negative appraisal of Augustine is woven throughout his work. This particular critique of Augustine does not remain unchallenged, but again, notwithstanding that Gunton may overplay the extent to which the lack of attention to the Spirit in Western theology can be attributed to Augustine, his basic point – that Western theology needed a more developed pneumatology – stands. 22 Gunton, The Promise, 116. 23 Ibid., 116–17. 24 See both Gunton, ‘The Church on Earth’, 75; and Gunton, The Promise, 9. 25 Gunton, The Promise, 11. 26 Gunton, ‘The Church on Earth’, 69. 21

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be the finite embodiment of the eternal communion of Father, Son and Spirit. The conception is one that has been more influential in the thought of Eastern Orthodoxy than in the various strains of Western Christianity, for a number of reasons, among them the greatest stress laid by the East on the doctrine of the Trinity and that by the West on the legal-institutional aspects of ecclesiology.27 Many of these strands are drawn together and in many respects, culminate, in The One, the Three and the Many where he expresses the hope that he is offering ‘an engaged theology to counter the ideology of disengagement that is the mark of so much modernity’.28 The engaged theology in question is a Trinitarian theology of being, God’s and ours, in which Gunton employs Trinitarian concepts to describe the nature of God and argues that as God is thus constituted, so should human beings relate to one another. Accordingly, Gunton employs the term ‘perichoresis’ to mean that the persons of the Trinity and human persons ‘mutually constitute each other, make each other what they are’.29 Moreover, this constitutive relatedness involves an orientation to the other that constitutes a person in their particularity.30 ‘Our particularity in community is the fruit of our mutual constitutiveness: of a perichoretic being bound up with each other in the bundle of life.’31

THE PRIORITY OF HUMANITY: CHRIST’S AND OURS Although Gunton argues strongly for the constitutive relatedness of human being on the basis of the being of God, his theology of how communities are formed is rooted in the agency of the persons of the Trinity in the world, and deeply rooted specifically in the work of the Spirit. The Spirit is the one behind, before and within the building of community and it is the Spirit’s task to create, shape and perfect the relations that form us into a people who are able to reflect the nature of God. Gunton’s pneumatology is founded upon early accounts of what subsequently came to be known as Spirit Christology. He relies on both Edward Irving and John Owen to develop an account of the work of the Spirit first in the humanity of Christ and then in our humanity, from which he advances a pneumatology that is specifically related to the forming of community. Arguing that the Spirit is the one who empowers, enables and perfects the humanity of Jesus, Gunton draws on Irving and Owen to establish that it is the Spirit who ‘gives due emphasis to [Christ’s] freedom, particularity and contingency: they are enabled by the (transcendent) Spirit rather than determined by the (immanent) word’.32 This account ensures that the humanity of Christ remains authentically human and is not subverted by the immanently operating Word.33 The way in which the Spirit works in the particularity and historicity of Christ’s humanity is the way in which we may expect God to work in particular human communities at particular times in history. In this way, he argues that the perfecting work of the Spirit is free, dynamic, personal and particular in Christ’s life, in an individual person’s life and Gunton, The Actuality of Atonement, 199. Gunton, The One, the Three and the Many, 168. 29 Ibid.,  169. 30 Colin E. Gunton, The Christian Faith: An Introduction to Christian Doctrine (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), 187. 31 Gunton, The One, the Three and the Many, 170. 32 Gunton, ‘The Church on Earth’, 64. 33 Ibid. 27 28

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in human communities. In addition to this, the Spirit is the one who brings humanity into freedom in relation, while also establishing human beings in their particularity. Once we say, however, that genuine freedom is the gift of the Spirit, the whole game changes. The Spirit is on such an account a person, inseparably related to the other persons of the Trinity, indeed, but the one whose distinctive function is to bring other persons into relationship while maintaining their otherness, their particular and unique freedom. It is for that kind of reason that more must be said than that the Spirit is Jesus’ spirit.34 This emphasis on the Spirit as the one who forms and establishes true humanity informs a number of aspects of Gunton’s theology of community and serves to underpin what he sees as the genuine marks of a Christ-centred and Spirit-filled community. His constant emphasis on the work of the Spirit in humanity and as the one who forms the human community as an authentically human community serves to militate against docetic tendencies within theologies of the church. His view is that the predilection among Christians to over-spiritualize either Christian existence or the church itself, or both, can only lead to unhealthy forms of hierarchy and authoritarianism. Gunton contends, further, that a strong pneumatology directed towards humanity will correct this tendency. Second, he argues that this pneumatological cast creates space for theologies of community in which there is no one determined outcome for the shape of any particular community. ‘Has the Church made the mistake of claiming a premature universality for her works and words instead of praying for the Spirit and leaving the outcome to God?’35 The interplay of the Spirit’s perfecting work and the enabled (but not determined), human response becomes a feature of his vision for community, which, in my view, holds enormous potential for theological reflection on what constitutes healthy and wellfunctioning communities in concrete terms.

GRACE AND FREEDOM: UNITY AND PARTICULARITY A key theological theme for Gunton in relation to community is his understanding of grace and how it operates. His concept of koinonia depends upon his understanding of communally mediated grace. Rather than viewing grace as ‘a semi-substantial force either assisting or determining human perseverance causally’, Gunton defines grace as ‘the action of the eschatological Spirit enabling right human response’.36 This, of course, follows from his work on Christ and the Spirit, but the emphasis here, drawing on John Webster, is that grace is ‘imperatival’.37 In other words, grace works in a person’s life as an action of God that carries with it a command ‘in order to confirm the place of the human agent in response to grace’.38 It is this dynamic between God and humanity that confirms human beings first in freedom and then enables them to become those who mediate grace one to another. ‘For is it not a defining mark of grace that it gives due place to the other, and therefore enables the other to be free?’39 So the ‘notion of grace as a form of mediated divine Gunton, The Promise, 136. Gunton, ‘The Church on Earth’, 62. 36 Gunton, Intellect and Action, 146. 37 See John B. Webster, Barth’s Ethics of Reconciliation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 51. 38 Ibid.,  75. 39 Ibid.,  191. 34 35

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action which enables gracious human action, and particularly action in community’ is pivotal in his understanding of community life.40 He sees this as serving to correct both an institutionalized and an individualistic approach to Christian community, both of which yield ‘inadequate ecclesiologies’. If grace is either channelled through the institution or a function of the individual’s experience, it is not a concept that will lead to the kind of liberating relational and interdependent existence that Gunton has in view.41 Thus, grace as an action of the Spirit that forms and establishes the free person as one in relation is central to constitutive relatedness. Through this, Gunton develops the idea that engagement and relationship with the other establish human beings in their particularity and diversity. Gunton does not advocate the collapsing of difference as we immerse ourselves in relationships, but quite the opposite. As we have noted, Spiritled communion, especially with the other, is a goal. However, the concept of bringing others into relation while maintaining their otherness, particularity and unique freedom is the defining feature of Gunton’s theology of community and, indeed, of the theology of personhood that is integral to his argument. He writes, ‘To be a person is to be in particularity and freedom – to be given space to be – by others in community. Otherness and relation continue to be the two central and polar concepts here. Only where both are given due stress is personhood fully enabled.’42

The marks of community In the second half of this chapter, I focus in more detail on some of the concrete particulars that Gunton perceives to be defining features of the communities he envisages and on how he perceives the Christian community as the place in which a fully human life could be realized. As mentioned above, Gunton refuses to idealize the Christian community through any over-realized eschatological vision and, in fact, resists this kind of approach. He is also clear, however, that in his discussion of the Christ-like community, he is not referring only to a future eschatological vision of life together but to a reality that the Spirit is able to bring to birth in realizing the conditions of the age to come in the here and now.43 Moreover, in accordance with his Spirit Christology, he holds a high view of what the Spirit is able to achieve through, in and with humanity in the shaping of community. He develops this anthropology in line with his understanding of the priestly role of believers. The concept of humanity as ‘priest’ in creation is rooted not only in the creation narrative but in Christ’s redemptive work which forms a people to be his ambassadors. This priestly role places Christians (and potentially all humanity) in a unique role as mediators in the perfecting work of God in creation but also as intricately bound up with the creation itself. So first Gunton writes, ‘The human race is given on earth the task of realizing this perfectedness, through our relation to God, through our relation with each other, and through our care of the non-personal creation, which cannot be perfected without us.’44 We see that humanity is given the task of enabling creation’s praise of the creator, which ‘becomes a central part of the human offering of thanks

Ibid.,  190. Ibid. 42 Gunton, The Promise, 71. 43 Ibid.,  50. 44 Colin E. Gunton, Christ and Creation. The Didsbury Lectures, 1990 (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 1990), 96. 40 41

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to God for his creating and redeeming love’.45 However, despite his high view of the centrality of humanity in the perfecting of creation, this is not at the expense or exclusion of the creation’s own relationship to its creator, which has its own life beyond human community. In The Actuality of Atonement he writes of the justifying work of God directed not to human life alone ‘but to that in the context of God’s loyalty to the whole creation. That dimension is taken up in a notion of communion which bursts the limits of human community, and spills over into the rest of the world.’46 It seems to me that these reflections have the potential to contribute fruitful theological insights for current discussions on community and creation care that have come to the fore in recent years. Having surveyed the theological foundations for Gunton’s view of community, we now turn to the distinctive marks of Christian community as Gunton envisages it: love, forgiveness, reconciliation, service and sacrifice.

CHRISTOLOGICAL VIRTUE ETHICS We noted above that Gunton’s theology of community is central to what he describes as the ‘most important of all human skills, the art of living before God, with our neighbour and in the created world’.47 Thus, there is a strong ethical slant to Gunton’s discussion. It is in his discussion of the ethics of community that we get a window on to a deeply held set of convictions, not just about the theological foundations of community but about how those who profess the Christian faith should treat one another and those outside the Christian community. In missiological circles, there is discussion around the process by which those outside the Christian community come to consider themselves to be part of the group and begin to adhere to both the beliefs and behaviour of that group. This is sometimes described simply by the concepts of ‘believe, belong, behave’, with the question being whether those who join the community first believe, then behave and then belong, or whether this takes an entirely different order. The point of this discussion is that our understanding of the process of coming to belong will determine how we go about our mission to those outside the community. Where Gunton’s work informs this discussion is in his response to the question of how a person comes to adopt a Christian way of living and behaving. He does acknowledge the importance of a habitus that has to be learned and understands the value of belonging to the community in order to learn the ways of being from within.48 However, he remains clear that virtue, or the human disposition to the good, must be rooted primarily in the renewing of the mind in Christ rather than mimesis. ‘Our theology of mediation and formation will follow from this: that a Christian ethic must first be conceived as those forms of right action which are enabled to take place by the Spirit as a function of the renewed relation to God taking shape in the community of worship and belief that is the body of Christ.’49 In this sense, I think, Gunton is moving the conversation to a different sphere in that believing, belonging and behaving are all rooted in participation in Christ and the Spirit that brings about its own transformation. Ibid.,  98. Gunton, The Actuality of Atonement, 199. 47 Gunton, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, 6. 48 Gunton, Intellect and Action, 81. 49 Ibid. 45 46

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In making these claims, he does not dismiss all forms of Aristotelian virtue ethics entirely. He is, however, critical of Christian ethical systems that are not explicitly Christologically and pneumatologically informed. In this regard, he questions Stanley Hauerwas and wonders whether Hauerwas’s ethical scheme is more rooted in exemplarism and an implicit Pelagianism ‘which lays upon human agents a burden too great for them to bear?’ He concludes, ‘I leave it as a question, and am, I think, not alone in doing so.’50 Whether he is right to question Hauerwas specifically poses yet further questions that are worth exploring; however, his key point here, going back to the theology of personhood in community, is that the Christian community must move away from ‘the anthropology of pure will that underlies so many modern characterisations of the person’.51 In sum, there can be no adequate virtue ethic apart from a theology of redemption and participation in Christ.52 And from this Christological foundation flows a number of themes related to community: the forgiveness of sins, reconciliation, a life of service and sacrifice, structures of leadership and authority, and knowing others, all of which result in the freedom of the individual in relation.

THE FORGIVENESS OF SINS The idea of the Christ-like, Spirit-led and Spirit-formed community of God mediating the character and grace of God one to another is extended to a number of themes. First and foremost among them is the call on the Christian community to be those who forgive one another’s sins. This begins with the realization that we ourselves are forgiven sinners, a realization that must be ever before us. On this basis, we extend forgiveness to others. Gunton’s atonement theology, predicated as it is primarily on mercy and not punishment, comes to the fore. ‘To be baptised is to enter a community committed to ordering its life by the forgiveness of sins. The concept of the justice of God … is, as we have seen, transformational rather than punitive or distributive.’53 The effect of this transformational revelation of God’s mercy is that we then bear with one another’s sins and faults rather than judge one another. ‘To enter the church is therefore to enter a form of community in which the vicarious suffering of Jesus becomes the basis for a corresponding form of life, one in which the offence of others is borne rather than avenged.’54 The result of the forgiven individual is that she is then set free to forgive others, which places her in a new pattern of relationality in which she becomes truly free.

RECONCILIATION The idea of the community as a place of forgiveness leads naturally into a theology of reconciliation that should be the mark of the genuine Christian community. For this, Gunton draws on Paul’s vision for community outlined in 1 Corinthians, as well as Galatians and Ephesians. Citing Paul’s severe rebuke for the wealthy Corinthians who exclude and oppress the needy at the Lord’s Supper in 1 Corinthians 11, Gunton claims that those who ‘respect economic and social divisions fail to recognise and practice Ibid.,  109. Ibid. 52 Ibid. 53 Gunton, The Actuality of Atonement, 188. 54 Ibid.,  190. 50 51

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the reality of the Supper; correlatively, the proper practice of worship bears fruit in transformed human relations’.55 The worshipping community is one in which all peoples are reconciled and where traditions that bind people into patterns of superiority and inferiority are abolished. Gunton views this as a defining and central feature of Paul’s view of salvation, which he himself also adopts. Thus, with reference to Gal. 3.28, the erasure of tribal, socio-economic and sex-based boundaries in worship is a central feature of the gospel as far as Gunton is concerned and should be evident to those around us in visible ways. In a footnote he writes, ‘It is always illuminating to interpret such expressions as those of Paul’s about being “in Christ” in a social rather than an individualistic or mystical way.’56 Concrete forms of reconciliation and the erasure of privilege do not take place, however, at the expense of diversity. Gunton observes in Paul’s theology a celebration of diversity within the body. First Corinthians 12 ‘is seminal for our conception of what it is it to be in community, for it implies richness and variety, not homogeneity’.57 This unity in diversity is a gift of the Spirit. ‘It follows that as the liberating Other, the Spirit respects the otherness and so particularity of those whom he elects,’58 and so in the work of the Spirit we see both the crossing of boundaries that separate people one from another and the preservation of particularity. We see in Christian community the richness, variety and autonomy that constitute relational dynamism.

A LIFE OF SERVICE AND SACRIFICE In line with the concepts of giving, receiving and sacrifice that are represented in the relation of Father, Son and Spirit, Gunton stresses the value of an ethic of sacrifice at the heart of community as central to the way in which humanity is able to image God. Individuals are called to serve one another within the community, and the Christian community is called to serve others outside their own sphere. The outward focus of the Christ-like community has a missional impulse. ‘And that brings us to the second aspect of exocentricity, that virtues are not for self-realisation, but for the sake of the world. The Fourth Gospel teaches that the love within the community is to serve – its ulterior motive – the divine purpose of bringing all nations into the fold.’59 The language of sacrifice and service is key to Gunton’s picture of community. He employs the language of sacrifice with a warning that ‘it can be, and often has, been used as a means of imposing an ethic of submission on others’ and, therefore, must be used with caution.60 With this in mind, however, his emphasis on service both within the community and to those outside the community is apposite, especially as the main target of this ethic of sacrifice and submission is authoritarian forms of leadership. Sadly, it is an all too familiar story that many of the problems of Christian community arise out of authoritarian models of leadership that call for unquestioning loyalty and submission. Of great importance in Gunton’s work, in terms of practical application, is that he identifies the dangers of autocratic leadership while at the same time holding on

Gunton, Intellect and Action, 117. Gunton, ‘The Church on Earth’, 80 n.41. See also Gunton, The Christian Faith, 131–2. 57 Gunton, The One, the Three and the Many, 184. 58 Ibid.,  183. 59 Gunton, Intellect and Action, 118. 60 Gunton, Christ and Creation, 116. 55 56

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to the ethic of submission as a general rule for all Christians. In other words, the solution to the power that corrupts is not to abandon the idea of submission but to emphasize the need for humility even more, and especially for those in leadership. Of immense practical value then is Gunton’s proposal that communities abolish permanent structures of subordination and leadership and replace them with patterns where ‘the same person will sometimes “subordinate” and sometimes “superordinate” according to the gifts and grace being exercised’. He adds, ‘The concept may be thought to be hopelessly idealistic, but is that because we have so long been in thrall to the inherited stereotype?’61 I would love to see this worked out in practice. All of which is to say that Gunton sees a theology of love, forgiveness, reconciliation, sacrifice and service as a reflection of God’s character that must be worked out in concrete ways. He concludes, ‘Creative subordination to others in conformation to Christ and replication of his manner of being towards others is the form of humanity that lives out the transcendental dynamics of things.’62

A personal touch Despite these hints at some of the practical outcomes of his theology, we find that in general, Gunton deals more in theological frameworks and principles in relation to the formation of community than he does in concrete particulars. This too, I believe, is a theological decision in line with his conviction that the outcomes of Christ-like community should be left to the Spirit. There are glimpses of a deeper candour in his writing, however, when he touches on the nature of personal relations in community and how this might be expressed in real relationships. He is aware, of course, that at the heart of his theology is the idea that we must allow ourselves to be known as we seek to know others. One cannot develop a theology of constitutive relatedness without reference to the ways in which human beings actually relate and come to know one another. This process entails intentionality, vulnerability and a certain realism about what constitutes relationship and how it is developed. In A Brief Theology of Revelation, Gunton discusses the complex dynamic of the way in which human beings become known to those around them, which, of course, is pivotal to our understanding of how communities are formed. In doing so, he explores the different threads that make up the rich tapestry of how we are known and come to know one another. In a rejection of certain forms of dualism, he claims that we do not know each other just as ‘minds’ or ‘souls’ but that our knowledge of one another springs from the multiple signs that are part of our embodied existence: demeanour, gestures, facial expressions, the way we walk, dress, touch. To some extent we control and regulate what is known of ourselves by others, some of the ways we communicate are intentional and willing. In this process, we both reveal and conceal; knowing others is understood within the paradigm of giving and receiving. He writes that even though our eyes are a window to the soul, ‘The eye too, that especially, can hide as well as reveal, and is also a form of mediation that must be read on the basis of gift.’63 At the same time, however, he notes that we also unintentionally (and maybe even unwillingly) reveal still other aspects

unton, ‘The Church on Earth’, 77. G Gunton, The One, the Three and the Many, 226. 63 Colin E. Gunton, A Brief Theology of Revelation. The 1993 Warfield Lectures (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1995), 24. 61 62

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of ourselves. The making known of oneself, therefore, lies not only with the individual. Thus, in addition to the revelation of ourselves as gift to others, we can only really know ourselves as we understand who we are through others’ eyes, and this is their gift to us. Self-knowledge and understanding are also mediated ‘because here too we are beings only in relation, and cannot know ourselves without the mediation of others. Indeed, there is a sense in which for that very reason others often do know us better than we know ourselves.’64 The process of forming real communities is highly complex and fraught with potential difficulties. In this regard, I believe that Gunton’s insights into community, knowledge of the other and self-knowledge have much to offer. Giving oneself to be known involves a willingness ‘to open ourselves up to the other, with all the pain and risk that that involves. It means that revelation is, between finite persons, a reciprocal and conversational process.  … We come to know both others and ourselves as we enable ourselves to be known, as we reveal ourselves and are granted revelation in return.’65 This commitment must be at the heart of any authentic community. However, learning to relate well one to another also requires loving wisdom.66 Part of this is also an essential aspect of the privacy, otherness and particularity of others, even within marriage, so as to allow others ‘room to be themselves’.67 The realism that shines through in this aspect of Gunton’s theology is not only the recognition that we must learn to respect the privacy, otherness and particularity of others but also the acknowledgement that knowing others and authentic relationships must be characterized by the mercy, tenderness and love that are needed for the kind of vulnerability that real relationships entail. Gunton discusses knowing others within a larger framework of a theology of revelation. In the course of this, and in a footnote, he writes, ‘Unless you reveal to me those things that touch your life the most deeply, I shall not be able to know who you are, while it is of the essence of love and friendship that we do entrust our bodies and souls to the tender mercy – an expression used, significantly, both positively and ironically – of others.’68 The ability to do this one for another is part of the gift of the creator Spirit to the world.

Conclusion In sum, Gunton crafts a rich, sophisticated, multifaceted and intriguing theological foundation for Christ-centred and Spirit-led and Spirit-formed communities. Throughout his writing, we see a conviction that these kinds of communities are able to offer the healing and life-giving antidote to the loneliness, isolation, individualism and disengagement of a fractured and broken society. His vision is for communities where individuals are forgiven, known and loved, and in being forgiven, known and loved they are freed from that which has enslaved them and are enabled to become their truest selves. Freedom ‘in Christ’ is a key concept for Gunton and the idea of how human beings become truly free weaves through his work. He constantly wrestles with the idea of whether there can be a unity that respects plurality, or ‘in human terms, individuality

Ibid. Ibid. 66 Gunton, Intellect and Action, 55. 67 Gunton, The Promise, 172. 68 Gunton, The Christian Faith, 51 n.18. 64 65

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and freedom?’69 He founds his conclusions on an unshakeable conviction that freedom does not come from within but is mediated to us by God and others. ‘Freedom is not an absolute, but something exercised in relation to other persons.’70 ‘Freedom is that which others do to and with my particular being, in enabling me to be and do, or preventing me from being and doing, that which is particularly myself.’71 Freedom, then, can only be achieved within sociality, and it is only this mode of freedom that is able to deliver us from our enslavement to modern culture. Thus, the Spirit is the one who mediates life in community and who frees humanity from alienating patterns of relations into ‘patterns of relationality in which one’s true being is realised’.72 As members of communities, we participate in this life of mediated grace. ‘It is an inescapable feature of our human situation that we are freed or enslaved by the way others love or hate us, thus enabling us to become or preventing us from becoming the people we were created to be.’73 The Spirit is the one at the heart of community. He gives us freedom through the gift of the other. Corresponding to this freedom in the Spirit is the God-given freedom to be like God in learning to love even the unlovely. Freedom that takes shape in community, and centrally in the church, which lives from the communion that God is and gives. That, surely, and not some individual endowment with spectacular capacities, is the meaning of baptism ‘in the Spirit’: it is the gift of life with others. Because the Spirit is the one who perfects all the creation, his work is centred on enabling the ordinary, and especially ordinary life in the human body, to be what it is made to be.74 Gunton’s reading of modern society, his emphases on idolatry and freedom from demonic systems, his specific Trinitarian foundations, his theology of atonement, his relentless emphasis on relationality and his negative appraisal of some aspects of Western theology may not win everyone’s approval, but nevertheless, his work on community, developed from the 1980s onwards, has an element of the prophetic within it. Many of Gunton’s insights were prescient, particularly the intuition that within both the church and society, the sense of longing for authentic community would only grow. Correspondingly, we are now seeing both small initiatives and whole movements founded on the notion that the goal of Christian community is not just growth at all costs but growth specifically in functional, healthy and healing communities, regardless of numbers attending. Moreover, his refusal to form a theology and practice of Christian community on any other foundation than Christ and the Spirit has much to say to a church that is seeking answers for a broken and fractured society in which we know that individuals are unable to heal themselves. On the other hand, with the capacity that we are given to be Christ to one another, much lies within the gift of communities. As he notes, ‘We make or break ourselves and each other by the way we live together in the world.’75 Throughout his work is the hope that Christian communities might be places that have learned, by the grace of God, to be places where we are made whole by giving and receiving from one another.

Gunton, The One, the Three and the Many, 21. Gunton, Christ and Creation, 55. 71 Gunton, Intellect and Action, 178. 72 Ibid.,  118. 73 Gunton, The Christian Faith, 45. 74 Ibid.,  156. 75 Gunton, Christ and Creation, 39–40. 69 70

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CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Gunton on theology, ministry and the Christian life ANDY GOODLIFF AND PAUL GOODLIFF

This chapter comes after all those theological themes that concerned Colin Gunton so much – revelation, Trinity, creation, atonement, ecclesiology, modernity and so forth. This sequence might imply that so-called ‘practical theology’, an interest in theological ethics or an existential interest in the living of the Christian faith, necessarily follows these theological disciplines in some form of submission to them, but we suspect that for Gunton, ministry and the Christian life was not an afterthought, but central to his life as a theologian. Gunton, like Barth, would not have recognized the division, in any case, and Gunton’s account of the Christian life was regularly expounded through his preaching. He was a minister of the United Reformed Church (URC) and a member of Brentwood URC, where he preached often1 and served as associate minister. His preaching, indeed, was not secondary to his academic theological work, but rather it was joined intrinsically to it, as is evidenced by the way in which the themes of his doctrinal work often appear contemporaneously in his preaching. Theology, for Gunton, was for the church first and the academy second.2 The development of a doctrinal coherence with both Scripture and the cultural context was for the church’s edification and its living, and the key place this was done, at least in his own life, was through the ministry of the Word. So, the place where we begin to learn how Gunton understood the Christian life is his involvement in the Brentwood congregation that was so much a part of his life, as also in the way he did theology at King’s; both formed a community context in which to think theologically.

He notes in the preface to his first collection of sermons that ‘it is one of the great blessings of my life to have been able to preach to the same congregation for a quarter of a century, in the latter part of the period, approximately once a month’, Colin E. Gunton, Theology through Preaching (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2001), viii. 2 He said, with regard to Brentwood URC, that it ‘has taught the lesson that right theology begins here, where the Gospel is proclaimed by word and sacrament and lived out in the company of others’, Colin E. Gunton, ‘Theology in Communion’, in Shaping a Theological Mind, ed. Darren C. Marks (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), 36. 1

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MINISTRY We observe first that Gunton shows surprisingly little interest in ministry per se, despite being an ordained minister and taking his own ministry with the greatest seriousness. At no point does he provide a theological account of ministry. Gunton grew up in the Congregationalist stream that would join English Presbyterianism to form the URC in 1972.3 He considered himself a dissenter.4 He was an ecclesial theologian. As Bruce McCormack remarks, ‘Colin had to become an ordained minister in the URC before completing the degree – which again said a lot about how he understood the nature of theology, its purpose, its public.’5 And, perhaps because of the Congregational stream from which Brentwood URC emerged into the new United denomination, with its emphasis upon the ministry of every member, Gunton does not develop so much a theology of ministry as a theology of the whole church. The absence of a theology of ministry should not be taken to imply that Gunton was an indifferent minister. Testimony on the website for Brentwood URC says of their associate minister (whose presence endured far longer than most minister’s pastorates of five- or-six-years duration), ‘But to us he was just Colin. The Associate Minister who stepped in during periods of interregnum, who ably chaired the Church Meeting, who was the rock on which the theology of our little church was founded and a friend and mentor to all who knew him.’6 What Gunton does have to say is often negative in its appreciation of ‘the ministry’.7 In The Christian Faith he shows no interest in its leadership or ministry beyond noting how the sacraments were clericalized by being made ‘the focus of ecclesiastical control and aggrandizement’.8 In his essay on the communal life of the church as a finite expression or ‘echo’ of the life of the Godhead, he writes, ‘much ecclesiology has been dominated by monistic or hierarchical conceptions of the Church, whose ontological basis is to be found in either neoplatonism or some other non-personal metaphysic. Where there is no explicitly Christian theological ontology, an implicit and foreign one will fill and has filled the vacuum.’9 In similar fashion, in his Didsbury Lectures, he has apostolic succession in his sights as he writes, ‘Claims to be able automatically to channel the Spirit, through an order of clergy, for example, have led to a false institutionalizing of the Church, while on the other hand the making of the church simply the outer vehicle of an inner experience have claimed too little for the reshaping of social relations which can be expected in a community which is the body of Christ.10

s noted by Christoph Schwöbel in his introduction to Gunton, Theology through Preaching, 17. A Blanche Jenson once asked Colin if he could for the sake of unity accept an episcopally governed body. His response ultimately was to pronounce boldly, ‘I’m a dissenter!’ See Robert Jenson, ‘Afterword’, in Trinitarian Soundings in Systematic Theology, ed. Paul Louis Metzger (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2005), 217–18. 5 Bruce McCormack, ‘Foreword’, in Trinitarian Soundings in Systematic Theology, 2. 6 http://www.brentwood-urc.org.uk/Colin.html. 7 It would be an interesting exercise to see if Gunton ever preached at an ordination or induction service and observe what he said about the ministry on such an occasion. 8 Colin E. Gunton, The Christian Faith: An Introduction to Christian Doctrine (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), 192. 9 Colin E. Gunton, ‘The Church on Earth: The Roots of Community’, in On Being the Church: Essays on the Christian Community, ed. Colin Gunton and Daniel W. Hardy (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1988), 65–6. 10 Colin E. Gunton, Christ and Creation. The Didsbury Lectures, 1990 (Carlisle: Paternoster, 1992), 111. See also Gunton, Theology through the Theologians, 187. 3 4

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PREACHING THE WORD What Gunton does pursue in his writings, with many examples in two collections of sermons, is the art of preaching. The pastoral task of preaching that is both theological and faithful to the Lectionary lay somewhere near the heart of Colin Gunton’s pastoral ministry. In a selection that Gunton himself edited, Theology through Preaching, he notes that the sermons ‘arise out of the church’s year and the pastoral needs of a particular small congregation’ but were ‘selected in order to give as wide a conspectus as possible of the faith which they seek to articulate and commend’.11 Not that Gunton saw himself as a pastoral theologian, per se.12 His starting point was doctrine as revealed in the Scriptures and its development through the history of the church, rather than starting with an experience of living in some way. But through his preaching, theologically and doctrinally, he responded to the pastoral needs of this particular congregation. Sermons include observations such as ‘At Bible study a week and a half ago’ 13 and ‘We know that we must pray for the sick, the dying, the suffering and our rulers … but prayer for the church is, if anything, more important.’14 ‘Today’s subject was suggested by the new URC order for communion which we have been trying out in church recently’15 and, most movingly, a sermon preached at the funeral of his 2½-year-old grandson, confident that ‘God will in his own way transform his frail little body in the glory of the resurrection life, and enable him to be that for which he was made to be.’16 The conversation between faith, a particular congregation and the world informs Gunton’s own understanding of the preacher’s task. In one essay on preaching from the Epistles he writes, ‘Preaching from the epistles is … a matter of bringing the particularities of the literature into conversation with the particularities of our own times, but always within the common framework of the universal gospel as it bears variously on the human condition.’17 It is ‘The acts of God in creation, covenant, the incarnation, death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus Christ and their implications – reconciliation, justification, sanctification – [which] together provide the foundations which underpin both the particular teaching of the writers and the particular preaching of today.’18 The task of preaching is to proclaim what is already given in ‘the great themes of the gospel … And the Spirit is the one who, through the living and ascended Christ, grants

Ibid.,  vii. In the late 1990s Paul Goodliff had completed a book on pastoral care and postmodern culture, and since Colin had been his tutor at Kings’ College while reading for the MTh in twentieth-century systematic theology, Paul asked him if he would write a foreword for that book, Care in a Confused Climate. Gunton responded in conversation by admitting he had initially thought ‘no’ – he was not a pastoral theologian – but after reading part of the manuscript on the train home from central London, and by the time his journey was over, he had changed his mind. The book was sufficiently theological for Gunton to grace it with the foreword and sufficiently pastoral to ‘provide fresh insights into the nature of our world and of the Christian life within it’, Colin E. Gunton, ‘Foreword’, in Paul W. Goodliff, Care in a Confused Climate: Pastoral Care and Postmodern Culture (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1998), vii–viii. 13 Gunton, Theology through Preaching, 122, from a sermon of 1995. 14 Ibid., 202, from a sermon on prayer of 1996. 15 Ibid.; and Colin E. Gunton, The Theologian as Preacher: Further Sermons from Colin E. Gunton, ed. Sarah J. Gunton and John E. Colwell (London: T&T Clark, 2007), 3, from a sermon of 2001. 16 Gunton, Theology through Preaching, 211. 17 Colin E. Gunton, ‘Preaching from the Letters’, in The Lectionary Commentary. Theological Exegesis for Sunday’s Texts. The Second Readings: Acts and the Epistles, ed. R. E. Van Harn (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2001), 626. 18 Ibid.,  626. 11 12

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the connections between teaching and proclamation, then and now, which is the point of the exercise.’19 For Gunton the exposition of Holy Scripture is never an exercise in fundamentalist overconfidence, nor ever an eschewing of contemporary scholarship, but it is always an engagement with the text of Scripture, without which there ‘is a guarantee that we shall get it wrong’, and the ‘promise … that the text will be enabled to speak, not always in ways that can be predicted, but nonetheless really and effectively’.20 This effective enabling of the Scriptures to speak through the preacher, empowered by the Spirit, is everywhere to be seen in the sermons published in Theology through Preaching and the posthumous selection, The Theologian as Preacher. In his sermon of 5 January 1992, the Sunday before Epiphany, Gunton’s text from Rev. 5.11-12 concerns angels, and in asking what angels do Gunton argues that they do the will of God which is to praise him. That does not mean always making a fuss, being seen in all the right attitudes and talking about spirituality, or feeling that we always have to make a lot of noise … it means living our lives so that what we do in our everyday tasks is able to express the praise of the one who sits upon the throne. The angels are not simply there to protect us from making silly mistakes, but, in the words of the hymn, to assist our song, to assist us in the tasks of daily living so that our thoughts and words, our washing up and travelling to work, our gardening and our listening to music, can also share in their own way in the creation’s praise of its maker and redeemer.21 The Christian life is lived out in the quotidian, the ordinary – for Gunton that was particularly gardening and music – and he sees dangers in the overly serious or flamboyant expression of it: these are the dangers of the Pharisee or the charismatic, or those who reject too quickly this life in favour of the resurrection to come. ‘The purpose of the resurrection is food for the Christian journey, not an evasion of life in the body but to bring out its point … stand firm and get on with the Lord’s work.’22 But all that ordinary life finds its focus in the corporate worship of God, where we are truly brought to the Father through the Son and in the Spirit as we hear the word, break the bread and are enabled to respond in prayer and praise … That is why what happens in worship is the centre of life, and why the heart of the Christian life is thanksgiving and praise: praise through and to the triune God, who has called us to share the personal communion that is the heart of his being.23

THE CHRISTIAN FAITH: A SUMMARY OF CHRISTIAN LIVING In one important place, his late work The Christian Faith: An Introduction to Christian Doctrine, Gunton offers a succinct summary of Christian living under the chapter heading ‘The Shape of the Christian life’. He begins with the doctrine of justification – living Ibid. Ibid. 21 Gunton, Theology through Preaching, 33. 22 Colin E. Gunton, ‘Eighth Sunday after the Epiphany, Year C’, in The Lectionary Commentary. Theological Exegesis for Sunday’s Texts. The Second Readings: Acts and the Epistles, ed. R. E. Van Harn (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2001), 231. 23 Gunton, Theology through Preaching, 60. 19 20

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by faith alone, arguing that ‘justification is liberation from the need to make or remake ourselves, and we are remade only through time, and then only partially’.24 Being renewed is not some non-bodily or merely inner transformation but the whole person. ‘The context is eschatological and implies not an instant transformation of one dimension of a duality, but the anticipatory participation in a perfection that will be completed only at the resurrection.’25 The being of the justified is changed, for they are, like the adopted child, ‘brought into a new set of relationships’, with God and with others. All this, he argues, is gift, the work of the Spirit, ‘the righteousness of Christ conferred on those who otherwise would remain unreconciled’.26 The human response to this gift of grace – the response itself always a gift of the Spirit ‘who enables people to become what they will be by relating them to God the Father through Christ’27 – is faith, not ‘the acceptance of credal propositions but a human response which consist of both trust in God and sheer gratitude that past rejection of God’s love is no longer definitive for the status and person of the sinner’.28 Gunton wants to recover a proper place for the work of the Spirit in the Christian life – a more comprehensive role than that supplied by charismatic or Pentecostal expositions. It is the Spirit who enables our praise and as the ‘perfecting cause in respect of God’s eternal being as well as of his creation … [is] perfecter  … of God’s love for the other in creation and redemption’.29 It is the Spirit who enables the church to ‘echo’ the Trinitarian life of God30 as it is oriented to the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, and so shapes the life of the Christian within that community. In a sermon of 1993, ‘Walking in the Spirit’, Gunton writes that we are situated in Christ and ‘by being where we are, we are placed under the authority of the crucified and risen Lord, and that is the work of the Spirit, who has led us here – who has called us to be in the community of the faithful. But … the Spirit does not only place us here. He continues to be the one who forms our lives.’31 In a sermon of 2001, he notes: The Spirit is not a warm feeling, but the Lord and giver of life … Life is a blessed gift, but also a struggle. In the midst of life, we are in death … The life of the age to come, the water that flows from the side of Jesus, the abundant teeming life of the Spirit, comes to us in all kinds of ways, and especially where Jesus is acknowledged and lived. One friend of mine likes to say that the Spirit is to be found as much in routine as in the ecstatic and special, and he is right.32 The interrelation of human response and divine action in the Christian life is focused in baptism: ‘the churchly rite which initiates particular people into the life of the people of God’.33 It symbolizes the death of self-divinizing man (the old Adam) ‘in order that new human beings, men and women living through faith in God, should be enabled to be godlike in the way they were created to be’.34 This establishes new relations with God, Gunton, Christian Faith, 143. Ibid. 26 Ibid.,  144. 27 Ibid. 28 Ibid. 29 Colin E. Gunton, Father, Son and Holy Spirit: Toward a Fully Trinitarian Theology (London: T&T Clark, 2003), 86. 30 Colin E. Gunton, The Promise of Trinitarian Theology (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1991), 82. 31 Gunton, Theology through Preaching, 181. 32 Gunton, Theologian as Preacher, 125–6. 33 Gunton, The Christian Faith, 145. 34 Ibid.,  145. 24 25

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and with a new family of those who live under the discipline of the Word and the table. The life of justification is appropriated in baptism and is ‘a change of status which makes possible a change of heart, from a bondage to the self to the glad service of God, and so it is at the same time a change of being’.35 From justification, expressed in baptism, Gunton proceeds to explore sanctification, which he calls ‘living in the realm of the holy’.36 It is the way of life of the justified, of the baptized and ‘is not primarily the holiness of the individuals within [the community] – though that is a part of it – but that of a people bound together because they share in the life of worship, proclamation, teaching, sharing and good works’.37 Answering the claim made by the religiously serious that justification encourages a frivolous approach to morality (after all, if sins are simply forgiven, why not continue to sin?), Gunton argues that in the Corinthian correspondence Paul shows that freedom from sin elicits a new moral seriousness. The new vertical dimension in the relations the justified are given – the Godward dimension – is worked out in new relationships with others and their consequent responsibilities. Holiness is ‘that calling to be different which is both given to and demanded of the church … Its source is Christ … a freedom to be what one is created to be, a child of God living confidently and unafraid in the creator’s world, even when surrounded and threatened by death’.38 He continues, with implicit reference to the virtue ethics that he develops in reaction to modernism’s technocratic ethics, ‘Holiness is formation through conformation: allowing life to be shaped after the pattern and manner of life of Jesus … shaped in the ways of love.’39 This holy life is one lived after the pattern of the love of God within the setting of a fallen world. It energizes the ‘mission to love the world, including the enemy, again in grateful response to the self-giving of the Son of God’. This is a ‘more risky endeavour, for there is no guarantee that the enemy will not recompense love with hatred. But that is what being like God – being holy – involves.’40 This holy relation to God and its ensuing mission is realized though prayer. Gunton continues with the fulfilment of this holy life in resurrection, and just as the Spirit orientates the Christian life to the past – the death and resurrection of Jesus, and to the present – by the Spirit and within the community of the church, the life of the Christian is being shaped by and conformed to the manner of Christ’s life and death, so the same Spirit shapes the life of the Christian in the future, when ‘God will complete at the end the holiness that is in process, so that the justified will become the perfectly just.’41 Gunton concludes this chapter of The Christian Faith with a brief discussion of the freedom of the Spirit. It is the Spirit, with the Son, through whom the Father justifies, sanctifies and, at the last, raises the dead. God is free (although not absolutely so, as Calvin remarked – God is not free to do evil) and this is expressed in creation, not because it had to be but because he willed it so. God is free in the second sense in the ways in which he achieves the end for which he purposes creation, which is not its ‘natural’ course of dissolution. God perfects creation by calling a community into being that is oriented

Ibid.,  147. Ibid. 37 Ibid.,  148. 38 Ibid.,  150–1. 39 Ibid.,  151. 40 Ibid. 41 Ibid.,  155. 35 36

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towards his Son, and whose sole basis is the free grace of God. ‘The Spirit is the one who gives freedom through community: through the gift of the other. Corresponding to this, freedom in the Spirit is the God-given freedom to be like God in learning to love even the unlovely. Freedom thus takes place in community, and centrally in the church, which lives from the communion that God is and gives.’42 From this summary of his understanding of the Christian life we turn to some important themes explored by Gunton elsewhere: formation, eternal destiny, community and creation.

CHRISTIAN FORMATION Gunton avoids any sense of an over-realized eschatology, in the sense that the Christian life never ceases to be an ordinary human life. Neither does he look to some golden age when the Christian life was somehow easier or exhibited greater purity. In eschewing any idea of a ‘golden age’ when the church was a model of uninhibited discipleship, he writes, We are finite beings, on the way to salvation, moving between the resurrection of Jesus and the completion of our pilgrimage … we stand in a new relation to God. But it does not follow, as we have seen, that there is a magical transformation. The past is not so much wiped out as made into the basis on which a transformed style of living may take shape. The church is the place given by God to be the living space of this new formation but there can be no suggestion that the inherited weight of evil simply disappears.43 The church is, unavoidably, the context for the living of the Christian life, a life ‘where the atoning grace of God is acknowledged and lived’44 and is ‘a God-given community ordered to that purpose’.45 The church and those who live out their discipleship within its community are positioned within a particular context – a particular way of responding to the wider social context. Gunton is certainly critical of the wrong-turns made when the church established its relation to society in terms of Christendom and which resulted in ‘a contradiction at the very heart of Christendom’.46 This prevented it from living according to the Gospel by adopting means of negotiating power and fighting God’s battles for him, things that the very mode of Christ’s victory forbids. But more damaging still is the turn to human self-determination revealed in modernism, and disoriented by these new contradictions, the ‘Christian responses to the modern world vary from puzzled perplexity, through frenetic and overpowering religiosity to an activism which tends to equate the gospel with the most worthy political cause.’47 Here Gunton sees the faithful living of Christian life neither in terms of evangelical or charismatic excesses48 (both are religious

Ibid.,  156. Colin E. Gunton, The Actuality of Atonement (London: T&T Clark, 1988), 175. 44 Ibid.,  177. 45 Ibid. 46 Ibid.,  175. 47 Ibid.,  176–7. 48 In his discussion of the freedom of the Spirit in The Christian Faith, 156, Gunton argues that it is the freedom to love in community that is the meaning of being baptized in the Spirit: ‘Freedom thus takes place in community, and centrally in the church, which lives from the communion that God is and gives. That surely, and not some individual endowment with spectacular capacities, is the meaning of baptism in the Spirit: it is the gift of life with others.’ 42 43

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responses to modernity, after all) nor in terms of adopting a series of social or political causes – many of which are responses to agendas derived from a radical egalitarianism – that attempt to give the church some political relevance. Instead, the Christian life is one that equates truth of life with truth of word: ‘an important claim is being made, that when a community is ordered around the proclaimed victory of the Word of God, its life will, although not automatically or even always satisfactorily, take something of the shape of the victory that is celebrated: it will be informed by it’.49 Proclamation and preaching are the tools that hold before the church the story of its origins in the life and death of Jesus, and which ‘become both the basis for the ordering of church and human life and a way of being in and for the world’. Gunton presents ‘an ecclesiology which seeks neither to be identical with the surrounding world nor to be isolated from it: a church which is, as a distinct community, both in and for (and sometimes against) the world, just as Jesus was’ since ‘only on the basis of a distinct form of community can effective Christian life take shape in the world’.50 The church’s preaching remains merely political unless it orders its own polity according to the victory of Christ on the cross. Central to this harmony between preaching and polity is the practice of forgiveness. Gunton places his discussion of forgiveness in the context of baptism, for ‘to be baptized is to enter a community committed to ordering its life by the forgiveness of sins’.51 The concept of the justice of God is transformational rather than retributive. Where ancient Greek thought held that justice is done by the imposition of equivalent suffering, Christianity held that while humans are truly culpable and responsible for the breach in the universal order, forgiveness creates the possibilities for transformation that mere punishment never can. Gunton writes, forgiveness is creative of human moral possibilities in ways that the alternative, a doctrine of the absolute requirement of punishment and vengeance, is not. There is, indeed, a kind of ‘natural justice’ in vengeance, even in the vendetta. But the gospel is that the cycle of offence and retribution is broken only by something different: by the creative re-establishment of human relations on a new basis. True reconciliation in that sense cannot ignore the past, which otherwise continues to spread its poison … The ethical task of the community of the forgiven … is to live the justice of God made real by Jesus’ bearing of the consequences of human injustice. It is therefore to live the life of the age to come in the present.52 In a sermon of 1994 he puts it similarly, speaking of Judah’s offer to substitute for his brother Benjamin in Genesis 42: ‘That is crucial because it breaks the chain of offence and revenge that so marks our ordinary human ideas of justice, and leads to ever greater wrong until war or some other disaster strikes … Judah overcomes evil with good, denying himself.’53 In a sermon of 1993 addressing what he perceived as the neurotic obsession with decision-making, Gunton rejects the brief (and, by that time, rather old-fashioned) ascendency of situation ethics in favour of the virtues. ‘What is important is that people are formed in the virtues: that their lives are shaped in such a way that they make the

Gunton, Actuality of Atonement, 180. Ibid.,  181. 51 Ibid.,  188. 52 Ibid.,  191. 53 Gunton, Theology through Preaching, 193. 49 50

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right decisions.’54 In turning to the virtues Gunton was an ‘early adopter’ of a way of understanding the forming of human beings that is now widespread and dominant – at least in theory.55 But in his familiar theological way, Gunton does not simply argue for training in the virtues, ‘Now the crucial thing [about the virtues] is not that we develop them for ourselves, though we have a part. It is that they come from walking by the Spirit … [The Spirit] continues to be the one who forms our lives.’56 Gunton continues by arguing that, first, this formation in the virtues takes place in the life of the church. Here we do not choose our company, ‘The Spirit is the giver of community: the teacher of the virtues, the one who joins us in the life of praise with people of different ages and interests, different temperaments and abilities’, so that we ‘develop the virtues in the company of those the Lord has placed in our path.’57 Second, ‘learning the Christian virtues … is being conformed to Christ: having our virtues formed around him, in Word, in sacrament, in life’.58 Gunton is clear that the reason the Christian life needs to be learned, that the virtues need to be cultivated, is that our human condition is sinful. In a sermon preached in 2002 he argues, No Christian belief is stranger to the modern mind than the doctrine of sin. If used at all outside the church, it is used in a jokey way, of sexual relations, betraying an unease with the way they are conducted, but little more. If people offend against the law, statutory, religious or moral, they are unlikely to be classified as sinners. They are either victims of something else, or sick and in need of therapy … Anything that relieves people of their responsibility for what they are and do also relieves them of their humanity, for to be human is to be, among other things, responsible: responsible for what we are in our relations with our maker, and what we do to one another … all, without exception, are sinners.59 Leaving aside Gunton’s dissatisfaction with the weak alternatives to admission of sinfulness in the modern world, what is important for his understanding of the Christian life is its context in a world of sinful humanity. Gunton develops his argument in this sermon by arguing that sin is fundamentally a desire to be our own god – he acknowledges that this is from Barth – and that ‘sin is throwing God’s good gifts back in his face’.60 But unlike many preachers, he does not dwell on the sinfulness so much as the remission of sins. ‘Sin is only known and acknowledged through its remission.’61 There follows a fine exposition of the way in which Gunton understands the role of Jesus Christ in bearing our sins. He pointedly notes from the text from which he is preaching – 2 Cor. 5.13-21 – that God made him to be sin and bear its consequences, death, but ‘notice it does not say that God punished him. Paul’s word elsewhere is that he gave him up, made a sacrifice of him, as we might give up something precious for

Gunton, Actuality of Atonement, 180. Gunton wrote appreciatively of Hauerwas and Yoder, although not uncritically, see Actuality of Atonement, 180–1; and Colin Gunton, Intellect and Action (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2000), 211–31. 56 Ibid. 57 Ibid.,  182. 58 Ibid. See Gunton, Intellect and Action, ‘The virtues … are prominent, but not supreme, among the vehicles of human perfecting … To grow in grace is to develop virtues, provisional perfections,’ 119–20. 59 Gunton, Theologian as Preacher, 152. 60 Ibid.,  153. 61 Ibid.,  154. 54 55

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the sake of someone we love.’62 In this ‘sweet exchange’, ‘He comes to where we are, so that we might be where he is.’63 It is in the forgiveness of sins that we find our true humanity, ‘remission of sins frees us to be simply human, to be those beings who let the love of God constrain us, to use Paul’s way of putting it’.64 And at this point he moves from the theological and biblical truth to the lived experience of his congregation, and every Christian. Concerning the forgiveness of sins, Gunton writes, the remission of sins is not primarily an experience but being transferred to a new realm, to a new authority, a new sovereignty. That is the point of reconciliation, the exchange. We are in a new place, and that is what matters. What counts is not what you feel – though it is good to feel set free from a burden – but where you are.65 There is no sinless existence prior to death, but our sins need not control us, and by the Spirit we meet Jesus Christ in his Word and through his sacraments. Here is no exposition of the Christian life that exceeds the biblical remit in terms of its holiness or perfection; Gunton is very clear about the continuing sinfulness of the Christian. But neither is his exposition indifferent to sin, but he places the emphasis firmly upon its remission and the means of grace – Word and sacrament. Emphasis upon the communal context in which remission is proclaimed is typical of Gunton. The form of life shaped by the gospel will then involve the acknowledgement of faults before God and each other alongside confession that the basis for human living is to be found in a common incorporation into the body of Christ. To enter the church is therefore to enter a form of community in which the vicarious suffering of Jesus becomes the basis for a corresponding form of life, one in which the offence of others is borne rather than avenged.66 The announcement of the sinfulness of humanity is immediately accompanied by the proclamation of the possibility of forgiveness and the transformation thereby of that condition, a transformation only possible within the community of the reconciled, the church.

COMMUNITY AS THE CONTEXT FOR CHRISTIAN FAITH In the chapter on the community of reconciliation in The Actuality of Atonement, the whole emphasis is upon the church as the community formed by preaching the Word, baptism and the Lord’s Supper. Gunton is fiercely critical of the practice of the Lord’s Supper where it is clerically controlled, in particular of the individualism portrayed in either ‘the trail to the altar rail’ where there is a division between an active clergy and a receptive laity; or the Free Church practice of distribution indebted to nineteenth-century individualism (by which he means the individual glasses of wine). ‘What is lacking is a crucial link joining the atonement and the life of the community as a whole in the Ibid. Ibid.,  155. 64 Ibid.,  156. 65 Ibid.,  156–7. 66 Gunton, Actuality of Atonement, 190. 62 63

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context of which the celebration takes place. The deficiency is ecclesiological: we lack a conception of church as the space in which God gives community with himself and so between human people.’67 This is accomplished by the present action of the Spirit mediated through the life of the community as a whole. ‘The incarnate Son pours out his life so that the Spirit may lift unredeemed life into communion with God … the work of Christ and the Spirit is to create, in time and space, a living echo of the communion that God is in eternity.’68 This outburst of the divine life in the community of the church is not restricted to it, however, but ‘spills over into the rest of the world’.69 The Christian life is conceived as a participation in the divine communion, which, through worship and by the Spirit, both provides the space within which the life of forgiveness and love is formed and also has a missiological purpose for the rest of creation, the wider human society in particular. Gunton’s colleague, Brian Horne, recognizes this: ‘What seems to be favored is a kind of free association in the Spirit in which structures are expressive of the kind of community which is created by the relationships of individual Christians who have heard the Word of God … community precedes hierarchy.’70 Gunton himself develops this in regard to John Owen’s pneumatology and ecclesiology, and the insights of the Cappadocians, in arguing for the Spirit’s free personhood.71 We noted earlier that Gunton avoids an over-realized eschatology, and that is nowhere clearer than in his understanding of the church as the community of Christ. ‘A true theology of the church will see it as the place – institution, even – where human life experiences not instant perfection but a new directedness towards community: that is toward the community of the last days which is relationship with the triune God and through that with the other who is the neighbour.’72 Similarly, ‘It is important to remember that what is involved is not instant transformation, but a reordering of teleology or directedness.’73 While the process is never instantaneous, it is, nonetheless, ordered according to the Trinitarian relationships that the church re-images: ‘The one – Godwards – movement is the source and teleology of the second [neighbourly]. And it is in the Spirit as the one through whom the end is realized that the movement in both directions can be seen to take shape. By relating to God through Christ, the Spirit redirects human energies and actions in the world.’74 The Christian life is one where the Spirit transforms and redirects the person in the community of the Church, re-imaging its Creator after the pattern of its Lord, as together it participates in the divine life through Word and sacrament. The word that best describes the human response to this graced participation is praise, closely related to the thanksgiving of the Eucharist. Gunton argues that praise is a whole way of being in the world, and not just what we do when we gather for worship. Drawing on Daniel Hardy and David Ford’s Jubilate: Theology in Praise,75 Gunton says that ‘we must understand basic Christian existence as praise’.76 Far from satisfying a

Ibid.,  196. Ibid.,  199. 69 Ibid. 70 Brian Horne, ‘The Republic, the Hierarchy and the Trinity: A Theology of Order’, in Order and Ministry, ed. C. Hall and R. Hannaford (Leominster: Gracewing, 1996), 10. 71 Colin E. Gunton, Theology through the Theologians (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1996), 187–205. 72 Gunton, Christ and Creation, 111. 73 Ibid.,  110. 74 Ibid.,  111. 75 Daniel Hardy and David Ford, Jubilate: Theology in Praise (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1984). 76 Gunton, Actuality of Atonement, 201. 67 68

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self-congratulatory appetite on the part of God, praise is the movement out of self into glad and free relationship with the other. In other words, praise is not for God’s benefit, but ours: it liberates us from self-preoccupation. ‘The church’s praise is true worship when the Spirit empowers it to offer the first fruits of the redeemed creation to the Father, in water, bread and wine, and, more generally, in words and music.’77 As we shall see, this is intimately linked to creation, and humanity’s place within it, and also to the church: In one respect, that is all the church is for: to praise the one who made us and has rescued us from the domain of darkness into his glorious light. The Christian life is first of all one of thanks and praise to God simply for what he eternally is, just as we are to love our fellow human beings simply for what they are.78

ETERNAL DESTINY What of the destiny of the Christian? First, note Gunton’s understanding of the fate of those who are not, seemingly, among the company of saints. He is critical of those theologies of eternal damnation and torment in hell which have characterized much of the preaching of the church until recently, viewing the metaphors in the Bible that elicit such horrors as just that – metaphors rather than literal outcomes.79 Portraying the pains of hell is mistaken, he argues, for it ‘frightens people into belief, rather than offering them good news of free salvation’,80 and such an emphasis is false to Scripture. The Bible might use images of fire, but ‘it is not meant to be a literal description of hell and certainly not an encouragement to expand on the pain’.81 Rather, Gunton is broadly a universalist, anticipating that the love of God will, in the end, triumph. In the gift of his Son, the Jewish Messiah, in some mysterious way, all will be called into God’s kingdom, whoever and whatever they are. Whether and how far we can refuse, whether any will end up excluded – whether we can choose to go to hell rather than accept God’s gifts – is another question and part of the mystery of human freedom. But the dominant message is this: that all human beings are created to share the love and the mercies of God, and God’s consistency, goodness and justice are demonstrated by his actions enabling this to take place.82 For Christians, by way of contrast, the hope is resurrection. ‘Our lives are indeed fragile, and we move inexorably towards death. But we move there in a world ruled by the sovereign creator who raised from the dead our Lord Jesus Christ, and will in his own time give eternal life to our mortal bodies also.’83 Because of what God has done in Christ, in renewing all things, ‘the present is lived in hope of the final renewal of all things, of the new heaven and the new earth which will take the place of the tired old order’.84 Here

Ibid.,  203. Gunton, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, 85. 79 Gunton, Theologian as Preacher, Sermons preached on All Saints, 1998, ‘Heaven and the Saints’, 49–54; and Epiphany 1998, ‘Eternal Punishment’, 75–80. 80 Ibid.,  49. 81 Ibid.,  50. 82 Ibid.,  79. 83 Ibid.,  9. 84 Ibid.,  51–2. 77 78

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is another major theme and characteristic of the Christian life – it is lived hopefully. This implies also living the life of faith with due seriousness. Accepting the free gift involves a life of moral seriousness. And that enables me to add to the definition of the saints among whom we are: the saints are simply those who accept that victory which is won for them on the cross and set out to realize it in overcoming those features of their lives which do continue to hold them back from full life in the kingdom.85 Gunton illustrates this in an All Saints sermon from the life of one of his teachers at Mansfield College, John Marsh. He notes that John confessed that as he got older he didn’t seem to get any better but continued to be dogged by foibles and weaknesses. ‘The point is, however, that he faithfully travelled the way of Jesus Christ, living only in the light of forgiveness and promise. That, simply, is what it is to be one of the saints, to whose company he has now gone.’86 Again, we note how Gunton balances the requirement that we take our faith seriously, with the fact that the faith so taken is one infused throughout with grace and mercy, and so that it is never a life to be somehow self-created by moral effort. It is God’s promise of life that predominates, not our human efforts at holy living. ‘Hearts are indeed warmed, lives are changed, but are not in this life perfected.’87

THE CHRISTIAN LIFE AND CREATION Gunton pursued a Trinitarian theology of creation throughout his career, from the 1990 Didsbury Lectures and The Promise of Trinitarian Theology88 through The Triune Creator89 to the opening chapter of The Christian Faith and late papers on creation in Father, Son and Holy Spirit.90 Sermons preached while Gunton was developing this theme echo it. Preaching on creation in 2001, he notes how the doctrine of creation reminds us of our complete and utter dependence upon God ‘who made the heavens, the earth and all their furniture. This involves facing the fact that we are fragile creatures, made of the dust of the earth, and that we must die, for we live only so long as God wills.’ Gunton reminds us that it ‘does no harm to remember, all of us, from time to time, that we come out of nothing, and will, apart from God’s goodness, return to it’.91 He makes a similar plea for reliance upon the goodness of the created order in a harvest sermon of 1994, ‘the creator has made a world that … will behave reliably’.92 In a sermon of 1997, entitled ‘The Doctrine of Creation’, he warns against an irrational fear of scientific knowledge, ‘because the God we worship is the Lord of all truth, wherever it is found and by whomever. Scientific, moral and artistic truth, all alike are gifts of the sovereign creator’, as compared, for example, with astrology; Gunton was clear that we should not ‘give an inch to the modern world of astrology’.93 Ibid.,  52. Ibid.,  53. 87 Gunton, The Christian Faith, 143. 88 Gunton, Promise of Trinitarian Theology, 142–61. 89 Colin E. Gunton, The Triune Creator: A Historical and Systematic Study (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1998). 90 Gunton, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, ­chapter 6, pp. 93–106 (originally published in 2000); c­ hapter 7, pp. 107– 26 (originally published in 2002); and ­chapter 8, pp. 127–43. 91 Gunton, Theologian as Preacher, 8–9. 92 Ibid.,  52–3. 93 Gunton, Theology through Preaching, 40. 85 86

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Reliance upon God’s goodness in creation becomes a fundamental attitude of the Christian life, matched by hope in the new creation and resurrection, but it is accompanied by an awareness that the same life in Christ calls for a proper respect for the rest of the created order. The predominant human alternative – exploitation – is sinful and harmful. It is the result of our replacement of trust in God’s promise with self-reliance upon our own resourcefulness: ‘in our modern world, in so many of our enterprises, we do not rely upon the promise of God in scripture, so much as on our own resourcefulness, technological power and determination to dominate nature at all costs’.94 Where human culture is good, it is so because of God’s upholding power, but ‘it is the case that things often take place rather differently, as … the pollution of the ecosystem only too well witness[es]’.95 This is not to endorse, however, ‘an over-anxious obsession with ecology, animal rights, and the rest’ because it ‘parallels the modern human refusal to face the fact of death. Perfection does not come from ourselves lasting for ever or from attempting to make the earth eternal.’96 He similarly can reject the over-industrialization of factory farming, while resisting some of the pretensions to ultimacy of ‘modern representatives of the green movement’.97 The Christian response is to generate ‘an awareness of the penultimacy of all matters to do with this world of time and space, and yet of the capacity that even this penultimate has to praise the God who made it’.98 The clue to the proper response in Christian living towards the creation is to see it as both a gift of God’s goodness and on the way to perfection. Here is the proper locus for ethics. Those written into the Lamb’s book of life are those who eschew ‘abomination and falsehood’, the wrong use of their persons both in themselves and in their relation to others … The end of the creation … comes when it is finally perfected in God’s everlasting kingdom. All human ‘ethics’, all right use of the creation, all offering of the creation to God the Father, perfected through Christ and in the Spirit; in sum, all right habitation of the world God has made and redeemed on the cross of Christ, takes form under that promise, whether it knows it or not.99 So, since ‘Trinitarian theology teaches that the world is destined for an absolute end, for perfection; it is directed to Christ, as it was created through him’, the Christian takes seriously the proper freedom of the creation to be itself and the arena where ‘through the action of the creator Spirit it is enabled to anticipate that end in the midst of time’.100 This is the reason why the relation between theology and science, between humanity and the created order, is ‘an encounter between what makes for life and what for death. Ontology and ethics, creation and redemption, cannot be treated apart from one another.’101 If that is creation’s end, what is its present purpose? It is to praise God, and the means by which it does so is focused by the Lord’s Supper: ‘the means by which the praise of God and the transformation of human life out of alienation and into eschatological Ibid.,  53. Gunton, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, 121. 96 Gunton, Triune Creator, 230. 97 Gunton, Christ and Creation, 126. 98 Ibid.,  124. 99 Gunton, The Triune Creator, 236. 100 Gunton, The Promise of Trinitarian Theology, 158. 101 Ibid.,  159. 94 95

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community are at once symbolized and realized’.102 The role of the Christian here is to enable all creation to praise its maker, in a way similar to the Holy Spirit’s making of the sacramental elements a vehicle for both the creation of human community and the voicing of praise of its maker. Creation  … has an end: that all things may be offered, perfected and transformed, to their creator. The primary offering, just like the primary realization of human community, is made in worship. It follows that unless there takes place a renewal of human relatedness to God, there will be neither true community nor redemption and perfection of the creation … [T]‌he church is the place where we must locate our first account of the reforming image of God.103 In this context, Gunton follows John Zizioulas in ‘a more general ecologically oriented concept of human priesthood’,104 which contrasts with an ‘essentially alienating’ concept of knowledge as control, ‘at or near the root of the ecological problem’.105

CONCLUSION A superficial overview of Gunton’s work might suggest he was too consumed with dogmatic questions to give much attention to the practice of the Christian life. In this chapter we have demonstrated that an account of the Christian life is interwoven throughout Gunton’s theology. Yes, there are areas that could have been given more attention, especially perhaps in a theology of ministry. For Gunton, humanity is creaturely and Christians share that fully, but through the work of Christ and the action of the Spirit, there is a transformed manner of life and a new telos – one that replaces death with resurrection life. This new life is first, and last, encountered in the community of the church, which is the locus of the formation of Christian virtue through the preaching of the Word, and the ‘word’ of the sacraments. It is in the whole community – the body of Christ – that essentially the priestly work of enabling creation to worship its creator, and sustain the world in its beauty and order, takes place. So, Gunton rejects any claims to ontological difference for a caste of Christians called ‘priests’ or ‘ministers’. Perhaps this is one of the weaknesses of Gunton’s account, for, coming from its congregational tradition, it does not take seriously enough the role of the minister of Word and sacrament to enable the whole community to fulfil its priestly function.

Gunton, Christ and Creation, 115. Ibid.,  115. 104 Ibid.,  120. 105 Ibid. 102 103

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CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Gunton and Irenaeus DOUGLAS FARROW

‘It is my view’, writes Colin Gunton, ‘that Irenaeus is a model for all systematic theologians.’1 Why? Not merely because the late-second-century bishop of Lyons is the first to offer something like a systematic theology or that he does so in a way that subordinates it to scripture and the baptismal confession, that is, to the divine economy rather than to some Archimedean point provided by philosophy. And not merely because he helps to shape the orthodox Christology of the councils, which in fixing boundaries for Christian thought enables it ‘to say interesting and penetrating things about God and man’.2 For of course there are other significant shapers of orthodoxy on which to draw and many later theologians of greater sophistication who have interesting and penetrating insights to offer – Anselm, for example, and Barth, whom Gunton aligns with Irenaeus over against the rather curious trio of Origen, Aquinas and Schleiermacher.3 Nor merely for Irenaeus’s remarkable capacity, observed by Emil Brunner, to perceive connections between truths and to show how one belongs to another, which is the very business of theology insofar as it means to be systematic.4 Irenaeus is certainly a model in all these ways – in him the discipline of theology gets off to a powerful start – but he is a model, perhaps the model, for several other reasons as well. Three of these warrant attention. First, Gunton thinks that Irenaeus exemplifies the theologian who recognizes, and rises to the task of addressing, a challenge that goes to the heart of things, that threatens the Church at its core; who remains centred on the gospel of Jesus Christ and refuses to be driven along by the winds of culture or to be deceived by the vagaries of human experience.5 Second, he thinks Irenaeus nonetheless exemplifies theological balance in that he gives proper weight to each of the creed’s three articles, achieving a unity of ktisiology, soteriology and eschatology that remains unsurpassed; that he has managed a union without confusion of the doctrines of ‘creation, recapitulation, and consummation’ which even the likes of Anselm or Barth did not achieve.6 Third, Colin E. Gunton, ‘Historical and Systematic Theology’, in The Cambridge Companion to Christian Doctrine, ed. Colin E. Gunton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 15. 2 Colin E. Gunton, Yesterday and Today: A Study of Continuities in Christology (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1983), 182. 3 Ibid.,  181. 4 Colin E. Gunton, Theology through the Theologians: Selected Essays, 1972–1995 (London: T&T Clark, 1996), 8; cf. Colin E. Gunton, ‘A Rose by Any Other Name? From “Christian Doctrine” to “Systematic Theology”’, International Journal of Systematic Theology 1 (1999): 9, and Colin E. Gunton, Intellect and Action: Christian Theology and the Life of Faith (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2000), 65. 5 Gunton, ‘Historical and Systematic Theology’, 14. 6 Colin E. Gunton, The Triune Creator: A Historical and Systematic Study (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1998), 52, 62, 168; cf. Gunton, ‘A Rose by Any Other Name?’, 9. 1

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he thinks that what Irenaeus finds in the Church’s common baptismal confession, in its specificity and within its boundaries, is the open Trinitarian space that allows God to be God and the human creature to be genuinely creaturely on its way to God. In brief, he thinks Irenaean theology alert and timely, intricate and balanced, faithful and capacious. He thinks Irenaeus able to see the parts in the whole and the whole in parts, while resisting any Euclidean temptation – those abstractions or rigid formulae by which theology too often tries to tie God’s hands and to foreclose on the humanity of man.7 To these latter three ways, I want to add a fourth, which appears to be missing and has some bearing on any assessment of Gunton’s own model; for reading and thinking with Colin Gunton is of course quite different from reading and thinking with Irenaeus. But let me attempt first some elaboration of those just mentioned.

THE RIGHT STUFF For a man of peace, Irenaeus was a keen controversialist. He was a controversialist, however, not for the thrill of intellectual combat but for the sake of the Church. Gunton admired him as a man who could recognize and respond to a crisis of faith, who could put his finger on the underlying causes and, in doing so, bring good out of evil by producing a richer and more winsome account of the faith. The crisis in question was produced by the advance of Gnosticism. Irenaeus was not slow to grasp the common denominators in that quite disparate set of religious movements belonging to the second century, which were united in their denigration of the God of Moses and all his works. He knew that they were really essaying a root-and-branch attack on Jesus and the gospel. In response he undertook two mammoth tasks: patient description of them in their dizzying variety – a description designed to display their true character as agents of chaos – and the organization of a coordinated answer that would make Christians aware of the depth and breadth and persuasive power of a genuinely biblical world view. Thus was born systematic theology as a Church discipline, in both its critical and its constructive mode. Of the practice of systematic theology as also a university discipline – the ‘also’ is crucial, since there is nothing worthy of the label theology, as distinct from what used to be called first philosophy, that is only a university discipline – Irenaeus knew nothing, for the Church had not yet invented the university. Gunton, for his part, knew nothing else; theology for him was at once ecclesial and academic. But he discerned the resurgent Gnosticism of the twentieth century, which in various guises had already occupied the university as a base of operations from which to assault the Church.8 That is one reason why he attracted so many students, who recognized in him a scholar capable of pursuing the task of description (not only of errors and heresies but of insights and advances) and of undertaking a theological response that could hold its own in the university. And for both purposes he turned regularly to Irenaeus, as already at the conclusion of Yesterday and Today, though only in earnest during the 1990s. Irenaeus was able to help him make clear that theology ‘ceases to be Christian’ where it ‘ceases to remain true to its boundaries’, where it no longer recognizes its credal obligations;9 and that, within those boundaries,

Gunton, Yesterday and Today, 178–9; cf. Gunton, ‘A Rose by Any Other Name?’, 8–9. Gunton, The Triune Creator, 225–8. 9 Gunton, Intellect and Action, 1; cf. Haer. 4.38-9. 7 8

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it is a more potent enterprise than the urbane, historically learned, but deracinated and deracinating kind of theology common in the academy and, increasingly, in the Church as shaped by the academy.10 Much of this Gunton had already learned from Karl Barth, of course, but in Barth’s theology he did not find quite so rich an affirmation of created goods as he found in Irenaeus, whose ‘defence of the goodness of the material creation is without equal in the history of theology’.11 Arguably, that limitation in Barth can be put down in large part to the fact that he had to confront resurgent Gnosticism chiefly in its neo-Arian and anti Trinitarian dimension. At all events, Gunton knew that Barth’s contribution to the revival of robust Trinitarianism and his thoroughly Christocentric view of creation and redemption were crucial to any resistance to contemporary forms of Gnosticism. He knew that Barth, too, had a Trinitarian doctrine of recapitulation in Christ. The Irenaean notion of recapitulation, however, seemed to take more seriously the distinct value of the creaturely in its own God-given goodness and freedom. It was Christocentric without risk of the Christomonism to which Barth’s doctrine of election and his revision of Chalcedon’s two-nature doctrine tended.12 Moreover, it was Trinitarian without the filioque anxieties that divided the mediaeval tradition and pushed moderns in the direction of German idealism and of process theology. Irenaeus, if I may put it this way, was neither Barth nor Hartshorne.13 He was able to speak more effectively than the former of a reinauguration of ‘the project of creation’ in and with Jesus, a project being carried out by the Father as originating cause, the Son as creative or effective cause and the Spirit as perfecting cause, as St Basil would later phrase it.14 At the same time, he was able and willing, as Hartshorne (like the German idealists) was not, to ponder that project without collapsing God himself into it. He was therefore useful to Gunton’s own desire to show two things: first, that theology was no private confessional enterprise, in which ‘confessional’ really means extra-rational or even irrational, but rather was open in principle to the whole panoply of human arts and sciences, from gardening to chaos theory; and second, that the kind of philosophy and theology being done by many who profess such openness was secretly despairing of the diverse riches of creation and engaged in furthering an ultimately oppressive monism. Irenaeus, in other words, sat nicely in the middle of the ellipse formed between Gunton’s doctoral thesis and his Bampton lectures. He also fit well into his ecumenical work with the British Council of Churches and into his dialogue with John Zizioulas, through which his critical engagement with the Western tradition was enhanced by a (not uncritical) appreciation of the Eastern.

Herewith a personal note: If memory serves, I first began discussing Irenaeus with Colin Gunton in 1989, as I worked on drafts of what would become the crucial third chapter of my dissertation. Oscar Cullmann, on whom I had written a master’s thesis, had already interested me in Irenaeus (cf. Douglas B. Farrow, Ascension and Ecclesia: On the Significance of the Doctrine of the Ascension for Ecclesiology and Christian Cosmology (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1999, 76 n.133)), but it was in the spirit of Gunton’s remarks in Yesterday and Today (178–9) and with his encouragement that I took up the task of studying Against the Heresies in earnest. For that encouragement, as for so much else, I am deeply and gratefully indebted to him. 11 Gunton, The Triune Creator, 62. 12 See Douglas B. Farrow, ‘Ascension and Atonement’, in The Theology of Reconciliation, ed. Colin E. Gunton (London: T&T Clark, 2003), 66–91. 13 The two subjects of Gunton’s own doctoral work, published in 1978 as Colin E. Gunton, Becoming and Being: The Doctrine of God in Charles Hartshorne and Karl Barth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978). 14 Cf. Gunton, The Triune Creator, 86 and 164–5. 10

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Increasingly, the doctrine of creation, approached with Irenaeus in Trinitarian terms, became the focal point of Gunton’s work, as the following remark illustrates: The real weakness of the Western tradition is that neglect of the trinitarian mediation of the doctrine of creation enabled gnostic elements to enter the bloodstream of theology. After the achievement of Irenaeus, no mainstream Christian theologian has entirely succumbed to the heresy he repudiated in so splendid and thoroughgoing a manner. The creator of the whole world, material and spiritual alike, is the one God and Father of the Lord Jesus Christ. Jesus’ recapitulation, in the flesh, of the human story is also a recapitulation of the cosmic story, and at once reverses the fall and re-inaugurates the project of creation. However, since that time Irenaeus’ affirmation of the goodness of the material world has come to be qualified in a number of ways inimical to his wholeheartedness.15 Things were not entirely otherwise in the East, of course. Had they been, communism, a remorselessly brutal form of materialism intended to supplant Christianity and to remove every cultural trace of it, could never have taken hold there as it did. Whether here or there, creaturely space in its relational and political dimensions was collapsing under pressure of ideological monisms of one sort or another.16 Such is the bitter fruit of any theology that divorces the stuff of this world from the economy of salvation, rather than reckoning with the implications of the triune God’s self-investment in creaturely time and space for the way we ourselves inhabit the world. In At the Roots of Modern Atheism Michael Buckley had pointed to the loss of Christological reasoning during the early nominalist era. Gunton believed that the problem went back much further. Under the influence of pre-Christian Greek philosophy theologians had quickly begun attenuating ‘the positive concern for living in time’ that follows naturally on the Irenaean approach, succumbing instead to ‘a false eternalizing of the divine economy’ that tends to neglect of the temporal realm. Modernity took advantage of that to sever the connection between theology and life in the saeculum altogether. This false eternalizing, and equally false appropriation of the divine economy in the form of secular absolutism, is ‘both modernity’s and Christianity’s tragedy’.17 Schleiermacher’s theological aggiornamento can be offered in evidence of the unfolding tragedy, for his Irenaean-like interest in temporal development is in thrall to a doctrine of absolute dependence that unfortunately reduces the divine economy to an eternal vanishing point. Even in Barth, the problem is not fully overcome. The divine selfinvestment in time through the incarnation comes back into focus, to be sure. Moreover, Barth maintains a better balance between creatio ex nihilo and divine providence than does Schleiermacher, avoiding the latter’s conflation of the two into a timeless relation of dependence. Yet he himself leaves too little room for contingency and for free creaturely action as enabled by the Holy Spirit. His theology in the end is one-handed. It is a Ibid.,  168. Witness in the West our equally remorseless assault on Christianity, on conscience and on the body itself, through aggressive policies promoting abortion, homosexuality and transgenderism; of the impact of such anthropological moves, with their theological correlatives, Gunton (as I know from personal conversation) could speak emphatically of a status confessionis. 17 Colin E. Gunton, The One, the Three and the Many: God, Creation and the Culture of Modernity. The 1992 Bampton Lectures (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 84. The other side of this coin is nicely articulated in Gunton, Intellect and Action, 111. ‘For Irenaeus, the overall consistency of God’s actions in the economy is rooted in his triune being; we might say, his acts flow from his eternal character.’ 15 16

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backward-looking doctrine of election that comes to the fore in Barth, at the expense of a forward-looking gospel of resurrection with its promise of perfection of all creaturely goods. The pneumatological dimension of creaturely goodness is neglected. What is required, suggests Gunton, is a better integration of Christology and pneumatology in describing the creature’s relation to God, permitting an attendant focus on the human creature’s relation to other creatures, on the relation ‘of the gardeners to the garden’ and to one another as fellow gardeners. For it is the Spirit’s role to enable creatures, beginning with Jesus himself, to be and to become who and what they ought to be.18 It is especially in the doctrine of creation, then, that Gunton wants to take Irenaeus as a model, because his proto-Trinitarian theology enables him to elaborate ‘both the material context of salvation and the eschatological orientation of creation’ and to bring all this to bear against gnostic dualism with its denigration of the present world.19 If God is the creator of all things, visible and invisible, he is the creator of time and space as the basic forms of the creaturely, as he is of matter and spirit. And if creator, also sustainer and perfecter. Gunton thought Irenaeus particularly admirable for ‘writing a positive estimation of temporality into his doctrine of creation’. That the temporal is not eternal, that the creaturely is not divine, does not make it defective. It does not even make it inferior in the sense that it is not, or does not rise to, what it ought to be. Temporal being, per definitionem, takes time to be, but it is good that it be, and that it come to be what it ought to be in just that fashion. That is true of man and of every creature. Irenaeus thus ‘thought together man and nature, the human and the cosmic’,20 making possible a theology that is neither dismissive of science or art or philosophy or politics or human culture generally, nor yet bound by them in a fashion that takes Christ captive or in any way constrains the liberty of God. Especially in the doctrine of creation? Only when we remember that Irenaean ktisiology is already (by an exchange of properties, so to say, with Christology and pneumatology) an eschatology. Since man is the creature who comes to be what he ought to be by partaking of the life of God, by participating in that divine eternity which is not the opposite or enemy but the source and friend of that which is temporal, man for the time being, and the rest of creation with him, is in receipt of his substance only according to a provisional form. When in the company of Jesus Christ there are finally real and perfect humans, as Irenaeus says, the whole creation will be refashioned as a theatre fit for the true partaking of God that makes (and will ever keep) man real. The things among which humans have grown old, rather than growing up, the things that have been subjected to frustration and become a theatre of death and dissolution, will be renovated as the theatre of eternal life.21 That is the proper work of the Spirit, and for it recapitulation in Christ is the necessary precondition. Recapitulation is a gathering up, redemptively and transformatively, of what belongs to man22 – a gathering up that is also an opening up. Its whole purpose lies in prising man Gunton, The Triune Creator, 192; see 179. Colin E. Gunton, Christ and Creation: The Didsbury Lectures, 1990 (Carlisle: Paternoster, 1992), 97; cf. Gunton, The One, the Three and the Many, 159 n.5. ‘Denigration’ remains, even in modernity, an appropriate descriptor, though ‘degradation’ might be even more appropriate. 20 Gunton, The One, the Three and the Many, 81. 21 See Haer. 5.36; cf. Farrow, Ascension and Ecclesia, ch. 3. 22 The seriousness with which Irenaeus took the idea of recapitulation is evident, for example, at Haer. 2.22.4: 18 19

For he made himself a Master for us in everything pertaining to the human condition, not despising or evading any condition of humanity, nor setting aside in himself that law which he had appointed for the human race, but sanctifying every age, by that period corresponding to it which belonged to himself. For he came to save all through means of himself … the Prince of life, existing before all, and going before all.

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open to the Spirit of life through whom he is deified, through whom man becomes not only the image but the glory of God. It is for the sake of such a man that creation will be transformed from its provisional condition, in which it has known corruption, into its permanent condition, in which it will know eternal increase. Gunton never tired of repeating the meme that man is moulded by both hands of God, not one only. In Irenaeus, the Christological is not at the expense of the pneumatological or vice versa; nor is one article of the creed ever expounded without reference to the other two, as if the work of Father, Son or Spirit could be divided or their persons separated. That he maintains this intricate dialectic is what makes him such an excellent model. There is something else, however, that we must not overlook here. Gunton believes that Irenaeus’s two-handed theology releases theology from bondage to a doctrine of emanation and return, of the creaturely mediation of being, of a chain of being. The triune God himself mediates being and all that belongs to being through the incarnation of the Son and the gift of the Spirit. This view of mediation, which Gunton contends is at the centre of Irenaean thought, makes for perhaps the ‘greatest ever’ contribution to the theology of creation.23 It combines with Irenaeus’s seminal exposition of creatio ex nihilo to establish both divine freedom and its creaturely analogue, while allowing neither of these to drift off with the nominalists into the realm of pure arbitrariness and hence into the irrational. Because the incarnation, effected through the obedience of the Son and perfected through the Holy Spirit, is at the very core of creation, all creation lies in God’s hands directly and immediately. On Gunton’s understanding of this point, hierarchies of being fall away; hierarchies of grace likewise.24 Beings may be granted greater or lesser roles in the cosmos and in the cosmic drama, but they all have their being in the same way. They are willed by God and made by God, sustained and perfected by God. The lesser members may even be clothed by God with a greater glory. The purpose and function of each, the intrinsic value of each, is open to human inspection and appreciation. That humble, attentive, grateful perspective is threatened, argues Gunton, by ‘Platonizing’ approaches such as those of Origen or Augustine, and by other Greekinfluenced approaches such as that of Aquinas or of Ockham and his heirs.25 While all Gunton, The Triune Creator, 52 (cf. 2). Gunton, Theology through the Theologians, 144; cf. Gunton, Intellect and Action, 184. The gnostic intermediaries are dismissed in favour of a God free to act directly on creation:  23 24

It was not angels, therefore, who made us, nor who formed us, neither had angels power to make an image of God, nor any one else, except the Word of the Lord, nor any Power remotely distant from the Father of all things. For God did not stand in need of these [beings], in order to the accomplishing of what He had Himself determined with Himself beforehand should be done, as if He did not possess His own hands. For with Him were always present the Word and Wisdom, the Son and the Spirit, by whom and in whom, freely and spontaneously, He made all things. (Haer. 4.20.1) Wherever faith in this God is lacking, suggests Gunton, ‘some logical or ontological – and hence necessitarian – link tends to be posited instead’, limiting both the freedom of God and the corresponding freedom of man (Gunton, The Triune Creator, 52 and 95; cf. Colin E. Gunton, The Christian Faith: An Introduction to Christian Doctrine (Malden: Blackwell, 2002), 187.). 25 Gunton tends for convenience to run these alternatives together, even where they ought to be distinguished. On the other hand, he does not address the fact that the Platonizing element he finds in Augustine, viz., an appeal to divine ideas as patterns (cf. Katherine Sonderegger, Systematic Theology: Volume 1, The Doctrine of God (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2015), 386, 412), seems also to be present in Irenaeus, who in 4.20.1 immediately goes on to say that God takes from himself ‘the substance of the creatures, and the pattern of things made, and the type of all the adornments in the world’. Only rarely does he criticize both men together, as when he traces back to Irenaeus Augustine’s fault in ‘substantializing’ the imago Dei (Colin E. Gunton, The Promise

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of these have had both positive and negative effects on theology and culture, they have shown themselves incapable of sustaining the health of either in the face of temptations to belittle this or that feature of what God has made. Hence Gunton posits of Irenaeus that ‘we shall not go far astray if we use him as a measure against which to assess prospective accounts of the economy’, whether traditional or modern.26 Irenaeus, to his great credit, supplies us with ‘essential clues for the reshaping of the tradition that is necessary alike for Christian theology and for culture, opposed as they both are by varieties of gnosticism’.27 To that reshaping Gunton directs his own energies as a constructive controversialist. Irenaeus has the right stuff, and Gunton wants to put it back to work.

A FALSE CONTRAST ‘I do not wish to idealize Irenaeus’, insists Gunton, ‘but to use his insights to reveal certain indispensable resources available in the doctrine of creation for the development of our theme of human life in the world.’28 These insights, to sum them up, enable us to resist ‘contamination of the Christian doctrine of creation by Greek teachings of the ontological inferiority’ or defectiveness of matter and the tendency to stack up intermediaries that insulate God from the world.29 They also enable us to resist modernity’s tendency to deify its own constructs of space and time, collapsing the distinction between creator and creation in a smothering immanence that tends to totalitarian utopianism. His grasp of creatio ex nihilo and of the work of recapitulation sends us down a different path altogether, on which is discovered a creator free from and for creation, and a creation in which it is possible to live freely from and for God. Steeped in scripture, while seeking to ‘see things whole’30 and display the grandeur of the gospel as an antidote to error, St Irenaeus sets a high standard for theology from the very outset. No one who reads Irenaeus attentively and sympathetically, as Gunton does, will want to dispute this. It may be allowed, however, that his use of Irenaeus remains rather formulaic. There is not, on the surface, much in the way of patient exposition of Irenaean texts or sustained engagement with his arguments. Moreover, the key idea of ‘trinitarian mediation’ is somewhat underdeveloped. Its ontological and cosmological and anthropological implications are more readily posited than explained. Nothing emerges by way of explanation that might answer, say, to what Augustine attempts in De Trinitate. Yet Augustine appears, equally formulaicly, as a negative model, a kind of anti-Irenaeus who allows metaphysics to overcome the divine economy and unity to triumph over triunity, which suggests that both men are being idealized, one positively and the other negatively, for the sake of a contrast that may be heuristic but is hardly fair, a contrast that actually militates against seeing things whole, even (as we shall see) in reading Irenaeus.31 of Trinitarian Theology (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1991), 105; cf. Gunton, The One, the Three and the Many, 52). This charge cannot be made to stick, however, and against Irenaeus is quickly dropped, as should be the case also with Augustine, for whom the ‘perfection of the trinitarian image is reserved for the full sight of God who is the Trinity’ (John Edward Sullivan, The Image of God: The Doctrine of St. Augustine and Its Influence (London: Priority Press, 1963), 142; cf. Trin. 14.15). 26 Gunton, The One, the Three and the Many, 159. 27 Ibid.,  2. 28 Ibid.,  53. 29 Gunton, The Triune Creator, 93. 30 Gunton, Theology through the Theologians, 15. 31 In Ascension and Ecclesia I myself made of Origen a kind of anti-Irenaeus, which indeed he is in the matter there at hand; on Augustine I was also very hard – much too hard, as I later came to see.

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Now some think Gunton’s brand of Trinitarianism problematic, a claim they connect both to his Barthian caution regarding independent reasoning about the unity of God and to the general drift, in the wake of Barth, towards something like a social concept of divine personhood – however unsatisfactory such a concept to Barth himself or, indeed, to Gunton – that deviates from the mainstream tradition. They do not, for the most part, connect it to his preference for Irenaeus, though they do remark his dislike of Augustine and Aquinas.32 What is wanting on both sides is an attempt to mediate the insights of Irenaeus, which focus on the economy, and those of the latter two saints, which in different ways tend to the metaphysical. Such an attempt is far from futile, for every serious Christian thinker knows that the revelation contained in the economy must revise (I do not say ‘negate’) the deliverances of first philosophy in the direction of a communion ontology of some sort.33 As Edmund Hill observes, Augustine himself attempts a synthesis of the economic and the metaphysical – Hill, not without reason, thinks it masterful34 – which in subsequent tradition sometimes gives way to approaches in which the economic is obscured. Gunton pins the blame for that directly on Augustine and argues for a return to Irenaeus in remedy of the West’s ills, but he would have done better to attempt to mediate between them and so to shore up the synthesis. For his part, Hill makes the mistake many patristic scholars make: treating Irenaeus as a whistle-stop between Justin and Tertullian, when he is rather a main hub, theologically speaking, one not even on the Subordinationist line that Augustine rightly wanted closed down. Happily, that is a mistake Gunton avoids, yet he spends too little time appreciating Augustine, who himself spent too little time, if any, appreciating ‘the famous Irenaeus’ (as Basil refers to him in De Spiritu Sancto). The desired mediation, if it is to be accomplished, will be accomplished by those who regard the differences between these two great fathers as more contextual than substantive – who do not see the Irenaean and the Augustinian models as opposed but rather as complementary.35 Differences will at times amount to contradictions and so to choices between mutually exclusive options, but that ought not to be the default position, The concern about Gunton’s putatively modern Trinitarian personalism is not, in my view, as pressing as some suppose, though it is important both as a question about communion ontology and as a question about the relation between dogmatic and natural theology. Barth’s worry about the latter, by the way, was much attenuated in Gunton, who knew on the one hand that philosophical reasoning has its place in theology and on the other that there can be no legitimate possibility of reading the first article of the creed, which is also a matter of natural theology, as if it were merely a matter of natural theology. He may not have been quite as clear that this is not what Augustine and Aquinas are doing when, like Irenaeus at Haer. 2.6, they treat the existence and unity of God as something philosophically accessible. 33 Of what sort remains an important question, of course. Paul Cumin has argued that Gunton moved gradually away from something more abstract towards Zizioulas’s approach, which grounds the being of God in the person of the Father, while giving that approach a filioquist twist, as it were, by emphasizing the perfecting role of the Spirit in the determination of the personhood of the Son (Paul Cumin, Christ at the Crux: The Mediation of God and Creation in Christological Perspective (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2014), 183; cf. John D. Zizioulas, Communion and Otherness: Further Studies in Personhood and Church, ed. Paul McPartlan (London: T&T Clark, 2006), ch. 3). Might this suggest already the beginning of a mediation? 34 St Augustine, The Trinity, Introduction, translation and notes by Edmund Hill O.P. (New York: New City Press, 1991), 56. 35 In Irenaeus’s day, the monarchian controversy was not yet full blown and it was not yet necessary to insist, against both the subordinationists and the modalists, ‘When I say “God”, I mean “Father and Son and Holy Spirit” ’ (Gregory Nazianzen, Or. 38.8). But that is just what Irenaeus did mean by ‘God’, and Augustine also. The latter’s observation that hypostasis was only a word chosen for a task, a word not to be pressed in any way that might undermine the unity of God (Trin. 7.7; cf. Augustine, The Trinity, 44), in no way implies that he sat lightly to the threeness of the persons or to the economy by which the Trinity acts and is known to act. 32

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as it appears to be in Gunton, whether in the doctrine of the Trinity or in the doctrine of creation. Recalling especially De Civitate Dei, together with De Trinitate the fruit of Augustine’s mature thought, it is simply not viable to think that Augustine’s synthesis somehow undervalued creation or life in the world as we know it. He leaves little to Irenaeus respecting the freedom of the Creator or the glories of creation. Consider, for example, this passage: Therefore God supreme and true, with His Word and Holy Spirit (which three are one), one God omnipotent, creator and maker of every soul and of every body; by whose gift all are happy who are happy through verity and not through vanity; who made man a rational animal consisting of soul and body, who, when he sinned, neither permitted him to go unpunished, nor left him without mercy; who has given to the good and to the evil, being in common with stones, vegetable life in common with trees, sensuous life in common with brutes, intellectual life in common with angels alone; from whom is every mode, every species, every order; from whom are measure, number, weight; from whom is everything which has an existence in nature, of whatever kind it be, and of whatever value; from whom are the seeds of forms and the forms of seeds, and the motion of seeds and of forms; who gave also to flesh its origin, beauty, health, reproductive fecundity, disposition of members, and the salutary concord of its parts; who also to the irrational soul has given memory, sense, appetite, but to the rational soul, in addition to these, has given intelligence and will; who has not left, not to speak of heaven and earth, angels and men, but not even the entrails of the smallest and most contemptible animal, or the feather of a bird, or the little flower of a plant, or the leaf of a tree, without an harmony, and, as it were, a mutual peace among all its parts; – that God can never be believed to have left the kingdoms of men, their dominations and servitudes, outside of the laws of His providence.36 Stylistic features aside, and a few other telltale signs, one hardly knows which of the two one is reading. While it is true that Augustine is not as Christocentric in his reasoning about the world as Irenaeus is, and that he is open to criticism on that score, it is quite unfair to laden him with sub-Christian notions of necessity, on the one hand, or of divine arbitrariness on the other; that is, with faults that later appear among the nominalists. Christologically mediated and pneumatologically effected forms of care and provision that enable creatures to reach their proper end, such that protology includes teleology and teleology eschatology, are by no means neglected.37 Neither the freedom of God nor the freedom of man is neglected, or the relation between the two. In many respects these things receive fuller or more elaborate theological treatment and philosophical justification, albeit with diverse arguments and forms of argumentation, just as one would expect.38 A less formulaic use of both men is called for, then, and a decidedly more sympathetic reading of Augustine. (The same goes for Aquinas, who suffers a like fate at Gunton’s iv. 5.11, trans. Marcus Dods (NPNF-CE1.2, 93). C No Christian thinker, nor any Platonist, nor any Gnostic, can fail to think together protology and eschatology; the only question is how it is done. 38 Think, for example, of Civ. 5.8, where Augustine attacks Cicero for having a God too small, a God unable to intervene and supply the freedom Cicero desires. Or the seventh book, where Varro’s enchanted cosmos is first disenchanted then re-enchanted, precisely by distinguishing between the mutable and the immutable in such a way as to leave room for the mutable to be and become what it is meant to be, by the free gift of God. Or Civ. 11.21 and 22.24, which again offer beautiful encomia to creation and the Creator. 36 37

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hands.) Such a reading must inevitably expose gaps and weaknesses in Gunton’s own approach that require correction, as his critics, both Protestant and Catholic, have maintained.39 One of these gaps or weaknesses is already evident in his handling of Irenaeus, whose notion of Trinitarian mediation does not exclude creaturely forms of mediation, whether angelic or ecclesial. What it excludes is only mediation of a sort that is not designed by God, providentially overseen by God and brought to unity under God through the recapitulating work of Christ.40 Once this principle is understood, many suppositions about the differences between Irenaeus and the shapers of Latin theology fall away. The Irenaean world view opens up to features explored by later patristic or mediaeval theologians and to staples of ecclesiology in both the East and the West. Neither that world view, nor the model for thinking theologically that Irenaeus offers us, is quite so readily stripped down to suit what, even in Gunton, appear to be modern Protestant sensibilities.

THE MISSING FEATURE It was suggested earlier that the one who is theologically liberal considers himself free to ignore credal boundaries; free, indeed, by ignoring them or by seeking to change them. The one who is liberally theological, on the other hand, thrives gladly within them, having discovered that they lead to broad and well-watered pastures, in which creaturely time and space is recognized for what it is and rightly ordered to the One who provides and maintains it. But where, we must now ask, is the liturgical time and space in which the creed itself has opportunity to operate, in which we ourselves are rightly ordered? It is clear in Irenaeus (far more so than in Gunton) that we require that particular time and space which by grace opens on the new creation; that the creed itself emerges only with and from it, as the baptismal confession is deployed doxologically. The ground for naming and knowing God as the triune God, the God who is Father, Son and Holy Spirit, is liturgical ground, and this liturgical ground is theology’s own ground. We say that knowledge of the immanent Trinity can be had only through the economy, but the liturgy belongs to the economy as the most critical locus of God’s personal action on and in creation during the present age. To ignore this is to fail to inhabit the Great Tradition, in which the lex orandi is the lex credendi.41

See, e.g. Bradley G. Green, Colin Gunton and the Failure of Augustine: The Theology of Colin Gunton in Light of Augustine (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2011); or Stephen R. Holmes, The Quest for the Trinity: The Doctrine of God in Scripture, History and Modernity (Downers Grove: IVP, 2012). Against the excesses of the critics, see Robert W. Jenson, ‘A Decision Tree of Colin Gunton’s Thinking’, in The Theology of Colin Gunton, ed. Lincoln Harvey (New York: T&T Clark, 2010), ch. 1; but Jenson misrepresents Augustine, who had already rejected a crucial feature of his intriguing but misguided Trinitarian project, in which the Son is the essentially visible member of the Trinity – a thesis to which neither Irenaeus nor Gunton held (Trin. 2.14-15; cf. Augustine, The Trinity, 40). 40 Where angels are concerned – Gunton, like Barth, has little to say of angels – see Haer. 2.2. That text plainly indicates not only that all things are given the nature suited to them but that all remain instruments in God’s hands. As when a man uses an axe to fell a tree, we say that the man, not the axe, felled it, so also, when God uses an angel or a man or any other creature to effect his will, we say that God did whatever was done. We do not deny his use of the mediator but deny only that he required it, rather than it requiring him. 41 Not just any proposed lex orandi, of course, but the Church’s very own lex orandi (cf. Douglas Farrow, Theological Negotiations: Proposals in Soteriology and Anthropology (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2018), 133). 39

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When in his Epideixis Irenaeus describes the process of knowing God, he describes it in terms at once credal (§6) and liturgical (§7): 6. This then is the order of the rule of our faith, and the foundation of the building, and the stability of our conversation: God, the Father, not made, not material, invisible; one God, the creator of all things: this is the first point of our faith. The second point is: The Word of God, Son of God, Christ Jesus our Lord … who also at the end of the times, to complete and gather up all things, was made man among men, visible and tangible, in order to abolish death and show forth life and produce a community of union between God and man. And the third point is: The Holy Spirit, through whom the prophets prophesied, and the fathers learned the things of God, and the righteous were led forth into the way of righteousness; and who in the end of the times was poured out in a new way upon mankind in all the earth, renewing man unto God. 7. And for this reason the baptism of our regeneration proceeds through these three points: God the Father bestowing on us regeneration through His Son by the Holy Spirit. For as many as carry [in them] the Spirit of God are led to the Word, that is to the Son; and the Son brings them to the Father; and the Father causes them to possess incorruption. Without the Spirit it is not possible to behold the Word of God, nor without the Son can any draw near to the Father: for the knowledge of the Father is the Son, and the knowledge of the Son of God is through the Holy Spirit; and, according to the good pleasure of the Father, the Son ministers and dispenses the Spirit to whomsoever the Father wills and as He wills.42 That the Son comes from the Father through the Spirit, and the Spirit from the Father through the Son; that the Spirit in turn leads us to the Son, while the Son presents us to the Father: such is the Father’s two-handed grasp of man that liturgical life constantly rehearses and renews. It is no accident, then, that at key junctures Irenaeus brings the baptismal or the eucharistic liturgy to bear in his instruction of the faithful and in his refutation of the heretics. For the theologian, this means not only that he must avoid error on any point in the threefold naming of God but also that he must reckon with the liturgical ground of that naming. If he is not self-critical in this way – that is, if he does not subject himself to the Church, to that ‘community of union’ established by the living God as the pillar and ground of the truth – he is bound to err and can hardly help the Church remain faithful and true. He cannot even begin to help except by way of his own faithful participation in the liturgical knowledge of God.43 Gunton allows that for Irenaeus ‘life in the community’ is indispensable, and that in its sacramental dimensions it is vital to authentic image-bearing.44 Grounded in his own United Reformed community and ministry, he sets all four ‘desiderata’ of Acts 2.42 ahead Epid. 6–7 (trans. J. A. Robinson, SPCK 1920) elaborates Haer. 4.20.5:

42

For man does not see God by his own powers; but when He pleases He is seen by men, by whom He wills, and when He wills, and as He wills. For God is powerful in all things, having been seen at that time indeed, prophetically through the Spirit, and seen, too, adoptively through the Son; and He shall also be seen paternally in the kingdom of heaven, the Spirit truly preparing man in the Son of God, and the Son leading him to the Father, while the Father, too, confers [upon him] incorruption for eternal life, which comes to every one from the fact of his seeing God. See Epid. 100; cf. Mt. 28.16, 1 Tim. 3.15. Direct appeal to the Eucharist is made especially at Haer. 3.17-18, 4.17-18, 4.33 and 5.1-2; to ecclesial authority and communion in the truth at 1.9-10, 3.1, 4.26, 4.32, et passim. 44 ‘Just as the Holy Spirit makes the sacramental elements into the vehicles at once of the praise of God and of the creation of human community, so the human calling is to enable through that same Spirit all the creation to praise 43

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of dogmatic and systematic theology as the primary context thereof.45 He can even say that ‘to live under the discipline of the Word and the Table is to be the one whose way of being is altered’.46 Yet, if there is a certain abstractness in his treatment of Irenaeus or any hesitancy to follow his lead, it shows itself especially here: first, in that the universal authority of the Church in matters of faith and praxis is not quite so readily acknowledged; second, and more specifically, in that the eucharistic note is necessarily muted.47 In Irenaeus, the Eucharist is the place where divine mediation and creaturely mediation converge, where divine and creaturely freedom converge. It is the place where the being of man is established as a being in communion, where it is made evident that the image of God is neither a universal nor a private possession, residing entirely in this or that faculty of man or even in the whole man, but rather a matter of life in the Spirit.48 While John Zizioulas, say, has no difficulty developing these motifs, Colin Gunton does, since he must try to affirm them without reliance on a robust view of the Eucharist and of the eucharistic conversio.49 Near the end of Yesterday and Today Gunton remarks that ‘loss of the concrete history of God with man has always entailed a collapse into a kind of Gnosticism – salvation by knowledge – and thus the transmogrification of Christianity into its opposite’.50 But theology not eucharistically grounded has already experienced that loss and begun that transmogrification. Salvation by knowledge becomes its stock in trade, until it subsides into that ideological monism and reductivist activism against which Gunton laboured. Hence it is imperative that the missing feature of his model theologian be restored.

EUCHARISTIA Let us approach this from another angle. Gnosticism does not take hold by some more or less benign neglect of the economy. It takes hold by way of the sin of resentment

its maker’ (Gunton, Christ and Creation, 115; cf. Gunton, The Promise of Trinitarian Theology, 112; and Gunton, The Triune Creator, 52). 45 Gunton, ‘A Rose by Any Other Name?’, 20. 46 Gunton, The Christian Faith, 146. In Intellect and Action he refers to Irenaeus’s ‘eschatological ecclesiology’ as essential to ‘the anthropology we are seeking’ (114) and seems a little less comfortable with sacramental nominalism. Here in §29 and §30 of The Christian Faith, he even arrives at an ‘eschatological conception’ of sanctification and justification that is remarkably close to that of the Catholic Church, though he does not say so. 47 ‘I hope’, says Augustine, ‘no one in his senses will take sides against reason, no one who is a Christian against the scriptures, and no man of peace against the Church’ (Trin. 4.10). A Reformed theologian, however, unlike Augustine and that man of peace, Irenaeus, reserves a right to take sides against the Church. So, for example, Gunton challenges the findings of the Sixth Council by making out the dual wills to be those of the Father and of Jesus rather than those of the eternal Son, willing together with the Father, and of the incarnate Son. See Gunton, The Christian Faith, 109. Or again, he sides with Irving, Barth and Torrance on the Virgin, accepting their conclusion that the Son assumed from her our fallen humanity, rather than the humanity which in us is fallen but in him, and in her because of him, is not. See Gunton, The Triune Creator, 223-4.; cf. Haer. 3.21-2. No doubt there is a connection between these two errors, in which the new Eve is not differentiated from the old and the new Adam remains implicated in the old – left to resolve the problem of sin from within the situation of sin by an exercise of human will alone, albeit a human will aided by the Spirit – and sacramental nominalism. 48 One of the main burdens of the final book of Adversus haereses is to show, if we may put it this way, that the imago is to be located ultimately in personhood and not simply in the faculties that serve personhood, that is, in man as rendered communicant in the divine life and love by the two hands of God. 49 See again Haer. 5.2. See further John D. Zizioulas, Being as Communion: Studies in Personhood and the Church (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1985), a work Gunton never engaged in its totality. On the eucharistic conversio, cf. Douglas Farrow, Ascension Theology (London: T&T Clark, 2011), ch. 5; and Farrow, Theological Negotiations, chs 5–6. 50 Gunton, Yesterday and Today, 179.

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and the evil of despair. As the story of Cain and Abel illustrates, it is difficult to disentangle sin from resentment, resentment of one’s fellow man and so also of his Maker; or, in the devil’s case, direct resentment of God and of the need to be pleasing to God in order to be pleasing at all.51 The lava of resentment, both diabolical and human, produces an ever-increasing mountain of rage and suffering that disfigures creation and fuels despair. What is Gnosticism, at bottom, but the rationalization of resentment, the induration of despair, through systematic denial of the goodness of the Creator, the creation and creaturehood? And if that be so, surely the only effective alternative, the only antidote to Gnosticism, is eucharistia. A eucharistic theology is just what Irenaeus offers; thus no account of him as a model theologian that overlooks this feature will do. Moreover, since eucharistia is not just any kind of thanksgiving, but thanksgiving of a very peculiar kind that takes place through, with and in Christ – since it is corporate and liturgical, perichoretic and personal – not just any account of that will do but only an account fully attuned to the ecclesial character of eucharistic man.52 Elsewhere, at the conclusion of his essay in Theology through the Theologians on the nature of dogmatic theology, Gunton (with an eye on English theology in particular) contrasts not Irenaeus and Augustine, but Coleridge and Newman. There he ventures by way of mediation that ‘what is needed to engage with the challenge of the end of modernism, if it is the end, is a combination of Newman’s firm hold on tradition with Coleridge’s willingness to engage with any thought that came his way’.53 That was Gunton’s own instinct, and indeed his method in trying to revive English theology under the conditions of postmodernity. He faults Newman, however, together with the Oxford Movement, for failing to do justice to certain thoughts about God and creation that came the Church’s way through the Reformation. The criticism is not altogether misplaced. But one question Irenaeus raises for heirs of the Reformation is whether a firm hold on the tradition remains possible where the eucharistic dimension is obscured or even disappears; where theology’s privilege and burden of giving a coherent account of the divine economy, and of the God whose economy it is, stops short of an account of the Church in its own recapitulating function and character; where theology’s focus therefore shifts from the history of God with man and man with God, first to history in some idealist sense, then to history as a record of raw power struggles; where theology’s raison d’être threatens to dissolve altogether in the acids of resentment that today are called ‘diversity’ and ‘autonomy’.54 Gunton’s attraction to Irenaeus tells of his own resistance to all this and to the neoGnosticism that underlies it. His use of Irenaeus helped arm that resistance and still does, particularly in Reformed and Evangelical spheres. There was and is more than a little of the spirit of Irenaeus in Gunton. Yet if, by divine providence, Irenaeus arose as the Church’s primary champion against Gnosticism in its original form, becoming f. Sir. 10.6-18, Mt. 22.34-40, and Augustine, Civ. 14:13. C One notes that Irenaeus is put to work already in the first chapter of Lumen Gentium, a document that represents an emphatic turn to the economy (cf. Aidan Nichols, O.P., Conciliar Octet: A Concise Summary of the Eight Key Texts of the Second Vatican Council (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2019), ch. 3. Would that he had been put to better use in Gaudium et Spes, where indeed he is misused at §26 through decontextualized references to Haer. 3. 53 Gunton, Theology through the Theologians, 32–3. 54 I am not suggesting that these acids have no effect on those who are not, or not directly, heirs of the Reformation; far from it (see further Farrow, Theological Negotiations, ch. 7). 51 52

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the prototypical Catholic theologian, he did so precisely as one who learned to operate theologically in the liturgical time and space in which the credo itself operates. That is where the theologian must operate if he or she wishes to see things whole. So the question remains and may be put again, in another way, to those who have taken their lead from Gunton: How far do they, how far do we, really mean to be Irenaean?

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Gunton and the Cappadocians DEMETRIOS BATHRELLOS

I am writing this chapter in order to pay tribute to Colin Gunton, a great theologian and a great man. It may be not entirely out of place to mention that I have been the only Greek and the only Orthodox doctoral student that he ever had. In the extensive theological family of King’s College, consisting largely of English-speaking Protestant and Anglican professors and students, I arrived as a stranger and I was an exception. This uniquely enables me to bear witness to Gunton’s Christian hospitality, academic integrity and ecumenical sensitivity. Not only did he take the risk to undertake the supervision of a student from ‘a far country’, with academic credentials whose value it was difficult to ascertain, but also treated me and my tradition with exemplary respect. This had probably to do not only with the aforementioned qualities of his character but also with his love for both the Greek classical culture, which he had studied at Oxford, and the Greek patristic tradition – especially its largely Cappadocian Trinitarian doctrine, at the heart of which lies, as he kept arguing, respect for particularity, diversity and communion. I find it very apposite that a chapter on Gunton and the Cappadocians is included in this volume, especially as it is authored by somebody who has not merely some acquaintance with Gunton’s Trinitarian theology but also some first-hand experience of how this theology shaped his personality and his life.

INTRODUCTION Colin Gunton had a deep respect for the Christian tradition in all its forms. His oral statement that ‘whoever knows only one Christian tradition knows none’1 is a testimony to his comprehensive approach to Christian theology. Among all traditions, however, Colin Gunton held the patristic tradition especially dear. His references, for example, to Irenaeus and the Cappadocians bear witness to this as much as his engagement with modern Orthodox theology, which largely stands on the Greek patristic soil. Gunton’s approach to the patristic tradition, however, was not uncritical but selective and creative. As he was not a patristic scholar, he did not attempt to delve into the technicalities of

This statement was made in the late 1990s during a session of the Research Institute in Systematic Theology at King’s College London, founded by Colin Gunton and Christoph Schwöbel and which Gunton led for a number of years. 1

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patristic dogma. He was interested in the creative reception of patristic insights that could enrich contemporary Christian theology. And he was able to discover several insights of this kind in the work of the Cappadocians. In this chapter we will discuss the reception of the Cappadocians by Colin Gunton. In order to do this, we will need first to present the Trinitarian theology of the Cappadocians,2 on which Gunton drew. Then, we will show how Gunton received the theology of the Cappadocians. Finally, we will attempt to assess this reception as well as point to ways in which it may have been better shaped.

THE NICAEAN BACKGROUND AND THE CAPPADOCIAN REVOLUTION3 The ad fourth century was widely marked by the life-and-death battle of Christian theology against Arianism, namely the doctrine that the Son of God and the Holy Spirit were mere creatures of God the Father, who alone (μόνος)4 was true God. During the early period of the controversy, the most distinguished defender of Orthodoxy was Athanasius the Great. At a later stage the Arian baton was passed from Arius to Aetius and Eunomius, a particularly able dialectician, who claimed that the essences of the Son and the Spirit were not merely different but dissimilar (ἀνόμοιαι) to that of the Father. On the side of the Orthodox, Athanasius was succeeded by the Cappadocians, who led the way to the eventual vindication of Trinitarian Orthodoxy by the second Ecumenical Council, held in Constantinople in ad 381, under the initial presidency of Gregory of Nazianzus, the so-called ‘theologian’. Athanasius refuted the Arian claims by drawing an all-important distinction between God’s essence and God’s will. According to this distinction, the Son was begotten of the essence of the Father (ἐκ τῆς οὐσίας τοῦ πατρός) and therefore he was consubstantial (ὁμοούσιος) with the Father, both statements being enshrined in the Creed of the Council of Nicaea (ad 325). By contrast, the world was a product of the Father’s will, and this is why it was a created world that differed in essence from the Father.5 Athanasius and Nicaea, however, employed a terminology that identified hypostasis with essence. For example, in its concluding part the Nicene creed anathematized those who claimed that the Son is ‘of another hypostasis or essence’. Likewise, Athanasius argued, ‘hypostasis is essence and has no other meaning but being itself ’.6 This was understandable given that in their battle against Arianism, Athanasius and Nicaea had to emphasize the Son’s essential identity with the Father as clearly and as strongly as possible. At the same time, the Nicene approach was much in line with the Western tradition, in whose theological vocabulary hypostasis (substantia, substance) and essence remain identical to this very day.

or the sake of brevity I will restrict my treatment of the Cappadocians only to this aspect of their theology. F I use the word ‘revolution’ instead of ‘contribution’ to reflect Gunton’s preferred way of speaking. See, for instance, Colin E. Gunton, The Promise of Trinitarian Theology, 2nd edn (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1997), 53. This, however, should not lead us to the conclusion that the Cappadocians somehow changed the faith of the Church. They rather offered a better conceptual and terminological apparatus for its doctrinal articulation. 4 This was a characteristic word of Arian theology, as we may see, for instance, in a letter by Arian clergy to Alexander of Alexandria (PG 26, 708D). 5 For an excellent account of this, see Georges Florovsky, ‘St Athanasius’ Concept of Creation’, in idem, Aspects of Church History, Collected Works 4 (Belmont, MA: Norland, 1975), 39–62. 6 Athanasius, Letter to the Bishops of Egypt and Libya, PG 26, 1036B, quoted in John D. Zizioulas, Being as Communion: Studies in Personhood and the Church (Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1997), 36n.23. 2 3

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This identification, however, gave hostages to fortune insofar as it allowed only the term ‘person’ to be used in order to denote the distinction between the Father and the Son. So, the Father and the Son share the same hypostasis and essence but are two distinct persons. The problem here was twofold. First, unlike hypostasis and essence, the term ‘person’ was not a strong ontological term – if it was an ontological term at all.7 Therefore, by identifying hypostasis with essence, by using the term ‘homoousios’, by claiming that the Son was begotten of the essence of the Father and by allowing only the ontologically weak term ‘person’ to signify the distinction between the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, Nicene terminology emphasized the essential identity of the Father and the Son without being able to counterbalance this with an equally strong emphasis on their personal differentiation. Second, this, in turn, made the terminology vulnerable to a Sabellian interpretation. That this was not merely a theoretical possibility became apparent with Marcellus of Ancyra, a follower of Athanasius, who relativized the distinction between the Father and the Son and argued for its eventual obliteration through the eschatological submersion of the latter to the former. The Cappadocians, and especially St Basil, were very sensitive towards the Sabellian danger. So, in spite of being a staunch defender of Nicaea, Basil attributed the identification of essence and hypostasis to Sabellius and criticized Marcellus, who ‘dared to express impiety towards the hypostasis of our Lord Jesus Christ and to present him as mere logos’.8 Basil’s quixotic attempt to argue that the Nicene Creed in fact distinguished between essence and hypostasis9 reveals both his reverence for Nicaea and his desire to reinterpret and revise its terminology so that it would safeguard the hypostatic distinction of the divine persons. For this purpose, Basil drew a sharp terminological distinction between essence and hypostasis and identified the latter with person (prosopon). Thus, in Letter 52 he argued that only distinct persons/hypostases can be homoousia and therefore the term ‘homoousios’ ‘corrects the evil of Sabellius, for it removes the idea of the identity of hypostasis [between the Father and the Son] and introduces the perfect concept of the persons’.10 In Letter 214 he stated that those who speak of one hypostasis and three persons fall into the error of Sabellius.11 Even more explicitly, in Letter 236 he claimed that Essence differs from hypostasis in the same way as the common differs from the particular …. This is why in the case of the divinity we confess one essence … and particular hypostasis [i.e. hypostases]. … Those who say that essence and hypostasis are the same are compelled to confess merely different persons and in refraining to speak of three hypostases they are found not to escape the evil of Sabellius.12 This went along with recognition of and respect for particularity. So, for Basil, Essence has the same relation to hypostasis as the common has to the particular. For every one of us both shares in being by the common term of essence and by his own properties is such a one and such a one. In the same manner there [i.e. in God]

n this see Zizioulas, Being as Communion, 27–49. O Letter 125.1; italics added. By ‘mere logos’ (‘ψιλὸν λόγον’) Basil implies that for Marcellus the Logos lacked a distinct hypostasis. 9 Letter 125.1. 10 Letter 52.3. 11 Letter 214.3. 12 Letter 236.6. 7 8

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the essence is common … while hypostasis is contemplated in the property of the Fatherhood or the Sonship or the sanctifying power.13 Three things are worthy of note here. First, Basil’s transition, which all three Cappadocians shared, from the terminology of ‘one essence, one hypostasis, three persons’ to that of ‘one essence, three hypostases, three persons’ was daring, for it replaced the terminology of Nicaea, the defence of which was the rallying cry of the fourth-century Orthodox. Second, it made personhood ontologically stronger. And third, as is obvious in the last passage quoted above, Basil drew a parallel between the divine and the human. As in humanity we have a common essence and particular persons/hypostases, likewise in divinity we have one essence and three homoousia persons/hypostases.14 Although this by no means implies that there are no differences in the way the distinction between essence and hypostasis is applied to God and to humans,15 it offers some grounds for relevant parallelisms. At any rate, the new terminology and the rationale supporting it was so powerful that Athanasius himself expressed his acceptance of its Orthodoxy.16

FURTHER CONTRIBUTIONS, READINGS AND MISREADINGS OF CAPPADOCIAN THEOLOGY Τhe Cappadocians made some further contributions but not always in the directions claimed by either their admirers or their critics. To begin with, it is well known that the Cappadocians identified the Father as the cause of the Son and the Spirit in the Trinity. This may sound as introducing an alarming inequality among the persons of the Trinity but does not need to. Τhe Cappadocians were far from putting forward a kind of neoArian (or tritheist) approach to the doctrine of the Trinity. They did not identify the one God exclusively with the Father. By contrast, they left no room for any implied inequality between the divine persons, precisely because they emphasized their unity in one essence. But let us unfold this a little further. The Cappadocians shared fully the theology of Athanasius and Nicaea. In Basil’s letters, for example, both the homoousion and the generation of the Son out of the essence of the Father are accepted and defended.17 For the Cappadocians, as for all Church Fathers after them, the unity of God is inextricably bound up with God’s one essence/nature.18 The claim that the Cappadocians downplayed, or even rejected, the language of essence in favour of a language of communion (or relationship) is incorrect. The word ‘communion’ (κοινωνία) in the Cappadocians refers primarily – if not exclusively – to the fact that the divine essence/nature is commonly shared by the three persons. When, for example, Basil refers to ‘the communion of the divinity’ (κοινωνία τῆς θεότητος), what he means is that divinity, that is, divine essence/nature, is common among the divine hypostases/persons.

etter 214.4. L This is quite typical of the Cappadocians. See, for instance, Gregory of Nyssa, De Communibus Notionibus, PG 45, 177A-D. 15 For example, three human persons, Peter, James and John, are three men, whereas the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit are one God. 16 Tomus ad Antiochenos, PG 26, 801A–804A. 17 See, for instance, Basil’s Letters 52, 125, etc. 18 As Gregory of Nyssa, for example, put it, ‘for there is one God and the same because of the identity of essence’ (De Communibus Notionibus, PG 45, 180D). Likewise, Basil argued that ‘both [i.e. the Father and the Son] are one according to their common nature (κατὰ τὸ κοινὸν τῆς φύσεως)’ (On the Holy Spirit, 45). 13 14

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As is obvious from Basil’s works, for instance his treatise on the Holy Spirit,19 and as André de Halleux has shown in a compelling way, what Basil means by the use of the word ‘communion’ with reference to the Trinity is not ‘interpersonal communion’ but ‘commonality of nature’,20 without this, however, excluding communion being understood also in more relational terms.21 Much the same applies to the term schesis (σχέσις). This word indicates relation of origin rather than interpersonal relationship. When, for example, Gregory of Nazianzus claims that ‘Father is neither a name of an essence …, nor of an energy, but of a relation and of how the Father stands towards the Son and the Son towards the Father’,22 he is pointing to the fact that the Father begets the Son and the Son is begotten of the Father. This is all that the text is saying, although this does not exclude personalistic relationships. Basil does the same, for instance, in his work Against Eunomius.23 The point is that it would be unthinkable for the Cappadocians to replace the common essence/nature of the three persons with communion (or interpersonal relationships) and conceive God’s unity exclusively in terms of the latter, for in this case God would not be conceived as one. Relation (schesis) alone implies a relative (schetikē) union. In the context of Christology this type of union was taken to be a mark of divisive, Nestorian Christology. This is why Cyrillian and Chalcedonian Christology did not refer merely to union of two natures but also to one hypostasis. In Christ there is a hypostatic, not merely a relative (schetikē), union and this is why Christ is one. The Fathers of the Church repeatedly ‘contrasted’ this type of union with the Trinitarian union. In Christology, they said, the two natures are united in one hypostasis/person; in the Trinity the three hypostases are united in one essence/nature.24 These two ontological terms, hypostasis and essence/nature, were used to explain in what respect Christ is one (i.e. one hypostasis/person) as well as in what respect the Trinitarian God is one (i.e. one essence/nature). To speak about relation, love and communion alone will not do.25 By emphasizing the union of the divine persons in one essence/nature, the Cappadocians forestalled any neo-Arian conception of the Trinitarian doctrine that could imply that the Father is identified with the one God in an exclusive manner. St Basil, for instance, has put it like this: ‘Therefore, according to the property of the Persons, [the Father and the

Basil writes that ‘the unity is in the communion of divinity’ (On the Holy Spirit, 45), but this refers to ‘communion with respect to the nature’ (τῆς κατὰ τὴν φύσιν κοινωνίας), ibid., 46. The very same phrase is used by Basil also elsewhere, for instance, ibid., 47 and 53. 20 See his article ‘Personnalisme ou essentialisme trinitaire chez les Pères Cappadociens?’ in André de Halleux, Patrologie et oecuménisme: recueil d’ études (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 1990), esp. 228–30. The title of the relevant section is ‘communion interpersonnelle ou communauté de nature?’ For the author, quite rightly, the latter is the case. The same view is shared by the Orthodox scholars Atanasije Jevtich (‘Between the “Nicaeans” and the “Easterners”: The Catholic Confession of St Basil’, St Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly 24 (1980): 244 and, more recently, John Behr, Formation of Christian Theology, 2, The Nicene Faith, part 2: One of the Holy Trinity (Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2004), 310–11. In fact, the word ‘κοινωνία’ (‘communion’) derives from the word ‘κοινόν’ (‘common’), as is the case also in English. What is common here is the divine essence/nature, which is equally shared by all three divine persons. 21 On this, see, for instance, Basil, On the Holy Spirit, 59 and 60. 22 Oration 29.16. 23 Against Eunomius, II. 10 and 11. 24 For a classic statement, which reflects also the theology of the Cappadocians, see, for example, John of Damascus, Expositio Fidei, 49. 25 Pannenberg, for example, has indicated the tritheist threat posed by an understanding of the Trinity by means of loving relationships, see Wolfhart Pannenberg, Systematic Theology, 1, trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1991), 297. 19

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Son are] one and one [masculine, εἷς] but according to their common [κοινὸν] nature, both are one [neutral, ἓν].’26 This short passage indicates that the Father and the Son are one according to their nature, which is common to both (hence the ‘communion of the divinity’ between them). But it also indicates that the one God is not to be identified exclusively with the Father. Here is how Gregory has put it in a famous passage: But monarchy is what we hold in honor. Yet, not that monarchy that is limited to one person …, but which is constituted by the equal dignity of nature, union of will and identity of movement, as well as the convergence towards their cause of those who come from it, which is impossible for created nature, so that although there is a distinction in number, there is no severance of essence.27 The passage makes it clear that divine monarchy is not limited to the Father as cause but refers to all three persons and has to do with both divine nature (as well as its will and movement) and the one cause of the divine persons, namely the person of the Father.28 In fact, the Cappadocians interpret Jn 14.28 (‘the Father is greater than I’) with reference to the Father as cause, in order not to compromise the absolute equality of the divine persons due to their one nature29 (the Father is ‘greater’ in the sense of being the cause of the Son, not in the sense that the Son is of a different essence/nature). As Anthony Meredith has argued, St Basil differs from Plotinus as well as Platonism and Neoplatonism in general, for he does not endorse the principle that the cause is superior to what is caused by it.30 The equality of the three persons is also highlighted through worship and the concept of perichoresis. Basil, who often invokes the lex orandi–lex credendi principle, insists that the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit are to be glorified together and also refers to the relevant traditional baptismal formula.31 Moreover, he alludes to Trinitarian perichoresis by adopting the well-known statements from the Gospel of John, ‘I am in the Father’ and ‘the Father is in me’.32 Even if the fully fledged concept of perichoresis may belong to a later period, its incipient form is to be found in the Cappadocians and in fact in the New Testament itself. In sum, by identifying hypostasis with person the Cappadocians produced a wellbalanced Trinitarian theology on the basis of the confession of one essence/nature and three hypostases/persons in God, which keeps equally at bay both Arianism/tritheism and Sabellianism.33 They emphasized that the Father is the only cause of the Son and the Spirit but without undermining the absolute equality of the divine persons. They understood divine unity in terms of the Father being the only cause of the Son and the Spirit, in terms

St Basil, On the Holy Spirit, 45. Oration 29.3; italics added. Basil shares this understanding of divine monarchy. See, for instance, On the Holy Spirit, 45 and 47, where monarchy refers to the one God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. 28 Basil argues for the identity of will and energy of the divine persons (On the Holy Spirit, 19–21). On this, see also Gregory of Nyssa, Ad Ablavium. 29 Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration 30. 7. Elsewhere Gregory writes that ‘the word “greater” does not apply to the nature but to the cause. For in the consubstantials there is nothing greater or lesser in point of essence’ (Oration 40. 43). 30 Anthony Meredith, The Cappadocians (Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1995), 35, 61, 119–20 and 125n.6. 31 See, for instance, On the Holy Spirit, 58–68. For Basil faith, baptism and doxology belong together (ibid., 68). 32 Jn 14.10-11. See also Basil, On the Holy Spirit, 45. See also Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration 42. 15 (PG 36, 476B). 33 The same terminology will be used later, for instance, by Chalcedon, in order to settle the Christological doctrine. 26 27

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of one essence, will and energy and in terms of perichoresis.34 Although they by no means replaced union in one essence with personalist communion, they facilitated a healthy Trinitarian personalism, by strengthening the notion of person, by pointing to a person, the Father, as the only cause in the Trinity and by suggesting a notion of ‘perichoresis’. But let us now move on and see how Colin Gunton received the above, as well as other, Cappadocian insights and how he used them in his constructive theological endeavour.

COLIN GUNTON’S RECEPTION OF THE THEOLOGY OF THE CAPPADOCIANS The doctrine of the Trinity Gunton is a deeply Trinitarian theologian, who derives his Trinitarian theology from the Cappadocians to such an extent that, as he informs us, he was tempted to call his most significant book on the doctrine of the Trinity Homage to Cappadocia.35 To begin with, Gunton appreciates the Cappadocian revolution of distinguishing between hypostasis and essence and of associating person with particularity and relation. At the same time, he is critical of Augustine, who continued to speak of ‘unam essentiam or substantiam and tres personas’, which, for Gunton, indicates his ominous inability to take advantage of the Cappadocians’ achievement.36 For Gunton, in Cappadocian theology hypostasis and essence involve one another. This allows for no easy separation of the dogmatic loci De Deo Uno and De Deo Trino.37 According to Rahner, this separation contributed to the former locus being placed front and centre in dogmatic manuals at the expense of the latter, which was not only underemphasized but also treated in much later sections and thus was relegated both symbolically and substantially to relative insignificance.38 For Gunton, the Cappadocian proposal, far from reducing persons to relations, brought about a relational ontology of communion.39 The Trinitarian concepts of relation, particularity, communion and perichoresis, which Gunton largely derived from the Cappadocians, proved instrumental for his theological project. As we will see later in more detail, they concern not only his way of conceiving the doctrine of the Trinity but also several areas of Christian theology, including the doctrine of creation, anthropology and ecclesiology as well as the relation of theology with science, politics and culture, especially in the context of (post-)modernity. The above, however, do not imply that Gunton received the Trinitarian theology of the Cappadocians uncritically. For example, he argues that Basil at times platonizes the Spirit.40 In addition, he is reluctant to endorse the identification of the person with tropos hyparxeos, because of its possibly modalist overtones.41 However, he concedes that for

See, for instance, how Gregory of Nazianzus combines all the above in one short passage in Oration 20, 7 (PG 35, 1073A). 35 Gunton, The Promise of Trinitarian Theology, 204. 36 Ibid., 40. On page 89 of the same work Gunton speaks favourably of Richard of St Victor, having made clear that his insights are not Augustinian. 37 Ibid.,  39. 38 Karl Rahner, The Trinity, trans. Joseph Donceel (London: Burns and Oates, 1986), 15–21. 39 Gunton, The Promise of Trinitarian Theology, 39. 40 Colin E. Gunton, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit: Toward a Fully Trinitarian Theology (London: T&T Clark, 2003), 89n.23. 41 Ibid.,  46. 34

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the Cappadocians the tropoi were not the persons but the ways by which the persons were distinct.42 In addition, he believes that the Cappadocians overreacted to Eunomius’s claim to full knowledge of God and thus became a little too apophatic.43 Also, he makes a critical note on the Cappadocian’s voluntarism characteristic of the freedom of the Father as the source of Son and the Spirit.44 Finally, he expresses reservations with regard to Gregory of Nazianzus’s attribution of impassibility to God.45 Some of these claims are controversial and point to the fact that Gunton’s reception of the Trinitarian theology of the Cappadocians is not always unproblematic. This applies, for example, to his treatment of the divine essence and of the person of the Father. Although he is right in rejecting the view that divine essence ‘supports’ the three persons he is not in agreement with the Cappadocians in arguing that it is constituted by their relatedness.46 Gunton tends to reduce essence to relation and communion. What is more, he understands koinonia not merely as communion but also as community.47 Thus he claims that ‘the word koinonia [is] perhaps best translated as community’48 and that ‘the being of God consists in the community of hypostaseis’.49 This is clearly at odds with Cappadocian theology. As to his treatment of the person of the Father, Gunton seems ambivalent and not entirely consistent. On the one hand, he emphasizes the centrality of the Father. For instance, he endorses Wolfson’s claim that for the Cappadocians the Father (and not divine substance) is the substratum and the basis of the being of God.50 Moreover, he is fond of Irenaeus’s metaphor of the Son and the Spirit as ‘the Father’s two hands’, which he repeats time and again. Although this can certainly be interpreted in an orthodox way, it is not a particularly successful metaphor, because of its almost inescapable subordinationist overtones – which is probably why it almost disappears from the subsequent patristic theological tradition. But Gunton is in favour of functional subordinationism. So, he draws attention to the obedience of the Son to the Father, clearly attested in the Scriptures. However, he fails to differentiate sufficiently between the immanent and the economic Trinity, and consequently to associate the obedience of the Son with his humanity. As a result, his functional subordinationism introduces a rift between God’s being and God’s act. For Gunton, the Son and the Spirit ‘are subordinate in doing his [the Father’s] behest, but not subordinate in being’.51 Therefore, the Son and the Spirit act in a manner that is different from and – at least from a Cappadocian point of view – incompatible with their (divine) being. In fact, Arianism claimed that the obedience of the Son to the Father proves that the Son is not God, equal to the Father. Gregory of Nazianzus refuted this claim by arguing that the Son obeys as man and not as God, for as God he cannot be either obedient or disobedient.52 Gunton is not in agreement with this insofar as he Ibid.,  47. Colin E. Gunton, Act and Being: Towards a Theology of the Divine Attributes (London: SCM Press, 2002), 54. By contrast, Gunton endorses Gregory of Nazianzus’s reservations about the capacity of language (ibid., 36–7). Further down, he mentions that Gregory is not happy with the priority of the negative (ibid., 68). 44 Ibid.,  106. 45 Ibid.,  58. 46 Gunton, The Promise of Trinitarian Theology, 43. 47 In Gunton, The Christian Faith, 186, he attributes this view to Basil’s Letter 38.4, but this is a misreading. 48 Gunton, The Promise of Trinitarian Theology, 72. 49 Ibid., 94; see also 53–4. 50 Ibid., 54. See also H. A. Wolfson, The Philosophy of the Church Fathers (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1956), 357. 51 Ibid.,  xxv. 52 See Oration 30. 6. 42 43

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talks of the Son’s ‘eternal … obedience’.53 The further Cappadocian anti-Arian and antitritheist claim that the Father and the Son share the same will, as they share the same essence, makes Gunton’s assertion even more contestable. Thankfully, Gunton somehow modifies this approach in a later work, where he points out the complementarity of the two types of doxology used and defended by St Basil.54 Thankfully here subordination gives way to mediation.55 But then Gunton contradicts himself. Whereas in the above claims he overemphasizes the person of the Father, elsewhere, as mentioned earlier, he puts forward a flattening ‘equality’ among the three divine persons that tends to deprive him of his distinctive hypostatic idiom. So, he calls into question the Cappadocian claim that the Father is the cause of the Son and the Spirit.56 On this point, Gunton refers to and follows T. F. Torrance, who argues for an assumed divergence between the Cappadocians and the Alexandrians, Athanasius and Cyril. Torrance argues that Cyril rejects ‘any notion of causality within the Holy Trinity’.57 But the passages of Cyril to which he refers point in the opposite direction.58 Be that as it may, having underestimated the significance of divine essence, Gunton has difficulty in securing the equality of the divine persons, and this is probably one of the reasons that leads him to alternative (and controversial) claims, such as the denial of the Father being the cause of the Son and the Spirit. Moreover, Gunton not only disputes the claim that the Father is the cause of the Son and the Spirit, he also maintains that ‘these three [i.e. the divine persons] are … for and from one another’.59 He also refers to the ‘hypostaseis who give and receive their reality to and from one another’.60 Once again he claims that ‘Father, Son, and Holy Spirit constitute each other’.61 All this implies that the three persons somehow ‘cause’ one another. Thus, as the Son is from the Father so also the Father is from the Son.62 This is incompatible with both the Scriptural witness and traditional dogma. It dispenses not only with any sense of the monarchy of the Father but also with the hypostatic idioms of all divine persons. Gunton is correct when suggesting both a kind of monarchy of the Father and the avoidance of an ontological hierarchy in the Trinity.63 But he has a difficulty in finding a consistent and satisfactory way to correlate and sustain these claims. In the final analysis, in Gunton the two fundamental pillars of the unity of God, the person of the Father and the divine essence, are relativized. Essence evaporates to communion understood as community, whereas the monarchy of the Father as cause is Gunton, The Promise of Trinitarian Theology, 196. The first type, ‘glory to the Father, through the Son, in the Holy Spirit’, pertains to the economy. The second, ‘glory to the Father with the Son together with the Holy Spirit’, pertains to theology. 55 Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, 83–6. However, elsewhere in the same work Gunton seems to confuse and identify subordination and mediation, 39. 56 Gunton, The Promise of Trinitarian Theology, xxiii. 57 Thomas F. Torrance, The Trinitarian Faith: The Evangelical Theology of the Ancient Catholic Church (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1997), 240. 58 Torrance refers to Thes., PG 75, 125–6, 128–9, 553 as well as to Dial. de Trin., ibid., 721, 744–5, and 769. However, in PG 75, 125C–128B, Cyril argues for an orthodox understanding of the claim that the Father is the cause of the Son. Moreover, in 721D God the Father is called ‘supreme root’. 59 Gunton, The Christian Faith, 187; italics added. 60 Gunton, The Promise of Trinitarian Theology, 94; see also 53–4. On 143, Gunton relates this ‘giving and receiving’ with love. 61 Ibid., 128; see also 196. 62 In his Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, 16, Gunton argues that the three divine persons ‘receive from and give to each other their unique particularity’, which is certainly a sounder statement. 63 Gunton, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, 74. 53 54

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weakened. Thus, both the personal (the Father) and the natural (the one nature) poles of unity in God are undermined. Communion and perichoresis, important as they are, cannot by themselves secure the unity, the oneness of God. When Gunton argues that ‘God is not a monad’,64 he runs against the traditional claim that he is indeed a monad in terms of essence or nature (μονὰς τῇ φύσει). At least from a Cappadocian point of view Gunton’s approach puts divine unity at risk and leaves the door open to tritheism.65 Perhaps this is the right place to add a few brief remarks about Christology and pneumatology. Gunton often makes use of Gregory of Nazianzus’s famous axiom ‘the unassumed is the unhealed’.66 Moreover, he refers to Gregory of Nyssa’s use of the metaphor of the deceit of the devil by Christ.67 As to the Holy Spirit and his role in perfecting creation we will have the opportunity to say more in the following section. At this point it may suffice to mention Gunton’s remark that, for Basil, one of the arguments establishing the divinity of the Spirit is that one may grieve him.68

The doctrine of creation For Gunton, the doctrine of the Trinity, conceived largely along Cappadocian lines, has substantial repercussions for all Christian doctrines, including the doctrine of creation. To begin with, the doctrine of the Trinity keeps at bay a form of pantheism that considers the existence of the world as necessary. As Gunton characteristically put it, ‘Precisely because God the Father is thus intrinsically related to the Son and the Spirit, he is not bound always to have a world around him … and therefore can be held to create freely. The outcome is that God’s triune being is eternal, but not his willing of creation, which therefore becomes an act of free willing.’69 Gunton makes good use of Basil’s classic treatise on the Hexaemeron. He highlights Basil’s admiration of and love for the diversity of the world,70 which has obvious Trinitarian overtones. He recognizes the strength of Basil’s doctrine of creation ‘which lay in its trinitarian construction and mediation’.71 Although he is critical of certain platonizing traits of Basil’s approach,72 as well as of his scant references to the Logos and the Spirit,73 he expresses his agreement with Basil’s rejection of the eternity and divinity of the world, astrology and some problematic aspects of Origen’s doctrine of creation.74 He also highlights Basil’s reference to creatio ex nihilo.75 Gunton, The Christian Faith, 186. There seems to be a tendency here for a postmodern understanding of relation, which has little to do with essence. Gunton, however, indicates the tritheist tendencies inherent in some social theories of the Trinity. See Colin E. Gunton, The One, the Three and the Many: God, Creation, and the Culture of Modernity. The 1992 Bampton Lectures (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 190. 66 See, for example, Colin E. Gunton, Yesterday and Today: A Study of Continuities in Christology, 2nd edn (London: SPCK, 1997), 173. 67 Colin E. Gunton, The Actuality of Atonement: A Study of Metaphor, Rationality and the Christian Tradition (London: T&T Clark, 1988), 63–4. 68 Gunton, Act and Being, 130n.30. 69 Colin E. Gunton, The Triune Creator: A Historical and Systematic Study (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1998), 67. 70 Ibid.,  70. 71 Ibid.,  96. 72 However, elsewhere Gunton differentiates between Basil’s approach and the platonizing allegory employed by Augustine (Father, Son and Holy Spirit, 138). 73 However, Gunton praises Basil’s identification of the Spirit as the perfecting cause of the creation (The Triune Creator, 10; see also ibid., 86). 74 Gunton, The Triune Creator, 80–1 and 111. 75 Ibid.,  69. 64 65

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Moreover, Gunton maintains that Basil’s demythologization of the heavenly realms was a contributing factor to the emergence of modern science. He underlines Basil’s non-literalist reading of the days of creation76 and draws links between him and modern scientists such as Galileo and Darwin.77 In addition, he gives special credit to Basil for arguing for the ontological homogeneity and inherent goodness of all creation as the good product of a good Trinitarian God.78 He also commends Gregory of Nyssa’s dissociation of difference from degree of being; to be different does not necessarily mean to be more or less good or real.79 What is more, Gunton argues that since the world has been created by a Trinitarian God, it is reasonable to expect that this God must have left his mark upon his creation. Gunton does not identify this mark with the traditional vestigia Trinitatis, but rather with the perichoretic principle by which the world is organized.80 He claims that ‘recent science has much to say about the interrelatedness of all that is’81 including the relation between humanity and the world. He argues that ‘the anthropic principle … at the very least suggests a necessary relatedness of the cosmos to the human intelligence’.82 The world, albeit in some ways a reflection of the Trinity, is not personal but ‘requires persons in order to be itself ’.83 For Gunton science, far from being an enemy of Christianity, reveals the interrelatedness of humanity and the world in a way that reflects the Trinitarian ontology of the Christian God. Gunton associates the above also with Jesus Christ. He mentions Faraday’s early scientific insight concerning the ‘mutual interpenetrability of the atoms’ as well as his view that ‘each atom extends, so to say, throughout the whole of the solar system, yet always retaining its own centre of force’ and on this basis he attempts to illustrate the mystery of Christology.84 Finally, Gunton applies his Cappadocian-inspired Trinitarian relationality to the question of the imago Dei. He takes issue with the traditional tendency to conceive the traits of the imago Dei as ‘static possessions of the human as individual, rather than (say) characteristics implying relation’.85 Moreover, Gunton conceives sin in relational terms, namely as a distortion of right relations.86 Finally, although he is not against conceiving the imago Dei also in terms of the man–woman relation, he points out some weaknesses of this approach, including its binitarian (instead of Trinitarian) tendency.87 A critical question may be raised here. Gunton endorses Barth’s claim that all good dogmatics is also ethics.88 But if we attempt to bring together the doctrine of the Trinity, the doctrine of creation and ethics we may ask with good reason how is our created

Ibid.,  16–17. Ibid., 16–17, 71–3, 97, 108 and 111; Father, Son and Holy Spirit, 138. 78 Ibid.,  68–73. 79 Ibid.,  72. 80 Gunton, The One, the Three and the Many, 144n.23 and 167–8. 81 Gunton, The Promise of Trinitarian Theology, 110. 82 Ibid.,  111. 83 Ibid. 84 Gunton, Yesterday and Today, 117. The quotations are from Michael Faraday’s 1844 paper ‘A Speculation touching Electric Conduction and the Nature of Matter’. 85 Gunton, The Promise of Trinitarian Theology, 102. 86 Gunton, The One, the Three and the Many, 166, 179 and 216. 87 For the above, see Gunton, The Promise of Trinitarian Theology, 112–13. 88 Gunton, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, 53. 76 77

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particularity related to the moral parameters of perichoresis? To the best of my knowledge Gunton has not sufficiently dealt with this issue. The core question is this: Is any form or created communion and perichoresis commendable? For instance, what about a homosexual relation? Or a sexual trio? Certainly the Cappadocians were against any such suggestion, as is obvious from their canons, which strongly condemn any form of extramarital sexual union.89 This points to the fact that the transition from the Trinity to the created order cannot bypass the moral content that is necessary for making communion and perichoresis a reflection of the Holy Trinity.

Culture, politics and ecclesiology Gunton applies the Trinitarian perichoretic model – which he derives from the Cappadocians – to the realms of culture, politics and ecclesiology. For Gunton, the Trinity is the transcendental of transcendentals. In his view, the three great transcendentals of truth, goodness and beauty (or science, ethics and art) have to be understood and coordinated on the basis of Trinitarian theology.90 So, on the basis of Gregory of Nazianzus’s equal emphasis on God’s oneness and threeness, Gunton justifies his move beyond Heraclitus and Parmenides, that is to say, beyond a unilateral stress on either unity or diversity. Gunton is critical of social and political systems promoting either individualism or collectivism – or both. In discussing Kierkegaard’s emphasis on the individual and Marx’s emphasis on the universal, he argues that ‘modern individualism and modern collectivism are mirror images of one another. Both signal the loss of the person.’91 This loss is reflected in the dominant liberal ethic of self-fulfilment as ‘the quest for relations by the essentially unrelated’.92 Gunton points to Gregory of Nyssa for an early and in a sense rather exceptional Christian critique of slavery.93 This is perhaps relevant to some of Gunton’s critical insights on the hierarchical structures of the Church. Gunton uses the Trinitarian grammar that he derives from the Cappadocians to that effect. He repeats Zizioulas’s thesis that the doctrine of the Trinity introduced a new ontology, which undermined ‘the neoplatonic doctrine of reality as a graded hierarchy’. He then remarks that this has not been allowed to shape our ecclesiology.94 Gunton appeals to Trinitarian relational dynamism, in order to criticize static hierarchies and their tendency to generate or justify relations of subordination.95 Thus, in the light of Trinitarian ontology he criticizes institutionalism,

S ee the Canons of St Basil in his Letter 188 and of Gregory of Nyssa’s in his Canonical Letter to Letoius. See Gunton, The One, the Three, and the Many, 149–54 and passim. For a pithy critical approach to Gunton’s project as deployed particularly in this book, see Karen Kilby, ‘Perichoresis and Projection: Problems with Social Doctrines of the Trinity’, New Blackfriars 81 (2000): 432–45, esp. 437–8. 91 Gunton, The Promise of Trinitarian Theology, 87. 92 Gunton, The One, the Three, and the Many, 151. 93 Gunton, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, 206n.7. Gunton also quotes approvingly a passage by Robert Jenson, where Gregory is presented to oppose the idea of the degrees of being, see Colin E. Gunton, A Brief Theology of Revelation: The 1993 Warfield Lectures (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1998), 53. A similar view is attributed to the Cappadocians in general in Colin E. Gunton, ‘The End of Causality? The Reformers and Their Predecessors’, in The Doctrine of Creation: Essays in Dogmatics, History and Philosophy, ed. Colin E. Gunton (London: T&T Clark, 2004), 77. 94 Gunton, The Promise of Trinitarian Theology, 60. 95 Ibid.,  72. 89 90

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clericalism and episcopocentrism.96 This, however, does not mean that he is unable or unwilling to appreciate good pastoral or theological work when done by bishops. Some of his theological ‘heroes’ after all, for instance, Irenaeus and the Cappadocians (not to mention Zizioulas), were bishops. For instance, Gunton has some good words to say about how Basil integrated his theology of the Trinity with his pastoral attempt to train his flock in holiness.97 These are significant remarks. One wonders, however, whether there should be some room for proper hierarchy in the Church, operating in the context of communion and conciliarity, instead of – as often happens – undermining them. Moreover, one wonders whether Gunton’s aforementioned critical ecclesiological remarks fit in easily with all aspects of his Trinitarian theology. As we saw earlier, Gunton talks about functional Trinitarian subordinationism. Although authoritarian Church structures and abuses of power are by no means either rare or commendable, it is difficult to see why a proper subordination of lay Christians to their pastors may not be a reflection of the functional subordination of the Son as man to the Father. By contrast, when Gunton puts forward perichoresis in order to suggest that different people or groups of people may be sometimes subordinate and other times superordinate,98 one wonders how this may fit in with the stability of Trinitarian subordinationism (the Son obeying the Father and not vice versa) that he suggests. Gunton applies his Cappadocian-inspired Trinitarian grammar also to the vexed question of the ordination of women and argues in favour of it on the basis of the doctrine of the imago Dei. He is justifiable in pointing out that a Trinitarian understanding of the image of God cannot but have implications for the relationship between man and woman.99 Still one wonders whether at this point particularity and diversity should not be taken sufficiently into account. May it not be argued that man and woman, albeit equal, have diverse callings and roles to play in the Church? May it not be argued that the secular anti-Trinitarian agenda of homogenization and egalitarianism, which Gunton criticizes,100 has invaded the Church and is calling for the ordination of both men and women, in a way that makes us suspect that its implicit assumption is that diversity necessarily implies superiority or inferiority? In other words, must men and women be in all respects the same in order to be equal?

GUNTON’S ACHIEVEMENT In an important article, Atanasije Jevtich argued that the Cappadocians were truly ecumenical theologians, bringing together both the Nicaean insight of God’s consubstantiality and the Eastern emphasis on Trinitarianism and by doing so created the standard Trinitarian vocabulary of the Christian Church.101 Gunton did something similar. Ibid., 61–3 and 197. Gunton is more congregational than Zizioulas, whose ‘strongly episcopal ecclesiology … tends to see the bishop as representing the Father’. Ibid., 197. 97 Gunton, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, 8. 98 Gunton, The Promise of Trinitarian Theology, 80. 99 Ibid.,  79. 100 Gunton is critical of this kind of egalitarianism ‘which is the denial of particularity, and leads to collectivism, and forms of individualism’. Colin Gunton, ‘Trinity, Ontology and Anthropology: Towards a Renewal of the Doctrine of the Imago Dei’, in Persons, Divine and Human: King’s College Essays in Theological Anthropology, ed. Christoph Schwöbel and Colin E. Gunton (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1991), 59. 101 Jevtich, ‘Between the “Nicaeans” and the “Easterners” ’, passim. Jevtich often highlights the particular contribution of St Basil. 96

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Of course, he adopted important aspects of the Cappadocians’ Trinitarian theology not merely out of ecumenical sensitivity but because of their perceived value. However, this would not have taken place without this sensitivity. One of the areas in which Gunton’s ecumenical openness is particularly obvious has to do with the question of the Filioque. Gunton is critical of the Filioque for at least three reasons. First, because it does not do justice to the biblical testimony of Jesus’ dependence on the Spirit. Second, because it does not easily allow for the personal distinction of the Spirit from the Father and the Son and so presents us with the danger of modalism. And third, because it tends to subordinate the Spirit to the Son and almost reduce its role to the application of Christ’s work ‘to believer, Church, and the rest’.102 A second important achievement of Colin Gunton was to use the Trinitarian theology of the Cappadocians in order to rethink the whole range of theology. As he has put it, ‘in the light of the theology of the Trinity, everything looks different’.103 Given that Gunton’s theology of the Trinity is largely Cappadocian, his whole theology bears Cappadocian marks. A third significant achievement has to do with the use of the doctrine of the Trinity for a creative diagnosis of the malaises of modernity (and postmodernity) and for some suggestions for their remedy. The question of the one and the many in its cultural, social and political implications and its Trinitarian remedy loom large in Gunton’s theological work. In addition, Gunton’s emphasis on the doctrines of the Trinity and of creation brings to mind Basil, who is best known for his Trinitarian theology and his Hexaemeron.104 The dialogue between science and theology plays here a significant role. However, there is an aspect of the theology of the Cappadocians, notably of St Basil, which Gunton does not endorse, although its proper integration into his theology would, I think, facilitate the deployment of one of its most crucial aspects, namely the emphatic rejection of pantheism, without affecting negatively divine/human communion. This concerns the distinction between God’s essence and God’s energies. Let me elaborate on this a little further. Gunton is critical of the distinction between God’s essence and God’s energies famously drawn by St Gregory Palamas in the fourteenth century but originating in the patristic past, including a famous passage by St Basil: ‘The energies are various, but the essence simple. We say that we know God from his energies, but do not promise to approach the essence itself. For his energies come down to us, but his essence remains inaccessible.’105 The passage is stimulating and intriguing, for it suggests not only divine unity and diversity, a theme of which Gunton was particularly fond, but also divine immanence and transcendence. It is precisely this point that drove Palamas’s theology, namely the wish to safeguard on the one hand God’s transcendence, otherness and freedom and on the other the reality of our communion with him. This is very close to one of Gunton’s greatest concerns: the avoidance of pantheism. Gunton believes that if we are to safeguard the ontological otherness between God and the world, we must avoid bringing them too closely together and allow for some

Gunton, The Promise of Trinitarian Theology, 199; 52 and 131. See also his Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, 53–6 and 72. 103 Gunton, The Promise of Trinitarian Theology, 7. On the other hand, the application of the ‘Trinitarian paradigm’ has limits. But that is another question. 104 He is also well known for his monastic theology, but this is outside Gunton’s theological interests. 105 Basil, Letter 234.1. For Gunton’s critiques, see Gunton, The Promise of Trinitarian Theology, 145. 102

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‘space’ between them.106 Only thus will we ensure ‘at once the Selbständigkeit of the created order and its continuing dependence upon God’.107 Otherwise, not only God’s otherness and freedom is compromised, but also ‘the world becomes simply a function of his being and so unable to be itself ’.108 Spinoza’s pantheism, for example, results in ‘absolute necessitarian determinism’.109 For these reasons Gunton believes that ‘pantheism and its equivalents are the real enemy’.110 On the other hand, as he again puts it, ‘from one point of view, space is the problem. … Οur requirement now is to find a conception which is correlative with that of relation.’111 So, for Gunton, we need both ‘space’ and communion. All this is very much in line with the Palamite distinction. This distinction originates not only in Basil’s aforementioned passage but also, as Florovsky has shown in a masterful article,112 in Athanasius’s distinction between God’s essence and God’s will, of which Gunton is, of course, aware.113 The generation of the Son has to do with the former (i.e. divine essence), whereas creation has to do with the latter (i.e. divine will) – and this is why creation is not divine. In like manner, for Palamas, whereas divine (uncreated) energies relate to us and secure our communion with God, divine essence is beyond our reach and thus allows for a kind of ontological ‘space’ that guards us from pantheism. Gunton does not endorse the distinction114 mainly because he sees in it a displacement of the Son and the Spirit by the divine energies in the context of the economy.115 Although this is a legitimate and justifiable fear, the distinction between divine essence and divine energies does not need to be understood in a way that obliterates the persons of the Son and the Spirit in God’s relation with the world. Gunton has repeatedly praised Basil for distinguishing between ‘the original cause of all things that are made, the Father; … the creative cause, the Son; … the perfecting cause, the Spirit’116 – which shows that the divine persons relate with the world in distinct ways. In addition, in his own remarks on God’s grace, Gunton emphasizes the need for grace to be placed in the context of the mediation of the Son and the Holy Spirit.117 But why can this not apply to Palamas’s energies, where grace itself belongs? In fact, to suggest that Palamas’s distinction undermines Trinitarian theology depends on a misreading of both his work and its reception in the Orthodox tradition.118 As Hussey has shown in a compelling way, Palamas’s distinction does not do Gunton, The Promise of Trinitarian Theology, 129; Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, 24. Gunton, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, 103. 108 Gunton, The Promise of Trinitarian Theology, 202. 109 Ibid.,  105. 110 Ibid.,  135. 111 Ibid.,  109. 112 Florovsky, ‘St Athanasius’ Concept of Creation’, passim. 113 Gunton, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, 49. 114 Elsewhere Gunton takes a more positive stance, partly because the term ‘energy’ implies a non-static concept of God in his relation to the world, see Colin E. Gunton, ‘Relation and Relativity: The Trinity and the Created World’, in Trinitarian Theology Today: Essays on Divine Being and Act, ed. Christoph Schwöbel (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1995), 99–100; and Gunton, The Promise of Trinitarian Theology, 144–5. 115 Gunton, The Promise of Trinitarian Theology, xxii. Another reservation may have to do with Gunton’s overconfident contention against Palamas’s denial of our knowledge of the essence of God that ‘we are granted to know the very being of God’. See Gunton, Act and Being, 110–11; for the quotation, 111. 116 Gunton, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, 59n.3 with reference to Basil, On the Holy Spirit, XV. 36 and 38. 117 Colin E. Gunton, ‘God, Grace and Freedom’, in God and Freedom: Essays in Historical and Systematic Theology, ed. Colin E. Gunton (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1995), 128–33, esp. 133. 118 We may see this in followers of Gregory Palamas such as Symeon of Thessalonica; for more on this, see Demetrios Bathrellos, Orthodox Dogmatics at the End of Byzantium: The Case of St Symeon of Thessalonica (in Greek; Athens: En Plo, 2008), 97–104. 106 107

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away with personal communion – quite the opposite.119 Through their divine energies the divine persons are in communion with the human persons in ways that do not confuse divine and created essences but respect divine and human ontological otherness. This is exactly what Gunton wished for. Moreover, the interplay between God’s knowledge and unknowability, to which Gunton subscribes,120 is also well served by the same distinction (the essence is unknowable, the energies are known), as Basil himself had suggested. In all, the fundamental insights of Eastern, Palamite and ultimately Cappadocian theology expressed by the essence/energies distinction are latent in Gunton’s delicate balance between God’s immanence and transcendence. This would have been better served by this distinction, which, however, Gunton had probably misunderstood and as a result rejected.

IN PLACE OF AN EPILOGUE Colin Gunton’s untimely death put an end to a theological endeavour that was gradually reaching its apex. God put a seemingly premature end to an activity celebrating his glory. It is a truism to repeat that the ways of God are strange. As an Orthodox theologian, I cannot read Colin Gunton without thinking of two major Orthodox theologians of the twentieth century, Georges Florovsky and John Zizioulas. The former advocated the ‘neopatristic synthesis’, namely an attempt not merely to repeat the words of the Fathers but to approach them creatively, to acquire their mind and to use their theology in order to respond to the challenges of our era. Like Florovsky, Gunton neither allowed cheap readings of the tradition nor repeated old slogans in responding to new challenges. As for Florovsky’s disciple, John Zizioulas, it is no secret that he exercised a significant influence upon Gunton, especially with regard to discovering promising aspects of the Trinitarian theology of the Cappadocian Fathers. Studying the works of Colin Gunton is a rewarding activity. For an Orthodox theologian, it is a lasting lesson on how to retrieve patristic wisdom in ways that make good sense in the context of our complex and demanding (post-)modern world.

M. Edmund Hussey, ‘The Persons – Energy Structure in the Theology of St. Gregory Palamas’, St. Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly 18 (1974): 22–43. 120 Gunton, The Promise of Trinitarian Theology, 194. 119

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CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Gunton and Augustine JOSHUA M. MCNALL

It was from Karl Barth that Colin Gunton picked up a rather unflattering description of Augustine’s brilliant and voluminous writings. At key points, the almost endless words that flowed forth from Hippo Regius were to be described not as the high-water mark of orthodox theology but as ‘sweet poison’ (süβes Gift).1 Gunton faulted Augustine for introducing certain problems into the doctrines which were closest to the heart of his own project, namely the Trinity and creation. Once this ‘poison’ dripped down through the centuries, his claim was that it would sicken not only theology but all Western thought. For this reason, Gunton did not hide his feelings when he admitted that the position he had just laid forth was ‘a biased one because I don’t like Augustine. I think he is the fountainhead of our troubles.’2 While this admission comes from a recording of Gunton’s posthumously published lectures, he could be nearly as harsh in print. The early flowering of these sentiments came in 1990, with ‘Augustine, the Trinity and the Theological Crisis of the West’3 – an article which fell, if not like a bombshell, then at least as an annoyance on the playground of the Augustinians.4 Such statements (both in public and in print) have made Gunton’s view of Augustine a relatively easy target, and it is undoubtedly the most criticized aspect of his work. The topic has spawned two doctoral monographs,5 as well as numerous rebuttals wherein even friends have noted Gunton’s tendency to ‘overdo it’.6 John Webster called his statements on the topic ‘breathtakingly tendentious’,7 while Christoph Schwöbel notes that they were ‘unfair perhaps’ and wishes readers could see the smile that would often coincide with these anti-Augustinian pronouncements.8 Others have not been so restrained. And Colin E. Gunton, Father, Son and Holy Spirit: Toward a Fully Trinitarian Theology (London: T&T Clark, 2003), 41. 2 Colin E. Gunton, The Barth Lectures, trans. and ed. P. H. Brazier (London: T&T Clark, 2007), 96. 3 Scottish Journal of Theology 43 (1990): 33–58. As Gunton notes, it was first delivered as a paper in 1988 and later republished in Colin E. Gunton, The Promise of Trinitarian Theology, 2nd enlarged edn (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1997). (All references to The Promise of Trinitarian Theology are to this second edition.) 4 Note the echo of Gunton’s title in Neil Ormerod, ‘Augustine and the Trinity: Whose Crisis?’, Pacifica 16 (2003): 17. 5 Bradley Green, Colin Gunton and the Failure of Augustine: The Theology of Colin Gunton in Light of Augustine (Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2011); Joshua McNall, A Free Corrector: Colin Gunton and the Legacy of Augustine (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2015). 6 Robert Jensen, ‘A Decision Tree of Colin Gunton’s Thinking’, in The Theology of Colin Gunton, ed. Lincoln Harvey (London: T&T Clark, 2010), 11. 7 John Webster, ‘Gunton and Barth’, in The Theology of Colin Gunton, 18. 8 Christoph Schwöbel, in his preface to Gunton, The Barth Lectures, 96. 1

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in response to all of this, the verdict now seems clear: If Gunton had harsh things to say about Augustine, then the years have brought a backlash whereby some of his statements have provided ammunition for the dismissal of Gunton’s own project. In my view, such a dismissal would be a shame and a move that only replaces one unfairness with another. My own argument will therefore seek a kind of middle ground between both Gunton and his critics. For while it seems clear to me that Gunton’s treatment of Augustine was both unnuanced and unfair, I will also claim that not all his charges may be easily dismissed. This is especially true when one recognizes that Gunton was more interested in Augustine’s ‘afterlife’ than he was with providing a full-orbed reading of the bishop in his context. Upon coming to the later influence of Augustine’s so-called ‘inward turn’, I will argue that Gunton was quite right to lament the unintended consequences that drip down from Hippo Regius – even if Augustine can hardly be faulted for all the ways in which his work would be appropriated. Before arriving at this conclusion, however, I must begin by clarifying just what Gunton claimed about Augustine. There were fleeting moments of affirmation. Gunton acknowledged that the church father sometimes spoke of God’s relation to the world in Christological terms;9 he valued Augustine’s epistemology, whereby Anselm was inspired towards the premise of ‘faith seeking understanding’;10 and he appreciated Augustine’s avoidance of a wooden literalism in the creation narratives.11 Yet even in these moments of praise, Gunton moved quickly to critique. The sweetness, he implied, would only mask the poison. His overarching charge was that a monistic imbalance in Augustine’s doctrine of God was connected to a damaging dualism in his doctrine of creation; thus, the triune Creator was allegedly distanced from the economy of salvation, and this ‘great divorce’ would wreak great havoc over time. Gunton’s critiques did not emerge in a vacuum. As Neil Ormerod notes, Augustine had long been ‘the whipping boy of much modern Trinitarian theology’, and especially among those who desired to elevate the ‘East’ above the ‘West’.12 To be critical of ‘Augustinian’ tendencies was almost a requirement for membership in the modern Renaissance of Trinitarian theology. Even so, Gunton often excelled his peers in making Augustine not just the ‘whipping boy’ but the ‘whip’ by which the intellectual inheritors of Hippo Regius were marked for punishment.13

THE TRINITY AND A ‘PLATONIC’ PROBLEM OF SIMPLICITY At the root of Augustine’s problems, Gunton named the attempt to defend Christianity through the unfortunate weaponry of Neoplatonism. As he wrote, In the fifth century, the dogmatic shape of Christianity was more or less formed. What was apparently required was the defence of certain doctrines of the creed against their Colin E. Gunton, The Triune Creator: A Historical and Systematic Study (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1998), 75. 10 Colin E. Gunton, Enlightenment and Alienation: An Essay towards a Trinitarian Theology (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1985), 3, 51, 131. 11 Ibid.,  81. 12 Ormerod, ‘Augustine and the Trinity’, 17. 13 I adapt this metaphor from Maurice Wiles’s description of ‘Arianism’ in his essay, ‘Attitudes to Arius in the Arian Controversy’, in Arianism after Arius, ed. M. R. Barnes and D. H. Williams (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2000), 43. 9

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philosophical opponents, and it is this which dominates Augustine’s approach. To a certain extent, he receives the doctrine from the tradition. But he receives it in such a way that certain problems remain for him. In every case, they centre on his continuing adherence to platonic ways of thought, and in every case mean that certain points are problematic for him.14 Aside from the well-worn employment of a certain ‘Hellenization thesis’, Gunton was clear that Augustine’s use of platonic presuppositions was rightly motivated by a desire to overthrow specific errors (whether Manichaean, Homoian or Pelagian). The charge, therefore, was not that Augustine was ‘propounding straightforward versions of the various heresies to which he [was] near’ but that he ultimately lacked ‘the conceptual equipment to avoid a final collapse into something like [these problems]’.15 The first of these near-heresies was to be found in a monistic (and thus modalistic) imbalance in the doctrine of the Trinity. Behind the Trinitarian deficiency, Gunton saw a version of divine simplicity. In classical theism, this doctrine involved the almost universal assumption that God is not comprised of ‘parts’; rather, God’s existence simply is his essence. In an unfinished draft of his planned dogmatics, Gunton wrote that ‘Augustine’s chief weakness is that he asked the wrong question … about how to reconcile the absolute simplicity of God with the apparent plurality of the persons, rather than [seeking] a concept of divine unity on the basis of the economy’.16 In this charge, there is a consistency with claims made at the beginning of his career. In the published version of his doctoral thesis, Gunton wrote that ‘If unity is construed as simplicity, and that is understood in the classical sense of absence of composition, then [citing Barth] “the simple is an utterly unmoved being, remote from this world altogether”.’17 In between these two works, Gunton came to nuance his view of simplicity somewhat. The problem was not simplicity per se, but a particular version of it. Just one year before his death, he wrote that while ‘it has become fashionable to deny the doctrine of divine simplicity[,]‌[t]his will not do if we wish to hold on to a doctrine of the unity and coherence of the divine being’.18 The trouble, therefore, was that Augustine had absolutized and misapplied simplicity so as to imperil the particularity of triune persons and to distance the triune God from the material and temporal world. Is there truth to this allegation? In certain passages, one is compelled to agree with Gunton’s fear that divine simplicity caused problems for Augustine’s doctrine of creation. For instance, in a tractate on John’s Gospel, Augustine wrestles with those passages that seem to refer to God speaking as if he had a body. In response, Augustine commands himself to ‘Take away all bodily things. See simplicity, if you are simple. But how will you be simple? If you do not entangle yourself [in the world], you will be simple.’19 While

Gunton, Triune Creator, 74, emphasis added. Gunton, Promise of Trinitarian Theology, 55. 16 Colin E. Gunton, A Christian Dogmatic Theology, Vol. 1: The Triune God. A Doctrine of the Trinity as Though Jesus Makes a Difference, 2003, unpublished typescript, ­chapter 5. Cited in Jenson, ‘Decision Tree’, in Theology of Colin Gunton, 10. 17 Colin E. Gunton, Becoming and Being: The Doctrine of God in Charles Hartshorne and Karl Barth, new edn (London: T&T Clark/SCM, 2001), 23. Citing Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, Volume 2/1, ed. G. W. Bromiley and T. F. Torrance (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1957) (hereafter CD), 449. 18 Colin E. Gunton, Act and Being: Towards a Theology of the Divine Attributes (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2002), 32. 19 Augustine, Tractates on the Gospel of John, 23.8 (sometime after ad 408). Cited in Ayres, Augustine and the Trinity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 93. Unless otherwise noted, citations of Augustine will 14 15

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one should not jump to conclusions from a single passage, it is easy to see how such language might present, in Barth’s words, ‘the Simple as … a being, remote from this world altogether’.20 After all, why, when Augustine wants to conceive of the divine, does he not turn his gaze to Christ, ‘the image of the invisible God’ (Col. 1.15)? Why must he set aside ‘all bodily things’ if the Word became flesh? The reason is that Augustine’s early struggle was with a material (Manichaean) view of God.21 Hence, when the younger Augustine thought of the divine, his tendency was to picture something material, divisible and imperfect.22 The solution came partly from the ‘books of the platonists’ mentioned in Confessions 7. For Plotinus (c.ad 204–270), the answer to material conceptions of ultimate reality was the absolute simplicity of the ‘One’ – depicted as a kind of light source that spread out through a series of emanations, the chief of which resulted in the construction of the nous (mind). While Plotinus taught that humans cannot glimpse this ultimate reality corporally, his further claim was that we may be enlightened through the inner conduit of the mind.23 Once purified, the human nous may be set free from the beguilement of the body in order to attain a mystical union with the One. In all of this, the potential parallels between Plotinian and Augustinian simplicity have been hotly debated.24 What is not debatable is that Augustine did affirm the irreducibility of the Father, Son and Spirit. And this fact accounts for Gunton’s claim that Augustine was only ‘near’ to modalism. For Augustine’s defenders, divine simplicity merely provided a philosophical concept by which to assert that all three persons may possess full divinity, without being three gods. And while this may be true, I have noted already how some versions of simplicity might weaken one’s affirmation of ‘bodily things’, which one must ‘take away’ in order to catch a glimpse of God within the self.25 I will return to this point momentarily. Yet rather than attempt to solve the ongoing debates regarding divine simplicity, the best path forward in examining Gunton’s argument will be to see how such commitments may have coloured Augustine’s other statements on the Trinity and creation.

UNSPEAKING OUSIA AND HYPOSTASIS Gunton’s favourite proof text by which to illustrate a monistic imbalance involved Augustine’s response to the Cappadocian distinction between ousia and hypostasis. In Book Five of De Trinitate, Augustine has this to say just after an affirmation of divine simplicity: I say [one] essence, which in Greek is called ousia, and which we call more usually substance. They indeed use also the word hypostasis; but they intend to put a difference, I know not what, between ousia and hypostasis … Yet, when the question is asked, What three? Human language labors altogether under great poverty of speech. The

come from the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers collection. With the exception of De Trinitate, I will use their English titles. 20 Barth, CD 2/1, 449. Gunton cites the passage in Becoming and Being, 203. 21 See Augustine, Confessions, 4.16.29. Unless otherwise noted, I will hereafter cite from the Henry Chadwick translation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991). 22 Ibid., 4.16.30. 23 See Plotinus, The Enneads, trans. Stephen MacKenna, ed. John Dillon (London: Penguin Books, 1991). 24 For a fuller survey of this literature, see McNall, Free Corrector, ch. 3. 25 See again Augustine, Tractates on John, 23.8.

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answer, however, is given three ‘persons’ [personae], not that it might be [completely] spoken, but that it might not be left [wholly] unspoken.26 In Gunton’s view, the translator’s insertion of the bracketed words ‘completely’ and ‘wholly’ was an attempt to place in Augustine’s mouth what he ‘ought to have said’ – because what he did say was more troubling. For Gunton, ‘To say that a term is used merely in order not to be silent seems to be too agnostic, and to fall short of what the Cappadocians had done’ with their desynonymizing of ousia and hypostasis.27 The alleged result was that the ‘distinguishable identity’ of the Father, Son and Spirit tends ‘to disappear into the all-embracing oneness of [Augustine’s] God’.28 There are, however, more charitable readings of Augustine’s statement. Perhaps his professed lack of understanding reveals little more than what has been called Augustine’s ‘pathetic’ grasp of Greek.29 Or perhaps he sees ‘little use in quibbling over the exact term, as long as the same concept is affirmed’.30 Or, as Richard Cross has argued, perhaps Augustine understands perfectly what the Cappadocians are trying to do, even while he rejects the utility of all genus-species language for describing the Trinity.31 (In my own view, this final suggestion seems most plausible.) Yet whatever the case, it would appear that Gunton places an awful lot of emphasis upon a single, ambiguous passage – especially given the fact that the precise distinction between ousia and hypostasis had, at the time, remained a matter of some debate even within the apophatic, Greek-speaking East.32 Despite the questionable treatment of a single proof text, there are areas in which Gunton’s later work seemed to alter earlier critiques. One shift in tone involved the validity of the so-called ‘De Régnon paradigm’.33 The label refers to the idea that, starting with Augustine, Western theologians began their doctrines of God with a focus upon divine unity (De Deo Uno) because it could be proved by reason. Then, only later would they move to speak of the three persons (De Deo Trino).34 While this view was once affirmed by even Augustine’s own supporters,35 it was taken up by Rahner and a host of modern theologians to demonstrate a Western-Augustinian tendency towards a monistic treatment of the Trinity.36 Augustine, De Trinitate, 5.8,9. Gunton, Promise of Trinitarian Theology, 40. 28 Ibid.,  42. 29 See James J. O’Donnell, Augustine: A New Biography (New York: Harper, 2005), 126. 30 As Bradley Green asks, in ‘The Protomodern Augustine? Colin Gunton and the Failure of Augustine’, International Journal of Systematic Theology 9, no. 3 (2009): 334n.26. 31 Richard Cross, ‘“Quid Tres?” On What Precisely Augustine Professes Not to Understand in De Trinitate 5 and 7’, Harvard Theological Review 100, no. 2 (2007): 215–32. Cross’s article is a direct response to Gunton’s claims in the aforementioned passage from The Promise of Trinitarian Theology. 32 For a fuller discussion, see McNall, Free Corrector, 66–72. The apophaticism of Cappadocian Trinitarianism is important, given their consistent emphasis upon the distance (epinoia) between our words and the reality of God’s nature. 33 So named for Theodore de Régnon, S. J., Études de théologie positive sur la Sainte Trinité, four volumes bound as three (Paris: Victor Retaux, [1892] 1998). 34 For a rejection of this simplistic breakdown between East and West, see Michel René Barnes, ‘De Régnon Reconsidered’, Augustinian Studies 26, no. 2 (1995): 51–79. For questions as to whether one should tie it to de Régnon, see Kristin Hennessy, ‘An Answer to de Régnon’s Accusers: Why We Should Not Speak of “His” Paradigm’, Harvard Theological Review 100, no. 2 (2007): 179–97. 35 See Stephen McKenna, ‘Introduction’ to Saint Augustine: The Trinity (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1963). 36 See Karl Rahner, The Trinity, ed. and trans. Joseph Donceel (London: Burns and Oates, 1970), 17; Gunton, Promise of Trinitarian Theology, 31. 26 27

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In his final published work, however, Gunton’s tone would soften. Perhaps in response to the flood of scholarship now questioning the De Régnon paradigm, Gunton now acknowledged that the idealized schema was indeed an ‘oversimplification’. ‘The real difference’, as he now wrote, ‘tends not to be in the starting point but in the way in which the oneness and threeness of God are weighted in relation to one another.’37 And on this subject, some of Gunton’s harshest claims were reserved for Augustine’s treatment of the Holy Spirit.

THE SPIRIT AS THE ‘LINK OF LOVE’ One of the most distinctive elements of Augustine’s pneumatology was his naming of the Holy Spirit as the vinculum amoris (link of love) between the Father and the Son.38 Gunton found the image helpful in that it could be taken to imply that the Spirit was the perfecting agent of communion, even in the life of God.39 But for Gunton, the problem with Augustine’s ‘link of love’ analogy was that it failed to make the outward (and eschatological) move so that the Spirit was seen also as the perfecting agent within history.40 The result was an alleged tendency to ‘turn the deity into an eternal inward turning circle rather than a being from eternity directed outwards to the other’.41 In a new epilogue to Becoming and Being, Gunton claimed that ‘the Achilles’ heel of all Western theology is Augustine’s failure to make the Spirit a person’.42 And in his final published book, he lashed out against the implications of the ‘link of love’ analogy: God is no lonely monad or self-absorbed tyrant, but one whose orientation to the other is intrinsic to his eternal being as God. God’s work ‘outward’ is an expression of what he is eternally. The Spirit, we might say, is the motor of that divine movement outwards, just as the Son is its focus and model (eikōn). Augustine called the Spirit the bond of love between the Father and the Son, but this is in danger of leading us to think of God as a kind of self-enclosed circle.43 This charge is perhaps the weakest point in Gunton’s argument against Augustine. In City of God, Augustine appears to make the very move that Gunton wants when he identifies the Spirit as the goodness (bonitas) and holiness (sanctitas) of God, by which creation is both crafted and destined.44 The directionality, here, is clearly outward and ‘creational’ in focus. And if one desires an outward-focused image of the Spirit, one could hardly do better than the two words that Augustine selects as descriptors of the Holy Spirit: Gift and Love. In fact, Augustine’s favourite passage in all of Scripture was Rom. 5.5, a text which speaks of God pouring his love into our hearts by the Holy Spirit.45 Gunton, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, 43–4. See Augustine, De Trinitate, 6.5. 39 See Gunton, Promise of Trinitarian Theology, 49; The Christian Faith: An Introduction to Christian Doctrine (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), 186; and Father, Son and Holy Spirit, 73. 40 See the telling subtitle in Colin E. Gunton, ‘God the Holy Spirit: Augustine and His Successors’, in Theology through the Theologians: Selected Essays 1972–1995 (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1996), 105–28. 41 Gunton, The Christian Faith, 186. 42 Gunton, Becoming and Being, 238. 43 Gunton, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, 86. 44 See Augustine, City of God, 11.24. See Lewis Ayres, Augustine and the Trinity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 225. 45 See again McNall, Free Corrector, 78–9. 37 38

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Before simply dismissing Gunton’s charge, however, one would do well to take another look at it – not to vindicate the claim against Augustine but to better understand how Gunton took snippets from the tradition and connected them to later (often genuine) imbalances. Upon closer inspection, what Gunton is critiquing is the impression created by a particular word-picture: the Spirit as the ‘bond of love’ between the Father and the Son. It is a memorable and innovative metaphor, and if it were all one had from Augustine’s pneumatology, then Gunton’s worry would be well-founded. Picture it. What Augustine’s ‘link of love’ analogy offers is a mental image of two persons (the Father and the Son) connected by a bond or chain: the Holy Spirit. And while the Father and the Son seem immanently personal, the ‘Spirit-bond’ seems less so and closed off from the ad extra work of God. The ‘hand’ – to channel the Irenaean metaphor of the Son and Spirit as God’s two hands46 – seems ‘handcuffed’ by being pictured as a link of chain. Gunton is not wrong about the potential connotations of the image, even while he is woefully unfair to Augustine’s overall theology of the Spirit. After all, if one wants to absolutize the mono-personal implications of a triune metaphor, then the Irenaean imagery of God’s two ‘hands’ could also be accused of failing to make both Son and Spirit persons in the fullest sense. This too raises an important point. As everyone admits, Gunton’s overriding concern was to highlight Augustine’s influence upon the subsequent tradition, rather than to provide a careful treatment of his massive corpus. The latter goal was once dubbed impossible by Isidore of Seville (c.560–636), who alleged that anyone claiming to have read all of Augustine was in fact a ‘liar’.47 There are always other passages in Augustine. Always. And there are also significant developments within his thought (try as he did to gloss this fact in his Reconsiderations). While the years since Gunton’s death have brought a corrective to his uncontextualized critiques of the church father, a further nuance must now be noted. In the words of the Augustine-specialist, Michel René Barnes: ‘There may never have been a “contextualized” reading of Augustine … Indeed, in bits and pieces sometimes seems to be the only way that Augustine’s trinitarian theology has been read. The medievals who read him, read him in that way. The moderns who read him have continued the practice.’48 In sum, Gunton was not the only one to read Augustine selectively. Nor was he the only one to latch onto a particular analogy, image or emphasis while leaving other passages aside. One finds a similar selectivity (without the negativity) in Boethius, Gregory the Great, Bonaventure, Francesco Petrarch, Martin Luther, René Descartes and many others.49 To be ‘Augustinian’, in one way or another, need not mean a slavish adherence to all aspects of Augustine’s thought. And even if one desired such a correspondence, then there was the question of ‘Which Augustine?’ Furthermore, like many polemicists (Gunton included), Augustine’s emphases depended partly upon the errors he was seeking to correct. On the Trinity, however, there is no doubt that De Trinitate is the magnum opus. It towers over subsequent Trinitarian theology. And in this text, we do find at least one example of how Gunton’s charge is partly justified.

See Irenaeus, Against Heresies, 4.20.1. Isidore of Seville, Carmina [Ascripta]. See J. P. Migne, Patrologia Latina, 83.1109. 48 Michel René Barnes, ‘Rereading Augustine’s Theology of the Trinity’, in The Trinity: An Interdisciplinary Symposium on the Trinity, ed. Stephen T. Davis, Daniel Kendal and Gerald O’Collins (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 147. 49 See McNall, Free Corrector, c­ hapters 5–8. 46 47

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GUNTON AND AUGUSTINE’S INWARD TURN The so-called ‘inward turn’ – whereby Augustine sought to find a kind of ‘trinity’ within his rational mind – may be understood as the ‘hinge-point’ between Gunton’s allegation of a monistic imbalance in the doctrine of God and a certain dualism in the doctrine of creation. In Book Eight of De Trinitate, Augustine announces a transition in his exploration of the Trinity. Henceforth, he will begin to ‘discuss in a more inward manner’ the things already covered previously with respect to Scripture and tradition. What follows are the oft-cited ‘psychological analogies’ (though Augustine never calls them that) which are tested out as imperfect echoes of the divine triunity. Among these Trinitarian similitudes, Augustine explores the triad of memory, understanding and will within his rational mind.50 For Gunton, the psychological triads proved what had been suspected all along: Augustine had failed to account for the full and particular personhood of the Father, Son and Spirit. They evidenced a monistic imbalance. After all, whatever else one might say about memory, understanding and will, it is obvious that they are the faculties of a single person. In Gunton’s view, such inward ‘speculation’ turned the Trinity into a ‘theological irrelevance’ because the focus turned to finding three things that could be spoken of as one rather than exploring how triune relatedness could be brought to bear on human relatedness.51 In Augustine’s defence, the quest to find a kind of Trinity within himself was partly motivated by a reading of Scripture. After all, the God of Gen. 1.26 had spoken in the plural when saying: ‘Let us make man in our image.’ And for Augustine, the statement proved that ‘man was made to the image, not of the Father alone or of the Son alone or of the Holy Spirit alone, but of the Trinity itself ’.52 The importance of this point can scarcely be exaggerated. It represents a shift from Augustine’s earlier position that humans had been made in the image of the Son.53 With this exegetical decision made, Augustine turned naturally to ask which part of the human should be seen as the imago Trinitatis. In his view, the only suitable candidate was the immaterial, rational mind.54 Augustine found support for such an ‘inward turn’ from Neoplatonism, yet he also claimed that the authority of the apostle himself declares that ‘man was not made in the image of God according to the shape of his body, but according to his rational mind’.55 Augustine was referring (as he often was) to Paul, and specifically to the claim of Ephesians regarding the renewal of the mind, ‘which was created after God’. The translation was a bad one, based as it was on the Latin text available to Augustine, yet it was not the only passage which bolstered such an inward turn. In 1 Corinthians 13 Augustine found the imagery of a ‘mirror’ in which one might gaze to find a dim reflection of that which we will one day see ‘face to face’ (13.12, NRSV). Augustine took this as a reference to the beatific

See De Trinitate, 10. Colin E. Gunton, ‘Trinity, Ontology and Anthropology: Towards a Renewal of the Doctrine of the Imago Dei’, in Persons, Divine and Human, ed. Christoph Schwöbel and Colin Gunton (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1991), 47. 52 Augustine writes this in a later amendment to On the Literal Interpretation of Genesis, an Unfinished Book, 16.61. 53 By the writing of Confessions 13.22.32 (c.ad 397–401), the shift towards a triadic view of the imago Dei had taken place. See McNall, Free Corrector, 83. 54 While Gunton was critical of Augustine for making the immaterial mind or soul the focus of the imago Dei, he was hardly the only pro-Nicene theologian to do so. Similar statements can be found in Athanasius, Gregory of Nyssa and Gregory of Nazianzus. 55 De Trinitate, 12.7.2. 50 51

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vision, and thus he found yet more biblical justification for his quest to find an echo of the Trinity within himself. I have highlighted some of the exegetical decisions behind Augustine’s inward turn because such a move is necessary for advancing the two points I wish to make. First, in focusing upon Augustine’s ‘speculative’ Platonism, Gunton fails to acknowledge the extent to which Augustine was attempting to be true to Scripture when he sought an imperfect echo of the ‘trinity’ within himself. Still, my second point is equally important: despite Augustine’s best intentions, Gunton was not wrong about the shaky exegetical and theological foundations for the inward turn, nor was he wrong about its long-lasting (and quite negative) repercussions. On the interpretation of the imago Dei, Augustine had alternatives. Indeed, one could be found in Gunton’s hero: Irenaeus of Lyons. In striking contrast to both Augustine and nearly all other early and medieval theologians, Irenaeus linked the imago Dei to the material body of the incarnate Christ, who was and is the perfect image of the invisible God. Thus even Adam is seen as having been patterned after the yet-to-be incarnate Messiah.56 In this move, Irenaeus rejected a gnostic ‘inward turn’ that sounds somewhat similar to Augustine’s Neoplatonic reading of the apostle Paul. In the gnostic version, converts were instructed to turn away from matter and to look for the Supreme God by looking within the human mind.57 Irenaeus would have none of it. The imago Dei was the imago Christi, and as an ‘image’ (which by definition may be seen) it must include even the visible and material body. Despite the arguments of Irenaeus, however, Augustine chose another path, and the subsequent tradition would find him more persuasive. None of this is to argue that Augustine was a closet gnostic or even a full-fledged Neoplatonist by virtue of his inward search for a vestige of the Trinity. But it is to note that there were other exegetical options at his disposal. And it is also to concur with Gunton that Augustine’s commitment to divine simplicity (influenced as it was by the platonicorum libros) stood behind his plunge into the looking glass to find a set of triads within the immaterial and rational mind. The words ‘immaterial’ and ‘rational’ form signposts to the next aspect of Gunton’s critique: that is, that certain platonic presuppositions led Augustine to an influential preference for mind over matter and to a distancing of the triune God from the created order. On such points, I will again find reasons to temper Gunton’s more exaggerated statements while also recognizing the grain of truth within them.

AUGUSTINE’S ‘DUALISM’ IN THE DOCTRINE OF CREATION Dualism, as Gunton defined it, was ‘an assumption that the divine and the human are opposing realms’.58 As he explained, ‘Mainstream Christianity has always held that God is other than the world, but because he is its Creator, has denied that the two are related in a negative way … Dualism denies such an interaction either explicitly or by conceiving the two in such a way that it becomes impossible consistently to relate them.’59 See Irenaeus, Against Heresies, 5.16.2; Demonstration of Apostolic Preaching, 22. See the gnostic claims as relayed by Hippolytus of Rome, On Heresies, 8.15.1–2. 58 Gunton, The Christian Faith, 87, italics his. 59 Colin Gunton, Yesterday and Today: A Study of Continuities of Christology (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1983), 86. 56 57

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Gunton’s claim, made most carefully in The Triune Creator, was not that Augustine denied the goodness of the created order, but that his lingering Platonism kept him from consistently relating the Creator to the creation by way of triune mediation. In contrast to Irenaeus, Gunton argued, ‘Augustine is not moving from the incarnation to the goodness of the created order. He is defending a position once established by that means, but now tends to leave them firmly in the background.’60 To prove the point, Gunton moved to a wide-ranging survey of Augustine’s doctrine of creation through a variety of different works that span almost the breadth of his corpus. In so doing, he demonstrated a more nuanced acquaintance with the church father (at least at points), and one that went beyond the recitation of some oft-repeated proof texts. In the end, however, Gunton’s verdict remained stark: ‘Augustine continued to be marked by the scars of the Manichaeism from which he was so desperate to be healed.’61 On material goodness, Gunton’s charge began with a claim made in Confessions 12.7. Here, the ‘earth’ of Genesis 1 is described not as ‘very good’ but as ‘close to being nothing’. Gunton’s response was that while Augustine sees God’s creation as good, ‘some things are definitely less “very good” than others’.62 A closer reading of Augustine reveals however that he is speaking not of the current world of trees and mountains but of the invisible, primordial and formless matter that God purportedly used to shape the present earth: a world of ‘great things at which the sons of men wonder’.63 In light of this distinction, Gunton’s criticism goes too far – like asking why Gen. 1.2 does not speak more glowingly of the Tohu wa-bohu: the ‘wild and waste’ that is often translated as ‘formless and void’. Gunton was not wrong, however, to note that a certain material dualism remained a problem for Augustine – even if it was a malady from which he was being progressively ‘healed’. In the Confessions, it is entirely possible that Augustine still believed that humans are souls fallen into bodies, rather than with them.64 And while the claim is never made explicitly, the implication is sometimes strong: ‘we [know] there is a home to which we may return’, Augustine writes, ‘because we fell from it’,65 and our souls ‘leapt down into times’.66 There is also (throughout Augustine’s life) the issue of a ‘hierarchy of being’ whereby the lower rungs of reality are reserved for visible matter. Gunton was correct, therefore, in saying that while ‘everything is “very good” [for Augustine], some things are definitely “less good” than others’.67 Herein lies a crucial point: while one rebuttal to Gunton is to note that Augustine’s dualism was ‘limited’ in important ways,68 the point (while accurate) does not grasp sufficiently that Gunton’s concern was always for Augustine’s ‘afterlife’. For Gunton, Augustine’s influence upon the subsequent tradition was all he ever cared about. Hence his charge was that Augustine’s dualism was actually more contagious by being limited.

Gunton, Triune Creator, 74. Ibid.,  79. 62 Ibid.,  78. 63 Augustine, Confessions, trans. Henry Chadwick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 12.8. 64 This argument is made by the Augustine specialist John Rist, Augustine: Ancient Thought Baptized (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 112. The most extensive argument in support of this thesis was set forth by Robert J. O’Connell. See Ronnie J. Rombs, Saint Augustine and the Fall of the Soul: Beyond O’Connell and his Critics (Washington, DC: CUA, 2006). 65 Augustine, Confessions, 4.31; see also 12.12–15; 13.9. 66 Ibid.,  11.39. 67 Gunton, Triune Creator, 78. 68 Green, Gunton and the Failure of Augustine, 132. 60 61

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The limitation was precisely the problem because it made it more transferable. As he states, ‘Augustine’s interpretations are far more controlled … than Origen’s but this means that they are more dangerous.’69 Given Gunton’s focus on the subsequent tradition, one must now ask which writings within Augustine’s corpus were most influential. Unquestionably, if the latter books of De Trinitate tower over later Trinitarian theology (with their problematic preference for ‘mind over matter’ and an exhortation to find an echo of God within the human mind), then the Confessions cast what may be an even longer shadow.

THE CONFESSIONS AND TIME OUT OF MIND Consider, then, how the Confessions deal with yet another topic that was integral to Gunton’s account of triune mediation: the subject of time. On temporality, Gunton’s emphasis upon the divine economy stressed a God who ‘takes his time’ in perfecting the project of creation.70 Thus the eternal is ‘conceived as a time-embracing and not a timedenying reality’.71 In Augustine, however, Gunton found the opposite, and not just in his claim that God created all things instantaneously. The Confessions are obsessed with time. And after puzzling yet again over the creation narratives of Genesis, Augustine offers a bold suggestion: that time is ‘simply a distension [distentio] of the mind itself ’.72 Never one to shrink from sweeping historical pronouncements, Gunton drew a line from here to Kant and the modern idea that temporal realities are but projections of the mind.73 His claim was that Augustine never could reconcile the temporal and the eternal through a theology of triune mediation: ‘The Manichee never quite disappears.’74 The result was an alleged dualism whereby the two realms were, again, related inconsistently. ‘Ever since Augustine, Western theology has operated with a conceptuality in which the otherness of time and eternity has been strongly accentuated.’75 Was Gunton right? In later works, Augustine spoke more positively of temporal goodness,76 yet he remained somewhat inconsistent. Nearly a decade after the Confessions, he still states that ‘Christ came to set us free from time.’77 And when he later sought to reimagine history’s end (by a rejection of millenarian eschatology), he famously discarded the idea that resurrected bodies will dwell within a physical and temporal New Creation. Instead, they shall live forever in the ‘heavens’78 – a move that effectively reversed the verdict of Scripture. In the words of Leo Ferrari, ‘For Augustine the terrestrial realm was a world from which to escape.’79 On this topic too, Gunton was not wrong to lament Augustine’s influence.80 For if the later tradition sometimes adopted an escapist eschatology that Gunton, Triune Creator, 76. See Colin E. Gunton, The One, the Three and the Many: God, Creation and the Culture of Modernity. The 1992 Bampton Lectures (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 80–1. 71 Gunton, Yesterday and Today, 130. 72 Augustine, Confessions, 11.26.33. 73 Gunton, Yesterday and Today, 110. 74 Gunton, The One, the Three and the Many, 82. 75 Gunton, Yesterday and Today, 28. 76 See On the Literal Interpretation of Genesis, 1.18.14. Here Augustine states that by events taking place ‘according to the limits of their time’, God weaves together ‘the beautiful tapestry of the ages’. 77 Augustine, Tractates on the Gospel of John, 31.5 (c.ad 406–7). 78 See Augustine, City of God, 22.4. 79 Leo Ferrari, ‘Augustine’s Cosmography’, Augustinian Studies 27, no. 2 (1996): 176. 80 See Gunton, Promise of Trinitarian Theology, 50. 69 70

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focused overly on ‘going to heaven’, then Augustine’s influential alteration of millenarian hope certainly played a part.

AUGUSTINE AND NON-BODILY MEDIATORS In all of this, Augustine again demonstrates an abiding preference for ‘mind’ over ‘matter’ – even while he moved progressively to a more positive treatment of physicality and incarnation. On the latter topic, Gunton emphasized the Spirit-led humanity of Jesus, which enabled him to be our sole mediator and our great High Priest. In Augustine, however, the charge was that Christ’s sole mediatorship was impinged upon by nonphysical forces: the angels, the monistic ‘will’ of God and the immaterial human mind or soul.81 In such non-bodily mediators, Gunton again found fault with both Augustine and his afterlife. While space does not permit a full evaluation, Gunton’s charges were (again) insightful and exaggerated. On angelic mediation, Augustine rejected the common interpretation of the Old Testament theophanies as ‘Christophanies’ in favour of a view that saw them as the work of angels.82 And in this move, Gunton again saw an ‘anti-incarnational Platonism’.83 In rebuttal, some note that Augustine made the move to head off Arian opponents who viewed the visibility of the Logos as proof that the Son was not fully divine. This may be so, but it is surely problematic that part of Augustine’s solution was to accept the Arian premise that divinity cannot be seen.84 On mediation by God’s ‘monistic will’, part of Gunton’s critique centres on Augustine’s doctrine of predestination. Hence he can say, ‘If not in Augustine, certainly in those who learned from him, creation becomes very much the product of pure, unmotivated and therefore arbitrary will, a will that operates equally arbitrarily in the theology of double predestination that became after him so much a mark of the Western tradition.’85 The ‘If not in Augustine …’ line is vintage Gunton; specifically, because it illustrates both a growing awareness that Augustine himself did sometimes relate creation to the Son and Spirit, and a sense that he could still be faulted for certain later problems. Finally, Gunton’s third charge against Augustine’s view of mediation involved the tendency to focus on the immaterial ‘mind’ or ‘soul’ as the place that one encounters God. And at this juncture, one encounters yet again the influential implications of Augustine’s so-called ‘inward turn’. Gunton’s claim was that Augustine’s move to encounter Truth within the self would reap massive consequences in time, in particular: intellectualism, individualism and the strange bedfellows of subjectivity and rationalism.86 Now a word on that.

or an extended discussion, see again McNall, Free Corrector, 117. F See De Trinitate, 4.31. 83 Gunton, Promise of Trinitarian Theology, 34. 84 See Michel René Barnes, ‘The Visible Christ and the Invisible Trinity: Mt. 5.8 in Augustine’s Trinitarian Theology of 400’, in Modern Theology 19, no. 3 (2003): 335n.59. While challenging Gunton’s uncontextualized critiques (348n.4), Barnes admits Augustine’s change of mind on the theophanies involved in the acceptance of the aforementioned Arian presupposition. 85 Gunton, One, the Three and the Many, 145. 86 See Revelation and Reason, 108–9. 81 82

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GUNTON AND AUGUSTINE’S AFTERLIFE While space does not permit a full evaluation of Augustine’s legacy, this final section will touch briefly upon three later thinkers in order to illustrate the diverse ways in which snippets of his thought would be appropriated to contribute to the modern ethos as described by Gunton. These thinkers are Gregory the Great (c.540–604), Francesco Petrarch (1304–1374) and René Descartes (1596–1650). I will deal with them, however, out of chronological sequence for reasons which will become clear in the course of the argument. Perhaps the most interesting chapter in Gunton’s telling of Augustine’s afterlife involves a famous, cogitating Frenchman. Where Plato turned outward to eternity, Descartes turned inward to the mind. Only one more step was needed for Kant to deny the link Descartes made between the contents of his mind and the transcendent eternal world. … Descartes taught Kant to look within. But who taught Descartes? … Is not the crucial figure of Augustine the one to whom we should look? … it can scarcely be denied that the decisive forerunner of the Meditations’ subjective style of philosophizing is to be found in Augustine’s Confessions.87 For Gunton, Descartes’ cogito was itself ‘straight out of Augustine’ – having been taken almost verbatim from Augustine’s prior proof of his existence.88 In his own battle with pervasive scepticism, Augustine had similarly found a rational antidote to crippling doubt by looking inward. ‘Fallo ergo sum’ is the simplest distillation of his dictum (‘I am wrong [about all sorts of things …], therefore I am’). The claim may be found in On Free Will, On True Religion and most notably in City of God. In the latter, Augustine’s proof comes forth in an examination of the imago Trinitatis within his rational mind.89 Even in Descartes’ own day, he was confronted by readers who traced the cogito to Augustine. And while the Frenchman’s Jesuit education provided a context for the inspiration, Descartes denied it. After all, his entire project was based upon the disavowal of traditional authorities. Recent scholarship, however, has shown that Gunton was indeed correct to link the men at this key juncture.90 And indeed, even the point that Descartes claimed to be a departure from Augustine (the thinking ‘I’ as an immaterial substance distinct from the material body) was in fact a further commonality between them.91 As Carol Quillen notes, ‘Augustine’s distinction between the corporeal and the incorporeal and his conviction that knowledge of God is best sought by turning inward rather than outward finds echoes in Descartes’ much starker dualism.’92 None of this changes the massive differences between Augustine and Descartes. Most notably, the church father would never attempt anything like the rational reconstruction of human knowledge apart from traditional authority. As Augustine noted, he would not

Gunton, Yesterday and Today, 108–9. Gunton, Revelation and Reason, 220. 89 See Augustine, On True Religion, 39; On Free Will, 2.3; City of God, 11.26. 90 See especially Gareth B. Matthews, Thought’s Ego in Augustine and Descartes (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992); Zbigniew Janowski, Augustinian-Cartesian Index: Texts and Commentary (South Bend, IN: St. Augustine’s Press, 2004). 91 See McNall, Free Corrector, 222. 92 Carol Quillen, ‘Renaissance to the Enlightenment’, in Augustine through the Ages: An Encyclopedia, ed. Allan Fitzgerald (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1999), 721. 87 88

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have believed the gospel had it not been for the authority of the Catholic Church.93 In the end, Augustine and Descartes were worlds apart in both their contexts and their aims. Yet even at a point where Descartes would differ greatly from the mature Augustine, my recurring caveat must again be noted: the ‘mature Augustine’ was not the only one to exert an influence upon the later centuries. One of Gunton’s critics has alleged that the true force of Cartesian modernism is not a Neoplatonic quest to look within the rational mind but a ‘stoic voluntarism’ that was brought to the fore by Gregory the Great.94 The point of the charge (however fair it is to Gregory) is that a belief in the freedom and potential of the human will represents a reversal of the anti-Pelagian Augustine. The latter point is undoubtedly true, yet what Gunton’s critic fails to note regarding Gregory is the existence of more than one ‘Augustine’ from which to draw. In fact, Gregory had been inspired by Augustine’s early treatise On Free Will, a work that was written before Augustine’s thinking was transformed by a reading of Paul.95 Once again, Gunton was not the only one to read Augustine selectively. And in Augustine’s earlier works especially it is undeniable that a focus on reason, the immaterial mind and the inward turn would have abiding modern consequences.96 This much is undoubtable, even if Gunton did exaggerate quite stunningly by remarking that ‘Augustine is a “modern” … [for] there is in Augustine this confidence that by looking inwards you will find the divine or the truth.’97 In a final ‘Augustinian’ exemplar, we see that not just the inward turn of Descartes but that of Renaissance humanism was inspired by the subjective interiority of the Confessions. Hence the father of humanism, Francesco Petrarch (1304–1374), would carry on conversations with Augustine’s ‘ghost’ in his influential work My Secret. In the book, Augustine’s shade adjures Petrarch to ‘take up and read’ (so to speak). Yet while such words led the real Augustine to Paul’s letter to the Romans, Augustine’s ‘ghost’ is interested in Virgil. Nor has his disembodied spirit retained the more positive view of materiality that the actual Augustine came to later in life: While your ‘soul was nobly formed in heaven’, Augustine’s ghost tells Petrarch, it is now ‘imprisoned’ via ‘contact with this body’ by which it has ‘degenerated’.98 Here is the lapsed Manichee that Gunton worried over, even while he bears little resemblance to the mature Augustine, who could speak in his old age, of the ‘blending’ or ‘miraculous combination’ of both soul and body.99 In his afterlife, it is Augustine’s theology that has degenerated in the minds of some selective readers.

CONCLUSION: OF PEARS AND POISONS Here then is at least one drop of the ‘sweet poison’ Gunton was concerned with – not as a malicious concoction that exists straightforwardly in Augustine’s mature theology but as

See Augustine, Against the ‘Foundation Letter’ of the Manichees, 5. Michael Hanby, Augustine and Modernity. Radical Orthodoxy Series (London: Routledge, 2003), 13, 133. 95 See again McNall, Free Corrector, 225. 96 See, for instance, the command given by the early Augustine in On True Religion: ‘Do not go outward; return within yourself. In the inward man dwells truth’ (39.72). 97 Gunton, Revelation and Reason, 42–3, emphasis added. 98 Petrach, My Secret Book, trans. J. G. Nichols (London: Hesperus Press, 2002), 23. 99 Augustine, On the Soul and Its Origin, 30.59. 93 94

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the troublesome result that sometimes came forth as centuries of thinkers took ‘bits and pieces’ of Augustine and mixed them in the cauldrons of their day. As many note, Gunton’s great gift as a teacher was to highlight how certain ideas might enter the Christian tradition and then go on to have astonishing results. He often overplayed this hand in such a way as to caricature key thinkers. And while he was known as the doctor particularis,100 Gunton’s view of history was less interested in some particulars. Even so, as he rightly saw, Augustine’s ‘inward turn’ was a consequential point in later history, whereby the immaterial realm of the rational mind was elevated as the place in which to encounter God or Truth. To be sure, the move was not entirely unique to Augustine,101 but he did espouse it in ways that were unquestionably more brilliant and influential than any other early Christian thinker. As Jaroslav Pelikan notes, ‘since the apostles, no figure … has so dominated a millennium … as Augustine did’.102 Thus while Gunton was surely wrong about many ‘particulars’ of Augustine’s overall theology, he was right to recognize his influence. What then should one make of this flawed yet fascinating aspect of Gunton’s work? While Jesus was clear that a good tree does not bear bad fruit, the anti-Pelagian Augustine would have been the first to note that ‘No one is good – except God alone’ (Lk. 18.19; NIV). To continue the fruit-based metaphor, Augustine’s most haunting memory involved the ruin of some perfectly good pears.103 And if there is a parable here, it is that even moderately good ‘fruit’ can go bad as it passes through the hands of countless, fallen harvesters. This does not make Augustine, in Gunton’s words, ‘the fountainhead of our troubles’. For as Augustine would remind us, that fault lies further back (Rom. 5.12). Yet as Gunton rightly noted, it does make Augustine an important influence in the later elevation of the internal and the immaterial realm of the rational mind as the place to encounter God or Truth. Such ideas would sometimes take on a ‘poisonous’ character, even if they dropped from Augustine’s ‘tree’ in less rotten ways than Gunton claimed. For such reasons, both Gunton and his harshest critics may stand in need of some correction on the topic of Augustine’s influence.

Christoph Schwöbel made this suggestion in his eulogy for Colin Gunton in the chapel at King’s College London, September 2003, Typescript, 2. 101 For instance, Gregory of Nyssa actually predated Augustine in seeing the human soul as a ‘mirror’ of the triune God; and he was perhaps even more ‘Platonic’ than Augustine. See McNall, Free Corrector, 275. 102 Jaroslav Pelikan, The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine, Vol. 1: The Emergence of the Catholic Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), 330. 103 Confessions, 2.6.1. 100

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CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Gunton and Western philosophy RANDAL RAUSER

Systematic theology is a uniquely integrative discipline, one which seeks to provide a comprehensive articulation of Christian belief and practice that is faithful to the witness of Scripture and the traditions of the church – all the while being conversant with contemporary culture, attendant to personal experience and engaged with human reason. Throughout his career, Colin Gunton illustrated his own concern with the role of reason in theology as illustrated in his extensive engagement with Western philosophy from the pre-Socratics up to the twentieth century. In this chapter I explore Gunton’s understanding of the relationship between theology and philosophy generally and the canons of Western philosophy in particular. I begin by addressing the topic of disciplinary boundaries as illumined through Gunton’s distinction between neutral reason and ontological reason. While Gunton recognizes that neutral reason should inform theological construction, he also warns of the danger of confusing neutral reason with an a priori philosophical system of ontological reason which may include a theology at profound variance with the Christian deposit of revelation. To avoid this danger, Gunton advises that theology should instead follow an a posteriori method based on the unique content of revelation in history. For Gunton, the contrast between these two different approaches is perhaps best illustrated by comparing Origen’s adaptation of theology to Neoplatonic philosophy with Irenaeus’s theology rooted in Scripture and framed by unapologetically Trinitarian categories. After surveying Gunton’s analysis of these two approaches I will conclude the chapter by evaluating the success of his a posteriori method in two areas: first, his theological analysis of the divine attributes in Act and Being and second, his Trinitarian analysis of one of the perennial problems of philosophy – the problem of the one and the many – as articulated in The One, the Three and the Many.

THEOLOGY AND TWO TYPES OF PHILOSOPHY When discussing the relationship between theology and philosophy, it is important to begin with a treatment of disciplinary boundaries. So, what, precisely, is the relationship between theology and philosophy? Many proposals have been offered, but within the modern context, one of the more influential treatments comes at the beginning of Bertrand Russell’s classic work History of Western Philosophy. While Russell may not

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have been one of Gunton’s familiar conversation partners,1 his tendentious mapping of the disciplinary terrain provides a useful contrast to Gunton’s own approach. Russell describes the relationship by way of a topographical metaphor according to which philosophy occupies a ‘No Man’s Land’ between theology and natural science: ‘Like theology’, he says, ‘it consists of speculations on matters as to which definite knowledge has, so far, been unascertainable; but like science, it appeals to human reason rather than to authority, whether that of tradition or that of revelation.’2 So while Russell believes that philosophy and theology both exist beyond the boundary of what he calls ‘definite knowledge’, philosophy at least echoes science in its reasoned pursuit of knowledge on profoundly difficult, liminal questions. By contrast, Russell consigns theology to the hinterland of dogma (i.e. firmly held opinions untethered to reality) which are sustained by way of non-rational appeals to revelation and tradition. On Russell’s view, theology lacks the persuasive power of reason, leaving force as the only means to persuade others.3 Russell’s dour view of theology is captured in his infamous dismissal of Thomas Aquinas as lacking ‘the true philosophic spirit’4 because Aquinas began with a faith perspective.5 As I said, Russell’s mapping of the terrain contrasts with that of Gunton. While Russell believes theology fails to produce ‘definite knowledge’, Gunton’s view is encapsulated in this passage from Karl Barth: ‘The Creed of Christian faith rests upon knowledge. And where the Creed is uttered and confessed knowledge should be, is meant to be, created. Christian faith is not irrational, not anti-rational, not supra-rational, but rational in the proper sense.’6 Exactly so, Gunton believes that revelation provides knowledge and theology constitutes a properly rational inquiry into that knowledge as the theologian seeks to re-narrate that story of revelation in every age. For Gunton, theology is not ungrounded opinion, let alone the mere rote repetition of dogmas untethered to reality. And it is patently absurd to suggest the only means of theological persuasion is by force. On the contrary, theology is an eminently rational discipline based on the fundamental data of divine revelation. Theology offers a rigorous and systematic means of reflecting on, organizing and clarifying that revelation for the church. However, while theology is committed to furthering coherence among its various affirmations, it is not determined by an overarching logical system. As Gunton writes, ‘It is, when rightly understood, dedicated to thinking in as orderly a way as possible from the Christian gospel and to the situation in which it is set, rather than in the construction of systems.’7

For Gunton’s take on Russell, see Colin E. Gunton, The Barth Lectures, ed. P. H. Brazier (London: T&T Clark, 2007), 251. 2 Bertrand Russell, History of Western Philosophy (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1945, 1972), xiii. 3 See Bertrand Russell, ‘Can Religion Cure Our Troubles?’, The Basic Writings of Bertrand Russell, ed. Robert E. Egner and Lester E. Denonn (London: Routledge, 2009), 582. 4 Russell, History of Western Philosophy, 463. 5 Antony Kenny observes: 1

Bertrand Russell was one of those who accused Aquinas of not being a real philosopher because he was looking for reasons for what he already believed. It is extraordinary that that accusation should be made by Russell, who in the book Principia Mathematica takes hundreds of pages to prove that two and two make four, which is something he had believed all his life. Aquinas on Mind (New York: Routledge, 1994), 12. 6 Karl Barth, Dogmatics in Outline, trans. G. T. Thomson (New York: Harper and Row, 1959), 22–3. 7 Colin E. Gunton, Intellect and Action: Elucidations on Christian Theology and the Life of Faith (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2000), 44.

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This brings us to the matter of defining philosophy. Gunton’s understanding of the relationship between theology and philosophy can be illumined by considering his distinction between two different types of reason: neutral reason and ontological reason.8 Gunton identifies neutral reason as a process which involves ‘the use of general terms, argument, logic and the rest’.9 In short, neutral reason consists of careful, conceptual reflection on intuitive starting points, subsequent reasoning processes from those starting points and the pursuit of coherence between these various beliefs. Neutral reason, so defined, is critical to the theological task as it is indeed critical to any rational mode of inquiry. It is not itself a system, but rather provides invaluable tools for the clarification of a system. For that reason, it is properly defined as neutral. Importantly, philosophers widely consider that which Gunton describes as neutral reason to map closely onto the very discipline of philosophy itself. For example, Alvin Plantinga once defined philosophy as ‘not much different from just thinking hard’.10 To be sure, philosophy is not only a matter of thinking hard given that one can think hard about many topics which are not properly philosophical.11 Philosophy is, rather, a matter of thinking hard about a particular range of fundamental questions pertaining to basic categories of metaphysics and existence. For example, The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy defines philosophy as ‘The study of the most general and abstract features of the world and categories with which we think: mind, matter, reason, proof, truth, etc. In philosophy, the concepts with which we approach the world themselves become the topic of enquiry.’12 Similarly, in his popular introduction to the discipline, Thomas Nagel points out that philosophy begins as we take our ‘analytical capacities’ and apply them ‘to question and understand very common ideas that all of us use every day without thinking about them’.13 In short, philosophy involves careful conceptual reflection on our intuitions, reasoning and the coherence of our beliefs as regards basic metaphysical and existential questions. Given that theology is centrally concerned with metaphysical and existential questions, it follows that insofar as one appeals to neutral reason in the theological task, one is thereby engaged in philosophy. However, one might object that we have thereby secured the role of philosophy in theology only by trivializing the meaning of philosophy itself. After all, surely every theologian appeals to general terms, argument and logic. To an extent, this is true. Nonetheless, Gunton’s explicit endorsement of the value of reasoning and coherence reflects a commitment to the rigors of careful philosophical thinking in theological construction which is absent in many other theologians.14 As Gunton observes, ‘Being systematic in theology involves, first, responsibility for the overall consistency In his classroom lectures for his course on revelation and reason, Gunton references Paul Tillich’s similar distinction between procedural and ontological reason. See Colin E. Gunton, Revelation and Reason: Prolegomena to Systematic Theology, ed. P. H. Brazier (New York: T&T Clark, 2008), 13. 9 Colin E. Gunton, ‘Historical and Systematic Theology’, in The Cambridge Companion to Christian Doctrine, ed. Colin Gunton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 13. 10 Alvin Plantinga, God, Freedom, and Evil (New York: Harper and Row, 1974), 1. 11 Late night sports talk radio, for example, features guests and callers offering extended in-depth analyses of sports strategies which exemplify hard thinking but with no explicit bearing on philosophy per se. 12 ‘Philosophy’, in Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy, 3rd edn, ed. Simon Blackburn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 360. 13 Nagel, What Does It All Mean? (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 5. 14 Gunton would be sympathetic with Donald Baillie’s warning that ‘There is a great danger in the habit of falling back too easily upon paradox in our religious thinking, and it would ultimately make all theological argument impossible’, God Was in Christ (London: Faber, 1961), 109. 8

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of what one says.’15 Thus, it is not enough simply to appeal to the mystery of divine transcendence: ‘If Christianity is to claim to be a true and rational faith, there must be consistency of some kind among its various doctrines.’16 The question is what kind of consistency? Given his emphasis upon neutral reason, Gunton remains cautious about the premature lapse into silence. To be sure, he is no rationalist, for God always remains infinitely beyond our understanding.17 Nonetheless, he remains cautious about convenient appeals to mystery as a way of covering one’s own failure to articulate the coherence of theology. Robert Jenson effectively captures Gunton’s commitment to neutral reason when he writes, ‘one should always be suspicious when theologoumena … are justified by saying that they “guard the Mystery” or something of the sort; the true mystery of God does not need our guarding: our menial task is to try to think in the face of the mystery’.18 While neutral reason is essential to the theological task, the situation is very different with ontological reason for this brings us to philosophical systems. Gunton writes, ‘one of the things inherited from the Greeks is a view of reason as ontological, in Paul Tillich’s expression. This is reason as it is conceived to be a capacity or endowment – a spark of the divine, perhaps – which in some way or other enables us to come to engage with the very nature of reality.’19 Ontological reason, so defined, goes far beyond the neutrality of intuitive reflection and careful reasoning on fundamental questions of metaphysics and existence by providing a particular conceptual framework for the pursuit of those questions. Crucially, it follows that ontological reason is not simply another neutral tool for the theologian but rather is itself an essentially theological enterprise which is concerned with the same fundamental questions as the theologian. The overlapping terrain is evident in Gunton’s definition of creation theology: ‘Creation theology, in the broadest sense of an enquiry into the divinity or divinities that shape or make our world, is a universal human concern, however different the forms that it can take.’20 To see that it truly is universal, we need to keep in mind that ‘divinity’ is conceptually not restricted to a personal deity but rather applies to the ultimate explanatory principle in any belief system. As philosopher Roy Clouser puts it, ‘In every religious tradition the divine is whatever is unconditionally, nondependently real. It is whatever is believed to be “just there”.’21 By that definition, every religion, world view or encompassing philosophical system includes a concept of the divine and by implication a theology of creation. For example, in a famous BBC radio debate on God’s existence, Frederick Copleston asked Bertrand Russell where the universe came from. Russell replied, ‘I should say that the universe is just there, and that’s all.’22 For Russell, the universe itself is that which is unconditionally, non-dependently real. Thus, though he is an avowed atheist, Russell unton, ‘Historical and Systematic Theology’, 12. G Ibid. 17 See, for example, Colin E. Gunton, The Promise of Trinitarian Theology, 2nd enlarged edn (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1997), 193–4; Gunton, Revelation and Reason, 164. 18 Robert Jenson, ‘A Decision Tree of Colin Gunton’s Thinking’, in The Theology of Colin Gunton, ed. Lincoln Harvey (London: T&T Clark, 2010), 12, emphasis added. 19 Gunton, ‘Historical and Systematic Theology’, 13. 20 Colin E. Gunton, ‘The Doctrine of Creation’, in The Cambridge Companion to Christian Doctrine, ed. Colin E. Gunton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 141. 21 Roy Clouser, Knowing with the Heart: Religious Experience and Belief in God (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 1999), 21, emphasis in original. 22 ‘Frederick Copleston: A Debate with Bertrand Russell’, in The Sheed and Ward Anthology of Catholic Philosophy, ed. James C. Swindal and Harry J. Gensler (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005), 394. 15 16

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nonetheless recognizes something that is functionally divine which establishes a theology of creation. The fact that philosophical systems include a concept of the divine which may be incompatible with Christian theology leads to the danger that the theologian who seeks a rapprochement with a philosophical system may inadvertently end up distorting the content of revelation in the process. Gunton is well aware of this danger,23 and so he is careful to recognize that philosophical systems are not merely products of neutral reasoning but rather constitute exercises in theology.24 As a result, when the theologian seeks to adapt to an encompassing philosophical system like Platonism or Kantianism, she is thereby adapting to a theological system with its own conception of the divine. This creates an imminent danger that adapting Christian theology to a foreign philosophical theology would result in a syncretistic distortion of Christianity no less than if the theologian had adapted Christian theology to a Buddhist or Muslim theology. The fact that theologians have often assumed that a foreign philosophical system is somehow neutral and non-theological – even worse, that it constitutes a force majeure to which the Christian theologian must adapt – has led to deep distortions in Christian doctrine.

TWO CONTRASTING METHODOLOGIES How does the theologian retain the rigour of neutral reason while securing the integrity of theology from the distorting encroachment of a foreign theological system? According to Gunton, the problem arises when the theologian begins by accepting a priori that this foreign system of thought or ‘general philosophy of being’25 is necessary for the articulation of theology. The distortion that results includes, for example, the common tendency of a priori methods to frame the divine/creation relationship in terms of negation: ‘The key to the matter is to be found in the location of the divine in a realm that is in some way opposed to or the negation of this world.’26 The assumption that theological knowledge begins by stipulating what God is not has ensured that the via negativa along with supplemental methods – the ways of causality, eminence and analogy – have played a central role in theological reflection all to overcome the God/ creation chasm. But in Gunton’s view, the damage is already done: ‘the divine attributes have been conceived largely cosmologically; that is, in terms of timeless relations between the eternal and the temporal, to the exclusion of attributes suggested by divine action in time. The economy and revelation have been placed in a straitjacket by a conception of divine being constructed a priori.’27 The resulting portrait of God diverges sharply from orthodox Christian confession: indeed, Gunton refers to it as ‘the Babylonian Captivity of Creation’.28

For example, ‘the relation of Greek religion and biblical faith’. Colin E. Gunton, Act and Being: Towards a Theology of the Divine Attributes (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2002), 19. 24 Ibid., 5, 20–1. In The One, the Three and the Many: God, Creation and the Culture of Modernity. The 1992 Bampton Lectures (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 114, Gunton also cautions that putatively scientific systems of thought can function as theologies. 25 Gunton, Act and Being, 5. 26 Ibid. 27 Ibid.,  17–18. 28 Colin E. Gunton, The Triune Creator: A Historical and Systematic Study (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1998), 97, 99, 116, 129, 232. Cf. The Promise of Trinitarian Theology, xxiii. 23

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The a posteriori theologian sets aside the obligation to conform to a foreign theological system and instead begins with the content of revelation itself – God’s actions in history culminating in the pre-eminent revelation of God as triune – so that it may provide the conceptual framework for subsequent theological construction. In short, the a posteriori method begins not with a procrustean a priori philosophical/theological system but rather with God as revealed in history. A system must still be constructed, for that is the theologian’s task, but it always remains rooted in the revelation of history. Gunton identifies several theologians whose dubious legacies provide a salutary warning about the dangers of adapting to the ontological reason of a foreign theological system.29 He also presents other theologians as exemplars of the a posteriori method which utilizes neutral reason in a way that is faithful to the content of revelation.30 Gunton’s description of Karl Barth, in particular, provides a clear overview of the a posteriori approach: Barth’s theology may be intellectually rigorous but it cannot, must not, be a philosophy because philosophy is grounded in a worldview, or a human view. Theology must be informed by God’s revelation, not what individuals think they can know of God through the power of their own reasoning. Human reasoning ties things up too neatly. Some theologians turn theology into a philosophy, but by examining Barth, you realize the need to raise methodological questions. Barth is always content driven. The method, the reasoning must conform to the content – the content being God’s selfrevelation in Christ Jesus. Barth’s conclusion was that if you use the wrong method, then your conclusions would be flawed. It would be the wrong method to try to drain the sea with a sieve – and that is what philosophers are doing when they think they can get away without revelation!31 While Gunton references several other exemplars of each method, I would submit that the clearest contrast is found in two great theologians of the early church: Origen and Irenaeus. Origen illustrates the dangers of the a priori adaptation of theology to a foreign philosophical system while Irenaeus exemplifies the a posteriori commitment to divine revelation faithfully articulated with the rigours of neutral reason. Neoplatonism provides the backdrop for Origen. Gunton writes, ‘The world in which Christianity grew to intellectual maturity was a highly religious world, in which platonic philosophy tended to be mined as much for its religious as for what we would now, probably wrongly, today consider its strictly philosophical content.’32 In the third century, Neoplatonism was viewed by many as constituting a force majeure that required the Christian theologian’s adaptive acumen. And Origen presents us with one of the most ambitious and forceful examples of such adaptation in the history of Christianity. The significance of his achievement is illustrated in Robert Jenson’s claim that Origen is the first world-class theologian of the Western tradition.33

See, for example, Gunton’s critique of the legacies of Augustine and Aquinas: ‘Augustine, The Trinity and the Theological Crisis of the West’, in The Promise of Trinitarian Theology, 30–55; The Triune Creator, 99–102. 30 See, for example, Gunton’s treatment of the Cappadocians: The Promise of Trinitarian Theology, 9–12; The Triune Creator, 68–73; ‘The Triune God’, in The Cambridge Companion to Christian Doctrine, 131. 31 Gunton, Barth Lectures, 52–3. For Gunton, Schleiermacher and Barth provide a modern contrast parallel to that of Origen and Irenaeus. Schleiermacher is constrained by a ‘modern drive for system’ which dresses up the Gospel in ‘borrowed philosophical clothes’; by contrast, Barth recognized that ‘Christianity of its very nature resists systematisation’. Gunton, ‘Historical and Systematic Theology’, 18. 32 Gunton, The Triune Creator, 33. 33 Gunton, Revelation and Reason, 30. 29

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However, for Gunton the central question is not whether Origen developed an impressive system but rather whether that system remained faithful to the knowledge of God given in Jesus Christ: ‘Either it is a step in advance of Irenaeus by virtue of his greater philosophical sophistication, or a step backwards because of a failure to preserve elements essential to the doctrine.’34 Gunton believes it is the latter. The basic problem with Origen’s project traces back to Parmenides whose contrast between eternal, static, reality and temporal, dynamic appearance created an insurmountable stumbling block for Christian theology.35 Plato further developed this system by proposing that the eternal realm consists of unchanging, perfect forms which structure the fleeting, concrete entities of material existence. Later, Plotinus further developed Platonism centred on the One, that entity which exists beyond all definition, a notion which has influenced theologians from Origen to Wolfhart Pannenberg.36 Gunton believes that there are many differences between Neoplatonism and Christianity. For example, Neoplatonism replaces the Christian doctrine of free creation with a doctrine of necessary eternal emanation, a shift which Gunton believes undermines the biblical commitment to ontological homogeneity – ‘God saw all that he had made, and it was very good’ (Gen. 1.31, NIV) – in favour of ontological gradations emanating from the One.37 As for the One itself, ‘it is Plato’s form of the good and demiurge rolled into one and deprived of all personal characteristics’.38 Thus, Gunton observes that ‘Origen is not really interested in the evidence of the relation between the Father and the Son as it is revealed in the biblical narrative, but in what “must be” the case.’39 And in this way, a foreign philosophical system has fundamentally distorted the content of Christian revelation. Needless to say, Origen’s concept of the divine is, in Gunton’s view, far from the living, breathing and maximally personal God of Scripture. By accepting the Neoplatonic philosophical framework a priori and then labouring to adapt theology to it, Origen critically distorts the content of revelation in a classic example of the cure being worse than the disease. To return to Jenson’s praise that Origen’s is the first world-class theology, one might ask, what shall it benefit a person to produce a world-class theology and yet lose the integrity of the revelation itself? If Origen’s theology constitutes a step backward, then from what does it step back? In other words, what does Irenaeus secure that Origen does not? Gunton helpfully contrasts the two in the following passage: As the originator of the first great system of Christian theology, Origen’s achievement is to show how all the doctrines of the faith belong together as a coherent whole. In this way, he defended the consistency and philosophical respectability of the faith. Irenaeus is less concerned with systematic consistency, more with the integrity of the faith in the face of attack. As we have seen, he thought systematically in a broad sense, so that our contrast shows that different conceptions of consistency are at stake.40

Gunton, The Triune Creator, 57. Ibid.,  27. 36 Ibid.,  33. 37 Ibid. 38 Ibid.,  34. 39 Colin E. Gunton, Father, Son and Holy Spirit: Toward a Fully Trinitarian Theology (London: T&T Clark, 2003), 61. 40 Gunton, ‘Historical and Systematic Theology’, 15. 34 35

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The key question is whether the consistency we seek is with Christian revelation itself or a foreign system of theology. While Origen’s system undoubtedly exhibits ‘greater philosophical sophistication’, it is not for that reason a step forward beyond the achievements of Irenaeus. Quite the contrary, in fact: the real difference is that Irenaeus remains committed to securing the integrity of theological revelation on its own terms rather than by adaptation to a foreign system. By staying true to the integrity of theology, Irenaeus advances understanding of Christian revelation in a way that Origen does not. For this reason, he earns Gunton’s praise as ‘a model theologian of creation’41 and ‘a model for all systematic theologians’.42 In Gunton’s estimation, Irenaeus’s theology is praiseworthy for a few key reasons. To begin with, his vigorous defence of creatio ex nihilo ensures a sharp distinction between the divine and creation, a fact that closes the door to theologies of emanation. As Gunton writes, ‘There must be creation out of nothing, [Irenaeus] argued, because if there is anything coeternal with God, that would be a kind of deity for it would impose necessity on the creator.’43 Consequently, creatio ex nihilo ensures that nothing apart from God is ontologically divine and that creation remains the product of a free divine act.44 Second, in contrast to the theologies of ontological gradation, Irenaeus’s theology of creation secures a tacit commitment to ontological homogeneity. While Irenaeus does not explicitly affirm the concept of created ontological homogeneity as such, nonetheless, he does challenge the Platonic distinction between the eternal spiritual realm and the temporal physical realm.45 By grounding the inherent knowability and goodness of all creation, Irenaeus thereby provides a basis to challenge the tendency towards rationalist knowledge as well as the spectre of scepticism qua sense perceptible knowledge. Finally, Irenaeus proposes that God creates, sustains and is providentially active within creation by the mediating hands of the Son and Spirit. In contrast to the Neoplatonic view in which reality is mediated by way of necessary emanation and creation’s exemplification of eternal forms, for Irenaeus, mediation occurs in free divine actions which originate in the Father, come to be through the Son and are brought to completion in the Spirit.46 Gunton writes, In distinction from the Gnostics, whose high God was far too lofty to be involved in matter except through the mediations of inferior deities, the two hands of God are God in action. It is thus through the thoroughly trinitarian structure of his theology that Irenaeus was able to do justice to God’s creating and redeeming activity towards and in the world.47 In this way, Irenaeus’s theology is faithful to neutral reason while avoiding the distorting influence of a foreign a priori philosophical system.

Gunton, The Triune Creator, 2. Gunton, ‘Historical and Systematic Theology’, 15. 43 Gunton, The One, the Three and the Many, 120. 44 Gunton, The Triune Creator, 54. 45 Ibid.,  52. 46 Gunton, ‘The Triune God’, 127. 47 Gunton, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, 30. 41 42

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APOSTERIORICITY AND THE ATTRIBUTES At this point, we turn from exposition to critical evaluation: how successful is Gunton’s a posteriori methodological proposal at ensuring robust theological construction? To answer this question, I first consider Gunton’s treatment of the divine attributes with a special focus on omnipotence. Next, I evaluate his attempt to extend Irenaeus’s project by using Trinitarian categories to resolve the problem of the one and the many. This latter point is undoubtedly Gunton at his most ambitious as he seeks to address a paradigmatic philosophical question with unapologetically theological categories. But is he successful? And if he is not, what does that tell us about his analysis of the relationship between theology and philosophy more generally? Let us begin with Gunton’s attempt in Act and Being to defend an a posteriori analysis of the divine attributes. Gunton argues that Christian theologians like Origen, Augustine and Aquinas adopt a ‘sub-Christian’ theology which assumes that theology ‘requires foundation in a general philosophy of being’.48 According to Gunton, these assumptions ‘deeply paganized’ Christian theology.49 As he puts it, ‘It is one of the tragedies – one could almost say crimes – of Christian theological history that the Old Testament was effectively displaced by Greek philosophy as the theological basis of the doctrine of God, certainly so far as the doctrine of the divine attributes is concerned.’50 Under the influence of Platonism, the tradition framed discussion of the divine attributes in terms of a priori intuitions on the nature of deity which are then clarified by way of abstract methods – negation, eminence, causality, analogy – all of which seek to overcome a radical disjunction between God and creation. Gunton notes, for example, that Plato envisioned three divine attributes: goodness, impassibility and simplicity: ‘In later centuries, however, the philosophies labelled variously as Platonic represented in part an attempt to develop a more systematic theology, and formed, along with their rivals, the penumbra within which the first Christian theologians did their thinking.’51 Plotinus provides one of the most influential examples as he took Platonic dualism and a theology of negation to their terminus by lapsing into the apophatic claim that God is wholly beyond description.52 The impact of Platonism is evident in Origen’s abstract definition of God in immaterial and intellectual terms: ‘God is defined without reference either to narrative or to anything explicitly Trinitarian. Whatever Origen wants also to say later, we are at this crucial and determinative stage restricted to an essentially philosophically and intellectually conceived deity.’53 From this point, theologians who were influenced by this Platonic philosophical synthesis came to believe that one can find God by negating the supposed characteristics of the ordinary structures of reality as we perceive them, something which is achieved by negating the ‘material’’ meaning of the words. It is a kind of Platonism which assumes that any reference to matter will necessarily be inimical to an account of the attributes, any purely intellectual account somehow nearer to the truth.54 Gunton, Act and Being, 5. Ibid. 50 Ibid.,  3. 51 Ibid.,  42. 52 Ibid.,  43. 53 Ibid.,  45. 54 Ibid., 48. 48 49

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Gunton views Aquinas as another theologian who, under philosophical pressure, errantly limits theological assertions to the ways of negation and analogical predication. As a result, a general philosophy of being frames the doctrine of God even as it marginalizes the particularities of uniquely Christian doctrine. Theologians thereby end up pursuing extended discussions of the general concept of God with no reference to specifically Christian revelation.55 Gunton believes that Irenaeus models the alternative a posteriori approach to theological reflection. Rather than base his theology in an a priori conceptual framework of ‘omnis and negatives’,56 he instead understands the attributes to be revealed by God’s actions in the economy.57 While the philosopher’s god is known through rational contemplation, the God of Judeo-Christian revelation is known through action in history.58 These contrasting approaches to the divine nature can be illustrated by considering how each analyses one specific attribute: omnipotence. The a priori method is exemplified by Thomas Aquinas who defines omnipotence abstractly ‘in a priori terms as the capacity to do everything but will a contradiction’.59 Gunton argues that this definition fails to make any ‘reference to what God actually does in the economy of creation and redemption’.60 And so, he soberly concludes that Aquinas’s conceptual framework for the doctrine of God is ‘philosophical, or, should we say, Greek theology’.61 On the a posteriori view, the divine attributes are defined not by way of an a priori conceptual framework of negation and analogical predication but rather by God’s revelation in history. In other words, if we want to define omnipotence, we should set aside abstract philosophical frameworks and instead look at how God has acted.62 In contrast to the a priori theologian’s tendency to speak of God in abstract terms of apophatic negation, causality, eminence and analogy, Christian theology should instead be based on a univocity of being and language that is rooted in the a posteriori discovery of God’s revelation.63 As Gunton puts it, if Christ is the ‘ “exact representation of [God’s] being” – then should it not follow that something of Scotus’s conception of univocity should hold, in his case and therefore in ours – when and as God wills?’64 Gunton argues that for Irenaeus, whom he lauds as achieving ‘the first systematic development of the concept’,65 omnipotence is defined not abstractly but rather in personal terms based on God’s action in history, pre-eminently in the initial free act of creation.66 Irenaeus came to believe that creation ought to be out of nothing since God ‘could be

For example, Gunton cites the case of Charles Hodge who devotes 250 pages in his Systematic Theology to discussing the doctrine of God before he ever gets to a discussion of the Trinity. Ibid., 7. 56 Ibid.,  22. 57 Ibid., 3, 22. 58 Ibid.,  40–1. 59 Ibid.,  52. 60 Ibid. 61 Ibid. 62 Ibid., 57, 58, 63. 63 Ibid., 67–72. Gunton adds Scotus is not claiming that language is perfectly univocal when applied to God but rather that it is sufficiently alike that ‘to affirm and deny it of one and the same thing would be a contradiction’. Ibid., 69. 64 Ibid.,  71. 65 Ibid.,  25. 66 Barth likewise defines omnipotence in terms of God’s actions and thereby uses attributes as revealed in the economy (e.g. patience) as the grid or framework to interpret the metaphysical attributes (e.g. omnipotence). Ibid., 100; cf. Gunton, The Barth Lectures, 107. 55

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limited by nothing outside himself – because there was nothing outside himself ’.67 Gunton adds that Irenaeus’s appeal to creatio ex nihilo was also tied to ‘what happened in the incarnation, life, death and resurrection of Jesus’.68 In sum, it is the revelation of God’s actions in creation and redemption rather than an abstract philosophical system which provides the basis for defining and affirming omnipotence. So how successful is Gunton’s a posteriori analysis of the divine attributes? Is it indeed preferable to define divine omnipotence a posteriori in terms of what God has done – that is, create out of nothing and then act to redeem that creation – rather than abstractly in terms of what God could do, that is, ‘the capacity to do everything but will a contradiction’? In order to answer that question, we should begin by unpacking Gunton’s method, and that requires us to distinguish between two different types of definition: ostentive and intensional. Ostension is definition by pointing: that is, one defines an entity by pointing to that entity as an example of the definition. From specific examples, a person then tacitly abstracts a rough definitional construct which is further refined through repeated use. Human beings originally acquire language by way of ostensive definition as when a mother points to a rubber ball and says to her child, ‘Ball’. By contrast, an intensional definition aims to provide the necessary and sufficient properties that are required to describe a concept. Furthermore, if the concept in question is essentially contested or a family resemblance term with fuzzy boundaries, then the definition(s) should likewise identify those specific nuances. When it comes to our sample attribute, divine omnipotence, Gunton’s a posteriori method appears to favour definition by ostension based on God’s actions as revealed in history. In other words, we define omnipotence by pointing to what God has done, preeminently in terms of bringing creation to be out of nothing and then incarnating for the purposes of redemption: that’s omnipotence. We can then proceed in a similar fashion with other attributes like wisdom, goodness and love. In each case, God’s actions in history provide us with the positive content to define the attribute. So what should we think of Gunton’s claim that we can ground our knowledge of the divine attributes a posteriori apart from a priori methods and sources? The problem with this claim is that every theologian inevitably holds some philosophical assumptions a priori.69 And those assumptions necessarily inform any putatively a posteriori inquiry. Consider, for example, Gunton’s observation that ‘To speak of God’s attributes is to attempt to speak of the kind of god that God is.’70 While this is certainly true, one cannot begin to talk about the divine attributes without making some assumptions about the kind of god that God is. Thus, for example, if we begin with the assumption that God is divine, defined as a being that is unconditionally and non-dependently real, then that assumption will deeply shape the way we view all the attributes, including omnipotence. Indeed, it will significantly determine which attributes we predicate of God in the first place. Thus, attributes like omnipotence are not derived solely from God’s actions but rather already form an a priori framework (albeit a fallible and revisable one) in which those actions are interpreted. To illustrate the point, consider that Gunton himself describes Irenaeus’s reasoning as follows: ‘there can be nothing which exists prior to God’s free act of creation, because, if there were, that would impose constraints upon God, and Gunton, Act and Being, 26. Gunton, The Triune Creator, 53. 69 See Fergus Kerr, Theology after Wittgenstein, 2nd edn (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1997), 3. 70 Gunton, Act and Being, 1. 67 68

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so conflict with his freedom and omnipotence’ (2.5.4).71 According to this description, Irenaeus reasons to creation out of nothing based on prior assumptions about the divine freedom and aseity. What is more, he interprets creation as a free act to protect God’s omnipotence. Given that fact, it is clear that omnipotence is not itself inferred from the act of creation but rather that it constitutes part of the prior framework which leads to the interpretation of creation as being out of nothing. In sum, it seems to me that Gunton’s attempt to pit a priori and a posteriori methods against one another is misguided. Instead, I would argue that the theologian inevitably adheres to a background framework of assumptions a priori. The key is not to set aside that framework but rather to become aware of our assumptions and how they inform, shape and potentially distort the theological process. And so, rather than restrict ourselves to ostensive definitions, we should seek to clarify our assumptions in clear, intentional definitions of concepts like divinity (e.g. that which is unconditionally, non-dependently real) and omnipotence (e.g. the ability to actualize any state of affairs that is logically possible). Having conceded this much, it then becomes possible that at least some of the a priori assumptions bequeathed to us from a philosophy like Platonism may be compatible with, and even helpful aids for, the articulation of Christian theology.

ON THE ONE AND THE MANY While Act and Being offers an a posteriori method for conceptualizing the divine attributes, in The One, the Three and the Many Gunton shifts his focus to the broader field of culture and philosophy by proposing a novel Trinitarian resolution to the perennial problem of the one and the many.72 Within Western philosophy the problem finds its origins in the Presocratic quest to move beyond the squabbling pantheon of gods to the fundamental categories of being itself. Two basic accounts of ultimate reality emerged in the ensuing debate: the static monism of Parmenides and the dynamic pluralism of Heraclitus. For those dissatisfied with either extreme, the challenge focused on how one establishes true distinction and relation (the many) within a singular reality (the one).73 Plato’s theory of forms offers a massively influential attempt to reconcile the one and the many. His account begins with that monistic, static reality as the sphere in which the eternal forms exist. Meanwhile, the world of material, temporal creation is consigned to the realm of Heraclitean flux. The link between these two spheres is established by the forms which structure and thereby distinguish concrete particulars (e.g. trees, boats, mountains, people) by way of the primitive relation known variously as exemplification or instantiation. Thus, for example, two human beings are united in virtue of exemplifying a common property of humanity while being distinguished by exemplifying multiple contrasting properties (e.g. height, hair colour, etc.). In this manner, Plato offers a very influential theory of attribute agreement which proposes to unite the spheres of being and becoming, thereby resolving the problem of the one and the many. Thus far, we have seen Gunton argue that Plato’s theory and its heirs distort the content of Christian revelation. But in The One, the Three and the Many he goes further Gunton, The Triune Creator, 53. Gunton, The One, the Three and the Many, 17. 73 Gareth B. Matthews and S. Marc Cohen, ‘The One and the Many’, Review of Metaphysics 21, no. 4 (1968): 630– 55. Cf. Frederick C. Copleston, A History of Philosophy: Greece and Rome from the Presocratics to Plotinus (New York: Image, 1993), 76. 71 72

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by insisting that Platonism (and indeed all other philosophical theories) also fails to offer a satisfactory resolution of the problem of the one and the many. While the problem may seem abstract, Gunton believes it has been a catalyst for the crisis of modernity.74 As he sees it, the ancient world of Greek Platonism and the modern world both ‘tend to suppress particularity by deriving the essential being of things or people from their possession of identical or common properties’.75 But this, Gunton insists, is too thin a basis for the genuine relationship and communion that a flourishing society requires. When he turns to propose an answer, Gunton draws once again upon Irenaeus for inspiration. The essence of his proposal is to replace Platonic forms/universals with the mediating role of the Son and the Spirit. In the following passage, he contrasts Irenaeus with Augustine’s allegedly failed attempt to reconcile Platonism to Christianity while resolving the problem of the one and the many: On an Irenaean account, what holds the creation together … are the Son and the Spirit, by whom the world is held in continuing relation to God the Father. After Augustine that function comes, increasingly, to be performed by the universals, which are traditionally conceived to be a timeless conceptual structure informing otherwise shapeless matter. Augustine’s interpretation of Genesis I in terms of a creation of forms, eternal archetypes, turns that celebration of particularity and variety into something dangerously like its subversion, because the replacing of christology by Platonic universals generates a very different conception of the relation of universal and particular. Not the particularizing will of God, but general conceptual forms come into the centre.76 And so, Gunton proposes that we can set aside Platonic universals by attributing relation and distinction to the particularizing will of God as mediated through the Son and Spirit.77 He writes that ‘a Trinitarian doctrine of divine creation which was in continuity with that of Irenaeus would hold that we are beings who exist, under God, only in mutually constitutive relations with each other and with the world of which we are a part’.78 And so, enduring being and particular distinction are together rooted in the Trinity: ‘It is through Christ and the Spirit, who bring us and our world, perfected, to the Father, that people and things can come to be that which they are particularly called to be.’79 In this way, the two hands of God replace both ‘the Parmenidean God of Christendom’ and the modernist ‘Heraclitean deity of individual human judgment’.80 Gunton’s scope in The One, the Three and the Many is vast, the ambition dizzying. The book purports to outline nothing less than a Trinitarian framework to heal a fragmented culture by means of a novel, explicitly Christian solution to one of the perennial questions of philosophy. While there is much that we could say by way of response, for the sake of space, I will concentrate on one central problematic of the one and the many, namely attribute agreement: that is, the way that particular individual entities appear to share unity by exhibiting the same properties. Consider, for example, the property of redness simultaneously exemplified in a ball, a fire truck and a pair of attention-getting pants.

Gunton, The One, the Three and the Many, 42, 47. Ibid.,  51. 76 Ibid.,  55–6. 77 Ibid.,  56. 78 Ibid.,  65–6. 79 Ibid.,  73. 80 Ibid., 120, 122, 124. 74 75

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The question is whether Gunton’s proposal constitutes an alternative theory of attribute agreement distinct from other major theories such as conceptualism, nominalism and, of course, Platonism. Further, assuming his proposal does constitute a genuine theory of attribute agreement, does it thereby constitute a superior account to these other theories? Platonism, in particular, remains a widely defended theory of attribute agreement with many theoretical virtues.81 Can Gunton’s Trinitarian theology offer the resources to displace it? In order to assess Gunton’s proposal for the specific question of attribute agreement, it is worthwhile first to specify the desiderata of a successful philosophical theory. To that end, I am going to appeal to two of Michael Rea’s five desiderata (numbered P2 and P3) in his introduction to the volume Analytic Theology. These principles may not be sufficient for a successful theory, but arguably they are necessary: P2. Prioritize precision, clarity and logical coherence. P3. Avoid substantive (non-decorative) use of metaphor and other tropes whose semantic content outstrips their propositional content.82 While there will undoubtedly be some disagreement in how precisely to apply these principles, I trust that the reader can appreciate how, in principle, they undergird a commitment to the value of philosophical theorization. As we have seen, Gunton himself endorses P2 (precision, clarity and logical coherence) under the rubric of neutral reason. P3 is equally important as it distinguishes the mere poetic-rhetorical appeal to metaphor83 from its theoretical use as a valid conceptual heuristic which provides genuine illumination of an explicandum. And so, the question is whether Gunton’s attempt to account for attribute agreement in Trinitarian terms is precise, clear and logically coherent (P2), and whether its metaphorical appeal is restricted to those metaphors which convey theoretically informative semantic content (P3). In my brief critique, I focus on P3, not least because failure on this point also serves to undermine the precision and clarity required of P2. With that in mind, the central metaphor within Gunton’s proposal is that of the two hands of God. Gunton believes that this metaphor illumines the divine unity, God’s mediated presence within creation and, as regards Platonism, an alternative account of the individuation and relation of particular entities, including, by implication, the explicandum of property agreement. As Gunton writes in The Triune Creator, ‘Irenaeus frequently says that God creates by means of his two hands, the Son and the Spirit. This enables him to give a clear account of how God relates to that which is not God: of how the creator interacts with his creation.’84 Consequently, much depends on the extent to which the resulting account is indeed clear such that the metaphor’s semantic content does not outstrip its propositional content. For the sake of space, we will set aside the questions of divine unity and mediated presence. But where the explicandum of property agreement is concerned, the appeal See, for example, J. P. Moreland, Universals. Central Problems of Philosophy, ed. John Shand (Montreal: McGillQueen’s University Press, 2001). For a very different version of Platonism, see D. M. Armstrong’s spatio-temporal view in Universals: An Opinionated Introduction (Boulder: Westview Press, 1989). 82 Introduction, in Analytic Theology: New Essays in the Philosophy of Theology, ed. Oliver Crisp and Michael Rea (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 5. 83 To clarify, I am not intending to diminish the value of poetic-rhetorical appeals to metaphor; far from it. Rather, I am simply pointing out that poetic-rhetorical appeals are not applicable to the construction of philosophical theories. 84 Gunton, The Triune Creator, 54. 81

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to the two hands of God is not clear and thus the semantic content of the metaphor simply does not translate into appreciable propositional content which may constitute a genuine theory or explicans. In short, the account is not clear. While Gunton says much about the two hands of God, noting in particular the role of mediation in the Spirit and particularization in the Son, he never explains how this account illumines the specific phenomenon of attribute agreement, and thus it is doubtful that this proposal would even qualify as a theory, still less as a superior theory to Platonism. I can anticipate that a defender of Gunton’s proposal might reply by insisting that I have somehow missed the point and imposed illegitimate desiderata on Gunton’s theory. The following passage from Intellect and Action might be seen to give voice to that objector: ‘The unity which systematic theology seeks, its unique way of integrating unity and diversity, is more aesthetic and moral than it is more gemetrico. That is why the great works of imagination have an openness, an uncompletedness even in their perfection – a relative, rather than absolute perfection.’85 The problem with this rejoinder is that it cedes the theoretical ground of actually explaining attribute agreement to philosophical theories like Platonism. And that would entail that Gunton’s proposal never was intended to provide an alternative account of attribute agreement at all. In that case, it is simply mistaken to pit this theological account against Platonism; on the contrary, to borrow a Wittgensteinian phrase, Gunton’s Trinitarian theology and Plato’s theory would appear to function as distinct language games. For these reasons, I conclude that Gunton’s Trinitarian attempt to resolve the problem of the one and the many, as well as the specific problem of attribute agreement, must be judged a failure.

CONCLUSION In this chapter, I presented a critique of Gunton’s a posteriori analysis of the divine attributes as well as his proposed Trinitarian resolution to the problem of the one and the many. However, even if his project is unsuccessful on these points, there is still much to be learned from his framing of the relationship between theology and philosophy. To begin with, Gunton’s recognition that theology begins with the knowledge of revelation provides a critical hedge against the distorting attempts to justify theological discourse relative to an external system. This commitment frees the theologian to shift from exercises in prolegomenal justification to robust theological engagement based on the autonomy and integrity of revelation itself. Second, Gunton’s commitment to neutral reason provides a powerful reminder of the ongoing need for clarity, concision and coherence in the articulation of theological systems. Third, Gunton’s observation that philosophical systems are indeed theological accounts of the divine and creation provides a critical caution to the theologian seeking to adapt to any putatively neutral philosophical system. Finally, while I have argued that Gunton’s specifically Trinitarian analysis of the problem of the one and the many is unsuccessful, the impetus behind it, namely that uniquely Christian doctrines should be explored for their heuristic potential in a multiplicity of fields, seems to me to be an important commitment well worth exploring. On all these points, Gunton models in his own work those convictions of Karl Barth cited above and with which we now conclude, namely, that ‘Christian faith is not irrational, not antirational, not supra-rational, but rational in the proper sense’.

Gunton, Intellect and Action, 45.

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Gunton and Calvin MARK D. THOMPSON

It is rather surprising that Colin Gunton, who from time to time expressed his antipathy to Augustine and his legacy, should refer quite frequently and with warm appreciation to the work of John Calvin.1 Often Calvin appears in the index to his books with the third largest entry behind Barth and Augustine. When discussing the noetic impact of the Fall, Gunton could unpack Aquinas’ thought and then speak of ‘a more pessimistic Calvinist like me’, identifying himself in one way or another with Calvin’s legacy.2 His single most sustained treatment of an aspect of Calvin’s theology, a 1999 article on Calvin’s soteriology with a glance towards reformed scholasticism, included an assessment of Calvin’s strategy as ‘brilliant’ and the comment that ‘when he structures his thought trinitarianly, no one is better’.3 Clearly, Gunton had a great deal of time for Calvin and his theology. Of course, the praise was not unalloyed. Elsewhere he could write of how Calvin put too much stress on our spiritual (understood as ‘inward’) natures and not enough on our embodiment and ‘relation to God the Spirit’ (which he suggested was the lingering influence of Augustine’s Platonism).4 He could write with clear distaste of ‘that skandalon of later Calvinist history, the doctrine of predestination’, without, it seems, much appreciation of the more careful accounts of Calvin and his successors circulating at the time he wrote and suggesting much more continuity between them than many had been willing to concede throughout the twentieth century.5 At certain points Gunton saw Calvin providing helpful correctives to the Western theological tradition; at others he considered him too bound by his Augustinian heritage. Gunton did not leave an account of Calvin’s theology as a whole. Yet in three particular areas he did interact with him quite substantially. Gunton’s own characteristically E.g. ‘because I don’t like Augustine. I think he is the fountainhead of our troubles’ Colin E. Gunton, The Barth Lectures (London: T&T Clark, 2007), 96. 2 Colin E. Gunton, Revelation and Reason: Prolegomena to Systematic Theology (London: T&T Clark, 2008), 123. 3 Colin E. Gunton, ‘Aspects of Salvation: Some Unscholastic Themes from Calvin’s Institutes’, International Journal of Systematic Theology 1, no. 3 (1999): 262. Gunton traces his appreciation of the Trinitarian structure of Calvin’s thinking to his own teacher Gareth V. Bennett. Colin E. Gunton, Father, Son & Holy Spirit: Toward A Fully Trinitarian Theology (London: T&T Clark, 2003), 7. 4 Colin E. Gunton, The Promise of Trinitarian Theology, 2nd edn (London: T&T Clark, 1997), 122. 5 Gunton, Promise, 120. The re-evaluation of the history of reformed thought has been led by Richard A. Muller. See Richard A. Muller, Christ and the Decree: Christology and Predestination in Reformed Theology from Calvin to Perkins (Durham, NC: Labyrinth, 1986), 178: ‘Anachronistic also is the claim that the development of Reformed orthodoxy brought about the formulation of a deterministic system: the orthodox are no more or less deterministic than Calvin himself.’ Gunton was not entirely unaware of this as is evident by a passing remark in his article on Calvin’s soteriology: ‘Paul Helm has shown that in certain respects there are things to be found in Calvin that support more of a continuity than Kendall allows.’ Gunton, ‘Aspects’, 254. 1

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impressionistic and yet insightful reading of theological texts, and his astonishing ability to synthesize vast amounts of material across the breadth of the tradition into a convincing account of larger philosophical and theological trends, mean that even his passing comments on Calvin’s contribution in these three areas remain valuable and of interest. In what follows we will examine Gunton on Calvin on Scripture and revelation, the Holy Trinity and the atonement.

GUNTON ON CALVIN AND HOW GOD MAKES HIMSELF KNOWN Colin Gunton’s own interest in the doctrines of revelation, Scripture and the knowledge of God is evident from the course for MA students he taught for nearly twenty years at King’s College London on ‘Revelation and Reason’, as well as his 1993 Warfield Lectures for Princeton Theological Seminary, published as A Brief Theology of Revelation.6 In these and elsewhere, Gunton clearly saw Calvin as a major conversation partner. He was somewhat selective as to which parts of the conversation he wished to engage, and he would distance himself at points from more conservative readings of Calvin, but a number of Calvin’s interests in this doctrine dovetailed with those of Gunton himself. Gunton was appreciative of what he understood as Calvin’s large-scale theological project. ‘The shape of his theology from the beginning’, Gunton wrote, ‘seeking to integrate the knowledge of God and of ourselves, is witness to theology as wisdom: not abstract, but saving and existentially relevant knowledge.’7 He might have noticed the original title of Calvin’s magnum opus, Institutes of the Christian Religion, Embracing Almost the Whole Sum of Piety, and Whatever Is Necessary to Know of the Doctrine of Salvation.8 Even so, what he did notice fitted well with Gunton’s own concern to anchor all theological reflection – upon the nature of knowing and knowledge as much as any other – in the person and activity of God. In the midst of a consideration of Barth’s Trinitarian theology, he wrote, ‘The wider the gulf is made between theological and nontheological knowing, the more will theology appear, especially under modern conditions, to be no more than a tilting at epistemological windmills.’9 So when he read the famous opening lines of Calvin’s Institutes, his heart was warmed: ‘Nearly all the wisdom we possess, that is to say, true and sound wisdom, consists of two parts: the knowledge of God and of ourselves. But, while joined by many bonds, which one precedes and brings forth the other is not easy to discern.’10 Transcripts of the lectures for the King’s College MA course were published in 2008: Gunton, Revelation and Reason. The Princeton lectures became, Colin E. Gunton, A Brief Theology of Revelation. The 1993 Warfield Lectures (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1995). Gunton had written on the topic before, including ‘Transcendence, Metaphor, and the Knowability of God’, Journal of Theological Studies 31, no. 2 (1980): 501–16; and ‘The Knowledge of God: “No Other Foundation” – One Englishman’s Reading of Church Dogmatics Chapter V’, in Reckoning with Barth. Essays in Commemoration of the Centenary of Karl Barth’s Birth, ed. Nigel Biggar (London: Mowbray, 1988), 61–79. 7 Gunton, A Brief Theology, 9. 8 This is the title of the 1536 edition. Its subtitle is ‘A work most worthy to be read by all persons zealous for piety, and recently published’. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans Ford L. Battles (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, [1536] 1975). 9 Gunton, ‘The Knowledge of God’, 77. 10 John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. John T. McNeill; trans. Ford L. Battles, 2 vols (Philadelphia: Westminster, [1559] 1960), I:35. Throughout this chapter, Calvin’s institutes will be cited by book, chapter and paragraph number as in this case, Calvin, Inst. I.i.1. 6

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What appealed to Gunton, as much as anything else, was this casting of both the knowledge of God and the knowledge of ourselves within the overall category of wisdom – ‘not abstract but saving and existentially relevant knowledge’. The knowledge of God is not the secret, privileged knowledge of a select few, as in ancient Gnosticism.11 Rather it is a gift of God mediated by Christ and offered in the midst of a world that is broken but still loved. Yet, and Gunton noticed this too, Calvin (like Barth four centuries later) stressed the limits of unaided human knowledge of God.12 The God who is personal can only be known personally. For this reason, as much as any other, the knowledge of God must arise from the revelatory activity of God. Gunton was remarkably clear on the principal reason why the concept of revelation and any appeal to revelation in Christian theology or ethics is unpopular, even offensive: ‘it is rooted in the problem of authority and the way it appears to violate human autonomy’.13 He also identified an intellectual or philosophical shift which had facilitated the marginalization of the concept, the breakdown of a long-held but variously conceived synthesis of reason and revelation. Such a synthesis, he argued, could be found in the medieval period up until the work of Ockham, and again in the work of Calvin and his immediate heirs. In all of those theological eras, despite all their differences, there is some kind of marriage between reason and revelation considered as distinct sources of knowledge. The marriage was dissolved for a number of philosophical, cultural and theological reasons, but it is the outcome which has been so problematic for theology. The divorce, sometimes known as the dissolution of the mediaeval synthesis, introduced an apparent gulf between what can be called religious and secular reason, so that the two appeared to belong to quite separate worlds of thought. Religious reason, through its association with general revelation and natural theology, has come to appear a radically different kind of use of reason from that operating in the recognition and articulation of truth in general … secular reason has for the most part felt it necessary to divorce itself from anything that is recognisably revelation.14 However, Gunton, in line with Coleridge’s dictum that ‘all Truth is a species of Revelation’,15 seeks to rehabilitate what he calls ‘a general doctrine of revelation’, which he sees as necessary for any recovery of ‘a doctrine of theological revelation – revelation of God’.16 It is in service of such a rehabilitation, and an argument that without revelation we know nothing at all since knowledge involves conforming our minds ‘to the way our neighbour is or the way the world actually is’, that Gunton made use of Calvin’s concept of a sensus divinitatis. In a context in which he distinguished this from Rahner’s idea of transcendentality, Gunton defined the sensus divinitatis in this way: ‘There is innate in every human being a kind of God-ward drive in some way.’17 A key difference between Calvin and Rahner, he observed, is their doctrine of sin. On the one hand for Calvin ‘the Gunton, Revelation and Reason, 16. Gunton, A Brief Theology, 41. 13 Ibid.,  31. 14 Ibid.,  31–2. 15 Samuel T. Coleridge, Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Volume II. 1801–1806, ed. Earl L. Griggs (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956), 388. This quote appears several times in Gunton’s Warfield lectures but first in Gunton, A Brief Theology, 22. 16 Gunton, A Brief Theology, 32. 17 Gunton, Revelation and Reason, 62. 11 12

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sense of sin almost completely obscures the sense of divinity; as the apostle Paul says, it is only enough to make you without excuse’. On the other, Rahner, following Aquinas, ‘is more optimistic about the fact that sin diseases the will but not the intellect’.18 Yet the point is that, even for Calvin, the fractured nature of human engagement with the world does not vitiate all knowledge or empty the concept of general revelation of meaning. Gunton insists that Calvin taught that ‘the existence of the sciences, politics and the arts shows that the Spirit is still active even in a fallen world’.19 The sense of divinity within each of us may routinely lead to superstition rather than truth so that apart from the Gospel we ‘all get our deity wrong’, we may suppress the universal presence of evidence for God in the world and so fail to understand the true nature of things – most disastrously by confusing the creature with the Creator – but the problem is most decidedly with the receivers of revelation rather than the revelation.20 In Gunton’s words, ‘If your thinking ceases to be coherent in relation to the givenness of revelation, if you produce a distorted god, different from Christ, then it is not God that is the problem – you are!’21 Gunton saw the created world as ‘the kind of world within whose structures there can be revelation’.22 That is to say, he saw a relationship between the doctrine of creation and the doctrine of revelation which was both necessary and productive.23 He certainly acknowledged the limitations in the human recipients of revelation to which Calvin drew attention, yet revelation is an activity of the triune God and by grace God effects what human beings in their finitude and fallibility could not. The answer to the conundrum, Gunton insisted, lies in a more thoroughgoing understanding of divine mediation. Ultimately that mediation is a work of the Spirit. Gunton made the point forcibly as he concluded his lectures on revelation. If Christ is the mediator of creation, then he is the basis of created rationality and therefore of human knowledge, wherever and whatever; we might say, of all human culture. But that point must be developed pnematologically also, so that all rationality, truth and beauty are seen to be realised through the perfecting agency of the Spirit, who enables things to be known by human minds and made by human hands. Christ is indeed the Truth, but the truth becomes truth in all the different ways in which it is mediated by the Spirit. Pneumatology is thus the key to any adequate theology of revelation and of its mediation.24 There are resonances here too with Calvin, whose emphasis on the Holy Spirit Gunton drew attention to time and again. He reminded his readers that ‘according to Calvin, the Spirit enables us through the medium or mediation of Scripture to see the world as God’s world’.25 It is at this point, though, for all the resonance and overt appreciation, that a significant difference between Calvin and Gunton emerges. Gunton’s doctrine of Scripture is markedly different from that of the Genevan reformer. Ibid.,  63. Ibid.,  124. 20 Calvin, Inst. I.iv.4, Gunton, Promise, 161; Calvin, Inst. I.v.1–2, Gunton, Revelation and Reason, 71, Colin E. Gunton, The Triune Creator: A Historical and Systematic Study (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1998), 7. 21 Gunton, Revelation and Reason, 124. 22 Gunton, Brief Theology, 33. 23 Ibid.,  36. 24 Ibid.,  124–5. 25 Ibid.,  80. 18 19

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At one level there is an appreciation of Calvin’s metaphor of spectacles, through which we are enabled to bring general revelation into sharper focus. Calvin had first traced the possibilities of knowing God by our own reflection and rational resources and had concluded that ‘all degenerate from the true knowledge of [God]’.26 Later he would conclude that ‘man’s nature, so to speak, is a perpetual factory of idols’.27 He had then traced the line through our observations of the universe and concluded ‘we are not at all sufficiently instructed by this bare and simple testimony which the creatures render splendidly to the glory of God’.28 What is necessary, according to Calvin, is ‘another and better help … to direct us aright to the very Creator of the universe’.29 Which is where Scripture comes in: Scripture gathering up the otherwise confused knowledge of God in our minds, having dispersed our dullness, clearly shows us the true God. This, therefore, is a special gift, where God, to instruct the church, not merely uses mute teachers but also opens his own must hallowed lips … by his Word, God rendered faith unambiguous forever.30 Gunton, however, drew back from Calvin’s identification of Scripture and revelation, though he acknowledged this was indeed what Calvin had taught (as had Luther).31 Gunton’s own debt, first to Coleridge and then to Barth, led him to refuse the identification. In the very first of his Warfield lectures (he would no doubt have understood the irony of the occasion, though he was too much of a gentleman to draw attention to it), he declared, ‘We are confident that we have passed the stage when we any longer equate revelation and the actual words of Scripture.’32 The doctrine of verbal inspiration, which Coleridge considered to be productive of ‘indiscriminate Bibliolatry’ and which Barth believed arose from a stiffening of the doctrine of inspiration in the generation after the Reformers, ‘separating the Bible from the free grace of God’, ‘grounding the Bible upon itself ’ and ultimately making the doctrine itself ‘incomprehensible’, is undoubtedly found in Calvin.33 In his commentary on 2 Tim. 3.16, a key biblical basis for this doctrine, Calvin wrote, ‘This is the principle that distinguishes our religion from all others, that we know that God has spoken to us and are fully convinced that the prophets did not speak of themselves, but as organs of the Holy Spirit uttered only that which they had been commissioned from heaven to declare.’34 In the final edition of his Institutes, Calvin wrote, ‘the Scriptures obtain full authority among believers only when men regard them

Calvin, Inst. I.iv.1. Calvin, Inst. I.xi.8. 28 Calvin, Inst. I.v.15. 29 Calvin, Inst. I.vi.1. 30 Calvin, Inst. I.vi.1, 2. 31 Gunton, Revelation and Reason, 126. 32 Gunton, Brief Theology, 6. Modern-day liberal Princeton would no doubt have applauded this repudiation of a key doctrine of its illustrious forebear (B. B. Warfield). 33 Samuel T. Coleridge, Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit (repr. New York: Chelsea House, 1983), 58; Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics: I.2 The Doctrine of the Word of God, ed. Geoffrey W. Bromiley and Thomas F. Torrance; trans. G. T. Thomson and H. Knight (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1956), 523, 525–6. Throughout this chapter Barth’s Church Dogmatics will be cited by volume and page number as in this case CD I/2:523, 525–6. 34 Unfortunately, within a few lines, Calvin produces a piece of hyperbole that would feed the later protests against this doctrine by Coleridge, Barth, Gunton and many others: ‘This is the meaning of the first clause, that we owe to the Scripture the same reverence as we owe to God, since it has its only source in Him and has nothing of human origin mixed with it.’ John Calvin, The Second Epistle of Paul to the Corinthians, and the Epistles to Timothy, Titus and Philemon, trans. Thomas A. Smail (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1964), 330. 26 27

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as having sprung from heaven, as if there the living words of God were heard’.35 However, far from a static doctrine, one which separated the text from the active and dynamic presence of God, Calvin went on to say, ‘For as God alone is a fit witness to himself in his Word, so also the Word will not find acceptance in men’s hearts before it is sealed by the inward testimony of the Spirit.’36 Gunton’s concern was to avoid what he called ‘a dry propositionalism’.37 ‘The crucial point is’, he wrote, ‘that Revelation is a personal act of God in some way or other. Hence the concept of revealed truth, or revealed proposition, tends to avoid this point.’38 A richer understanding of God (and indeed the incarnate Son, Jesus Christ) as a communicative being, and of words, even written words, even words conveyed by real secondary agents, as God’s communicative actions, might have helped Gunton avoid this dichotomy between personal and propositional. However, much of the most helpful work in this direction was not available to Gunton and has only appeared since his death.39 Gunton himself turned for help, once again, to one of his favourite theological themes, that of mediation. In the first instance he affirmed that ‘the distinct mark of the revelatory character of the Bible is its relation to salvation in Christ the mediator of salvation’.40 Scripture is one of the ways in which the risen and ascended Jesus, the Mediator between God and humanity, is mediated to us by the Spirit. ‘The truth of God [Jesus Christ himself] is to be mediated through human words or human language or human actions.’41 This is a critical observation, Gunton contended, for a number of reasons. Chief among them is the way it opens up a proper relation of human creatures and the knowledge of God: ‘Knowledge [of God] which is mediated by the spirit (sic) is a gift rather than possession, because it is a bringing into being by relation of the Father and the Son.’42 Barth’s great concern with the doctrine of inspiration, that it objectified the text and attributed to it a static quality of ‘inspiredness’ that not only separated it from God but left open the illusion of mastering the word of God, is avoided by this emphasis on gift and on the necessary, ongoing mediation of the Spirit. Another of Barth’s great concerns, that all doctrine be Christologically focussed, is met by Gunton’s comment: ‘the stress has to be on knowledge mediated by the Incarnation. Without the Incarnation as God’s self-revelation there is no true knowledge of God.’43 Scripture therefore mediates the knowledge of God, Gunton argued, but only indirectly (again picking up a characteristic Barthian theme).44

Calvin, Inst. I.vii.1. Calvin, Inst. I.vii.4. 37 Gunton, Revelation and Reason, 101. 38 Ibid.,  72. 39 For such an account, see Kevin J. Vanhoozer, Remythologizing Theology: Divine Action, Passion, and Authorship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), esp. 179–294. 40 Gunton, Brief Theology, 73. 41 Gunton, Revelation and Reason, 73. Later in these lectures Gunton suggests, ‘The key to understanding all this and to see how it all interrelates is to perceive varieties of mediation, to acknowledge varieties of mediation: Revelation is mediated in a number of ways: each way is a different way or revealing something of God and the truth, whether prophetic, Christological or pneumatological’ (76). 42 Ibid., 20. There is an Irenaean influence here as well: ‘God is made known through the mediation of his two hands – the Son and the Holy Spirit’ (24). 43 Ibid.,  28. 44 Ibid., 83. Barth, CD I/2: 492. 35 36

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GUNTON ON CALVIN AND WHO IS THE GOD WHO IS KNOWN Colin Gunton is best known as a Trinitarian theologian. He was one of the most important contributors to a renaissance of Trinitarian theology – and indeed systematic theology more generally – in the Anglophone world in the late twentieth century. Christoph Schwöbel highlighted his contribution to the doctrine of the Trinity in the eulogy he delivered at a service for Gunton held in King’s College Chapel in September 2003: Colin was a trinitarian theologian. The doctrine of the Trinity was for him no optional extra to theology. It was simply the way in which theology can remain true to the gospel … If God is not simply ‘a sea of essence, infinite and unseen’ [John of Damascus] but first of all this particular God, the Father, the Son and the Spirit whose story begins with Israel, culminates in Christ and involves us in the dynamics of the operation of the Spirit of truth, the particular must have paramount significance in theology … If we still followed the ancient custom of venerating the great doctors of the church by a particular title, Colin Gunton would have to be the doctor particularitatis, the teacher of the significance of the particular who was never content with abstract generalities.45 It is significant then that in this area too Gunton interacted in a substantial way with the theology of Calvin. We have already noted his assessment that ‘when [Calvin] structures his thought trinitarianly, no one is better’.46 He realized that Calvin’s explicit treatment of the doctrine is confined to one chapter of the Institutes, ‘but’, he insisted, ‘his thought is structured by it’, as instanced by his definition of faith:47 Now we shall possess a right definition of faith if we call it a firm and certain knowledge of God’s benevolence toward us, founded upon the truth of the freely given promise in Christ, both revealed to our minds and sealed upon our hearts through the Holy Spirit.48 The Father’s benevolence, grounded in the person and work of the Son, perfected in us by the ministry of the Holy Spirit – here is a genuinely Trinitarian account of faith that provides a model for work on other theological topics. It was indicative of a commitment to viewing all God’s activity in the world from this Trinitarian vantage point: ‘to the Father is attributed the beginning of activity, and the fountain and wellspring of all things; to the Son, wisdom, counsel, and the ordered disposition of all things; but to the Spirit is assigned the power and efficacy of that activity’.49 Gunton appreciated the profundity of the insight, which he utilized in response to overstatement about the suffering of God in some late-twentieth-century theology. ‘It is the Son’s particular office to become incarnate and suffer in the flesh’, he reminded his readers, ‘and too much stress on God the Father’s suffering may detract from that.’ After all, ‘one point of the doctrine of the Trinity is that it should enable us to attribute particular forms of action to the particular persons of the Trinity, albeit without suggesting that they are other than the acts of the one God’.50 Christoph Schwöbel, ‘A Tribute to Colin Gunton’, in The Person of Christ, ed. Stephen R. Holmes and Murray Rae (London: T&T Clark, 2005), 13–18, 14. 46 Gunton, ‘Aspects of Salvation’, 262. 47 Gunton, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, 7. 48 Calvin, Inst. III.ii.7, emphasis mine. 49 Calvin, Inst. I.xiii.18. 50 Gunton, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, 28. Gunton quotes this passage from Calvin again on page 81. 45

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Of particular interest to Gunton was the way such a commitment on Calvin’s part led to him giving fresh attention to the proper divine work of the Holy Spirit. He described Calvin as one ‘who was very much a theologian of the Holy Spirit, not least in his doctrine of creation, which to an extent shows the effect of its trinitarian dimension’.51 This is demonstrated by Calvin’s words on the Spirit’s work in creation: ‘For it is the Spirit who, everywhere diffused, sustains all things, causes them to grow, and quickens them in heaven and in earth.’52 Gunton argued that this new prominence to the Spirit and a genuinely Trinitarian approach to theology as a result could be traced at least in part to Calvin’s familiarity with the work of the Eastern fathers, especially the Cappadocians. In some ways this mitigated ‘his heavy dependence upon Augustine’.53 Indeed, he drew attention to Calvin’s cautious and somewhat indirect criticism of Augustine with regard to the distinctive characters of the persons of the Godhead and his ‘clear preference for some parts of the Western tradition against others’.54 There was more of an ambivalence when it came to Calvin’s own treatment of the Trinitarian persons. On the one hand, he was aware of T. F. Torrance’s argument that Calvin is one in a chain of thinkers who developed a relational rather than individualist concept of person: ‘relations between persons have ontological force and are part of what persons are as persons they are real person-constituting relations’.55 On the other hand, he criticizes Calvin’s ‘nearly successful’ definition of person: ‘ “Person”, therefore, I call a “subsistence” in God’s essence, which, while related to the others, is distinguished by an incommunicable quality. By the term “subsistence” we would understand something different from “essence”.’56 Gunton followed Claude Welch in his critique: ‘It does seem that Calvin here commits the characteristic sin of Western trinitarianism, of seeing the persons not as constituting the being of God by their mutual relations but as in some way inhering in being that is in some sense prior to them.’57 Gunton concluded that Calvin is not able to break decisively with the substance language of the Western theological tradition and as a result his insight into the importance of relations is shown to be limited. Torrance may well have been right to place him as part of a trajectory which chartered a different course to Boethius’ individualist approach to persons, a trajectory stretching from Richard of St Victor through Duns Scotus, John Major and on to Polanus, yet it appears somewhat anachronistic to suggest that Calvin understood persons to be constituted by their relations. Whether or not that conclusion itself needs further nuancing in the light of recent discussions probing more intensely the nature of relations,58 Gunton is certainly right to caution about claiming too much for Calvin at this point. Gunton, Promise, 146. Calvin, Inst. I.xiii.14; Gunton, Promise, 146. 53 Gunton, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, 51. 54 Gunton, Promise, 93, 94. 55 Thomas F. Torrance, Transformation & Convergence in the Frame of Knowledge: Explorations in the Interrelations of Scientific and Theological Enterprise (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1984), 230. Gunton, Promise, 89. 56 Calvin, Inst. I.xiii.6. 57 Gunton, Promise, 201. 58 Representative protests include: ‘It is true that the Father is defined by his fatherhood to the Son, but this does not constitute his existence; it presupposes it … Person and relation therefore have to be understood in a reciprocal relationship. Here there are no persons without relations; but there are no relations without persons either.’ Jürgen Moltmann, The Trinity and the Kingdom of God: The Doctrine of God, trans. Margaret Kohl (London: SCM Press, 1981), 172; ‘The persons are identical to their relations, but they are not reducible to their relations; they are not mere relations.’ John M. Frame, The Doctrine of God (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R, 2002), 703; ‘Too many contemporary theologians confuse the concept of personhood (what it is to be a person) with 51 52

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For Gunton, particularity and relationality go together. This was a consistent feature of his writing in the area of Trinitarian theology. In the very first collection of essays published under the aegis of his Research Institute in Systematic Theology he explored the question: What flows from the conception of God as three persons in communion, related but distinct? First, there is something of the space we have been seeking. We have a conception of personal space: the space in which three persons are for and from each other in their otherness. They thus confer particularity upon and receive it from one another. That giving of particularity is very important: it is a matter of a space to be. Father, Son and Spirit through the shape – the taxis – of their inseparable relatedness confer particularity and freedom on each other. That is their personal being.59 Ten years later he was even more pointed: ‘The three are not individuals, for none of their actions can be identified except as it takes place in relation to the other two … It remains the case, however, that if we fail to identify three distinct agents, we are not being true to the biblical witness.’60 In his 1992 Bampton lectures he drew this connection between particularity and relatedness explicitly and repeatedly. For example, chief among the reasons that a theology that incorporates Trinitarian transcendentals is productive is that ‘it provides concepts by which particularity and relatedness may both be given due right and due place in our thought and practice’.61 Gunton saw, in the theology of the Fourth Gospel especially, a conception of God ‘neither as a collectivity nor as an individual, but as a communion, a unity of persons in relation’. What is more, ‘because there is a diversity of relations, the triune giving and receiving is asymmetrical rather than merely reciprocal’.62 A key concept he used in developing these ideas was perichoresis, a mutual indwelling of the persons. Yet, he insisted, ‘it is an important feature of the being of persons that they have the capacity to be themselves and not a function or clone of another’. This led him to conclude ‘God is what he is only as a communion of persons, the particularity of whom remains at the centre of all he is, for each has his own distinctive way of being or tropos hyparxeōs’. He acknowledged that ‘we are not licensed by revelation to speak of a social life’, but he went on to argue, ‘we are, however, to say that if the Spirit works in a particular way in the economy as the one who perfects the creation’ – an argument he had made at length just prior to this – ‘it is reasonable to suppose that he has a similar kind of function to perform in relation to the being of God, to the communion that is the life of God’. Indeed, Gunton was prepared to say ‘the Spirit’s function in the Godhead is to particularize the hypostases’.63 In these lectures Gunton acknowledged a certain tentativeness was appropriate when speaking of particularizing or perfecting the persons

personal identity (what it is to be just this person). The relations that distinguish, for example, the Father from the Son and the Spirit are constitutive of the Father’s distinct personal identity rather than the Father’s personhood simpliciter.’ Vanhoozer, Remythologizing, 144. 59 C. E. Gunton, ‘Trinity, Ontology and Anthropology: Towards a Renewal of the Doctrine of the Imago Dei’, in Persons, Divine and Human, ed. C. Schwöbel and C. E. Gunton (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1991), 56. 60 C. E. Gunton, Act and Being: Towards a Theology of the Divine Attributes (London: SCM Press, 2002), 143. 61 C. E. Gunton, The One, The Three and the Many: God, Creation and the Culture of Modernity. The 1992 Bampton Lectures (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 152. 62 Gunton, The One, 225. 63 Ibid., 190. This would appear to be a development from the earlier notion that the Trinitarian persons confer particularity upon one another. See above, note 59 and Gunton, Promise, 196.

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of the Godhead: ‘it is reasonable to suppose’. The scope for misunderstanding at this point is cavernous. Yet Calvin had never ventured that far, for all his Trinitarian reflection and his concern to highlight the Spirit and his work. In this regard, Gunton’s work is a clear, though not entirely unproblematic, advance on Calvin’s Trinitarian thought.64 A related problem Gunton identified in Calvin is the way he chooses to eschew speculation when it comes to the being of God (NB: not the decision to eschew such speculation but the way he does it) and instead to place a heavy emphasis on the living experience of relation to God. He acknowledged Calvin’s good intentions, but what Calvin (and Luther before him with all his talk about the Deus absconditus) had done was to open up ‘a disastrous breach between an essence of God, unknowable and indeed impersonal, and the personal actions in which God presents himself to us’.65 In Calvin’s own words, ‘he is shown to us not as he is in himself, but as he is toward us’.66 Gunton pointed to one significant effect of this breach: a theology of projection which constructs God in our own image – ‘there is no end to the demons which can be let loose’.67

GUNTON ON CALVIN AND HOW THIS GOD SAVES THROUGH THE CROSS OF CHRIST A third area in which Gunton made some considerable use of Calvin was in his discussion of soteriology and especially the atonement. We have already noted the article he wrote on atonement themes in Calvin in 1999. In that article there is the same critical appreciation of Calvin we have had occasion to notice elsewhere: ‘where Calvin thinks trinitarianly – that is to say with particular respect to the work of the Son and the Spirit mediating the act and will of God the Father – he is unequalled; when not, he is often deeply problematic’.68 He applauded the way Calvin ‘corrects Augustine’s doctrine of sin into a generally more satisfactory mode: sin is not “sensual intemperance” but infidelity leading to ambition, pride and ingratitude’.69 So too the way Calvin’s use of the Eusebian formula of the munus triplex, the threefold office of prophet, priest and king ‘enables him to link the saviour with his Old Testament predecessors and models, and to frame his treatment of the past historic cross within a theology of the present and future lordship of the ascended Lord’.70 Most important of all, though, is the way Calvin casts Christ’s work of obedience as deriving from God’s love in a way that ‘prevents the emergence of crude substitutionary teaching’.71 Gunton concludes that ‘a careful reading of Calvin’s treatment of the atonement makes it manifestly worthy of defence’ and acknowledges that he has provided ‘a largely celebratory account’ of Calvin’s work.72

For example, more thought needs to be given to whether the work of the Spirit in perfecting the humanity of the incarnate Son is indicative of the Spirit’s eternal relation to the Father and the Son. For important work reflecting upon the Spirit’s work in this regard, in conversation not only with Gunton but with Dietrich Bonhoeffer as well, see David A. Höhne, Spirit and Sonship: Colin Gunton’s Theology of Particularity and the Holy Spirit (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010). 65 Gunton, Act and Being, 92–3. 66 Calvin, Inst. I.x.2. 67 Gunton, Act and Being, 93. 68 Gunton, ‘Aspects’, 253. 69 Ibid.,  255. 70 Ibid.,  256. 71 Ibid.,  258. 72 Ibid., 260, 264. 64

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Yet Calvin cannot entirely escape the criticism which Gunton aimed more directly at his successors in the reformed (and especially federalist) tradition. The nub of the issue is a construal of the atonement as penal substitution, seeing it in essentially juridical and even mathematical terms, but much more importantly and disastrously in a way that pits a loving Son against a wrathful Father, both with ‘different ends in view’.73 Gunton explicitly echoed Irving and Forsyth in his critical comments about penal substitution and his attempt to provide an account of Calvin’s doctrine which avoids these dangers.74 Gunton at points appears to massage Calvin’s treatment in order to make it more palatable: on the one hand acknowledging that Calvin uses a range of language, including both the judicial and the sacrificial, but then insisting ‘the substitution is real, and indeed penal, though not in the sense often understood’.75 Yet Gunton did not seem to appreciate that the account of penal substitution from which he wished to distance Calvin is in fact a caricature and that Calvin’s presentation of the atonement spoke of love and wrath, grace and justice, peace and satisfaction, without setting any of them against the others. Therefore, by his love the Father goes before and anticipates our reconciliation in Christ. Indeed, ‘because he first loved us’, he afterward reconciles us to himself. But until Christ succors us by his death, the unrighteousness that deserves God’s indignation remains in us, and is accursed and condemned before him.76 … suppose he learns, as Scripture teaches, that he was estranged from God through sin, is an heir of wrath, subject to the curse of eternal death, excluded from all hope of salvation, beyond every blessing of God, the slave of Satan, captive under the yoke of sin, destined finally for a dreadful destruction and already involved in it; and that at this point Christ interceded as his advocate, took upon himself and suffered the punishment [poenam] that, from God’s righteous judgement, threatened all sinners; that he purged with his blood those evils which had rendered sinners hateful [exosos] to God; that by this expiation [piaculo] he made satisfaction and sacrifice duly to God the Father; that as intercessor he has appeased [placatum] God’s wrath; that on this foundation rests the peace of God with men; that by this bond his benevolence is maintained toward them. Will the man not then be even more moved?77 Undoubtedly a variety of images are used in such a description: estrangement, wrath, curse, hopelessness, slavery and destruction as the human predicament; intercession, punishment, judgment, propitiation, cleansing, sacrifice, satisfaction, peace and benevolence as God’s provision in the face of it. Certainly, as Calvin wrote just a few lines earlier, there is a measure of accommodation in the language used, so that ‘we may better understand how miserable and ruinous our condition is apart from Christ’. Yet the dynamic of punishment or judgment and satisfaction or appeasement is embedded within the description and has a peculiar role within it. Care must be taken to avoid caricature

Ibid.,  257. Ibid., 259, 265. Others would later take notice of Gunton’s hesitations about penal substitution but press the question of whether the ‘transformational rather than punitive or distributive’ view of God’s justice that Gunton advocated is sufficient to satisfy the biblical principles of guilt, proportionality and equity. S. Jeffrey, M. Ovey and A. Sach, Pierced for Our Transgressions: Rediscovering the Glory of Penal Substitution (Nottingham: IVP, 2007), 249–63, referring particularly to Colin E. Gunton, The Actuality of the Atonement: A Study of Metaphor, Rationality and the Christian Tradition (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1989), 188. 75 Gunton, ‘Aspects’, 258. 76 Calvin, Inst. II.xvi.3. 77 Calvin, Inst. II.xvi.2. 73 74

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and any notion of a rupture of the divine persons – Jesus remains at every point, even on the cross, the beloved Son in whom the Father is well pleased – but as Gunton himself admits, ‘the heart of the doctrine of substitution is … God the Son bearing as man the weight of the Father’s holy wrath against sin’ and Calvin is as clear as anyone in making that critical point.78 Similarly, according to Gunton, Calvin may be appreciated for correcting ‘the Lutheran stress on justification, which can throw out of kilter other things that need to be said’ – with a particular smile at the way Calvin began his treatment of the appropriation of salvation with an account of sanctification (which he called regeneration) – yet he seems to have overlooked Calvin’s own explanation for the order in which he addresses these doctrines. ‘The theme of justification was therefore more lightly touched upon’, Calvin wrote, ‘because it was more to the point to understand first how little devoid of good works is the faith, through which alone we obtain free righteousness by the mercy of God.’ He then made clear that this in no way represented a de-emphasis on justification which he described as ‘the main hinge on which religion turns’.79 Calvin’s point was made more succinctly in his Antidote to the Council of Trent: ‘It is therefore faith alone which justifies, and yet the faith which justifies is not alone.’80 Gunton’s fullest appreciation of Calvin was always reserved for the Trinitarian shape of his theological reflections. This was no less the case in his doctrine of the atonement than elsewhere. In his important and influential monograph, The Actuality of the Atonement, Gunton drew attention to the way Calvin gave special prominence to the action of the Holy Spirit in the priestly work of Christ, based, not least, on passages such as Heb. 9.14. Gunton paraphrased both Calvin and Hebrews by describing the Spirit as ‘the efficient power of Christ’s sacrifice’.81 Yet what was almost as important, as far as Gunton was concerned, was that Christ’s sacrifice was a human sacrifice, a substitution, yes, but a substitution of a particular type. ‘What we find in Calvin is a theology which sees in the life and death of Christ a human self-giving which is effective in giving life to others.’ Even now, ‘the ascended Christ is the means of access by virtue of what he achieved in his human priesthood’.82 This is the point at which Gunton believed Calvin could have developed even further the role of the Spirit, in ways which Irving would do two and a half centuries later. In Calvin’s own theology and more particularly in that of his successors, the fact that salvation came from God as a genuinely human event had tended to be lost … If we understand the Spirit to be God as he graciously enables human life to be truly human, we are also able to see the atonement as genuinely a work of God the Father, coming indeed from ‘outside’ as the outworking of the eternal love of God, but taking shape within an autonomous human life (autonomous because given autonomy by the Spirit).83

unton, ‘Aspects’, 265. G Calvin, Inst. III.xi.1. 80 John Calvin, ‘Acts of the Council of Trent with The Antidote (1547)’, in Tracts and Letters: Volume 3: Tracts, Part 3, ed. and trans. Henry Beveridge (1851; repr. Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 2009), 152. 81 Gunton, Actuality, 130, 136. 82 Ibid., 130, emphasis mine. 83 Ibid.,  136. 78 79

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Gunton applauded much of what Calvin had achieved in providing a more fully Trinitarian approach to the atonement, but from Gunton’s perspective there was still much work to be done.

CONCLUSION What then can we say about Colin Gunton’s engagement with the theological thought of John Calvin? The key directions of Gunton’s thought, particularly in the areas we have surveyed, were shaped more by Barth, Coleridge, Irving and even Forsyth than by Calvin. In some ways those influences ensured that Gunton’s appreciation of Calvin was constrained within certain limits. Yet Gunton’s engagement with Calvin was not derivative. He was well acquainted with Calvin’s work in both the Institutes and his commentaries (witness the use made of the Calvin’s commentary on Hebrews in The Actuality of Atonement). He might not have been as well acquainted with the renaissance of Calvin scholarship in the last two decades of his life, a renaissance that has led to a significant revision of the mid-twentieth-century consensus on Calvin and his legacy. Yet he was not entirely unaware and, in any case, his own assessment had, by and large, been much more positive than that of many of his contemporaries. Colin Gunton did not like Augustine, but he refused to ignore him and could, from time to time, speak with somewhat measured appreciation of his intellectual achievement. He was much more fond of Karl Barth, but a glance through his now published Barth Lectures reveals he critically engaged even him.84 His treatment of Calvin fits somewhere in the middle, full of respectful engagement, genuine appreciation and thoughtful critical assessment. Gunton knew that all our theological construction, by the small or the great, even when it seeks most assiduously to reflect the teaching of divine revelation, labours under the reality of our finitude and fallibility. It is always, as the Reformed theologian Franciscus Junius put it, ectypal theology, not the archetypal theology that is the possession of only God himself.85 All that we write and teach stands open to evaluation and correction. One of my favourite personal memories of Colin Gunton is of watching him engage the audience after a conference paper at one of his King’s College conferences in the mid1990s. He was taken to task by one attendee, full of youthful hubris, who suggested he had succumbed to heresy. His reply was simply, with both confidence and warmth, ‘You know, I might not be a heretic; I might just be wrong.’ Gunton’s own willingness to be corrected and to grow in understanding of the Lord he loved and sought to serve with all the intellectual gifts he had been given belied the fact that he was one of the leading theologians of his generation. Yet it is something he shared with Calvin, with Barth and, yes, even with Augustine.

olin E. Gunton, The Barth Lectures, ed. P. H. Brazier (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2007). C Franciscus Junius, A Treatise on True Theology, trans. D. C. Noe (1594; Grand Rapids, MI: Reformation Heritage, 2014), 107–20. 84 85

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CHAPTER TWENTY

Gunton and Coleridge STEPHEN R. HOLMES

Many have suggested that Colin Gunton’s Bampton Lectures, published as The One, the Three, and the Many, were the crowning achievement of his writing career;1 he himself described Samuel Taylor Coleridge as ‘the presiding genius’ of that book,2 indicating just how important Coleridge was to him, at that point at least. Gunton’s engagement with Coleridge over the course of his writing career was very uneven, however: he appears as a consistent conversation partner in Enlightenment and Alienation (published in 1985, but written by 1982), and remains so until the Bamptons (delivered in 1992; published in 1993); in the 1993 essay on the possibility of ‘An English Systematic Theology?’3 Coleridge is the great example of the right path (and Pusey the example of the wrong one). After that, Coleridge continues to be referenced, albeit rather infrequently, in Gunton’s writing, but mostly as a helpful illustration of a point rather than a resource to be drawn upon. Only some of this is explained by variations in subject matter: it is little surprise, given what Gunton found in Coleridge, that Yesterday and Today had little space for him, for example, but the relatively sparse references in Triune Creator (1998) are remarkable given the centrality of Coleridge’s account of the Trinity and creation a decade earlier, as is, differently, the fact that The Actuality of Atonement (1988) leads with Coleridge, and several times returns to him, despite Coleridge having very little to say on the topics it engages.4 I have argued before5 that two related shifts are visible in Gunton’s Trinitarian theology, both resulting from his engagement with John Zizioulas on the British Council of Churches Study Commission on Trinitarian doctrine, which was set up in 1983 and reported under the title The Forgotten Trinity in 1985. One, almost immediate, is a move from a simple acceptance of Barth’s Trinitarian theology, with its stress on the Filioque and its doubts about the language of ‘persons’6 to a Zizioulian account of persons in

For representative example, Bruce McCormack describes it as ‘arguably Colin Gunton’s finest work’. Bruce L. McCormack, ‘The One, the Three, and the Many: In Memory of Colin Gunton’, Cultural Encounters 1, no. 2 (2005): 7–17, 7. 2 Colin E. Gunton, The One, the Three and the Many: God, Creation and the Culture of Modernity. The 1992 Bampton Lectures (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 15. 3 Colin E. Gunton, ‘An English Systematic Theology?’, Scottish Journal of Theology 46, no. 4 (1993): 479–96. 4 Section 2 of this chapter will analyse Gunton’s use of Coleridge in various works in detail. 5 Stephen R. Holmes, ‘Towards the Analogia Personae et Relationis: Developments in Gunton’s Trinitarian Thinking’, in The Theology of Colin Gunton, ed. Lincoln Harvey (London: T&T Clark, 2010), 32–48. 6 To those familiar only with Gunton’s later theology, it may come as a shock to read him asserting that ‘ “Three persons” suggests three separate Gods, not the one God in the threefold richness of his being.’ Enlightenment and Alienation, 141. 1

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relation; the other, which on published evidence seems to take place a decade or so later, concerns the proper use of Trinitarian doctrine: until A Brief Theology of Revelation (published in 1995, but being the 1993 Warfield Lectures), Gunton used the doctrine as Coleridge had, as a way of establishing human freedom and the relative independence of the world; in that text and after it became a way of answering questions concerning mediation. This, I suggest, explains the fascination with Coleridge for a decade and the relative lack of interest in him afterwards. To argue this, I will here first offer a brief introduction to certain themes in Coleridge. This will not be a full survey of his thought, even of his theology – there is nothing here on the idea of a ‘clerisy’ (which Gunton would have hated) and not much on the central distinction between ‘reason’ and ‘understanding’, for ­example – but instead a focus on the development of his Trinitarian theology, which is largely what inspired Gunton.7 After that I will trace Gunton’s various references to Coleridge, attempt to construct an account of what he found in him during the decade of serious engagement and of why that engagement ceased around 1994.

INTRODUCING COLERIDGE Stop, Christian passer-by! – Stop, child of God, And read with gentle breast. Beneath this sod A poet lies, or that which once seem’d he. – O, lift one thought in prayer for S. T. C.; That he who many a year with toil of breath Found death in life, may here find life in death! Mercy for praise – to be forgiven for fame He ask’d, and hoped, through Christ. Do thou the same!8 Coleridge’s self-penned epitaph, probably written in 1833, jars badly with his reputation. He is known as, par excellence, the Romantic poet who dragged mythic creatures out of folklore into our imagination – in ‘Christabel’; in ‘Kubla Kahn’; most obviously in ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’. Coleridge re-enchanted our life by throwing at us faeries and enigmatic damsels and worlds of imagined spirits conjured by a dying albatross. We remember, with a (perhaps delighted) shiver, a ‘woman wailing for her demon-lover’, or all the stories told to a wedding guest, or Geraldine’s wooing of Christabel, but there is surely nothing Christian there? Coleridge’s career as a poet was, in fact, remarkably brief9 and essentially entirely bound up with his intense, complicated, almost symbiotic relationship with William

See Mary Anne Perkins, ‘Religious Thinker’, in The Cambridge Companion to Coleridge, ed. Lucy Newlyn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 187–200 for a judicious exploration of the themes and varying interpretations; the reader interested in my own broader construction can find it in Stephen R. Holmes, ‘Coleridge’, in Blackwell Companion to Nineteenth Century Theology, ed. David Fergusson (Oxford: WileyBlackwell, 2010), 76–96. 8 Coleridge, ‘Epitaph’, in Selections from the Poems of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. English Romantic Poets, ed. A. Hamilton Thompson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1916), 94. 9 The best biography of Coleridge remains the two volumes by Richard Holmes: Coleridge: Early Visions (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1989) and Coleridge: Darker Reflections (London: Flamingo, 1999). 7

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Wordsworth.10 He was born in Devon in 1772 and educated at Christ’s Hospital (a charitable school in London, founded by Edward VI in 1552) and Jesus College, Cambridge. He first met Wordsworth in 1795, and in 1797 urged him to become a close neighbour in Alfoxden. Coleridge had written poetry before then, but not anything of great worth; many long days spent in conversation with Wordsworth led to them developing together a new, or renewed, conception of what poetry should be, and the publication of the great Lyrical Ballads in 1798,11 with its somewhat defensive – and occasionally passive-aggressive12 – opening ‘Advertisement’ (Wordsworth’s ‘Preface’ would be written for a later edition). Coleridge travelled in Germany 1798–9, then settled near Wordsworth in Cumbria in 1800. Their relationship deteriorated; Wordsworth never stopped admiring the intellectual power of his friend, but became more and more disgusted at the weaknesses of his character. Coleridge left for Malta in 1804, citing medical needs (although he was a lifelong hypochondriac), and their creative partnership was effectively over. Coleridge had despaired of his own poetic abilities before that, in large part because he compared himself to Wordsworth unfavourably. Perhaps his only genuinely great poem after 1800 was ‘Dejection: an ode’.13 It is not hard to find literary critics asserting that Coleridge’s poetic achievements depended on a certain borrowing of, or even submission to, Wordsworth’s style. Riasanovsky speaks of ‘Coleridge’s extraordinary receptivity’,14 for example. As McFarland’s language of ‘symbiosis’ hints, however, the dependence was not only in one direction. Jonathan Wordsworth suggests that Coleridge’s contribution was essentially subservient, aiding in the development of the Wordsworthian voice,15 which is a plausible interpretation of Coleridge’s conversation poems. The three great daemonic poems – ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’, ‘Kubla Kahn’ and ‘Christabel’ – go places that Wordsworth never went, however, and so demand further explanation. I have argued elsewhere16 that it is possible to trace a growing theological dissatisfaction through Coleridge’s despair over his poetry. The vocation of the poet, he believed, is to read the book of nature to discover spiritual truth and to report what is found, but he loses confidence in his readings. The daemonic poems are each, fundamentally, about this loss of confidence. In ‘Christabel’, Geraldine is clearly a strange spiritual creature, but whether a force for good or evil is left undetermined (a point heightened by the incompleteness of the poem; perhaps it could not be finished without undermining the

The classic treatment of this remains Thomas McFarland, Romanticism and the Forms of Ruin: Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Modalities of Fragmentation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981). McFarland describes the relationship as a ‘symbiosis’ in a chapter title, 56. 11 Anon. [but Wordsworth and Coleridge], Lyrical Ballads, with a Few Other Poems (London: J.&A. Arch, 1798). 12 ‘Readers accustomed to the gaudiness and inane phraseology of many modern writers,’ Lyrical Ballads, i–ii. 13 Mays suggests that Coleridge’s ‘later poems … are customarily taken to begin after the time he met Sara Hutchinson (November 1799) and settled in the north of England (early 1800)’. J. C. C. Mays, ‘The Later Poetry’, in Cambridge Companion, ed. Newlyn, 89–99, 89; he acknowledges the remarkable nature of the suggestion that any writer’s ‘later’ period begins before their thirtieth birthday and then argues hard – hard enough to demonstrate the general prevalence of the opposing view – that Coleridge’s nineteenth-century poetry has lasting literary worth. 14 Nicholas V. Riasanovsky, The Emergence of Romanticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 29. 15 Jonathan Wordsworth, The Music of Humanity: A Critical Study of Wordsworth’s ‘Ruined Cottage’ Incorporating Texts from a Manuscript of 1799–1800 (London: Nelson, 1969). For example, ‘It is almost as if in “This LimeTree Bower” Coleridge had deliberately taken one of Wordsworth’s most recent poems – the Yew-tree lines – shown him how to make it fully Wordsworthian, and then decided not himself to compete.’ 199. 16 Holmes, ‘Coleridge’, 80–1. 10

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uncertainty which is the core of it). The Mariner’s tale is explicitly reported to a wedding guest, and so the reader is forced to question if all these strange goings on are true reports, the honest delusions of a water-starved sailor or mere falsehoods. ‘Kubla Kahn’ breaks off its description of Xanadu with a recollection of a dulcimer-playing ‘Abyssinian maid’ (from Abyssinia (i.e., Ethiopia)? Or from the Abyss?) whose song, if only recalled, would enable the poet to perform in air with words the ‘miracle of rare device’ that Kubla performed with stone in Xanadu (‘I would build that dome in air’). Her song, represented (paradoxically?) as ‘the milk of Paradise’, is lost, however, and the narrator – by now, surely, Coleridge – is left with only an aching memory (‘could I revive within me’) of the magic that seemed possible when he still believed he could write poetry.17 Coleridge’s response was to deepen his, already evident, interest in philosophy – perhaps seeking to recapture what he had lost, perhaps merely to find a better way of understanding the world. He toyed with a career in colonial administration in Malta 1804–5,18 but even there his instinct for philosophical musings was not suppressed.19 As early as 1801, in a famous letter to Thomas Poole, he had announced that he had broken free of the British empiricist philosophical tradition.20 The language of ‘escape’ and ‘freedom’ is appropriate here: he believed that he had overcome the mechanistic and deterministic metaphysics that had driven the scientific advances, but dulled the art, of the Enlightenment. His reading remained voracious and eclectic (reading his notebooks from the Mediterranean months, there is a sense that he was devouring whatever he found available in Malta and Sicily), but his interests were coalescing into two areas: varieties of Neoplatonism and post-Kantian idealism. The post-Kantian move, narrated in his Biographia Literaria, was a fairly obvious and (at least in Germany) well-trodden path: if Kant is right about space and time at the beginning of the Critique of Pure Reason, then causality, and with it any form of determinism, is revealed to be merely one of our mental categories for ordering the world, not a metaphysical reality. We perceive the world as deterministic, but its reality may well be profoundly different. For someone like Coleridge, imbued with the sensibilities of Romanticism, this invitation to recover the philosophical possibility of human freedom must have felt vital and, well, liberating.21 Coleridge’s ongoing fascination with Neoplatonism has troubled some interpreters of his philosophical thought. Hamilton locates it in a captivity to Anglican doctrine, which, on his account, apparently leads Coleridge to deny his best philosophical insights, and so to lapse into incoherence.22 This seems implausible – Coleridge’s celebration of

Mays argues that at Stowey, Coleridge explored the possibility ‘that poems can act like charms to call forth the powers residing in names and thereby adjust or control them’. ‘Later Poems’, 94. 18 See Holmes, Darker Reflections, ch. 1 for details. 19 See Holmes, Darker Reflections, 12 for some evidence. 20 ‘If I do not greatly delude myself, I have not only completely extricated the notions of Time and Space; but have overthrown the doctrine of Association, as taught by Hartley, and with it all the irreligious metaphysics of modern Infidels – especially, the doctrine of Necessity.’ E. L. Griggs (ed.), The Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 6 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1956–71), vol. II, 706. 21 For a much fuller account of what Coleridge received from Kant, and what more he wanted, see, ed. Thomas McFarland, The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Vol. 15: Opus Maximum (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), lvii–lxii. 22 Paul Hamilton, ‘The Philosopher’, in Cambridge Companion, ed. Newlyn, 170–86, see particularly on the Biographia and The Friend, 172–3. To be fair, Hamilton by the end of his essay wants to claim significance for Coleridge as a philosopher, but the fact that he feels the need to spend his entire essay arguing this point demonstrates the problem. 17

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the Anglican settlement clearly comes much later in his life than his fascination with Neoplatonism. So why the latter? In part it can, surely, be explained by another part of the Romantic reaction to Enlightenment, the celebration of antiquity. Coleridge simply wants to find his key ideas in the Cambridge Platonists, and before them in Greek Fathers, just as Schelling was pleased to discover a precursor in Boehme. There is more to it than this, however: Coleridge comes to believe that a Neoplatonic Trinitarianism is the only way to realize the possibility of establishing freedom that had been opened up by Kant. Kant’s achievement here, after all, was basically negative (and was anticipated by Hume): the apparent regularity of the world is not based on some deterministic and mechanical metaphysical reality but on our structures of perception. There is nothing in Kant’s claims (here23) to deny that the metaphysical – transcendental, noumenal – reality is in fact deterministic, only a demonstration that it need not be. The major German idealists who followed Kant – Schelling, Hegel and Fichte (post-Jena) – adopted broadly monistic accounts of metaphysics,24 which raised again for Coleridge the problem of freedom. To cite a letter which Gunton quoted more than once, ‘Make yourself thoroughly, intuitively, master of the exceeding difficulties of admitting a one Ground of the Universe (which, however, must be admitted) and yet finding room for any thing else.’25 Coleridge and Wordsworth had alike been fascinated by pantheism in their early friendship (as indeed had many of the first generation of the Romantics, both in England and in Germany). In ‘Frost at Midnight’ (written 1798), for example, Coleridge wrote that ‘God … doth teach Himself in all and all things in himself ’. Over the next few years (as we will see in a moment, he had settled the question by 1806) Coleridge became dissatisfied with pantheism, or even sophisticated panentheisms, precisely because of this question of ‘finding room’ – they excluded the possibility of genuine human freedom. Another passage that Gunton quoted several times,26 from the dense and difficult essay, ‘On the Prometheus of Aeschylus’, sets out the same issue in almost tabular form. There are, Coleridge suggests, three available accounts of cosmogony. The first he calls ‘Phoenician’, and he defines it as ‘the cosmogony was their theogony and vice-versa’ – that is, God and the world share the same beginning. This leads to monism and so ineluctably (according to Coleridge) to absolute determinism. The second cosmogony, the ‘Greek’, is dualistic, assuming a primordial dualism of the divine and some unformed material substrate out of which God creates the world. (As Coleridge less than helpfully puts it, ‘The corporeal was supposed co-essential with the antecedent of its corporeity.’) Such a dualism, on Coleridge’s account, risks again a version of pantheism, by identifying ‘mind’ or ‘spirit’ with the divine, and so again collapses once more into determinism. Finally,

In The Metaphysics of Morals and Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, I think he does insist on the necessity of human freedom, but I cannot pretend to be a specialist. 24 Paul Guyer and Rolf-Peter Horstmann, ‘Idealism’, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2019 edition), ed. Edward N. Zalta, https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2019/entries/idealism/, see §5. 25 Collected Letters, vol. 4, 849. For Gunton’s use see, e.g., The One, the Three and the Many, 21, emphasis original. 26 For example, Colin E. Gunton, The Triune Creator: A Historical and Systematic Study (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1998), 137–8; Colin E. Gunton, The Promise of Trinitarian Theology, 2nd edn (London: T&T Clark, 1997), 105–7; ‘Trinity, Ontology, and Anthropology’, in Persons, Divine and Human: King’s College Essays in Theological Anthropology, ed. Christoph Schwöbel and Colin E. Gunton (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1991), 51–2. 23

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we have the ‘Hebrew’ scheme, asserting an uncreated Creator who created ex nihilo, enabling, ‘by the spirit and the word’ a world to be.27 The emphasis on ‘the spirit and the word’ is a classically Coleridgean quiet allusion to the developed, but unpublished, heart of his system. As early as 1806,28 he had identified what was to remain the core of his answer to the question of human freedom: the establishment of the possibility of genuine otherness on the basis of a primordial distinction in unity in the deity, for which he coins the word ‘alterity’, and which forms the basis of a recognizably Neoplatonic account of Trinitarian doctrine. The fullest explication of this is in the Opus Maximum fragments, only recently edited and published.29 The primordial reality, Coleridge asserts, is absolute Will, which is identical to the possibility of personality, which he terms ‘personeity’.30 Absolute Will, he claims, is self-caused, the ground of its own existence, but this does not exhaust its fecundity, and so there must be a further product, which is both distinct from and identical to the first. This is where he introduces the term ‘alterity’.31 Echoing (probably consciously, given his vast erudition) themes found in Origen, Coleridge writes of ‘a self wholly and adequately repeated, yet so that the very repetition contains the distinction from the primary act’, and identifies this as the begetting of the Son by the Father.32 He nonetheless acknowledges that he is following Plotinus ‘and the most sober of the Neo-platonic writers amongst his followers’.33 The self-communication of Father to Son and Son to Father is the unity, the love, which holds the distinction in unity and is identified as ‘Spirit’.34 Here, the echo is of Augustine’s account of the Spirit as the vinculum caritatis; we might also note that the Filioque is necessarily assumed. The discussion goes on to give an account of a heavenly Fall which is again reminiscent of Origen, but we have the key points for our purposes. The problem of ‘finding room’ is answered by a doctrine of the Trinity. It is the Spirit-enabled alterity of Son from Father that establishes enough relative independence for creatures that human freedom – human personhood – is made possible. This doctrine of the Trinity, and its implications for the being of creation, is the heart of what Gunton received from Coleridge. There is one further theme, central to Coleridge’s thought, but rather more peripheral to Gunton’s, that we need to harvest, which is the distinction between ‘reason’ and ‘understanding’. Coleridge once wrote: ‘my philosophy (as metaphysics) is built on the distinction between the Reason and the Understanding. He who, after fairly attending to my exposition of the point … can still find no meaning in this distinction … for him the perusal of my philosophical writings, at least, will be a mere waste of time.’35

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ‘On the Prometheus of Aeschylus’, Complete Works, ed. W. G. T. Shedd (New York: Harper, 1853) vol. IV, 344–65; see 353–4 for the passage referenced and the quotations. 28 See Collected Letters, vol. 2, p. 1196; I believe this to be the earliest clear statement of this theme, which was to become central to Coleridge’s thought. 29 Collected Works Vol. 15 (ed. McFarland): Opus Maximum. 30 Opus Maximum, 164. 31 Ibid.,  195–6. 32 Ibid.,  199. 33 Ibid.,  205. 34 Ibid. 35 From the letter of 24 November 1819 to Joseph Hughes, Collected Letters, vol. 6, 1048–50; it is also reproduced in Collected Works, 4.II, 503–4. 27

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The distinction is, once again, based on themes Coleridge found in Kant and developed by the German idealists, here particularly Jacobi. It was, that is to say, his attempt to replicate their distinctions between Vernunft and Verstand.36 ‘Understanding’, for Coleridge, is all empirical knowledge and everything that is derived from reasoning about empirical data – the Kantian phenomenal world. ‘Reason’, by contrast, is an organ of noumenal perception; Coleridge quotes Jacobi: ‘Reason bears the same relationship to spiritual objects, the Universal, the Eternal and the Necessary, as the eye bears to material and contingent phenomena.’37 He immediately makes a move of his own, however: ‘It must be added, that [reason] is an organ identical with its appropriate objects.’ Here is the Neoplatonic theme of the presence of the divine in all things, given the twist that it is Reason – the Logos – that is the point of contact. The understanding deals in ‘notions’; reason deals in ‘ideas’ – fundamentally inexpressible concepts that conform directly the noumenal reality; the Trinity is the ‘idea of ideas’, the place where all reality finds its unity. Coordinated with the distinction between reason and understanding is another, between ‘fancy’ and ‘imagination’. The ‘fancy’ (it is hard not to assume that the term is deliberately dismissive) associates the data of the understanding in patterned ways, and so is supremely uninteresting; the ‘imagination’ by contrast is profoundly important: it expresses truths of reason through symbols accessible to the understanding – it is the work of the poet, with which we started.

GUNTON’S USE OF COLERIDGE So we have a doctrine of the Trinity based on metaphysical speculation, with no mention of the life of Jesus, and an account of humanity that demands a Platonic chain of being argument; these are not themes that are generally celebrated in Gunton’s later theology! What, we might ask, did Coleridge offer to Gunton that he found of use, even if, as I have previously indicated, he later grew beyond it? Andrew Walker told me once in conversation that he had introduced Gunton to Coleridge’s writings; from textual evidence it must have been about 1980.38 As already noted, Gunton’s first significant engagement with Coleridge is in Enlightenment and Alienation: An Essay towards a Trinitarian Theology (the subtitle is important here). The book essentially offers an alternative, and Gunton believes a more hopeful, approach to the problems bequeathed by Enlightenment, looking in three sections at perception and belief, autonomy and freedom, and biblical criticism. Gunton describes Coleridge as ‘the thinker through whom the fundamental unity of three main sections of this book comes to expression’.39 The first part of the book deals with alienation through perception, and the dichotomy of empiricism and belief, and Coleridge’s theory of the imagination is offered as a hint of a way forward. The second addresses the question of freedom, where Gunton followed much of my discussion above (although without the benefit of

For Coleridge’s key discussions of this distinction, see Aids to Reflection Collected Works, 9, 232–6; also Essay V of ‘The Landing Place’, in The Friend (Collected Works, 4.I, 154–61) and Appendix C of The Statesman’s Manual (Collected Works, 6, 59–93). 37 Collected Works, 4.I, 155–6. 38 Arguments from silence are notoriously difficult, but it is hard to believe that Gunton would not have referenced Coleridge in essays such as Colin E. Gunton, ‘Transcendence, Metaphor, and the Knowability of God’, Journal of Theological Studies 31, no. 2 (1980): 501–16, had he found then what he later used. 39 Enlightenment and Alienation, 85. 36

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the Opus Maximum fragments). The third deals with higher criticism, and particularly the increasing recognition of the plurality of voices in the scriptures; Gunton does not turn to Coleridge’s posthumously published responses in Confessions of an Enquiring Spirit but rather uses his Trinitarian response to the question of the one and the many – alterity as distinction in unity – as a hint as to how problems may be approached. In Enlightenment and Alienation, then, Gunton found help in Coleridge’s account of the imagination but more centrally found a solution to what he was beginning to name as the ‘problem of the one and the many’ in Coleridge’s Trinitarian account of alterity. At this point in Gunton’s career he still understands the Trinity in a basically Barthian way, with the word ‘person’ explicitly found to be problematic, and the Filioque assumed. The establishment of alterity, the possibility of genuine otherness, in a basically metaphysical account of the Trinity becomes a way of establishing space for human freedom, and more generally a way of navigating between extremes of atomism and undifferentiated sameness. Gunton’s inaugural lecture at King’s, The One, the Three, and the Many (1985), is in some ways a revisiting in miniature of the themes of Enlightenment and Alienation, although focused on social structures. ‘Modern individualism and modern collectivism are mirror images of each other. Both signal the loss of the person, the disappearance of the one into the many or the many into the one.’40 Coleridge is there as a witness to this at the end of the lecture, now with a concern that his theology is not incarnational enough, and so with Irving as a corrector. Others take a more central place in the argument, however: Richard of St Victor and John Macmurray, then the Cappadocians mediated through Zizioulas. The concept of the ‘person’, absent from Enlightenment and Alienation, has now become central; the mediation between the one and the many is still a doctrine of the Trinity, which Coleridge can be cited in support of, but the Trinity is now understood as persons-in-relation. There is also a new genealogy of the failure: what had been the fault of the Enlightenment can now be traced back through Descartes to Augustine. Another essay published in 1985, ‘Creation and Re-Creation’,41 discusses aesthetics, with Augustine again the chief villain of the piece, although here Augustine merely channels Plotinus and so Plato in their suspicion of the material. Coleridge appears at the beginnings of the solution as providing the way into a theory of metaphor;42 a battery of more recent citations follow, but Coleridge eventually reappears, with his account of the imagination offering a way to move from aesthetic theory to theology.43 This leads, via a series of characteristically quick intellectual moves, to (what I think are) Gunton’s first published reflections of the status of the classical transcendentals – goodness, truth and beauty. The problem of aesthetics, finally, is the alienation of beauty from goodness and truth, and a theology of creation and redemption through incarnation can overcome that problem.

Colin E. Gunton, The One, the Three and the Many: An Inaugural Lecture in the Chair of Christian Doctrine (London: King’s College London, 1985), 5. 41 Colin E. Gunton, ‘Creation and Re-Creation: An Exploration of Some Themes in Aesthetics and Theology’, Modern Theology 2, no. 1 (1985): 1–19. The note on p. 18 indicates that it is a revised version of a paper presented to the Society for the Study of Theology conference in 1984. 42 Gunton, ‘Creation and Re-Creation’, 7. 43 Ibid.,  11. 40

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The Actuality of Atonement (1988) picks up on some of these themes and opens with Coleridge’s account of Reason as something more than mere reasoning; quickly we are into the failures of the Enlightenment, and then of Kant, Schleiermacher and Hegel. The loss of metaphor as a way of making serious intellectual progress is the symptom of these various failures, and so the second chapter begins again with Coleridge, and his insistence that non-literal language can be powerful, perhaps uniquely powerful; the development of this idea is in dialogue with more recent writers once more – Coleridge appears once more, at the start of the third subsection, which is largely drawn from the ‘Creation and Re-Creation’ essay. The Promise of Trinitarian Theology appeared in 1991, a collection of essays that had (mostly) been published earlier in other places. The second chapter is a paper first published in 1986;44 in it Coleridge is used as a way to travel further than Cupitt and Ward did in debating the metaphysical reality of God. Coleridge, for Gunton, shows us that the real question is who God is, which then determines the possible forms of God’s relation to the world, invoking the typology from ‘The Prometheus of Aeschylus’.45 The sixth chapter, written for the collection, returns to this typology46 but also returns to the question of transcendentals, now linked with Coleridgean ideas, and so with the Trinity as the ‘idea of ideas’ – hints of themes to be worked out in the Bampton lectures, to which we now turn. The theme of The One, the Three and the Many is once again the critique of modernity and the search for theological resources to overcome the Enlightenment. The shifts made in the 1985 inaugural lecture are maintained and strengthened, so that the crucial failures of modernity can be traced back directly to Augustine’s improperly platonizing theology.47 The book has a chiastic structure, the opening four chapters criticizing modern failures to adequately comprehend the problem of the one and the many, particularity, relationality and truth and the closing four offering theological correctives to each of these in reverse order. The centre of the chiasm is the question of truth, and Gunton’s proposed solution to it is the concept of the ‘open transcendental’, defined as ‘a notion, in some way basic to the human thinking process, which empowers a continuing and in principle unfinished exploration of the universal marks of being’.48 The solution to each of the remaining three problems is presented in the form of an open transcendental that will enable us to think better about it: relationality can be thought about well using the concept of perichoresis; particularity through substantiality; and the problem of the one and the many through a concept of being in relation. All three of these are of course borrowed from Trinitarian doctrine. Where is Coleridge in all this? The simple answer is nearly everywhere, particularly in the second half of the book. Gunton’s concept of the ‘open transcendental’ is explicitly dependent on Coleridge’s concept of the ‘idea’;49 Coleridge’s definition of perichoresis is twice cited;50 and the whole project of attempting to derive open transcendentals from the triune life is explicitly redolent of Coleridge’s account of the Trinity as ‘the idea Gunton, Promise of Trinitarian Theology, xii. Ibid.,  26. 46 Ibid.,  104–6. 47 See Gunton, The One, the Three and the Many, 51–61, and particularly the claim ‘distinctive features of modern culture emerged out of the finally incompatible mixture that Augustine produced’. 54. 48 Ibid.,  142. 49 Ibid.,  143–4. 50 Ibid., 164; 185. 44 45

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of ideas’.51 At the same time, the doctrine of the Trinity that is being deployed is not Coleridge’s; an account of the ‘Cappadocian desynonymizing’ of ousia and hypostasis that is obviously, although at this point silently, dependent on Zizioulas leads back to criticism of Augustine’s Neoplatonism.52 As we have seen, however, Coleridge’s account of the Trinity was far more Neoplatonic than anything Augustine offered. At this point, where Gunton is most celebratory of, and most dependent on, Coleridge, a fissure is nonetheless visible, a fissure that would grow into a clean break fairly quickly. In the same year as the Bamptons were published, Gunton had an essay in the Scottish Journal of Theology entitled ‘An English Systematic Theology?’ (the question mark being vital).53 The first footnote indicates that it was a lecture given at a conference in October 1990 and implies that it is published unrevised. The essay begins with the various failures of the Oxford movement, and particularly of Pusey and Newman; Coleridge emerges (via Newman’s critiques) as ‘a model for an English systematic theology’ that Gunton ‘wish[es] to recommend’,54 a suggestion which he acknowledges to be less than obvious. However, there was a unity to his thought, a desire ‘to see things whole’55 – and a unity that was fundamentally philosophical. Coleridge’s use and repudiation of Kant is read as demonstrating a fundamentally moral orientation to this sought-for united system, which appears to be another point of commendation for Gunton: ‘freedom, human freedom, was Coleridge’s concern’.56 Finally, and perhaps most significantly, Coleridge saw that the doctrine of God is decisive for all else: ‘There is a choice of divinity to be made … Coleridge’s point is that only a God conceived trinitarianly … is consistent with a universe that is a fit place for human beings to live their lives.’57 (The reference is clearly to Coleridge’s essay ‘On the Prometheus of Aeschylus’, but it is not explicit.) The problem is unidentified in the essay, but in hindsight glaring: through Zizioulas, Gunton had come to believe that Coleridge made the wrong ‘choice of divinity’, that his doctrine of the Trinity was so inadequate as to lead to all the failures of modernity. The year these two texts were published, Gunton gave the Warfield lectures in Princeton, published two years later.58 As we have seen, Coleridge’s doctrine of the Trinity is intimately bound up with his account of revelation, as the ‘idea of ideas’, and Gunton was deploying this conception as a structuring motif in his Bampton lectures. In view of this, it is remarkable how little Coleridge features in the Warfield series. He supplies what is almost an epigraph for the first section, ‘all Truth is a species of Revelation’, quoted three times in quick succession;59 beyond that, he is quoted twice, once negatively as an illustration of a problematic polarity between subject and object that Gunton wants to overcome60 and once positively as an illustration of the distinction between revelation and inspiration.61 The concept of the open transcendental, so potentially generative for a doctrine of revelation, is not appealed to; instead, the concern is with the mediated

Ibid.,  154 Ibid.,  191–2. 53 Colin Gunton, ‘An English Systematic Theology?’, 479–96. 54 Ibid.,  488. 55 Ibid. 56 Ibid.,  489. 57 Ibid.,  490. 58 Colin E. Gunton, A Brief Theology of Revelation: The 1993 Warfield Lectures (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1995). 59 Ibid., 22, 30, 32. 60 Ibid.,  65. 61 Ibid.,  66. 51 52

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nature of all knowledge and how revealed truth can be successfully mediated (and can be known to have been successfully mediated). The edited volume God and Freedom, the latest in the line of conference proceedings of the Research Institute in Systematic Theology, also appeared in 1995, with Gunton contributing the Introduction and the concluding chapter.62 Coleridge is mentioned once in each,63 both times in the middle of a list of names of exemplars of a particular point. In ‘An English Systematic Theology?’, published two years earlier, Coleridge’s preoccupation with freedom had been one of the three reasons for him to be chosen as a model systematic theologian, and his ‘making room’ for human freedom through his doctrine of the Trinity was an exemplary move; now he is a parenthetical example of a common mode of thought – and the interest in freedom is that real freedom must be a function of personhood and must be mediated.64 The next Research Institute volume was God and Creation,65 rapidly followed by Gunton’s monograph on creation, The Triune Creator. Again, it is worth reflecting how central Coleridge’s account of the Trinitarian structuring of creation had been to Gunton in the Bampton lectures five years before when looking at these works. In his essay in the edited volume, Gunton adapts a quotation from Coleridge for his epigraph, but otherwise makes no mention of him; rather the theme is how a platonic view of creation, found in Origen and Augustine, makes the interpretation of the Genesis account impossible; what is needed is the doctrine of mediation offered by Irenaeus. In the monograph, there is one substantial discussion of Coleridge, which is then recalled a couple of times. It concerns the typology of world views from ‘On the Prometheus of Aeschylus’ and is explicitly a repetition of material from Promise of Trinitarian Theology.66 By this point, Gunton had lost interest in Coleridge; if he appears at all in later writings, it is as the source of a wellturned quotation or a useful example of a point, never as a serious dialogue partner.67

REFLECTIONS AND CONCLUSIONS It is not unusual, of course, for a theologian to be fascinated by a writer for a period, and then to move on – and Colin Gunton was more restless and eager to make progress than most of us. What is striking about the story I have told is the speed of the drop: in the 1990 lecture on the possibility of an English systematic theology, and the 1992 Bampton lectures,68 Coleridge is front-and-centre, the ideal theologian to be emulated; the ‘presiding genius’ of the lecture series; in the 1993 Warfield lectures, he is relegated to a useful illustration. In part I suspect this is artificial: Gunton presumably set the theme, and developed the argument for his Bampton series some years in advance (and may not really have started work on the

olin E. Gunton (ed.), God and Freedom (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1995). C Ibid., 4; 123. 64 Gunton, ‘An English Systematic Theology?’, 121–2. 65 Colin E. Gunton (ed.), God and Creation: Essays in Dogmatics, History, and Philosophy (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1997). 66 See Gunton, Triune Creator, 138n.47. 67 The English systematics essay is republished in Theology through the Theologians, with a new title which names Coleridge, but it is only very lightly edited and so cannot be considered a new piece. Colin E. Gunton, ‘The Nature of Systematic Theology: Anselm of Canterbury, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and the Possibility of an English Systematic Theology’, in Theology through the Theologians: Selected Essays 1972–1995 (London: T&T Clark, 1996), 1–18. 68 Giving here the dates of delivery, not of publication, to make the pattern clearer. 62 63

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Warfield series until the Bamptons were complete); whilst the enthusiasm for Coleridge in the 1990 lecture seems genuine enough, Gunton needed an English theologian to admire for his argument, and having not to that point really explored John Owen, Coleridge, even if he now saw the flaws, was perhaps the best he had available.69 As indicated at the beginning of this chapter, I have elsewhere argued that the broader evidence suggests two related shifts in Gunton’s Trinitarian thought: a move from a Barthian to a Zizioulian account of Trinitarian doctrine around 1984; and a move from using the Trinity as a way of making room for human freedom and creaturely reality (as Coleridge did) to using the doctrine to answer questions concerning mediation, which happened around 1992. This exploration has added one further feature to that argument: a sense of discomfort, or systematic dis-ease, because (unsurprisingly) the form of the doctrine and the use to which it is put are related. In some ways the most interesting text in the survey above is The Promise of Trinitarian Theology. With the exception of one early essay, Coleridge is almost absent, except in one freshly written chapter that is developing themes for the Bampton lectures in the following year. By the beginning of the 1990s, the promise Gunton saw in the doctrine of the Trinity was no longer linked to Coleridge, although he still had his most Coleridgean statement to make in his Bampton lectures. I have commented before in print that, on the odd occasions I talked to him about The One, the Three, and the Many, he was rather dismissive of it (‘not much theology in it’ he once said to me);70 it is without doubt the most erudite and wide-ranging of his books, which accounts for celebrations like the one from McCormack with which I began, but I wonder if he already knew, or perhaps halfknew, that he no longer believed the constructive argument even as he published it? It is perhaps worth returning, finally, to the essay on English systematics, just because this mattered to Gunton; he was, in odd ways, endearingly parochial, and he wanted a theological tradition in his homeland – and he went looking for it, in Coleridge, in Owen – in stranger places. (I have still a collection of the Complete Works of Daniel Waterland that once belonged to Colin; Coleridge wrote an approving essay about Waterland somewhere, and I suspect that this sent Colin off to see if, even in the arid landscape of seventeenth-century Anglicanism, there might be something worthy of recovery.) His commitment to Coleridge was not just patriotic – he was very happy to be very rude about English theologians, most notably, and most often, St John Henry Newman – but it was, in part at least, patriotic. I conclude with one personal footnote. In 1996 I completed my master’s programme, and so my training for Baptist ministry, at Spurgeon’s College by writing a dissertation on Coleridge. Through the good offices of John Colwell, my tutor, who had studied under Gunton, that dissertation found its way to Colin’s desk. As a result, I received a handwritten letter, inviting me to come to talk to him about doctoral studies; I cannot pretend that this is the only act of kindness that my career depends upon, but it is certainly a significant one; by 1996 Colin had himself grown beyond Coleridge (and I blush to think what he made of the comparison with, and enthusiasm for, Jacques Derrida that the dissertation ended with), but he was ready, even eager, to encourage another who had found inspiration in Coleridge, as he had once done, to engage with the questions that had fascinated Coleridge, that fascinated him and that still fascinates me. The elevation of Anselm, whose role in the essay is rather marginal (and who was of course French), to sit alongside Coleridge in the subtitle of the 1990 lecture in Theology through the Theologians might be a quiet indication of a concern that the role given to Coleridge was too great. 70 Holmes, ‘Towards the Analogia’, 39. 69

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CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Gunton and Irving GRAHAM W. P. MCFARLANE

Irving was as the sun in my firmament. His talk was so genial, cordial, free flowing, beautiful and delightful to me; all my meetings with him stand out still as sunlight. A man of noble faculties and qualities; the noblest, largest, brotherliest man I have met with in my life’s journey.1 In 1825, a 32-year-old Scot, Edward Irving, was barely three years into his new charge at the Caledonian Chapel, Hatton Garden, London, when he delivered a series of sermons on the doctrine of God as Trinity. This rising cause célèbre was already attracting significant attention which would expand the church from its original congregation of fifty to over a thousand. The highest echelons of London society could be seen in the Chapel congregation, whether aristocracy, political elite (Gladstone, Wilberforce) or poetic luminaries (Coleridge, Wordsworth).2 Perhaps it was Irving’s dramatic oratory style, his imposing demeanour, his endearing squint, his soft Scottish Borders’ accent or perhaps even the way in which, unafraid to pronounce on social and political matters, Irving kept ‘the public in awe by insulting all their favourite idols’,3 a cultivated Caledonian skill. Yet, for all this, Irving was no dilettante. The depth and breadth of his theological acumen were matched by a personality well able to critique his fellows’ thought and unafraid to stand apart from theological fashion and are evidenced in the subject matter of his sermons that would be later published. Their content – the Fatherhood of God – was based upon Eph. 1.2 – ‘Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ’ – and were a trenchant rebuttal of the Unitarianism of his day which had dominated London spirituality for several decades.4 In what would turn out to be his inimitable style, Irving eschewed, in typical manner, any form of namby-pambyism, advocating, rather, an articulate biblical, theologically nuanced yet muscular apologetic for the triune identity of God.5 In addition, and again typical of Irving the pastor-theologian, these theological treatises sought to establish a personal and deeply relational doctrine of God as Trinity at a time when, across the North Sea, Schleiermacher had been relegating this coping stone of Christian religion to the appendices of his theological dogmatics.6 The irony of Thomas Carlyle, Reminiscences (New York: Scribner’s 1881), n.p. Peter Elliot, Edward Irving, Romantic Theology in Crisis (Milton Keynes: Authentic Media, 2013), 24. 3 William Hazlitt, The Spirit of the Age (Oxford: Woodstock Books, 1989), 91, quoted in Elliot, Edward Irving, 24. 4 Irving’s London parish had a rich Unitarian history, the buildings of which can still be seen today. 5 Irving exemplifies his own Scottish theological tradition well, which Barth later describes as a balance between the ‘majesty of God’ and the ‘person of God’, Karl Barth, The Knowledge of God and the Service of God According to the Teaching of the Reformation (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1949), 25. 6 Fredrich D. E. Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith, ed. and trans. H. R. McIntosh and J. S. Steward (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1986), §170.3, 741. 1 2

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Irving’s place in Trinitarian thought is not to be missed: not only was his one of the last significant defences of Trinitarian thought before its occidental demise, it was also one of the significant sources for the renaissance in Trinitarian thinking today via Gunton.7 Irving’s focus in these sermons was on the relation between the Father and the Son in order to contest the Arian, Socinian and Unitarian notions that the Son was a creature – not divine Creator. Only from this relation of equality of nature, on the one hand, and hypostatic diversity, on the other, could the identity of the Spirit be established. In all this, Irving remains an intriguing yet interesting figure in that despite the largesse of his broad Romantic style and persona8 his theological concerns remain distinctly practical. Indeed, like Gunton, Irving’s understanding of any knowledge of God is derived not from ‘divine self-identification but divine saving action’.9 That is, Irving’s interest was not in divinity abstracted from the here and now but in divine identity as it is demonstrated in God’s saving activity towards human beings and creation. For Irving, personal knowledge of God is only identified and subsequently understood from the kind of divine agency we see within the economy of redemption of human beings. Irving’s hermeneutic, the theological rule opera trinitatis ad extra indivisa sunt (‘the external operations of the Trinity are indivisible’), drove his entire Trinitarian thinking. The unity and diversity of divine action ad extra reflect the personal being of God ad intra. As it would be later for Colin Gunton and had been previously for Irving’s theological tutors, the divines Hooker10 and Owen, so it was for Irving: this heuristic and methodological principle was asymmetrical in that what can be seen in the economy can only approximate to but never exhaust our knowledge of who God is in Godself. Irving’s stature of reflective thinking comes through strongly in the way he elaborates divine identity in relation to human knowledge of the Word compared with our knowledge of the Son: The Word doth express His participation of all the Father’s counsels, and His office in revealing them all: but the Son is that which expresseth His full possession of the Father’s undivided affections, wrapping up in Himself all that love upon which the universe was to lean, as he wrapped up in his name of the Word all that wisdom by which the universe was to subsist. If it be an essential part of the eternal purpose of the Godhead revealed by Christ, that it contains the fullness of the Father’s love in Christ, that it contains the fullness of the Father’s love in surrendering, as well as of the Father’s wisdom in manifesting Christ, then I say that He who surrendered must have been in the full possession of all the Father’s love, as well as a sharer of all the Father’s wisdom; or that He must have been Son as well as Word from all eternity. There is the same connexion between His office as prophet in time and His personality of Word from eternity, as there is between His office of Saviour in time and of Son from eternity, – the one expressing a portion of the incommunicable wisdom of God Irving’s most immediate contemporaries were theological giants of the nineteenth century who dallied in their own ways with the belief that the doctrine of God as Trinity was something the Church could do without: Schleiermacher for whom Trinity was separated from Christology, Hegel for whom Spirit was impersonal history and culture. Only Coleridge was to change his mind and influence both Irving and Gunton, subsequently. 8 See Peter Elliot’s convincing thesis that the proper locus for Irving is neither ‘evangelical’ nor ‘reformed’ but Romantic, a Romanticism that precedes Irving’s move to London and exposure to Coleridge, Elliot, Edward Irving. 9 Colin E. Gunton, A Brief Theology of Revelation. The 1993 Warfield Lectures (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1995), 111–12 cited by Najeeb G. Awad, ‘Personhood as Particularity: John Zizioulas, Colin Gunton, and the Trinitarian Theology of Personhood’, Journal of Reformed Theology 4 (2010): 47. 10 About whom Irving referred to as his venerable companion in his early days. 7

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which he was fraught withal; the other expressing a portion of the incommunicable love of God, whereof the fullness was poured into His single bosom, which can alone contain the ocean of its fullness.11 Irving establishes divine personal identity, at this point, in the relations of Father and Son. One could argue that the Romantic Irving puts stress on the love of God here – but this must be counterbalanced by an equally pronounced emphasis that the personal identity of God is to be located in terms of will – divine will. That is, Irving defines divine love within the personal and also dialectical contours of divine volition and obedience – a relational dialectic of Father and Son personalized by the priority of paternal will in relation to filial obedience. Only once this filial-paternal relationship is identified is Irving then able to locate the Spirit’s identity. This he achieves in terms of liberating other – that is, it is the Holy Spirit as the transcendent agent who enables the Father’s will and the Son’s obedience: the former in the paternal majesty of redemption, the latter in the filial personalism of incarnation. For Irving, then, all knowledge of the divine that is specifically personal is knowledge pro nobis, that is, knowledge derived from divine action towards humanity in redeeming activity. This is, of course, incarnational and yet, at the same time, it is equally paternal and most specifically pneumatological. This Trinitarian agency can be seen in two ways. First, it is the Holy Spirit who facilitates and completes the Father’s good will as it is lovingly and obediently undertaken by the Son. In this Irving extends the Augustinian notion of the Spirit being the vinculum unitatis, the bond of unity, or the nexus amoris, the bond of love. Second, the Spirit particularizes both the divine and human within the incarnation, in preparing a body for the Son and in sanctifying the incarnate humanity. It is the latter for which Irving is most specifically renowned, in particular the patristic maxim that the unassumed is the unhealed, in this instance, that the unfallen humanity under the weight of sin and the wrath of God remains unhealed should it not be this kind of flesh that was assumed by the incarnate Son and finally presented holy before God.12 ‘What he took to work upon was sinful, sinful flesh and blood: what he wrought it into was sinless.’13 Thus, for Irving, our knowledge of God is known only within the drama of the entire incarnation and the redemption Christ achieved by virtue of his entire human existence. As such, our knowledge is derived only from what we see of the Father’s loving will as it

Edward Irving, Collected Writings of Edward Irving in Five Volumes, vol. 4, ed. Rev. G. Carlyle (London: Alexander Strahan, 1864), 241–2. 12 Irving, ‘That Christ took our fallen nature is most manifest, because there was no other in existence to take.’ Irving, Collected Writings, Volume 5, 115. Irving makes the distinction between original sin and actual sin: the former being the condition – sinful flesh – into which all human beings are born and one under the curse of the Law; the latter being volitional sin – an act of the will. For Irving, the will is in bondage to human nature, Collected Works, Volume 5, 338. This distinction allows Irving to maintain God’s holiness in the light of the sinless Christ’s death. While never committing actual sin, in being born into original sin, Christ could die since his humanity was ‘fallen’ (as are infants who have not volitionally sinned and yet die). Thus, Christ’s death could be vicarious for fallen humanity while at the same time being an acceptable sacrificial death by God. See Graham W. P. McFarlane, Christ and the Spirit: The Doctrine of the Incarnation According to Edward Irving (Carlisle: Paternoster, 1996), 139–47; Brad G. Green, Colin Gunton and the Failure of Augustine: The Theology of Colin Gunton in Light of Augustine (Cambridge: James Clarke, 2012), 107–8. For critical responses see: Oliver Crisp, ‘Did Christ have a Fallen Human Nature?’ International Journal of Systematic Theology 6, no. 3 (2004): 270–88; Donald Macleod, The Person of Christ (Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 1998). 13 Edward Irving, The Orthodox and Catholic Doctrine of Our Lord’s Human Nature, Tried by the Westminster Confession of Faith, Set in Four parts (London: Baldwin and Craddock, 1830), 66–7. 11

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is responded to in obedience and love by the Son and made possible in genesis, execution and fulfilment by the Holy Spirit. It might be worth reading Irving at length on this: In the Church, I say, whether of the angels or of men, there never was a doubt concerning the unity of God; while there was no clear knowledge of a trinity of persons in the Divine substance. It was not until the Son came into manifestation as a man, until the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us, become our Saviour, the long-expected Messiah on earth, the long-looked for Christ and Lord in heaven, for whom all things were created, that the truth of the glorious Trinity became a grand and manifest truth for ever. Because so soon as the Son became manifest He made known the Father, to whom He always inferred back as the eternal Father of the Son, and in Him the great originator of all things, and principal party to the eternal purpose which the Son came forth to reveal. ‘No one has ever seen God: the only Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, he has made him known.’ By the same act also did the Spirit become manifest; for … Christ’s becoming outward and visible was the act of the Spirit. He was conceived by the power of the Holy Ghost, He grew in wisdom by the power of the Holy Ghost, and walked by the same inspiration of the Holy Ghost.14 The later Gunton would build upon two aspects of Irving’s thought that we can identify here. The first is the perichoretic nature of divine personhood demonstrated in the incarnation. Irving states elsewhere regarding the dynamic nature of divine action:  I lay it down as the first principle in all sound theology that the fullness of the Father is poured into the Son, and returneth back through the Holy Spirit unto the Father, all creatures being by the Holy Spirit brought forth of the Son, in order to express a part of the Father’s will and of his delight in His Son, which they do by union with.15 Thus, any notion of a divine monarchy of will in Irving’s Trinity is counterbalanced by a radical understanding of mutual personal relations: a relational as well as substantial oneness that marks Irving out from his Western counterparts, bar a few exceptions.16 The second is how the Spirit particularizes divine personal identity. This is exhibited in Irving’s emphasis that it is not solely the Son who drives the incarnate Christ from within but more so that such personal action is driven by the Holy Spirit who enables the Son to transcend his fallen human condition. In so doing Jesus Christ not only overcomes what Irving describes as ‘sin in the flesh’17 but in addition becomes paradigmatic of a new humanity. Here Irving unites the work of the Son with the ecclesial community he institutes via the Holy Spirit: those who believe in Jesus Christ receive the same Spirit and thus the same ability to overcome sin.18 We catch a glimpse of Irving at his most distilled when he articulates the kind of divine agency revealed within the economy of salvation,

Irving, Collected Writings, Volume 5, 87–8. Ibid., Volume 4, 252. 16 E.g. twelfth-century Scottish Augustinian prior, Richard of St Victor, On the Trinity. English Translation and Commentary, trans. R. Angelici (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2011), and seventeenth-century Puritan Divine, John Owen, Collected Works in 16 Volumes (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, New Impression edn, 1965). While Irving’s Trinitarian theology leans towards a more Cappadocian expression (see McFarlane, Christ and the Spirit), it is unlikely that Irving will have been ignorant of Augustinian expressions of perichoresis from Augustine onwards. 17 ‘That Christ took our fallen nature is most manifest, because there was no other in existence to take,’ Irving, Collected Writings, Volume 5, 115. 18 Irving, Collected Writings, Volume 5, 124, 126. 14 15

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one that underscores his Trinitarian apologetic against the Unitarians and Socinians of his day: Ye may be able to state out the redemption, without a Trinity of persons in the Godhead: I lay claim to no such ability. Your Trinity is an idle letter in your creed; but it is the soul, the life of mine. Your Christ is a suffering God; I know it well; my Christ is a gracious condescending God, but a suffering man. In your Christ, you see but one person in a body: in my Christ I see the fullness of the Godhead in a body. My Christ is the Trinity manifested not merely the Trinity told of, but the Trinity manifested. I have the Father manifested in everything which He doth; for he did not His own will, but the will of His Father. I have the Son manifested, in uniting His Divinity to a humanity prepared for Him by the Father; in making the two most contrary things to meet and kiss each other, in all the actings of his widest, most comprehensive being. I have the Holy Ghost manifested in subduing, restraining, conquering, the evil propensities of the fallen manhood, and making it an apt organ for expressing the will of the Father, a fit and holy substance to enter into personal union with the untempted and untemptable Godhead.19 Irving’s robustly Trinitarian theology reveals a theological architecture unusual for his day. The Zeitgeist was one in which explicitly monistic theologies held sway. On the one hand, it could be argued that Irving was an anachronism, a voice singing out of tune with the wider mood music of the day – the stubborn echo of a Trinitarian theology soon to be relocated to a Schleiermacherian appendix. The following century and a half might even confirm this. On the other hand, however, it could equally be argued that Irving’s precocity on so many levels20 anticipated what was required if the dry and sterile religion of his contemporary deists, as he perceived it, was to be replaced with a theological vision capable of rejuvenating the church and wider country. In this, his theological ambition very much paralleled that of Colin Gunton in that, like Gunton, Irving understood that the task of theology involved being able ‘to express the meaning’ of a subject ‘and its claim to truth conceptually in such a way that its implications for life and thought may become evident’.21 Indeed, while Nausner expresses his own analysis of Gunton with the following, it can equally be attributed to Irving’s theological vision whether regarding our knowledge of God, the work of Christ in redemption, the transcending empowering of the Holy Spirit, spiritual gifts or the return of Christ: ‘Theology … is the enterprise of thought which seeks to express conceptually and as well as possible both the being of God and the implications of that being for human existence on earth.’22 As such, it is not difficult to appreciate why Colin Gunton found a conversation partner in Edward Irving to whom he was introduced by fellow professorial colleague, Andrew Walker, around the time Colin’s questions were beginning to take shape, after the publication of Enlightenment and Alienation.23 As Stephen Holmes points out, ‘direct reflection on or deployment of, the doctrine of the Trinity was actually remarkably lacking in Gunton’s Irving, Collected Writings, Volume 5, 170. Irving’s precocious mind can be seen in his millennialism and view of charismata, both of which have become centre stage in various forms due to the rise of Pentecostalism. 21 Colin E. Gunton, Christ and Creation. The 1990 Didsbury Lectures (Carlisle: Paternoster Press, 1992), 81. 22 Bernhard Nausner, ‘The Failure of a Laudable Project: Gunton, the Trinity and Human Self-Understanding’, Scottish Journal of Theology 62, no. 4 (2009): 404. 23 Colin E. Gunton, Enlightenment and Alienation: An Essay towards a Trinitarian Theology (London: Marshall, Morgan and Scott, 1985). 19 20

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major theological writings in the 1980s’.24 This was all to change, however, once John Owen and, in particular, Edward Irving became conversational partners. From the brief sampling of Irving’s thought above, it comes as no surprise that Colin Gunton would seize upon Irving for his own theological purposes in the formative years of his own Trinitarian thinking. It is possible to see why if we take a step back from the detail and look at Gunton’s programme as a whole methodologically. For instance, Anizor identifies three themes in Gunton’s work – particularity (in relation to God’s work in the economy); relationality (relationships as the foundation of all reality); and mediation (referring to the problematic of Western theology regarding divine action within creation).25 Nausner deepens an appreciation of Gunton’s hermeneutic in terms of levels: the first concerns how we best safeguard both the particularity of Father, Son and Spirit and divine unity in the light of redemption; the second relates to Gunton’s concern for creation and human personhood – of the one and the many as well as the question of Trinitarian language; the last concerns ‘the search for an adequate understanding of universal marks of being, open transcendentals, which allow him … to connect divine and human being’.26 Each one of these aspects of Gunton’s theology can be located in Irving. It is not surprising, therefore, that what intrigues Gunton in Enlightenment and Alienation, namely Jesus’ freedom and the ‘kind of relationship’ required for the human Jesus to relate to God, finds a way forward through engaging with Irving. In terms of the direction Gunton’s theology took in the mid- to late 1980s, it is of interest to note that Gunton himself acknowledges Irving’s influence in relocating the centre of his ‘constructive theological endeavour’ to the doctrine of the Trinity rather than Christology.27 In Enlightenment and Alienation Gunton identifies three areas of pneumatic interest in relation to the manner in how the Spirit brings about ‘authentic human reality in the here and now’ – how the Spirit makes possible the ‘end’ in the present; how the Spirit relates people to Jesus and creates community; and how the Spirit works in believers while upholding their ‘independence and autonomy’.28 Importantly, at this stage, Gunton is not offering a solution. However, hints of Irving are detected in subsequent thought: ‘The Spirit is God making true humanity possible even in the present that is so stained by the sins and errors of history.’29 It is, however, in his 1988 publications, ‘Christology: Two Dogmas Revisited: Edward Irving’s Christology’30 and The Actuality of Atonement: A Study of Metaphor, Rationality

Stephen R. Holmes, ‘Towards the Analogia Personae et Relationis: Developments in Gunton’s Theology of the Trinity’, in The Theology of Colin Gunton, ed. Lincoln Harvey (London: T&T Clark, 2010), 36. 25 Uche Anizor, Trinity and Humanity: An Introduction to the Theology of Colin Gunton (Milton Keynes: Paternoster, 2016), 22. 26 Nausner, ‘The Failure of a Laudable Project’, 408. 27 Colin E. Gunton, Yesterday and Today: A Study of Continuities in Christology (Darton: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1983), 221. See David Höhne, Spirit and Sonship: Colin Gunton’s Theology of Particularity and the Holy Spirit (Farnham, Ashgate, 2010), 32, where Höhne identifies the shift between the first and second editions on which Gunton moves from a ‘God-Man’ Christology, similar to Bonhoeffer, to a kenotic Christology that parallels Irving’s understanding where ‘the eternal Son relates to the Father in the Spirit as manifest in the man Jesus Christ’. 28 Gunton, Enlightenment and Alienation, 103. 29 Ibid., 104, italics original. 30 Colin E. Gunton, ‘Christology: Two Dogmas Revisited: Edward Irving’s Christology’, Scottish Journal of Theology 41, no. 3 (1988): 359–76, later included in Theology through the Theologians. Selected Essays 1972– 1995 (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1996). 24

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and the Christian Tradition,31 that Gunton finds in Irving a foil for his own theological reflection and where we detect the shift from Christology to Trinity taking place in Gunton’s thought. First, from the manner by which Gunton appreciates both a negative and a positive trait in Irving’s incarnational soteriology, we can see how primitive to his thought was the intimate relation between Christ and creation. Gunton’s impetus towards the relational appears to relish and delight in Irving’s turn of phrase – ‘StockExchange divinity’32 – in which atonement reduces ‘all divinity to a debtor and creditor account’33 and whereby sin is solved by a ‘legal and quasi-financial balancing act supposed to have taken place in our past’.34 Here Irving’s critique facilitates Gunton’s relational hermeneutic – the cross is not about an ‘external transaction’ but about a ‘renewed relationship between God and the sinner’.35 Indeed, it could be argued that Gunton not only finds in Irving, here, a theological companion but, rather, an actual theological muse, a point picked up most clearly by Christoph Schwöbel.36 It is Irving who provides Colin with three platforms of thought. The first is Christ’s relation to creation: the incarnate Son takes to himself a humanity that is in complete union with a stained creation.37 This incarnational reality, in turn, set the scene for the kind of atonement required if redemption is to be secured. Here Gunton draws, second, on Irving’s understanding of atonement in terms of sacrifice. Critics point out the paucity of scriptural references in Colin’s thought; yet here, we glimpse the macro thinker Gunton was in registering the connections the New Testament makes between first the eternal Word through whom all things were made and without whom was not anything made; second the creation that came into bondage through human sin; and third the means by which Jesus Christ breaks the power of sin and subsequently liberates humanity and creation from their respective bondage. In this, Gunton mirrors Irving, whom Gunton believed produced a ‘remarkably consistent and original theology which is yet open to enrichment from many streams of biblical witness. There are echoes and more than echoes of many New Testament themes.’38 The true systematician that he is, Gunton is driven to identify what connects all three. He finds it in what he notes to be Irving ‘at his most interesting and original’, namely, ‘in his treatment of the humanity of the Saviour’.39 In Irving’s Christology, where

Colin E. Gunton, The Actuality of Atonement: A Study of Metaphor, Rationality and the Christian Tradition (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1988). 32 Ibid.,  100. 33 Ibid.,  129. 34 Ibid. 35 Colin E. Gunton, Father, Son and Holy Spirit: Toward a Fully Trinitarian Theology (London: Continuum T&T Clark, 2003), 190. 36 Christoph Schwöbel, ‘The Shape of Colin Gunton’s Theology: On the Way towards a Fully Trinitarian Theology’, in The Theology of Colin Gunton, 193. Schwöbel argues that Gunton was inspired by Irving. Terry lists several areas for which Gunton applauds Irving: his consistency and originality; the way in which he developed Calvin’s theology of Christ’s human priesthood; his use of sacrifice within a cosmic context; his refusal to reduce atonement to a mathematical equation; and his rich doctrine of the Holy Spirit. See Justyn Terry, ‘Colin Gunton’s Doctrine of Atonement: Transcending Rationalism by Metaphor’, in The Theology of Colin Gunton, 193. 37 See Colin E. Gunton, The Promise of Trinitarian Theology (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1991), 34. Gunton argues that Owen and Irving succeeded where most of Western theology failed in developing ‘adequate conceptual equipment to ensure due prominence to Christ’s full humanity. Part of the cause of this may be found in Augustine’s reluctance to give due weight to the full materiality of the incarnation.’ It could be said that while Gunton was denominationally attracted to Owen he was theologically and systematically inspired by Irving. 38 Gunton, The Actuality of Atonement, 135. The same can be said of Gunton’s systematic and theological grasp of biblical theology. 39 Gunton, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, 192. 31

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the eternal Son takes to himself a humanity as much stained as the creation into which it is born, a fallen humanity – a stained humanity – Gunton finds a necessary theological space within which his questions and concerns can be explored. ‘For Irving, the fallen flesh which Christ bore represents in a strong sense the whole of the created order in its fallenness.’40 This condition demands only one obvious solution – sacrifice – an understanding of the death of Christ in terms of ‘cleansing’ and of ‘reordering’.41 It is an appreciation that what the cross achieves in terms of the one (the cosmos) and the many (humanity) is condensed in the one man, Jesus Christ, and his act of obedience to fulfil the Father’s will.42 And, like Irving, Gunton also recognizes that this kenotic act of obedience spans the entire life of Christ and results not only in cleansing and reordering (the innate human desire to see things whole)43 but also in justice, mercy and victory that bring about true liberation.44 Of course, being a systematician who understood that ‘theology must be concerned with an interrelatedness that has clear contours and presents a recognizable shape’ that must be done, ‘although this shape will not be perfected and finished as long as we do theology in via and not in patria’.45 Gunton needs to know how this liberation is possible. Here, Colin’s theological method is perhaps best encapsulated in Vial’s summation of Gunton’s concept of divine revelation: ‘God’s being itself is knowable, but it is only knowable on the basis of God’s action in and for the world.’46 Put simply, the manner by which Jesus Christ recapitulates humanity not only provides the answer as to how this is possible for the rest of humanity (the many) but also provides a window into not only how God is (the One) but also free to be Many. Irving provided Gunton with a pneumatology that turned the categories on their head. No longer was ‘Spirit’ to be categorized with the immanent as ‘some inner fuel, compulsion or qualification’ – some impersonal power. As we have seen above, the immanent is the prerogative of the Son – it is he who becomes creature, part of creation. The conundrum turns on the manner by which, in terms of Rom. 8.21, he becomes ‘liberated from the bondage of history’.47 ‘History’ here could easily be replaced by ‘economy’ for what Irving enables Gunton to pursue is his search for an open transcendental that will do justice both to the particulars of incarnation (Jesus’ humanity and, to a lesser extent, ours) as well as to the result of incarnation (community as well as the perfection of creation). The answer for Gunton lies in the specific relation that the Spirit has with the incarnate Son who was born with a humanity ‘that was truly liable to the assaults of the enemy, not one automatically predetermined to innocence’.48 Gunton finds in Irving a thinker unton, ‘Christology: Two Dogmas Revisited’, 160. G Gunton, The Actuality of Atonement, 136–7. 42 It is to Irving Gunton turns in his inaugural lecture in order to establish Jesus Christ as the concrete link between ‘the one and the many, the eternal God and his erring creation … Jesus Christ, who is both the one and the many’. It is the National Portrait Gallery portrait of Irving by Joseph Slater that appears on the cover of Colin E. Gunton’s original inaugural lecture handout, ‘The One, the Three and the Many: An Inaugural Lecture in the Chair of Christian Doctrine’, 1985, no publisher. 43 Gunton, The Actuality of Atonement, 118. 44 Ibid. 45 Schwöbel, ‘The Shape of Colin Gunton’s Theology’, 203. 46 Marc Vial, ‘Colin Gunton on the Trinity and the Divine Attributes’, in Recent Developments in Trinitarian Theology: An International Symposium, ed. Christophe Chalamet and Marc Vial (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2014), 133. 47 John D. Zizioulas, Being as Communion: Studies in Personhood and the Church (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1985), 130. 48 Gunton, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, 154. 40 41

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predating Barth who engages deeply in the full and authentic humanity of the Saviour and does so within the parameters of his own Reformed tradition.49 We can highlight several points of influence here. First, by virtue of his common humanity, Jesus learns wisdom. We catch a glimpse of Colin Gunton the master-theologian in the way he expresses this weighty truth rather beautifully in a sermon he preached at his home church, Brentwood United Reformed Church, Essex, on the childhood and humanity of Christ, ‘The birth of Jesus of a sinful human woman is part of the process whereby the Son of God takes to himself our fallen world and lives in it a life of obedience on our behalf … [I]‌n this fallen world, even one who is the eternal wisdom of God become man must learn to be wise.’50 Like Edward Irving, Colin Gunton was not only unafraid to bring weighty theological insights to the pulpit but could do so in ways that were not only understood by those who heard but had real practical and pastoral import for their daily faith. Second, Jesus Christ’s temptations have an authenticity about them in that while peculiar to him being Son of God, Jesus overcomes temptation, and thus sin in general, by virtue of his ‘free response to the guidance of the Spirit’.51 Here we are back to Gunton’s quest to identify what kind of relation and therefore freedom exists between the incarnate Son and the transcendent Spirit. It is this: it is the Spirit who liberates Jesus; it is the Spirit who enables Jesus to be free, particular and contingent.52 In doing so, Colin identifies what he considers to be a ‘distinctive element’ in Irving’s Christology, namely, ‘the part it ascribes to the Holy Spirit as the one who maintains Jesus in truth’. As a result, he identifies two strengths: the first is that this perspective stresses the importance that needs to be accorded Jesus’ humanity. The second is that it ‘provides the basis of a link between Jesus’ humanity and ours’.53 Third, it is in his 1992 book Christ and Creation that Gunton argues that Jesus Christ must be genuinely free if he is not only to demonstrate free human activity but also to be able to offer the same freedom to us. As we have seen above, it is imperative for Gunton that not only has Jesus’ humanity to be seen as part of the ‘general network and relationality of created being’ but that ‘it is from the same network in which we share that the body of the Son is formed’.54 This being the case, it follows that even the incarnate Son of God was held immanent by the humanity he inherited from his mother – one that was fallen and under the curse of sin, the law and death. As such, the incarnation does not proffer the Son of God any advantages unavailable to any other human being. What liberates this humanity is rooted in the particular relation the Spirit has both to Christ and to the wider creation. In so arguing, what Irving does is provide the conceptual framework for developing not a ‘Spirit Christology’ but rather a Trinitarian Christology whereby we are able to make sense of how Jesus’ humanity can be both our own and yet free. Thus, Gunton follows Irving in holding that Jesus’ freedom, particularity and contingency are ‘enabled by the (transcendent) Spirit rather than determined by the immanent Word’.55

Gunton interestingly asks the question of himself as to why Owen and Irving were marginalized and concludes: ‘In England, they have tended to be buried under a deluge of ill-informed if not positively malicious Tractarian misrepresentation of the Reformed tradition.’ Theology through the Theologians, 168. 50 Colin E. Gunton, Theology through Preaching: Sermons for Brentwood (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2001), 83. 51 Gunton, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, 193. 52 Höhne, Spirit and Sonship, 142. 53 Gunton, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, 195. 54 Gunton, Christ and Creation, 52. 55 Colin E. Gunton, ‘The Church on Earth: The Roots of Community’, in On Being the Church: Essays on Christian Community, ed. Colin E. Gunton and Daniel W. Hardy (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1989), 64. 49

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For there to be any representative meaning, Jesus’ temptations required ‘free worship and obedience’. And, like Irving, Gunton understands this in Trinitarian terms: Jesus’ freedom comes only by virtue of the Father’s gift of the Spirit. We catch a glimpse of what Gunton would develop more fully in his later writings, when Irving’s influence had become ‘sedimented’ in his thought when he writes of Jesus’ freedom as ‘not an absolute, but something exercised in relation to other persons, and that means in the first instance that it is the gift of the Spirit who is God over against us, God in personal otherness enabling us to be free’.56 Fourth, and in the light of the previous insight, the Spirit is not simply the divine other facilitating freedom. Rather, this is freedom with a purpose. Repeatedly, Irving insists that the present state of humanity is not its original state – it is a second order of existence. In echoes of Irenaeus, Irving argues that what the Son achieves is to recapitulate the Father’s initial intention for humanity and the creation into which it was placed and to do so on his original terms – as a sacrifice provided from the very foundation of the world. As such, this is no ‘plan B’. Whether in creation or in recreation, the Father’s will may well be executed by the Son but, as we have seen, it is empowered by the Spirit. And while the Son’s obedience is confirmed through resurrection and ascension, the Spirit’s work is not complete. After the pattern of the Son as prototype, the Spirit brings about two things. The first is community wherein believers are liberated from the bondage of their own fallen and individualistic histories in order to be a new humanity. In this, Colin recognizes that Irving reorders John Owen’s ecclesiology. For Owen, ‘The Holy Ghost … is the immediate, peculiar, efficient cause of all external divine operations: for God worketh by his Spirit, or in him immediately applies the power and efficacy of the divine excellencies unto their operation.’57 However, for Gunton, another move is required since such thinking cannot be abstracted from the telos of the incarnation, one which Irving’s Trinitarianism facilitates:  If we wish to say something of what kind of sociality the Church is we must move from a discussion of the relation of Christology to pneumatology to an enquiry into what it is that makes the Church what it is: and that first necessitates a move from the economic to the immanent Trinity; or from the ontic to the ontological.58 What this means, for Gunton, is that ‘The Church is what it is by virtue of being called to be a temporal echo of the eternal community that God is.’59 The second, the eschatological, is an extension of the first: the Spirit is recognized as the one who perfects creation in a manner similar to the way in which Christ’s humanity was perfected. And, as we have already seen, for Irving and for Gunton, this is not a merely individualistic and soteriological focus. Rather, it extends beyond the individual, and even beyond the corporate church. As Gunton so pithily and characteristically puts it, ‘The Spirit is God as he empowers the creation to reach its end.’60 That the doctrine of the Holy Spirit has come of age both within the academy (with the rise of Trinitarian theology) and within the church (with the rise of the majority world

Ibid.,  55. Ibid., 63–4. Colin understood that Irving, along with Owen, clarified Nicea concerning what Western theologians had failed to do. See Gunton, A Brief Theology of Revelation, 27–8. 58 Gunton, ‘The Church on Earth’, 65. 59 Ibid.,  75. 60 Gunton, Christ and Creation, 92. 56 57

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church and its Pentecostal and Charismatic emphases) cannot be doubted. Described by Strauss in the nineteenth century as ‘the Achilles’ heel of western systems’,61 and more of late fashionably referred to as the ‘Cinderella’ of Western theology,62 neither are now correct: Cinderella has very much come to the theological ball. And if Berdayev rightly described pneumatology in the last century as ‘the last unexplored theological frontier’63 then it is Colin Gunton who can be identified as one of the foremost explorers of this theological and doctrinal continent, with Edward Irving being one of his most significant and inspiring guides. For it was with Irving in particular that Gunton was able to pursue his ‘trinitarian enthusiasm’64 in a manner that galvanized much of his thinking prior to discovering his theological writings. Certainly, Coleridge offered to the exploring Gunton the macro-construct of the Trinity as the ‘transcendental of transcendentals’.65 However, he failed to deliver, at the same time, the actual ‘particular’ Colin needed that would unite Trinity with Christology and incarnation in such a way that could articulate adequately the kind of freedom Jesus Christ himself experienced as well as how this freedom might be a possibility for those who believe in him. While Coleridge provided the Trinitarian skeleton for Gunton, it was Irving who supplied the muscle by identifying and illustrating Trinitarian agency within the incarnation: The conception and life of Jesus is a triune act: as Irving puts it, the Father sends the Spirit to form a body for his Son out of the only material available to hand. The soiled flesh of the created order which he comes to redeem; so that this human life, as a perfect sacrifice of and to God the Father becomes the means of the sacrifice of praise of the whole world.66 Thus, while it is equally true that the mature Gunton would experience similar influence, albeit less occidental, from John Zizioulas, it is with Edward Irving that Colin found the conversation partner needed to enable him to develop his own distinct and specifically Trinitarian understanding of the Spirit’s eschatological identity. Robert Jenson has described this kind of almost forensic thinking in terms of Colin’s ‘usual obsessive diligence’67 and most certainly Douglas Farrow is correct in saying that it was Gunton who unsettled ‘the prevailing liberalism’ and combatted ‘the torpor into which it naturally declines’.68 He did so by developing a muscular Trinitarian understanding of reality – a personal reality – and was enabled in this task by Irving who provided him with the

David Friedrich Strauss, quoted from George S. Hendry, The Holy Spirit in Christian Theology (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1956), 12. 62 Referring to the historical emphasis given to the Father and Son, G. J. Sirks, ‘The Cinderella of Theology: The Doctrine of the Holy Spirit’, Harvard Theological Review 50 no. 2 (1957): 77–89; Veli–Matti Kärkkäinen, Pneumatology: The Holy Spirit in Ecumenical, International, and Contextual Perspective (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 2002), 16. 63 Nicolas Berdayev, Spirit and Reality (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1964), 22. 64 Nausner, ‘The Failure of a Laudable Project’, 404. 65 Colin E. Gunton, ‘Trinity, Ontology and Anthropology: Towards a Renewal of the Doctrine of Imago Dei’, in Persons, Divine and Human: King’s College Essays in Theological Anthropology, ed. Christoph Schwöbel and Colin E. Gunton (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1991), 53. 66 Colin E. Gunton, The Triune Creator (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1998), 223, citing Irving, Collected Writings, Volume V, 115–16. 67 Robert W. Jenson, ‘A Decision Tree’, in The Theology of Colin Gunton, ed. Lincoln Harvey (London: T&T Clark, 2010), 8. 68 Douglas Farrow, ‘Foreword’, in The Theology of Colin Gunton, ed. Lincoln Harvey (London: T&T Clark, 2010), xii. 61

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necessary ‘grandes lignes’ that enabled him to unite Christology and Trinity. And while Webster captures so appositely Colin’s generosity of mind in letting ideas loose and ‘watch what happened’69 the conversation partner he found in Irving facilitated not so much a sense of ‘free thinking’ so much as the actual keystone to his thought. In Irving, Gunton found a thinker who had gone before him and pondered the final piece of the theological system that had eluded Western theology, well put by McIntyre when he identifies that ‘One of the major problems confronting the enquirer in the field of pneumatology is the question of the identity of the subject.’70 Serendipitously, it was Irving who provided Gunton with the answer, who provided him with a dynamic pneumatological identity. It was this: that the Spirit as ‘the eschatological member of the Trinity … brings the freedom of God especially to attention’.71 In Irving, Gunton found a creative thinker who had already developed a Trinitarian space and who thus, in turn, provided him with the conceptual tools within which to develop his own notions of human agency, freedom and contingency. For, by paying attention to the specifically pneumatological Gunton realized that Irving was able to address different dimensions – particularities – that would otherwise not be addressed.72 It was these specifics, these particularities, that enabled Gunton to develop what lay hitherto undeveloped in Irving’s thought. In conclusion, it is worth highlighting the fact that the Trinitarian theologies of Irving and Gunton continue long after their respective untimely deaths. Both continue to influence in different ways. Perhaps this is the case for a very fundamental reason: both pursued a faith-seeking understanding and did so not within the cloisters of church walls but via engagement within the widest possible parameters. Edward Irving, like Colin Gunton, was a preacher-theologian. Both men understood that good theology requires not only a content of its own – an interrelatedness – but also a proper form – clearly recognizable contours.73 In addition, Colin Gunton, like Edward Irving, was also a pastortheologian. Both men were earthed in the messy business of pastoral ministry, and, like Edward Irving, Colin Gunton’s sermons reflect a personal connection with his hearers, evidencing the fact that both were ‘in constant touch with the practical task of thinking and living theology in the Church’.74 It is fitting, therefore, that as preacher-pastortheologians, both be remembered for the advance each has made in their respective expressions of Trinitarian thinking, advances that have equipped the contemporary Church and Academy better not only to preach but also to live out the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ whom both served so faithfully and fully.

J ohn Webster, ‘Gunton and Barth’, in The Theology of Colin Gunton, 29. John McIntyre, The Shape of Pneumatology: Studies in the Doctrine of the Holy Spirit (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1997), 19–20. 71 Gunton, The Christian Faith, 155. 72 Gunton, Theology through the Theologians, 116–17. 73 Schwöbel, ‘The Shape of Colin Gunton’s Theology’, 203. 74 Ibid.,  204. 69 70

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Gunton and Owen KELLY M. KAPIC

COLIN GUNTON AS THEOLOGIAN: PRELIMINARY COMMENTS Theology is about ideas, but not merely ideas. Good theology is ultimately about God and his ways; in light of God’s self-disclosure, good theology also requires us to consider how the Divine relates to his creation in general, and humanity in particular. Consequently, good theology is always and necessarily also about life, relationships, creativity and courage. Worship should be provoked while idolatry evaded. Communion is fostered while sinful impulses resisted. So, it would seem, is the call of true theology. These goals may sound good, but the challenges are far greater than are often recognized. How many Christians even imagine or fear that they may be directing their prayers and praises to an idol rather than the living God? We don’t, after all, intentionally distort our proclamations about the Creator, but do we do it without intending to? As Christians and theologians, we need to see that our faith and practice, our words and deeds, even our conceptions of God are far more influenced by cultural assumptions, childhood experiences, our distinctive personalities and a host of complex factors that we do not immediately recognize or easily admit. And because we inevitably find ourselves in a tangled web of self, culture, tradition and competing visions, we often don’t ask whether our worship is directed to the true God, rather than merely a construct that has clouded our vision. While it may surprise some – especially those who didn’t know him well – it is along these lines that Colin Gunton powerfully influenced me. And while I will focus most of this chapter on Gunton’s engagement with the particular theology of the Puritan John Owen, it is appropriate to begin with an introduction to Gunton as a particular kind of person and theologian. Without this background, we might misunderstand and misjudge Gunton. We will begin therefore with three words that both describe his approach to the dogmatic endeavour and, more particularly, frame key aspects of Gunton’s engagement with Owen’s theology. Next, a brief word about Gunton’s work as a ‘historical’ theologian will be necessary, to introduce readers to Gunton’s way of handling theologians of the past. Finally, the majority of the chapter will explore two significant areas where Gunton most especially claimed inspiration from Owen: SpiritChristology and his holding together of Election and Ecclesiology. Let’s begin with three words.

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Restless That is a word used by more than one person to describe Gunton. Although he did not have a physically large build, he was filled with energy. When he was excited about an idea or stimulated by a debate he would literally find it difficult to stay in his seat. Fidgeting was normal, not because he was distracted or disrespectful, but because his energy was overflowing; this was a way to keep his brain stirring even as his body was often stuck in a stiff chair at a seminar table, at the back of a conference hall or even in his office as he sat back and stirred with interest at the ideas being debated. But this restlessness meant he was willing to learn from others, especially those he thought were honest brokers. Gunton understood theology as pilgrimage, and in this way he modelled genuine humility to his students and colleagues. Rare is the professional theologian who happily learns from their students, but Gunton was eager to discover gold wherever it was to be found. This meant that, even as the mentor, he was open to learning about theologians who had not been part of his own formal education. His restlessness led to countless episodes of joyful discovery – for him and his students – and this experience was contagious. Rather than assuming he had the answers and solutions, his restlessness allowed him to look even in those dark corners forgotten by the academy he was trained in. This attitude opened him up to learning from a seventeenth-century Puritan – what could be more outrageous in the academy in which Gunton was trained and working? Banner of Truth conferences might talk positively about someone like Owen, but not Oxford-trained scholars now teaching at the King’s College, University of London. He was restless because he longed for his reflections to be a creative rumination that provoked people to think afresh about the true God and how he relates to his world. Thus, he was open to what John Owen might teach him. One does not need to agree with all of Gunton’s conclusions to appreciate his earnestness and humility in the dogmatic task.

Non-conformity Some mixture of personality and history had given Gunton a healthy distrust towards dominant theological fads. In the opening editorial for the inaugural issue of the International Journal of Systematic Theology (1999), John Webster attributed the resurgence of dogmatics in the English-speaking world, especially in the United Kingdom, to ‘a certain amount of doggedness on the part of a few gifted doctrinal theologians whose work put systematics back on the agenda’.1 While he likely had in mind such figures as Thomas F. Torrance, since he was talking about the ‘last twenty-five years’, it is reasonable to suppose he was also mindful of his older co-editor of the journal, Colin Gunton. Gunton could be ‘dogged’, not because he was unkind or because he wanted to win arguments but because he liked to ask questions, to push, to test and to wonder. It is not a coincidence that he never became Anglican but remained a non-conformist; he was one of relatively few theological professors from that background. Gunton’s restlessness bred a willingness to be different, to go against the grain. His friendship with and respect for celebrated congregational minister and church historian Geoffrey Nuttall serves as a symbol of this willingness not to fit in. Nuttall appears to have played a pivotal role in Gunton’s being selected for the 1992 Bampton Lectures at

John Webster, ‘Editorial’, International Journal of Systematic Theology 1, no. 1 (1999): 1.

1

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Oxford,2 later published by Cambridge University Press and warmly received to wide acclaim. His willingness to resist conformity also made the Puritan John Owen resonate with him in a variety of ways. Again, rather than simply categorizing the Puritans as ‘puritanical’ and theologically naive or outdated, Gunton was willing to learn from Owen and other Puritans who sometimes had to go against the establishment that was most powerful during their days of training.3 Whereas Owen found himself wrestling with the unwelcome pressures represented by William Laud,4 Gunton appears to have grown disenchanted with the classic liberalism that was still a powerful influence during his years of training.5 The Telegraph’s obituary for Gunton concluded that ‘Like Barth, Gunton felt moved to confront the prevailing liberal theology of his time with a rational and orderly account of the content of Christian belief based on orthodox, biblical categories. He believed that much modern, largely Anglican, theology is too intellectually feeble and too accepting of the assumptions of Enlightenment culture.’6 Having a spirit of nonconformity helped (and hurt!) each of these theologians, but this meant that they were willing to resist the pressures of ever-changing theological fads. Having said that, it is worth recognizing that both Owen and Gunton evolved theologically as they aged, but that would be a topic for another chapter.7

Community It would be a misunderstanding to think Gunton’s restlessness and non-conformity made him isolated or anti-relational. He was energized by others, valued friendship and loved vibrant conversation. While he was an avid reader, much of Gunton’s theological project appears to take the form of working through his instincts and impulses, concerns that he sensed at some intuitive level. These intuitions were, it seems to me, shaped as much by live conversations as they were by times alone in the study. He valued reading, but he also strongly valued the clarity and questions that seemed to emerge with real freshness when he wrestled with a text or idea together with other people. Like his beloved pastime of gardening, Gunton’s theology was often advanced by getting his hands dirty, pulling weeds as they surfaced and trimming back branches that seemed Colin E. Gunton, Brie, the Three and the Many: God Creation and the Culture of Modernity. The 1992 Bampton Lectures (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), xiv. 3 Gunton also supervised a dissertation on Thomas Goodwin and was actively involved (though not the supervisor of) a work on Richard Sibbes. See Paul R. Blackham, ‘The Pneumatology of Thomas Goodwin’ (Unpublished PhD thesis, University of London, King’s College, 1995); Ron Frost, ‘Richard Sibbes’ Theology of Grace and the Division of English Reformed Theology’ (Unpublished PhD Dissertation, University of London, King’s College, 1996). My own dissertation under Gunton and Susan Hardman Moore on John Owen was completed in 2001 and revised for publication as Communion with God: The Divine and the Human in the Theology of John Owen (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2007). 4 Crawford Gribben, John Owen and English Puritanism: Experiences of Defeat, Oxford Studies in Historical Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), e.g., 30–2, 35–6. 5 The fact that a reading from Gunton’s work on the atonement is included in Theology after Liberalism: A Reader, ed. John Webster and George P. Schner (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 113–31, serves symbolically to show his working through these tensions. It is not that he aimed to be pre-critical, but he was uncomfortable simply accepting modernity’s influence, which tempted theologians to water down or completely dismiss key doctrines central to classical dogmatics. Again, whether or not one agrees with Gunton’s solutions, his attitude of retrieval mixed with creativity is laudable. 6 ‘The Rev. Professor Colin Gunton’, 20 May 2003. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/1430548/TheRev-Professor-Colin-Gunton.html. Accessed 8 October 2018. 7 For more on Owen’s possible developments (although some of these are debated), see Gribben, John Owen and English Puritanism, 8–11. 2

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to grow too far. Yet in his theological garden, he loved having others in the dirt working with him. There would be laughter, surprises, and even corrections when he thought the flowers were in danger of getting hurt. In this way, Gunton embodied the idea of ‘doing theology in community’. For him, that primarily meant regularly participating in his local church (preaching once a month and singing in the choir) and testing ideas in a community of scholars (young and old, new and established) at King’s College, University of London. Colin was drawn to Owen’s emphasis on the local church (which we will discuss later), but I suspect Gunton was far more open to dialogue and challenging assumptions than the Puritan Owen ever allowed. While I have learned far more theology from Owen than from Gunton, I am not sure I would hang out at the local pub with Owen, but you can bet I would surely be there with Colin.8 It is possible that Owen wrote far more eloquently about the experience of communion than Gunton ever did, but Gunton’s manifest ability to commune with others provided a much-needed model for emerging theologians who were tempted towards fragmentation and isolation. For Gunton, The Research Institute in Systematic Theology was the ideal place to cultivate a community where he could serve as a co-learner, testing ideas, discovering new theologians and possibilities, probing hidden assumptions and asking fresh questions. Theology should grow out of and feed community – this is one of the most important lessons Gunton taught me, by example as much as by anything he actually said. These three words: restless, non-conformist and community, all have something to do with Gunton’s attraction to John Owen. One of the most significant seventeenthcentury English non-conformist theologians, this one-time chaplain to Oliver Cromwell was willing to advance ideas that seemed either outdated or too contrarian, depending on the context. Owen was also someone who deeply valued community (at least in theory!), especially the local manifestation of the Church. These are impulses that resonated with Gunton and contributed to the way Owen’s theology attracted him.

COLIN GUNTON: HISTORICAL THEOLOGIAN? There is a crucial question that must be addressed head-on if people are ever going to make sense of Colin Gunton in general and his employment of Owen in particular: Was he a good historical theologian? The background observations above were designed to prepare the reader for what I think is an honest and appropriate answer. Was Gunton a good historical theologian? No. Simply put. You should not depend on Gunton to provide a foundation for your historical appreciation of the original context and nuance of a past thinker. He doesn’t specialize in history, nor does he take the time to qualify and nuance his claims, which sometimes leads to small mistakes and at other times to problematic sweeping charges. Except for his treatment of Barth, whom Gunton treated with care, Gunton’s primary goal was not so much to enlighten our historical understanding but

Tim Cooper, an able biographer of Owen, is probably correct when he responded to my quip about hanging out with Owen at the pub: ‘Actually, he [Kapic] might well have enjoyed Owen’s company, but only if he paid him due respect, and he would not have come away with any great sense that he truly knew the other man.’ Tim Cooper, ‘Owen’s Personality: The Man Behind the Theology’, in The Ashgate Research Companion to John Owen’s Theology, ed. Kelly M. Kapic and Mark Jones (Surrey: Ashgate/Routledge, 2012), 226. In this way, Gunton, living in a different time and having a different personality, seemed far more open to letting others in, allowing genuine dialogue and debate, and allowing space for real disagreement. That may be a bit unfair to Owen, but not to Gunton. 8

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to use the theologian at hand to spark ideas, to act as a friend or foe who might provide illumination for a nagging problem or concern that Gunton had. No example of this is as obvious as Gunton’s treatment of Augustine. Far too often Gunton made claims about Augustine that exposed his lack of familiarity with the primary and secondary literature (e.g. the charge that Augustine seemed to neglect the threeness of God). In other words, if you want to learn about Augustine or Trinitarian debates in the fourth and fifth century, read Lewis Ayres or Michael R. Barnes, rather than Gunton.9 But … Gunton never fashioned himself as a historical theologian. That was never his goal. He didn’t have the time or patience for such work, especially since he didn’t see it as the focus of his labour. Instead, he loved to read theologians from the past so that he might better understand both how we arrived at our present situation and how we might move forward theologically in a constructive way. We have to understand this aspect of Gunton’s temperament and purposes if we are ever to fairly appreciate the way Gunton interacts with Owen (or, for that matter, any other historical figure). Maybe I am too sentimental because of my great respect for Gunton as a person, but I believe we can acknowledge his weakness as a historical theologian while still learning from the problems and potential promises he finds by engaging with work from theologians of the past.10 We must always keep in mind, even when he is speaking about historical theologians, his actual goal is not historical reconstruction (which he was relatively poor at) but theological construction (pointing to potential dangers and possibilities in our day). This is why the chapter began as it did, drawing our attention to the self-critical nature of theological reflection. With that said, I will now explore two areas where Gunton especially showed engagement with John Owen’s theology. I will seek to understand how Gunton is drawing upon Owen, what problems he might be addressing and what possibilities might lay ahead.

SPIRIT-CHRISTOLOGY The extent of Gunton’s early acquaintance with Owen’s work is unclear, but it seems to have been minimal until well after his writing career began. We do know that a few of his PhD students eventually played a significant role in provoking and then sustaining his interest in Owen. By the 1980s Gunton had apparently picked up the sixteen-volume set of Owen’s works (excluding the seven-volume Hebrews Commentary series) at a secondhand bookstore. And, although Owen might not be considered a natural resource for such a late-twentieth-century theologian, Gunton’s own exploratory theological work kept leading him to new and interesting figures from the past. Owen was one such theologian who grabbed his imagination. Graham McFarlane, one of Gunton’s students in the 1980s, was studying Edward Irving (1792–1834), and both professor and student were finding Irving’s work provocative

See, e.g. Lewis Ayres, Nicaea and Its Legacy: An Approach to Fourth-Century Trinitarian Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), especially ­chapter 16, where he engages with those like Gunton who he thinks misread and misrepresent Augustine, the Cappadocian Fathers, etc. For more on Augustine, see Ayres, Augustine and the Trinity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). 10 A similar conclusion of a generous (but not uncritical) reading of Gunton is found in Michael A. Tapper’s chapter, ‘Critiquing Gunton’s Trinitarian Theology’ in his volume Canadian Pentecostals, the Trinity, and Contemporary Worship Music: Things We Sing. Global Pentecostal and Charismatic Studies (Leiden: Brill, 2017), 109–21. 9

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and constructively suggestive.11 This was particularly the case in terms of exploring the humanity of the Messiah and the relationship of the Spirit to the incarnate Son. Around that same time, Gunton encouraged another of his doctoral students, Alan Spence, likewise to investigate Irving’s work. Gunton was eager to see Irving’s SpiritChristology unpacked more fully. Apparently while hearing public presentations on Irving at the Research Institute for Systematic Theology, Spence recalled the previous reading he had done while serving in South Africa as an evangelist in his early twenties: Spence believed he recognized a number of similarities between the early-nineteenth-century writings of Irving and John Owen’s seventeenth-century work on pneumatology.12 Bringing this to Gunton’s attention, Spence provided detailed notes to volume three of Owen’s Works, his magisterial treatment on the Holy Spirit. Gunton received the notes enthusiastically and apparently was so struck by them that he started to share them with friends, including Geoffrey Nuttall (mentioned above). Spence’s recollection is that Gunton believed he had finally found ‘a solid base for a defence of Irving, who was of course considered theologically suspect in some quarters’.13 Despite significant differences between Owen and the later, more eccentric Irving, at this point the potential similarities were the big draw. If Gunton was going to push his Spirit-Christology forward, then there might be a greater reception to these neglected emphases, at least as Gunton perceived them, if he were drawing from a top-tier seventeenth-century English theologian like Owen. Many still considered Irving to be theologically objectionable: he had, after all, been excommunicated from his London presbytery in 1830 and then by the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland in 1831. Owen could help Gunton potentially legitimate not just an aspect of Irving’s theology but of his own. Spence was pivotal in informing Gunton on these matters: he would go on to present a series of essays on Owen’s own version of a Spirit-Christology,14 which culminated in his eventual publication of a volume on the ‘Coherence of Christology’ in John Owen’s work. This volume grew out of his PhD work under Gunton’s supervision.15 We must therefore briefly review Spence’s work, since he really is the one who laid the foundation that Gunton assumed and built upon. To skip Spence and immediately discuss Gunton’s use of Owen will be to misunderstand both. Fundamental to Spence’s thesis was the belief that Owen helped heal an inherent tension between two ancient approaches to Christology. The two historic approaches were linked with Antioch (stressing the full humanity of Jesus, labelled as ‘inspirational’ Christology) and Alexandria (stressing Jesus as the divine Son of God, labelled as

Thanks to correspondence (especially 13 August 2018) with Graham McFarlane I was able to start reconstructing the developments, and then further correspondence with Alan Spence helped me better understand the chronology of events and developments. For McFarlane’s excellent work on Irving, see Graham McFarlane, ‘Christology and the Spirit in the Teaching of Edward Irving’ (PhD thesis, London, King’s College, 1990) revised and published as Christ and Spirit: The Doctrine of the Incarnation According to Edward Irving (Carlisle: Paternoster Press, 1996). 12 Alan Spence, Incarnation and Inspiration: John Owen and the Coherence of Christology (London: T&T Clark, 2007), xiii. 13 From personal correspondence with Alan Spence, here quoting from an email exchange on 8 August 2018. Used with permission. 14 See Alan Spence, ‘John Owen and Trinitarian Agency’, Scottish Journal of Theology 43, no. 2 (1990): 157–73; Spence, ‘Christ’s Humanity and Ours: John Owen’, in Persons, Divine and Human: King’s College Essays in Theological Anthropology, ed. Christopher Schwöbel and Colin E. Gunton (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1992); Spence, ‘Inspiration and Incarnation: John Owen and the Coherence of Christology’, King’s Theological Review 12 (August 1989): 52–5. 15 Alan Spence, Incarnation and Inspiration. This is really a lightly edited version of his 1989 dissertation. 11

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‘incarnational’ Christology). But how can we describe one person, Jesus of Nazareth, the Messiah, as both fully divine and fully human in a way that prevents either description from swallowing the other? How could the integrity of the natures be preserved in the person of Christ? This is the classic Chalcedonian challenge. Spence believes that Chalcedon doesn’t solve this tension but, in fact, simply displays it. Drawing from Owen’s extensive work on the Spirit and Christology, Spence sees a path forward in Owen’s proposal: Jesus is one person with two natures (maintaining a Chalcedonian Christology), and the integrity of both natures in the one person is maintained in and through the presence and power of the Holy Spirit. In other words, Jesus is genuinely human in all ways, yet without sin. The without sin comes not simply because the Logos humbles himself and becomes a man, but because of the presence and power of the Holy Spirit: from conception through ascension (and ongoing), Jesus is the one filled with the Spirit beyond measure. Owen declares: ‘The human nature of Christ being thus formed in the womb by a creating act of the Holy Spirit, was in the instant of its conception sanctified, and filled with grace according to the measure of its receptivity … And this work of sanctification, or the original infusion of all grace into the human nature of Christ, was the immediate work of the Holy Spirit.’16 The eternal Son’s only ‘immediate’ work is the assumption of a human nature, but once that happens, to maintain the integrity of his assumed humanity, it will be the Spirit who is the ‘immediate efficient cause of all divine operations’ in the incarnate Son.17 Keep in mind that by ‘ “immediate” agency Owen means actions accomplished by just one of the persons, in whom the other have no concurrence, but by approbation and support’.18 Since Owen never abandons the presupposition that the opera ad extra ad indivisa sunt, he discusses the incarnation in a Trinitarian framework that is, on the one hand, designed to avoid undermining or belittling the particular persons but, on the other hand, allows him to acknowledge what he calls ‘peculiarities’. Thus, taking the virginal conception as an example, he argues that the Father is active in respect of the ‘designation’ and the ‘authoritative disposal of things’, but this does not mean the Father is immediately doing ‘the actual forming and making ready of that body’ which is to be assumed, though that body ‘was prepared in the counsel and love of the Father’. Likewise, the Father does not become incarnate, but it is the Son who enters into a ‘voluntary assumption’ through his condescension of a human nature and allows himself to be of Abraham’s seed. ‘But the immediate divine efficiency in this matter was the peculiar work of the Holy Ghost.’19 Beginning with his conception and birth, the Spirit actively sanctifies the incarnate Messiah; the Spirit continues to sanctify his childhood and life, preserving and strengthening Jesus and revealing to him what he needs to know. As Owen states it, ‘The Holy Ghost … is the immediate, peculiar, efficient cause of all external divine operations: for God worketh by his Spirit, or in him immediately applies the power and efficacy of the divine excellencies unto their operation; when the same work is equally the work of each person.’20 It is the Spirit who creates the body of Jesus, but not as an ex

John Owen, The Works of John Owen, ed. William H. Gould, vol. 3 (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, n.d.), 168. For Owen’s development of this idea, see ibid., 159; but also all of Book 3 c­hapter 2 (pages 159–67), emphasis added. 18 Adonis Vidu, ‘Trinitarian Inseparable Operations and the Incarnation’, Journal of Analytic Theology 4 (2016): 121. 19 Owen, Works, 3:163. 20 Ibid., 3:161–2. 16 17

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nihilo act like the original creation: instead, the Spirit ‘in forming the body of our Lord Jesus Christ’ here, like his ‘subsequent acts of creation’, works through what is there. In this case, the Spirit’s ‘infinite creating power’ forms the human nature out of ‘the substance of the blessed Virgin’.21 Lest there be confusion here, the Spirit is not acting as a human husband to Mary or something like that, but, according to Owen, there is ‘no other relation between the person of the Holy Ghost and the human nature of Christ but that of a creator and a creature’.22 The Spirit forms the body, but the Logos assumes the human nature ‘into personal union with himself ’. Given that this is God’s work, we ought to be careful about erecting chronological creaturely boundaries to make sense of this, for the Son assumed the nature formed by the Spirit ‘the instant of its formation, thereby preventing the singular and individual subsistence of that nature in and by itself ’.23 Jesus of Nazareth, the Word become flesh, then acts not immediately as simply the Divine one but as the Mediator, the one who is truly human, dependent on the Spirit, one with the Father and preserved even through the darkness of the grave. While discussions of incarnation and pneumatology are often separated, Owen consistently held these together. This basic move of highlighting the mediating work of the Spirit in the life of Christ – which Gunton believed he first found in Irving and then later Owen – captured Gunton’s imagination, providing possibilities for his own proposals. However, as Spence will point out in his later reflective essay, Gunton seems to head in directions that might have made Owen uncomfortable, mostly stemming from Gunton’s ambivalence about the ‘language, concepts and implications of the Definition of Chalcedon’.24 Owen, however, never imagined he was challenging or undercutting Chalcedon, but he believed he was simply unpacking it. With Gunton, that is not always clear. What one then finds in Gunton’s own work is not a sustained treatment of Owen’s Spirit-Christology, but instead a set of references scattered throughout his corpus. Most of the time Gunton appears to assume rather than argue for his conclusions regarding Owen.25 He does praise Owen for his emphasis on the doctrine of Christ’s humanity, which he saw as having been previously neglected.26 Thus, while engaging the work of Robert Jenson and even Jonathan Edwards, Gunton points in the direction he elsewhere attributes to Owen when he writes, If we ask how it is that the humanity of Jesus of Nazareth is maintained in its autonomy, the answer is in part pneumatological. If Jesus’ humanity was in no way imperilled by its being that of the Word, that is because of the action of God the Spirit. The Spirit is the one who mediates the action of God the Father in such a way that the life of the

Ibid., 3:163–4. Ibid., 3:164–5. 23 Ibid.,  3:165. 24 See Alan Spence, ‘The Person as Wiling Agent: Classifying Gunton’s Christology’, in The Theology of Colin Gunton, ed. Lincoln Harvey (London: T&T Clark, 2010), 49–64. 25 E.g. Colin E. Gunton, ‘Holy Spirit’, in Oxford Companion to Christian Thought, ed. Adrian Hastings, Alistair Mason and Hugh Pyper (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), especially 305, where he draws upon Owen to make his point, yet his language and conception is clearly directly from Spence. Cf., his entry on ‘Protestantism’ also found in that Oxford Companion: here he also references Owen’s Christology, with particular attention to Owen’s memorable response to Socinianism, 572. 26 Colin E. Gunton, The Promise of Trinitarian Theology, 2nd edn (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1997), 34. Here he links Owen and Irving. Cf., Lincoln Harvey, ‘The Double Homoousion: Forming the Content of Gunton’s Theology’, in The Theology of Colin Gunton, 94–5. 21 22

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Son, while deriving from the Father and dependent upon him, is given space to remain authentically human.27 Michael D. Stringer, in his dissertation on Gunton’s pneumatology, likewise sees two main influences from Owen on him: the transcendent Spirit and his theology of mediation.28 The link between these ideas was then set, for both Owen and Gunton: once one more adequately examined the role of the Spirit in the life of Mary’s son, then one was also able to make the final step to see the connection between ‘God’s provision to the humanity of Christ and, by analogy, to the concrete lives of Jesus’ followers’.29 We will return to these ideas again when we discuss ecclesiology. But there have been some concerns. For example, although he does not directly engage Gunton’s work, Oliver D. Crisp – a King’s College graduate during Gunton’s tenure – wrote of his modest hesitations regarding Owen’s approach in ‘John Owen’s Spirit Christology’. While he finds much to commend in Owen, Crisp is concerned about drawing such a strong distinction between the Son’s assumption of a human nature and Jesus’ dependence on the Spirit, where the Spirit takes on this mediating role. Here is a chart of Owen’s approach to distinguishing between the assumption and hypostatic union as he lays it out in his Christologia:30 Assumption

Hypostatic Union

‘immediate act of divine nature’ ‘unto personality … the Son of God and our nature became one person’ ‘the acting of the divine and the passion of the human nature: the one assumeth, the other is assumed.’

‘mediate, by virtue of that assumption’ ‘act or relation of natures subsisting in that one person’ ‘mutual relation of the natures unto each other.’

Thus the eternal divine Son after ‘assumption’ acts not directly but mediately through the Spirit on the nature assumed, a move that Crisp believes is ‘theologically dubious’.31 It is dubious, Crisp contends, because this arrangement proposed by Owen (and endorsed by Gunton) appears novel and fails to give an adequate account of the way in which God the Son remains the agent whose intentional actions are brought about in his human nature. And it fails to pay sufficient attention to the fact that God the Son must maintain the hypostatic union (not God the Holy Spirit), because it is a Trinitarian act that terminates upon the Son. The direct, unmediated work of the Son in the Incarnation cannot be restricted to his assumption of human nature. It must include all the acts performed by the Son whilst incarnate.32

Gunton, Theology through the Theologians, 147. Michael D. Stringer, ‘The Lord and Giver of Life: The Person and Work of the Holy Spirit in the Trinitarian Theology of Colin E. Gunton’ (PhD diss., University of Notre Dame Australia, 2008), 74–5. Cf., Gunton, Theology Through the Theologians, 191–2. 29 Stringer, ‘Lord and Giver of Life’, 75. 30 For original chart, see Kapic, Communion with God, 82. For original, see Owen, Works, 1:225–6, from which these quotes are drawn. 31 Oliver Crisp, ‘John Owen on Spirit Christology’, Journal of Reformed Theology 5 (2011): 5–25, here 15. 32 Ibid.,  23–4. 27 28

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The Son, not just the Spirit, must sustain the hypostatic union. Crisp’s concern with Owen – and accounts that follow Owen’s approach – is that Owen risks reducing the eternal Son to a bystander, having no continuing agency in the incarnate person of the Messiah. Tyler R. Wittman responds to these concerns by arguing that Owen’s view is not novel because it assumes the Augustinian and Reformed tradition of inseparable operations which thus frames his position. Rather than trying to be freed from the classic doctrine of inseparable operations, which some seem to believe Owen sought, Wittman makes a compelling case that Owen’s own position only makes sense because he assumes this classic view. Along these lines Wittman is concerned even more with Spence than with Crisp, because Crisp (and Gunton) assume Spence’s account. While Spence acknowledges that Owen explicitly affirms inseparable operations, he believes there is an inherent tension in his work, since Owen appears to want real distinctions between the persons so as to protect a unique incarnation. Only the Son becomes incarnate, not the Father or the Spirit. Because of that, it can sound at times – according to Spence – as though Owen sets aside inseparable operations in order to preserve his view of a real incarnation that highlights the Son’s distinct assumption.33 Spence wants to highlight the distinct actions of the divine persons ad extra, and in this he believes Owen is advancing a fresh way past the Augustinian problem of inseparable operations which (it is imagined) makes the incarnation impossible; or at least, as it appears in Gunton’s assessment, it points to the affirmation of some divine essence behind the Trinity, or the ‘God behind the three persons’ problem.34 However, as others have shown, this is to misunderstand Augustine, who himself (most famously in Sermon 52) both affirms inseparable operations and acknowledges that only the Son becomes incarnate and the Spirit is poured out at Pentecost.35 Apparently this is not a problem Augustine and the tradition had failed to imagine. Instead, Wittman argues this really is not so much a fresh move made by Owen, but rather the failure of more recent scholarship to rightly understand the tradition. Owen provides a rich articulation and a careful thinking of the implications, but his actual assumptions and views are not anti-Augustinian or fundamentally at odds with an affirmation of inseparable operations, but instead he assumes these as true. Owen’s position grows out of rather than undermines inseparable operations, though as Adonis Vidu recently concluded, there are some inconsistencies in Owen’s language. But in the end, Vidu believes that in terms of ‘causality’ the action of the assumption is the action of all the persons, ‘yet the effect of the action is only united to the second person’.36 Owen never pits divine oneness against threeness: ‘this numerically same essence of God belongs equally to the Father, Son and Spirit, which does not threaten the oneness or simplicity of God’s essence’.37 This is possible because Owen assumes that ‘person’ in reference to the divine is referring to ‘the divine essence, upon the account of an especial property, subsisting in an especial manner’.38 The reason this matters in discussions about See Tyler R. Wittman, ‘The End of the Incarnation: John Owen, Trinitarian Agency and Christology’, International Journal of Systematic Theology 15, no. 3 (2013): 284–300, here 286. For more on this in Spence, see Inspiration and Incarnation, especially 131–7. 34 Gunton, The Promise of Trinitarian Theology, 30–55; see Wittman, ‘The End of the Incarnation’, 288. 35 See Lewis Ayres, ‘“Remember That You Are Catholic” (serm. 52,2): Augustine on the Unity of the Triune God’, Journal of Early Christian Studies 8, no. 1 (2000): 39–82. 36 Vidu, ‘Trinitarian Inseparable Operations and the Incarnation’, 119. 37 Wittman, ‘The End of the Incarnation’, 290. 38 Owen, Works, 2:407, quoted here by Wittman, ‘The End of the Incarnation’, 290. 33

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Owen (and Gunton) is that a careful reading of Owen shows that he locates the will in God, not in the divine person. It is along these lines that the tradition has spoken of the one will of God. The clarity of this reading is questionable however because Owen, like others, can still speak of the Son’s will, or the Spirit willing to act, or the will of the Father.39 So when such statements arise, one could quickly move towards a social framework for making sense of Owen, imagining that you have three independent centres of ‘self-consciousness’ or something along those lines; obviously the risk here is that of moving towards a social Trinitarianism which, at minimum, flirts with forms of tritheism. But does that charge actually stick to Owen? Owen affirms the one will of God, and that will is distinctly appropriated to the divine persons ‘respectively’. Wittman nicely summarizes Owen and the tradition here: ‘the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, as subsisting principles of operation, demonstrate the one will of the divine nature in accordance with their mode and order of subsistence’.40 In this way, there are not three competing wills potentially at odds with one another, but instead the one will of God acts distinctly in the divine persons. An example of how this works itself out in Owen’s theology appears in his treatment of the Father in Communion with God.41 When he unpacks the love of the Father, he carefully makes it clear that salvation should not be portrayed as the incarnate Son trying to do certain things in order to make the Father love humans. Sadly, this type of presentation does appear at points in the history of the Church, including among some Puritans. No, the Father, out of his love for his people, sends the Son in the Spirit, that the love of God might be made manifest and that he might secure his people’s redemption. Like Augustine in his sermon on Jesus’ baptism, Owen here is making it clear that there are distinctions between the divine persons, but this is still God who acts, who loves and who redeems. But the God who is and who acts is always the Father, Son and Spirit. Not three wills in potential competition or ongoing tension, but in harmony and love, moving towards the object of God’s love. This is simply the doctrine of appropriations, where the divine persons act according to the order of subsistence. As Owen argues, ‘every divine work, and every part of every divine work, is the work of God, that is, of the whole Trinity, inseparably and undividedly’.42 Gunton seems to believe he is assuming and building upon Owen’s basic distinction between assumption and hypostatic union. Robert Jenson recognizes Gunton’s debt to Owen at this point, but worries (as a good Lutheran theologian!) that such a strong affirmation of the ‘hypostatic union of the Son and the man Jesus is so sheerly a metaphysical reality that it has no consequences at all on the “physical” level; that is, it makes no difference for either the divine nature of the Son or the human nature of Jesus’.43 Jenson wants to see greater consequences, such that maybe there is an infiltrating of the communicatio, so that the hypostatic union truly affects even the ‘physical’. Jenson isn’t sure Gunton meant or realized that ‘this Christology repristinates that of late medieval theology’, posing the danger of making it difficult to know how the risen Jesus can be present on a Sunday morning worship service at the local First Presbyterian Church.44

or more on this discussion, see Kapic, Communion with God, 197–8. F Wittman, ‘The End of the Incarnation’, 292. 41 For this work see Owen, Works, 2:5–274. His focus on the Father, in particular, is found in Works, 2:17–40. 42 Owen, Works, 3:94, cited by Wittman, ‘The End of the Incarnation’, 293. 43 Robert Jenson, ‘A Decision Tree of Colin Gunton’s Thinking’, in The Theology of Colin Gunton, 15. 44 Jenson, ‘Decision Tree’, 15. 39 40

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What made the Lutheran theologian uncomfortable, however, would have made good sense to Owen – the integrity of each nature needed to be preserved, so the ascended Christ is only present in the worship by his Spirit, the Spirit of Christ. Rather than look to the elements, Owen – and Gunton like Owen – believed that the ecclesial presence of Christ was built upon a strong connection between pneumatology and Christology. Without such a connection, Christology is isolated and thus required to carry more weight than it can bear. The Spirit cannot be forgotten or downplayed, neither in the life of Christ nor in his Church Body. In the end, however, Gunton does not provide an extended exposition of Owen’s Christology or pneumatology, so what we have are mostly inferences and assumptions. Leon Harris has fairly argued that Owen was important for Gunton, but he really only served as a ‘model for a Christology that incorporates the Holy Spirit’. As much as there was to learn from Owen, he didn’t go ‘far enough for Gunton’.45 This is why Gunton leaned more heavily upon Edward Irving than Owen at times. But he was indebted to Owen’s strong emphasis on the Spirit who works in the life of Christ and then is poured out and empowers God’s people.

ELECTION AND ECCLESIOLOGY Gunton certainly did not follow Owen’s theology uncritically. There were plenty of areas he found problematic and even offensive. His goal clearly was not to romanticize Owen but to use what he believed were lasting insights while leaving the rest behind. Unfortunately, what Gunton sometimes rejects may have been significant to the parts that he used, thus causing him to miss some of Owen’s intent. For example, Gunton draws upon Owen as he tries to make sense of ‘election’ in the post-Constantinian Church. ‘On the face of it’, Gunton confesses, Owen is ‘the last person we should expect to be of assistance’ when trying to reimagine the doctrine of election.46 Why so? Because Owen followed the line of those after Calvin, so ‘his dual predestination often sees him placed in the class of those rigid Calvinists’ who seem – it was claimed by many – to have distorted Calvin’s theology.47 We must force ourselves to ignore the ‘Calvin vs the Calvinists’ debate for now, but we should notice that Gunton proposes that one must set aside Owen’s view of particular/limited atonement before one can ever hope to find something useful in his position. Having set that aside, however, Gunton finds Owen’s approach to election ‘more christological and pneumatological, and therefore more historical and eschatological than that of the tradition’.48 How he treats election relates to Gunton’s ecclesiology and thus is relevant to our discussion. For Gunton, Owen provides appealing cautions and prospects for moving forward in the doctrine of election and the Church. Contrary to the stereotypes of Puritan legalism, Owen cautions against the use of coercion, since there is a built-in incompatibility between the Gospel and state-sponsored compulsion.49 The Gospel is meant to be good and free

Leon I. Harris, The Holy Spirit as Communion: Colin Gunton’s Pneumatology of Communion and Frank Macchia’s Pneumatology of Koinonia (Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2017), 76. 46 Colin E. Gunton, Intellect and Action: Elucidations on Christian Theology and the Life of Faith (London: Bloomsbury, 2005), 148. 47 Ibid. 48 Ibid. 49 Ibid.,  148–9. 45

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news, not the tyranny of yet another fallen human social structure imposing its will on the people. There are tensions, however, that cannot be ignored: Owen preached before Parliament the day after the King’s beheading, and yet he is also the one who wrote a memorable work advocating greater toleration.50 Assessing Owen’s words and actions on toleration with detail is beyond what we can do here, but a few comments are necessary as they relate to Gunton’s appraisal. In The Promise of Trinitarian Theology, Gunton approvingly drew on Owen’s advocacy of toleration when it came to fighting heresy.51 Gunton elsewhere noted Locke’s influence on modern conceptions of toleration while pointing to the ‘Cromwellian head’ of his college who anticipated these concerns.52 While Owen’s own understanding of toleration is far more restrictive than twenty-first-century views, by the end of his life he was considered a genuine opponent of religious coercion.53 Owen appears to formulate a theology of toleration that evolved and grew as a result of his own experiences of cultural and religious disruption.54 Standing at the overlap between pre-modern orthodoxy and the rise of Enlightenment assumptions, Owen is navigating these changes in ways he himself was likely unaware of, sometimes showing himself strongly aligned with premodern convention, while in other ways displaying flashes of the emerging signs of modern instincts and values.55 Drawing on the early Church’s lack of governmental support in resisting the plague of heretics, Owen thinks the ancient ecclesial model of non-coercion should be recaptured by the Church in his day.56 This is something that resonates deeply with Gunton, a non-conformist to his core.57 Now we must return more specifically to election and the Church. Owen’s affirmation of double predestination makes Gunton uncomfortable. He is nevertheless impressed that Owen provides a Christologically centred doctrine of election that allows for a view that is ‘both Reformed, appropriately confident and “modern”, even allowing for “pluralism” of a kind’.58 How so? Because the Church has confidence that those who have willingly come to partake of the local gathering are God’s people (or should be assumed so), since this is a voluntary rather than compulsory koinonia. The Constantinian Church, with its principle that the State would establish the Church, caused a confusion of identities by

Owen, ‘Of Toleration’, Works, 8:163–206. But we should keep in mind that Charles Stuart was not beheaded on any sort of ecclesial or theological grounds, nor on the grounds of merely political differences. He was accused and convicted of treason. 51 Gunton, The Promise of Trinitarian Theology, 61. 52 Colin E. Gunton, ‘The Indispensability of Theological Understanding: Theology in the University’, in Essentials of Christian Community, ed. Daniel W. Hardy, David Ford and Dennis L. Stamps (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1996), 274–5. 53 For the best treatments on the history, nuance and proper framing of Owen’s take on toleration, see John Coffey, ‘John Owen and the Puritan Toleration Controversy, 1646–59’, in Ashgate Research Companion to John Owen’s Theology, 246–7; John Coffey, ‘The Toleration Controversy During the English Revolution’, in Religion and Revolutionary England, ed. Christopher Durston and Judith Maltby (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006); and John Coffey, Persecution and Toleration in Protestant England 1558–1689 (New York: Routledge, 2000), especially ­chapters 6–8. 54 This kind of development in Owen’s life and thought (including the abiding tensions) is well laid out in Gribben, John Owen and English Puritanism. 55 For more on how to see Owen amid this transition, see Kelly M. Kapic and Willem van Vlastuin (ed.), John Owen between Orthodoxy and Modernity (Leiden: Brill, 2019). 56 Owen, Works, 8:183. Lee Gatiss recently wrote a provocative short essay trying to reconnect Owen with Anglicanism far more strongly than is often done, in ‘Anglicanism and John Owen’, Crux 52, no. 1 (2016): 44–53. 57 Gunton, Intellect and Action, 149. 58 Ibid. 50

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coercing the gatherings, which then bred undue confidence among some (who really are not believers) and undo anxiety among others (who are believers). In the seventeenth century, there was a danger that church-goers would seek their security through internal examination, rather than by looking to Christ and their free participation in worship. Unfortunately, Puritans sometimes advised heavy doses of introspective activities that could lead to painful doubt and anxiety for tender hearts rather than provoke the hardened ones who needed it.59 Owen’s personal and pastoral experience showed him the problems this created in congregations: consequently, he emphasized the value of meditating on Christ’s love, the finished work accomplished on the cross and the Spirit’s abiding and preserving power. These pastoral problems of insecurity appeared to be heightened, in Owen’s mind, when the State interferes with the Christian religion and forces conformity of ‘belief ’ among a people. The Gospel must always be good news, freely given and freely received. This Gospel was to be the centre around which God’s people voluntarily gathered for worship, so that the assurance of such a freely gathered community could rest on the benediction of the Triune God. Such an impulse made good sense to the non-conformist Gunton. Not only did Gunton appreciate aspects of Owen’s push towards some level of toleration instead of coercion in the Church, but he also believed that ‘Owen’s Christology enables greater attention to be given to the humanity of Christ as the locus of divine action and election’.60 Gunton resonated with Owen’s emphasis on the ‘flesh’ which the eternal Son assumes: the incarnate Word serves uniquely as the ‘chosen one whose life is at once predestined by God the Father and enabled and realised by the action of God the Holy Spirit’.61 This pattern is reflected in election and the Church, since the Spirit works in the adopted (i.e. the elect) just as he worked in the humanity of Jesus. Although this position might sound like it flirts with the Christological heresy of adoptionism, neither Owen nor Gunton went in that direction. Sinclair Ferguson, who is far more of an Owen scholar than Gunton and could never be accused of adoptionism, similarly sees the connection between the Spirit’s unique presence and power in the Messiah and how that same ‘messianic Spirit’ then uniquely reshapes us into the image of Christ.62 Gunton’s own emphasis here is on the Spirit’s work – both in the life of Christ and in the life of believers – as eschatological work. Confessing the Spirit as ‘Jesus’ inseparable other’, Gunton imagines he is building on Owen and then taking him farther than maybe he meant to go. Believers are liberated by the Spirit from sin’s chains: and, although this is only fully realized eschatologically at the resurrection, yet the Spirit presently connects his people with this future reality so that they are changed by it even this side of the grave. But Gunton does not stop there, since he sees in this a fairly ‘open doctrine of election’, because the Spirit is able to create the space for otherness in such a way that neither God

For probably the fullest treatment of this historical development see Joel R. Beeke, Assurance of Faith: Calvin, English Puritanism, and the Dutch Second Reformation. American University Studies, Series VII, Theology and Religion, vol. 89 (New York: Peter Lang, 1991). 60 Gunton, Intellect and Action, 149. 61 Ibid. 62 Sinclair Ferguson, The Holy Spirit (Downers Grove: IVP, 1996), 56. Although Owen deeply influences much of this book, ­chapter 2 on ‘The Spirit of Christ’ displays a deep debt to Owen as it moves from stage to stage in the life of Jesus of Nazareth, showing how the Gospel writers highlight the Spirit’s presence and power in Jesus’ life in a way that strongly parallels Owen’s own presentation in his work on pneumatology in Works, 3: especially 159–88, which speak specifically of the Holy Spirit’s work ‘in and on the human nature of Christ’. 59

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nor the human is eliminated or compromised. Accordingly, Gunton makes the following extended deduction: Only the Spirit can reconcile lost human beings to God the Father through Christ – by election – yet the Spirit’s otherness, modelled on the New Testament depiction of his relation to Jesus, generates an openness according to which the Spirit can determine that relation through an election which is yet uncompelled because it is the means of the realization of the sinner’s true being in Christ.63 Here he is connecting creation and recreation. The Son and Spirit who speak and order the creation as God’s ‘two hands’ are now active through a Spirit-Christology. The Spirit – not a creature – is uniquely able to affirm creation’s otherness (including that otherness of humanity) while bringing human creatures as creatures back into reconciled relationship with the Creator. Part of Gunton’s concern is that some might ignore the otherness of the Spirit, treating the Spirit as nothing more than an aspect of the human, a created spirit rather than the Holy Spirit of God. Furthermore, Gunton is concerned that some theologians treat ‘grace’ as if it were a ‘semi-hypostatic reality’ that starts to function as an ‘intermediate between God and the world’.64 But ‘grace’ is not the intermediary. Instead, the incarnate Son who is filled with the Spirit beyond measure is the one mediator. That same Spirit then unites his people to Christ. Only here do we see a proper Christological framing of the electing God that is grounded in the person and work of Christ as made possible by the Spirit. Not just the Logos incarnate, but the Creator Spiritus is working in and through this incarnation in such a way that he affirms both God’s creation and his election. Gunton is concerned that Augustine’s approach to election too easily moves towards ‘otherworldly individualism’ while Barth’s ‘heavenly-earthly Christ’ puts all of humanity ‘in Christ’ immediately, rather than mediately, as we find in Israel and the Church.65 By highlighting (as Owen does) the Spirit’s immediate work in the life of Jesus of Nazareth, Gunton attempts to re-establish the link between creation and eschatology, between history and salvation, between God’s incarnate Son and his gathered people. And by connecting these elements in this way, he enlarges the dynamic of election so that it moves not only away from an account that ties an abstract election to the individual but also towards a more integrated account that describes Christ as the elect One who gathers his people by his Spirit into his Church. This brings us then to the third point he thinks Owen contributes to this discussion. Circling back, Gunton – drawing on Owen – believes not only the negative (i.e. that coercion should not be part of the Gospel) but also the positive (the Church is necessarily a voluntary organization/organism). As the eschatological Spirit gathers and unites the Church, it is a free people who congregate in response to the Word and Spirit: their obedience is still, nevertheless, only possible ‘because [the Church] is elect’. Drawing on the philosophical language of causation, Owen argues that the obedience of believers is the formal cause of the Church, whereby believers are ‘jointly giving themselves up unto the

Gunton, Intellect and Action, 150. It should be noted that the ‘Only’ in the quoted material does not appear to state some restriction upon God, as if it excluded the Father or the Son; rather, it means that ‘Only God acting through his Spirit, in contrast with any merely human agency, can accomplish such reconciliation.’ 64 Ibid. 65 Ibid.,  150–1. 63

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Lord Jesus Christ, to do and observe’.66 Against a larger backdrop of Post-Constantinian Church concerns, Gunton appears to appreciate that for Owen, while obedience is not the basis of election, but the free response to it, this response also changes how one relates to others.67 Now that one is in the family of God, each turns towards the other as participants within the life of the Church. The Church’s real existence is here in vibrant and lived experience and cannot be faithfully explained merely in the formal terms of an instituted entity. In an essay in which he draws from both Owen and the Orthodox theologian John Zizioulas, Gunton expresses strong concerns that too often Roman Catholicism and even Protestantism have confused ‘institutionalism’ with the Church.68 When this happens the ‘otherness’ of the Spirit is lost, collapsed into the institution of the Church rather than distinguished from her, even though the Spirit is the author and preserver of the Church.69 ‘As the Son institutes the Church – gives it immanent historical existence – it is the function of the Spirit to constitute it to free it from institutionalism.’70 When an institution – rather than the Spirit-led being-in-community – is considered the Church, then ecclesial authorities too readily declare divine sanction for whatever they do or say. Such a conclusion sends shivers down Gunton’s spine, which is again why Owen and his Reformation heritage so resonates with him. In one of his later works, Gunton – while not drawing explicitly upon Owen – argues that Christian theology grounds the doctrine of election in Jesus of Nazareth, not to abolish the election of Israel but because only in the Son incarnate do we find that ‘God’s providence becomes particular in a decisive and personal way’.71 The particular is chosen for the sake of the universal: Gunton moves from Israel to the Church, with Jesus at the centre. Rather than replacing Israel, the post-ascension Church is expanding Israel to include Gentiles, and all (Jew and Gentile) are to find their centre in the elect One, Jesus of Nazareth.72 In this movement the Spirit gathers and frees a people in order to worship the Father through the Son. The challenge for Gunton, however, is that he is trying to say multiple things at the same time. He frames election and the Church in Christ; and he affirms that it is the Spirit who elicits faithful human response to God.73 ‘Like Israel, the church can come to be only by divine choice and call’, which is only made possible and secured by God’s ‘two hands’.74 But because Gunton vehemently rejects classic forms of predestination found in Augustinianism and traditional Calvinism, he is trying to draw water from the well without drinking some elements that he finds distasteful. And so there is a tension, as he wants to utilize Owen’s strong Spirit-Christology as a way to help frame his ecclesiology, but in so doing he at times seems to fail to understand the very reasoning that influences why Owen ends up affirming particular atonement in the first place.

Owen, The True Nature of a Gospel Church, in Works, 16:11–208, here page 29 quoted by Gunton, Intellect and Action, 151. 67 Gunton, Intellect and Action, 139–55. 68 Colin E. Gunton, ‘The Church: John Owen and John Zizioulas on the Church’, in Theology through the Theologians, 187–205. 69 Ibid., 187–90, 198–9. 70 Ibid.,  199. 71 Colin E. Gunton, The Christian Faith: An Introduction to Christian Doctrine (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), 31. 72 Ibid.,  126. 73 Ibid.,  128. 74 Ibid.,  127. 66

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Many find Owen’s Trinitarian approach appealing because he highlights distinct communion with the three persons without pitting the persons against one another. Yet, Owen’s logic (one can debate the exegesis, but that is another discussion) appears more consistent than that of many who criticize him even as they want to embrace the benefits of his Trinitarian approach. Whether or not one wants to end up affirming Owen’s position on the application of Christ’s atoning work, we need to recognize his logic and how it fits into this conversation. The term ‘limited atonement’ is usually applied to the Calvinist version of the doctrine, which, like Owen’s presentation, affirms that it applies only to the elect and not to the non-elect. He insists that the alternative, a ‘universal’ atonement, is limited in an even more pernicious way if it still leaves some people unsaved. One version limits the scope of the atonement, while the other limits its effectiveness and promise. Owen, struck by the depth and power of the work of Christ, opts for the former. More fundamentally, he is deeply concerned not to pit the divine persons against one another. This is a risk not always easily recognized. For example, as mentioned earlier in this chapter, this appears when someone imagines that the Father wants to punish all sinners, but the Son loves them and so offers himself in order to satisfy the Father’s uncompromising wrath. Owen was aware of that error even in his own day: he explicitly rejects it, affirming instead that the incarnation and cross are the overflow of the Father’s love, not that which secures it.75 Christ’s death does not make God love people, but instead is the fruit of the Father’s love for people. Others, however, argue that Jesus’ death is for the whole world: the Father sends the Son who then offers himself for everyone. Accordingly, the Father loves the world and the Son dies for the world. Then why are there any who are not, in the end, saved? What about the Spirit? Is the Spirit the life-giving presence and power who makes a heart of stone into flesh (Isa. 44.3-4; Ezek. 11.19; 36.26-27; Rom. 8.6-13)? Is he the one who brings life to the dead (Ezek. 37.1-14; Jn 3.5; Jn 6.63; 1 Pet. 3.18)? Owen sees that, in seeking to make Christ’s death ‘universal’, some unintentionally make it appear that the Father and Son desire to save everyone, but the Spirit is apparently either reluctant or ineffectual. Why won’t the Spirit apply Christ’s death to the world? Why won’t he make all the blind see? Why won’t he warm all the cold hearts? Again, the danger of pitting the persons against one another surfaces, only now it is not the Father who appears to be the problem but the Holy Spirit. Put differently in terms of a withholding by the whole Godhead, and not a tension within it, the question could also be framed this way: if God in Jesus Christ has completely atoned for the sins of the world, and salvation depends on the application of that atonement by the Spirit, then why does God not, by his Holy Spirit, awaken, enlighten and regenerate everyone? Why does God not, by his Holy Spirit, bring to faith those whom he has elected and for whose sin he has made atonement? Owen’s logic can sound cold to us, but he is forcing readers to look carefully at the consequences of their theological moves. In this way Owen and Barth are more similar than different.76 All really good theologians must wrestle with universalism.

S ee especially Owen, Works, 2:17–40. For a fascinating study on Owen and Barth and what might be learned from each, see Suzanne McDonald, ‘Evangelical Questioning of Election in Barth: A Pneumatological Perspective from the Reformed Heritage’, in Karl Barth and American Evangelicalism, ed. Bruce L. McCormack and Clifford B. Anderson (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2011), 250–68, with Owen especially on pages 254–62; Suzanne McDonald, Re-Imagining Election: Divine Election as Representing God to Others and Others to God (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2010). 75 76

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Owen’s logic here shapes his ecclesiology, and only when this is recognized can we see a real difference from Gunton. Owen’s classic syllogistic framework can be laid out fairly simply:77 • God imposed his wrath due unto, and Christ underwent the pains of hell for; either • All the sins of all or • All the sins of some or • Some sins of all. These are the three options as Owen imagines them. If he died for all the sins of everyone, then because it is God who saves (i.e. inseparable operations), Christ’s death covers everyone’s sins (which must include the sin of unbelief!), and God, by his Holy Spirit, will apply the work of Christ to their lives by uniting a people to himself, thus securing them as daughters and sons of God. If God doesn’t do this, then we have a completed redemption that is left unapplied to some for whom he designed it, which is obviously problematic. So how does Gunton make sense of God’s action?78 If instead one claims Christ died for some of the sins of all (maybe everything but the sin of unbelief, or something like that), then we risk undercutting the efficacy and power of the life, death and resurrection of Christ. It is like presenting an incredibly strong rope to a rock climber about to descend a mountain, and then, just as they are about to rappel down, you mention that although the rope is two inches thick through 99.999% of the rope, at one small point that two-inch rope is reduced to a mere thread. But then we offer reassurance to the climber: ‘Don’t worry, besides that tiny point the rest of the rope is incredibly strong.’ To Owen, either the rope is two inches thick throughout or it simply can’t save the life of the person it is meant to save. Either salvation is of the triune God from start to finish or it isn’t. Only in this way would Owen think the Spirit really secures freedom, for it is the Spirit who brings freedom. Thus, while Gunton finds Owen helpful in how he highlights the Spirit in the life of Christ, and he approves of his affirmation of the voluntary nature of the Church which is nevertheless called and secured by the Spirit, one wonders if he can enjoy Owen’s cake without eating all the ingredients. Only because of his strong Trinitarian formulation of salvation can he likewise offer such comfort to his congregation amid their struggles. Obviously, that raises plenty of questions for all of us, but to be fair to Owen and Gunton, we must admit a real difference here.

CONCLUSION While Gunton found the Puritan John Owen to be a stimulating theological resource, he never devoted significant time or energy to expositing his work. Instead of writing a monograph on Owen, Gunton instead relied primarily on his former PhD students to help supply ideas from Owen that might then offer creative pathways forward amid the theological challenges Gunton encountered. Primarily looking to Owen in the areas of Spirit-Christology and his formulation of how election and ecclesiology relate, Gunton

See Owen, The Death of Death, in Works, 10:139–428 [this quote comes from 10:173–4]. For more on how this fits into Owen’s framework of reconciling God and humanity, see Kapic, Communion with God, 131–3. 78 Like Barth, Gunton could say, ‘I don’t know how or why God would leave any unsaved, and we cannot say either that he will or that he won’t,’ leaving that question completely in the hands of the undivided, triune God. 77

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found Owen to be a keen mind who offered creative ways to think afresh about classic problems. Gunton would never claim to be an expert on John Owen, but he was willing to read, wrestle with and learn from him. Sometimes he follows the Puritan while at other times he simply uses him as a springboard to say what he really wants to say. As long as we keep that in mind, reading Gunton’s engagement with Owen can prove stimulating to our own theological endeavours, even if we end up disagreeing or diverting from the paths laid out by one or both of them.79

Particular thanks to John Yates for his willingness yet again to offer such meaningful and substantial editorial  help.

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CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Gunton and Barth PETER S. OH

In October 1998, newly enrolled as a PhD student under the supervision of Colin Gunton, I attended my first seminar of the Research Institute in Systematic Theology at King’s College London. I recall taking my seat and then, a moment later, an elderly man with a long white beard in a black suit quietly sat next to me. After the seminar, I realized that this man was John Zizioulas whom I admired so much. It was his writings that had inspired me to continue my study of the doctrine of the Trinity. Here I was at King’s College in the company of Zizioulas and Gunton whose work on the Trinity remains profoundly important for contemporary theological discussion. During my first year at King’s College, I was able to meet Trinitarian theologians, such as Christoph Schwöbel, Alan Torrance, Murray Rae, John Webster, Brian Horne, Francis Watson, Steve Holmes and research students with diverse backgrounds and from various countries. The ecumenical diversity was also striking. At King’s, I shared in the seminar programme with Roman Catholic and Orthodox priests, Anglicans, Lutherans, Evangelical pastors, Baptist ministers and Pentecostal preachers. It was an era of rich theological discussion among scholars committed to understand all things in relation to the triune God and to work together in the quest for truth and spiritual nourishment.

ON READING BARTH FAITHFULLY Gunton’s interest in the Trinitarian theology of Karl Barth emerged during his student years in the 1960s when, under the direction of Robert Jenson, Gunton found in Barth a compelling alternative to the liberal theology of that time and to the postmodern relativism that was beginning to emerge. In his doctoral study Gunton developed a critical comparison between, and assessment of, the doctrine of God in the work of Charles Hartshorne and Karl Barth. The fruit of that doctoral research was published in 1978 under the title Becoming and Being: The Doctrine of God in Charles Hartshorne and Karl Barth.1 Gunton’s study of Barth continued throughout his career and while he remained deeply appreciative of Barth’s theology, he was also critical at a number of points, notably in respect of Barth’s pneumatology and his eschatology. As Christoph Schwöbel points out, however, many of the theological commitments forged through engagement with Barth remained foundational for Gunton. Schwöbel notes that the following claim that appeared in Gunton’s first book could equally well have found a place in his last: ‘The

Colin E. Gunton, Becoming and Being: The Doctrine of God in Charles Hartshorne and Karl Barth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978). 1

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lesson of Barth’s doctrine of the Trinity is that if God and so also the creature are to have the freedom proper to their natures, the conception of God as triune, and fully triune, is going to be instrumental in ensuring it.’2 That Gunton considered the study of Barth to be richly rewarding for aspiring theologians is evident in his teaching of a master’s course on Barth’s theology almost every year for fifteen years.3 He warned students against the popular caricatures and misconstruals of Barth and repeatedly stressed in those lectures that ‘the way to get into Barth is to select and to read – read him, there is no substitute!’4 The extent of Gunton’s engagement with Barth precludes comprehensive description and assessment in this short chapter, so I have chosen to focus on one theme that Gunton developed through his study of Barth and that remained central to his own theology. The theme is the character of the relation between God and humanity.5 Gunton was unimpressed by a tendency among some Barthian scholars to interpret the Church Dogmatics and Barth’s theology as a whole by framing it in the form of a rigid dualism, a total diastasis between God and humanity. Of course, the critique offered by Barth of the liberal theologians and speculative philosophers who demolished the ontological distinction between God and humanity remains entirely valid. The clear distinction must be maintained, but Gunton dismisses ‘the old cliché’ that for Barth, ‘God is everything, man is nothing’.6 There is no question of the ontological distinction between God and the creature, but God’s otherness is not expressed through remote isolation and inaccessibility. Rather, God draws humanity into communion with himself, elects humanity for that communion and so makes the creature holy.7

GUNTON’S VIEW OF BARTH’S DIALECTIC Gunton points out that Barth always develops his theology in dialectical form.8 It is crucial to understand the nature and dynamic of Barth’s own qualitative dialectic that reconciles a pair of contradictory statements that appear to be opposite to one another. For this reason, Gunton insists, it is impossible to resolve seemingly inconsistent and paradoxical issues in the Church Dogmatics under the assumption of a wholly diastatic relation between God and humanity. Barth’s dialectic is characterized by what Gunton describes as ‘a persistent dualism’, but it ‘must not be confused with a Hegelian dualism which emphasized the synthesis of thesis and antithesis’.9 Rather, Barth follows Kierkegaard’s

Gunton, Becoming and Being, 218. Cited in Schwöbel, ‘Foreword’, in Colin E. Gunton, The Barth Lectures, ed. P. H. Brazier (London: T&T Clark, 2007), xx. 3 We are indebted to Paul Brazier, one of Gunton’s students in that course, who transcribed from recordings, edited and published the text of those lectures. See Colin E. Gunton, The Barth Lectures, ed. P. H. Brazier (London: T&T Clark, 2007). 4 Gunton, The Barth Lectures, 71. 5 I will draw in what follows upon my own doctoral research on Barth’s Trinitarian theology completed under Gunton’s supervision at King’s College London and subsequently published as Karl Barth’s Trinitarian Theology: A Study in Karl Barth’s Analogical Use of the Trinitarian Relation (London: T&T Clark, 2006). It is worth noting with respect to the citations from that volume that are included in this chapter that Brazier reproduces the oral form of the lectures, so the prose is less formal and less elegantly crafted than is true of Gunton’s writing elsewhere. 6 Gunton, The Barth Lectures, 126. 7 Ibid.,  126. 8 Ibid.,  56. 9 Ibid.,  35. 2

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‘existential dialectic’ in which the ‘qualitative distinction between God and humanity, eternity and time, the infinite and the finite’ are maintained. ‘These opposites come together’, Gunton continues, ‘in an absolutely paradoxical manner in Christ Jesus; both poles remain in creative tension but they come together in no other way in our reality other than in Christ Jesus.’10 Gunton affirms that this dialectical epistemology of Barth’s is firmly based on the qualitative distinctions between divinity and humanity, the infinite and the finite, and the transcendent and the immanent, without each losing its respective nature and while maintaining the relational bipolarity between the opposites. For instance, in dealing with Barth’s doctrine of freedom, Gunton explains that God’s transcendence is revealed in his capacity to become immanent. Likewise, his infinity is revealed in his capacity to become finite: ‘If God’s infinity means you [God] can’t become finite then he is not infinite.’11 ‘God’s transcendence means that he can become finite so that he is infinitum capax finite – the infinite capable of the finite.’12 In explaining further the dialectical form of Barth’s theology, this time with respect to Barth’s doctrine of the eternal will of God, and God’s tying himself to our reality, Gunton observes, you cannot separate the eternal decision from its historical outcome. You can distinguish between the two but you can’t separate them entirely. Barth is almost obsessed with tying together what happens in history with what happens in eternity.13 The dialectical epistemology briefly described here is essential, Gunton explains, to a proper understanding of Barth’s Church Dogmatics. Without it one is apt to consider Barth’s work full of contradiction and irrational dogmas. It is also important to understand that it is a mistake to regard Barth as an anti-rational theologian. Rather, Gunton sees Barth as ‘an aesthetic theologian’.14 The structure of Barth’s theology is assertive rather than argumentative. It may be compared, Gunton suggests, to music. ‘Barth is not concerned to argue any more than Mozart is concerned to argue, Mozart just plays. I think that is Barth’s aim: to play on the revelation of God so that its truth and beauty will shine.’15 Unlike the Scholastics, Barth does not depend on human reason or natural philosophy but begins with the Word of God, as do the great Reformed and Lutheran theologians. Barth firmly establishes his own dialectical epistemology on the basis of the Word of God. ‘The Word of God’, says Barth, ‘is the centre and foundation and it is like a circle, and a certain number of lines are drawn out to a certain distance in all directions.’16 Barth does not consider the Bible alone as the Word of God, but it can be the Word of God in a particular condition. It becomes revelation just insofar as it bears witness to Christ. Revelation is thus the event of God’s saving presence in history. This is the foundation of Barth’s epistemological framework and of his qualitative dialectic.

Ibid.,  36. Ibid.,  102. 12 Ibid. 13 Ibid.,  117. 14 Ibid.,  63. 15 Ibid. 16 Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, Volume I/2, ed. G. W. Bromiley and T. F. Torrance (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1956) (hereafter CD), 869. 10 11

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BARTH’S QUALITATIVE DIALECTIC What is Barth’s qualitative dialectic like in essence, and how does it build upon Kierkegaard’s qualitative dialectic? In music, before an opera begins, an orchestra first plays an overture in order to present an outline of the music to the audience. Likewise, before beginning his magnum opus, the Church Dogmatics, Barth performed an overture in his Ethics. This material was the subject of his lectures from 1928 to 1931 in Münster and in Bonn, but they were not published until 1973. The editor of those lectures, Dietrich Braun, insists that ‘Barth offered a general sketch of theological ethics in which he anticipated what would be developed in the Church Dogmatics.’17 Gunton concurs and adds that this particular book says a great deal about Barth and his theology as a whole. Gunton comments in the Barth Lectures that, ‘for Barth there is no good theology that is not also ethics… A Barthian statement is that dogmatics is ethics and ethics is dogmatics – you will not do either right if you do not have the other in view all the time.’18 G. W. Bromiley confirms the point: ‘When the lectures are compared in detail with available material in Church Dogmatics, it will be seen that Barth … made considerable use of the contents of these earlier discussions.’19 Barth’s theology is always ethical and action-oriented in contrast to the abstract theology of his predecessors. This is one of the reasons why he changes the title of his Christian Dogmatics to the Church Dogmatics, thus indicating the essential ethical and existential character of his theology. The existential character of Barth’s thought, by which is meant its essential relation to the day-to-day realities of human existence, is a legacy of Barth’s early appreciation of Søren Kierkegaard. God’s self-revelation is the foundation, starting point and constant criterion of theology, but theology is also concerned with humanity’s response to revelation. Kierkegaard makes clear that the response is an existential response; it is expressed in the form our lives take. In stark contrast to rationalism and to the speculative German Idealism of the nineteenth century, Kierkegaard draws a sharp distinction between thought and existence. According to René Descartes, one’s existence is established through one’s consciousness as claimed in his famous dictum, ‘cogito ergo sum’, ‘I think therefore I am.’20 Kierkegaard insists that human existence is not an abstract notion, it is not a matter of speculation; rather it is actualized through the process of acting. The human being, according to Kierkegaard, forms the self through his or her own actions. Thinking is essential to this process insofar as action flows from deliberation, but it is through action that the self is formed. Writing under the pseudonym Johannes Climacus, Kierkegaard explains further that ‘the qualitative dialectic continually enjoins that one is not to flirt in abstracto with that which is the highest and then want to dabble in it, but one is to comprehend one’s essential task in concreto and essentially express it’.21 Elsewhere Kierkegaard explains that one’s life, one’s action in concreto, is always the expression of a life view be it aesthetic, ethical or religious.22 The final form, the religious Karl Barth, Ethik, ed. Dietrich Braun (Zürich: Theologische Verlag Zürich, 1973), ET, Geoffrey W. Bromiley, Ethics (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1981), vii. 18 Gunton, The Barth Lectures, 41. 19 G. W. Bromiley, ‘Translator’s Preface’, in Barth, Ethics, vi. 20 René Descartes, Descartes: Selected Philosophical Writings, trans. John Cottingham, Robert Stootthoff and Dugald Murdoch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 126–7. 21 Søren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments, vol. 1, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 563. 22 See Søren Kierkegaard, Stages on Life’s Way, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988). 17

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life view, appears in two forms which Kierkegaard calls Religiousness A (general religiosity) and Religiousness B (fully committed Christianity). Religiousness A involves all the common features of every religion, including Christianity without full commitment, and is distinguished as the religion of immanence. In other words, it is Religiousness founded upon the natural capacities, reason and experience of human beings. Religiousness A is dialectical in essence dealing with antithetical issues, such as the infinite and the finite, eternity and time, God and humanity. But it lacks the paradoxical nature that is characteristic of Religiousness B. Religiousness B is rooted in the revelation of God, most especially in the paradoxical reality of the incarnation in which the infinite is found in the finite, the eternal in time, thus calling into question our human conceptions of what is and is not possible for God. Within the dialectic of Religiousness A, the contradiction between eternity and time, the infinite and the finite, God and humanity, is perceived to be absolute and the perceived impossibility of their reconciliation leads to despair. The Christian confession that the God who is infinitely, qualitatively, different from the creature is found within the realm of finite human existence appears from the perspective of Religiousness A to be simply absurd.23 Human reason here comes up against its limits. The absurdity of this claim is the particularity that differentiates Christianity from any other form of religious and philosophical thought. Kierkegaard insists again that the truth of the Christian claim, the truth of the claim that God has come among us, cannot be known speculatively; it can be known only by ‘venturing the decisive act’ by committing one’s life to the reality with which we are confronted in Jesus. In contrast to G. W. F. Hegel who claims ‘Faith is essentially the consciousness of absolute truth’ and ‘faith comprehends’,24 Kierkegaard insisted that ‘to believe’ is qualitatively different from ‘to comprehend’. Faith requires a concrete existential act, an obedient response to divine authority.25 As Murray Rae explains, ‘ethics (the business of acting decisively) and epistemology cannot be separated’26 because ‘faith is a mode of existence which, far from presupposing an understanding of the Truth, is that which makes understanding possible’.27 This line of thought is very similar to Anselm’s famous dictum, ‘Fides quaerens intellectum’ (faith seeking understanding) in relation to Christian faith and human reason.28 In Kierkegaard’s thought, as Rae again indicates, the radical transformation of one’s epistemology in company with existential action is a key aspect of ‘conversion’ or ‘metanoia’ in the biblical sense. Metanoia involves the radical renewal of one’s mind by the power of the Holy Spirit.29 While Barth never refers to the qualitative dialectic of Kierkegaard’s Religiousness B as a positive, existential communication in faith, he agrees with Kierkegaard in rejecting any claim to a natural continuity between God and humanity. As Barth himself says, ‘If

S ee further, Oh, Karl Barth’s Trinitarian Theology, 26. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Christian Religion: Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion; Part III: The Revelatory, Consummate, Absolute Religion, ed. and trans. Peter Hodgson (Missoula: Scholars Press, 1979), 216. 25 Cf. Søren Kierkegaard, Journals and Papers, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1967–78), 1130, XA 268.n.d., 1849. 26 Murray Rae, Kierkegaard’s Vision of the Incarnation: By Faith Transformed (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 159. 27 Ibid.,  159. 28 Cf. Karl Barth, Anselm: Fides Quaerens Intellectum, trans. Ian W. Robertson (London: SCM Press, 1960), 16. 29 Rae, Kierkegaard’s Vision of the Incarnation, 115. Also see Søren Kierkegaard, For Self-Examination and Judge for Yourself!, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 81. 23 24

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I have a system, it is limited to a recognition of what Kierkegaard called the “infinite qualitative distinction” between time and eternity, to my regarding this as possessing negative as well as positive significance: “God is in heaven and thou art on earth.” ’30 T. F. Torrance is right to claim, therefore, that Barth’s dialectic is very much indebted to Kierkegaard.31 Their respective dialectics hinge upon the paradoxical reality of the Incarnation, the antithetical relationality of God and humanity in the person of Jesus Christ. The conviction shared with Kierkegaard that all human theological speculation is challenged and confounded by the reality of God’s presence with us in the lowly and suffering figure of Jesus was maintained by Barth throughout his life, as is confirmed in his acceptance speech following the award of the Sonning Prize in 1963. Barth expresses his perspective on Kierkegaardian dialectic in the following manner: The second edition of my Epistles to the Romans is the very telling document of my participation in what has been called ‘the Kierkegaard Renaissance.’ There were to be for all of us, and indeed especially for me, new dawns with new questions and answers, and yet I believe that throughout my theological life I have remained faithful to Kierkegaard’s reveille as we heard it then, and that I am still faithful to it today.32 Here, we must keep in mind the importance of the otherness of God in relation to humanity in the dialectics of Kierkegaard and Barth. For both of them, the radical diastasis between God and creation, between the infinite and the finite, was not the end of their contentions. As John Godsey explains, Barth wanted to emphasize ‘the fundamental discontinuity’ between God and humanity as revealed in the Bible.33 While he never abandoned this emphasis he also realized that this way of describing the relationship between God and humanity is not sufficient as it stands. For God does not exist only in and for himself; God determines to be God for us. ‘It is when we look at Jesus Christ that we know decisively that God’s deity does not exclude, but includes His humanity.’34 Gunton observes that Barth’s Christology clearly follows a Chalcedonian pattern – Jesus Christ is both ‘the electing God and the electing man’35 – although he also expresses some reservations about the adequacy of Barth’s treatment of Christ’s humanity.36 George Hunsinger likewise indicates Barth’s use of the Chalcedonian pattern in developing the concept of the double agency of Christ in his work.37 Thus, even though Barth did not fully grasp the ultimate purpose of Kierkegaard’s qualitative dialectic in Religiousness B, he does end up with the same conclusion. Both Kierkegaard and Barth base their conceptual frameworks exclusively on the once-for-all event of the Incarnation of Jesus Christ – the paradoxical existence of divinity and humanity in the person of Jesus. We have already noted Gunton’s estimation of Barth’s debt to Kierkegaard in this matter: Barth learned

Barth, The Epistle to the Romans, trans. from the sixth edition by Edwyn C. Hoskyns (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968), 10. 31 T. F. Torrance, Karl Barth: An Introduction to His Early Theology, 1910–1931 (London: SCM, 1962), 83. 32 Karl Barth, ‘A Thank-You and a Bow’, in Fragments Grave and Gay, ed. Martin Rumscheidt; trans. Eric Mosbacher (London: Collins, 1971), 98. 33 John Godsey, ‘Introduction’, in Karl Barth: How I Changed My Mind, introduction and epilogue by John D. Godsey (Edinburgh: Saint Andrew Press, 1969), 23. 34 Karl Barth, The Humanity of God, trans. John Newton Thomas (Louisville: John Knox Press, 1960), 46. 35 Gunton, The Barth Lectures, 115, 223. 36 Ibid.,  200. 37 George Hunsinger, How to Read Karl Barth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 223. 30

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from Kierkegaard that ‘These opposites come together in an absolutely paradoxical manner in Christ Jesus.’38 In contrast to Hegel’s harmonious synthesis in which the dialectical opposites are resolved by human reason, the dialectical thinking of Kierkegaard and Barth seeks to reveal the utter inadequacy of human reason in relation to the knowability of God. What is required is a radical transformation of one’s consciousness brought about through encounter with Christ that reaches out beyond and above human reason.39 As T. F. Torrance explains, Barth’s theology took a dialectic form in order to expose the false continuity between God and humanity that was prevalent among the philosophers and liberal theologians in the early nineteenth century.40 In Hegel’s dialectical movement, the infinite qualitative difference between God and humanity gradually disappears and the two antithetical elements come together by transforming one to the other in a harmonious synthesis that is logically explicable and comprehensible.41 Gunton explains that for Hegel, ‘knowledge really meant the human mind realizing its oneness with divine’.42 In other words, according to the logic of Hegel’s dialectic, when one thinks about the world, one ultimately comes to recognize one’s unity with the divine. But as Gunton points out, Barth completely rejects any suggestion that humans are in any way divine or that the mind is divine.43 It is clear for Barth that God is the Creator, and we are creatures. However, this does not mean Barth rejects the possibility of a communal relation between God and humanity. While for Hegel, the relation between God and man takes place through the infinite God becoming finite man (humanization) and in return, the finite man becoming the infinite God (divinization), for Barth, following Kierkegaard, there is a movement between God and humanity consisting in God’s self-disclosure and human response. The paradoxical dialectics of Kierkegaard and Barth maintain the complementary relationality of God and humanity without destroying their antithetical natures and so keep an antithetical bipolarity in tension. Barth’s use of the Kierkegaardian diastasis is not intended to divide God from man or man from God. On the contrary, his ultimate purpose is to understand aright the perichoretic unity between God and man in Jesus Christ. Barth says, We must believe that God can and must only be absolute in contrast to all that is relative, exalted in contrast to all that is lowly, active in contrast to all suffering, inviolable in contrast to all temptation, transcendent in contrast to all immanence, and therefore divine in contrast to everything human, in short that he can and must be only the ‘wholly Other.’ But, such beliefs are shown to be quite untenable and corrupt and pagan, by the fact that God does in fact be and do this in Jesus Christ.44 In this particular communal unity, as Barth indicates, God remains God, and man remains man without negation on either side. Like Kierkegaard in the nineteenth century, Barth reveals the fallaciousness and shortcomings of the speculative philosophy and liberal theology that proposed a natural smooth transition between God and man apart from

Gunton, The Barth Lectures, 36. Oh, Karl Barth’s Trinitarian Theology, 35. 40 Torrance, Karl Barth, 84. 41 Cf. Thomas E. Hulme, Speculation (London: SCM, 1924), 10. 42 Gunton, The Barth Lectures, 136. 43 Ibid.,  136. 44 Barth, CD IV/1, 186. 38 39

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divine revelation and grace. For Barth, the deployment of the concept of the wholly otherness of God in his theological discourse served to eliminate the secularized and humanized basis for the relation between the divine and the human, and so to establish on the appropriate terms the inseparable relationality between God and humanity revealed in Jesus.45 Having established the qualitative distinction between God and man, Barth then begins to deal with the positive and reconciling dialectical unity between God and humanity in the event of the Word of God, the Revelation in which man is no more considered as nothing but everything. Gunton explains that Barth’s insistence on the ‘wholly otherness’ of God from man does not entail, as is sometimes alleged against Barth, that God is everything and man is nothing. For Barth, humanity is indeed nothing by itself, but, in reconciling the world to Himself God determines that man may not be nothing in Jesus Christ.46 Barth expresses this in the following way: Man is nothing, that is to say, he is fallen and prey to nothingness … In the giving of his Son, however, in reconciling the world to himself in Christ God is indeed everything and only in order that man may not be nothing, in order that he may be God’s man, in order that as such he may be to everything in his own place on his own and within his own limits.47 Gunton explains that for Barth, the coming of Jesus Christ to our state, to our estate, as the Reconciler enables us to become everything according to our own limits.48 In other words, the grace of God in sending his one and only Son as the means of reconciliation has changed once and for all the entire fabric of the diastatic God-man relation and the status of humanity. It opens up a new dynamic of existential relationality between God and humanity. As Gunton indicates, the action of God for us in Jesus Christ is universal in scope. Furthermore, ‘the connection between the man Jesus and other men is ontological and therefore dynamic. Jesus’ humanity is a spelling out of the humanity implicit in election.’49 Barth who presupposes the wholly otherness of God in order to make a qualitative distinction between God and man now talks about the existential elevation of humanity in relation to God. As Gunton indicates, in regard to Barth’s doctrine of the humanity of Jesus, the coming of Jesus as the Mediator to the human estate in the event of the Incarnation ‘gives the creature a share in his divine life’.50 This does not mean divinity becomes humanity, and humanity becomes divinity; this is the folly of the Hegelian synthetic dialectic. The divinity of Jesus remains as it is in the event of the Son’s becoming human. In the hypostatic union of divinity and humanity in the event of the Incarnation, the two qualitatively different natures unite complementarily while maintaining each of the respective natures. On account of the incarnation, however, by which the Son meets us on our own plane, so to speak, God and humanity are put in a totally different existential relation than was thinkable in the condition of wholly otherness in which God is related to humanity only perpendicularly from above.

Cf. Torrance, Karl Barth, 89. Gunton, The Barth Lectures, 155. 47 Karl Barth, CD IV/1, ch. 58. 1, 89. 48 Gunton, The Barth Lectures, 156. 49 Ibid.,  198. 50 Ibid.,  201. 45 46

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Barth’s ontology. Defining what it is to be We are now in a position to consider in more detail the nature of human existence. For Barth, to exist or to be means more than mere biological and substantial existence. Gunton considers Barth to be ‘a relational theologian who wants to show how righteousness flows from reconciliation’.51 Righteousness here means right relationship. This comment gives us a clear insight into Barth’s concept of being on the whole. As Gunton says, for Barth, God’s being is not substantial or numerical but relational and communal. This is the biblical way to exist. As mentioned above, René Descartes, the father of modern Western philosophy, claims that to think is to exist. In contrast, Barth claims that to exist is to act. What is more, action always takes place in the form of a relational event. This is why for Barth, as Gunton explicates earlier, ‘Good dogmatics is also ethics. Ethics is more than good moral instruction.’52 For Barth, action is a way of defining the existence of both God and man. Barth defines God’s relational way of being ‘in the light of His activity’.53 All the events through which God relates himself to the creature such as creation, reconciliation and redemption are different types of act; yet ‘they are interlinked because they are all done by the one Triune God and of course the Trinity is the crucial link. This is because although creation is appropriated to the Father and reconciliation to the Son they are both acts of the whole, in relation to the whole of creation.’54 Gunton himself endorses this relational understanding of the being of God: ‘we may say that to think of divine being is to have one’s mind necessarily drawn to the three persons, to think of the three [is] to be led ineluctibly to a concept of shared, relational, being’.55 Gunton develops the nature of this relational being of God further by characterizing it as self-related divine reality. He explains that for Barth, ‘The modes of divine being that are distinct from each other are successively related in such a way that each mode of being of God first becomes what it is together with both the other modes of being.’56 In other words, the three Persons of the Triune God constitute the one Being of God in the interrelational reality of each action. As Gunton points out, when Barth deals with the interrelational reality of the Triune God, he is concerned ‘with ontology, with the ontological ground for the relation of God to the creatures’.57 The form of divine relationality has found expression in theology in the doctrine of the perichoresis of the divine persons which ‘states that the divine modes of being mutually condition and permeate one another so completely that one is always in the other two and the other two in the one’.58 Nevertheless, the three distinct modes of being of the Triune God do not mix together or become a synthetic being by eliminating the three different modes. Rather, as in the qualitative dialectic of the Incarnation, the three different modes of being of the Trinity maintain their unity in distinction but with no separation in relation to one another. This perichoretic unity seen in both the Trinity and the Incarnation gives us a unique ontological framework.59 Each mode of being has Ibid.,  133. Ibid.,  228. 53 Barth, CD I/2, 881. 54 Gunton, The Barth Lectures, 245. 55 Colin. E. Gunton, The One, the Three, and Many; God, Creation, and the Culture of Modernity. The 1992 Bampton Lectures (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 214. 56 Gunton, Becoming and Being, 143, italics original. 57 Ibid.,  145. 58 Barth, CD I/1, 370. 59 Cf. Gunton, Act and Being, 119. 51 52

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its own distinct identity but without separation. This concept of perichoresis guards the Trinitarian Being against tritheism and modalism. Returning then to the claim made above: for Barth, as Gunton points out, to exist is to act. This ontological definition opens the way to a clearer understanding of the doctrine of the Trinity and of the hypostatic union of the two natures in the event of the Incarnation. God’s Triune being is not a matter of substance; nor is it countable. In other words, elementary algebra is not applicable with respect to the Tri-unity of God or to the union of God and man in Jesus Christ. God’s being cannot be perceived substantially or numerically. This divine way of being as the ultimate form of existence gives us a deeper and truer sense of the reality of existence for both God and humanity. For Barth, Gunton explains, ‘God’s being is event, and therefore a becoming.’60 That is to say, ‘God is movement toward the other, and this movement is expressed conceptually by the eternal relation of the Son to the Father in the Spirit. In its turn, this inner movement provides the ontological grounding for the outward movement we see to have happened in the life of Jesus.’61 In the event of the Incarnation, God moves towards the world that he has created.62 This is the basis of Barth’s doctrine of election according to which God elects humanity for relationship with himself and so determines to be God for us. In The Humanity of God, published in 1956, Barth claims, ‘God does not exist without man.’63 He had developed the same line of thought in Church Dogmatics IV/1, published in 1953, in the following manner: The divine being and life and act takes place with ours, as it is only as the divine takes place that ours takes place. To put it in the simplest way, what unites God and us men is that He does not will to be God without us, that he creates us rather to share with us and therefore with our being and life and act His own incomparable being and life and act, that He does not allow His history to be His and ours ours, but causes them to take place as a common history.64 This remark is a quantum shift from the context of the wholly otherness of God in his Epistle to the Romans. This shift in his understanding of the existential relation between God and man has led many readers of Barth to divide his theology into an early period and a late period and to differentiate between his dialectical theology and his later analogical theology. However, that does not do justice to his theology as a whole for the qualitative distinction between God and man, the infinite and the finite, and eternity and time never fades away but remains throughout Barth’s theology. In other words, for Barth, the dynamic of the qualitative dialectic remains an essential tool for theology. His later use of analogy must be understood in this light and so also in the light of the mediating role of Jesus Christ. Barth speaks of an analogia relationis and an analogia actionis but for him they are the same thing.65 As Gunton observes, Barth understands ‘the relation of the God and the world not in terms of a static Analogy, but in terms of correspondences of acts’.66 Gunton, Becoming and Being, 167. Ibid. 62 Ibid. 63 Barth, Humanity of God, 50. 64 Barth, CD IV/1, 7. 65 Cf. Barth, ‘Karl Barth’s Table Talk’, 66. In Analogie Entis order Fidei? Die Frage der Analogie bei Karl Barth (Göttingen: Vandenkoek & Ruprecht, 1965), 116–19. 66 Gunton, Becoming and Being, 184. 60 61

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Gunton explains further that Barth fundamentally identifies God’s being with His act.67 Thus, says Barth, ‘the statements “God is” and “God loves” are synonymous’.68 Analogous predication based on a relation between God and the world subsists in the events of divine action. Accordingly, ‘Barth’s conception of God is based upon God’s becoming man, and so into relation with what is not himself.’69 Consequently, human participation in the divine being and life and action consists in the cooperation of human action with divine action occurring as an ongoing event of becoming in the relationship made possible by the God-man Jesus Christ in whom there is ‘no isolation of man from God or of God from man’.70 To put it another way, in Jesus Christ there is no isolation of human action from divine action or of divine action from human action. God simply does not want to act alone in Himself but wills to take action together with humanity because God through Jesus Christ wants to bring to humanity the ultimate salvation that is ‘the supreme, sufficient, definitive, and indestructible fulfilment of being’ that ‘has a part in the being of God’.71 This is the basis of any analogy between divine and human being and act. This fulfilment of being that has a part in the being of God does not mean, however, that the creature becomes a Creator, nor a divinized being in the form of a Hegelian synthesis but hidden in God. The being of humanity is hidden in God but has become manifest in the incarnate Word of God, Jesus, the Son of God and the Son of Man. His unique humanity, as Barth claims, includes ‘an indefinite multitude of other men, so as to be manifest and effective in those who believe in Him in a way that is absolutely decisive for their past, present and future’.72 The true and real humanity can be found not in Adam but in Jesus Christ. Adam is the temporary copy only, pointing to the original, who is the true and real Human. Jesus Christ’s uniqueness lies in His universally encompassing humanity as humanity’s true and original nature, thus reconciling the diastatic relation between God and humanity. Jesus Christ brings about the salvation of man by identifying Himself with us.73 Participation in the ultimate humanity of Jesus Christ in which the qualitative diastasis between God and humanity is overcome takes place through faith. Jesus Christ’s encompassing of all humanity can be effective only when each individual identifies themselves with Him within the common ontological basis established in Jesus by the Holy Spirit. When a person identifies themselves with Jesus Christ in faith, they share in real humanity through a complementary unity of action with Him. Barth gives us lucid insight into this unique existential unity of Jesus and man in faith in the following manner: They have to identify themselves with Him, because He has already identified Himself with them. There is no question of any merging or any confusion between Him and them, but neither can there be any question of any abstraction or separation. He in Ibid.,  193. Barth, CD IV/II, 755. 69 Gunton, Becoming and Being, 186. 70 Barth, Humanity of God, 108. 71 Barth, CD IV/1, 8. 72 Karl Barth, ‘Christ and Adam: Man and Humanity in Romans 5’, in Scottish Journal of Theology, Occasional Papers No 5, trans. T. A. Smail (Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd, 1956), 3. 73 Cf. Barth’s ‘God’s Word and the Decision of Faith’, in God Here and Now, trans. Paul M. van Buren (London: Routledge, 2003), 18. Cf. Paul Fiddes, Past Event and Present Salvation: The Christian Idea of Atonement (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1989), 134. 67 68

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His individuality is theirs, and so they in their individuality can only be His. The ineffaceable distinction between Him and them is the guarantee of their indissoluble unity with Him. They as receivers are subordinated and yet indissolubly related to Him as Giver; they as members are subordinated and indissolubly united to Him as Head.74 Humanity’s relationship with Jesus Christ in faith involves cooperative action with Him. This relationship of divine action and human action is complementary in nature because there is no confusion or isolation but harmony in the indissoluble unity between the antithetical sides. If divine action merges with human action, it would mean a divinization of human being along the lines of the Hegelian dialectic which seriously violates the Chalcedonian Christology and misses the essential point of analogia relationis and anaogia actionis (similarity within dissimilarity). Following his qualitative dialectic, and that of Kierkegaard, Barth not only draws an ineradicable distinction between divine action and human action but also firmly maintains their inseparable unity and an irreversible order between them. Barth constructs his theology on the three major pillars of doctrine: the doctrine of creation, the doctrine of reconciliation and the doctrine of redemption. The first two doctrines reveal the penultimate situation of humanity in relation to God whereas the doctrine of redemption deals with the ultimate eschatological form of true human existence which involves cooperation with Jesus Christ in faith. The ultimate eschatological goal of humanity is to be a child of God in the God-Man Jesus. This eschatological goal of humanity is not solely future but is present now as the future.75 For Barth, a groundbreaking transformation of the ‘infinite qualitative distinction between Creator and creature into Father-children relationship’ is established in the context of redemption. Through redemption, the human being is not a mere creature and a forgiven sinner, but becomes ‘a partaker of the divine nature’.76 The hypostatic union of Jesus Christ and the communicatio operationum opens up to human nature through the Holy Spirit a wholly transformed situation and an impossible possibility. At this point, Barth transforms the irreconcilable qualitative difference between divine nature and human nature into a bipolar relational reality which enables the possibility of humanity’s participation in the nature of God. This participation should not be understood as a substantial or numerical union in the manner of a Hegelian synthesis but rather as a complementary synthesis of bipolar relational action in tension that is similar to the essential characteristics of the perichoretic union of the Trinity and the union of divine and human natures in Chalcedonian Christology. To repeat the point made earlier, the relation is characterized by inseparable unity, indissoluble differentiation and indestructible order. In the event of the Incarnation, the Word of God became ‘true Man’ and dwelled in and with humanity. In such a way, Jesus Christ proves himself worthy to be called ‘Immanuel’. Barth makes clear, of course, that God freely decided to be with and for humanity. Yet, his claim, ‘God does not exist without man’, clearly entails an inseparable relation between God and man. It is of the utmost importance to recognize, however, that this inseparable relation is wholly contingent upon God’s freely deciding to be God for us. Gunton points out that this affirmation of God’s being with and for humanity involves

Barth, Christ and Adam, 41. Barth, Ethics, 465. 76 Ibid.,  466. 74 75

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‘a realized eschatology’, not a fulfilled and complete eschatology but the beginning of ‘a future eschatology to come’.77 He explains later that this eschatology ‘yet has to be realized in each believer by accepting it in faith’.78

CONCLUSION I hope to have made clear that, notwithstanding the points of disagreement that Gunton has with Barth, he remained deeply appreciative of Barth’s doctrine of God.79 He sharply criticizes Barth’s weakness in handling the doctrine of the Holy Spirit. He claims that Barth is wrong in some aspects of eschatology.80 But Gunton also insists that regardless of doctrinal correctness or incorrectness, the careful and respectful reading of Barth enables such readers to do other and better things than Barth himself did. For Gunton, this is exactly Barth’s greatness! In order to experience this sheer theological euphoria, Gunton repeatedly insisted, one must read Barth first. ‘Select and read Barth, there is no substitute.’ This is Gunton’s lasting advice to generations of theologians to come.

Gunton, The Barth Lectures, 158. Ibid.,  227. 79 See ibid., 109. 80 See ibid., 185–6. 77 78

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CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

Gunton and Jenson JEREMY IVE

From his early studies as a research graduate right to the end of his life, Colin Gunton came to develop a close relationship with Robert Jenson as guide and theological conversation partner. Jenson’s influence on Gunton is clearly evident in the innumerable citations of Jenson’s works in Gunton’s writing, including Jenson’s systematic theology.1 Gunton engaged closely with Jenson’s theology and edited and contributed to his Festschrift on the occasion of Jenson’s 70th birthday.2 Just before Gunton died, he and Jenson were both involved in a three-year-long colloquium at Princeton University, where Jenson was theologian in residence.3 For his part, Jenson continued to reflect on Gunton’s theology after Gunton’s sudden death.4 Jenson came from a strong Lutheran background – the Norwegian heritage Lutheranism of the Midwest of the United States – and had deep roots in Continental theology and philosophy.5 Although Jenson was a Lutheran, he liked to point out that he spent much of his life in the exposition of two Reformed theologians, namely Jonathan Edwards and especially Karl Barth.6 Jenson’s Lutheranism expressed itself especially in his emphasis on God’s freedom in the grace revealed in the crucified and risen Jesus effected and witnessed to by the work of the Holy Spirit.7

Robert Jenson, Systematic Theology, vol. I: The Triune God (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997); vol. II: The Works of God (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). Hereafter abbreviated ST with volume number. 2 Colin Gunton, ed. Trinity, Time and Church: A Response to the Theology of Robert Jenson (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2000). Gunton’s personal response in that collection is ‘Creation and Mediation in the Theology of Robert W. Jenson: An Encounter and a Convergence’, 80–93 and reprinted in Father, Son and Holy Spirit: Towards a Fully Trinitarian Theology (London: Continuum T&T Clark, 2003), 93–106. The page numbers for both printed versions will be given in further references. 3 Colin Gunton and Robert W. Jenson, ‘The Logos Ensarkos and Reason’, in Reason and the Reasons of Faith, ed. Paul J. Griffiths and Reinhart Hütter (London: T&T Clark, 2005), 78–85. 4 See, for example, Robert W. Jenson ‘A Decision Tree of Colin Gunton’s Thinking’, in The Theology of Colin Gunton, ed. Lincoln Harvey (London: T&T Clark, 2010), 8–16. 5 See Robert W. Jenson, ‘About Dialog, and the Church, and Some Bits of the Theological Biography of Robert W. Jenson’, Dialog 11 (1972): 38–42; Carl E. Braaten, ‘Robert William Jenson – A Personal Memoir’, in Trinity, Time and Church, 1–9. 6 Robert W. Jenson, America’s Theologian: A Recommendation of Jonathan Edwards (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988); Colin E. Gunton, The Promise of Trinitarian Theology, 2nd edn (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1997), 123; Robert W. Jenson, ‘Autobiographical Reflections on the Relation of Theology, Science, and Philosophy; or, You Wonder Where the Body Went’, in Essays in Theology and Culture, ed. Robert W. Jenson (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1995), 222. 7 Colin Gunton, Act and Being: Towards a Theology of the Divine Attributes (London: SCM Press, 2002), 106–7; quoting Robert W. Jenson, ‘An Ontology of Freedom in the De Servo Arbitrio of Luther’, Modern Theology 10, no. 3 (1994): 250. 1

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Gunton belonged to the Reformed tradition which brought him into a constructively critical conversation with Jenson. Gunton first met Jenson when he undertook a comparative study of Charles Hartshorne and Karl Barth under Jenson at Mansfield College, Oxford, in 1966 while Jenson was Lutheran World Federation exchange professor there as well as dean and tutor of Lutheran Studies.8

THE CRITIQUE OF ‘STANDARD RELIGION’, ‘CLASSICAL THEISM’ AND THE CRISIS OF MODERNITY Jenson and Gunton developed a robust critique of much Christian theology, both ancient and modern, as both sought to return to the roots of the Christian faith as represented in the experience and witness of those who first encountered the risen Christ. A central theme which Jenson brought to Gunton’s attention was the question of what he called ‘standard religion’ – the natural attempt of humanity to reach beyond itself, a ‘mixing of time and eternity’ – in its traditional form as myth with its calendar of a recurring seasonal cycle, and then in its metaphysical form shaped by the quest for a timeless eternity. Then finally, after the Enlightenment, standard religion took the form of science as the domestication of time and the knowledge of the world and, allied to this, of technology as the attempt to control and limit the vagaries of the historical process. Standard religion involved a view of a God, or of some ultimate reality, who or which cannot be known and is unchanging and impassible.9 For Jenson, standard religion in either its ancient or modern forms is an attempt to insulate humanity from the outcomes of uncertainty in everyday life. This is a theme which Jenson inherited from Barth (as we shall see in the following section) who set faith against religion – in contrast to the view of Friedrich Schleiermacher who portrayed religion in a positive way as humanity’s sense of God in the integrated totality of human experience.10 As will be seen, Jenson contends that from the first encounter with the Gospel in the world of late Mediterranean antiquity to the present day, there has been a thoroughgoing synthesis in classical Christian theology between standard religion and the revelation of God in the Bible. This synthesis forms the framework which informs traditional dogmatic presentations of the Christian faith.11 From the first, standard religion came into collision with the Christian gospel based on the encounter of the first disciples with the risen Christ, the Christian Gospel constitutes a scandal to the standard religious mind with respect to the particularity Jesus as saviour and with respect to the offence of God’s sovereign electing act in Jesus.12

Christoph Schwöbel, ‘The Shape of Colin Gunton’s Theology: On the Way towards a Fully Trinitarian Theology’, in The Theology of Colin Gunton, 182–6. Gunton’s thesis was published as Colin. E. Gunton, Becoming and Being: The Doctrine of God in Charles Hartshorne and Karl Barth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978) and reprinted with an epilogue (London: SCM Press, 2001). All further references to this work will be to the latter edition. 9 Jenson ST I, 3, 8–9, 49–60, 67; Gunton, The Promise of Trinitarian Theology, 124; Jeremy G. A. Ive, ‘The God of Faith: R.W. Jenson’s Critique of Standard Religion and His Temporal Account of the Trinity’ (University of London, MPhil thesis, 1995), 18–26. 10 See Robert W. Jenson, ‘The Christian Doctrine of God’, in Keeping the Faith: Essays to Mark the Centenary of Lux Mundi, ed. Geoffrey Wainwright (London: SPCK, 1989), 46; Robert W. Jenson, ‘You Wonder Where the Spirit Went’, Pro Ecclesia 2, no. 3 (1993): 296–304; Jenson, ST I, 8–9, 54; Ive, ‘God of Faith’, 34–5. 11 See Ive, ‘God of Faith’, 27–40. 12 Jenson, ST I, 42–60; Ive, ‘God of Faith’, 47–74. 8

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Jenson argues that behind the defects of Christian theology in the Western church, but also in the Eastern church, lies a conception of God inherited largely from their common Hellenistic philosophical framework.13 Standard religion expressed in classical theology saw God as an essentially monadic being. Thus, Jenson avers, this framework, even when expressed in terms of Trinitarian terminology, tends towards an implicitly Unitarian methodology and a fatally flawed view of God defined as the final cause of the existing order. This is an essentially protological conception of deity (i.e. God is seen in terms of the beginning of creation rather than its final outcome), while God is known largely, or exclusively, in terms of a list of negatively defined attributes. This conception is then coupled uneasily with the biblical accounts of the God who is active in creation and in human history.14 In its classical form, Christianity took the metaphysical conception of timelessness largely from the Greeks and reinterpreted it as God’s ‘impassibility’.15 The Christian version of standard religion, according to Jenson, understands God not in terms of the revelation of the particular man Jesus Christ, fully human and divine, but rather in terms of the ladder of spiritual ascent through degrees of being to an unknown divinity to which the seeker after religious validation or status is to climb.16 Gunton largely adopted Jenson’s critique of standard religion although he used the term ‘classical theism’ and identified three key features: it is ‘supernaturalistic’, it conceives of God as timeless and it is ontologically hierarchical. With respect to the first, classical theism holds that God can be characterized solely in terms of the negation of human experience. The second feature follows from this: time and the human experience of time are entirely alien to the God of classical theism. The third feature is that the great chain of being is the framework within which the relationship of God and the world needs to be conceived.17 Classical theism, grounded as it is in Greek dualistic thinking, was carried through into the Western Enlightenment and further into the secularism of the modern world. Indeed, Gunton argues that both the Western Enlightenment world view and the dualistic thinking of the Greeks that provided the background of classical theism are in essence one and the same thing.18 Gunton’s initial target in the 1970s was Thomas Aquinas whose conception of God exemplifies archetypically all three of the characteristics of classical theism which Gunton identified.19

Jenson, ST I, 7; Gunton, Act and Being, 5–6. Gunton, Act and Being, 22. 15 Robert W. Jenson, Triune Identity: God According to the Gospel (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1982), 57–77; ‘Christian Doctrine of God’, 34; Robert W. Jenson, Unbaptized God: The Basic Flaw in Ecumenical Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1992), 120. 16 Robert W. Jenson, God after God: The God of the Past and the God of the Future as Seen in the Work of Karl Barth (Indianapolis: Bobbs–Merrill, 1969), 120; Colin E. Gunton, A Brief Theology of Revelation. The 1993 Warfield Lectures (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1995), 53; Gunton, Act and Being, 14–18; Ive, ‘God of Faith’, 27–40; and Uche Anizor, Trinity and Humanity: An Introduction to the Theology of Colin Gunton (Bletchley: Paternoster, 2016), 44–6. 17 Gunton, Becoming and Being, 2–3; Colin E. Gunton, The Triune Creator: A Historical and Systematic Study (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1998), 31–6; Anizor, Trinity and Humanity, 25–6, 55–6; Jenson, ‘A Decision Tree of Colin Gunton’s Thinking’, 9. 18 Gunton, Yesterday and Today: A Study of Continuities in Christology, 2nd edn (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1997), 86–7, 97–100. 19 Gunton, Becoming and Being, 1–5; Gunton, Triune Creator, 6, 99–102; Jenson, ‘A Decision Tree of Colin Gunton’s Thinking’, 9–10; Anizor, Trinity and Humanity, 21, 33–4, 46, 58, 60–1. 13 14

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His critique of Thomas owes much to Jenson who describes how Thomas uses the notion of analogy to safeguard God’s timelessness.20 From the 1980s, Gunton came to identify Augustine as the prime representative of the classical theistic position, a suspicion he shared with Jenson who characterizes Augustine as interpreting God as sheer eternal presence to whose infinite consciousness past and future are equally immediate, and of whom the human soul is the created mirror. The central charge which both Jenson and Gunton levied against Augustine was that he tended to stress the timeless unity of God over against God’s engagement with the material world.21 Gunton and Jenson both found much of Christian theology inadequate to represent the biblical witness, not least regarding the person and work of Jesus Christ. Both theologians, first Jenson and then Gunton, found a common source of inspiration to stimulate and shape their quest for a more satisfactory alternative in the writings of the Swiss theologian, Karl Barth. This is not to say, however, that they always agreed with Barth.

HOW JENSON INFLUENCED GUNTON’S READING OF KARL BARTH Gunton’s reading of Barth will be dealt with elsewhere in this volume, but here we will consider the way in which his reading was influenced by that of Jenson. Through their conversations and in the development of their respective theological systematics, Barth remained a third interlocutor for the two theologians, stimulating their common reflections or uniting them in largely common critiques of his theological systematics. Jenson wrote his doctoral thesis, later published as a book, at Heidelberg under the supervision of Peter Brunner, who advised him to work on Barth’s doctrine of election.22 Jenson saw in Barth’s work a revolutionary reorientation of nineteenth-century theology, especially that which developed from Schleiermacher onwards with its focus on subjective religious experience. In contrast Barth insisted that theology mist be centred and premised on God’s sovereign and eternal act of election, of and through Jesus Christ.23 Barth’s theology was the door which Jenson opened for Gunton in his theological enquiries. At the heart of Barth’s account of election is the claim that the triune God who elects us to salvation cannot be other than the person known to us in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.24 As Jenson later pointed out, like Barth, Gunton made the triunity of God the starting point of his reflections. For Gunton, as for Jenson, Barth’s

Robert W. Jenson, The Knowledge of Things Hoped for: The Sense of Theological Discourse (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), 58–89; Jenson, Triune Identity, 118; Robert W. Jenson, ‘Triune God’, in Christian Dogmatics, vol. 1, ed. Carl E. Braaten and Robert W. Jenson (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1984), 142; and Ive, ‘God of Faith’, 30–1. 21 Gunton, Triune Creator, 75–86; Jenson, ‘A Decision Tree of Colin Gunton’s Thinking’, 11–12; Robert W. Jenson, ‘Aspects of a Doctrine of Creation’, in The Doctrine of Creation: Essays in Dogmatics, History and Philosophy, ed. Colin E. Gunton (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1997), 25–7; and Anizor, Trinity and Humanity, 21, 33–8. 22 Robert W. Jenson, Alpha and Omega: A Study in the Theology of Karl Barth (New York: Thomas Nelson, 1963). 23 Ibid., 39; Robert W, Jenson, ‘Karl Barth’, in The Modern Theologians, Vol. I, ed. David F. Ford (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 38; Jenson, ‘You Wonder Where the Spirit Went’, 296–304. 24 Jenson, Alpha and Omega, 143; quoted in Colin E. Gunton, Theology through the Theologians: Selected Essays 1972–1995 (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1996), 90; Jenson, God after God, 103, 154–6, 172–5 quoted in Gunton, Theology through the Theologians, 95–9. 20

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foundational insight is that only the triune God could have a creature which is truly an other, not a mere emanation from himself, and yet enter into intimate relations with that other.25 But Barth’s theology was not without problems for both Jenson and Gunton. Jenson argues that Barth does not take the critique of standard religion far enough. He was also critical of what he took as Barth’s failure fully to integrate the account of Jesus as he is known through his death and resurrection above all and the eternal son whom God the Father elects from eternity as the one through whom salvation uniquely and ultimately is brought to humanity. He argues that Barth tends to conceive of God’s electing act in Christ as ‘before all time’.26 He saw Barth’s analogy of faith as deeply problematic since it seemed to operate on two levels: on one, the eternal sending of the Son, and then, on the other, the latter’s historical ministry, death and resurrection.27 Gunton adopted Jenson’s critique that Barth’s formulation of the doctrine of the Trinity is essentially directed towards the past or to a timeless realm somehow portrayed as above or parallel to the working out of the historical process.28 Like Jenson, he is critical of the tendency in Barth to conceive of Jesus Christ as a metaphysical idea rather than a fully historical person.29 Further, and related to this, Gunton agrees with Jenson that for Barth, the Holy Spirit tends to remain an ‘occasional assertion’ and is squeezed out of the Trinitarian schema,30 and that Barth’s doctrine of the Holy Spirit remains undeveloped.31 Despite these shortcomings which Jenson and Gunton both identified, Barth’s insights were vital to both theologians in their development of a robust and incisive account of the Trinity and in their conviction concerning the necessary centrality of Trinitarian faith to any satisfactory Christian dogmatics. Jenson described Gunton – together with Jürgen Moltmann, Wolfhart Pannenberg and Karl Rahner – as a fellow member of a ‘distrustful minority’ who ‘followed lines opened up by Barth and began a contrary movement’.32 Barth provided the impetus for Jenson and, following him, Gunton to develop, albeit in slightly different ways, a reconstruction of Christian systematic theology on a radically Trinitarian basis. It is here that not only the similarities but also the differences of their respective approaches can be seen.

THE TRINITY – IMMANENT AND ECONOMIC The centrality of the doctrine of the Trinity was the critical element which Jenson contributed to Gunton’s theological thinking, but became, in time, the place where

J enson, ‘A Decision Tree of Colin Gunton’s Thinking’, 10. Robert W. Jenson, The Triune Identity: God According to the Gospel (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1982), 180. 27 Jenson, Alpha and Omega, 162. 28 Jenson, God after God, 168–75; Jenson, ‘You Wonder Where the Spirit Went’, 301; Gunton, ‘“Until He Comes”: Towards an Eschatology of Church Membership’, in Called to One Hope: Perspectives on the Life to Come, ed. John Colwell (Carlisle: Paternoster Press, 2000), 252; Gunton, The Promise of Trinitarian Theology, 124; Gunton, Becoming and Being, 182; Gunton, Theology through the Theologians, 36n.7; Gunton, ‘Creation and Mediation’, 81–2/94–5; Schwöbel, ‘The Shape of Colin Gunton’s Theology’, 184; Anizor, Trinity and Humanity, 32, see n.29 on 223. 29 Gunton, Becoming and Being, 184; Gunton, Promise of Trinitarian Theology, 127; Gunton, Theology through the Theologians, 61; Gunton, Barth Lectures, 199–200; Gunton, ‘Creation and Mediation’, 81/94. 30 Jenson, God after God, 173, Gunton, Theology through the Theologians, 36n.7. 31 Jenson, ‘You Wonder Where the Spirit Went’, 303–4; Gunton, Becoming and Being, 218; Gunton, Theology through the Theologians, 106n.2; Anizor, Trinity and Humanity, 32–3. 32 Jenson, ST I, 113n.166. 25 26

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their differences of approach, influenced by their respective Lutheran and Reformed backgrounds, can be seen. In his own theological thinking, Jenson had come to, and articulated, the view that a robust doctrine of the Trinity is essential to Christianity as a faith, rather than as a form of standard religion. He builds on Barth’s basic contention that the Trinity is Christianity’s identification of God.33 The articulation of the doctrine of the Trinity is the answer to the question as to which God it is in whom we put our ultimate trust. As Gunton sums up Jenson’s position, the doctrine of the Trinity has to do with God’s ‘concrete identity’.34 Jenson argues that God as Trinity is not the negative deity of standard religion who lacks boundaries or definition but is rather the one who is encountered in his historical actions and overcomes boundaries.35 God, for Jenson, is not somehow above or remote from time but precisely constitutive of it through the relations of Father, Son and Holy Spirit as respectively God’s past, present and future: the Spirit is the power of the future who frees the Father as the past and witnesses to the Son who is God’s ‘specious present’.36 Gunton adopts and develops Jenson’s key insight on the Trinity as identifying the God whom Christians worship and in whom they have faith. Gunton followed Jenson in viewing the God of the Bible not as the unknown God of classical antiquity but, rather, as the historical person of Jesus of Nazareth who died and was raised from the dead by the Holy Spirit. In the sacrifice and resurrection of the Son through the liberating and futureanticipating Spirit, God as Trinity is known definitively as humanity is drawn into the innermost life of God. Jenson quotes Gunton approvingly to this effect, ‘The universality of the significance of the cross is … based in the universality of the activity of the Word, reaffirmed and realised in the Spirit in the resurrection of Jesus.’37 This is a position which Gunton develops over the course of his life, from the time of writing his thesis on.38 That God is Trinity means that God is orientated eternally to what happened in Jesus of Nazareth and identified across the divide between time and eternity.39 Gunton took up Athanasius’s insistence on Jesus Christ as a creating Word incarnate in human flesh to present what he called the triune ‘mediation’ of creation, that is, the Triune God acts directly on the world not at one remove from it through intermediate beings or through a nexus of causality in which the world is conceived of as mechanism.40 Further, he takes Jenson’s description of how the Cappadocians reorganized the vertical account of the hypostases which they inherited from Origen, who unsatisfactorily portrayed each hypostasis rising one step after another from time towards eternity, into a more satisfactory account of the hypostases as related horizontally to one another across time.41 I ve, ‘God of Faith’, 48; ‘You Wonder Where the Spirit Went’, 296. Gunton, Barth Lectures, 91 quoting Jenson, God after God, 113; Jenson, ST I, 63–74; Ive, ‘God of Faith’, 47–59. 35 Gunton, Act and Being, 85–6. 36 Jenson, ST I, 89; Robert W. Jenson, ‘Creation as a Triune Act’, Word and World 2, no. 1 (1982): 38–42; Robert W. Jenson, ‘Does God Have Time?’, in Essays in Theology of Culture, ed. Robert W. Jenson (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1995), 199; Ive, ‘The God of Faith’, 117–35; Jeremy Ive, ‘Robert W. Jenson’s Theology of History’, in Trinity, Time and Church, 152–7, ‘Specious present’ is a term coined by William James in his Principles of Psychology (1890) to denote the content of our sensible experience of time by contrast with the ‘strict present’, the punctilinear perceptual present. 37 Jenson, ST, I, 191–2; quoting Gunton, The Actuality of the Atonement, 169. 38 Gunton, Being and Becoming, 149–51; Gunton, Act and Being, 84, 96. 39 Gunton, Yesterday and Today, 136. 40 Gunton, Theology through the Theologians, 144–6; Jenson, America’s Theologian, 25. 41 Jenson, The Triune Identity, 106–7; Jenson, ‘A Decision Tree of Colin Gunton’s Thinking’, 12–13; Gunton, Theology through the Theologians, 145–6; Colin E. Gunton, ‘The God of Jesus Christ’, Theology Today 54, no. 3 (1997): 333; Anizor, Trinity and Humanity, 43 and 227n.73. 33 34

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This notion of otherness and mediation remained a central feature of his dialogue with Jenson, one which shows Jenson’s own concern to counteract the conception of God as remote and timeless.42 Following Jenson, Gunton counters the conception of God as remote from time with Irenaeus’s description of the Son and the Holy Spirit as the ‘two hands of God’, and indeed, as can be seen in other contributions to this volume, this came to play a formative role in Gunton’s own systematics.43 However, Gunton argues for greater space between the persons of the Trinity than Jenson allows for.44 He sees the distinction between the immanent and economic Trinity, which Jenson seeks to play down if not remove altogether, as necessary to retain the distinction between the persons as relating freely to one another.45 With Jenson, Gunton affirms that God makes room for creation through his engagement with it. However, he differs from Jenson in how this ‘roominess’ is conceived of and articulated. For Jenson, God’s engagement with creation is conceived of in terms of the triune constitution of the divine being itself, as we have seen. For Gunton, God’s triune constitution supports the genuine otherness of creation within the divine economy. However, he is concerned that Jenson’s account does not do full justice to the particularity of the Son and the Spirit as the two hands of God – to use the picture from Irenaeus. The pneumatological and Christological aspects of this will be further developed in the following two sections.

THE UNSURPASSABLE HOLY SPIRIT For both Jenson and Gunton, the Holy Spirit has a constitutive role within the life of God and in the triune economy although that constitutive role is worked out in somewhat different ways. For Jenson, drawing not least on the insights of Gregory of Nyssa, the Holy Spirit as the power of the future brings about radically new, and ultimately hopeful, possibilities despite the past with its constraints and frozenness. For him the Spirit brings the distinctive characteristic of unsurpassability.46 This is so since the future which the Spirit brings constitutes hope for the present and since the Spirit is the person of the Trinity whom Jenson associates with that futurity. The Spirit for Jenson is the One who speaks the Gospel Word and transforms the life of the world in the light of what is to come. Gunton notes with approval that for Jenson the Spirit ‘is another who in his own intention liberates Father and Son to love one another’.47 Gunton developed his theology of the Holy Spirit in conversation with Jenson. He picks up but takes in his own way Jenson’s insight that the Spirit frees the Father from mere intention to bring about that intention’s concrete realization in the unfolding creative order, that is, through the achievement of true otherness-in-relation – as the Father, Son and Spirit are in eternity so are they in the created order.48 It is through the

Gunton ‘Immanence and Otherness. Divine Sovereignty and Human Freedom in the Theology of Robert Jenson’, in The Promise of Trinitarian Theology, 122–41; Christoph Schwöbel, ‘The Shape of Colin Gunton’s Theology’, 197 and n.66, 208. 43 Jenson, Triune Identity, 69–70; Jenson, ‘A Decision Tree of Colin Gunton’s Thinking’, 13–14. 44 Gunton, Promise of Trinitarian Theology, 133. 45 Ibid.,  134. 46 Jenson, ST I, 160. 47 Ibid., 156 quoted in Gunton, Act and Being, 120; ST I, 146 quoted in Gunton, Act and Being, 146. 48 Jenson, ST II, 35; Gunton, Act and Being, 146; Gunton, Theology through the Theologians, 161–4; Schwöbel, ‘The Shape of Colin Gunton’s Theology’, 193. 42

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Spirit that the reconciliation which re-establishes the community lost at the Fall takes place.49 For both Jenson and Gunton there are suggestive possibilities in Augustine’s account of the Spirit as the bond of love between Father and Son. The Spirit is the source of relational liveliness, that is, love, within the Trinity and just so within the world. From Jenson, Gunton received the conviction that it is the Spirit who brings life.50 Gunton is close indeed to Jenson as his mentor and interlocutor since, as we have seen, Jenson’s own theology is animated above all by hope – a hope which is grounded in the anticipation of God’s future realized by the work of the Holy Spirit. As we have seen, Jenson and Gunton share an ambivalence towards Augustine. One of the points of dissatisfaction with Augustine is that according to Augustine’s theology, according to Jenson, the work of the Holy Spirit is displaced. This is because of Augustine’s problematic conception of the relationship of God to the world as one causal agent over another against the objects of causality, leaving the Spirit operating in a semi-mechanical way through grace within the causal nexus of the world.51 While Gunton welcomes Jenson’s characterization of the work of the Spirit as liberation, and the bringing of election into the present, he has concerns about the loss of particularity which Jenson’s account seems to result in, not least through Jenson’s tendency to identify the Spirit as the power of the future in a general rather than in a particular sense.52 For Gunton, it is the Holy Spirit who is the ‘agent of otherness and particularity … the mediator of the Son’s relation to the Father’.53 Drawing on Basil of Caesarea, Gunton sees the Holy Spirit as the one who brings the creation to perfection.54 Gunton speaks of the eschatological action of the Spirit as ‘the enabling of created things to become what they are by anticipation of what they shall be’.55 Thus, for both Jenson and Gunton, the Holy Spirit has primacy in their talk about God. For Jenson, the Holy Spirit is constitutive of who God is and brings the future hope of what God offers through the gospel. For Gunton, the Holy Spirit is the bringer of particularity within creation and the perfecter of God’s purposes for creation. Either way, the Holy Spirit is key to their respective accounts of the person and work of the Son, as we shall see in the following section.

THE PNEUMATOLOGICALLY ENHYPOSTATIC CHRIST For Jenson, Jesus of Nazareth is the man of the future, the final judge whom the unsurpassable Spirit has raised and denoted as our saviour and Lord. For Jenson (and, indeed, for Gunton), the Holy Spirit holds for us the promise of the future known and revealed in the present in the person of Jesus of Nazareth.56

Colin E. Gunton, The One, the Three and the Many: God Creation and the Culture of Modernity. The 1992 Bampton Lectures (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 217n.5. 50 Jenson, ST II, 185, Gunton, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, 125–6, also n.26. 51 Jenson, ‘The Holy Spirit’, in Christian Dogmatics, Vol. 2, ed. Carl E. Braaten and Robert W. Jenson (Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press, 1984), 126–8; Gunton, Theology through the Theologians, 146–7. 52 Gunton, Promise of Trinitarian Theology, 132–3. 53 Gunton, Intellect and Action, 80. 54 Gunton, Act and Being, 13–14; Gunton, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, 125. 55 Gunton, Theology through the Theologians, 149; Gunton, The One, the Three and the Many, 223. 56 Jenson, ‘Triune God’, 184. 49

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Jenson’s and Gunton’s positions on Christology are shaped by their respective Lutheran and Reformed traditions. As Gunton points out, whereas the Calvinist tradition tends to draw attention to the distinction of the divine and human in the person of Christ, Lutherans tend to articulate their Christology in terms of the communicatio idiomatum – the exchange of attributes whereby the divine attributes are transferred to the human and vice versa.57 As Jenson puts it, the Lutheran position tends to follow the Alexandrian position in the early church which emphasized strongly the unity of the natures of Christ. This is opposed to the Antiochene position which tends to distinguish the person of the divine Son from his human incarnation. Jenson characterizes the difference between the Alexandrian and Antiochene positions as follows: the Alexandrians took as their starting point the identity of the man Jesus with the eternal Logos, while the Antiochenes asserted the difference of status and operation between Jesus the man and his divine identity to protect the divinity of the Logos from subjection to change and vicissitude.58 Gunton, although from the Reformed tradition, is deeply critical of what he sees as its ‘Nestorian’ tendencies, that is, the tendency to posit two persons of the Son: one divine and one human.59 Nevertheless, following Barth, he is critical of the Lutheran notion of the communicatio idiomatum which he sees taken to its logical conclusion in Hegel, where humanity is divinized and the divine is seen as the highest achievement of the human spirit. The effect of this, he argues, is to submerge the human Jesus in the action of the divine.60 He sees this tendency also in Jenson,61 notably in Gunton’s favourite quotation from Jenson, half-concealed in a footnote, that Hegel’s ‘only fault, was to confuse himself with the last judge – but that is quite a fault.62 The question of the Logos asarkos, the notion of an identity of the Son separate from his enfleshed identity as the son of Mary, was another point of initial divergence between Jenson and Barth. Although in his doctoral thesis he had been critical of Barth’s rejection of the notion of a Logos asarkos, Jenson eventually came to reject the notion himself.63 According to Jenson, the Chalcedonian framework of two natures in one hypostasis merely established the ‘necessary boundaries of christological interpretation’, but it did not resolve the precision of the what or rather the who of that hypostasis and what it, or rather he, does.64 Jenson denies that there can be any universal state of the Logos, a Logos asarkos, who as he puts it is in effect ‘an actual unincarnate Logos lurking somehow before, behind or beyond Jesus the Son’.65 For Jenson the flesh of Jesus is that of the Logos.66 Pre-existence as an affirmation of the Son’s timeless existence is anathema to the whole position for which he has argued. He rejects

Gunton, Theology through the Theologians, 78. On which see, Jenson, ST I, 125–7; Jenson, ‘A Decision Tree of Colin Gunton’s Thinking’, 14–15; Colin E. Gunton, The Christian Faith: An Introduction to Christian Doctrine (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), 91–2, 95. 59 Gunton, The Christian Faith, 78–9; for comment on this, see Alan Spence, ‘The Person as Willing Agent: Classifying Gunton’s Christology’, in The Theology of Colin Gunton, 52–3. 60 Gunton, ‘Creation and Mediation’, 84–5. 61 Gunton, The Promise of Trinitarian Theology, 134–8; Gunton, Theology through the Theologians, 78 and n.24; Gunton, ‘Creation and Mediation’, 84–5. 62 Gunton, Yesterday and Today, 142 quoting from Jenson, Knowledge of Things Hoped for, 233. 63 Jenson, Alpha and Omega, 165–7; Jenson, ‘Religious Pluralism, Christology and Barth’, Dialog 20 (1982): 33; Jenson, ‘The Christian Doctrine of God’, in Keeping the Faith; Jenson, Triune Identity, 140–1; Gunton, The Barth Lectures, transcribed and ed. Paul H. Brazier (London: T&T Clark, 2007), 170–1. 64 Jenson, ST I, 132–3. 65 Ibid.,  142. 66 Robert W. Jenson, ‘An Attempt to Think about Mary’, Dialog 31, no. 4 (1992): 260. 57 58

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any notion of God divorced from God’s self-realization.67 For Jenson it is the begetting of the Son by the Father which precedes the incarnation, not the existence of some disembodied Logos. This point he later clarified in his Systematic Theology by acknowledging that in the Triune Identity he had not sufficiently affirmed his affirmation of the former while denying the latter.68 It is the Spirit working back from the intended future through the resurrection of Jesus, that the latter is, as described in Rom. 1.3-4, determinately the divine Son.69 For Gunton the notion of a pre-incarnate Logos is a necessary safeguard to the assertion of the divinity of the child born to Mary.70 Gunton differs from Jenson in that while he does not affirm the Logos asarkos, nevertheless he holds to a sharper distinction between the ‘states of being’ of the eternal Son and the incarnate Lord than does Jenson. That distinction, Gunton argues, is necessary for a recognition of the particularity of the humanity of Jesus and so that his human identity is not entirely absorbed into the divine action.71 However, despite these differences, both came to the view that there is no longer a Logos asarkos separate from the Jesus known in his life. And indeed, having nuanced his own position in this regard in his Systematic Theology, Jenson might not be as far away from Gunton on this matter as he might have been formerly. Both agree that the notion of the Logos asarkos is incompatible with the historical particularity of the person of Christ – to adopt the notion of a Logos asarkos would be to divide the person of the Son, with the historical Jesus, on the one hand, and his atemporal doppelgänger, on the other. They took up together the theme of the Logos ensarkos – it is in the incarnate, historical human being, Jesus of Nazareth that is being referred to. Jenson and Gunton together hold the universal Logos as ‘one and the same’ person as the one born of Mary. They jointly affirm that Jesus is the Logos ensarkos, that is, fully enfleshed, or a Logos fully shaped by reference to the historical concreteness of the fully human son of Mary.72 As well as their divergences over the question of the Logos asarkos, there is also a divergence between Jenson and Gunton on the question of the will of Jesus. Jenson, following Maximus the Confessor, asserts that the Son’s divine will is what Father, Son and Holy Spirit will together, and his human will is fully harmonious with the divine will in that Jesus is divine. The Son in his obedience to the Father is merely participating as the Son in the mutual harmony he eternally enjoys in common with the Father and the Spirit. The constraint on his action is not external to who he is – he is one in will with the Father and the Spirit. The second person of the Trinity simply is the Jesus of the Gospels, and it is as the fully incarnate Logos that Jesus suffers – his divinity is not somehow insulated from his sufferings.73 Gunton by contrast takes the position that the man Jesus has only one will – that of his Spirit-assisted humanity. Jesus fulfils the will of God as the enfleshed Logos not because he is unable to sin (non posse peccare) but because, through the Holy Spirit, he is able not to sin (posse non peccare). For Gunton, as indeed for Jenson, it is not the nature which has attributes to be shared but the person – the person who acts is the eternal son of God become truly human. Properties or attributes should not be considered as things but the actions of a person.74 Jenson, ST I, 139. Ibid., 141n.85; Jenson, Triune Identity, 175; Ive, ‘God of Faith’, 128–9. 69 Jenson, ST I, 42–4. 70 Jenson and Gunton, ‘Logos Ensarkos and Reason’, 81. 71 Gunton, ‘Creation and Mediation’, 83–5/96–5. 72 Gunton and Jenson, ‘Logos Ensarkos and Reason’, 80–1. 73 Jenson, ST I, 134–6. 74 Gunton, Act and Being, 147–50. 67 68

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For Gunton, it is as a man that Jesus is fully obedient to the Father through the enabling work of the Holy Spirit rather than because of his identity as the eternal Logos, as Jenson, following Maximus, argues. For Gunton it is above all the Spirit who effects the particularity of the man Jesus in the latter’s full humanity. That same Spirit is able to triumph over sin and death, and transforms and enables Jesus to be our saviour.75 Thus, for Gunton, it is the perfecting Spirit who denotes the man Jesus as truly the One through whom all things were made – it is through the mediation of the Spirit that the mediation of Jesus as Logos, Christ and Lord is made possible and brought to completion.76 Here we see reflected Jenson’s emphasis on the Spirit as the bringer of futurity whereby Jesus, resurrected by the Holy Spirit, is truly to be understood as the man of the future, and the one through whose personality that future is defined and takes its true character. All history is moving towards our encounter with Jesus whose particular character will shape the outcome in which all will share in a publicly experienceable way.77 With the scholastic Lutheran theologian Johannes Brenz, Jenson affirms that Jesus is risen not into some metaphysical realm but rather into the future; it is according to his character that all things will be shaped.78 So, despite the various divergences between Jenson and Gunton in Christology, as in other areas, they end up with similar directions of travel albeit following different paths along the way. Both affirm that it is Jesus born in the flesh, crucified, risen and expected whom we worship, not some remote, unknowable eternal double. This has bearing on how the church as the body of Christ is conceived of by the two theologians.

THE CHURCH AS THE BODY OF GOD’S INSPIRITED PRESENCE For Jenson, the church is the body of Christ, and the sacraments of baptism and above all the Lord’s Supper are visible signs of the presence of the risen Lord among his people in anticipation of the totus Christus, that is, the full eschatological revelation of Christ’s Lordship over the whole of creation.79 Moreover, as one body, the church for Jenson lives in the Trinitarian life of God in that it is enhypostatic, that is, it takes on the personality of Jesus through the work of the Holy Spirit.80 Jenson rejects the notion of the extra Calvinisticum whereby the physical body of Christ is located in heaven. The communicatio idiomatum translates in terms of the Lutheran Eucharistic theology to the claim of the ubiquity of the physical body of Christ – an account to which Jenson gives a strongly eschatological twist, in that the Lord’s Supper is seen as a placeholder for the risen Christ between his ascension and return.81 Drawing on Hegel’s discussion of dominion and slavery in the German philosopher’s

Gunton, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, 157; Paul Cumin, ‘The Taste of Cake; Relation and Otherness with Colin Gunton and the Strong Second Hand of God’, in The Theology of Colin Gunton, 66, who quotes from Gunton’s incomplete and unpublished dogmatics. 76 Gunton, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, 180. 77 Ive, ‘God of Faith’, 54–5. 78 Jenson ST I, 203–6; ST II, 253–4. 79 Jenson, ST II, 159, 167–73, 271–2, 289, 298–9, 347–54; See also Ive, ‘God of Faith’; Ive, ‘Robert Jenson’s Theology of History’, 150–1; Jenson, Visible Words: The Interpretation and Practice of Christian Sacraments (Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press, 1978), 40–50. 80 Jenson, ‘An Attempt to Think about Mary’, 263. 81 Jenson, Visible Words, 11; Jenson, ST I, 206; Jenson, ST I, 205–6. 75

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Phenomenology of Spirit, Jenson argues that were Christ not embodied in his community, albeit proleptically, his presence would represent that community’s enslavement not its liberation, and indeed the damnation of the world.82 Through the Spirit, the new community is created as the spouse of the Son and as the embodiment of God’s own life as its members are drawn into the divine conversation.83 Gunton regards this as too close an identification of the church with Christ. As Gunton argues, the point of 1 Cor. 11.26 is that there is a real absence not a presence of Christ in the Lord’s Supper.84 Gunton hesitates to say that the church is the body of Christ – its identity is anticipatory of the work of the Holy Spirit rather than realized; certainly the presence of the Holy Spirit is not something to take for granted.85 This presents a real difference between Gunton’s ecclesiology and that of Jenson’s – as the latter argues graphically: ‘If the risen Jesus does not have the eternal Son’s transcendence of time and space, how does he get to be in First Presbyterian of a Sunday morning?’86 However, Gunton, following Jenson, argues that it is as the church that Christians truly know who God is and inhabit liturgically God’s presence among them in the world.87 Thus, while Jenson and Gunton may disagree as to how Christ is present, they nevertheless agree that the church through the work of the Holy Spirit anticipates the final realization of God’s purposes in Christ in the eschaton. And so, with their ecclesiology as with their pneumatology and Christology, Jenson and Gunton arrive at not too dissimilar a destination, albeit by different routes.

CONCLUSION Gunton was deeply influenced by Jenson from the time of the latter’s acting as Gunton’s doctoral supervisor at Mansfield College, Oxford University. From their common engagement with the theology of Karl Barth, Gunton adopted and developed a critique of what Jenson called ‘standard religion’, and which Gunton called ‘classical theism’ in its Christian manifestation. Such a position has its origin in Greek metaphysics and its progeny not least in Western Enlightenment thought is characterized by fissiparous individualism. In conversation with Jenson, again through their common engagement with Barth, Gunton developed a systematic theology centred on the doctrine of the Trinity. Gunton’s Trinitarianism contained a strong emphasis on the primacy of the work of the Holy Spirit, not only in creation but also within the community of the divine persons, in which, both Jenson and Gunton affirmed, the being and identity of the triune God consists. Through the influence of Jenson, Gunton developed a strong account of the reality of the incarnate and crucified Son and the transforming implications of his resurrection. However, while sharing the central features of Jenson’s theological insights, and the concomitant critique of ancient and modern culture, Gunton had critical reservations about the theology of his lifelong friend and interlocutor. These reservations concern

Jenson, ST II, 214–5. Jenson, ‘Attempt to Think about Mary’, 263’; Jenson, ST II, 172–3; Ive, ‘God of Faith’, 101–3. 84 Gunton, ‘ “Until He Comes” ’, 254–5, 258–9; See also John Colwell, ‘Provisionality and Promise: Avoiding Ecclesiastical Nestorianism’, in The Theology of Colin Gunton, 106, 111–12, 114; Uche Anizor, ‘A Spirited Humanity: The Trinitarian Ecclesiology of Colin Gunton’, Themelios 36, no. 1 (2011): 30–4. 85 Gunton, The Christian Faith, 121–3. 86 Jenson, ‘A Decision Tree of Colin Gunton’s Thinking’, 15. 87 Gunton, The Christian Faith, 14; Gunton, Revelation and Reason, 26–7. 82 83

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both Jenson’s account of the Trinity as well as his accounts of the work both of the Holy Spirit and of Christ as they are made present in the church and in the world. Gunton was concerned about Jenson’s tendency to collapse the immanent into the economic Trinity and to define the distinctive work of each person in terms of past, present and future. He was concerned that this identified God too closely with the temporal process itself. Taking Irenaeus’s picture of the two hands of God, Gunton argued that the relationality and particularity which this signifies should be protected by a more careful distinction between the immanent and economic Trinities. This works through into his pneumatology, Christology and ecclesiology. In his pneumatology Gunton’s focus on the Holy Spirit as the specific bringer of particularity was at variance, he felt, with Jenson’s generalized account of the Holy Spirit as the bringer of the future promised by God through the resurrection of Jesus. With respect to Christology, Gunton was concerned about the monophysite direction of Jenson’s theology, that is, the tendency to collapse the human and the divine nature into one. For this reason, he held back from the blanket rejection by Jenson, at least in the latter’s middle thinking, of the notion of a Logos asarkos, that is, of a separate, preincarnate identity of the Son. However, with Jenson he affirmed that the hypostatic union is best understood in terms of the Logos ensarkos, that is, of the person of the Son known primarily and definitively as enfleshed, and thus in all his historical particularity. In his ecclesiology, Gunton qualified Jenson’s close identification of the church as the body of Jesus but differed from Jenson over speaking more about the absence of Christ and the anticipated coming presence of the risen Lord. The presence of the Holy Spirit and a demonstrably greater eschatological reserve is found in Gunton’s theology compared to Jenson’s. Jenson’s influence on the development of Gunton’s thought was far-reaching and transformative, even though Gunton clearly developed his own distinctive voice and theology, while remaining Jenson’s close conversation partner right up to the time of his death. Mutually enriched and sharpened by this conversation, both theologians were able to bring their respective and distinctive insights to bear in their contributions to the development of a robust reaffirmation of the Trinitarian roots of the Christian faith and the decisive potential of that retrieval for Christian life and thought.

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Gunton and Zizioulas PARASKEVÈ (EVE) TIBBS

‘It is a mark of interesting minds that they see a little further or deeper than the customary or fashionable, that they are a little ahead of the field.’1 Although this glowing commendation certainly could have applied to Colin Gunton, it was actually penned by Colin Gunton about John Zizioulas, Metropolitan of Pergamon, in the introduction to a chapter he wrote on the topic of Zizioulas’s trinitarian theology. Gunton closed that chapter with a similarly generous encomium: ‘I write as someone who has learned from [Zizioulas] important lessons not only about all the topics I have discussed so far’2 and many more. These words serve here as an introduction to one of the reasons the present chapter exists. Not only were Colin Gunton and Metropolitan John Zizioulas engaged in similar theological undertakings, but they were also colleagues and friends, and Zizioulas was a prominent influence on Gunton’s ideas. It is well known that Colin Gunton was not only a careful and systematic thinker but a prolific author, and an engaging author at that, with a broad assemblage of scholarly references. He showed a willingness to listen to other voices, even voices from the past, and even if he would ultimately disagree with them at points.3 These points are evidenced by how his theological ideas developed in dialogue with so many theologically diverse and chronologically disparate thinkers, from Irenaeus, a second-century bishop, to Charles Hartshorne, a twentieth-century Process Theologian, and, of course, even a contemporary Greek Orthodox bishop like Metropolitan John Zizioulas. The friendship and professional relationship between John Zizioulas and Colin Gunton is especially fascinating if only because of their dissimilar ethnic and ecclesiological traditions. In many ways, the diverse ecclesiologies of Gunton and Zizioulas serve as a case study exception to the widely held rule that a particular model of the Trinity will typically support a parallel or corresponding ecclesiology.4 In fact, I believe one of the more interesting outcomes of their relationship is how one moved significantly towards the trinitarian views of the other without a similar shift in his understanding of the Church. A brief biographical introduction of Metropolitan John Zizioulas will be followed by a discussion of their friendship and their professional relationship from Colin Gunton’s point of view. I will then survey the more significant areas in which their theologies

Colin E. Gunton, ‘Persons and Particularity’, in The Theology of John Zizioulas: Personhood and the Church, ed. Douglas H. Knight (Hampshire: Ashgate, 2007), 97. 2 Ibid.,  107. 3 This was the attitude Gunton conveyed in Theology through the Theologians: Selected Essays, 1972–1995 (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1996), ix. 4 See: Miroslav Volf, After Our Likeness: The Church as the Image of the Trinity (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans,  1998). 1

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gradually became aligned and some areas that were never ultimately affiliated. In the former case, I will discuss two major shifts ‘Eastward’ in Gunton’s conceptualization of the Trinity, both of which, many scholars believe, were inspired in some way by Zizioulas. In the latter case, their methodologies remained dissimilar from one another, as might be expected with their theological and ecclesial backgrounds. Those ‘external’ cultural and ecclesial differences (we might say ‘eastern’ vs ‘western’) remained apparent in their individual approaches to theological inquiry, even as their conclusions aligned in some areas. Also significant within the legacy of their scholarly alliance is that the two were often both praised and critiqued together as the nearly homogenous ‘founding fathers’ of a particular trinitarian outlook and were even referenced frequently throughout at least one article with the singular moniker: ‘Gunton/Zizioulas’.5 Although I will not revisit that particular article, it is certainly unique that one would find a Greek Orthodox bishop and an English United Reformed Church pastor discussed together as a unified thought-entity.

METROPOLITAN JOHN ZIZIOULAS John D. Zizioulas was born in 1931 in Greece, where he began his theological education in the universities of Thessaloniki and Athens (1950–4). His first contact with the West came in the following year, when he spent a semester of formation for graduate students at the Ecumenical Institute of Bossey near Geneva. In 1955 he left Europe for the United States to undertake master’s studies at Harvard under a scholarship offered by the Conseil Oecumenique des Eglises, which led to doctoral studies there. For the three years of his doctoral work, Zizioulas simultaneously pursued two areas of research: one at Harvard, under the direction of Georges Florovsky6 on the Christology of Maximus the Confessor, and another on the unity of the Church in the bishop and the Eucharist during the first three Christian centuries, for the University of Athens, supervised by Florovsky and George Huntston Williams, who was Professor of Church history at Harvard at that time.7 In 1964, John Zizioulas returned to the University of Athens and became Assistant Professor of Church History. In 1970 he became Professor of Patristics at the University of Edinburgh, moved to the University of Glasgow in 1973 to become Professor of Systematic Theology and in 1975 became a delegate of the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople to the Central Committee of the World Council of Churches (WCC). In 1986 he was called from the laity to ordination as a Greek Orthodox bishop. He has taught theology at the University of Thessaloniki and held visiting professorships at the Universities of Geneva, London and the Gregorian.8 In his Introduction to The Theology of John Zizioulas, Douglas Knight called him ‘one of the best known theologians of the

‘Gunton/Zizioulas’ or ‘Gunton’s/Zizioulas’s’ is found twenty times, and ‘Gunton and Zizioulas’ at least seventeen times in Richard M. Fermer, ‘The Limits of Trinitarian Theology as a Methodological Paradigm’, Neue Zeitschrift für systematische Theologie und Religionsphilosophie 41, no. 2 (1999): 158–86. 6 Georges Florovsky held the chair of Eastern Church History at Harvard from 1956 to 1964. 7 Patricia Fox, God as Communion: John Zizioulas, Elizabeth Johnson and the Retrieval of the Symbol of the Triune God (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2001), 4. Fox incorrectly stated that it was under ‘A. G. Williams’ that Zizioulas studied at Harvard. See Andrew Louth, ‘John D. Zizioulas, “Eucharist, Bishop, Church: The Unity of the Church in the Divine Eucharist and the Bishop during the First Three Centuries” ’, The Ecumenical Review 56 (2004): 147–8. 8 Fox, God as Communion, 5. Also see John Meyendorff, ‘Foreword’, in Zizioulas, Being as Communion: Studies in Personhood and the Church. Contemporary Greek Theologians Series Number 4 (New York: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press and London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1985), 12. 5

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contemporary Orthodox Church, a central figure in the ecumenical scene, and one of the most cited theologians at work today’.9

THEIR STORY BEGINS Gunton and Zizioulas met through their work together on the British Council of Churches’ (BCC) Study Commission on ‘Trinitarian Doctrine Today’, which convened from November 1983 and continued until May 1988.10 Contributors to this study were from a broad variety of confessional traditions and as the Commission’s purpose statement suggested, they sought to ‘find in trinitarian doctrine, in our beliefs about the very being of God, the foundation for the unity of humankind’.11 The Commission subsequently published three volumes for different audiences, each under the title The Forgotten Trinity.12 Zizioulas’s contribution was published as ‘The Doctrine of God the Trinity Today: Suggestions for an Ecumenical Study’.13 His contribution unpacked with broad strokes the problem throughout history of the absence of proper trinitarian witness and the present aporia of consensus caused by so many diverse interpretations of the Trinity. One of Zizioulas’s major emphases was the essential relatedness of the doctrine of the Trinity to the proper worship of God. He also described the communion of the trinitarian Persons in the Trinity and suggested that ecumenical dialogue would be enhanced by consideration of the meaning of ‘person’ in light of divine personhood.14 Gunton’s contribution to the BCC study documents was entitled ‘The Spirit in the Trinity’. In this work, Gunton expressed his concern that Christology had become the focus of ecclesiology in the West, to the detriment of the church’s consideration of pneumatology, and had resulted in the marginalization of the Trinity itself.15 In different ways, and from different starting points, both Zizioulas and Gunton agreed that the Church suffered when the Trinity was not part of the fabric of its doctrine and praxis.

Douglas H. Knight, ‘Introduction’, in The Theology of John Zizioulas: Personhood and the Church, ed. Douglas H. Knight (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007; New York, London: Routledge, 2016), 1. 10 See British Council of Churches, The Forgotten Trinity 1. The Report of the BCC Study Commission on Trinitarian Doctrine Today (London: British Council of Churches/CCBI, 1989). More recently, Churches Together in Britain and Ireland have published the report, the study guide and a selection of articles together under one cover as The Forgotten Trinity (London: CTBI), 2011. In 2014, Christoph Schwöbel revisited the Commission’s study as well as John Zizioulas’s seminal paper presented to the Commission in his paper entitled ‘Where Do We Stand in Trinitarian Theology? Resources, Revisions, and Reappraisals’, in Recent Developments in Trinitarian Theology: An International Symposium, ed. Christophe Chalamet and Marc Vial (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2014). 11 British Council of Churches, The Forgotten Trinity. Volume 1, 40. 12 The Forgotten Trinity, Volume 1 was the actual report of the BCC Study Commission on Trinitarian Doctrine Today, aimed at a theologically informed audience. The Forgotten Trinity 2 was a study guide on six issues contained in the Commission’s Report aimed at local churches and study groups, both published in London by the British Council of Churches/CCBI, 1989. Of the study papers presented to the Commission during its years of study, only about one-third were published as a third volume under the same title: The Forgotten Trinity 3: A Selection of Papers Presented to the British Council of Churches [BCC] Study Commission on Trinitarian Doctrine Today, ed. Alasdair I. C. Heron (London: British Council of Churches/CCBI, 1991). 13 John D. Zizioulas, ‘The Doctrine of God the Trinity Today: Suggestions for an Ecumenical Study’, in The Forgotten Trinity 3: A Selection of Papers Presented to the British Council of Churches [BCC] Study Commission on Trinitarian Doctrine Today, ed. Alasdair I. C. Heron (London: British Council of Churches, 1991), 19–32. 14 Ibid., 23–4, 27. 15 Colin E. Gunton, ‘The Spirit in the Trinity’, in The Forgotten Trinity 3, 123–36. 9

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During the time of the BCC Study Commission, Gunton invited Zizioulas to lecture at King’s College. Zizioulas accepted the invitation, lecturing at King’s College a few times each year until 2003, with the status of a visiting professor.16 Citations of Zizioulas in Gunton’s corpus began in 198917 and continued until the last writing he prepared, published just after his untimely death in 2003.18 In total, Gunton’s citations of Zizioulas far exceed Zizioulas’s citations of Gunton. Yet despite their friendship and Gunton’s evident respect for Zizioulas’s views, Gunton did not always agree with Zizioulas’s ideas. His critiques were always polite, however. Ever the gentleman, consider, for example, Gunton’s amicable notice that a challenge was approaching: ‘John Zizioulas will not thank me for suggesting it, but I do wonder whether he is here too influenced by . . .’.19 Their friendship was also evidenced by a heartfelt tribute to the memory of Gunton by Zizioulas in his last published book, Communion & Otherness: This book is dedicated to the blessed memory of two theologians who have been especially dear to me. Father Georges Florovsky, the great Orthodox theologian of last century, was my teacher and exercised a profound influence on my thought. Professor Colin E. Gunton, a precious friend and colleague at King’s College, London, with whom I shared so much in theology over more than two decades, and whose premature death was a great loss to systematic theology, will always be remembered with affection and gratitude. May the Lord grant to both of them eternal rest and a place in his Kingdom.20 Gunton’s ultimate conceptions of the Trinity clearly owed a great deal to the Christian East, and especially Irenaeus, the second-century Bishop of Lyons, as well as the fourthcentury Cappadocian Fathers. Those within Gunton’s scholarly circle have observed with interest that a bold new trajectory in Gunton’s ideas about the Holy Trinity seemed to

 ‘Gunton invited him to come to Kings and found money that would cover his flight costs, and Zizioulas was given visiting professor status. He came over very irregularly, but perhaps twice a year from the mid-eighties to 2003. He seldom gave Colin much notice of his visits, though he always gave a paper when Colin did have notice of his coming.’ Personal communication with Douglas Knight, email 3 February 2006. Gunton arranged for grants to support Zizioulas’s fellowship at King’s College. See https://kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/portal/en/projects/ visiting-fellowship-for-professor-zizioulas(633c49e9-6d30-4d5b-8e01-df9f33974112).html. 17 Colin E. Gunton, The Actuality of Atonement: A Study of Metaphor, Rationality and the Christian Tradition (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1989), 196. ‘In place of this we need, as John Zizioulas has argued, a conception of the church as indeed instituted by Christ, but requiring constitution in every new present by the Spirit.’ Also, in the same year, Colin E. Gunton, ‘The Church on Earth: The Roots of Community’, in On Being the Church. Essays on the Christian Community, ed. Colin Gunton and Daniel W. Hardy (Edinburgh: T&T Clark. 1989), 52, 53. ‘I would hold rather, with John Zizioulas, [against Harnack] that the development of the doctrine of the Trinity was the creation, true to the gospel, of a distinctively Christian ontology.’ 18 The desire to remember the Trinity remained a keen focus in Gunton’s work, and perhaps not coincidentally, ‘The Forgotten Trinity’ was the title of the first chapter of the last book published before his untimely death in 2003. See Colin E. Gunton, ‘The Forgotten Trinity’, The William Hodgkins Lecture, Cardiff Adult Christian Education Centre, 5 June 1998, in Father, Son and Holy Spirit: Essays toward a Fully Trinitarian Theology (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2003), 3–18. 19 Gunton, ‘Persons and Particularity’, 106. The full quotation is: ‘John Zizioulas will not thank me for suggesting it, but I do wonder whether … he is here too influenced by the development of theology in the tradition of Pseudo-Dionysius and Palamas.’ 20 John D. Zizioulas. Communion & Otherness: Further Studies in Personhood and the Church, ed. Paul McPartlan (London: T&T Clark, 2006), xiv. 16

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immediately follow his collaboration with Zizioulas on the BCC Study Commission and Zizioulas’s guest lecturing at the Research Institute in Systematic Theology (RIST) at King’s College, which was formed in 1988 by Colin Gunton together with Christoph Schwöbel. For example, one of Gunton’s last students, Stephen Holmes, wrote that ‘a fairly fundamental revolution in his thought’ could be established from published evidence between 1982 and 1985, ‘which I propose resulted from his working with John Zizioulas’.21 Even scholars outside the inner circle of King’s College have observed that encounters with the Orthodox bishop and engagement with his ideas moved Gunton’s trinitarian theology in an eastward direction. Sarah Coakley recognized that Gunton’s 1991 work was ‘much influenced by Zizioulas’.22 In Problem and Promise in Colin Gunton’s Doctrine of Creation, William Whitney identified that Gunton’s conception of personhood ‘derived primarily from Orthodox theologian John Zizioulas’.23 Uche Anizor, in Trinity and Humanity: An Introduction to the Theology of Colin Gunton, described Zizioulas as ‘the vehicle through which Gunton encountered the Cappadocian Fathers and appropriated them in his later theology’.24 Robert Jenson, who supervised Gunton’s dissertation at Oxford for a time, acknowledged the possibility of Zizioulas’s influence on Gunton, but left open the notion that Gunton might have affirmed Cappadocian trinitarian views regardless of Zizioulas.25 In any case, Zizioulas was included as one of the four trinitarian theologians (including Daniel W. Hardy, Robert W. Jenson and Thomas F. Torrance) to whom Gunton dedicated The Promise of Trinitarian Theology, first printed in 1991.26

THE TRINITY IN THE 1980S A common area of differentiation among trinitarian theologians is how they navigate the concepts of unity and diversity within the being of God. Writing in the early 1980s about the same time as he began working with Gunton on the BCC Study Commission, Zizioulas had already established his appropriation of the Cappadocian view of the Trinity, whom he believed inaugurated an ‘ontological revolution’ in giving ontological content to difference, otherness and particularity.27 God is not first an impersonal substance and then three, but God’s ontological being is communion, which was the main theme of his seminal book, Being as Communion, published in 1985. This theologically dense work established several of Zizioulas’s key themes, among which is the critical importance of God’s freedom, which is eliminated if priority is assigned to the one substance of

‘After this point, he [Gunton] adopted what has become known, rightly or wrongly, as an “Eastern” account of the Trinity, stressing the true personhood of the three hypostases and finding an account of the divine unity in their relations’, Stephen Holmes, ‘Towards the Analogia Personae et Relationis: Developments in Gunton’s Trinitarian Thinking’, in The Theology of Colin Gunton, ed. Lincoln Harvey (London: T&T Clark, 2010), 42. 22 ‘Colin Gunton’s recent work (Gunton 1991), much influenced by Zizioulas, argues that an appropriately “relational” view of “personhood” was compromised even by Augustine (in whom he sees, paradoxically, the remote sources of the derided Cartesian individualism)’, Sarah Coakley, ‘Why Three? Some Further Reflections on the Origins of the Doctrine of the Trinity’, in The Making and Remaking of Christian Doctrine: Essays in Honour of Maurice Wiles, ed. Sarah Coakley and David A. Pailin (Oxford: Oxford University, 1993), 35–6. 23 William B. Whitney, Problem and Promise in Colin E. Gunton’s Doctrine of Creation (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 81. 24 Uche Anizor, Trinity and Humanity: An Introduction to the Theology of Colin Gunton (London: Paternoster, 2016), 18. 25 Robert Jenson, ‘A Decision Tree of Colin Gunton’s Thinking’, in The Theology of Colin Gunton, 12. 26 Colin E. Gunton, The Promise of Trinitarian Theology, 2nd enlarged edn (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1997). 27 Zizioulas, Being as Communion, 36–7. 21

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God. If substance is primary, the being of the Trinity is bound by ontological necessity, rather than ‘the free self-affirmation of divine existence’.28 Following Basil the Great’s notion of the ‘communion of the Godhead’29 Zizioulas argued the importance of the view that God’s ontological being is itself an act of communion: ‘The nature of God is communion. This does not mean that the persons have an ontological priority over the one substance of God, but that the one substance of God coincides with the communion of the three persons.’30 Rather than giving priority to particularity over unity (as many have misunderstood) Zizioulas wanted to establish the communion of the Three as an inseparable condition of divine being itself. Gunton’s writings before and at about this same time are absent of even a hint of the Cappadocians’ or Zizioulas’s emphasis on the ontological priority of communion or person, which he would later affirm. In Becoming and Being, for example, published in 1978, Gunton compared Barth’s and Hartshorne’s doctrine of God. However, it was only in the ‘Epilogue’ added to the 2001 reprint (and not present in the original) where Gunton offered Cappadocian insights into personhood and particularity. In another early book, Enlightenment and Alienation, written in 1982 (but not published until 1985)31 Gunton explored the hermeneutical tools that he believed could engender and support a much-needed biblically informed trinitarian theology. The themes in the book are more philosophical than theological, and only scant glimpses of his thoughts on the Trinity can be gleaned from this writing. In fact, the few descriptions of the Trinity in this work evidence a modalistic emphasis reminiscent of Barth: ‘the open and personal reality of the God … can come to speech if we conceive God in his Fatherhood, Sonship and Spiritness’.32 Rather than three persons, the one God, ‘who is various in his being’33 is perceived in these three ways. Suffice it to say that in the early to mid-1980s Gunton had not yet boarded the train en route to his trinitarian theology of ontological personhood. Yet both of these early books conveyed his intense longing for a coherent Trinitarian hermeneutic and, more importantly, for a trinitarian theology that would undergird the believer’s need to apprehend the personal experience of the Triune God.

Gunton’s first shift: Persons and particularity It would not be surprising to observe shifts in the thinking of one perennially engaged in a quest for truth within theological enquiry, and indeed, several significant conceptual shifts can be observed in Gunton’s work. It was Gunton’s Inaugural Lecture at King’s College in 1985 that offered the clearest evidence that the first dramatic change was taking place in his thinking on the Trinity. As documented by Stephen Holmes, it was in this lecture that Gunton left behind Barth’s focus on the singularity of God, as well as Barth’s disdain for the use of the term ‘person’ to refer to the three trinitarian hypostases. In the first half of the lecture, Gunton argued against the Western monistic concept of God as a foundation for the trinitarian proposal he presented in the second half of the

Ibid.,  44. See, for example, Basil the Great, de Spiritu Sancto, 18.45: ‘The nature [of God] is in the communion of the Godhead’ (koinonia tes theotetos). 30 Zizioulas, Being as Communion, 134. 31 Colin E. Gunton, Enlightenment & Alienation: An Essay towards a Trinitarian Theology (London: Marshall, Morgan and Scott; Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1985), viii. 32 Ibid.,  141. 33 Ibid. 28 29

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lecture, which was that the Three are indeed ‘persons’ with ‘particularity’.34 As we shall see, it is likely no coincidence that the title of Gunton’s much-later contribution to The Theology of John Zizioulas was entitled ‘Persons and Particularity’.35

Gunton’s second shift: The monarchy of the Father in the Trinity For Zizioulas, as for the Cappadocians, the cause of divine existence must be a free person, and not an impersonal substance: ‘No person exists without substance or nature, but the ontological “principle” or “cause” of being – i.e. that which makes a thing to exist – is not the substance or nature but the person or hypostasis.’36 Gregory of Nazianzus wrote of the Trinity: ‘Each God because Consubstantial (to Homoousion); One God because of the Monarchia (of the Father)’.37 Zizioulas therefore affirmed the Greek patristic idea of the ‘Monarchia’ and especially ‘Monas’ and ‘Arche’ attributed to the Father by the Cappadocians. The monarchy of the Father means, above all, that the source or origin of divinity is personal, and that the Father freely confers this divinity in fullness on the other two Persons:38 ‘If God exists, He exists because the Father exists, that is, He who out of love freely begets the Son and brings forth the Spirit. Thus God as person – as the hypostasis of the Father – makes the one divine substance to be that which it is: the one God. This point is absolutely crucial.’39 It is important to note the distinction that for Zizioulas, as for the Cappadocians, cause and personhood are simultaneous events in the divine triune life. There can be no temporal notions when speaking ontologically of the Trinity, and therefore (contra Arius, for example) there can be no prior being of the Father before the generation of the Son or of the procession of the Spirit.40 Gunton, however, had disagreed with Zizioulas that any sort of primacy could be extended into the eternal relations of the Trinity. Gunton had approved of speaking of a certain priority of the Father in the Trinity, acknowledging that the biblical narrative often described the Son and Holy Spirit as doing the will of the God the Father.41 His cautious recognition of the Father’s economic primacy also followed Irenaeus’s concept of the Son and the Spirit as the ‘two hands of God’ to which Gunton referred often.42 In The Promise of Trinitarian Theology, Gunton even explicitly accepted a certain subordination of taxis

olmes, ‘Towards the Analogia Personae et Relationis’, 3–9. H Gunton, ‘Persons and Particularity’, 97–108. 36 Zizioulas, Being as Communion, 42n.37. Also see John D. Zizioulas, ‘The Teaching of the 2nd Ecumenical Council on the Holy Spirit and Ecumenical Perspective’, in Credo in Spiritum Sanctum, ed. J. S. Martins (Roma: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1983), 37. Zizioulas also noted the Cappadocian preference for the terminology of aitia (cause) over pege (source) because aitia ‘carried with it connotations of personal initiative’. 37 Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration 40 [On Holy Baptism], in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, ed. Philip Schaff and Henry Wace, Second Series, vol. 7 (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1996), 375. 38 Zizioulas, Being as Communion, 40. 39 Ibid.,  41. 40 Ibid., 40, 41. 41 Colin E. Gunton, The Triune Creator: A Historical and Systematic Study (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1998). Gunton’s point in this writing was to affirm that although the New Testament speaks of Jesus in whom ‘all thing were created in heaven and in earth’ (Col. 1.16) Jesus is the ‘mediator of God the Father’s activity’ (21) and there is ‘difference between saying that the world is created in Christ and in God, simpliciter’ (22). 42 For example, Gunton, The Triune Creator, 54. Colin E. Gunton, The One the Three and the Many: God, Creation and the Culture of Modernity. The 1992 Bampton Lectures (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 120, 159. Holmes presented the suggestion that the Irenaean ‘two hands’ did not function analogically for Gunton but rather was used to show that mediation between God and creation must always be ‘an account of persons in relation’, Holmes, ‘Towards the Analogia Personae et Relationis’, 41. 34 35

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‘of ordering within the divine life – but not one of deity or regard’43 in both the eternal being of God as well as in the economy. At that point in time Gunton acknowledged that a taxis was evident in the economy, such that the Son and Spirit express their divinity ‘through their economically subordinate functions of doing the will of the Father in the world’.44 He pointed to the text at 1 Cor. 15.28 as ‘some support for Zizioulas’s giving of priority to the Father’45 but disagreed with Zizioulas and stated that any talk of the priority of the Father (beyond ‘begetting’ and ‘procession’) ‘is not ontological but economic’.46 Gunton was content to qualify, along the lines of Gregory of Nazianzus, that there are no degrees of deity in the Godhead: ‘I should like to call the Father the greater, because from him flows both the equality and being of the equals, but I am afraid to use the word origin (arche) lest I should make him the origin of inferiors.’47 Gunton was not at this time in agreement with Zizioulas that the unity of the Trinity was to be found in the hypostasis of the Father, nor was he in agreement at that stage in his writing with the idea of the Father as eternal Monarchia or Arche of the Trinity.48 To follow the trajectory of Gunton’s thought on the unity of the Trinity requires a bit of piecing together. In The Promise of Trinitarian Theology, Gunton located trinitarian unity in the homoousion, which he said ‘enables a theology of the Trinity to express the oneness of the being and act of God’.49 Gunton preferred to translate homoousion as ‘one in being’ rather than ‘of one substance’ to avoid implying that God is in any way substance, or even impersonal being, but rather three persons in relation.50 It is perichoresis or the inter-animation in the relation of Father, Son and Spirit that assures that all that is done is an act of all three.51 However, perichoresis for Gunton was only an economic reality: ‘a concept heavy with spatial and temporal conceptuality’ which offered ‘an implication of the unity-in-variety of the divine economic involvement in the world’.52 Gunton wrote that the two concepts together, homoousios and perichoresis, were vital to ensure that trinitarian language did not lapse into tritheism.53 The unity of God was to be found in the shared essence/substance (homoousion) expressed within the economy by the ‘unityin-variety’ of their perichoresis. Gunton also initially differentiated between the divine attributes that could be applied to the immanent Trinity. For example, God’s love may be applied eternally, since it is the ‘Spirit … within the divine eternity … who perfects the love of God as love in community’.54 However no hierarchy of order should be applied eternally, since (as already

Gunton, The Promise of Trinitarian Theology, 197. Ibid.,  199. 45 Ibid.,  197. 46 Ibid. 47 Ibid., with reference to Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration 40, 43. 48 In his dissertation, Steve Bachmann had placed Gunton’s view of the monarchia alongside Miroslav Volf ’s in that both have removed the monarchia from the Father. See Steve Bachmann, ‘Enigma variations: The “Imago Dei” as the basis for personhood with special reference to C. E. Gunton, M. Volf and J. D. Zizioulas’ (PhD Diss., Brunel University, 2002), 107. 49 Gunton, The Promise of Trinitarian Theology, 198. 50 Ibid.,  10. 51 Ibid., 198. Elsewhere, Gunton agreed with Dumitru Staniloae that the Spirit is the agent of the unity of the Godhead, as well as the diversity of the persons. Dumitru Staniloae, Theology and the Church, trans. Robert Barringer (New York: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1980), 67. 52 Gunton, The One, the Three and the Many, 163. 53 Gunton, The Promise of Trinitarian Theology, 198. See Gunton, Theology through the Theologians, 126. 54 Gunton, Theology through the Theologians, 127. 43 44

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discussed) any priority of the Father could only be economic. In this specific regard, Gunton admitted that his own view of Trinity would result in a ‘theology of the church … more congregational in its structure than Zizioulas’s strongly episcopal ecclesiology that tends to see the bishop as representing the Father’.55 From the other side of the matter, however, it may have been Gunton’s preference for a congregational ecclesiology that precluded a consistent application to the eternal Trinity of certain trinitarian attributes present in the economy – such as the Father as Arche (origin or cause) of the Trinity. Nevertheless, as we will soon see, Gunton again dramatically revised his trinitarian views in his later writings, more closely aligned himself with Zizioulas and yet maintained his preference for a congregational, polycentric and expressly non-hierarchical ecclesiology.

ASYMMETRY IN THE TRINITY AFTER THE 1980S Like Zizioulas, Gunton also supported the idea of an asymmetrical view of the Trinity; however, unlike Zizioulas, the asymmetry in the Trinity for Gunton was only apparent in the economy of salvation at the earlier stages of his writing. For example, although Gunton moved boldly into ontological personhood and particularly in The One, the Three and the Many (1991), in a continuing quest for ways to know and speak about God, his emphasis throughout this work was on what God has made known in biblical revelation within the ‘economy of salvation’. He lamented the divorce of the doctrine of the Trinity from its basis in history in the past, such as the ‘platonically conceived otherness’ of God as a consequence of Augustine’s legacy.56 He suggested that the best ways to define persons, and thus the persons of the Trinity, is ‘by indicating where persons are to be found and the way that they are conceived to be and act’. His view of asymmetry in the Trinity followed this same overarching focus on the action of divine persons within the economy. Since the Spirit’s primary role in Scripture is to lead to Christ, who is the way to the Father, there is thus an ‘essential asymmetry of the relationships in the economy of salvation’.57 If Gunton’s first ‘shift’ away from Barth’s monism towards Zizioulas’s personhood particularly was observable at his 1985 lecture, this second equally noteworthy shift in Gunton’s thinking was on the horizon in the 1990s and would be clearly observable in his twenty-first-century writings. During the last two years of his life, Gunton contributed an article entitled ‘And in one Lord Jesus Christ … Begotten not Made’ to Pro Ecclesia, published in 2001, in which he wrote: ‘The Father, Son and Spirit are one because the Son and the Spirit are, in a sense, though as God, subordinate in the eternal τάξις.’58 The significance with this seemingly subtle distinction is that Gunton had moved to locate eternally that which he was disinclined to admit in his earlier writing. Previously, any talk of hierarchy and subordination in the Trinity was discussed within the economy of salvation, but now (in 2001) he believed it appropriate to speak of hierarchy in regard to

Gunton, The Promise of Trinitarian Theology, 197. Gunton, The Promise of Trinitarian Theology, 194. Again, Zizioulas was among the authors to whom this volume was dedicated. Zizioulas was also the most-frequently cited living author, a little less than Augustine in first place, and Barth in second place. 57 Gunton, The Promise of Trinitarian Theology, 198–9. 58 Colin Gunton, ‘And in One Lord Jesus Christ … Begotten Not Made’, Pro Ecclesia 10, no. 3 (2001): 261–74, and subsequently published in Father, Son and Holy Spirit, 73; and in Nicene Christianity: The Future for a New Ecumenism, ed. Christopher R. Seitz (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2001), 47. 55 56

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the eternal trinitarian relations. Furthermore, Gunton had even used the term ‘monarchy of the Father’ in the same work: ‘It is thus possible to maintain an Eastern – and scriptural – sense of the monarchy of the Father without succumbing to an ontological hierarchy which renders the Son and the Spirit as less than fully divine.’59 Paul Cumin described this later shift in Gunton’s thinking through the dialectic exemplified by Thomas F. Torrance and Alan Torrance on one side of the table, and Zizioulas on the other side of the table. To the question of what characterizes the ‘cause’ of the communion of the Trinity, the earlier Gunton sat on Torrance’s side of the table ‘firmly across from Zizioulas’60 in his insistence that ‘all three persons are together the cause of the communion in which they exist in relations of mutual and reciprocal constitution’.61 But this would not be the end of the story. Gunton gave Paul Cumin a typescript of Volume One of his unpublished Systematic Theology, on which he was still working at the time of his death in 2003.62 This later writing offers clear support for the shift in Gunton’s views in favour of an ontological monarchia of the Father, in open agreement with Zizioulas, based on Gunton’s prioritization of particularity: ‘Being may indeed be understood in terms of communion, but there is for Zizioulas no communion that is not grounded in the particular.’ Gunton was explicit in this later writing in disagreement with Torrance: ‘Whatever we do we must not suggest that “being” unifies. The Father unifies the Godhead by virtue of the fact that he is Father of the Son and breather of the Spirit, and is therefore eternally the “cause” of the being of the Son and the Spirit.’63 In Gunton’s eyes, newly focused eastward, the eternal cause of the Trinity is the Father, and the unity of the Trinity is ontologically grounded in a particular Person. In his contribution to the Zizioulas Festschrift, presumably written about the same time as Volume One of his unpublished manuscript, Gunton similarly wrote (here specifically contra Alan Torrance) that ‘Zizioulas rightly insists that the personal should be primordial.’64 Gunton added further that Torrance’s preference for ‘perichoresis’ or ‘communion’ as the defining locus of the Trinity’s unity was rather illogical, since ‘perichoresis  … cannot do anything because it is the outcome of the relations of the (particular) persons, not their cause’.65 Gunton was now seated comfortably on Zizioulas’s side of the table. Furthermore, Gunton described in detail and with explicit approval of Zizioulas’s view of the Father as the sole cause of the Trinity and the principle of unity. ‘Notice very carefully what Zizioulas is saying. There is a taxis, a Trinitarian ordering, which (like the economy, we might say) issues from the Father, but it is not, as in the Origenist emanationism of which he is sometimes accused, linear; rather, it involves inter-dependence.’66 Instead of Alan Torrance’s ‘illogical’ emphasis on an outcome (either communion or perichoresis) as the source of unity within the Trinity, Gunton settled with Zizioulas in insisting that the principle of unity within the Trinity must be grounded ontologically in a Person. God is not Trinity because God in God’s essence is love; God is Trinity because of the person of the Father who freely begets the Son and brings forth the Spirit.67 Cumin unton, ‘And in One Lord Jesus Christ’, 73–4. G Paul Cumin, ‘The Taste of Cake’, in The Theology of Colin Gunton, 76. 61 Gunton, The Promise of Trinitarian Theology, 196. See related discussion in Cumin, ‘The Taste of Cake’, 76–8. 62 See Cumin, ‘The Taste of Cake’, 81n.7. 63 Colin E. Gunton, unpublished manuscript, 2.7.31.3 in Cumin, ‘The Taste of Cake’, 76. 64 Gunton, ‘Persons and Particularity’, 100. 65 Ibid. 66 Ibid.,  99. 67 Zizioulas, Being as Communion, 41. 59 60

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suggested that the fact that Gunton even asked for a ‘principle’ of God’s oneness in the first place was evidence of his high regard for Zizioulas’s theology and concluded with his own view that although the ‘turn’ in Gunton’s theology with regard to trinitarian unity ‘may have been charted by Zizioulas, it was Gunton’s own pursuit of particularity that fueled it’.68

THEOLOGICAL METHOD One of the more interesting ingredients in this story is the degree to which these two scholar-churchmen from diverse ecclesial traditions have agreed on the nature of the Holy Trinity. And yet there are differences that come to light on the plane of Gunton’s and Zizioulas’s theological method, especially when comparing the starting point and directional ‘fit’ of their approach. Consider by way of analogy this problem reminiscent of grade school: ‘A train leaves a station travelling West. At a distant location on a parallel track, another train leaves a station travelling East. Where do they meet?’ In terms of theological method, Zizioulas and Gunton are like the two trains which start rather distant from one another, travelling parallel, yet in opposing directions, crossing paths and ending where the other began. Stated simplistically, Zizioulas began his theological journey in the past and moved towards the present. Gunton’s approach was somewhat the opposite, beginning in the present with the ‘problem’ and looking back through history to suggest a point before Christian thought became ‘derailed’. They crossed one another at the point when Gunton’s views aligned with Zizioulas’s and the Cappadocian expression of the ontological being of the Trinity as a communion of three Persons, and again when Gunton later agreed with Zizioulas that the Father is the eternal ‘Arche’ of the Trinity. More specifically, Zizioulas began by explicating the Eucharistic consciousness that grounded the thought of the early Church Fathers of the East. As he moved through history, he synthesized Greek patristic thought and appropriated especially the views of Athanasius, Irenaeus, the Cappadocian Fathers and Maximus the Confessor. He spoke often and fervently about his belief that the contemporary Church was in need of a ‘Neopatristic synthesis’69 in order to foster a Eucharistic approach in Christian life, and theology and doctrine that would be faithful to the Apostolic Tradition, but also relevant to present-day concerns. Gunton’s theological method, in contrast, began in the present day with his reaction against individualistic postmodernity. Gunton blamed postmodernity in the West, for a ‘loss of the commitment to objective truth’.70 He moved backwards in history through Barth, Coleridge, Irving and others into the Enlightenment (Kant) and even further back through Aquinas and ultimately Augustine, citing with approval the subsequent Cappadocian Fathers who did a better job of holding together the one and the many. Gunton believed that the most pressing responsibility of the theologian in the present day was to recover an ancient (and yet renewed) concept of truth that opposed Western theology’s tendency to elevate the one over the many.71

umin, ‘The Taste of Cake’, 76–7. C ‘Neopatristic Synthesis’ was a major emphasis of Zizioulas’s mentor, Georges Florovsky. See Georges Florovsky, Ways of Russian Theology, I. The Collected Works of Georges Florovsky (Belmont, MA: Nordland, 1979). 70 Gunton, The One, the Three and the Many, 69. 71 This is the main thesis of The One, the Three and the Many. 68 69

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While it may have been considered unlikely that a Greek Orthodox bishop and a minister in the United Reformed Church would ever ‘meet on the tracks’ theologically with regard to the Trinity, their disparate methodological choices would not be a surprise. Most notably, while they agreed that the ontological being of the Trinity should be asymmetrical, with the Father as the eternal Protos, Arche or Monarchia, Gunton continued with his unwavering support of an egalitarian, expressly non-hierarchical, Reformed ecclesiology. Zizioulas’s trinitarian views, which were founded in a Eucharistic consciousness, remained well-aligned to his hierarchical and liturgical Orthodox ecclesiology. Neither of these ecclesiological views are unexpected. Yet this diversity in ecclesiology refutes a specific critique of Zizioulas by Miroslav Volf, which I will discuss briefly in the following section.

AN ‘A PRIORI’ ASYMMETRY? Miroslav Volf ’s After Our Likeness: The Church as the Image of the Trinity72 is divided into three sections. The first section describes Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger’s trinitarian views. Zizioulas’s views are covered in the second section, and the third section is generally a critique of the first two views, presented from an egalitarian Free Church ecclesiology and grounded in a Social trinitarian model. Volf ’s Trinity consists in the ‘polycentric and symmetrical reciprocity of the many’.73 Although Volf appreciated Zizioulas’s view of personhood, he considered that Zizioulas’s asymmetrical Trinity, with the Father as sole Arche or Cause, leads unavoidably to the one church and the one bishop.74 Volf wrote that ‘every ecclesial unity held together by a mon-archy is monistic and thus un-trinitarian’. One of the more striking critiques of Zizioulas by Volf is that it seemed to him that Zizioulas is ‘projecting the hierarchical grounding of unity into the doctrine of the Trinity from the perspective of a particular ecclesiology’.75 In other words, Volf discredited Zizioulas’s view of the Trinity since Volf suspected it was developed to align with Zizioulas’s hierarchical Orthodox ecclesiology. Yet it is Colin Gunton who unexpectedly undermines the logic of Volf ’s critique merely by virtue of the combination of his ecclesiology and trinitarian views. Gunton’s views on symmetry, authority and hierarchy in the Trinity developed in harmony with Zizioulas’s views on the same concepts, but with a distinctly Western methodological and hermeneutical grounding. Volf ’s suggestion of Zizioulas’s a priori monarchy of the Father in the Trinity as a result of his hierarchical ecclesiology fails logically simply because it cannot also be applied to Gunton. Gunton, like Zizioulas, also affirmed the eternal monarchy of the Father, and thus eternal asymmetry in the Trinity, but Gunton continued as an ordained minister in an egalitarian congregational ecclesiology. Again, I believe this supports my earlier observation that it was not that the ecclesiology of each determined the outcome of his trinitarian views but rather that the ecclesiological milieu of each determined the starting point and direction of his methodology.

Volf, After Our Likeness. Ibid., 215–17. 74 Ibid.,  78–9. 75 Ibid.,  79. 72 73

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A FEW DIFFERENCES Thus far I have only alluded to areas of theological difference between Zizioulas and Gunton, as my primary goal in this chapter has been to accentuate what these two venerable scholars have shared. Nevertheless, there are a few notable ‘world view’ dissimilarities that might prove interesting. As I have already discussed, their ecclesial traditions have certainly informed their methodologies and directional emphasis, as well as their understanding of the Church, proper. For example, Gunton aligned well to his own tradition in referring to the Church as ‘the human institution which is called in Christ and the Spirit’.76 Gunton’s challenge to this institution came through a distinctively systematic and rational methodology, providing evidence of how modalistic conceptions of the Trinity had led the Western church and society at large towards individualism at the expense of relationality. In contrast, Zizioulas considered the Church not simply as an institution but as an ‘event of communion’ bound to the very being of God.77 Zizioulas also aligned well to his own tradition in his foundational understanding that philosophical ideas about ecclesiology, and especially of the Holy Trinity, maintain their deep existential meaning only through the experience of ecclesial being within the ecclesial community.78 These ecclesiological differences cannot be harmonized any more than one could suggest that a Golden Retriever should be an English Bulldog. Both are very nice breeds, but their inherent differences would not be surprising to anyone. Gunton systematically disassembled the ramifications of Augustinian thought that found its way through the Enlightenment and into the individualism of Postmodernity. For Gunton, a right view of the Trinity would lead directly to a right view of the Christian faith and of its doctrines, as well as a right view of all relationships in the world. His approach was grounded in the realm of ideas. For Zizioulas, the problematic departure of the West from an adequate view of the Trinity has not been a departure of thought so much as a departure of proper worship; that is, first it is an absence of a Eucharistic view of all creation.79 His approach has been grounded liturgically in the Eucharist. Again, there are no surprises here. One final example of what I have called ‘directional fit’ can be found through observing their use of Irenaeus. Gunton pointed to Irenaeus for support of his view that creation bore the marks of the ultimate truth of its trinitarian Creator.80 Gunton believed that Irenaeus’s theology was a starting point to be further developed, and that it was precisely the West’s failure to ‘develop the possibilities within Irenaeus’s trinitarian theology of creation’ that led to modernity’s subsequent conceptual deficiencies.81 Zizioulas agreed that Irenaeus’s views were significant as a beginning, and they were further developed by the Cappadocians and, centuries later, by Maximus the Confessor. Quite unlike Gunton, however, Zizioulas did not consider Irenaeus to be noteworthy for presenting a coherent intellectual account of the Trinity as observed in creation, but precisely as the one who broke from the earlier (Justin-Clement-Origen) tradition by linking truth not with the

Gunton, The Promise of Trinitarian Theology, 12. Elsewhere, he describes the church as an ‘echo of the life of the Trinity’, 82. 77 Zizioulas, Being as Communion, 15. 78 Ibid.,  15–17. 79 Zizioulas suggested that even scientists should recognize that their work is para-Eucharistic. Ibid., 120. 80 ‘Irenaeus is able to give a remarkably coherent and satisfying account of the divine constitution of and involvement in the created world’s time and space,’ Gunton, The One, the Three and the Many, 159. 81 Ibid.,  151. 76

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intellect but with ontological being. Following Irenaeus, Zizioulas asserted that Christ is the ‘Truth’ not because he is an epistemological principle which explains the universe but because the entire universe ‘finds its meaning in its incorruptible existence in Christ’.82 The meaning of the universe is not an idea but the incarnate Christ. ‘The incarnate Christ is so identical to the ultimate will of God’s love, that the meaning of created being and the purpose of history are simply the incarnate Christ.’83 For Gunton, Irenaeus represented truth through the logic of creation, but for Zizioulas, Irenaeus represents truth as ontological being – as a break from linking truth with the intellect.

CONCLUSION The more I read and re-read the development of Gunton’s ideas from the mid-1980s forward, the more I lean towards Robert Jenson’s opinion that Gunton may have indeed found the Cappadocians regardless of Zizioulas. There was certainly a strong inclination in his writing towards eastern Patristic ideas, and the move from Irenaeus to the Cappadocians would not have been unexpected. Yet Zizioulas was certainly ahead of Gunton in his exploration of the Cappadocians, and it seems that, at the very least, Zizioulas provided a solid footing for Gunton’s thinking when the proper time arrived for Gunton to explore the personhood and particularity of the Cappadocians. Having Zizioulas’s writings and Zizioulas himself at hand at King’s College also provided Gunton with the freedom to enter into dialogue with Zizioulas, as he explored the best way to formulate the language to describe his own intuitions about God’s triune being. This chapter reviewed the history of their friendship and collegial relationship and identified two significant ‘shifts’ in Gunton’s thought and writings. The first was the move away from Barth’s trinitarian ‘modes of being’ and towards personhood and particularity, which seemed to follow his work with Zizioulas in the BCC Study Commission on the Trinity in the mid-1980s. The second major shift in Gunton’s understanding of the Trinity was the affirmation of an eternal asymmetry which posited the Father as Arche or Monarchia in the Trinity. This second shift was in express agreement with Zizioulas (contra Thomas F. Torrance) and I think it was the more daring of the two moves. It was daring, I believe, because the Monarchy of the Father was (and continues to be) strongly rejected by Social Trinitarians, and especially those who, like Gunton, affirm a polycentric congregationalist ecclesiology. Gunton’s last published writing not only removed any question about his support and affirmation of the monarchy of the Father but also exhibited his independence of thought.84 Gunton was able to establish the logical/ theological importance of this view, despite its unpopularity in his own ecclesial circles. This alone is such an admirable quality, and I think it shows Gunton as an intrepid role model for contemporary scholars; intrepid not in the sense of going ‘where no one has gone before’85 but rather of not being afraid to reconsider what is no longer popular but still may be true and good. Gunton’s career exemplified a robust curiosity and humility of spirit that allowed him to change course without apology. It was his desire to know the true God: Father, Son and Holy Spirit, that sustained his impetus as a teacher, preacher and scholar, Zizioulas, Being as Communion, 80. Ibid.,  95. 84 Gunton, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, 73. 85 Star Trek, the next generation. Seasons 1–7 (California: Paramount Pictures, 1987–94). 82 83

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and it was the grace of God that sustained his boldness to proclaim it. I began this chapter with a quote about Zizioulas by Gunton, so I will end it in reverse by reprising the Metropolitan John Zizioulas’s words in the dedication of his last book to Colin Gunton: ‘a precious friend and colleague … [who] will always be remembered with affection and gratitude’.86

Zizioulas, Communion & Otherness, xiv.

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CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

Gunton and Jüngel IVOR J. DAVIDSON

‘A piece of supervisory genius’ sent the young Gunton to Barth.1 In late 1960s Oxford, Robert Jenson’s advice would hardly have been everyone’s; it proved formative for almost all of Gunton’s work thereafter. In an era in which the very existence of God was cause for theologians’ ambiguity, Gunton found in Barth’s Trinitarianism compelling alternative to the lassitude of doctrinal criticism. Here was a theology both modern and positive: conscious of the questions presented by its cultural context, cheerfully resistant to determination by them. Christian dogmatics could, it seemed, go about its business after all in the freedom of the gospel. To a lot of English sophisticates, the approach was pretty bizarre. To a nonconformist, it held appeal. Gunton’s judgements about Barth’s strengths and weaknesses would evolve. His initial training occurred in Barth’s shadow; his mature work never lost touch with the effects. Lutheran influences assumed a certain significance: Jenson, inspirer of his doctoral project, and Eberhard Jüngel. The former, who supervised only the first phase of the research,2 would be a lifelong conversation-partner. Interactions with Jüngel would be far fewer; in a fair bit of Gunton’s writing he is mentioned very little. But Jüngel as well as Jenson played a part in Gunton’s early construal of Barth’s ways of speaking of God and time. Inasmuch as major lines of thought in Gunton’s theology require to be traced back to the ‘incomparable’ beginning in which he was introduced to serious study of the doctrine of God,3 Jüngel deserves to be considered among those who affected the direction of his work.

GOD’S BEING IS IN BECOMING When Gunton began his doctorate, Jüngel was in his mid-thirties, not long moved from East Berlin to Zürich, already a force to be reckoned with; but his work was not widely

Colin E. Gunton, ‘Theology in Communion’, in Shaping a Theological Mind: Theological Context and Methodology, ed. Darren C. Marks (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), 31–6, at 33. On the general debt, see Colin E. Gunton, ‘Creation and Mediation in the Theology of Robert W. Jenson: An Encounter and a Convergence’, in Trinity, Time, and Church: A Response to the Theology of Robert W. Jenson, ed. Colin E. Gunton (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2000), 80–93, repr. in Colin E. Gunton, Father, Son and Holy Spirit: Essays toward a Fully Trinitarian Theology (London: T&T Clark, 2003), 93–106. 2 John Marsh took over the supervision on Jenson’s return to the United States in 1968; the final stages were completed under John Macquarrie. 3 Colin E. Gunton, Becoming and Being: The Doctrine of God in Charles Hartshorne and Karl Barth, rev. edn. (London: SCM Press, 2001), xi. The work was first published by Oxford University Press in 1978; references hereafter are to the second edition. On the setting of Gunton’s lifelong agenda in consequence of his doctoral work, see Gunton, ‘Theology in Communion’, 33. 1

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known in Britain and no English translations were available.4 Profoundly influenced by Barth, Jüngel’s Lutheranism had also been affected by a range of forces after Heidegger and Bultmann, as mediated by teachers such as Ernst Fuchs and Gerhard Ebeling. His initial specialism in New Testament studies had made much of the interruptive, eschatological presence of the divine Word in Jesus’ parables of the kingdom and the Pauline kerygma; an existentialist hermeneutic of language and justification by faith sat alongside a typically Barthian insistence on divine revelation and the particularity of God’s self-identification in the history of Jesus Christ.5 Jüngel’s chief scholarly accomplishment in dogmatics to date was Gottes Sein ist im Werden.6 Ostensibly a ‘paraphrase’ of Barth’s Trinitarian theology, it was in reality much more than that. On various tracts of Barth’s Trinitarianism – the divine identities of Father, Son and Holy Spirit in Church Dogmatics §10–12; the doctrine of reconciliation in Church Dogmatics IV – it said very little. Its interest lay not in Barth-exegesis for its own sake so much as in the resources Barth might be said to offer to constructive thought. Jüngel’s original subtitle (obscured in later English translations)7 signalled a focus on ‘responsible speech with regard to the being of God’. His study was a tightly argued exercise in philosophical dogmatics which sought to lay bare a number of the ontological issues involved in the gospel’s declaration of divine presence in historical occurrence. Its context was a debate that had erupted in Germany in the early 1960s between the New Testament scholar Herbert Braun and the Barthian dogmatician Helmut Gollwitzer. Braun had argued for a ‘non-objectifying’ account of God: talk of God as an objective being outside of human thought or speech was essentially mythological. Gollwitzer had countered that with a strong insistence that God exists independently of human experience: language about God in and for himself must take priority over talk of God for us. For Jüngel, the dispute traded on a false polarity as far as Barth’s own account of divine objectivity was concerned: rather than driving a wedge between God’s being in and for himself and God’s being for us, the burden of Barth’s Trinitarian logic was that God’s being in se is to be found in God’s being pro nobis. God is himself in the event of his self-bestowal in history. Gollwitzer’s instincts to resist dissolution of theology into some malleable species of experientialism were correct, but his abstract rendition of divine aseity as mere independence, and of divine historicity as a function of God’s will rather than God’s being, was, as Jüngel saw it, effectively a mirror image of the subjectivity he so deplored in Braun. Both failed to grasp the significance of Barth’s emphasis on the free self-movement of the living God: the God encountered in the economy of salvation is God as he really is, the One who is neither augmented nor diminished in so becoming, but simply free to be God this self-chosen way. Divine freedom ought not to be thought

For overview, see J. B. Webster, Eberhard Jüngel: An Introduction to His Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986, pbk. 1991); R. David Nelson, Jüngel: A Guide for the Perplexed (London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2019). 5 See especially Eberhard Jüngel, Paulus und Jesus. Eine Untersuchung zur Präzisierung der Frage nach dem Ursprung der Christologie (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1962). 6 Eberhard Jüngel, Gottes Sein ist im Werden. Verantwortliche Rede vom Sein Gottes bei Karl Barth. Eine Paraphrase (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1964, 2nd edn, 1966). 7 Eberhard Jüngel, The Doctrine of the Trinity: God’s Being is in Becoming, trans. Horton Harris (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1976); Eberhard Jüngel, God’s Being Is in Becoming: The Trinitarian Being of God in the Theology of Karl Barth. A Paraphrase, trans. John Webster (Edinburgh: T&T Clark/Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2001). 4

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of in opposition to the unfolding of God’s primal decision to live his life in identity with the history of Jesus. There was no basis to posit a sharp antithesis between God’s selfrelation and God’s relation to the world; God’s being is ‘ontologically located’8 in his free relation to us. Jüngel recognized the dispute between Gollwitzer and Braun as a late expression of the differences between Barth and Bultmann on what it meant for theology to move on from philosophical idealism. His emphasis on history, on divine presence as temporal ‘event’ and on the implications of that reality for the relationship of theology and anthropology undoubtedly reflected the existentialist impulses he brought to the reading of Barth. For Jüngel, Trinitarian theology addressed – radically – a hermeneutical question concerning human encounter with the God who lives and moves and intercepts his rational creatures. In this, however, Jüngel also saw that Barth’s Trinitarian theology proposed no flight from being – only a rethinking of the categories of being in light of God’s self-disclosure. In Jüngel’s construal, Barth’s version of Trinitarian dogmatics tendered no evasion of philosophy: it pressed for a specifically theological ontology. Gunton read Jüngel’s book as a postgraduate student. Alongside Jenson’s Alpha and Omega9 (and God after God, published during Gunton’s studies)10 it proved a significant instrument in his interpretation of Barth’s doctrine of the Trinity; the revised form of Gunton’s dissertation, Becoming and Being, acknowledges the debt.11 The foil for the argument advanced in the thesis is ‘classical theism’: the term is borrowed from the process thinker, Charles Hartshorne; the characterization retains aspects of Hartshorne’s critique. Classical theism is, for the purpose, deemed to evince three features in particular: ‘supernaturalism’, roughly an assumption that God is not whatever this-worldly nature is as we encounter it; a belief that divinity is timeless; and a basically Neoplatonist view that the being of God exists as ultimate in a chain of being. For Gunton, these instincts were typified in Western tradition by Thomas (later it was all said to be Augustine’s fault, though Thomas himself never escaped). Over against them stood, at Jenson’s suggestion, two versions of modern revision: Hartshorne’s and Barth’s. Gunton had spent the initial months of his research on process theology (‘revulsion intervened’);12 Jenson proposed he might consider the results of that study by way of a

Jüngel, God’s Being Is in Becoming, foreword to the 1st edn, xxv. Robert W. Jenson, Alpha and Omega: A Study in the Theology of Karl Barth (New York: Thomas Nelson, 1963). 10 Robert W. Jenson, God after God: The God of the Past and the God of the Future, Seen in the Work of Karl Barth (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1969). Gunton’s published dissertation also includes reference to Robert W. Jenson, The Knowledge of Things Hoped for: The Sense of Theological Discourse (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969). 11 Gunton, Becoming and Being, 120, 127n.44, 130, 134, 136–7, 142–3, 146–7, 149–51, 163, 167–8, 171–2n.17, 175, 200, 202, 220; cf. also Gunton’s epilogue to the 2nd edn, 226n.5. The usage is pervasively appreciative in tone, acknowledging dependence on Jüngel’s work (127n.44), his ‘great precision’ (130), his repeated insight into Barth (149), his penetration to ‘the heart of the matter’ of Barth’s reasoning on analogy in (and before) the ‘illuminating’ Gottes Sein ist im Werden (175). In a later appraisal of a new English translation of Jüngel’s text, he hails Jüngel’s exposition in the work as generally ‘masterly’: Colin E. Gunton, review of God’s Being Is in Becoming: The Trinitarian Being of God in the Theology of Karl Barth (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2001), Theology Today 59, no. 2 (2002): 310–11, at 311. Becoming and Being additionally cites (171–2n.17, 175–6, 184) an early essay by Jüngel on Barth on analogy, which helped to lay some of the ground for Gottes Sein ist im Werden: Eberhard Jüngel, ‘Die Möglichkeit theologischer Anthropologie auf dem Grund der Analogie. Eine Untersuchung zum Analogieverständnis Karl Barths’, Evangelische Theologie 22, no. 10 (1962): 535–57. 12 Gunton, ‘Theology in Communion’, 33. 8 9

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dialogue with Barth. Hartshorne and Barth both spoke of divine ‘becoming’; both had engaged the opening chapters of Anselm’s Proslogion; both aspired to be modern. Their methods and results were, however, very different. Hartshorne’s alternative to classical notions of divine transcendence was to render divinity heavily vulnerable to temporal process: a dipolar deity was absolute in respect of his existence, but contingent and limited in his actuality; his absoluteness consisted in the eminence of his relativity to all things. Barth saw another possibility: God’s being is to be found in the particular becoming in which God makes himself known. If God determines to be God in the free movement that is his relation to us, his transcendence is in no wise diminished but his being is already to be thought of as a being-in-becoming. In Gunton’s assessment, Barth’s Trinitarianism was, like Hartshorne’s, radical as far as the assumptions of conventional Western metaphysics were concerned, but far more effectively so. In practice, Hartshorne’s incorporation of divinity into a temporal whole actually continued to trade on some rather conventional (Greek) assumptions about the possibilities of divine agency in the world: classical divinity still had to be scaled down or substantially adjusted if God was to be said to engage in genuine interaction with temporal reality. For Barth, by contrast, God’s being is not collapsed into contingency when he acts in time: God is able in freedom and love to relate to creatures who are other to himself, for in God’s own being as triune there is already both otherness and relation. As Barth had seen, the God who is Trinity is neither frozen in static transcendence nor dissolved into some general ontology of flux. The triune God who freely becomes is the God for whom aseity is not mere independence and temporal economy is not compromise to being. Jüngel’s impressive work helped to determine some of the features to which Gunton was drawn as he reckoned with Barth. As Jüngel’s exposition had served in its own way to point up, Barth was somewhat more of a philosophical theologian than his hastier critics imagined. Insistent as Barth was on the primacy of dogmatic language, Jüngel had shown Barth knew full well that when theology spoke of the being of God, or of God’s perfections, or God’s freedom to act in time and space without detriment to his Godness, it did so with consequences for philosophy’s categories. Having begun to teach philosophy of religion in the midst of his studies, Gunton for his part had clear interest in explicating the general metaphysical entailments of the gospel; Jüngel’s constructive applications of Barth were suggestive of a certain direction of travel.13 Theology could not stand upon any non-theological account of rationality, but God’s Trinitarian selfdisclosure entailed a theological construal of worldly reality at large. Gunton would later describe his Trinitarian theology as concerned at its core with ‘a quest for ontology’: ‘ít is only through an understanding of the kind of being that God is that we can come to learn what kind of beings we are and what kind of world we inhabit.’14 In this Gunton would ultimately roam a good deal more freely than Barth in interpreting the world as realm of divine presence in action, but Jüngel helped him to sense that the exposition of all being in light of the being of the triune God ought to be a crucial concern for any theology that took Barth’s doctrine of God seriously. Barth’s Trinitarian actualism was startling indeed: ‘To its very deepest depths God’s Godhead consists in the fact that it is an event – not any event, not events in general, but

arth died in Basel on 10 December 1968. Jüngel moved from Zürich to Tübingen in 1969. B Colin E. Gunton, The Promise of Trinitarian Theology (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1991), ix.

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the event of His action.’15 That logic had for Barth intensified from CD II/2 onwards, in exposition of election; it had reached its peak in the Christology of CD IV. But was it the case that Barth’s reasoning still had not followed through entirely on what it might mean for theology to press into the matter of God’s becoming in time? In a paper written towards the end of his doctoral work, Gunton began to air a version of that question, while citing Jenson and Jüngel as reference points on the language of ‘event’.16 Barth had, he reasoned, begun to discern the potentially radical significance of the truth that God’s being is personally present in history, yet Barth continued to be affected by vestiges of a more conventional assumption: that temporal occurrence discloses rather than enacts divine being. This in turn, for Gunton, appeared to leave Barth caught between a ‘static’ conception of Christian thought and an ‘eschatological’ one: rather than doctrine developing, it can seem as if everything that really matters for the church’s teaching has already happened; the church is not being moved through history by the Spirit’s work specifically. As Jenson in particular had argued with force, Barth’s pneumatology was inadequate. Barth’s God was free, but not yet free enough in his sovereignly dynamic presence in time; this impinged on Barth’s conception of the church and of the theological task itself. In the published version of his thesis (by far his most careful book as an engagement with texts), Gunton is appreciative of Barth but also willing to venture criticism of the limitations in his doctrine of God. The critique might be said to press further along a path which the reading of Jüngel had helped to open up, albeit the negative judgements were surely encouraged by Jenson’s influences in particular. Gunton sees Barth’s recasting of the theme of divine becoming and being as, in all its power, incomplete. Oriented towards the past in its emphasis on divine self-determination,17 Barth’s doctrine of God continued to imply that creaturely temporality was less than fully significant as site of divine ontology. Barth had seen that temporality of an eminent sort was to be affirmed of the being of the God who acts, but even as his theology had developed in its historicism it had remained too wedded to tendencies to relativize the world of time and space over against a timeless eternity. By placing as much emphasis as he did on the eternal decree of God as basis of the earthly history of reconciliation Barth had continued to risk evacuation of that history’s constitutive character: in effect, salvation history merely displayed a pretemporal determination, or served as theophany of a timeless eternity. If divine reality was indeed to be identified not in supra-temporal freedom to be other, or in independence of relation to creation, but in the drama of divine self-identification in history, the economy needed to be taken with full seriousness. Barth had not said enough Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics II/1 (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1957), 263. Colin E. Gunton, ‘Karl Barth and the Development of Christian Doctrine’, Scottish Journal of Theology 25, no. 2 (1972): 171–80, repr. in revised form as ‘The Development of Christian Doctrine: Karl Barth’s Understanding of the Theological Task’, in Colin E. Gunton, Theology through the Theologians: Selected Essays 1972–1995 (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1996), 34–49. The revised version cites an additional essay by Jüngel which is ‘full of insights about “development” ’ (48n.42): Eberhard Jüngel, ‘The Emergence of the New’, in Eberhard Jüngel, Theological Essays II, ed. J. B. Webster (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1995), 35–58. 17 On this see also the use of Jüngel in critical exposition of Barth on election in Colin E. Gunton, ‘Karl Barth’s Doctrine of Election as Part of His Doctrine of God’, Journal of Theological Studies 25, no. 2 (1974): 381–92, at 387–90, repr. in revised form as ‘The Doctrine of God: Karl Barth’s Doctrine of Election as Part of his Doctrine of God’, in Gunton, Theology through the Theologians, 88–104, at 96–101. In a later essay on Barth’s soteriology Gunton is somewhat more measured in his adoption of Jenson’s critique of Barth’s theology as quasi-Platonist since unduly tied to divine determination in eternity past: Colin E. Gunton, ‘Salvation’, in The Cambridge Companion to Karl Barth, ed. John Webster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 143–58, at 155–6. 15 16

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about the human history of Jesus, or about the role of the Spirit as the one through whose personal divine agency temporal creation is brought towards its eschatological perfection.18 A good deal of this would move – by implication though not expressly – beyond Jüngel as well, but the concern to locate divine being in history without collapsing divine transcendence, and to speak in turn of the being of creation and creatures in light of the being-in-action of their triune creator, was one that Jüngel’s approach to theological metaphysics had served to encourage.

GOD AND CREATURES By the time Becoming and Being appeared, Jüngel had issued his magnum opus, Gott als Geheimnis der Welt – partly a huge construal of the history of modern theology, especially in its relations to philosophical theism, partly an ambitious exercise in constructive dogmatics.19 The latter case was governed by the conviction that divine self-disclosure in history occurs specifically in God’s identification with the crucified Jesus, and thus God must be thought of as able to be in a way that involves passion and death. For Jüngel, the God of the cross remains God in self-surrender; suffering and death are not the dissolution of divinity, but a chosen mode of God’s sovereign capacity. It is the God who remains the living God even in the event of his death who is love; only a Trinitarian theology can begin to articulate it. God comes from God, as God, to God, living completely from himself yet ever self-related, and just as such the God whose being for us exists – even in the darkness of Calvary and the tomb – in identity with his being for himself. Aspects of Jüngel’s argument had been anticipated in the third part of Gottes Sein ist im Werden and other subsequent writing.20 Though Jüngel had possibly overstated the significance of divine suffering in the mature theology of Barth, he had undoubtedly offered a far more careful presentation of theopaschitism than could be found in certain other contemporary versions of a Kreuzestheologie (such as Jürgen Moltmann’s).21 Here was a theology in which Hegel as well as Barth played an obvious role, yet a theology that also refused any crass identification of divinity with worldly process at large, or treatment of the death of God as event in cultural history. The theodicial dimensions of an account of divine suffering were also muted: Jüngel’s interest lay in the ontological character of God for God’s own sake, not in apologetics or putative correlations with moral experience.22 Jüngel’s work was a study of undeniable weight. Its reception in Britain remained slow, however; Gott als Geheimnis der Welt does not feature in Becoming and Being.

S ee in particular Gunton, Becoming and Being, 181–5. Eberhard Jüngel, Gott als Geheimnis der Welt. Zur Begründung der Theologie des Gekreuzigten im Streit zwischen Theismus und Atheismus (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1977); ET of 3rd edn as God as the Mystery of the World: On the Foundation of the Theology of the Crucified One in the Dispute between Theism and Atheism, trans. Darrell L. Guder (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans/Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1983). 20 Particularly Eberhard Jüngel, ‘Vom Tod des lebendigen Gottes. Ein Plakat’, Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche 65, no. 1 (1968): 93–116; ‘Das dunkle Wort vom “Tode Gottes” ’, Evangelische Kommentare 2, no. 3 (1969): 133–8; no. 4 (1969): 198–202. Jüngel had also published Tod (Stuttgart: Kreuz-Verlag, 1971; ET as Death: The Riddle and the Mystery, trans. Iain and Ute Nicol (Edinburgh: St Andrew Press, 1975). 21 Jürgen Moltmann, Der gekreuzigte Gott: das Kreuz Christi als Grund und Kritik christlicher Theologie, 2nd edn (Munich: Chr. Kaiser Verlag, 1973); ET The Crucified God: The Cross of Christ as the Foundation and Criticism of Christian Theology, trans. R. A. Wilson and John Bowden (London: SCM Press, 1974). 22 Deity arrived at by theistic reasoning or moral sentiment alike was, for Jüngel, product of theological malaise, not wisdom. 18 19

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In the study of Christology which Gunton completed after his transition to a lectureship in systematic theology, Yesterday and Today,23 Jüngel plays no part; the epilogue to the second edition, published in 1997, mentions him briefly as, with Moltmann, a theologian who sees the cross as key to the doctrine of the Trinity, a judgement Gunton considers inadequate in itself, albeit a salutary reminder that ‘the scandalous aspects of the Trinity and its cultural cutting edge are to be maintained’.24 What is, however, very clear in the text at large is Gunton’s continuing concern to avoid any form of metaphysical dualism which sets the eternal God and creaturely history in separate realms. As Gunton sees it, what the Fathers at their best discerned – unlike so many moderns – was that in Christ the presence and action of God do indeed occur in a human life and death, and in this neither the transcendence of God nor the authenticity of Jesus’ humanity is compromised. On this reckoning, confessions of Jesus as the temporal logic of the eternal God inevitably lead to the doctrine of the Trinity, for they ‘presuppose the reality of a God who is able to become spatio-temporal without loss of his divinity, of an eternal who is able to differentiate himself to become other than he is’. For Gunton, ‘God is not to be understood as the bare negation of our time and space – as utterly timeless and spaceless – but as being eternally in himself that relatedness to the other which actualizes itself in our history.’25 The triune God must be thought of as ‘oriented from all eternity to what happened in Jesus of Nazareth’,26 and that means – as of course Jüngel had earlier shown Gunton in application of Barth’s theology of election – reconsidering the nature of divine being in creaturely time. But the thought required to be pursued further. Gunton’s third book, Enlightenment and Alienation, published in 1985 after his appointment to his chair though written three years earlier,27 does make brief reference to Gott als Geheimnis der Welt,28 but the text is not widely deployed. Subtitled An Essay towards a Trinitarian Theology, Gunton’s study attempts to trace three problems bequeathed by the Enlightenment – perception, freedom and interpretation – arguing that the remedy for modern dichotomies of objectivity and subjectivity, freedom and obligation, and criticism and faith is a vision of all reality and those who experience it as the creation of the triune God. To see and believe, to think and act, to read and understand the Bible in light of the being and action of the triune God is to know enlightenment without alienation and the scepticism or despair into which it may descend. Gunton’s resources are generally drawn from his experience in teaching the history of modern philosophy. Jüngel might have helped him quite a bit more in the plotting of modernity as a story in which poor theology was ever implicated; on Jüngel’s construal, that narrative was writ large in the fate of thought and speech about God from Descartes through German idealism to Nietzsche. In a mid-1980s paper on the doctrine of God,29 later revised as a chapter in The Promise of Trinitarian Theology,30 Gunton mentions Jüngel’s treatment of divine Colin E. Gunton, Yesterday and Today: A Study of Continuities in Christology (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1983; 2nd edn, London: SPCK, 1997). 24 Ibid., 225; cf. generally the criticism of Moltmann in Colin E. Gunton, Christ and Creation. The Didsbury Lectures, 1990 (Carlisle: Paternoster/Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1992), 86–9. 25 Ibid.,  134–5. 26 Ibid.,  136. 27 Colin E. Gunton, Enlightenment and Alienation: An Essay towards a Trinitarian Theology (Basingstoke: Marshall, Morgan & Scott, 1985). 28 Ibid., 67–9, 96–7, 99. 29 Colin E. Gunton, ‘The Christian Doctrine of God: Opposition and Convergence’, in Heaven and Earth: Essex Essays in Theology and Ethics, ed. Andrew Linzey and Peter J. Wexler (Worthing: Churchman, 1986), 11–22. 30 Colin E. Gunton, ‘The Question of God in the Modern World: Trinitarian Possibilities’, in Gunton, The Promise of Trinitarian Theology, 16–30. 23

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revelation in history in Gottes Sein ist im Werden and his emphasis in Gott als Geheimnis der Welt on divine coming as self-identified in the cross. Both texts were now in English translation and are cited among recent representative studies of the Trinity. Jüngel’s concentration on ‘justification’ as the particular place of God’s presence is said to be deficient in explaining how God may be said to be the mystery of the world.31 It is not immediately obvious that Jüngel’s big book does in fact make as much as Gunton suggests of the theme of justification (essential as it certainly is to Jüngel elsewhere);32 the criticism is perhaps intended to be more general in its terms: in focusing so heavily on the cross as such (vital as it is), it may be that the significance of Trinitarian action elsewhere in the divine economy receives inadequate attention. That is consonant with Gunton’s concern to speak of creation and history at large as place of divine action, and indeed to move beyond the restrictions of a narrowly noetic (and so anthropocentric) exposition of salvation as apprehension of justifying grace; ontological restoration and perfection of creaturely reality as a whole is, once again, the end to which the triune God’s temporal self-enactment is directed. Jüngel’s theology was very clear that the created order is divine gift, but Jüngel’s particular refraction of Lutheranism also tended to stress the interruptive dimensions of divine action. The construal there was duly ontological rather than moralistic; still, eschatological categories – divine coming, interception, gospel versus law, presence-inabsence, the priority of possibility over actuality, the boundaries as much as the realities of creaturely mediation of divine work – were fairly dominant. In this it seemed to Gunton to underplay the immanent movements of the triune God’s action within and for creation and creatures all the while. The ontology for which Gunton reached did not posit a relation of time and eternity, or a God who existed and acted over against a moving world, but a God who in acting in the world allowed the world to be properly itself in consequence of its pervasive dependence upon him.33 As Gunton would later phrase it, theology needs to speak of the sovereignty and priority of divine action and, at the same time, of ‘the proper Selbständigkeit – relative independence – of the world’.34 As Jüngel had demonstrated so effectively in response to Gollwitzer, the alternative to unqualified immanence was not unqualified transcendence; what was needed was a rich depiction of the creaturely as medium of divine presence. Gunton continued to make various passing references to Jüngel’s work as guide to Barth’s endeavours to hold together divine objectivity and divine freedom, and thus to reach after a non-competitive account of divine being and creaturely time. He also knew

Gunton, The Promise of Trinitarian Theology, 28. Gunton would make only modest use of Jüngel’s later spirited response to the Lutheran-Roman Catholic Joint Declaration on Justification (1999) in Das Evangelium von der Rechtfertigung des Gottlosen als Zentrum des christlichen Glaubens, 3rd edn (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1999), ET Justification: The Heart of the Christian Faith: A Theological Study with an Ecumenical Purpose, trans. Jeffrey F. Cayzer, intro. John Webster (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2001), though cf. Colin E. Gunton, Act and Being: Towards a Theology of the Divine Attributes (London: SCM Press, 2002; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003), 109; cf. also 123–4. He refers students in passing to Jüngel’s ‘good article’, ‘On the Doctrine of Justification’, International Journal of Systematic Theology 1, no. 1 (1999): 24–52, in Colin E. Gunton, The Barth Lectures, ed. P. H. Brazier (London: T&T Clark International, 2007), 219. 33 See generally Colin E. Gunton, ‘Barth and the Western Intellectual Tradition: Towards a Theology after Christendom’, in Theology beyond Christendom: Essays on the Centenary of the Birth of Karl Barth, May 10, 1886, ed. John Thompson (Allison Park, PA: Pickwick, 1986), 285–301, esp. 286–7. 34 Gunton, ‘Salvation’, 155. 31 32

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of Jüngel’s exposition of Luther on human freedom35 and of Jüngel’s important work on metaphor.36 He is critical of Jüngel’s bold attempt to defend a distinction of inner and outer freedom, considering it bedevilled yet by classic Western tendencies towards a valorization of interiority and other-worldliness over against immediate moral and political responsibility (the relation of Jüngel’s Luther to Barth here is only obliquely considered; Gunton appears to take it that the two merely reflect similar problems, a judgement that might well be contested). The evocation of Jüngel on language is more appreciative: divine movement does indeed enable true speech about God in human words; in the divine commandeering of creaturely semantic forms, the possibilities of creaturely language are actualized by the purposive ends of divine disclosure. As he had felt his way onwards in Trinitarian theology, Gunton had come to believe ever more firmly that Barth had not gone nearly far enough in the task of identifying the God who in acting within creation genuinely lives his triune life in our midst. Barth’s doctrine of Trinity had retained far too many vestiges of a notion of transcendence uncorrected by the gospel. From around the time of his inaugural lecture at King’s College in 1985,37 Gunton had begun to argue with force that the problems had a large hinterland indeed. Western theological tradition in general remained deeply monistic in its confession of God. Father, Son and Holy Spirit had in Western theology been typically said to be relations of the one God rather than three divine persons distinctively and mutually constitutive of the being of God all the way down. Divine unity or simplicity had in effect remained primordial; the genuine threeness of divine action ad extra had been deemed ‘indivisible’, somehow less than fully rooted in God’s innermost being. It was all, in no small measure, Augustine’s responsibility, and the legacies had been baleful. The theological crisis of the modern West, the problems of Cartesianism, of persons as unrelated minds, of modern individualism and all its ills, could all be traced back, one way or another, to a failure to take essential Trinitarian personhood with full seriousness. It was only in light of the reality of the triune God as fundamentally personal – as three particular persons with essentially interdependent but also essentially distinctive features and forms of personal action – that human personhood, made in this God’s image, could in turn be seen in proper theological perspective.38 The critical agenda launched in Becoming and Being expanded; Gunton increasingly wished to spell out the ways in which Barth’s weaknesses were evidenced: in a preference for Seinsweisen rather than ‘persons’ in his Trinitarian theology (Gunton himself, it might be noted, had appeared to share some of the same reserve not so long before); in Barth’s lack of interest in the human history of Jesus as revelatory; and – especially – in his pneumatology, or lack of it, which had implied that revelation occurs immediately and

Gunton, The Promise of Trinitarian Theology, 122–41, makes reference to Eberhard Jüngel, Zur Freiheit eines Christenmenschen. Eine Erinnerung an Luthers Schrift (Munich: Chr. Kaiser, 1987). 36 Colin E. Gunton, The Actuality of Atonement: A Study of Metaphor, Rationality and the Christian Tradition (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1988), 27–52, briefly cites Eberhard Jüngel, ‘Metaphorische Wahrheit. Erwägungen zur theologischen Relevanz der Metapher als Beitrag zur Hermeneutik einer narrative Theologie’, in Metapher. Zur Hermeneutik religiöser Sprache, ed. Paul Ricoeur and Eberhard Jüngel (Evangelische Theologie Sonderheft, Munich: Chr. Kaiser, 1974), 71–122, repr. in Eberhard Jüngel, Entsprechungen. Gott–Wahrheit–Mensch. Theologische Erörterungen (Munich: Chr. Kaiser, 1980), 103–57, ET in Eberhard Jüngel, Theological Essays I, ed. J. B. Webster (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1989), 16–71. 37 Most readily accessed in its revised form in Gunton, The Promise of Trinitarian Theology, 86–103. 38 The issues are distilled in Colin E. Gunton, ‘Augustine, the Trinity and the Theological Crisis of the West’, Scottish Journal of Theology 43, no. 1 (1990): 33–58, repr. in Gunton, The Promise of Trinitarian Theology, 31–57. 35

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interceptively but left little room for the Spirit as pervasively involved in the world and the one who affords intimacy with divine life to creaturely reality. Barth’s Trinitarianism posited an ontology of event; his theology of revelation still worked with a notion of the one God as underlying the revelatory movements of the three. Unity was basic, threefoldness derivative. Within the being of God, the Spirit was bond of unity, but as such the closer of a divine circle more than the agent who opened up its personal fellowship for creatures. Within the economy of creation and redemption, the Spirit was not seen as he ought to be as the personal perfecter of the world, the one through whose action all things created are finally brought to their proper ends and enabled to be distinctly themselves in proper relation to God. Barth was not a modalist, pace his more obtuse critics, but the tendencies of Western theology’s persistent downplaying of plurality had indeed remained in his thought. Gunton found resources well beyond Barth: a vocabulary of personhood drawn from Cappadocian theology as filtered by John Zizioulas in particular; a broader set of assets from Irenaeus and elsewhere for speaking of what he called ‘mediation’ – the personal movements of the triune God in the world which enact God’s presence in time and effect his purposes for the blessing, restoration and completion of his creation. Where did this leave Jüngel? At one level, nowhere particularly prominent. Jüngel continued to feature much less than Barth himself, even in areas where he might somewhat have helped. Jüngel’s Trinitarianism was at its sharpest in its proposal that the doctrine of God serves as counterpoint to an amorphous theism and its modern atheistic shadow. At least some of that ought to have been companionable to Gunton as he laboured to articulate a Trinitarian account of relationality over against the displacements of modern culture, individualist and collective, in his 1992 Bampton Lectures, The One, the Three and the Many,39 but the argument does not cite Jüngel at all. The doctrine of the Trinity is presented as yielding a non-competitive construal of God and the world, and as basis for the identification of a relational metaphysic of spirit as (Coleridgean) transcendental. Neither Barth nor Jüngel would have wished to underwrite the latter; whatever a theological ontology entailed, it could not be a generalized notion of personhood as ultimate. Gunton himself came to think – with some justice – that his argument in The One, the Three and the Many was theologically inadequate, an instance of a sort of tendency to treat Trinitarian doctrine too much as hermeneutical instrument, almost a way of describing the world more than the character of the God who is present in action within it. The outline treatment of revelation in the 1993 Warfield Lectures40 began to consider a fuller exposition of mediation, somewhat less invested in analogical applications of sociality, concerned more with what it means that God the Father operates in the world of creaturely reality through the distinctive agencies of God the Son and God the Holy Spirit. In all this, though, Jüngel’s possible strengths and weaknesses as theologian of God and the world do not feature, nor does he appear very much in Gunton’s evolving body of work over the course of the 1990s on creation, anthropology and ethics. Gunton does, however, turn to Jüngel more specifically in one essay; there and in one or two other places it is clear that Jüngel is indeed drawn into the general critique Gunton wished to press against Barth. Having originally assisted Gunton to ponder the questions of becoming and being, Jüngel is himself adjudged only partially successful in the formulation of the answers. Colin E. Gunton, The One, the Three and the Many: God, Creation and the Culture of Modernity. The 1992 Bampton Lectures (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). 40 Colin E. Gunton, A Brief Theology of Revelation: The 1993 Warfield Lectures (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1995). 39

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MOVING BEYOND BARTH A paper produced for a Festschrift for Jüngel’s sixtieth year41 represents, beyond Gunton’s doctoral study, his most explicit engagement with Jüngel’s work. One essay – a somewhat meandering one at that – offers limited base for general analysis, nor of course does the piece purport to be anything like so comprehensive in its interests, but it helps us gain a sense at least of how Gunton had come to view some of the limitations as well as the achievements of Jüngel’s theology. After beginning with the point that Barth’s interest in the perfections of God demonstrates that he was, after all, a positive philosophical theologian, and that his approach involved dialogue with accounts of both absolute and personal categories within a classical theological tradition, Gunton argues that Jüngel had shown in his Barth interpretation that rejection of Greek metaphysics on Trinitarian grounds is able to generate not merely critique of but alternative to a philosophical theology ‘that appears to imprison God in eternity’.42 Gunton then considers Jüngel’s relation to Hegel. If Barth’s theology did not succeed in effecting an adequate break with a theology of God as absolute subject, a tradition in which Hegel was self-evidently a leading light, Jüngel might be said to succeed in using Hegel to different effect, especially in recasting the notion of necessity. For Jüngel, the triune God reveals himself to be, in his self-identification in the death of the cross, mehr als notwendig: in this, as Gunton reads it, aseity, transcendence, omnipotence and so on are transformed. While process theology, and perhaps also Moltmann’s theopaschitism, simply inverts axioms of absoluteness, impassibility and immutability, Jüngel’s theology is much more careful: God involves himself in nothingness, is affected by it, but not overcome: such is the Trinitarian dialectic of action-in-difference. Jüngel’s achievement amounts to a revision rather than a wholesale rejection of the tradition: ‘the coming of God to the world in Christ is made the basis of a doctrine of the immanent trinity which both writes the historical action of God into the being of God and maintains a proper distinction between God and the world’.43 The results, for Gunton, are greatly preferable to modern theologies of divine necessitarianism which collapse the right of God to be God and of the world to be the world (Gunton suggests that Lutheran Christologies which, in their exposition of union, degenerate as Hegel’s does into a general principle of immanence are usually implicated). Yet he wonders again if Jüngel’s concept of mystery – a God both identical and not identical with his presence in Jesus – is robust enough to do what is required of it. In the end, Jüngel’s Trinitarianism, like Barth’s, does not seem to yield all that is needed. As with Barth, what is required still is a much stronger pneumatology: the cross is not only the death of God but the death of the human Jesus, whose humanity is all that it is, all along the line, by the Spirit’s personal enabling; within the immanent being of God, too, the Spirit has a personal not just a formal relational role (as vinculum caritatis). Like Barth, Jüngel has revised the classical tradition, but has risked still the Lutheran–Hegelian danger: ‘a monist Christological principle’.44 Colin Gunton, ‘The Being and Attributes of God. Eberhard Jüngel’s Dispute with the Classical Philosophical Tradition’, in The Possibilities of Theology: Studies in the Theology of Eberhard Jüngel in His Sixtieth Year, ed. John Webster (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1994), 7–22, repr. in Gunton, Theology through the Theologians, 70–87. References hereafter are to the reprinted essay. 42 Gunton, ‘The Being and Attributes of God’, 76. 43 Ibid.,  85. 44 Ibid.,  87. 41

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Similar notes are sounded elsewhere. The idiom of divine ‘coming’ is interesting so far as it goes, but Jüngel’s pneumatology might still be held to subordinate the Spirit to the Son, or at least to leave the Spirit’s role less defined and less personal than it ought to be. What does it mean to say, as Jüngel’s Christology does so much, that God ‘identifies’ with the man Jesus along the course of his human life and in the event of his death? What, again, does it mean to say that the Spirit acts within the creaturely sphere at large to outwork creation’s genuinely temporal perfection as opposed to merely effecting the shadow cast by a settled pretemporal determination in respect of creation’s final character? What does it mean to speak of divine ‘time for’ us? Is it (by implication) a matter of attempting once again to relate eternity and time in general terms?45 The case against Barth himself is nuanced but also summed up with a degree of vigour in the epilogue to the second edition of Becoming and Being.46 Barth’s legacy as passionate theologian of the Trinity is seen as immense – what a difference a generation had made to the status of Trinitarian doctrine – and his ontology remains greatly preferable to the panentheism of process thought. But it is in the end seriously deficient in its articulation of the primacy and particularity of the triune persons, and weak in its doctrines of creation and pneumatology. Some qualifications are offered, and there is enduring concern for appreciation, but in the main Gunton had come to feel the critique presented in his thesis had not been brisk enough. Jüngel is not overtly indicated, but it is again evident elsewhere that his work is implicated in the mature version of the charges against Barth. In his 2002 review of God’s Being Is in Becoming, Gunton retains his admiration for Jüngel’s powerful treatment of Barth’s ontology, but comments that its ‘clarity diminishes… at the places where questions can most be asked of Barth’s theology’. Jüngel’s Christology, whose Lutheran roots Gunton assumes evidence a degree of correspondence with Barth’s theology (presumably insofar as Jüngel’s construal of the enhypostasia, like Barth’s in Gunton’s judgement, is deemed to underplay the humanity of Christ),47 does not say what it might mean for the man Jesus to be ‘constitutive of the being of the triune God’. The issue is linked to a doctrine of election which, in Barth’s hands, risks compromise to the freedom in which God relates to the world. Jüngel is right to say the event of revelation does ‘in some way correspond to something in the being of God’ (a notably thin way of describing Jüngel’s Trinitarian ontology), but satisfactory construal of the event of eternal love that God is calls – once again – for ‘a stronger concept of the divine persons’. By implication, it seems, Jüngel may have aspired admirably to press on in treating the created world and its history with full significance, but his theology, like Barth’s, lacks resources to go as far as it intends. At the last, Jüngel’s theology appears to need two things at least: ‘a stronger doctrine of creation than Barth ever achieved

Colin E. Gunton, review of Theological Essays II, by Eberhard Jüngel, Scottish Journal of Theology 52, no. 2 (1999): 248–50, at 249–50. 46 Gunton, Becoming and Being, 225–45. 47 Jüngel’s Christology might conceivably be said to abstract the drama of the cross from the human life that precedes it, though the assessment of such an argument would depend in part on broader consideration of Jüngel’s several renditions of Jesus as the Word of God, of divine identification in/with the man Jesus and of divine revelation and hiddenness. Whether it is a remotely fair assessment of Barth to suggest that he is uninterested in Jesus’ free (and as such salvifically dense) human action, or that Barth’s immense endeavours to reckon with the legacies of Reformed Christology on the relationship of humanity to divinity in the temporal enactment of the enfleshed Word can somehow be set aside, is a whole other matter. But Gunton’s own Christology and its relation to post-Reformation traditions must be considered further elsewhere in this volume. 45

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and a theology of inner-Trinitarian otherness-in-relation to counter the weakness of the Augustinian notion of God’s self-relatedness’.48 A great deal of Gunton’s mature work is of course an attempt to map out a better way, in depiction of the essential communion of the divine persons and of the economy of these persons in the history of creatures. In this the critique of Jüngel as such never becomes terribly fierce. In Act and Being, he features occasionally and positively: on the divine empowerment of human language to refer to God and God’s attributes;49 on Barth’s theology of God’s self-presentation of his triune being in the triune economy of his action;50 and on the vital principle that God is to be known and worshipped not on the basis of creaturely self-interest or for any other end, but simply inasmuch as God is, and is interesting for his own sake.51 Still: the constructive argument of the book aims to move beyond the deficiencies of Barth which Gunton has elsewhere suggested continue to afflict Jüngel as well. Gunton seeks to present all of God’s acts as taking their beginning in the Father, put into effect through the Son and reaching completion in the Spirit. Divine mediation occurs from within the structures of creation, not simply towards creation from the outside. For Gunton, this requires, in Christology, a clear articulation of the humanity of the Saviour, in which Jesus’ identity and freedom as an agent in time and space (as distinct from a mere function of God’s presence) is affirmed; it further requires, in pneumatology, an expansive treatment of the Spirit as completing agent of creaturely being, the one through whose personal work creaturely reality is brought to fulfilment in its own sphere in relation to its divine creator, redeemer and perfecter.

GUNTON’S JÜNGEL IN LIGHT OF GUNTON’S BARTH As the posthumously published transcripts of his Barth lectures illustrate,52 Gunton urged his students to recognize in Barth’s dogmatic – and yes, moral – bequest ‘the major achievement of twentieth-century theology’.53 Gunton remained far too conscious of Barth’s stature, and of his own debts, to venture the kinds of facile critiques of Barth that some have seen fit to proffer. Cheap dismissals were ever to be eschewed; Gunton continued to nurse ambitions to write a considered study of Barth in his retirement. He had early begun to ask questions of Barth that would only intensify; with Jüngel’s input not least he had also learned early from Barth that the doctrine of the triune God mattered supremely, and that, rightly articulated, it provided the only sure basis for a doctrine of creation and creatures. Plenty of others besides Gunton have discerned in the mature Barth’s legacy the beginnings at least of a radical alternative to classical metaphysics and have continued to argue about what such a position may or may not entail if logically pursued. Jüngel’s interpretation of Barth has understandably been drawn somewhat into that discussion.54

Colin E. Gunton, review of God’s Being Is in Becoming: The Trinitarian Being of God in the Theology of Karl Barth, by Eberhard Jüngel, Theology Today 59, no. 2 (2002): 310–11. 49 Gunton, Act and Being, 74, 113. 50 Ibid.,  97–8. 51 Ibid., 109–10. 52 Gunton, The Barth Lectures. 53 Gunton, Becoming and Being, 244. 54 See, e.g., Bruce L. McCormack, ‘God Is His Decision: The Jüngel-Gollwitzer “Debate” Revisited’, in Theology as Conversation: The Significance of Dialogue in Historical and Contemporary Theology. A Festschrift for Daniel L. Migliore, ed. Bruce L. McCormack and Kimlyn J. Bender (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2009), 48–66. 48

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Gunton’s theology has thus far featured very little in the context,55 not least because his work cannot be located in the same ways in specialist interpretation of Barth, or in the related debates about the relationship of Trinity and election, or perhaps even – for all the undoubted gestures towards clarity on such matters in his later work especially – in a thoroughgoing exposition of the nature of a theological language of personhood, or of the analogia entis.56 Plainly Gunton’s endeavours to move beyond Barth, however different their style,57 do not strike out in nearly so bold a direction as some have recommended – his mentor Jenson’s Systematic Theology most obviously58 – in the identification of salvation-history itself as drama of divine self-actualization. Gunton’s theology is in the end considerably less prone than some others after Barth to marginalize (or dissolve) a distinction between the perfection of God in se and the free enactment of that perfection in time. Nor – of course – does Gunton wish to fall into the forms of blatant projectionism championed by some advocates of a ‘social’ Trinity as basis for a creaturely programme. It is simply that for Gunton – as for Barth or indeed any other theologian who has begun to reckon with the fragments of Hegel as these may be deemed to be dispersed around a modern field – the relationship of divine being and history can scarcely be ignored as subject for Trinitarian theology’s rigorous consideration. The particular paths of enquiry that Jüngel as well as Jenson had helped to expose remained of deep and wide-ranging interest; a great deal of Gunton’s theology was taken up with one version or another of a fundamental fascination with the due articulation of Trinity and time. Gunton recognized Jüngel to be ‘a modern theologian in the best sense of the word’: a thinker engaged with matters of immense contemporary concern – epistemology, the nature of worldly reality, the definition of human dignity and purpose, the basis of human freedom, community and agency – in light of the gospel of God’s being and act.59 Jüngel’s writing on the nature of the theological task and on theological thought and speech was obviously demanding in its style, but also of great value; his discussions of various soteriological themes – atonement, substitution, sacrifice – were often ‘splendid’.60 Still, as with all of Gunton’s interlocutors, Jüngel was also a thinker with whom it was important to disagree as well as agree; theology was to be prosecuted ‘through the theologians’, but as a conversation aimed at constructive confession, not commentary for its own sake. There remains much in Gunton’s critique that is distinctly arguable. As I read Barth, divine freedom is for him scarcely if ever synonymous with sheer transcendence, and creaturely integrity and temporality actually matter a very great deal. The accounts of personal being-in-action may not be nearly as foreshortened as Gunton proposes. Jüngel’s work as a whole is indubitably less integrated and more episodic in its ways of

Though projects influenced by him have existed somewhere in the ambit, see, e.g. Paul M. Collins, Trinitarian Theology West and East: Karl Barth, the Cappadocian Fathers, and John Zizioulas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). 56 See, e.g., Thomas Joseph White, ed., The Analogy of Being: Invention of the Antichrist or the Wisdom of God? (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2011); also Keith L. Johnson, Karl Barth and the Analogia Entis (London: T&T Clark, 2010). 57 For one assessment, see Paul D. Molnar, Divine Freedom and the Doctrine of the Immanent Trinity: In Dialogue with Karl Barth and Contemporary Theology, 2nd edn (London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2017), 483–527. 58 Robert W. Jenson, Systematic Theology, 2 vols (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997, 1999). 59 Gunton, review of Eberhard Jüngel, Theological Essays II, 248–9. 60 Ibid.,  250. 55

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expounding the relationship of God and creatures; its Christology lacks (I think) some vitally necessary density, precision and range; its pneumatology might indeed be deemed slender; its treatment of revelation may well be too tied to the interruptive, the linguistic and the existential to give full scope to divine communicative action in the world at large. Of Jüngel’s theology of creation, and its implications for a systematic theology, questions can certainly be asked. Still: Jüngel does also have a fair bit of real interest to say about a Trinitarian theology of the natural, about an anthropology of an indicative grace and, in his later work especially, about the moral entailments of human correspondence to God as distinct from human self-realization. It is a pity that Gunton’s writing did not explore some of that material further. His readings of Jüngel, as of others, remain selective and restless, eager to press on with big ideas and provocations, not much concerned to pore over the full range of what Jüngel might have to offer or to consider how such wider textual engagements might impinge on the assessments of his work. It is of course a greater loss still that we do not have a final synthesis of what a ‘fully trinitarian’ theology ought to look like, and of what might ultimately have been suggested about the strengths and weaknesses of Jüngel’s contributions, as of Barth’s, in that. As things stand, it may well be that Gunton’s tendency to consider both theologians as afflicted by a generic Augustinian disease risks failure of justice to the richness of Barth’s engagement with his Reformed inheritance and to the particularities of Jüngel’s Lutheranism alike. Some might also wish to explore larger questions about the relationships between patristic and modern Trinitarian theologies in all of it, and to ask what it may or may not mean to be ‘traditional’ or ‘classical’, ‘revisionist’ or ‘modern’ in the articulation of doctrine. There, too, as he would have exhorted fully, Gunton’s thought, like Barth’s and Jüngel’s, deserves to be probed. It is, however, a measure of Gunton’s enduring stature as a theologian of the gospel that he sends us back to the issues with which he never ceased to wrestle since first encountering them in the doctrine of the triune God as set forth by the Barth whom Jüngel had helped to open up. In that, sure enough: ‘Gunton was into the genuine stuff.’61

Robert W. Jenson, ‘A Decision Tree of Colin Gunton’s Thinking’, in The Theology of Colin Gunton, ed. Lincoln Harvey (London: T&T Clark International, 2010), 8–16, at 16. 61

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Gunton, Colin E. ‘Karl Barth and the Development of Christian Doctrine’. Scottish Journal of Theology 25, no. 2 (1972): 171–80. Gunton, Colin E. ‘Rudolf Bultmann and the Location of Language about God’. Theology 75, no. 628 (1972): 535–9. Gunton, Colin E. ‘Process Theology’s Concept of God: An Outline and Assessment’. Expository Times 84, no. 10 (1973): 292–6. Gunton, Colin E. ‘Karl Barth’s Doctrine of Election as Part of His Doctrine of God’. Journal of Theological Studies 25, no. 2 (1974): 381–92. Gunton, Colin E. ‘The Remaking of Christian Doctrine’. Theology 77, no. 654 (1974): 619–24. Gunton, Colin E. ‘The Theologian and the Biologist’. Theology 77, no. 652 (1974): 526–8. Gunton, Colin E. ‘The Knowledge of God According to Two Process Theologians: A Twentieth Century Gnosticism’. Religious Studies 11, no. 1 (1975): 87–97. Gunton, Colin E. ‘Christian Belief Today: God, Creation and the Future’. New Fire 3 (1975): 434–41. Gunton, Colin E. ‘Rejection, Influence, and Development: Charles Hartshorne and the History of Philosophy’. Process Studies 6, no. 1 (1976): 33–42. Gunton, Colin E. ‘The Biblical Understanding of Reconciliation: Paul and Jacob before God’. Free Church Chronicle 32 (1977): 17–22. Gunton, Colin E. Becoming and Being: The Doctrine of God in Charles Hartshorne and Karl Barth. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978. Gunton, Colin E. ‘The Political Christ: Some Reflections on Mr Cupitt’s Thesis’. Scottish Journal of Theology 32, no. 6 (1979): 521–40. Gunton, Colin E. ‘Transcendence, Metaphor, and the Knowability of God’. Journal of Theological Studies 31, no. 2 (1980): 503–16. Gunton, Colin E. ‘The Truth of Christology’. In Belief in Science and in Christian Life: The Relevance of Michael Polanyi’s Thought for Christian Faith and Life, edited by T. F. Torrance, 91–107. Edinburgh: Handsel Press, 1980. Gunton, Colin E. ‘Time, Eternity and the Doctrine of the Incarnation’. Dialog 21 (1982): 263–8. Gunton, Colin E. Yesterday and Today: A Study of Continuities in Christology. London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1983. Gunton, Colin E. ‘David Ford: Barth and God’s Story’. Scottish Journal of Theology 37, no. 3 (1984): 375–80. Gunton, Colin E. ‘Christus Victor Revisited: A Study of Metaphor and the Transformation of Meaning’. Journal of Theological Studies 36, no. 1 (1985): 129–45. Gunton, Colin E. The One, the Three, and the Many: An Inaugural Lecture in the Chair of Christian Doctrine. Given on 14 May 1985, King’s College, London. Pamphlet. Gunton, Colin E. Enlightenment and Alienation: An Essay towards a Trinitarian Theology. London: Marshall, Morgan and Scott, 1985. Gunton, Colin E. ‘The Justice of God’. Free Church Chronicle 40 (1985): 13–19.

420

Bibliography of Gunton’s Works

Gunton, Colin E. ‘Creation and Recreation: An Exploration of Some Themes in Aesthetics and Theology’. Modern Theology 2, no. 1 (1985): 1–19. Gunton, Colin E. ‘Barth and the Western Intellectual Tradition: Towards a Theology after Christendom’. In Theology beyond Christendom: Essays on the Centenary of the Birth of Karl Barth, May 10, 1886, edited by John Thompson, 285–301. Allison Park, PA: Pickwick Press, 1986. Gunton, Colin E. ‘The Christian Doctrine of God: Opposition and Convergence’. In Heaven and Earth: Essex Essays in Theology and Ethics, edited by Andrew Linzey and Peter J. Wexler, 11–22. Worthing: Churchman, 1986. Gunton, Colin E. ‘Barth, the Trinity, and Human Freedom’. Theology Today 43, no. 3 (1986): 316–30. Gunton, Colin E. ‘The Playwright as Theologian: Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus’. King’s Theological Review 10, no. 1 (1987): 1–5. Gunton, Colin E. ‘Revelation’. In A Dictionary of Pastoral Care, edited by Alastair V. Campbell, 240–1. London: SPCK, 1987. Gunton, Colin E. ‘Christ the Sacrifice: Aspects of the Language and Imagery of the Bible’. In The Glory of Christ in the New Testament: Essays in Memory of George Bradford Caird, edited by L. D. Hurst and N. T. Wright, 229–38. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987. Gunton, Colin E. ‘Reinhold Niebuhr: A Treatise of Human Nature’. Modern Theology 4, no. 1 (1987): 71–81. Gunton, Colin E. ‘Christianity among the Religions in The Encyclopaedia of Religion’. Religious Studies 24, no. 1 (1988): 11–18. Gunton, Colin E. The Actuality of Atonement: A Study of Metaphor, Rationality and the Christian Tradition. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1988. Gunton, Colin E. ‘No Other Foundation: One Englishman’s Reading of Church Dogmatics, Chapter V’. In Reckoning with Barth: Essays in Commemoration of the Centenary of Karl Barth’s Birth, edited by Nigel Biggar, 61–79. London: Mowbray, 1988. Gunton, Colin E. ‘The Spirit as Lord: Christianity, Modernity and Freedom’. In Different Gospels: Christian Orthodoxy and Modern Theologies, edited by Andrew Walker, 169–82. London: Hodder and Stoughton for the C.S. Lewis Centre, 1988. Gunton, Colin E. The Transcendent Lord: The Spirit and the Church in Calvinist and Cappadocian. The 1988 Congregational Lecture. London: Congregational Memorial Hall Trust, 1988. Gunton, Colin E. ‘Two Dogmas Revisited: Edward Irving’s Christology’. Scottish Journal of Theology 41, no. 3 (1988): 359–76. Gunton, Colin E. ‘A Far-Off Gleam of the Gospel: Salvation in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings’. King’s Theological Review 12 (1989): 6–10. Gunton, Colin E., and Daniel W. Hardy, eds. On Being the Church: Essays on the Christian Community. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1989. Gunton, Colin E. ‘The Church on Earth: The Roots of Community’. In On Being the Church: Essays on the Christian Community, edited by Colin and Daniel W. Hardy Gunton, 48–80. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1989. Gunton, Colin E. ‘The Sacrifice and the Sacrifices: From Metaphor to Transcendental?’. In Trinity, Incarnation, and Atonement, edited by Ronald J. Fenstra and Cornelius Plantinga, 210–29. Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1989. Gunton, Colin E. Service Book. Edited by The United Reformed Church in the United Kingdom. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989. Gunton, Colin E. ‘The Triune God and the Freedom of the Creature’. In Karl Barth: Centenary Essays, edited by S. W. Sykes, 46–68. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.

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Gunton, Colin E. ‘When the Gates of Hell Fall Down: Towards a Modern Theology of the Justice of God’. New Blackfriars 69, no. 821 (1989): 488–96. Gunton, Colin E. ‘Augustine, the Trinity and the Theological Crisis of the West’. Scottish Journal of Theology 43, no. 1 (1990): 33–58. Gunton, Colin E. ‘Baptism and the Christian Community’. In Incarnational Ministry: The Presence of Christ in Church, Society, and Family. Essays in Honor of Ray S. Anderson, edited by Christian D. Kettler and Todd H. Speidell, 98–109. Colorado Springs: Helmers and Howard, 1990. Gunton, Colin E. ‘Newman’s Dialectic: Dogma and Reason in the 73rd Tract for the Times’. In Newman after a Hundred Years, edited by Alan G. Hill and Ian Ker, 309–22. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990. Gunton, Colin E. ‘The Idea of Dissent and the Character of Christianity’. Reformed Quarterly 1, no. 5 (1990): 2–6. Gunton, Colin E. ‘Used and Being Used: Scripture and Systematic Theology’. Theology Today 47, no. 3 (1990): 248–59. Gunton, Colin E. ‘Immanence and Otherness: Divine Sovereignty and Human Freedom in the Theology of Robert W. Jenson’. Dialog 30, no. 1 (1991): 17–26. Gunton, Colin E. The Promise of Trinitarian Theology. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1991. Gunton, Colin E. and Christoph Schwöbel, eds. Persons, Divine and Human: King’s College Essays in Theological Anthropology. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1992. Gunton, Colin E. ‘Trinity, Ontology and Anthropology: Towards a Renewal of the Doctrine of the Imago Dei’. In Persons, Divine and Human: King’s College Essays in Theological Anthropology, edited by Christoph Schwöbel and Colin E. Gunton. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1992. Gunton, Colin E. ‘The Spirit in the Trinity’. In The Forgotten Trinity, 3. A Selection of Papers Presented to the BCC Study Commission on Trinitarian Doctrine Today, edited by Alastair I. C. Heron, 123–35. London: BCC/CCBI, 1991. Gunton, Colin E. ‘Mozart the Theologian’. Theology 94, no. 761 (1991): 346–49. Gunton, Colin E. Christ and Creation. Carlisle: Paternoster Press, 1992. Gunton, Colin E. ‘Proteus and Procrustes: A Study of the Dialectic of Language in Disagreement with Sallie McFague’. In Speaking the Christian God: The Holy Trinity and the Challenge of Feminism, edited by Jr Alvin F. Kimel, 65–80. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1992. Gunton, Colin E. ‘Knowledge and Culture: Towards an Epistemology of the Concrete’. In The Gospel and Contemporary Culture, edited by Hugh Montefiore, 84–102. London: Mowbray, 1992. Gunton, Colin E. ‘Universal and Particular in Atonement Theology’. Religious Studies 28, no. 4 (1992): 453–66. Gunton, Colin E. ‘Foreword’. In In the Likeness of Sinful Flesh: An Essay on the Humanity of Christ, edited by Thomas Weinandy, ix–xi. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1993. Gunton, Colin E. The One, the Three and the Many: God, Creation and the Culture of Modernity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Gunton, Colin E. ‘All Scripture Is Inspired?’ Princeton Seminary Bulletin 14, no. 3 (1993): 240–53. Gunton, Colin E. ‘An English Systematic Theology?’ Scottish Journal of Theology 46, no. 4 (1993): 479–96. Gunton, Colin E. ‘Marriage Address’. In As Man and Woman Made: Theological Reflections on Marriage, edited by Susan Durber, 148–51. London: United Reformed Church, 1994. Gunton, Colin E. ed. God and Freedom: Essays in Historical and Systematic Theology. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1995.

422

Bibliography of Gunton’s Works

Gunton, Colin E. ‘God, Grace and Freedom’. In God and Freedom: Essays in Historical and Systematic Theology, edited by Colin E. Gunton, 119–33. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1995. Gunton, Colin E. ‘Editorial Introduction’. In God and Freedom: Essays in Historical and Systematic Theology, edited by Colin E. Gunton, 1–12. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1995. Gunton, Colin E. ‘Relation and Relativity: The Trinity and the Created World’. In Trinitarian Theology Today: Essays on Divine Being and Act, edited by Christoph Schwöbel, 92–112. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1995. Gunton, Colin E. ‘The Being and Attributes of God: Eberhard Jüngel’s Dispute with the Classical Philosophical Tradition’. In The Possibilities of Theology: Studies in the Theology of Eberhard Jüngel, edited by John Webster, 7–22. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1995. Gunton, Colin E., Páraic Réamonn and Alan P. F. Sell, eds. The Church in the Reformed Tradition: Discussion Papers Prepared by a Working Party of the European Committee. Geneva: World Alliance of Reformed Churches, 1995. Gunton, Colin E. ‘The Community of the Church in Communion with God’. In The Church in the Reformed Tradition: Discussion Papers Prepared by a Working Party of the European Committee, edited by Colin E. Gunton, Páraic Réamonn and Alan P. F. Sell, 38–41. Geneva: World Alliance of Reformed Churches, 1995. Gunton, Colin E. ‘The Real as the Redemptive: P. T. Forsyth on Authority and Freedom’. In Justice the True and Only Mercy: Essays on the Life and Theology of P. T. Forsyth, edited by Trevor Hart, 37–58. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1995. Gunton, Colin E. ‘The Trinity’. In A Companion Encyclopaedia of Theology, edited by Peter Byrne and Leslie Houlden, 937–57. London: Routledge, 1995. Gunton, Colin E. A Brief Theology of Revelation: The 1993 Warfield Lectures. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1995. Gunton, Colin E. ‘Universal and Particular in Atonement Theology’. In Readings in Modern Theology, edited by Robin Gill, 147–62. London: SPCK, 1995. Gunton, Colin E. ‘Christology’. In Dictionary of Ethics, Theology and Society, edited by Paul B. Clarke and Andrew Linzey, 133–7. London: Routledge, 1996. Gunton, Colin E. ‘Persons’. In Dictionary of Ethics, Theology and Society, edited by Paul B. Clarke and Andrew Linzey, 638–41. London: Routledge, 1996. Gunton, Colin E. ‘Pneumatology’. In Dictionary of Ethics, Theology and Society, edited by Paul B. Clarke and Andrew Linzey, 644–7. London: Routledge, 1996. Gunton, Colin E. ‘Toleration’. In Dictionary of Ethics, Theology and Society, edited by Paul B. Clarke and Andrew Linzey, 826–9. London: Routledge, 1996. Gunton, Colin E. ‘The Indispensable God? The Sovereignty of God and the Problem of Modern Social Order’. In Beyond Mere Health: Theology and Health Care in a Secular Society, edited by Hilary Regan, Rod Horsfield and Gabrielle McMullen, 1–21. Kew: Australian Theological Forum, 1996. Gunton, Colin E. ‘The Indispensability of Theological Understanding: Theology in the University’. In Essentials of Christian Community: Essays for Daniel W. Hardy, edited by David Ford and Dennis Stamps, 266–77. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1996. Gunton, Colin E. ‘Response to “Hard Copy or Good News? Genetic Engineering and the Gospel”, by John Henley’. In Beyond Mere Health: Theology and Health Care in a Secular Society, edited by Hilary Regan, Rod Horsfield and Gabrielle McMullen, 22–37. Kew, Australia: Australian Theological Forum, 1996. Gunton, Colin E. ‘Sin, Death and the Resurrection of the Body: Towards an Ontology of Personhood’. In Beyond Mere Health: Theology and Health Care in a Secular Society, edited

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by Hilary Regan, Rod Horsfield and Gabrielle McMullen. Kew: Australian Theological Forum, 1996. Gunton, Colin E. ‘The Trinity, Natural Theology and a Theology of Nature’. In The Trinity in a Pluralistic Age: Theological Essays on Culture and Religion, edited by Kevin Vanhoozer, 88–103. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1996. Gunton, Colin E. Theology through the Theologians: Selected Papers 1975–1995. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1996. Gunton, Colin E. ‘Indispensable Opponent: The Relations of Systematic Theology and the Philosophy of Religion’. Neue Zeitschrift für Systematische Theologie und Religionsphilosophie 38, no. 3 (1996): 298–306. Gunton, Colin E. ‘Atonement and the Project of Creation: An Interpretation of Colossians 1:15– 23’. Dialog 35, no. 1 (1996): 35–41. Gunton, Colin E. ‘Article Review. Bruce L. McCormack’s Karl Barth’s Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology: Its Genesis and Development 1909–1936’. Scottish Journal of Theology 48, no. 4 (1996): 483–91. Gunton, Colin E. ‘Foreword’. In Graham McFarlane, Christ and the Spirit: The Doctrine of the Incarnation According to Edward Irving, ix–x. Cumbria: Paternoster Press, 1996. Gunton, Colin E. ed. The Cambridge Companion to Christian Doctrine. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Gunton, Colin E. ‘The Doctrine of Creation’. In The Cambridge Companion to Christian Doctrine, edited by Colin E. Gunton, 141–57. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Gunton, Colin E. ‘Historical and Systematic Theology’. In The Cambridge Companion to Christian Doctrine, edited by Colin E. Gunton, 3–20. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Gunton, Colin E. The Promise of Trinitarian Theology. Second enlarged edition. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1997. Gunton, Colin E. Yesterday and Today: A Study of Continuities in Christology. Second edition. London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1997. Gunton, Colin E. ed. The Doctrine of Creation: Essays in Dogmatics, History and Philosophy. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1997. Gunton, Colin E. ‘Introduction’. In The Doctrine of Creation: Essays in Dogmatics, History and Philosophy, edited by Colin E. Gunton, 1–16. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1997. Gunton, Colin E. ‘Between Allegory and Myth: The Legacy of Spiritualising of Genesis’. In The Doctrine of Creation: Essays in Dogmatics, History and Philosophy, edited by Colin E. Gunton, 47–62. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1997. Gunton, Colin E. ‘The End of Causality? The Reformers and their Predecessors’. The Doctrine of Creation: Essays in Dogmatics, History and Philosophy, edited by Colin E. Gunton, 63–82. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1997. Gunton, Colin E. ‘The God of Jesus Christ’. Theology Today 54, no. 3 (1997): 325–34. Gunton, Colin E. The Triune Creator: A Historical and Systematic Study. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1998. Gunton, Colin E. ‘The Atonement’. In Routledge Encyclopaedia of Philosophy, edited by E. Craig, 536–41. London: Routledge, 1998. Gunton, Colin E. ‘Martin Kahler Revisited: Variations on Hebrews 4.15’. Ex Auditu 14 (1998): 21–30. Gunton, Colin E. ‘A Rose by any other Name? From “Christian Doctrine” to “Systematic Theology”’. International Journal of Systematic Theology 1, no. 1 (1999): 4–23. Gunton, Colin E. ‘Editorial: Orthodoxy’. International Journal of Systematic Theology 1, no. 2 (1999): 113–18.

424

Bibliography of Gunton’s Works

Gunton, Colin E. ‘Christ the Wisdom of God: A Study in Divine and Human Action’. In Where Shall Wisdom Be Found? Wisdom in the Bible, the Church and the Contemporary World, edited by Stephen C. Barton, 249–61. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1999. Gunton, Colin E. ‘A Far-off Gleam of the Gospel: Salvation in Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings’. In Tolkien: A Celebration. Collected Writings on a Literary Legacy, edited by Joseph Pearce, 124–40. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1999. Gunton, Colin E. ‘Dogma, the Church and the Task of Theology’. In The Task of Theology Today: Doctrines and Dogmas, edited by Victor Pfitzner and Hilary Regan, 1–22. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1999. Gunton, Colin E. ‘The Cross and the City: R.W. Dale and the Doctrine of the Atonement’. In The Cross and the City: Essays in Commemoration of Robert William Dale. Supplement to the Journal of the United Reformed Church History Society vol. 6; Supplement to the Congregational History Circle Magazine vol. 4, edited by Clyde Binfield, 1–13. Cambridge: United Reformed Church History Society, 1999. Gunton, Colin E. ‘Aspects of Salvation: Some Unscholastic Themes from Calvin’s Institutes’. International Journal of Systematic Theology 1, no. 3 (1999): 113–18. Gunton, Colin E. Incarnation and Imagery: Words, the World and the Triune God. Volume 4 of Farmington Papers; Philosophy of Religion. Oxford: Farmington Institute for Christian Studies, 1999. Gunton, Colin E. ‘“Response” to “Are you Saved? Receiving the Full Benefits of Grace” by Cynthia L. Rigby’. Insights. The Faculty Journal of Austin Seminary 115, no. 2 (2000): 27–9. Gunton, Colin E. ‘Election and Eschatology in the Post-Constantinian Church’. Scottish Journal of Theology 53, no. 2 (2000): 212–27. Gunton, Colin E. ‘Three Pitfalls in Preaching Creation’. Living Pulpit 9, no. 2 (2000): 14–15. Gunton, Colin E. ‘Authority’. In The Oxford Companion to Christian Thought, edited by Adrian Hastings, Hugh Pyper and Alistair Mason, 55–6. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Gunton, Colin E. ‘Holy Spirit’. In The Oxford Companion to Christian Thought, edited by Adrian Hastings, Hugh Pyper and Alistair Mason, 304–6. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Gunton, Colin E. ‘Protestantism’. In The Oxford Companion to Christian Thought, edited by Adrian Hastings, Hugh Pyper and Alistair Mason, 571–4. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Gunton, Colin E. ‘Salvation’. In The Cambridge Companion to Karl Barth, edited by John Webster, 143–58. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Gunton, Colin E. ‘The Atonement and the Triune God’. In Theology after Liberalism: A Reader, edited by George P. Schner and John B. Webster, 113–31. Oxford: Blackwell, 2000. Gunton, Colin E. ‘The Church as a School of Virtue? Human Formation in Trinitarian Framework, Faithfulness and Fortitude’. In Faithfulness and Fortitude: In Conversation with the Theological Ethics of Stanley Hauerwas, edited by Mark Thiessen Nation and Samuel Wells, 211–31. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2000. Gunton, Colin E. ed. Trinity, Time and Church: A Response to the Theology of Robert W. Jenson. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2000. Gunton, Colin E. ‘Creation and Mediation in the Theology of Robert W. Jenson: An Encounter and Convergence’. In Trinity, Time and Church. A Response to the Theology of Robert W. Jenson, edited by Colin E. Gunton, 80–93. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2000. Gunton, Colin E. ‘Dogmatic Theses on Eschatology: Conference Response’. In The Future as God’s Gift: Explorations in Christian Eschatology, edited by David Fergusson and Marcel Sarot, 139–44. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2000.

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Gunton, Colin E. Intellect and Action: Elucidations on Christian Theology and the Life of Faith. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2000. Gunton, Colin E. Theology through Preaching: Sermons for Brentwood. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2001. Gunton, Colin E. Becoming and Being: The Doctrine of God in Charles Hartshorne and Karl Barth. 2nd edn. London: SCM Press, 2001. Gunton, Colin E. ‘“Until He Comes”: Towards an Eschatology of Church Membership’. International Journal of Systematic Theology 3, no. 2 (2001): 187–200. Gunton, Colin E. ‘And in One Lord Jesus Christ … Begotten Not Made’. Pro Ecclesia 10, no. 3 (2001): 261–74. Gunton, Colin E. Commentary on the Lectionary. 3 vols (London: Continuum, 2001). Gunton, Colin E. ‘Introduction’. In Karl Barth, Protestant Theology in the Nineteenth Century, new edition, xv–xx. London: SCM Press, 2001. Gunton, Colin E., Stephen R. Holmes and Murray A. Rae, eds. The Practice of Theology: A Reader. London: SCM Press, 2001. Gunton, Colin E. ‘Creeds and Confessions’. In The Practice of Theology: A Reader, edited by Colin E. Gunton, Stephen R. Holmes and Murray A. Rae, 101–5. London: SCM Press, 2001. Gunton, Colin E. ‘The Place of Reason in Theology’. In The Practice of Theology: A Reader, edited by Colin E. Gunton, Stephen R. Holmes and Murray A. Rae, 149–53. London: SCM Press, 2001. Gunton, Colin E. ‘Can We Know Anything about God Anyway?’. In The Practice of Theology: A Reader, edited by Colin E. Gunton, Stephen R. Holmes and Murray A. Rae, 219–23. London: SCM Press, 2001. Gunton, Colin E. ‘Doing Theology in the University Today’. In The Practice of Theology: A Reader, edited by Colin E. Gunton, Stephen R. Holmes and Murray A. Rae, 441–55. London: SCM Press, 2001. Gunton, Colin E. ‘Preface’. In Karl Barth, Dogmatics in Outline, translated by G. T. Thompson, vii–xi. English Translation with Preface. London: SCM Press, 2001. Gunton, Colin E. ‘And in One Lord, Jesus Christ … Begotten, Not Made’. In Nicene Christianity: The Future for a New Ecumenism, edited by Christopher R. Seitz, 35–48. Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2001. Gunton, Colin E. ‘Being and Person: T. F. Torrance’s Doctrine of God’. In The Promise of Trinitarian Theology: Theologians in Dialogue with T. F. Torrance, edited by Elmer M. Colyer, 115–38. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001. Gunton, Colin E. The Christian Faith: An Introduction to Christian Doctrine. Oxford:  Blackwell, 2002. Gunton, Colin E. ‘The Spirit Moved Over the Face of the Waters: The Holy Spirit and the Created Order’. International Journal of Systematic Theology 4, no. 2 (2002): 190–204. Gunton, Colin E. ‘We Believe in … the Holy Spirit, Who with the Father and Son Is Worshiped and Glorified’. In Fire and Wind: The Holy Spirit in the Church Today, edited by Joseph D. Small, 21–36. Louisville, KY: Geneva Press, 2002. Gunton, Colin E. ‘Trinity and Trustworthiness’. In The Trustworthiness of God: Perspectives on the Nature of Scripture, edited by Paul Helm and Carl R. Trueman, 275–84. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2002. Gunton, Colin E. ‘Theology in Communion’. In Shaping a Theological Mind: Theological Context and Methodology, edited by Darren C. Marks, 31–44. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2002. Gunton, Colin E. Act and Being: Towards a Theology of the Divine Attributes. London: SCM Press, 2002.

426

Bibliography of Gunton’s Works

Gunton, Colin E. Father, Son & Holy Spirit: Toward a Fully Trinitarian Theology. London: T&T Clark, 2003. Gunton, Colin E. ed. The Theology of Reconciliation. London: T&T Clark, 2003. Gunton, Colin E. ‘Introduction’. In The Theology of Reconciliation, edited by Colin E. Gunton, 1–11. London: T&T Clark, 2003. Gunton, Colin E. ‘Towards a Theology of Reconciliation’. In The Theology of Reconciliation, edited by Colin E. Gunton, 167–74. London: T&T Clark, 2003. Gunton, Colin E. ‘A Sermon: The Almighty God’. In Exploring and Proclaiming the Apostles’ Creed: Vol. 1, edited by Roger Van Harn, 33–7. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2004. Gunton, Colin E. ‘Preaching from the Letters’. In Exploring and Proclaiming the Apostles’ Creed Vol 2, edited by Roger Van Harn, 621–6. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2004. Gunton, Colin E. ‘Sermon: 1 Corinthians 15:51–58’. In Exploring and Proclaiming the Apostles’ Creed Vol 2, edited by Roger Van Harn, 228–31. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2004. Gunton, Colin E. ‘The Truth … and the Spirit of Truth: The Trinitarian Shape of Christian Theology’. In Loving God with Our Minds: The Pastor as Theologian: Essays in Honor of Wallace M. Alston, edited by Michael Welker and Cynthia A Jarvis, 341–51. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2004. Gunton, Colin E. ‘Election and Eschatology in the Post-Constantinian Church’. In Reformed Theology: Identity and Ecumenicity, edited by Wallace M. Alston Jr. and Michael J. Welker, 97–110. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2004. Gunton, Colin E. ‘Towards a Trinitarian Reading of the Tradition: The Relevance of the “Eternal” Trinity’. In Trinitarian Soundings in Systematic Theology, edited by Paul Louis Metzger, 63– 72. London: T&T Clark, 2005. Gunton, Colin E. and Robert Jenson, ‘The Logos Ensarkos and Reason’. In Reason and the Reasons of Faith, edited by Paul J. Griffiths and Reinhard Hütter, 78–85. London: T&T Clark, 2005. Gunton, Colin E. ‘Persons and Particularity’. In The Theology of John Zizioulas, edited by Douglas Knight, 97–108. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006. Gunton, Colin E. ‘Confessions, Dogmas and Doctrine: An Exploration or Some Interactions’. In Reformed Theology in Contemporary Perspective: Westminster: Yesterday, Today – and Tomorrow? edited by Lynn Quigley, 215–27. Edinburgh: Rutherford House, 2006. Gunton, Colin E. The Theologian as Preacher. Further Sermons from Colin E. Gunton, edited by Sarah J. Gunton and John E. Colwell. London: T&T Clark, 2007. Gunton, Colin E. ‘Revelation: Do Christians Know Something No One Else Knows?’ In Tolerance and Truth: The Spirit of the Age or the Spirit of Christ?, edited by Angus Morrison, 1–19. Edinburgh: Rutherford House, 2007. Gunton, Colin E. ‘The Spirit Moved Over the Face of the Waters: The Holy Spirit and the Created Order’. In Spirit of Truth and Power: Studies in Christian Doctrine and Experience, edited by David F. Wright, 56–73. Edinburgh: Rutherford House, 2007. Gunton, Colin E. The Barth Lectures, edited by Paul Brazier. London: T&T Clark, 2007. Gunton, Colin E. ‘Reformation Accounts of the Church’s Response to Human Culture’. In Public Theology in Cultural Engagement, edited by Stephen R. Holmes, 79–93. Milton Keynes: Paternoster, 2008. Gunton, Colin E. Revelation and Reason, edited by Paul Brazier. London: T&T Clark, 2008.

427

INDEX

Analogy 25–7, 37–8, 368–9 analogia entis 50 Anselm 101 anthropology 105–19 apophaticism 70 Aquinas, T. 32–3, 48, 51, 294 Arianism 254 ascension 103, 130, 199 Athanasius 52, 254 atonement 41–2, 91–104, 310–13, 333, 357 Augustine 52, 56, 155, 269–83, 297 critique 4, 42, 209–10, 245–7, 380 Aulén, G. 97 baptism 162–4 Barth, K. 10–12, 27–8, 32, 45, 47–53, 60, 241–2, 290, 359–71, 376–7, 404–8, 412–17 criticism 135, 377, 411 imago Dei 114 Basil of Caesarea 124, 140 Braun, H. 404 Brentwood URC 222 Buckley, M. 242 Calvin, J. 133, 301–13 Cappadocian Fathers 79, 123, 140, 155, 210, 253–68 Chalcedonian christology 87, 257 Christ (see also Jesus) person and work 93–5 sinlessness 86 Christian life 221–35 church 1–2, 103–4, 134–36, 143–5, 151–67, 227, 249–50, 336, 350–6 culture 200–2 body of Christ 383–4 classical theism 374–6 Coleridge, S. T. 32–3, 189, 315–26 communalism 106 communicatio idiomatum 81, 381, 383 community 205–19, 230–32, 341–2 confessions of faith 36

creatio ex nihilo 62 creation 59–75, 91–3, 132–4, 140–2, 292, 379 and Christian life 233–5 and culture 195–7 doctrine 16, 20, 242–3, 262–4, 277–9 mediation 68 Crisp, O. 347 cross 310–13 sacrifice 101–3 victory 97–100, 207–8 culture 187–203 Darwinism 171 Dawkins, R. 21–2 death 145–6 De Régnon paradigm 273–4 Descartes, R. 173–5, 180, 281–2 divine attributes 293–6 divine simplicity 270–2 dualism 277–9, 360 Dulles, A. 11–15 dyothelitism 86–9 election 157–8, 350–6 embodiment 115–16 Enlightenment 169–84, 375, 409 epistemology 361 eschatology 112, 137–50 ethics 158–60, 214–15, 234 eucharistia 250–1 evil 98, 100 fallen human nature 85–6 Faraday, M. 263 Feuerbach, L. 179 Fichte, J. G. 175 filioque 54, 126–7, 266 forgiveness 215, 228, 230 freedom 107, 111–12, 212–14, 218–19 Frei, H. 38–9 Galileo 67 Gnosticism 20, 240–1, 250–1

428

Index

Gollwitzer H. 404 grace 212–14

Logos asarkos 381–2 Lord’s supper 164–5, 202–3

Hartshorne, C. 25–6, 47–8, 60, 241, 405–6 Hauerwas, S. 215 heaven 147–8 Hegel, G. W. F. 18, 48, 175, 177, 182–3, 365, 413 hell 147–8 Hermann, W. 184 history 13 Holy Spirit 19, 36, 69, 143–4, 153–4, 211, 225, 379–80 and Christ 82–5, 127–32, 335–6, 380–3 link of love 274–5 mediation 37 perfecting cause 56, 159, 199 homoousion 56 hypostasis 191, 254–5, 258, 272–4 hypostatic union 347, 370

Marsh, J. 233 McFague, S. 4 mediation 14, 20, 22, 34–7, 61–5, 92, 194–203, 242, 280, 306 Christ 17 Spirit 124 metaphor 28–31, 96, 103 ministry 221–35 modalism 52 Modernity 3, 169–86, 189, 206–7, 374–6 monarchy 258, 393–6 monothelitism 86, 89

imago Dei 72, 108–9, 113–19, 263, 273 incarnation 83–4, 94, 197, 368, 370 individualism 106, 206, 264 Irenaeus 64, 74–5, 239–52, 273, 292 Irving, E. 49, 56, 127–8, 327–38

Ockham, W. 66 omnipotence 294–5 Origen 290–2 Owen, J. 85n., 156, 158, 339–57

narrative 38–9 Neoplatonism 270, 291–2, 318–19 Nestorianism 88 Newman, J. H. 251 Nietzsche, F. 178

Kant, I. 95–6, 172, 175–7, 181, 319 kenosis 78–82 Kierkegaard, S. 17, 362–5 knowledge of God 306–10, 329 koinonia 191, 212, 256–7, 260 Küng, H. 166–7

Palamas, G. 267 Pannenberg, W. 12–13, 69–70 pantheism 46–7, 266–7, 320 particularity 107, 111, 212–14, 309, 392–3 perichoresis 33, 55, 106–9, 193, 258, 259, 309, 323, 394 personhood 78–82, 105–8, 308, 330, 392–3, 411 Peters, T. 44 Petrarch, F. 282 Philoponos, J. 67 philosophy 285–300 Plato 296 Platonism 37, 293, 297–8 Pneumatology 121–36 Polanyi, M. 28–9 praise 202–3, 231–2, 234 preaching 223–4, 228

LaCugna, C. M. 43–4, 46 Lampe, G. W. H. 82 Language 25–39, 96 Lash, N. 185 Lindbeck, G. 14 n.35 Locke, J. 175, 181

Rae, M. 363 Rahner, K. 54 Rea, M. 298 reason 95, 287–9, 321 reconciliation 94, 215–16 redemption 197

Jenson, R. 160–1, 288, 349, 373–85 Jesus 69, 83, 183, 380–3 divinity 50, 78–82, 366 humanity 12, 19, 50, 78–82, 84, 152–3, 198, 211, 335, 345, 366, 369 perfection 142 judgement 146–7 Jüngel, E. 403–17 justice 100–1 justification 101, 225, 312

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Index

relationality 111, 155 Research Institute 2–3, 121, 325, 342, 359, 391 resurrection 13, 99, 103, 139, 199, 232 revelation 9–23 Russell, B. 285–6, 288 Sabellianism 21, 255 sacraments 101–3, 162–5 sacrifice 198, 216 salvation 21, 93 sanctification 226 Schleiermacher, F. D. E. 15, 21, 177–8, 242 Schwöbel, C. 359–60 scripture 224, 305 Scotus, J. D. 65–6 Sensus divinitatis 303 sin 93, 229 social trinitarianism 79, 125–6, 179 Spence, A. 88, 344–6, 348 Spirit christology 82–5, 129–30, 335, 343–50, 354 subordinationism 57, 260, 265

Terry, J. 97 theology, task of 2, 286, 331, 397–8 Thiemann, R. 10, time 279–80 Torrance, T. F. 41, 50, 53–7, 261 transcendentals 31, 33, 63, 107, 189–90, 192– 3, 264, 323, 337 Trinity 31–4, 41–58, 209–11, 270–2, 276, 328, 337, 377–9, 406 church 154–6 doctrine 26, 121, 123, 158, 326, 389–98, 400, 412 virtues 158–60, 214–16, 226, 228–9 Volf, M. 398 Webster, J. 12, 18 Wittman, T. 348–9 Wordsworth, W. 317 worship 192, 201 Zizioulas, J. 55, 387–401

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