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Keith Ward clarifies the Trinitarian doctrine in light of contemporary scientific thought, offering a coherent, wholly monotheistic interpretation of God.
List of contents
Part I. The Threefold Nature of the Divine Being: 1. Introduction: talking about the Trinity; 2. Why we may need to restate the ways in which we talk about the Trinity; 3. The doctrine of divine simplicity; 4. Cosmological and axiological explanation; 5. Divine potentiality and temporality; Part II. The Biblical Sources of Trinitarian Thought: 6. Three centres of consciousness?; 7. The synoptic Gospels; 8. John's Gospel; 9. The Trinity in the Epistles; 10. The idea of incarnation; Part III. The Trinity, Immanent and Economic: 11. Why three?; 12. Trinity and revelation; 13. Hegel and modern theology; 14. The immanent Trinity; 15. The identity of the immanent and the economic Trinity; 16. Hegel again; 17. What creation adds to the Trinity; 18. The epistemic priority of the economic Trinity; 19. The Trinity and naive realism; 20. The Trinity and the cosmos; 21. Revelation and the immanent Trinity; Part IV. The Social Trinity: 22. Persons and substances; 23. The idea of a personal and free creation; 24. The logical uniqueness of persons; 25. The divine nature and freedom; 26. Freedom in God and in creatures; 27. Persons as necessarily relational; 28. An ontology of the personal?; 29. Intra-Trinitarian love; 30. Infinite goods; 31. Divine love and necessity; 32. Love and alterity; 33. Trinity versus Monotheism; 34. The passion of Christ; 35. God and abandonment; Part V. The Cosmic Trinity: 36. The doctrine of perichoresis; 37. The convergence of social and unipersonal models of the Trinity; 38. Life-streams and persons; 39. Modalism and necessity; 40. The cosmic Trinity.
About the author
Keith Ward is Professorial Research Fellow at Heythrop College, University of London and Fellow of the British Academy. He was formerly Regius Professor of Divinity and a Canon of Christ Church at the University of Oxford. His numerous publications include The Evidence for God: The Case for the Existence of the Spiritual Dimension, Morality, Autonomy, and God and the five-volume Comparative Theology.
Summary
Challenging the concept of the 'social Trinity' that posits three conscious subjects in God, this volume furthers the arguments of theologians such as Barth and Rahner to offer a coherent, wholly monotheistic interpretation. Keith Ward analyses theistic belief in a scientific context, demonstrating the necessity of cosmology to theological thinking.
