Theological Journal – May 26 Gunton Tuesday – The One, the Three, and the Many

I will be suspending Torrance Tuesday in favor of Colin Gunton Tuesday for a while. We’ll work through his important book The One, the Three, and the Many.                     

                                                                                                            

PART ONE THE DISPLACEMENT OF GOD

Introduction

William Morris: 'Modernism began and continues, wherever civilisation began and continues to deny Christ.' Here is the problematic Gunton explores. Christendom, he claims, brought unity to the Roman Empire but with some significant distortions of the gospel. Some! I think that’s typical British understatement at its finest. Modernity, he continues, reacting against the gospel “bequeathed equal and opposite distortions of human being in the world.” This is the particular shape of the problem Gunton tackles.

In Part One he seeks the roots of the modern crisis of culture - its fragmentation and decline into subjectivism and relativism - in an inadequate exegesis of the opening chapters of Genesis and the other biblical texts of creation.

In Part Two he draws out some of the implications for culture and our understanding of the world by taking a more explicitly trinitarian approach to the texts. He finds in Irenaeus the essential clues for the reshaping of the tradition needed by both Christian theology and culture, oppressed as they both are by varieties of gnosticism.

Three aspects needing examination:

1.       Creation is one and not dual

The effect of the dual interpretation has led to downgrading of the Bible's affirmation of the goodness of the whole world, in favour of a hierarchy favouring the immaterial against the material creation.

It also had the effect of tying the doctrine of creation to a belief that species were created as

timeless and unchanging forms, a belief that made theories of evolution more difficult to engage positively during the nineteenth century.

2.       Human being in the image of God is to be understood relationally rather than in terms of the possession of fixed characteristics such as reason or will, Relation is to God and then to others and the rest of creation.

3.       There is a continuity within discontinuity between the human and the non-human creation.

Humanity is a part of creation, on the one hand and has been given dominion over the rest of creation, on the other.

Neglect of these three emphases shaped the way the doctrine of creation took form in the West and shaped modern culture and led to the contradictions of modernity.

Modernity, in its greatness and its pathos, has a strange, dialectical relation to this most central and neglected of Christian doctrines.

In his analysis of modernity “the centre of interest is to be found in the kinds of attitudes, ideologies and forms of action that are characteristic of the era we call modernity, within which are to be included some of those which are described as postmodern.”

Supporting theses:

-neither antiquity not modernity understand relationality – they play the one vs. the many (w/loss of the rights of the many) and the one is transcendentalized

- modernity displaces God to the immanent sphere, and thus the place of the divine is found in various aspects of this-worldly reality. Only where the divine and immanent are truly other and held in tension can all aspects of reality be respected.

- the fragmentation of the realms of truth, goodness and beauty (Plato) makes modernity deeply uneasy in the world. See the treatment of the arts.

- “an account of relationality that gives due weight to both one and the many, to both particular and universal, to both otherness and relation, is to be derived from . . . a conception of God who is both one and three, whose being consists in a relationality that derives from the otherness-in-relation of Father, Son and Spirit.”

Key idea:” Drawing on Coleridge's notion of the idea, and his belief that the Trinity is the idea of ideas, I have argued that trinitarian conceptuality enables us to think of our world, in a way made impossible by the traditional choice between Heraclitus and Parmenides, as both, and in different respects, one and many, but also one and many in relation.”