Academic literature on the topic 'Trinitarian authors'

Luther’s method of theology is that of Scriptural interpretation. Erasmus complains that Scripture is obscure, an authoritative tradition is needed to interpret it. Luther confirms both the external and internal clarity of Scripture itself: “External clarity” is guaranteed by the public proclamation of God’s word; the natural meaning of the “text published to the entire world” is found in the very letter of Scripture. “Internal clarity” guarantees that the same Holy Spirit who inspired the canonical authors “internally moves” the hearer of the word granting him/her participation in Christological grace. The Spirit-inspired word is an efficient carrier of Trinitarian grace that changes its hearers. In contrast to the skeptical view of Erasmus, Luther uses the assertive propositions of Scripture as a means of assuring theocentric salvation. Because of its double clarity, “Scripture alone,” sola Scriptura, is a sufficient norm for the truth of the gospel. Another central feature of Luther’s theological method in The Bondage of the Will is his view of the conflict between the opposing transcendental powers which fight over the control of the human beings: the Triune God’s goodness, love, and grace against unfaith, sin, and Satan. Only God’s Spirit can liberate the sinner from captivity by unfaith and evil. Erasmusnever mentions God’s Spirit when discussing grace, and there is no mention of Satan in his treatise. Moreover, the distinction between the “things below oneself” and the “things above oneself” is crucial for Luther’s understanding of law and gospel; Erasmus makes no distinction between the two realms.

This chapter examines the fundamental Nicene response to their opponents’ claim to Christian orthodoxy: they made them into Arians. It shows the intellectual effort this (deceptively difficult) move required. Nicene controversialists drew on the history and heresiology of both the Arian Controversy and the Donatist Schism to portray contemporary Homoians as heretics. To establish the link between their opponents and the Arians of the past, Nicene authors imaginatively rewrote fourth-century ecclesiastical history, reworking what they saw as an authoritative past to match the needs of the present. In so doing, they made the contemporary controversy into a reenactment of earlier conflicts—one from which they, as the heirs of Athanasius and Augustine, would inevitably emerge triumphant. Of course, Homoian clerics were exploiting the same histories of the church to support their own ecclesiological claims. For both sides, this controversy was not new, but rather an extension of fourth-century Trinitarian debates.

Focusing on the nexus between Rammohun Roy’s religious deliberations and William Wilberforce’s religious policies, the chapter emphasizes the interconnections between the developments of the nineteenth-century public spheres in Britain and India. Wilberforce’s intervention involved constructing a new model of Hinduism and the Hindu ‘other’ from the perspective of Anglo-Protestant Christianity. Rammohun Roy set a trajectory of transnational ethical–religious debate followed subsequently by other Indian public intellectuals. However, the meaning both gave to the term ‘religion’ differed. While Wilberforce regarded only one religion as authentic and true, Roy looked for the truth shared by all (elite) forms of religion. Starting with a comparative evaluation of different theological–religious traditions, he later integrated this with Enlightenment as well as Christian reformist and anti-Trinitarian vocabularies. At the same time, Roy shared the anti-idolatry penchant of Christian missionaries, while he undertook what the authors call a de-provincialization of Christian theology.

Chapter 3 (‘The One is Many and the Many are One’) explores ʿAbdīshōʿ’s writings on the Trinity, a key Christian tenet that many Muslim polemicists believed to be a form of tritheism. This charge was levelled repeatedly in the centuries leading up to ʿAbdīshōʿ’s lifetime, prompting Christian apologists to demonstrate that God was a unitary being without denying His triune nature. In line with earlier authors, ʿAbdīshōʿ begins by establishing the existence of the world and its temporal origins from a single, infinite cause, which he infers from the orderliness and composite nature of cosmos. He then argues that this cause must possess three states of intellection identical to its essence, while affirming the three Trinitarian Persons as essential attributes in a single substance. While these strategies owe much to earlier apologies, ʿAbdīshōʿ frames them in a technical language reminiscent of the Muslim philosophized theology (kalām) of his day, in particular, by making use of Avicennian expressions of God as a Necessary Being. But rather than simply borrowing from Islamic systems of thought to justify the Trinity, our author demonstrates that the issues raised by Muslims regarding the Trinity could be resolved internally, that is, through recourse to the works of earlier Christian authorities and to Christian scripture.

This essay is about the doctrine of the Trinity as classically formulated and retained by the churches, not about the Ultimate Reality that the doctrine is believed by Christians to describe. What follows is an original, creative and inclusive statement of what has emerged for the author about the nature of doctrine from over fifty years of research in the fields of Christian theology, the history of Christianity in the first five centuries of its existence, philosophy, religion studies, studies of human nature, and global ethics; and from the philosophy of religion about methods of critical scholarly enquiry into issues in religion. The essay extracts from that research the most important insights obtained, global ethics most of all, and uses them to offer a way of understanding the doctrine of the Trinity. While key insights drawn from that research into the work of leading scholars are obviously not original, the synthesis made of those insights in this essay certainly is original.

Chapter 4 discusses the Incarnation in ʿAbdīshōʿs works. Central to his defence of this doctrine is the argument that Christ possessed a divine and a human nature, each united in a single person. For Muslim polemicists such a notion was further proof of Christianity’s denial of God’s oneness, leading ʿAbdīshōʿ to make a case for the Incarnation’s rootedness in reason and revelation. As in his Trinitarian doctrine, our author appeals to a theological and literary vocabulary shared in by Christians and Muslims. Nevertheless, he explicitly cites Christian authorities, suggesting that it is to the language of Islamic theology rather than its substance that he wishes to appeal. With that said, ʿAbdīshōʿ does not merely instrumentalize this language for the sake of apologetics. By employing poetic and narrative techniques shared between Christian and Muslim literatures, our author supplies renewed meaning and relevance to the mystery of the Incarnation and the biblical story of Christ’s mission. In contrast to his Trinitarian dogma, which appears uniformly directed against external criticisms, aspects of ʿAbdīshōʿ’s Christology are grounded in intra-Christian polemics, since various Christian confessions under Islamic rule were for centuries divided over the issue of Christ’s natures. Later in life, however, ʿAbdīshōʿ skilfully negotiated this vexed theological inheritance to formulate a Christology that was no longer hostile to other Christians.

We can understand the multiple roles that the divine ideas tradition played in the history of Christian thought by beginning with an analogy: as a great author draws upon her own consciousness and self-understanding to give life to all the realities within the world of her novels, in an analogous way, the divine ideas teaching holds, God’s eternal and infinite knowing and loving of Godself is the creative exemplar or archetype for the existence of every creature in time, and also the intelligible form or idea by which the truth of every creature may be known. Intensifying the transformation of Plato’s forms by the Middle Platonists, Augustine grounds the divine ideas firmly within Trinitarian theology. We can trace the role of the divine ideas across the full range of Christian doctrines as well as in its influence upon the mystical or contemplative dimension of Christian theology.

The chapter analyses Fyodor Dostoevsky’s artistic theology within the context of the tradition of the moral interpretation of dogmas, which developed in Russia during the 19th and the first third of the 20th century. A typical feature of this tradition was the desire to bridge the gap between the temple and the outside of it, between dogmatics and ethics, making the truth of faith the rule of life. The Author shows the development of the idea of the unity of dogmas and commandments in the works of Aleksey Khomiakov, Ivan Kireevsky, Nikolay Fedorov, Vladimir Solov’ev, metropolitan Antony (Khrapovitsky), while simultaneously drawing parallels with Dostoevsky. The work takes into account Dostoevsky’s understanding of two main dogmas of Christianity: the dogma of Trinity and the two-natures dogma. The unconfused and inseparable unity of the Divine hypostases appears in Dostoevsky as an image of perfect interaction between personalities, a rule for social relations, a model of all-encompassing unity of humanity, where the right of personality is reconciled with the right of the whole. Two diary fragments dated 1864 — “Masha is lying on the table…” and “Socialism and Christianity” — are analyzed from the point of view of the Trinitarian question. Dostoevsky holds that when a personality moves towards another and enters in a relation “I” — “you”, considering the other as a face and not as a function, thus giving something to rather than taking something from the other, this personality realizes in his life the mystery of Trinity, professing it in deeds not only in words. Atomicity, antinomy, dualism are corruptions of the Trinitarian principle, while its realization is the idea of “an expanding family, a society-Church, a world that is temple. The Christology of Dostoevsky is analyzed. It is shown that Dostoevsky’s perception of Christ as “the ideal of man in flesh” should be understood not in the context of utopian thought, but as a manifestation of the idea of the deification of man, as expressed in the patristic aphorism: “For the Son of God became man so that we might become God”. The essay shows how the assertion of the equality of Christ’s two natures, Divine and human, affects Dostoevsky’s anthropology and historiosophy. Views of the writer’s contemporaries, as well as of other 20th-Century philosophers and theologians who developed the idea of a moral interpretation of the dogma of Trinity and of the Divine-humanity of Christ (archimandrite Fedor (Bukharev), bishop Ioann (Sokolov), Nikolay Fedorov, Vladimir Solov’ev, archimandrite Antony (Khrapovitsky), Viktor Nesmelov, Sergey Bulgakov, Boris Vysheslavtsev, Nikolay Lossky, Aleksandr Gorsky, Mother Maria (Elizaveta Kuz’mina- Karavaeva)) are considered.