The Trinity

摘要

In addition to the indisputably positive achievements of the much-touted twentieth-century revival of interest in the doctrine of the Trinity, a twofold irony attended that revival. First, while rediscovering 'the Cappadocians', much of the twentieth century's most widely influential constructive doctrinal work proceeded by deliberately marginalizing classic 'Western' sources. The 'personalism' of Basil and the two Gregories was viewed as a safeguard from the 'essentialism' of Augustine and Aquinas. Second, such a bifurcation of the tradition of trinitarian inquiry into 'Eastern' and 'Western' strands precluded a grasp of how those strands might after all be organically related.3 Assuming the virtue of the former and the vice of the latter, huge swaths of trinitarian theology were kept from taking with full seriousness a messier picture of intertwined virtue and vice, impossible to separate neatly by means of a narrative of historical alteration.