Journal: Bibliotheca Sacra
Volume: BSAC 167:668 (Oct 2010)
Article: Periodical Reviews
Author: Jefferson P. Webster

BSac 167:668 (October-December 2010) p. 481

Periodical Reviews

By The Faculty and Library Staff of Dallas Theological Seminary

Jefferson P. Webster

Editor

“The Unity of the Triune God: Reviving an Ancient Question,” Bruce D. Marshall, The Thomist 74 (2010): 1-32.

Recent decades have witnessed a startling renaissance of studies on the Trinity, the implications of which continue to radiate into all corners of the theological realm. Beginning with the bold conceptual reconstructions of Barth’s Church Dogmatics and continuing until the present day, the wealth of Trinitarian reflection is both staggering and encouraging. As a result, the doctrine that was once consigned to curious irrelevance or dismissed as a mathematical conundrum has been delivered from its moribund state and placed at the center of theological reflection; from there it plays a determining role in shaping the entire corpus of Christian faith.

At the center of the Trinitarian turn is the conviction that God’s triune nature is explicated only through the events of salvation history—the divine economy—rather than by reflection on the traditional categories of essence, person, procession, and relation. Proceeding in this manner, theologians have distinguished between the immanent Trinity, which is God’s tri-unity in His innermost being, and the economic Trinity, which is His tri-unity as manifested in space and time through the economy of creation and redemption. As a result of this distinction, some modern theologians have come to regard the unity of these two concepts as “the main problem facing Trinitarian theology” (p. 8).

Marshall, professor of theology at Southern Methodist University, claims that focusing on the relationship between the immanent and economic Trinity is a “serious mistake” (p. 8), for it fails to address the fundamental problem that exercised Trinitarian thought for centuries, namely, the unity of the triune God. The latter issue had long been a staple of rich theological reflection, but in the wake of the immanent/economic distinction, the unity “seems simply to be assumed, or insisted upon as a kind of afterthought” (p. 7). This is problematic, in Marshall’s estimation, because the unity of the economic and immanent Trinity “contributes nothing to our understanding of the unity of the Triune God. They are two quite distinct problems” (p. 13). Furthermore defining God’s immanent tri-unity on the basis of His economic manifestations must address two significant consequences of this identification: first, “no feature of the economy as such” is able to distinguish the divine persons, for they do not “acquire their personal identities in virtue of anything that happens in the ec...