Biblical Theology: Past, Present, and Future (I)
Southwestern Journal of Theology
Volume 55, No. 2 – Spring 2013
Managing Editor: Terry L. Wilder
By Gilles Emery, OP. Translated by Francesca Aran Murphy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. 440 pages. Paperback, $ 45.
Gilles Emery’s present work is his historical, theological, and exegetical apology for Thomas’ speculative or philosophical theology. His primary task here is to show what Aquinas’ Trinitarian theology really teaches in the Summa Theologiae by interpreting not only the medieval writer’s theological but also philosophical arguments with regard to the triune God. In response to critiques of Thomas’ Trinitarian theology as speculative and unbiblical, Emery contends that the medieval theologian’s “speculative theology is not superimposed on or juxtaposed with the biblical texts, but is part and parcel of the biblical reading; it aims at disclosing the doctrinal meaning of the ‘letter,’ the literal sense, of the Gospel” (20). For Thomas, “it is not enough to produce Bible quotes” in clarifying the truth of the mystery of the Trinity and correcting Trinitarian heresies (27). If Thomas employs Aristotelian or Stoic terms and phrases, Emery points out, his intention is always to show the rationale of the truth of the Trinity, which the Bible presents and the church tradition defines.
This present work could also be a theological rebuttal to modern critiques of Aquinas’ Trinitarian theology such as Karl Rahner, Catherine M. LaCugna, and Colin Gunton, who argue that Thomas dissolves the indissoluble connection between soteriology and the Trinity. By letting Thomas speak through his own Summa, Emery attests that like Athanasius, Aquinas’ primary concern about the Trinity is soteriological. If Christ and the Holy Spirit are not God, we cannot be saved, or deified, through their ministries because salvation is the work of God. Like Basil, Thomas attempts to prove the divine personality of the Holy Spirit by demonstrating the divine works of the Spirit and to point out a theological parallel between Christ and the Spirit in their works. If Christ is God, the Spirit is necessarily to be God.
In answering the question as to why the deity has three Persons, not a single person, interestingly, Thomas rejects a rational approach of Richard of St. Victor and Bonaventure based on the divine fecundity and the divine goodness. Instead, Thomas is simply content that the threeness of the divine Persons is given to us as revelation. Like the Cappadocian Fathers, Thomas admits there is a Trinitarian order among the three Persons. However, for Thomas, the order that makes each Person distinct from the other is the order of opposed relations rather than that of origin. Departing from St. Victor and Bonaventure who saw the origin of being (generation and spiration) makes the Son and the Spirit distinct from the Father, Thomas sees the origin of being as the principle of constituting “the Son as a person” but relation as the principle of constituting “the Son in himself” (124). For Thomas, relation is not something that was “adventitiously added on to persons who have already been constituted in some other way” (125). Rather, relation is what God is. In other words, we cannot understand the Father apart from his paternity. The Father has never existed prior to his personal attribute of paternity. Each Person as a subsistent relation also denotes that paternity has no priority over filiation, and, likewise, filiation has no priority over the procession of the Spirit in deity.
Since the three Persons do not have their divine substance in a separate and material way that is applicable to humans, there is numerical unity of the divine essence preserving Trinitarian monotheism. The plurality of Persons in the Trinity is transcendental. Therefore, we do not have three gods but one God who is the Father, the Son, and the Spirit. Despite his awareness that the Greek fathers used aitia [cause] or archē[beginning] in order to describe the relational, not ontological, priority of the Father, Thomas points out a danger of the theological misapplication of the Latin word causa when used related to the Father. In Latin language, causa could imply “dependence plus externality” (158). That is why the Latin Fathers preferred principium which could be rendered as “a point of departure” without connoting “inequality” (157). Personally, Thomas prefers the Augustinian phrase “principle” and intentionally avoids using the term “hierarchy” in relation to the Trinity. There must be no hierarchy of any Person except the priority of relation. Like Augustine, Thomas sees the Father as the principle of the Son and the Spirit and also the principle to whom we Christians must return through the missions of the Son and the Spirit.
Thomas finds theological legitimacy of the doctrine of the eternal filioque from the Bible, in particular, the Gospel of John and patristic traditions such as Hilary, Augustine, and Didymus the Blind. While recognizing a theological distinction between the historic mission of the Holy Spirit and the eternal procession of the Holy Spirit, nonetheless, Thomas argues that the filioque in the economy must be “the eternal procession encountered in time at the behest of grace” (273). Thomas’ justification of the filioque in the immanent Trinity based on the Christological and soteriological ministry of the Spirit in the economy is continued in Karl Barth.
Emery’s contribution in this work is not only that he presents Thomas’ speculative Trinitarian theology in a way that beginners of theology can understand but also that his work provides a succinct analysis of medieval Trinitarianism prior to Thomas. Emery’s work will be a valuable reference to those who study Thomas’ Trinitarian theology.
