Isaak August Dorner
An Ethical Trinity
Dorner (1809–1884) published the first volume of his important study, A System of Christian Doctrine,1 in 1879. By that time he had already for a number of years held the prestigious Chair in Theology at the University of Berlin previously occupied by Schleiermacher. Dorner will be of particular interest since he brought into this trinitarian thought elements from both Hegel and Schelling, while showing as well in his own thought similarities to that of Schleiermacher and Kant. Indeed, we can already now say that it was Dorner who, in his thought on Trinity, mediated at least to a certain extent Idealist thinking on Trinity to twentieth-century theologians. Pannenberg has, for example, described him as “the most important champion of an essential Trinity in Protestant theology during the second half of the 19th century.”2 Though Barth was quite appreciative of Dorner’s effort to say something new and to let theology be theology, he claimed that as a speculatively developed position Dorner’s theology represented more the thinking of the 1840s than that of the 1870s. In fact, six years before the appearance of Dorner’s own System Albrecht Ritschl had already published his monumental study, Justification and Reconciliation. With Ritschl there had already come a shift in theology from metaphysics toward historical studies, which latter were in fact carried out in an increasingly Neo-Kantian philosophical context.3
Dorner’s A System of Christian Doctrine is a study in what is traditionally called mediating theology. In this study Dorner worked with and between such thinkers as Schleiermacher, on the one hand, and Hegel and Schelling, on the other, as well as between newer and more traditional approaches. He started his theological reflection, for example, from the Christian experience of faith and yet asserted the need faith has to seek understanding through thought and reflection. As we shall see, he mediated as well between the thought of Hegel and that of Schelling as he developed his notion of an ethical Trinity in which are held together an at least quasi-Hegelian notion of necessity and a Schellingian insistence on freedom.
Dorner on Trinity
Dorner divides his System into two main parts: “Fundamental or Apologetic Doctrine,” treated in §§ 15–70, and “Specific Doctrine,” treated in §§ 71–155. We will focus on selected elements in the first part, which has as its purpose to verify the “Godhumanity” of Jesus Christ. More germane to our interests, in this first part Dorner does this verification by arguing to the certainty of the object of faith, namely, the Christian idea of God as Trinity. More specifically, we will concentrate on the second division of this first part, entitled “The Doctrine of God or of the Holy Trinity” (344),4 subsection C, “Positive Exposition of the Doctrine of the Holy Tri-unity” (412),5 composed of §§ 31, 31b, and 32.
Before turning directly to Dorner’s creative presentation of Trinity, however, it will be helpful to mention briefly the more general relationship Dorner sees between faith and its content or object. In this regard, along with Schleiermacher he insists that we start from the Christian experience of faith. But, in order to avoid what he considers to be the inevitably subjective direction in which Schleiermacher’s approach and method leads, he speaks of Christian faith as a way of knowing which has its own proper pious object or content. He then says that this faith seeks out certainty with regard to what it believes. He argues that neither an appeal to ecclesiastical authority nor to the authority of Scripture as such is sufficient to establish certainty with regard to faith’s object. For these authorities are both ultimately appeals to a source of certainty outside of the object or content itself of faith. Here he understands especially the evangelical faith of the Reformation. The certainty faith seeks is not that of a logical demonstration but, rather, that of reasoned necessity. By way of anticipation, we can note that this demonstration of scientific certainty regarding the Christian idea of God as Trinity will lay in this idea’s ability, starting from experience, to solve a number of problems arising in relation to the notion of God. So, for Dorner faith is the way of knowing and the object or content of faith is the way of being. Theology, then, is the reflexively carried out development of the understanding of the object or content of faith now no longer merely as piously understood but as scientifically demonstrated both to the believer and even to others as well.6
With this understanding of the relationship between faith and its object or content in mind, we can now consider more specific selected elements of Dorner’s richly developed positive statement of the doctrine of God as the essentially triune. Dorner presents his trinitarian thought, as mentioned, in three articles, §§ 31, 31b, and 32, parts of which we will present in closer paraphrasing of his own wording. In the first of these, § 31, he makes two basic points. In the first part of § 31 (412–16) he spells out the aim of his reflection, which is to sketch out the relationship between Christian Evangelical faith and the Christian idea of God as Trinity. In a brief phenomenological analysis of faith he affirms that “the objective basis of our communion with God is contained in the theanthropic personality of Christ.” Faith could not assure its full sense if it did not accept that there was in Christ “a mode of the being of God, which refers to an internal distinction of God in Himself as its secure and eternal ground” (415). Without such a mode of being (Seinsweise, often used in parallel with Hypostase), Christ would be a mere man. Dorner continues, saying that the immanence of the Holy Spirit equally weighs upon and affects faith. Both Christ and the Holy Spirit must be permanent modes based in the eternal and immutable being of God. Thus faith poses the problem of the relationship between unity and triunity (415–16). In fact, for Dorner faith poses this problem to science as well (413).
In the second part of § 31 (417–19), Dorner spells out his aim in developing his trinitarian theological position. He acknowledges that, with its notion of Christian freedom, the Reformation worked out an anthropological consideration as to how necessity and freedom are brought together in the Christian personality. But now he wishes to take that reflection a step further and show how necessity and freedom are maintained, and their unity rooted, in God. He proposes a theological expression of the necessary anchorage of the unity of necessity and freedom in God seen as eternal archetype and supreme principle. By way of anticipation, Dorner acknowledges this unity has already been treated at length by the Fathers of the fourth century. But he rather insightfully notes that they remained with what he calls more physical and logical forms. To be adequate to the needs of Evangelical faith, which necessarily involves the ethical, Dorner will propose an ethical Trinity (ethische Trinität, also ethical Triunity, ethische Dreieinigkeit) as “the divine foundation of believing Christian personality” (419).
Dorner continues this creative reflection in § 31b, where he first speaks of the Trinity of the physical definitions of the concept of God and then of the logical Trinity. In this first part of the article (420–22), he speaks of a living God who is characterized in that life by aseity. As any living reality, then, God must include distinction and union of these distinctions. Self-origination requires that this union must be the result of an internally originating triad, otherwise there would result either an infinite progression or God’s not reaching Godself again. In effect God would remain simply a rigid, self-identical substance. In the second part of the article (422–26), Dorner refers to the logical Trinity, in which divine self-consciousness arises due to the Son’s being the image of the Father. But any knowledge must arise as the union of thought and thinker, subject and object. In God’s knowledge as self-consciousness, God fully knows Godself, which requires a third moment. To explain this, Dorner appeals to the example of human self-consciousness which, in its alienation, does not arrive at full self-consciousness but does come to some limited form of such knowledge. In the divine, however, where all is transparent in the full gift of Father to Son, a “third and equally real principle of union is necessary.” This “Third is not the mere sum of the two first forms of Being of the Godhead, is not the divine Essence as such, but one of the modes of the existence of the divine Essence, as the two others also are. This Third is the principle of their union by being the power in God, which elevates into consciousness the unity of Essence in the distinctions” (425).
Dorner moves in the third part of § 31b, tellingly entitled “The Ethical Derivation of the Trinity, or the Ethical Triunity of the Divine Will” (426–47), to the core consideration of his trinitarian thought. That core consideration is the way in which necessity and freedom can be maintained and united in God so that we can recognize the Trinity as archetype and principle (427) of Christian ethical personality. He considers the ethical in four steps. At the beginning of the first step (426–32), he recalls that in § 26 he had concluded God should be thought of as the primary ethical Essence and the ultimate, real, and primary Goodness. However, the question now arises as to how we can think of God as good. It would seem we cannot think of the ethical in God as pertaining to being since the ethical is the result of willing. But if we think of the good in God existing only as the result of willing, we end up in an arbitrary understanding of the good, which is antithetical to the notion of the good as such. Dorner sees Plato as already having noted this dilemma when he asked whether the good is good because of the divine will or whether the divine will wills it because it is good. He notes that antiquity had no answer to this question. Finally neither did the Middle Ages have an answer, given its vacillation between Duns Scotus, who took the volitional side, and Thomas Aquinas, who thought in terms of what was ethically necessary and good in itself (427–32). Dorner closes this first of four considerations by arguing, in very tight wording, that God as the Good is both “the ethically necessary and the ethically free.” He has to have this “antithesis within Him, or eternally divide Himself.” The questions as to whether God is good because God wills goodness or goodness is good because God wills it can only be answered if we think of God in such a way that God is divine in various ways, “absolutely correlated, however, and reciprocally conditioning” (432). Dorner insists that in order to establish this we must start with the ethically necessary and not from the free. If we start with the latter, we arrive only at that which is arbitrary. But willing in an arbitrary fashion does not realize the ethical.
Dorner begins the second (432–38) of the four steps in his argument in favor of an ethical Trinity by asserting that the ethical is rational and good in itself and is not above God. Rather, it lies within divine Being. God is good as the ethically necessary Being. He identifies this “first form of Being in God as the ethical One … the Principle of Fatherhood in God” (433). God the Father is necessarily good Being. But this does not describe God completely and we need to think a further “mode of divine Being in relation to the ethical.” Without freedom we would end in Fatalism. Dorner recalls physical definitions of Trinity involving self-production and logical definitions involving self-consciousness. They must be ethical self-production or we fall back upon a God who is merely naturally ethical and not such as spirit. There is, then, in a satisfactory conception of God a movement of ethical self-production or self-realization. He names this “second Principle … God the Son, the mode of the existence of the spiritual God in the form of freedom” (434). Both of these, the necessary and the free or volitional forms of goodness in God, refer mutually to one another. Dorner speaks, for example, of the Son’s internal connection to the Father in New Testament terms as the incarnate Son’s free obedience to the Father.
In God the ethically necessary and the free are not contradictory. Dorner argues in various ways that the ethically necessary is rational and desires its own idea and expression in freedom. “It is a love of freedom” (435). In turn, the free strives to get back to the ethically necessary and to condition itself by that ethically necessary. It cannot maintain itself without the ethically necessary. With reference again to the Reformation standpoint of Christian freedom, Dorner says that the union of ethical necessity and freedom in God is “only perfected by the third Principle; one and the same Principle, namely, the Holy Spirit, originally and archetypically combines in God the ethically necessary and the free, and consummates the same union as a kind of copy in man, the image of God” (437). The agency of the Holy Spirit eternally effects the unity of the self-knowledge and the self-volition of the free in the necessary, and that of the necessary in the free. This is absolute self-consciousness and free Love. This “ontology or metaphysics of love thus depicted forms the conclusion of the process by which God is eternally absolute Personality” (437).
In the third (438–44) of these four steps in his reflection on the ethical Trinity, Dorner opens with the statement that God is absolute personality. He then, as if he has gained his stride, moves quickly but clearly and succinctly through a series of potential objections to attributing personality or personhood to God. He demolishes them, from his perspective, one after another in tight, direct argumentation. In his consideration of potential objections, Dorner first argues more generally that divine knowledge would be an imperfect knowledge if it did not include self-knowledge or if, in God’s consciousness, God did not know and perceive Godself. God would not be free if, as absolute good, God did not will Godself.
We can get a further taste of the way in which Dorner responds to and refutes various objections to thinking of God as absolute personality by briefly listing a sampling of those objections and several of his responses. For example, some say God would be limited by what is distinct from God. So personality involves limitation. Dorner says Fichte accepted this objection and stayed with the affirmation of a moral order of the world. Hegel in turn spoke, rather, of an ongoing subjectivization in and through finite spirits. For Dorner, God would in this case “never come to self-realization as absolute spirit.” Then, too, some say self-consciousness and personality come about only through action of an other on a passive self. Here Dorner interestingly distinguishes between “being produced by” and “stimulated by.” Self-consciousness is not, as Dorner says, produced but, rather, stimulated from without (439). He goes on to assert that God is always active in the positing of Godself. Since God is in control of all which is not God, there is no clear evidence that something not God would limit God. Rather, God “conceives and embraces everything in Himself dynamically” (440). God’s infinity is not simply boundlessness. God is definite and the most definite being. Again, some say we cannot grasp God in thought. Thus God cannot be thought as personal. In thinking God we would only finitize God. Dorner responds that in saying anything we think of God finitizes God we end up in an internal contradiction because when we so speak we are nevertheless affirming a definition of God.
Again others say that thinking of God as personality would make God merely an individual or single being. But God is supposed to be the all-embracing universal or the whole of which individuals or persons are parts. Dorner responds, saying here we are thinking in inadequate quantitative terms. That God alone has aseity is the basic point to keep in mind. God is to be thought as “the universal ground of the possibility of everything He is not” (441), all of which owes its existence to his divine self-conscious will. Dorner insists that God knows and wills Godself by being triune and through his self-originating aseity in being, knowledge, and ethical volition. God is primarily his own content, for absoluteness means a fullness. God’s uniqueness lies in God’s having aseity as triune. “The concept of God is a particular and definite concept, and it has an essentially universal reference” (442).
Dorner brings this third step in his presentation of the ethical Trinity to a close with further reflection on God as love and on the implications of this understanding for thinking of God as absolute personality. He treats of this question of God’s absolute personality in relation to the notion of love in what he calls a turn from his previous focus more on thinking and being to the side of the will. In effect, by way of anticipation, we can say that Dorner has, while continuing to refer to being, reformulated the notion of divine essence as absolute personality. This move on his part reflects, and is part of, his serious effort to rethink God in terms brought into play by Idealist thinkers in a new and modern way congenial to at least certain strands of nineteenth-century thinking. For him the contents of divine love are the idea that God is love “by means of the three Trinitarian Principles, [and who] necessarily loves Himself primarily” (442). Dorner remarks that all he has said so far is simply the description of the process of divine self-love. He then goes on to develop the idea that God’s perfection includes communicability. So God’s love as self-preservation is equally an ethical self-love, a universal love open to that which is not God. While God is transcendent, God is able to exist in anything distinct from Godself. In divine self-preservation God is master of Godself and does not lose Godself in loving what is not God. There is no question then of simple pantheism. The fact that God, as the unity of necessity and freedom, loves the good and can will to communicate it to another is the highest thing of which we can conceive, namely, divine love. God concentrates in Godself “all modes of being of the ethical good.” In a way reminiscent of Hegel’s himself making a trinitarian claim, Dorner ends this third step with his own claim in which he stresses will. For him, the true concept of the Trinity must be ethical and this ethical conception permits “Christian personality [to] attain its absolute theological verification” (444).
Dorner ends § 31b and his four-step presentation of the ethical Trinity with a fourth and final series of remarks (445–47) concerning the fruitfulness of his understanding of the ethical Trinity. He says that we find in his understanding a uniting of objective doctrines with the Protestant principle. Bringing these together gives us a basis for asserting something truly true, that is, human beings who are created in the image of God find their truth in God who is the archetypal unity of necessity and freedom, the ultimate expression of love. He then turns to a practical consideration, namely, the relationship between religion and morality or ethics. In God we see the necessity of the ethical verified in the fact that in his essence God freely wills the good. So Nomianism or the stress on the importance of the law for salvation becomes a merely intermediary stage in which one has not yet profited from the experience of the Holy Spirit. Again, religion is necessary for the ethical. If God is the absolutely ethical, then true morality requires at least an unconscious surrender to God. For in God, as the archetype of the good, freedom requires necessity to avoid caprice and arbitrary willing. So Anti-Nomianism or the lack of stress on the importance of what is good and right also finds its corrective in the ethical Trinity. With the ethically necessary and the ethically free maintained in their difference, neither Deism nor pantheism can stand. Both Deism, with its cold and distant God, and pantheism, with its God who loses Godself in the created world, end up in contradictions. In the ethical Trinity transcendence remains ever communicative without losing itself and immanence remains holy and exalted, as Dorner writes, “in participation with and condescension to what is beneath” (447).
Dorner brings to an end his “Positive Exposition of the Doctrine of the Holy Tri-Unity” with § 32, entitled “The Absolute Personality in its Relation to the Divine Hypostases and Attributes” (447–65). In line with Idealist thought taken very generally, he focuses on the notion of absolute personality as the basic way of understanding the triune God. He locates the unity of God in this notion and subordinates to it the more traditional trinitarian notions such as being, essence, and substance. He equates God as absolute personality with a movement of what he calls ethical love, namely, in self-preservation a love of Godself and in communicative form a love of what has been brought about by God.
Article § 32 opens with a general statement. There then follow six final reflections on the ethical Trinity. After these six reflections, which constitute six steps in his presentation, he will turn to the question of creation and a series of subsequently treated more specific, soteriologically oriented theological themes, all of which he discusses in the light of his trinitarian thought.7 In his general statement, Dorner says that absolute personality is the combination of the three modes of divine existence participating in it. So the absolute personality is the eternally present result of the trinitarian process of God as spirit and life. Though the three modes are not in themselves individually personal, they “share in the One Divine Personality” (448).
Following upon this initial clarification of his position, Dorner teases out further consequences of that position. In a first step (448–50), he argues that, in line with Christian consciousness and the witness of Scripture, each of the divine modes remains distinct in the resultant absolute divine personality. He refers to the ancient trinitarian doctrine of perichōrēsis or intermingling of the three as he argues that the absolute personality relates to what is not God in and through each of the divine modes in a distinct way while they always work together. God knows and wills Godself in a distinct way in each mode of being. This is true, he says, as well within the triune God as it is in God’s relation to the world. Dorner concludes this section, saying “He [God] is personal in the three Hypostases, as He is personal by their means” (450).
In step two (450–51) of his further reflections, Dorner works with the notion of divine life as an organism to underscore again that result and members reciprocally condition one another. The absolute personality is unity and eternal result while equally being cooperative in its self-production. As organism, the members cooperate in the production of the result while the result precedes the parts. In God distinctions become more profound than they do in us while the union becomes absolutely intimate. In step three (452–53) he affirms that his view brings together what we would today tend to identify as Western and Eastern approaches to Trinity. Unity brings about the persistence of distinctions. With regard to the ancient saying that God acts outside of God as one, he concludes that “in the revelation of each of the Modes of the divine existence the one absolute Personality is present and efficient” (453).
In step four (453–62), Dorner spends a great deal of time reviewing the now-affirmed supreme divine unity and its ability to ground a whole series of divine attributes he had previously considered. Without indicating them in detail here, we can simply note that he speaks of rising from physical attributes to the intellectual and then to the ethical, with all the complex connotations these references bring with them in his thought. In a special observation at the end of this fourth step (460–62), he refers to divine immutability which, in his thought, is of particular import.8 He notes the importance of being able both to count on the continuing faithfulness of God and to acknowledge that God is the living God who maintains a living relationship with the world. How then to balance immutability and living presence? He finds the response in the Christian ethical idea of God with its correct idea of love. In God, love includes justice, so God is both concerned with self-preservation and with self-communication. Immutability includes rather than excludes love. To be truly Godself, God cannot be indifferent to history and its development. God assumes different relations to it. In this way God retains ethical self-identity through changing relations with the world. Through change, God remains and retains his ethical self-identity. “In the last resort the divine Immutability rests upon God’s ethical Essence, which is at once the principle of His Self-preservation and of His movement or of the guarantee of His living relation to the world” (461).
Dorner then continues his reflection on the importance of his ethical understanding of immutability for our life of piety. He does this in a fifth step (462–63) in his further reflections on the implications of understanding God as absolute personality. His notion of ethical immutability leads to an understanding of the history of God’s deeds in the world, to seeing justification as a special act, to asserting a special providence, and to affirming a change not only in the relation of the world to God but of God to the world. After the coming of Christ, the world has a different meaning and value for God. This all gives rise to a living intercourse and relation of reciprocity between God and humans. In a relation of asking and giving, God actually hears prayer and lets Godself, in his very self-identity, be conditioned by prayer. In a sixth and final step (463–65), Dorner speaks of God’s being all-sufficient and blessed. God is blessed not because God becomes love by willing something distinct from Godself but because God is “love which wills to be itself holy and communicative and is blessed in itself. Only thus can God will a world without being dependent upon a world.” He hints that God’s all-sufficiency, to the affirmation of which the ethical concept of God leads, brings us to the question of creation (464). With these last two steps in his further reflection on the implications of our understanding of God as absolute personality, and especially the fifth step concerning the relationship between the Christian idea of a trinitarian God and Christian piety, Dorner comes back to the starting point of his positive presentation of the triune God. That point is of course the Christian experience of faith. He will continue on to theological considerations of a more formally soteriological character in the rest of his System of Christian Doctrine.
A Later Testimonial to Idealist Influence
We should acknowledge that Dorner, in his constructive reflection on Trinity, works insightfully and in original ways directly with various ecclesial understandings of Trinity as developed especially in the earlier centuries of the history of the Church. Yet, of more direct concern here, we can as well readily recognize his creative appropriation of Idealist approaches to Trinity. He reflects at least the indirect influence of Fichte to the extent that he works throughout with a triply structured understanding of reality as we know it, though he clearly rejects Fichte’s more limited and restrictive understanding of the notion of personality or personhood (438). With Hegel he sees the critical importance of beginning with the Trinity, though in Hegel this is a beginning in the realm of logic or pure thought where Hegel speaks of moments in the dialectical development of that thought. Dorner, for his part, begins not with such a realm of pure thought but with the more theologically acceptable aseity of the triune God, in whom the distinctions among Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are, in a sense with Hegel, not persons. Rather, as Dorner says, they are modes of being (Seinsweise). With Schelling he stresses the importance of will in his idea of an ethical Trinity, though he maintains this notion of will in tandem with the need for reference to necessity, a more Hegelian theme, in the idea of a truly ethical Trinity.9 Whereas Schelling will speak of potencies becoming persons, Dorner maintains the trinitarian distinctions as divine modes of being out of which absolute personality eternally arises, and in and through which absolute personality eternally expresses itself.10 In his insistence that the dynamically developing ethical Trinity be thought of as absolute personality, Dorner reflects the influence of both Hegel, who spoke more of divine subjectivity, and Schelling, who spoke more explicitly of absolute personality. In a brief but telling one-page discussion of Hegel and Schelling, Dorner acknowledges the contributions of both. There he writes, “It is impossible to deny that these systems [Hegel’s and Schelling’s] have done the service of having achieved something for the metaphysical foundations of the concept of the Trinity” (400).11 We might perhaps recall, then, for sake of comparison and discussion that Hegel’s philosophy in general and his reading of Trinity in particular is a movement of thought from possibility to actuality to necessity. The later Schelling’s philosophical reflection on Trinity begins with an initial moment of full actuality followed by a movement from possibility (potentiality) to renewed, full actuality. Whereas with Hegel the movement is one of conceptual thought, for Schelling it develops fundamentally as a movement of will. Dorner, for his part, develops his theological reflection on ethical Trinity as a movement from necessity to actuality to realized possibility.12
Samuel M. Powell has drawn attention to the influence of Idealist philosophies on Dorner’s theology and speaks of that theology’s congruence, at various points, with Hegel’s philosophy. He likewise indicates ways in which Dorner differed from Hegel on Trinity, such as the fact that for Dorner philosophy did not constitute a higher way of knowing than faith. However, as he points out, like Hegel, Dorner presented God as a “harmony of opposites, a unity that embraces difference.”13 He notes as well that Dorner, with Hegel, refused to remain with God understood merely as substance. God was spirit, the unity of two prior moments of thought for Hegel and of three modes of being for Dorner. We might add, however, that much of what Powell notes concerning Hegel’s influence on Dorner would apply as well in a general way to Schelling’s potential influence on Dorner.
In his dissertation, written some years before these just referred to statements, Powell cited Robert F. Brown as to whether Dorner sided more with Hegel or Schelling regarding freedom. Powell writes that Brown saw Dorner as following Hegel’s view of God rather than Schelling’s. The implication then was that for Dorner “freedom [is] uninhibited and complete actualization, and not the Schellingian freedom that can choose among alternatives.”14 John W. Cooper15 also, again citing Brown, says that Dorner sides with Hegel on the question of whether Dorner follows Schelling on freedom. It is true that Schelling himself develops at least a hypothetically radical metaphysics of will, but that metaphysics remains perhaps, once launched, slightly less radical than we might at first think. It is true that I have not in my limited reading of Dorner seen that he speaks explicitly of choosing among alternatives. That Dorner does not speak of such choosing would seem to be one of the reasons why various commentators say Dorner’s understanding of freedom is closer to that of Hegel than that of Schelling. Dorner does indicate that necessity is the first of three modes of being and wants to avoid mere arbitrary choosing on the part of the divine. Yet he clearly says that, in line with divine aseity, God did not need to create the world in order to be absolute personality. This would seem to distinguish his view of God and God’s free relationship with the world rather clearly from that of Hegel. It would seem to leave room at least in this regard for a somewhat more Schellingian interpretation of Dorner’s understanding of freedom.16 Not unlike Schelling, Dorner strongly stresses will in his understanding of Trinity. But, without wanting to tear Dorner away from Hegel and Schelling regarding necessity and freedom, perhaps in this regard we might say he was more his own person than we have tended to recognize.
Dorner reflected in his trinitarian thought a number of generally speaking Idealist themes and the overall Idealist dynamic of a movement from a first distinction to a second and then to an inclusive third distinction. In addition to points already mentioned, we could note that Dorner has picked up on the Idealist effort to go beyond another form of distinction, even if only a distinction of reason in classical Thomist theology. That distinction he wished to go beyond is one between divine essence and the distinctions in God. He has as well brought God and history into a close relationship and even introduced the notion of history into his understanding of God and God’s development. In the process, Dorner did indeed incorporate a number of identifiably Hegelian elements into his own thinking. However, we cannot really escape the feeling that he was finally closer to Schelling than to Hegel. He himself had written two important articles on the thought of the later Schelling.17 He strove to maintain in God both necessity and freedom and, while he held them to be mutually conditioning, he insisted that necessity needed freedom. Following in a somewhat more Kantian line, he stressed the importance of the good. And, consequently, in his own thought he insisted on the role of will, even ultimately over the role of knowing. For Dorner, God as Trinity was not, as for Hegel, a movement of conceptual thought in three syllogistically related moments. God was, rather, absolute personality in three ever-distinct modes of being related to one another eternally and acting together in creation and salvation. In this way of presenting ever-distinct divine modes of being, he was again surely closer to Schelling’s position. As with Schelling, so too in Dorner there is a certain fullness in God already from the beginning of God’s development. There is then a clear resemblance between Dorner’s trinitarian thought and that of Hegel and Schelling, but especially that of Schelling. This resemblance and his own statements regarding Idealist thought permit us to claim Dorner as a strong witness, indeed as providing a strong testimonial, to the influence of post-Kantian German Idealism on subsequent trinitarian thought.