Introduction to Part 4

1. For a contextualizing overview of German Idealism’s impact on American intellectual development, see Nicholas Boyle, “General Introduction: The Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries,” in The Impact of Idealism: The Legacy of Post-Kantian German Thought, ed. Nicholas Boyle and Liz Disley, vol. 1, Philosophy and Natural Sciences, ed. Karl Ameriks (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 24–29.

2. For a colorful history of St. Louis Hegelianism, see Henry A. Pochmann, New England Transcendentalism and St. Louis Hegelianism: Phases in the History of American Idealism (New York: Haskell House Publishers Ltd., 1948); a longer introduction to the St. Louis Hegelians and for a collection of their writings, The St. Louis Hegelians, 3 vols., ed. Michael H. DeArmey and James A. Good (Sterling, VA: Thoemmes Press, 2001); a particularly succinct and insightful review of the St. Louis Hegelians and their influence in the United States, Boyle, “General Introduction: The Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries,” 27–29, where he refers especially to Henry A. Pochmann, German Culture in America: Philosophical and Literary Influences 1600–1900 (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1957, 1961). In this 1957 volume, accessed February 22, 2014, https://archive.org/details/germancultureina00poch, Pochmann treats directly of the St. Louis Hegelians on 257–94. Over the course of his study, he provides a detailed review of German influences on American life and thought.

3. See James Allard, “Idealism in Britain and the United States,” in The Cambridge History of Philosophy 1870–1945, ed. Thomas Baldwin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 43–59; a contextualizing overview of German Idealism’s impact on British intellectual development, Boyle, “General Introduction,” in The Impact of Idealism, vol. 1, Philosophy and Natural Sciences, 22–24 and 29–34, where he makes particular reference to W. J. Mander, British Idealism: A History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).

4. Jan Olof Bengtsson, The Worldview of Personalism: Origins and Early Development (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 1. This is an extraordinarily rich and rewarding study.

5. Bengtsson, Worldview of Personalism, 27.

6. For a further consideration of aspects of Hegel’s thought which personalist thinkers at times tend to accept and at others to reject, see Walter G. Muelder, “Personalism’s Debt to Hegel,” in The Boston Personalist Tradition in Philosophy, Social Ethics and Theology, ed. Paul Deats and Carol Robb (Mercer, GA: Mercer University Press, 1986), 30–54. For his part, though he is less than enthusiastic about post-Hegelian revivalist trinitarian thought, Lewis Ayres does note the origins of personalist thought in Kant, Schelling, and Hegel. “Into the Cloud of Witnesses: Catholic Trinitarian Theology Beyond and Before its Modern ‘Revivals,’ ” in Rethinking Trinitarian Theology: Disputed Questions and Contemporary Issues in Trinitarian Theology, ed. Giulio Maspero and Robert J. Woźniak (London: T & T Clark International, 2012), 8–9.

7. For an excellent study, with abundant references, of Hegelian influence on this developing understanding of subjectivity from the perspective of Hegel’s influence on Pragmatist understandings of experience in the thought of Dewey and James, but especially of Peirce, see Dina Emundts, “Idealism and Pragmatism: The Inheritance of Hegel’s Concept of Experience,” in The Impact of Idealism: The Legacy of Post-Kantian German Thought, ed. Nicholas Boyle and Liz Disley, vol. 1, Philosophy and Natural Sciences, ed. Karl Ameriks (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 347–72. Justus Buchler identifies a number of Peirce’s remarks concerning Hegel and his thought, including various references to Hegel in relation to pragmatism and pragmaticism. Philosophical Writings of Peirce (New York: Dover, 1955), index 383. A copy of these references has been brought together for convenient review in “On Hegel,” accessed May 22, 2014, http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/us/peirce3.htm.

8. By way of entry into Peirce’s “trinitarian thought,” see the insightful remarks in James Bradley, “Transformations in Speculative Philosophy,” in The Cambridge History of Philosophy 1870–1945, ed. Thomas Baldwin, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 444–46, where on 444 he writes: “In line with his emphatic declarations of indebtedness to Augustine, Aquinas, Hegel, and, above all, Duns Scotus, actualization is understood by Peirce as a threefold serial structure, which he defines in terms of the categories of Firstness or Spontaneity, Secondness or Existence, and Thirdness, which is Community or Continuity.” On the other hand, Josiah Royce said that Peirce’s theory “is, historically speaking, a theory not derived from Hegel … [and that] Peirce’s theory … promises new light upon matters which Hegel left profoundly problematic.” The Problem of Christianity: Lectures Delivered at the Lowell Institute in Boston, and at Manchester College, Oxford, 2 vols. (New York: Macmillan, 1913; reprinted 2 vols. in one, Hamden, CT: Archon, 1967), 2:186, cited as in the Archon reprint. In line with this remark, however, as I had noted earlier in my study, Experience and Spirit: A Post-Hegelian Philosophical Theology (New York: Peter Lang, 2007), 99: “Royce himself had logically, though not necessarily in terms of historical dependence, viewed the transition from Hegel’s dialectic to Peirce’s theory of signs and interpretation to his own communitarian/individual theory as a process of widening of conception and of application (The Problem of Christianity, 2:185–86).” For a succinct and insightful entry into the discussion concerning Peirce and Royce in relation to Hegel, and especially through consideration of Hegel’s thought on essence, see John Kaag, “Hegel, Peirce, and Royce on the Concept of Essence,” Dialogue 50 (2011): 557–75. John W. Cooper, in turn, sees parallels between Peirce’s “Firstness,” “Secondness,” and “Thirdness,” and the thought of Hegel and Schelling. He writes: “Peirce shares with Hegel and Schelling the view that the metaphysical structure of reality is triadic”; and, “Firstness, secondness, and thirdness are clearly reminiscent of Schelling’s three potencies.” Panentheism: The Other God of the Philosophers: From Plato to the Present (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2006), 137–39, with the quotes respectively on 138 and 139. A helpful point of entry into the well-documented more general influence, mediated through other thinkers as well as occurring more directly, of Schelling on American thought and especially that of Peirce is H. G. Callaway’s discussion in his review of Franz Josef Wetz, Friedrich W. J. Schelling: Zur Einführung (Hamburg: Junius Verlag, 1996), “Schelling and the Background of American Pragmatism,” accessed September 22, 2013, at http://www.cspeirce.com/menu/library/aboutcsp/callaway/schelling.htm.

More particularly concerning the complex relationship between Hegel’s thought on experience, especially as found in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, and that of Peirce, see Emundts, “Idealism and Pragmatism,” 350–68. Emundts variously notes “Peirce maintains that his three categories are taken over from Hegel” (353–54) and “after having said that he got the idea of phenomenology from Hegel, Peirce also claims that Hegel considered phenomenology in a ‘fatally narrow spirit’ ” (355–56). Emundts draws attention to several important papers by Robert Stern: “Peirce, Hegel and the Category of Firstness,” International Yearbook of German Idealism 5 (2007): 276–308; “Peirce, Hegel, and the Category of Secondness,” “Peirce on Hegel: Nominalist or Realist,” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 41 (2005): 65–99. These three studies are reproduced in Robert Stern, Hegelian Metaphysics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), along with Stern’s “Hegel and Pragmatism,” in Hegelian Metaphysics, 209–37. With regard to the relationship between Hegel and Peirce, we could almost say that what goes around comes around. Recently, John Burbidge has proposed an interpretation of Hegel’s Logic as metaphysics, namely, that logical concepts say something about reality, by calling upon Peirce’s idea, very generally stated, of appealing to experience to correct concepts. Burbidge proposes, again very generally stated, that this is what occurs in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit as Hegel moves from a phenomenological study to the conceptual world of his Science of Logic. “Hegel’s Logic as Metaphysics,” Hegel Bulletin 35 (2014): 100–15, esp. 110–12.

We can in regard to Hegel give the last word here to Peirce himself, who often enough commented on the strengths and especially the weaknesses of Hegel’s thought: “The truth is that pragmaticism is closely allied to the Hegelian absolute idealism, from which, however, it is sundered by its vigorous denial that the third category (which Hegel degrades to a mere stage of thinking) suffices to make the world, or is even so much as self-sufficient. Had Hegel, instead of regarding the first two stages with his smile of contempt, held on to them as independent or distinct elements of the triune Reality, pragmaticists might have looked up to him as the great vindicator of their truth. … For pragmaticism belongs essentially to the triadic class of philosophical doctrines and is much more essentially so than Hegelianism is.” “What Pragmatism Is,” The Monist 15 (1905): 180–81, accessed September 5, 2013, http://www.jstor.org/stable/27899577?seq=1.

And again concerning Schelling, for example, “I [Peirce] have begun [my task] by showing that tychism must give birth to an evolutionary cosmology, … , and to a Schelling-fashioned idealism which holds matter to be mere specialized and partially deadened mind. I may mention, … , that I was born and reared in the neighbourhood of Concord—I mean in Cambridge—at the time when Emerson, Hedge, and their friends were disseminating the ideas that they had caught from Schelling, … I am not conscious of having contracted any of that virus. Nevertheless, it is probable that some cultured bacilli, some benignant form of the disease was implanted in my soul, unawares, and that now, after long incubation, it comes to the surface, modified by mathematical conceptions and by training in physical investigations.” “The Law of Mind,” The Monist 2 (1892): 533–34, accessed September 23, 2013, http://www.jstor.org/stable/27897003?seq=4.

Yet again concerning Schelling, Joseph L. Esposito stresses the Idealist character of Peirce’s thought, especially the early Peirce. He refers, for example, to the pragmatist trinity of Peirce-James-Dewey, but suggests another trinity, that of Schelling-Hegel-Peirce. He writes that “in his capsule autobiographies he [Peirce] closely associates himself with German Idealism, and specifically the philosophy of Schelling. … In a letter to James he considered Schelling ‘like a scientific man’ and his own philosophy ‘Schellingism transformed in the light of modern physics.’ [Esposito’s reference 138n2:] Letter dated January 18, 1894 in Ralph Barton Perry’s The Thought and Character of William James (Boston: Little, Brown, 1935), 2, pp. 415f.” “Peirce and Naturphilosophie,” Transactions of the Charles Sanders Peirce Society 13 (1977): 122–41 with quote on 122, accessed January 28, 2014, http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/40319807?uid=3739920&uid=2134&uid=372791751&uid=2&uid=70&uid=3&uid=372791741&uid=3739256&uid=60&sid=21103351697927. On 135, Esposito refers to Royce: “Royce, who may have known more of Schelling than his own works on idealism reveal, saw enough idealism in Peirce to have regarded him as a ‘pure Schellingian.’ [Esposito’s reference 141n22:] This is reported in a letter from Herbert Nichols to Peirce in L-320 [Richard S. Robin. Annotated Catalogue of the Papers of Charles S. Peirce (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1967)].”

9. Josiah Royce, The Problem of Christianity: Lectures Delivered at the Lowell Institute in Boston, and at Manchester College, Oxford, 2 vols. (New York: Macmillan, 1913; reprinted 2 vols. in one, Hamden, CT: Archon, 1967). For a brief exposition of Royce on experience, see Schlitt, Experience and Spirit, 93–100, 123–25. In order to recall Royce’s intimate understanding of post-Kantian German Idealism, it might be well to note Royce’s 1906 lectures, entitled “Aspects of Post-Kantian Idealism,” at Johns Hopkins University, posthumously published as Lectures on Modern Idealism, ed. J. Loewenberg (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1919, 5th printing 1967). In lecture 4, “The Dialectical Method in Schelling,” Royce speaks first of Idealists more generally (87–96) before briefly mentioning Fichte (96–98) and then masterfully focusing on Schelling’s 1797 System of Transcendental Idealism (98–114). He continues to analyze this 1797 work in his further discussion of Schelling in lecture 5, “Schelling’s Transcendental Idealism” (115–35). He then concentrates more on Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit as he dedicates lectures 6 through 9 to a prolonged discussion of Hegel’s thought (136–231). Toward the end, Royce colorfully remarks: “The idealistic movement in later European thought, although frequently suppressed, although often deliberately ignored, has been as constant as the movement of a great river beneath masses of winter ice. Every now and then the ice breaks or melts, and the idealistic tendency comes to the light of consciousness. It is irrepressible, because it is human” (237–38). And more specifically regarding American pragmatism in particular, he notes: “In more recent times, post-Kantian idealism, influencing thought in France, in England, and in this country, has led to a complication of opinions which it would require many courses of lectures to unravel … in a measure, most of our own American pragmatists could be viewed as the outcome of the same movement” (2).

10. See John Dewey, Experience and Nature, in The Later Works, 1925–1953, ed. Jo Ann Boydston with associate textual editors, Patricia Baysinger and Barbara Levine (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1981, 1st ed. originally published 1925, 2nd ed. 1929) with, by way of example, Dewey’s more general criticism of Idealism on 61–62. The phrases describing each of these three forms or phases of experience I refer to are taken from Francis E. George, “Dewey and Dialectic,” in Dewey and His Influence: Essays in Honor of George Estes Barton, Tulane Studies in Philosophy 22, ed. Robert C. Whittemore (New Orleans: Tulane University, 1973), 22. On Dewey on experience, see briefly in Schlitt, Experience and Spirit, 100–07. For longer analyses of Dewey’s thought, analyses carried out in support of the idea of an ongoing influence of Hegel on Dewey, see John R. Shook, James A. Good, and John Dewey, John Dewey’s Philosophy of Spirit, with the 1897 Lecture on Hegel (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010). In this volume see: John R. Shook, “Dewey’s Naturalized Philosophy of Spirit and Religion,” 3–55; and especially James A. Good, “Rereading Dewey’s ‘Permanent Hegelian Deposit,’ ” 56–89; also transcribed seminar lecture notes of Dewey’s own 1897 seminar at the University of Chicago on Hegel, “Hegel’s Philosophy of Spirit,” 93–174. Shook and Good provide further bibliographic references concerning relationships between the thought of Hegel and that of Dewey, indicating in their view the influence of Hegel on Dewey’s thought. Good in particular stresses the impact of Karl Rosenkranz’s life of Hegel on Dewey (for example 62, with 183n22). Rosenkranz himself had been an “auxiliary member of the St. Louis Philosophical Society [the St. Louis Hegelians]” (62). As a further indication of resemblances between the thought of various Americans and that of Hegel, we could note Good’s citation of a letter from Dewey to William James, dated May 6, 1891, in which Dewey wrote: “Would it horrify you, if I stated that your theory of emotions (where you seem to me to have completely made out your case) is good Hegelianism?” (188n67). Perhaps Dewey’s remark would have horrified James, given James’s overall critique of Hegel in James’s collected lectures, A Pluralistic Universe (New York: Longmans, Green and Co., 1909), 83–129, accessed October 24, 2014, https://archive.org/stream/apluralisticuni01jamegoog#page/n0/mode/2up, and see Don Morse, “William James’s Neglected Critique of Hegel,” Idealistic Studies 35 (2005): 199–213.

See also briefly in Emundts, “Idealism and Pragmatism,” 349. In a look back, Dewey himself wrote that Hegel’s philosophy answered “a demand for unification that was doubtless an intense emotional craving, and yet was a hunger that only an intellectualized subject-matter could satisfy. … [T]he sense of divisions and separations that were, I suppose, borne in upon me as a consequence of a heritage of New England culture, divisions by way of isolation of self from the world, of soul from body, of nature from God, brought a painful oppression—or, rather, they were an inward laceration. … Hegel’s synthesis of subject and object, matter and spirit, the divine and the human, was … no mere intellectual formula; it operated as an immense release, a liberation. Hegel’s treatment of human culture, of institutions and the arts, involved the same dissolution of hard-and-fast dividing walls, and had a special attraction for me.” John Dewey, “From Absolutism to Experimentalism” (1930), in The Later Works, 1925–1953, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1981–90), vol. 5, 153. Quoted by Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001), 266–67.

11. The Analogy of Experience: An Approach to Understanding Religious Truth (New York: Harper and Row, 1973), 33. For a succinct reminder that by “experience” Peirce, James, and Dewey meant far more than something epistemological, see John E. Smith, “The Reconception of Experience in Peirce, James and Dewey,” in John E. Smith, America’s Philosophical Vision (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 17–35, esp. 35. For a fuller discussion of experience in pragmatist thought, see John E. Smith, Purpose and Thought: The Meaning of Pragmatism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1978; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978, pagination the same in both editions), with special focus on Dewey, James and Peirce on experience, in chapter 3, “The New Conception of Experience,” 78–95; again, “The Reconception of Experience in Peirce, James and Dewey,” 17–35, with discussion of similarities and differences between the thought of Dewey and that of Hegel, but without focus on historical influences, on 111–15.

12. Smith himself has remarked that “[Robert C.] Neville is right in calling attention to the two traditions that have determined most of my thought—the development of American philosophy starting with Edwards and moving to the pragmatists, and the tradition of German idealism which for me meant largely the tension between Kant and Hegel.” “Metaphysics, Experience, Being, and God: Response to Robert C. Neville,” in Reason, Experience, and God: John E. Smith in Dialogue, ed. Vincent M. Colapietro (New York: Fordham University Press, 1997), 131. See Robert C. Neville, “John E. Smith and Metaphysics,” in Reason, Experience, and God: John E. Smith in Dialogue, 71–72. Especially regarding experience and the validity and value of religious experience, a good point of entry into Smith’s longer engagement with the thought of Jonathan Edwards is Smith’s earlier study, the “Editor’s Introduction” to Jonathan Edwards, Religious Affections, ed. John E. Smith (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1959), 1–89, where Smith stresses several aspects of Edwards’s thought which we can see with hindsight as providing an opening toward American philosophical pragmatism. Among these many aspects or insights we might note what we can call Edwards’s appreciation of empiricism now expanded by Edwards in a holistic, spiritual direction (see, for instance, 52–53 taken within the context of the overall introduction) and Edwards’s understanding of the role of practice in relation to the discernment of true religious conversion (see in this latter regard especially 40–43, where Smith discusses Edwards’s twelfth sign of gracious affections.)

On Smith on experience, see in my study, Experience and Spirit, 107–21, with further bibliography indicated there. By way of additional comment here at the end of these references to, generally stated, Pragmatism on experience, I think it could be argued that many Western theories of experience can, to a certain extent, in a real sense find roots and something of their origin in Hegel’s efforts in his Phenomenology of Spirit to work out an understanding of the varied relationships between self and other. This would be especially true with regard to the first part of the text itself. See Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Gesammelte Werke, vol. 1: Phänomenologie des Geistes, ed. Wolfgang Bonsiepen and Reinhard Heede (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1980), 63–70/Phenomenology of Spirit (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 58–66. On the relationship between pragmatist thought on experience and Hegel’s Phenomenology, see briefly Emundts, “Idealism and Pragmatism,” 249–50.

13. Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen, The Trinity: Global Perspectives (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2007), 153–54, identifies “several factors [that] are shaping the thinking about God in North America … First … asking questions relevant to the multicultural, multidenominational, and somewhat pluralist context … Second … the theological currents increasingly include not only evangelical churches … but also various kinds of ‘Free Churches’ … Third, North America provides fertile soil for the rise of contextual theologies for the simple reason of its multicultural population.” He refers to further remarks in this regard in his book, The Doctrine of God: A Global Introduction (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2004), 165–67, 239–40.

14. The following, for example, give a first sense of this approach to trinitarian reflection as a response to the needs of people in particular or even marginalized situations: Miguel H. Díaz, “The Life-giving Reality of God from Black, Latin American, and US Hispanic Theological Perspectives,” in The Cambridge Companion to the Trinity, ed. Peter C. Phan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 259–73; Patricia A. Fox, “Feminist Theologies and the Trinity,” in Cambridge Companion to The Trinity, 274–90. The Latin American liberationist theologian, Leonardo Boff, is a particularly striking example of one in whom we can recognize trans-Atlantic “echoes” of post-Kantian German Idealism’s trinitarian thinking which give expression to Idealist insights in light of the needs of those who find themselves in marginalized situations. He works with great concern for liberation in Trinity and Society (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1988) and Holy Trinity: Perfect Community (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2000). From an explicitly praxis starting point and perspective, see David N. Power and Michael Downey, Living the Justice of the Triune God (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2012).

15. Kärkkäinen, Trinity: Global Perspectives, 151, entitles the overall section of his book on American traditions “North American Traditions: Dialogue with European Views.” He relates the thought of the North American trinitarian thinkers to several European trinitarian thinkers, with brief reference to German Idealism (233).

Chapter 9

1. Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen, The Trinity: Global Perspectives (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2007), 163, where he quotes R. Kendall Soulen, “YHWH the Triune God,” Modern Theology 15 (1999): 35, speaking of Jenson as “perhaps the major trinitarian theologian writing in English today.” He also cites Carl Braaten as calling Jenson the “first American theologian to write a systematic construction of the Trinity.” “God and the Gospel: Pluralism and Apostasy in American Theology,” Lutheran Theological Journal 25 (1991): 47. See further laudatory remarks and references cited by Stanley J. Grenz, Rediscovering the Triune God: The Trinity in Contemporary Theology (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2004), 106–07.

2. Robert W. Jenson, “A Theological Autobiography, to Date,” Dialog: A Journal of Theology 46 (2007): 46–54, with quote from 51. Much of the content of these introductory remarks is taken from this article. On his being Lutheran, note also his self-description as “a representative of an in Britain now exotic species of Christian: I am a Lutheran.” “What is the Point of Trinitarian Theology?” in Trinitarian Theology Today: Essays on Divine Being and Act, ed. Christoph Schwöbel (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1995), 31. See more generally, Carl E. Braaten, “Robert William Jenson—A Personal Memoir,” in Trinity, Time, and Church: A Response to the Theology of Robert W. Jenson, ed. Colin E. Gunton (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2000), 1–9.

3. Jenson, “A Theological Autobiography,” 52.

4. Jenson, “A Theological Autobiography,” 53.

5. Jenson, “A Theological Autobiography,” 49. Jenson subsequently published a version of the thesis as Alpha and Omega: A Study in the Theology of Karl Barth (New York: Thomas Nelson, 1963), as well as another study on Barth’s thought, God after God: The God of the Past and the God of the Future Seen in the Work of Karl Barth (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1969).

6. “Jenson—A Personal Memoir,” 4.

7. Wolfhart Pannenberg, Review of Systematic Theology, vols. 1 and 2, by Robert W. Jenson, in First Things (May 2000): 1–13, with the quote on 1, accessed August 3, 2013, http://www.firstthings.com/article/2007/01/systematic-theology-volumes-i-amp-ii-25.

8. Robert W. Jenson, The Triune Identity: God According to the Gospel (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1982), hereafter mostly cited in the text by page number and generally referred to, especially in notes, as Triune Identity. Emphasis in quotations reflects the original.

9. Robert W. Jenson, Systematic Theology, vol. 1: The Triune God (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), hereafter referred to as Triune God.

10. Among them, Robert W. Jenson, “Second Locus: The Triune God,” in Christian Dogmatics, ed. Carl E. Braaten and Robert W. Jenson, vol. 1 (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1984), 83–191, based in part on Triune Identity. For a listing of a number of Jenson’s other writings on Trinity, see: Grenz, Rediscovering the Triune God, 249n178; Kärkkäinen, Trinity: Global Perspectives, 164n8.

Among a growing number of insightful studies of Jenson’s trinitarian thought, I have found the following particularly helpful, especially from the point of view of present interest in identifying possible Idealist influence on that thought: the constructively critical chapters in Colin E. Gunton, ed., Trinity, Time, and Church: A Response to the Theology of Robert W. Jenson (Grand Rapids, MI: W. B. Eerdmans, 2000), chapters covering various aspects of Jenson’s trinitarian thought, among which are of special interest here: Jeremy Ive, “Robert W. Jenson’s Theology of History,” 146–57; Wolfhart Pannenberg, “Eternity, Time, and the Trinitarian God,” 62–70; A. N. Williams, “The Parlement of Foules and the Communion of Saints: Jenson’s Appropriation of Patristic and Medieval Theology,” 188–200; furthermore, Grenz, Rediscovering the Triune God, 106–16, where he refers primarily to Jenson’s Triune God; Kärkkäinen, Trinity: Global Perspectives, 162–77, where he works more with Jenson’s Triune Identity, while drawing as well on Jenson’s Triune God (he considers his approach and that of Grenz as complementary); Scott R. Swain, The God of the Gospel: Robert Jenson’s Trinitarian Theology (Downer’s Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2013), esp. 63–141, where in chapters 3 and 4 (77–120) he refers mainly to Triune God when he presents Jenson’s trinitarian reading of God’s identity in the Old and New Testaments, but where in chapter 5 (121–41) he, it should be noted, cites much more often Jenson’s earlier work, Triune Identity, as he “analyzes the major implications Jenson draws from his theological interpretation of Scripture for the being of the gospel’s God” (26).

11. John Webster, “Systematic Theology after Barth: Jüngel, Jenson, and Gunton,” in The Modern Theologians: An Introduction to Christian Theology since 1918, ed. David F. Ford with Rachel Muers (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2005), 256. It is interesting to note that Jenson has not let drop the title of his 1982 monograph on the Trinity, The Triune Identity. Rather, he has used the phrase as the title of the second of three parts of vol. 1 of his Systematic Theology, The Triune God, 61. In a 1995 essay, Jenson continued to refer readers to Triune Identity for “my understanding of trinitarian doctrine generally,” and notes this work can be improved. “What Is the Point of Trinitarian Theology?” 36n5. For a particularly helpful, more synthesizing summary of Jenson’s trinitarian thought in Triune Identity, with reference as well to “Second Locus: The Triune God,” in Christian Dogmatics, vol. 1, see Ted Peters, GOD as Trinity: Relationality and Temporality in Divine Life (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1993), 128–34.

12. Triune Identity, 84 with 100, citing Gregory of Nazianzus, Orations 32.28.

13. Triune Identity, 157n154, with reference to God after God, 33–35, where he says “Hegel brought the Christian synthesis or accommodation to its perfection, by defining reality as history” (34).

14. With careful nuance, Jenson sees this mutually constituting movement of Trinity as the overcoming, as well, of the last vestiges of a male view of a dominating God. Triune Identity, 144.

15. Ekkehard Mühlenberg, Die Unendlichkeit Gottes bei Gregor von Nyssa (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1966).

16. In referring to a Hegelian coloring to Jenson’s systematic theology, George Hunsinger has been rather negatively critical of that theology overall. “Robert Jenson’s Systematic Theology: A Review Essay,” Scottish Journal of Theology 55 (2002): 161–200, on Trinity esp. 175–200. He writes, for example: “It is Hegel, more than any other who determines Jenson’s view of the trinity … Jenson develops his trinitarian proposal within the confines of a broadly ‘Hegelian’ metaphysics” (175); “Hegel’s presence in the background is unmistakable” (195); “His [Jenson’s] vision of the great consummation transcends, as does much else in his soteriology, the Hegelian straight jacket that constrains it” (200).

17. John Byung-Tek Song, “An Assessment of Robert Jenson’s Hermeneutics on Divine Im/Passibility and the Emotions of God,” International Journal of Systematic Theology 15 (2013): 87, accessed September 29, 2013, http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1468-2400.2012.00653.x/pdf. Song refers to Richard A. Muller, “Incarnation, Immutability, and the Case for Classical Theism,” Westminster Theological Journal 45 (1983): 23. However, Muller himself does not speak there of “the philosophical ethos of our day.” He refers, rather, to “a new perspective on philosophy … developed by Hegel, Fichte, and Schelling.” Still, Song himself has been quite perceptive in his own remark specifically concerning Jenson in relation to Hegel, Fichte, and Schelling.

18. Song, “An Assessment of Robert Jenson’s Hermeneutic,” 87, citing David Bentley Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2003), 156–57.

19. Hart, Beauty of the Infinite, 160–66.

20. Hart, Beauty of the Infinite, xi.

21. Hart, Beauty of the Infinite, 160. For Hart’s particularly positive and insightful overall reading of Jenson on Trinity, see “The Lively God of Robert Jenson,” First Things, Issue Archives, October 2005, accessed October 13, 2013, http://www.firstthings.com/article/2007/01/the-lively-god-of-robert-jenson-4.

22. Hart, Beauty of the Infinite, 161.

23. Wesley J. Wildman, “Basic Christological Distinctions,” Theology Today 64 (2007): 291.

24. Paul D. Molnar, “Robert W. Jenson’s Systematic Theology, vol. 1, The Triune God,” Scottish Journal of Theology 52 (1999): 122, cited by Grenz, Rediscovering the Triune God, 115.

25. Jeremy Ive, “Robert W. Jenson’s Theology of History,” in Time, Trinity, and Church: A Response to the Theology of Robert W. Jenson, ed. Colin E. Gunton (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2000), 157, emphasis in the original, again cited by Grenz, Rediscovering the Triune God, 115. Kärkkäinen refers to Molnar (as cited in the note immediately above) and Ive as he observes that “in contemporary theology, reference to Hegel has become a mantra (often used in relation to Pannenberg’s theology too) that can be called to aid whenever problems such as the ones related to Jenson’s proposal arise.” Trinity: Global Perspectives, 174n73.

26. A situation aptly corrected with a major study, Robert W. Jenson, America’s Theologian: A Recommendation of Jonathan Edwards (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988).

27. Jenson, “A Theological Autobiography,” 49.

28. Robert W. Jenson, “Parting Ways?” First Things, Issue Archives, May 1995, accessed July 17, 2012, http://www.firstthings.com/article/2008/09/001-parting-ways-22. Braaten, close colleague of Jenson’s, complements Jenson’s own remarks when he notes that Jenson “taught [at Luther College] what he knew and believed with impassioned vigor and uncompromising integrity. That included … serious engagement with the great thinkers of German Protestantism—Immanuel Kant, Georg Hegel, and Friedrich Schleiermacher.” “Jenson—A Personal Memoir,” 4–5.

29. Jenson, “A Theological Autobiography,” 49.

30. In Triune God (Systematic Theology, vol. 1), Jenson makes several passing references to Fichte as well, but I have not noted any in Triune Identity. He seems not to have referred to Schelling by name in either of these volumes.

31. Robert W. Jenson, The Knowledge of Things Hoped for: The Sense of Theological Discourse (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), 158–233, with the quotation on 233n327, the quotation being cited by Colin Gunton, “Creation and Mediation in the Theology of Robert W. Jenson: An Encounter and a Convergence,” in Time, Trinity, and Church: A Response to the Theology of Robert W. Jenson, ed. Colin E. Gunton (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2000), 90n25.

32. On Triune Identity, 157n154, Jenson refers to his further remarks in God after God, 33–35. There Jenson admits that Hegel speaks of reality as history and provides a definition of reality as freedom, but Hegel is really searching for logical necessity. So, “the God of Hegel is the perfected realization of the God of past history. … Reality is history, says Hegel, but means a history in which all is already decided” (35). Jenson reiterates these points on 61. In this discussion, he cites Hegel’s Phenomenology and Encyclopedia.

33. Robert W. Jenson, “Eighth Locus: The Holy Spirit,” in Christian Dogmatics, vol. 2, ed. Carl E. Braaten and Robert W. Jenson (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1984), 169, cited by Hart, Beauty of the Infinite, 157. Jenson reflects at greater length on Hegel, his system, and his understanding of Trinity, on 167–71.

34. For a wider consideration of Hegel on spirit by Jenson, see “Eighth Locus: The Holy Spirit,” 167–70.

35. Jenson continues, except in historical references, to speak of “three identities of one being” in Triune God, where in 106n115 he refers to his earlier work, Triune Identity, 105–11. He does, however, note in Triune God, 117n7, that, in difference with what he had said previously, Father, Son, and Spirit are indeed persons in the sense that they can address and converse with other persons. In Triune God, 123, in response probably to critical remarks concerning his notion of one divine person and three identities, Jenson says that “when the Trinity is regarded as in one way personal, and Father, Son, and Spirit as in variously other ways personal, then Father, Son, and Spirit can be fully acknowledged as persons and also interpreted as poles in the Trinity’s personal life.”

36. For example, Kärkkäinen, Trinity: Global Perspectives, 170–71 and 174–75.

37. Wolfhart Pannenberg, for example, argues that “the one divine essence taken by itself, without the persons, is not personal, not the one personal God. Otherwise it would have to count as a fourth person in addition to Father, Son, and Spirit.” “Eternity, Time, and the Trinitarian God,” 170, citing Jenson, Systematic Theology, 1:116 and 122. In referring to these two pages, Pannenberg documents in effect that Jenson maintains in Systematic Theology, vol. 1: The Triune God, his position argued in his earlier study, Triune Identity, that person is to be affirmed of God as a whole. We might note, however, that Jenson’s revised Hegelian understanding of person would not seem to mean that the one divine essence could be considered personal independent of the mutual interaction of the three identities.

38. Of particular interest regarding Jenson’s proposal of a single divine trinitarian person, see Triune Identity, 144–47 and 173–76, esp. 175 regarding the Trinity as person. Swain, God of the Gospel, 138, is particularly helpful in bringing together Jenson’s somewhat expanded understanding, in Triune God, 138, of God’s being personal: God is a “subsisting self-consciousness” (essentially the Augustinian-Hegelian understanding of person); there is the threefold structure “of the Father’s singular self-consciousness”; and “the dialogical, interpersonal relationships of his [God’s] three subsistent social relations.”

39. As noted in our review of aspects of Jenson’s trinitarian thought, Jenson refers explicitly to “Hegel’s definition of spirit as the relation between self and not-self, which just so is the being of the self,” see Triune Identity, 123. In Triune God, 20n20, Jenson acknowledges Hegel’s “deepest reading” regarding consciousness but “disappointing concluding capitulation to the doctrine of identity” in the Phenomenology. Jenson notes that he is proposing a notion of infinite person to counter Fichte’s argument that God cannot be personal since a person must be a bounded, finite self. “Second Locus: The Triune God,” 170.

One might wonder as well whether or not someone like Albrecht Ritschl, with his strong emphasis on the single personhood of God, might not have had a role in Jenson’s insistence on the single personhood of God. On Ritschl, see Dale M. Schlitt, “Albrecht Ritschl on God as Personal and as Loving Will,” Theoforum 42 (2012): 229–72.

40. Though with regard to Jenson we have here focused more on his references to Augustine and Hegel regarding the triune God as a single divine Person, it is striking to note that Schelling spoke as well in terms of one divine Person, but of course with much greater emphasis on the three differing potencies becoming differing Persons: “The actual [divine] self, is re-established [at the end of time], only with the difference that now there are three different names, that the three forms are now three personalities. They are however only three different names of the same absolute personality”/“das wirkliche Selbst wieder hergestellet, nur mit dem Unterschiede, daß jetzt drei verschiedene Namen sind, daß die drei Gestalten jetzt drei Persönlichkeiten sind. Sie sind aber nur drei verscheidene Namen derselben absoluten Persönlichkeit.” Urfassung der Philosophie der Offenbarung, ed. Walter E. Ehrhardt (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1992), 192:30–34 (my translation).

41. Jenson’s rejection of any beginning in a pretemporal state can be illustrated by his critique of Barth who, as Jenson says, “locates Christ’s function as God’s centering object not in Christ’s final reality but in his primal reality.” Triune Identity, 180, and see more generally, 141. We can find at least inklings of several aspects of Jenson’s future trinitarian thought already in his book, Alpha and Omega, 151–71, based on his doctoral dissertation and published in 1963. There, toward the end, he criticizes the notion of pretemporal eternity (151) and reinterprets the “pre” in predestination (159–60). He does not like speaking of God acting “to” Jesus but, rather “through” him (168). God is that acting in temporal history, “a God who happens among us” (162, with quote on 168, and see, for example, 110–11).

Jenson prolongs his own reflection on what the “pre” means in relation to Jesus in Triune God, 138–44. During this reflection, he speaks of Barth in language which has a rather strong Schellingian ring to it. For example, Jenson says that “according to Barth, God’s being is most decisively construed by the notion of decision. God is so unmitigatedly personal that his free decision is not limited even by his ‘divine nature’: what he is, he himself chooses” (140). There may be more of the Schellingian notion of freedom in Barth’s trinitarian thought, especially that of the later volumes of Barth’s Church Dogmatics than we had previously noted.

42. In “The Point of Trinitarian Theology,” 39, Jenson speaks of the Father as “the ‘whence’ of divine events,” the Spirit as “the ‘whither’ of God’s life,” and the Son as “God as his own ‘specious present.’ ” He even speaks of a narrative causality among the three divine identities (42). He repeats the identification of Father with “whence,” Spirit with “whither,” and Son with “specious present” in Triune God, 218–19.

43. In summarizing Schelling, Urfassung der Philosophie der Offenbarung, Philosophische Bibliothek, vols. 445a and 445b with continuous pagination, ed. Walter E. Ehrhardt (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1992), 208.15–211.19, we previously noted that for Schelling the Father is the whole God in that all being is in him and the Son is the whole God in that he has mastery of being and the Spirit is the whole God in that he has mastery of being in as it arises from Father and Son, reconciled being. So we must conceive of the three potencies as three successive masters or rulers of being in line with temporal succession. The time before creation is then that of the Father, the time of excluding power, a form of pastness. The time of creation is that of the Son, the present time of actual creation and the great ages of the world (Weltzeit). The Father was before all time, the Son the personality ruling during creation and the Spirit the future and last ruler of fulfilled creation as return to the beginning. In all of this the glory of the Father and of the Son comes to fullness in the glory of the Spirit. The glory of the Father and of the Son, and consequently the Father and the Son themselves, are not surpassed but continue therein.

However, as also previously noted, Schelling’s notion of the Father is complex. It serves to refer, in a way, to what we have come to call “immanent” Trinity (though acknowledging that prior to this point there is for Schelling a moment of initial fullness) for Schelling the initial realm of possibility as such. And in this sense the Father was before all time. And yet, there is a sense in which the Father is the first of the three divine potencies, and thus to some extent at least characterizable as past.

On Schelling on time, see chap. 2, n. 21 above for a brief listing of several studies. Again, by way of entry into the question, see Drew M. Dalton, “Being and Time for Schelling: An Exploration of Schelling’s Theory of Temporality and Existence,” Idealistic Studies 38 (2009): 175–84. It will be helpful to recall that Walter Kasper has studied Schelling’s understanding of time from Schelling’s early works through to and including the later philosophy. Das Absolute in der Geschichte: Philosophie und Theologie der Geschichte in der Spätphilosophie Schellings (Mainz: Matthias-Grünewald, 1965), 241–65.

44. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), 27, with the following comment by J. N. Findlay in “Analysis of the Text”: “Time with its essential, living self-differentiation, is the very Notion present in actual existence,” 501. A text in German reads: “So ist sie [die Zeit] der daseyende Begriff selbst.” Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Gesammelte Werke, vol. 9, Phänomenologie des Geistes (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1980), 34:20–21. In a similar vein: “Time … appears as the destiny and necessity of Spirit that is not yet complete within itself” (487)/“Die Zeit erscheint daher als das Schicksal und die Nothwendigkeit des Geistes, der nicht in sich vollendet ist” (429:13–14). On Hegel’s interpretation of “time” in the Phenomenology, see Alan B. Brinkley, “Time in Hegel’s Phenomenology,” in Tulane Studies in Philosophy, vol. 9, Studies in Hegel (New Orleans: Tulane University, 1960), 3–15. Among Brinkley’s remarks on Hegel on time, the following will be of particular present interest: “The future appears in the present because it has denied the past” (6); “Hegel regards the temporality of the notion or the necessary appearance of the spirit in time, as reality itself” (9). See also Michael Murray, “Time in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit,” Review of Metaphysics 33 (1981): 682–705 where he traces the development of the notion of time through the Phenomenology and interprets its meaning at various stages in that development. Murray’s references to time and Trinity would lead one to think that in the Phenomenology Hegel linked Father with past, Son with present, and Spirit with future (695–97). More generally, on time in Hegel’s thought, see: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Gesammelte Werke, vol. 20, Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften im Grundrisse (1830), ed. Wolfgang Bonsiepen and Hans-Christian Lucas, with Udo Rameil (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1992), §§ 257–59/Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature, part 2 of Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences (1830), trans. A. V. Miller, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970, 2004), §§ 257–59; and, Peter Tawny, Die Zeit der Dreieinigkeit: Untersuchungen zur Trinität bei Hegel und Schelling (Würzburg; Könighausen & Neumann, 2002), esp. 179–94; Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel: Plasticity, Temporality and Dialectic (London: Routledge, 2005). In addition to Hegel’s remarks on time in the 1830 edition of the Encyclopedia, Malabou recalls, on 6 with 199n15, Hegel’s earlier remarks in his Jena philosophy of nature lectures (1804–05 and 1805–06) as well as in the 1817 and 1827 editions of the Encyclopedia. In partial critique of Heidegger’s reading of Hegel on time, Malabou finds in Hegel’s thought not only the more standard notion of time as sequence of “nows,” so to speak, “the vulgar, ordinary understanding [as expressed by Heidegger],” but another notion, namely, that of “originary temporality” which “forms that succession [of nows]” (191, see 1–5). Malabou suggests that “the times of Hegel’s philosophy, with a generosity Heidegger consistently denies, were perhaps generous enough to offer him a name for his own time of ontological difference” (192). It is interesting to note that Malabou says she “decided to take as my starting point for this study not Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature but the Philosophy of Spirit” (191). It may well be that in so proceeding she is reflecting somewhat the tendency in a good amount of French reading and interpretation of Hegel to stress the Phenomenology of Spirit. Though Malabou chooses to work with the Encyclopedia as such (in a way illustrated by her reference to “the System as the dwelling place of spirit,” 153), she still refers often and at crucial moments to the Phenomenology (e.g., 1, chap. 12 [167–83]) which in a way, within Hegel’s encyclopedically expressed system of spirit as movement of thought, is where he treats of “phenomenology” in the third part, which is on spirit. This might help explain her working with a more originary notion of temporality than that seemingly present early on in the Encyclopedia’s second part, namely, the one on nature.

45. Jenson himself writes that “time is the form of God’s life with and for us.” God after God, 128, cited by Peters, GOD as Trinity, 135. Grenz speaks of Jenson’s “understanding of the divine self-disclosure as narrative, temporal, and eschatological,” Rediscovering the Triune God, 113, and Kärkkäinen, Trinity: Global Perspectives, 172, considers this an accurate description of Jenson’s project. With particular reference to narrative, it would be interesting to follow up on a report that Xavier Tilliette refers to Schelling’s philosophy as a narrative philosophy, perhaps pointing to a possible relation with Jenson’s notion of a trinitarian narrative more explicitly developed in Jenson’s Triune God but strongly present as well in Triune Identity.

46. I am grateful to Prof. Renata Furst, who first drew my attention to this notion of a possible shift from movement of the concept to temporally based plot-line. Without suggesting that Jenson has been influenced by the following works, it would perhaps be rewarding to review his working with narrative and plot in light of studies in literary theory such as, for example, Ruth Ronen, chapter 5, entitled “Fictional Events and the Intricacies of Plot,” in Possible Worlds in Literary Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 144–74. Ronen summarizes the chapter as follows: “This chapter has traced stages in the history of narratological studies, from classical structuralism to current semantics of possible worlds, as stages located along one continuous line of theorizing about plot-structures” (173). Though her study concerns fiction, there might well be insights to be gained from examining Jenson’s trinitarian narrative in light of her analyses of plot theory. She notes that “fictional narratives are not necessarily different ‘objectively’ from nonfictional narratives’ ” (174). In relation to Jenson’s working with narrative, it would be helpful as well to consider further notions such as character and time, as does Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan, Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 1983, 2002). Prof. Furst drew my attention to these studies as well.

47. Triune God, 81 with n. 53.

48. God after God, 34.

49. God after God, 169.

50. God after God, 184.

51. God after God, 191.

52. God after God, 173.

53. See further on Barth on God and time, for example, in Jenson, God after God, 123–35. The following doctoral thesis on Barth should be noted: Adrian E. V. Langdon, “God the Eternal Contemporary: Trinity, Eternity, and Time in Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics,” PhD diss., McGill University, Montréal, 2008, accessed October 14, 2013, http://www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/obj/thesescanada/vol1/QMM/TC-QMM-40681.pdf. Langdon brings to the fore the various understandings of time with which Barth is working. He also presents and evaluates Jenson’s reading of Barth on time and Trinity (53–90). This study has been published under the same title (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2012). With its emphasis on the third and fourth volumes of Barth’s Church Dogmatics, Langdon’s study opens the possibility of exploring at greater length the possible similarities between Barth’s notion of time in relation to Trinity and Hegel’s overall notion of time. See, for example, Langdon’s brief remark concerning Hegel and Schelling (283n9 and 194–95 with n. 9, both references to the electronic version).

On Trinity and time in Barth and Jenson, see also Jason M. Curtis, “Trinity and Time: An Investigation into God’s Being and His Relationship with the Created Order, with Special Reference to Karl Barth and Robert W. Jenson,” PhD diss., University of Edinburgh, 2007, accessed October 15, 2013, https://www.era.lib.ed.ac.uk/bitstream/1842/2216/1/Curtis%20JM%20thesis%2007.pdf. Curtis points to various senses in which Barth and Jenson use the word “time.” Curtis himself briefly raises the question of a possible trajectory, in the understanding of time, from Hegel to Barth to Jenson (3n11) and, we might ourselves add Schelling and Pannenberg. At the same location, Curtis provides a helpful listing of various places in Hegel’s writings where Hegel speaks of “time.”

Kasper contrasts Hegel’s understanding of time as a necessary moment or element in the development of Spirit with Schelling’s understanding of time as God’s freely determined actualization of the eternal possibility (Möglichkeit) of time as temporal succession. Das Absolute in der Geschichte, esp. 259–60. We might note, however, that Hegel also moves from a form of possibility regarding time in that his encyclopedic moment of logic as movement of pure thought gives, in principle and intention at least, structure to the development of history. However, Kasper seems correctly to note the ultimately necessary realization of logical movement in realphilosophical or, here, historical form. He regularly brings out the importance for Schelling of time as the result of free decision and says that only a further working out of trinitarian speculation will clarify whether time is a moment in the development of the Absolute or something truly positive with a continuing significance for the Absolute. The loose rephrasing in this last sentence is based in Kasper’s words: “In der Trinitätsspekulation erst wird es sich entscheiden, ob die Zeit nur Ausfaltung und Rückkehr des Absoluten in der Geschichte ist oder ob der Zeit wirklich positive, bleibende Bedeutung angesichts des Absoluten zukommt” (265).

54. See Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Gesammelte Werke, vol. 9, Phänomenologie des Geistes, p. 109 line 4 to p. 119 line 25/Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (New York: Oxford, 1977), 111–23. In Triune God, 155–56, with 155n61, Jenson explicitly refers to Hegel’s treatment of master and slave as found in the Phenomenology.

55. Jenson is not denying Christ’s deity, which is finally fully established in the eschatological unity of the then immanent Trinity (140–41), with this final establishment reminiscent of Schelling’s idea that the potencies become fully Persons at the end of time. Jenson further clarifies his position when he writes in Triune God: “But once it is clear that there truly is only one individual person who is the Christ, who lives as one of the Trinity and one of us, and that he is personal precisely as one of us, then to say that he as creature is our savior—or that he as creature exercises any divine power—is simply to say that he plays his role in the triune life and does not need to abstract from his human actuality to do so” (144–45).

In Triune God, 220n65, Jenson refers back to his earlier Triune Identity, 183n22, concerning Hegel and self-consciousness. And see also in Triune God, where Jenson speaks of the overall danger of enslavement to avoid which “each [in mutual discourse] must be both subject for and object of the other” (228).

56. On Hegel’s idea of the true infinite, see, with further references, Dale M. Schlitt, Experience and Spirit: A Post-Hegelian Philosophical Theology (New York: Peter Lang, 2007), 353–63, or a somewhat wider consideration in Dale M. Schlitt, Hegel’s Trinitarian Claim: A Critical Reflection (Leiden: Brill, 1984; Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2012), 249–75 (1984), 159–82 (2012).

57. Jenson speaks of Gregory of Nyssa on infinity in Triune God, 212, 215–16, and refers the reader to Triune Identity, 111–13, 162–63 on Gregory. He remarks briefly on Gregory as well in Triune God, 152–53 with n. 40, where he refers to Triune Identity, 111–14, 161–68.

58. By way of comparison with Schelling, note Kasper’s conclusion that God’s eternity is for Schelling the “depth dimension” (Tiefendimension) of time and does not stand before, after, or under time. Die Absolute in der Geschichte, 382.

59. Ekkehard Mühlenberg, Die Unendlichkeit Gottes bei Gregor von Nyssa (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1966).

60. For example, Hart, Beauty of the Infinite, 161, 193n54. Hart himself returns to Gregory of Nyssa toward the end of this study (402–11). There he speaks of Gregory as being much richer, so to speak, in his understanding of history and eschatology than either Plato or the later Idealists. Though Hart may, then, not himself reflect or echo more directly the post-Kantian German Idealist trinitarian legacy, he nevertheless finds that Idealist legacy of value as an at least negative point of reference through which he clarifies his own understanding of and identification with the thought of Gregory.

It is indeed surprising to see the conclusion to a temporal infinity drawn from a reading of Gregory of Nyssa since Gregory himself argued strongly against Eunomius when he insists Eunomius misunderstood and misrepresented the begottenness of the Son of God. Gregory says in effect that Eunomius temporalized what is a nontemporal begottenness, namely, that of the Son, without temporal beginning. See, for example, the remarks by Mühlenberg, Unendlichkeit Gottes, 111–12. And see, again for example, Gregory of Nyssa, Against Eumonius, in Philip Shaff and Henry Wace, eds., Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Second Series, vol. 5, trans. H. A. Wilson (Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1893.), book 1 §§ 25 and 26, pp. 67–71. There Gregory writes: “But the existence which is all-sufficient, everlasting, world-enveloping, is not in space, nor in time; it is before these, and above these in an ineffable way; self-contained, knowable by faith alone; immeasurable by ages; without the accompaniment of time; seated and resting in itself, with no associations of past or future; there being nothing beside and beyond itself, whose passing can make something past and something future. Such accidents are confined to the creation, whose life is divided with time’s divisions into memory and hope. But within that transcendent and blessed Power all things are equally present as in an instant: past and future are within its all-encircling grasp and its comprehensive view” (69–70). Most of this quote would tend to stress the otherness of God in relation to time, yet the last words, “past and future are within its all-encircling grasp and its comprehensive view” may serve as an opening to Jenson’s reading of divine temporal infinity in terms of temporal unhinderedness (see below). Jenson says that “as my language has already been driven by the logic of the case to show, the infinity that is, according to Gregory, God’s ousia, is temporal infinity.” Triune Identity, 165. And on 182n9 attached to this quote: “For a surplus of citations, ibid. [Mühlenberg, Unendlichkeit Gottes], esp. pp. 106–11.” On the other hand, it could be noted that Mühlenberg closes this section with the following, including several qualifications: “Gregor faktisch nur die zeitliche Ausdehnungslosigkeit Gottes in dem Begriff des Unendlichen behauptet. Aber er meint, daß das Unendliche doch in jeder Hinsicht für Gott gelte. Denn die menschliche Vernunft kann den Gedanken der Größe nur fassen, indem sie durch die Zeit die Grenzen der gewordenen Dinge findet. Ist ein Ding der Zeit entzogen, wie die ungeschaffene göttliche Natur, so kann die Vernunft keine Grenzen erkennen. … Der Begriff der Unendlichkeit ist zwar bisher nur in negative Weise als Ausdruck für die Zeitlosigkeit aufgetaucht. Aber er kann auch positiv verstanden werden, indem er die Ewigkeit Gottes aussagt”/“In fact Gregory only asserts the absence of temporal extension. But he means that the infinite in any case, though, is valid for God. For human reason can only grasp the thought of size in that it finds through time the limits of that which becomes. If something is removed from time, as is the case with the uncreated divine nature, then reason can acknowledge no limit. … The concept of infinity has indeed arisen so far only in a negative way. But it can also be understood in a positive sense, in that it expresses the eternity of God” (roughly translated by myself). Unendlichkeit Gottes, 110–11. Shortly thereafter, Mühlenberg adds: “Der trinitarische Gott liegt außerhalb jeglicher Begrenzung, da er über die Schöpfung erhaben ist. Er ist zeitlich gesehen das Unbegrenzte oder, wie Gregor auch sagt, das Ewige”/“The trinitarian God lies outside every limit, since he is elevated above creation. He is with respect to time the Unlimited or, as Gregory also says it, the Eternal” (118) (my translation). So Jenson speaks of the triune God’s “temporal unhinderdness” (Triune Identity, 166; see Triune God, 216). It would be of interest to see how far Jenson seems to have gone in his own creative way beyond what Gregory of Nyssa himself has said about God when Jenson speaks of a temporal infinity of Father, Son, and Spirit (see, for example, Triune Identity, 170–71). It would seem that he has moved from “temporal unhinderedness” to “embracing time” to a “temporal” or even “temporalized infinite.”

61. Williams writes somewhat more generally: “If Jenson’s trinitarian theology often acknowledges the Cappadocians with appreciation, it nonetheless follows a theological line that is unmistakably modern.” “The Parlement of Foules,” 190.

62. Jenson confirms in the later Triune God that he maintains “God’s eternity is temporal infinity” (218).

63. See, for example, Hegel, “Vorrede,” in Phänomenologie des Geistes, 18:18–21/“Preface” in the Phenomenology of Spirit, 10.

64. And, as stated in Triune God, 157: “Of course, we have already many times noted and said where in fact the Spirit stands: at the End of all God’s ways because he is the End of all God’s ways. The Spirit is the Liveliness of the divine life because he is the Power of the divine future.”

65. Though of course, as almost any theologian would want to argue, it would really also be very old.

66. Kärkkäinen mentions several of the thinkers whom I would include as ones mediating to Jenson various elements of Idealist thought: “He builds on his mentor Karl Barth, gleans significantly from Rahner and Pannenberg, and creatively echoes and expands themes from other recent developments in trinitarian theology such as the turn to history.” Trinity: Global Perspectives, 163.

67. Regrettably it has not been possible to do justice to Jenson’s overall view of theology in his volumes Triune God and Triune Identity, to the metaphysical implications of his trinitarian insights which he sketches out in brief but tantalizing remarks in these two volumes, and especially to his rich remarks on Jesus in relation to time and to the Trinity as such.

Chapter 10

1. Catherine Mowry LaCugna, The Theological Methodology of Hans Küng, American Academy of Religion Academy Series, vol. 39 (Chico, CA: Scholars Press, 1982). See further remarks on LaCugna and her career in Nancy A. Dallavalle, “In Memory of Catherine Mowry LaCugna (1952–97),” Horizons 24 (1997): 265–66.

2. Catherine Mowry LaCugna, God for Us: The Trinity and Christian Life (New York: HarperSanFrancisco, 1991), referred to as God for Us and usually cited in the text by page number. LaCugna opens the book as follows: “The doctrine of the Trinity is ultimately a practical doctrine with radical consequences for Christian life. That is the thesis of this book” (1). Among her many other studies on Trinity, we could note, by way of a here particularly relevant example, “Philosophers and Theologians on the Trinity,” Modern Theology 2 (1986): 169–81. Among many studies of various aspects of LaCugna’s trinitarian thought: Ted Peters, GOD as Trinity: Relationality and Temporality in Divine Life (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1993), 122–28; Earl Muller, “The Science of Theology: A Review of Catherine LaCugna’s God for Us,” Gregorianum 75 (1994): 311–41; “Review Symposium, Four Perspectives,” Horizons 20 (1997): Susan Wood, 127–29, who on 129 asks: “Even though you [LaCugna] begin with the economy, you still seem to be largely operating within the conceptual framework of a specific philosophical system”; Roger Haight, 129–32; Mary Ann Donovan, 132–33; Barbara A. Finan, 134–35; with “Author’s Response,” 135–42, where she responds to Wood’s question concerning her having worked from a “specific philosophical system” rather than from the biblical witness by saying she is “averse to beginning with a specific philosophical system and applying it to biblical data” (136). She goes on to insist that what is pertinent is especially what is expressed in Scripture concerning God’s relationship, with “relationship” as an appropriate category for working with biblically expressed religious experience (136); Mary Catharine Hilkert, “The Mystery of Persons in Communion: The Trinitarian Theology of Catherine Mowry LaCugna,” Word & World 18 (1998): 237–43; Elizabeth T. Groppe, “Catherine Mowry LaCugna’s Contribution to Trinitarian Theology,” Theological Studies 63 (2002): 730–63; Stanley J. Grenz, Rediscovering the Triune God: The Trinity in Contemporary Theology (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2004), 147–62; Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen, The Trinity: Global Perspectives (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2007), 178–93; Patricia A. Fox, “Feminist Theologies and the Trinity,” in The Cambridge Companion to the Trinity, ed. Peter C. Phan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 282–84, 286–87.

3. Italics here and in other quotes from this volume are in the original.

4. For LaCugna’s careful consideration of selected aspects of the thought of the Cappadocians, see chap. 2, 53–79.

5. On Augustine see God for Us, chap. 2, 81–109.

6. God for Us, for example: 10, 44, 145, 150–52, 167, 215. For LaCugna’s quite respectful treatment of Aquinas, see chap. 5, 143–80.

7. For LaCugna’s in many ways sympathetic presentation of Gregory Palamas, see God for Us, chap. 6, 181–205.

8. However, LaCugna references Aloys Grillmeier, Église et tradition (Le Puy: X. Mappus, 1963), 118, in her first note regarding divine “self-revelation” and “self-communication.” God for Us, 233n1. She refers explicitly to Rahner regarding divine self-communication on 212.

9. In God for Us, 233n2, LaCugna refers more generally to Karl Rahner, The Trinity (New York: Herder and Herder, 1970) and to several of his other works.

10. Groppe, “Catherine Mowry LaCugna’s Contribution,” 732–41.

11. LaCugna’s reference at this point is especially to John D. Zizioulas, Being as Communion (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1985), 41–42, in God for Us, 245, with 306nn5 and 6.

12. LaCugna cites Zizioulas, Being as Communion, 18.

13. LaCugna refers to Jürgen Moltmann, The Trinity and the Kingdom of God (New York: Harper and Row, 1981), 139–48.

14. LaCugna works with John Macmurray’s Self as Agent (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1957) and Persons in Relation (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1961).

15. God for Us, 257 with 307–08n40.

16. LaCugna cites Macmurray, Persons in Relation, 174.

17. John D. Zizioulas, Being as Communion: Studies in Personhood and the Church, Forward by John Meyendorff (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1985, 1993), 27–65.

18. For example, God for Us, 260–61.

19. Patricia Wilson-Kastner, Faith, Feminism and the Christ (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1983)126, cited by LaCugna in God for Us, 270.

20. Moltmann, Trinity and the Kingdom, 174–76, referred to in God for Us, 270.

21. Leonardo Boff, Trinity and Society (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1988), 133–34, cited by LaCugna in God for Us, 276.

22. Of particular note is LaCugna’s later clearly affirming Trinity in terms of divine and human persons in communion: “The point of the doctrine of the Trinity is the relationship and communion among persons, divine and human, not their absolute distance from each other.” “Author’s Response,” Horizons, 139, and see 140.

23. For a critique of Hegel, with Augustine, as doing a “transcendental projection of humanity’s self-understanding,” see God for Us, 321.

24. Rahner, The Trinity, 22 (italics in the Rahnerian original and in LaCugna’s citation).

25. “There is only one God, one self-communication, one triune mystery of love and communion, which has both eternal and temporal modalities.” God for Us, 231, and see 320, 334. As well, “There is neither an economic nor an immanent Trinity; there is only the oikonomia that is the concrete realization of the mystery of theologia in time, space, history, and personality” (223 and see 6). See LaCugna’s further remarks in “Author’s Response,” Horizons, 139. Overall, when LaCugna works directly with her preferred notions of theologia and oikonomia, she tends to use a somewhat more flexible language to express the relation between these two as compared with her language regarding “immanent” and “economic” Trinity. With regard to theologia and oikonomia she will typically speak of essential relationship (for example, God for Us, 293), essential unity of the two and “not collapsing the distinction between them” (for example, 319). Five years before God for Us, LaCugna had said that “after medieval theology the speculative tradition ran aground in two directions. On the one hand the speculation on God became indistinguishable from God as such (Hegel). On the other, speculative reason sundered the two histories of God, thinking that we could have knowledge only of the ‘economic trinity’ (Schleiermacher). Speculative idealism is incompatible with Christian trinitarianism for a number of reasons; either it fails adequately to distinguish between the eternal and temporal enactments of God’s history as God, or, it conflates them. Deus in se must be distinguished but not separated from Deus pro nobis.” “Philosophers and Theologians on the Trinity,” 180n24.

See further remarks on the relationship between theologia and oikonomia in: Groppe, “Catherine Mowry LaCugna’s Trinitarian Theology,” 742–47, 753–54; Grenz, Rediscovering the Triune God, 158–62, with abundant references to various concerns with and praise or critique of what he terms LaCugna’s corollary, namely, “her contention that theologia is oikonomia with its attendant rejection not only of the distinction between, but even of the language of, the immanent Trinity and the economic Trinity” (159); Kärkkäinen, Trinity: Global Perspectives, 179, 182, 187–93.

26. Dale M. Schlitt, Hegel’s Trinitarian Claim: A Critical Reflection (Leiden: Brill, 1984; Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2012), 18–19 (1984), 7 (2012).

27. Macmurray was certainly quite familiar with post-Kantian German Idealist thought, especially that of Hegel. In Macmurray’s Gifford Lectures, entitled “The Form of the Personal,” of 1952–53 and 1953–54, published respectively as The Self as Agent (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1957; London: Faber and Faber, 1957, 1969 [same pagination]) and Persons in Relation (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1961; London: Faber and Faber, 1961, 1970 [same pagination]) we find remarks such as the following: already at the beginning of his first Gifford Lecture series, “The Self must be conceived not theoretically as subject, but practically, as agent. … The first [the point that the Self must be conceived not theoretically but practically] requires us to substitute for the Self as subject, which is the starting-point of modern philosophy, The Self as Agent.” Self as Agent, 38. This remark by Macmurray should be taken in conjunction with his further, though quite sparse, references concerning Hegel in the published Gifford Lectures concerning Hegel (see Self as Agent, 32, 34, 40, 52, 53).

On Macmurray more generally see: John E. Costello, John Macmurray: A Biography (Edinburgh: Floris Books, 2002), with an overview of the published Gifford Lectures 323–33; Alexander Broadie, A History of Scottish Philosophy (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009/2010), who treats Macmurray under the title “Aspects of Idealism,” 339, with biographical background on 351–52 and a survey, on 352–62, of aspects of his thought in the published Gifford Lectures.

James Allard speaks of post-Kantian German Idealism’s rather commanding presence on the British philosophical scene beginning with Henry Longueville Mansel in this latter’s A Lecture on the Philosophy of Kant (London: John Henry and James Parker, 1856), reprinted in Henry Longueville Mansel, Letters, Lectures and Reviews (London: John Murray, 1873), where he encourages the study especially of Schelling and Hegel, 181 (1873 text), and with James Hutchison Stirling, The Secret of Hegel (London: Longmans, 1865). “Idealism in Britain and the United States,” in The Cambridge History of Philosophy 1870–1945, ed. Thomas Baldwin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 43–44. See also Jan Olof Bengtsson, The Worldview of Personalism: Origins and Early Development (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), chap. 4, section entitled “British Personal Idealism,” 240–70, where on 255, he discusses the thought of A. A. Pringle-Pattison, among others, and remarks: “Pringle-Pattison’s formulations neatly sum up arguments that had been polemically set against impersonalism since the 1780s. For his positive alternative he employs, as did his predecessors, the resources of modern idealism, to which he adds those of more recent philosophies.” And more specifically concerning Idealism as a major force in Scottish philosophy see Broadie, History of Scottish Philosophy, especially in chapters 10 and 11. See also David Boucher, introduction to The Scottish Idealists: Selected Philosophical Writings, ed. David Boucher (Exener, UK: Imprint Academic, 2004), 1–22. On the important presence of German Idealist thought in Scotland, see the comprehensive article by David Fergusson, “Scottish Idealism,” in The Impact of Idealism: The Legacy of Post-Kantian German Thought, ed. Nicholas Boyle and Liz Disley, vol. 1, Philosophy and Natural Sciences, ed. Karl Ameriks (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 272–98, where Fergusson underscores the importance of Hegel (280, 295) and makes regular reference not only to Idealism’s impact on Scottish philosophy but also, through various philosophers and theologians, on religion and social ordering. He speaks as well of the influence of Scottish Idealism on philosophical thought in Australia (289–90). Of particular present interest, he colorfully refers to continuing twentieth-century Idealist impact in Scotland when he speaks of metaphysical Scotland, within the context of which he notes the work of more personalist Idealists and, in particular, John Macmurray (293–94).

28. On more general, recognizably Idealist elements in Macmurray’s thought, see, for example: Stephen Cowley, “John Macmurray’s Early Milieu,” in “Hegelian News & Reviews,” accessed December 6, 2013, http://scottish-hegelian.blogspot.com/2012/07/john-macmurrays-early-milieu.html; Stephen Cowley, “Hegel and John Macmurray on Personhood and Society,” in “Hegelian News & Reviews,” accessed December 8, 2013, http://scottish-hegelian.blogspot.com/2012/09/john-macmurray-and-hegel.html; Mark Bevir and D. O’Brien, “From Idealism to Communitarianism: The Inheritance and Legacy of John Macmurray,” History of Political Thought 24 (2003): 305–29; Costello, John Macmurray: A Biography, especially in chapter 7, “Discovering the Personal (1925–1928),” the part entitled “Exploring the German Romantics,” 130–37, where Costello discusses Macmurray’s reading, among others, of Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel. There Costello notes that Macmurray studied mechanical and organic conceptions of unity, critiquing both as inadequate to the human reality. According to Costello, for Macmurray “the organic conception … produced the need for a dialectical logic, the expression of which reached its greatest refinement in Hegel’s thought. It forced him [Macmurray] to acknowledge that whatever way an advance might be made towards a philosophy of the distinctively human, it would necessarily have to be a logic that included, in some manner, the gains made by the two earlier modes of thought” (132). Costello makes further remarks concerning Macmurray in relation to Hegel on, for example, 101, 125, 130, 138, 145. In “Idealism against Religion,” (booklet) (London: The Lindsey Press, 1944), Macmurray reflected what would indicate a more negative impact of Idealism on his thought. As Michael Edwards puts it, without referring to a specific Idealist thinker, “Macmurray defined Idealism, both in its popular and philosophical forms, as an emotional attachment to ideas rather than to things. “Idealism against Religion: A Summary,” in “John Macmurray: The John Macmurray Fellowship Website,” accessed December 12, 2013, http://johnmacmurray.org/reviews/idealism-against-religion/. The references here to Macmurray in relation to the post-Kantian German Idealists are not, of course, meant to indicate that Macmurray was not as well variously influenced by a wide range of thinkers including, notably, Kant and his stress on the practical.

29. On Hegel’s dynamic presentation of dialectically developing subjectivity, see Schlitt, Hegel’s Trinitarian Claim, 1–28 (1984), 3–14 (2012).

30. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, ed. Allen W. Wood, trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). This English “translation is based on the text of the first edition of the Rechtsphilosophie (1820), as reproduced in Volume VII of Hegel’s Werke, edited by Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel and published by the Suhrkamp Verlag (Frankfurt am Main, 1970). I [Nisbet] have compared the text throughout with the variorum edition of the work in Volume II of Karl-Heinz Ilting’s edition of Hegel’s Vorlesungen über Rechtsphilosophie 1818–1831 … whose readings I have at times adopted in preference to those of the Suhrkamp edition.” H. B. Nisbet, translator’s preface to Elements of the Philosophy of Right, xxxv. The critical edition of the 1821 text can be found in Hegel’s Gesammelte Werke, vol. 14 (in three vols.), Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts, ed. Klaus Grotsch and Elisabeth Weisser-Lohmann (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 2007).

31. On Hegel’s concept of person in the Philosophy of Right, see, for example, §§ 34–40, 186–87, 190 remark. In looking forward to his further development of the notion of “person,” and this in particular relationship to the question of property, Hegel remarks, “Die Person sich von sich unterscheindend verhält sich zu einer andern Person.” Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts, § 40/“A person, in distinguishing himself from himself, relates himself to another person.” Elements of the Philosophy of Right, § 40.

For further remarks on Hegel’s concept of person in the Philosophy of Right, in addition to works cited immediately below in n. 32, see here and there throughout the following: Allen W. Wood, Hegel’s Ethical Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Paul Franco, Hegel’s Philosophy of Freedom (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999); Frederick Neuhouser, Foundations of Hegel’s Social Theory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000).

32. See, for example, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, §§ 105, 113, 114. On Hegel on person in relation to action, see: Dudley Knowles, Hegel and the Philosophy of Right (London: Routledge 2002), 165–90; Michael Quante, Hegel’s Concept of Action, trans. Dean Moyar (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); David Rose, Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: A Reader’s Guide (New York: Continuum, 2007), 78–84.

33. Self as Agent, 127–28. See Costello, John Macmurray: A Biography, 325–26.

34. Self as Agent, 327.

35. Though it is perhaps harder to establish any direct or perhaps even indirect connection between Macmurray and Schelling on the notion of person as relational and as agent, it might be helpful to recall that Schelling himself had envisioned the development of the divine potencies into divine Persons through the interaction of the second and third potency giving rise to the full personhood of Spirit, Son, and Father.

36. Broadie, History of Scottish Philosophy, 339.

37. Zizioulas, Being as Communion, chapter 1, “Personhood and Being,” 27–65, esp. 15, 43–63.

38. John D. Zizioulas, “Human Capacity and Human Incapacity,” The Scottish Journal of Theology 28 (1975): 401–48.

39. In Trinitarian Theology Today: Essays on Divine Being and Act, ed. Christoph Schwöbel (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1995), 44–60.

40. Zizioulas, “The Doctrine of the Holy Trinity,” 58.

41. Zizioulas, “The Doctrine of the Holy Trinity,” 52.

42. Lucian Turcescu, “ ‘Person’ versus ‘Individual,’ and Other Modern Misreadings of Gregory of Nyssa,” Modern Theology 18 (2002): 527–39. For a response to Lucian Turcescu’s critique of Zizioulas, see Aristotle Papanikolaou, “Is John Zizioulas an Existentialist in Disguise? Response to Lucian Turcescu,” Modern Theology 20 (2004): 601–07. Papanikolaou says that Turcescu does not successfully argue his critique of Zizioulas’s reading of the Cappadocians on “person” as relational being. Papanikolaou does, however, remark that “though Turcescu may, in the end, be correct that a relational ontology of trinitarian personhood does not exist in the Cappadocian Fathers, this particular article does not by itself discredit Zizioulas’s interpretation” (602). He goes on to say that Zizioulas has himself admitted to being influenced by modern personalism and names J. Maritain, E. Mounier, M. Buber, G, Marcel, as well as the existentialism of S. Kierkegaard as those by whom Zizioulas has been influenced (604). Papanikolaou cites Zizioulas’s article, “The Being of God and the Being of Anthropos” (in Greek), SYNAXIS 37 (1991): 11–35, esp. 15–19.

Turcescu has published his own reading of Gregory of Nyssa on Divine Persons in Gregory of Nyssa and the Concept of Divine Persons (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), with a succinct summary of that reading on 116–17. This study is based on his PhD dissertation, “The Concept of Divine Persons in St. Gregory of Nyssa’s Works,” University of St. Michael’s College, Toronto, 1999.

On Zizioulas’s personalist thought see, among many studies, Basilio Petrà, “Personalist Thought in Greece in the Twentieth Century: A First Tentative Synthesis,” trans. Norman Russell, Greek Orthodox Theological Review 50 (2004): 1–48, on Zizioulas 26–33 plus important notes on 43–48, including references to hesitations concerning Zizioulas’s personalist thought in nn. 112–17, accessed January 26, 2014, http://web.ebscohost.com/ehost/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?vid=53&sid=4ae0bc8f-a788-4299-adef-ee0ec8becacc%40sessionmgr4005&hid=4209. Petrà stresses the influence of Émigré Russian Thought on the development of personalist thought in Greece since 1960 (13), including that of Zizioulas.

43. Turcescu, “ ‘Person’ versus ‘Individual,’ ” for example, 530 with 533, 534, and 537.

44. Turcescu, “ ‘Person’ versus ‘Individual,’ ” 534.

45. James L. Fredericks, “Primordial Vow: Reflections on the Holy Trinity in Light of Dialogue with Pure Land Buddhism,” in The Cambridge Companion to the Trinity, ed. Peter C. Phan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 326–27, citing Jaroslav Pelikan, The Emergence of the Catholic Tradition (100–600) (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), 220–23. Pelikan writes: “Significantly, the defense of the dogma of the Trinity did not rely primarily on this metaphysical identification [the identification of the divine ousia as a universal]. Even Gregory of Nyssa, philosophically the most brilliant and bold of the three Cappadocians, stopped short of providing a speculative solution for the relation of the One and the Three or of the distinction between the properties of the One and those of the Three” (222).

46. Sarah Coakley, “Chapter 7: ‘Persons’ in the ‘Social’ Doctrine of the Trinity: Current Analytic Discussion and ‘Cappadocian’ Theology,” in Powers and Submissions: Spirituality, Philosophy and Gender (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), 109–29, a lightly revised version of the text first published in The Trinity: An Interdisciplinary Symposium on the Doctrine of the Trinity, ed. Stephen T. Davis, Daniel Kendall, S.J., and Gerald O’Collins, S.J. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 123–44. Coakley questions the reading of Gregory of Nyssa on person by, for example, David Brown and cites the following works by him: “Trinitarian Personhood and Individuality,” in Trinity, Incarnation, and Atonement: Philosophical and Theological Essays, ed. Ronald J. Feenstra and Cornelius Plantinga (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 1989), 48–78; The Divine Trinity (London: Gerald Duckworth, 1985), with Brown discussing the notion of “person” and Gregory of Nyssa on, for example, 285–87; “Trinity,” in A Companion to Philosophy of Religion, ed. Philip I. Quinn and Charles Taliaferro (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), 525–31.

Among others who have expressed hesitations concerning Zizioulas’s interpretation of the Cappadocians on the notion of person, see Najeeb G. Awad “Personhood as Particularity: John Zizioulas, Colin Gunton, and the Trinitarian Theology of Personhood,” Journal of Reformed Theology 4 (2010): 1–22, on Zizioulas 3–15.

47. Coakley, “ ‘Persons’ in the ‘Social’ Doctrine of the Trinity,” 110.

48. Coakley, “ ‘Persons’ in the ‘Social’ Doctrine of the Trinity,” 112.

49. Coakley, “ ‘Persons’ in the ‘Social’ Doctrine of the Trinity,” 117–24.

50. Coakley, “ ‘Persons’ in the ‘Social’ Doctrine of the Trinity,” 118, emphasis in the original.

51. Coakley, “ ‘Persons’ in the ‘Social’ Doctrine of the Trinity,” 119–20.

52. Coakley, “ ‘Persons’ in the ‘Social’ Doctrine of the Trinity,” 125–26.

53. Coakley, “ ‘Persons’ in the ‘Social’ Doctrine of the Trinity,” 123. And she concludes: “A reduction of ‘person’ to ‘relationality’ is not what he [Gregory of Nyssa] intends” (129), emphasis in the original texts. The Cappadocians, and especially Basil of Caesarea, were involved in controversy with those who denied the full divinity of the Holy Spirit. Basil spends a great deal of time and energy discussing a wide variety of roles and functions of the Holy Spirit in his effort to argue to its equality in divinity and honor with Father and Son. In light of discussions as to the understanding of person in Cappadocian thought, it would perhaps be interesting to re-read Basil’s On the Holy Spirit to see whether it would provide any further insight into that understanding.

Several studies by Coakley and Turcescu as well as Zizioulas have been referenced with regard to Zizioulas’s reading of the Cappadocians on person. One might say the discussion concerning this reading continues, at least indirectly, as witnessed to by studies such as the following: John D. Zizioulas, Communion and Otherness: Further Studies in Personhood and the Church (London: T & T Clark, 2006); John D. Zizioulas, “Relational Ontology: Insights from Patristic Thought,” in The Trinity and an Entangled World: Relationality in Physical Science and Theology, ed. John Polkinghorne Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2010), 146–56; Sarah Coakley, ed. Re-thinking Gregory of Nyssa (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 2002); Sarah Coakley, “Afterword: ‘Relational Ontology,’ Trinity, and Science,” in The Trinity and an Entangled World, 184–99, with explicit reference to Zizioulas especially on 188–91 and reference in 189–90n16 to several further relevant discussions in her edited volume, Re-thinking Gregory of Nyssa, by herself (chapter 1), Lewis Ayres (chapter 2), and Lucian Turcescu (chapter 7).

54. Coakley, “ ‘Persons’ in the ‘Social’ Doctrine of the Trinity,” 110, 111, 115, 116; Turcescu, “ ‘Person’ versus ‘Individual,’ ” 528, 530, 534, 535.

55. Generally stated, Fredericks, “Primordial Vow,” 327, see 337, 341.

56. Turcescu cites Zizioulas’s references to John Macmurray’s Persons in Relation and Self as Agent as well as Martin Buber’s I and Thou, in Zizioulas, “Human Capacity and Human Incapacity,” 408, as well as Zizioulas’s reference to Buber in Being as Communion, 17. “ ‘Person’ versus ‘Individual’ ” (in Modern Theology), 539n51, with references on 539n45 by Turcescu to Zizioulas’s further references to Buber.

57. Turcescu, “ ‘Person’ versus ‘Individual’ ” (in Modern Theology) 535–36. Charles D. Raith, II, follows in many ways a critique similar to that of Turcescu concerning Zizioulas’s reading of the Cappadocians, but he does so in critiquing more directly LaCugna’s own interpretation of the Cappadocian’s on Trinity. He in effect criticizes LaCugna’s “nominalist” reading of the Cappadocians when she stresses the priority of person or hypostasis over ousia as not reflecting what the Cappadocians held, thus for Raith making her appeal to the Cappadocians in support of her own position unacceptable. “Resourcing the Fathers? A Critical Analysis of Catherine Mowry LaCugna’s Appropriation of the Trinitarian Theology of the Cappadocian Fathers,” International Journal of Systematic Theology 10 (2008): 267–84, where in addition to his own references directly to Church Fathers he refers to Turcescu and others, including Sarah Coakley (276n51), on 269n10, 274n37, 277–78n61, with reference to Turcescu, Gregory of Nyssa and the Concept of Divine Persons, 269n10. He speaks on 271, 279, 281, and 283 of LaCugna’s nominalism.

58. Regarding Hegel and Buber and the question of similarities in their thought, see, by way of entry, Stephen Hudson, “Intersubjectivity of Mutual Recognition and the I–Thou: A Comparative Analysis of Hegel and Buber,” Minerva: An Internet Journal of Philosophy 14 (2010): 140–55, accessed December 29, 2013, http://www.minerva.mic.ul.ie/vol14/intersubjectivity.pdf.

59. Torrance, “Mapping Modern Concepts of the Person onto the Greek Patristic Past,” 1, 9, with references on 9n26 indicating articles challenging patristic sources as being “key to true relational ontology. The vocabulary simply isn’t consistent, even if the concepts in question can arguably be discerned” (9), accessed November 24, 2013, http://dataspace.princeton.edu/jspui/bitstream/88435/dsp010c483j425/1/Mapping%20Modern%20Concepts%20of%20the%20Person%20onto%20the%20Greek%20Patristic%20Past.pdf,1.

60. Torrance, “Mapping Modern Concepts of the Person,” 1–4. For a brief but most helpful reference to Mounier within the overall context of the development of personalism, see Thomas D. Williams and Jan Olof Bengtsson, “Personalism,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2013 Edition), ed. Edward N. Zalta, accessed December 30, 2013, http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2013/entries/personalism/. While Mounier of course reacted strongly against Hegel’s thought as he understood that thought, it would be of interest to see whether or not he might have been influenced, at least indirectly, by Schelling, whether through the thought, for example, of Kierkegaard or of Solovyov, the latter perhaps through subsequent Russian thinkers.

61. On Florovsky and his shifting relationship to Solovyov and German Idealism, see Paul L. Gavrilyuk, Georges Florovsky and the Russian Religious Renaissance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), for example, 206–09, 159–62.

62. Torrance, “Mapping Modern Concepts of the Person,” 4.

63. Turcescu, “ ‘Person’ versus ‘Individual’ ” (in Modern Theology), 528.

64. For a brief presentation of key elements of Hans-Georg Gadamer’s hermeneutical theory, see Truth and Method, 2nd rev. ed., trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (New York: Crossroad, 1990, 1995), 300–07.

65. It might be helpful to recall that, in a somewhat similar situation, Zizioulas saw in Athanasius someone who at least implicitly, to use Zizioulas’s word as in the English translation, in effect brought about a new ontological understanding of being as relational and as communion. See the French and English texts cited in chapter 8, n. 17 above.

66. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode: Grundzüge einer philosophischen Hermeneutik (Tübingen: Mohr, 1965), 284, 285/Truth and Method, 300, 301, with examples of German terms and English translations. Of course, even Gadamer himself seems to root his notion of horizon, as a form of flexible limit, in Hegel’s notion of limit. See, for example, Truth and Method, 343. It is important to recall again as well the rich variety of thinkers with which Zizioulas interacts either explicitly or implicitly in addition to those here indicated as mediating to him in various ways post-Kantian German Idealist insights into the notion of person. For a recent rather positive reading of Gadamer, at a wider level of hermeneutics, in relation to Hegel, see Nicholas Boyle, “Biblical Hermeneutics: From Kant to Gadamer,” in The Impact of Idealism: The Legacy of Post-Kantian German Thought, ed. Nicholas Boyle and Liz Disley, vol. 4: Religion, ed. Nicholas Adams (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 134–39.

We should note that others have tried to insulate Zizioulas from too close a connection with post-Kantian German Idealism. For example, Paul M. Collins writes: “Zizioulas does not set out to combine the Cappadocian tradition with that of Augustine and Hegel. Any appeal which Zizioulas makes to the notion of self-realization is in relation to each particular divine person, not to a simple Absolute Subject.” Trinitarian Theology, West and East: Karl Barth, the Cappadocian Fathers, and John Zizioulas (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2001), 194. But it is just such notions as self-realization which have a certain rootage in German Idealist thought, whether self-realization would be considered in relation to a singly personal triune God or, as Schelling had done, in relation to each divine person.

67. In “On the Criticism of Being as Communion in Anglophone Orthodox Theology,” in The Theology of John Zizioulas: Personhood and the Church, ed. Douglas H. Knight (Aldershot, Hampshire, England: Ashgate, 2007), 35–78, Alan Brown has mounted a forcefully stated, sweeping critique of a number of individuals and their criticism of the thought of John Zizioulas. Of particular interest here, he argues (35n2) against the positions especially of John Behr in The Way to Nicea (Crestwood, NY: SVS, 2001); John Behr, The Nicene Faith (Crestwood, NY: SVS, 2004); Lucian Turcescu, “ ‘Person’ versus ‘Individual’ and other Modern Misreadings of Gregory of Nyssa,” in Re-thinking Gregory of Nyssa, ed. Sarah Coakley (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), 97–109; Andrew Louth, John Damascene: Tradition and Originality in Byzantine Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). To these should be added Sarah Coakley, “ ‘Persons’ in the ‘Social’ Doctrine of the Trinity: A Critique of Analytic Discussion,” in The Trinity: An Interdisciplinary Symposium on the Trinity, ed. Steven T. Davis, Daniel Kendall and Gerald O’Collins (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 123–44. Of particular interest are his summary of several objections to Zizioulas’s reading of “Anti-personalist and Anti-existentialist Objections” (43–45) and his “Refutation of the Patristicist Objections” related to “Personalism and Existentialism” (see esp. 66–68). To put it very broadly, Brown responds to objections to Zizioulas’s reading of person and relation in the Cappadocians by emphasizing that Zizioulas is working not so much with specific words as used by them but, rather, with their fundamentally revised view of ontology. Brown writes, for example: “It is no part of Zizioulas’ programme to show that the meanings the Cappadocians gave to these words are absolutely isomorphic to the meanings he [Zizioulas] gives to these words. … It is no refutation of Zizioulas’ ontology to point out that he accords different meanings to the words ὑπόστασις and/or πρόσωπον than does a particular Father” (67). For a recent, positive reading of Zizioulas on person as relation in Gregory of Nyssa, a reading based in Zizioulas’s stress upon the Father who, as Person, is the origin of Son and Spirit, see Giulio Maspero, “Patristic Trinitarian Ontology,” in Rethinking Trinitarian Theology: Disputed Questions and Contemporary Issues in Trinitarian Theology, ed. Giulio Maspero and Robert J. Woźniak (New York: T & T Clark, 2012), 211–24.

Chapter 11

1. Marc A. Pugliese, introduction to Seeking Common Ground: Evaluation and Critique of Joseph Bracken’s Comprehensive Worldview, ed. Marc A. Pugliese and Gloria L. Schaab, S.S.J. (Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press, 2012), 7 and see 10, 15. Introductory material is drawn from this introduction as well as a curriculum vitae accessed January 30, 2014, http://www.xavier.edu/_application/media/faculty/Bracken%202010.pdf.

2. See similar remarks in Marc A. Pugliese, The One, the Many, and the Trinity: Joseph A. Bracken and the Challenge of Process Metaphysics (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2011), xv, 67, 246.

3. Joseph A. Bracken, Freiheit und Kausalität bei Schelling (Freiburg: Karl Albert, 1972). On Schelling, Bracken has also published: “Freedom and Causality in the Philosophy of Schelling,” New Scholasticism 50 (1976): 164–82; “Schelling’s Positive Philosophy,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 15 (1977): 324–30.

4. Pugliese, The One, the Many, and the Trinity, xv.

5. Brandon Gallaher, “The Problem of Pantheism in the Sophiology of Sergii Bulgakove: A Panentheistic Solution in the Process Trinitarianism of Joseph A. Bracken,” in Seeking Common Ground: Evaluation and Critique of Joseph Bracken’s Comprehensive Worldview, ed. Marc A. Pugliese and Gloria L. Schaab, S.S.J. (Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press, 2012), 147.

6. Joseph A. Bracken, “The Holy Trinity as a Community of Divine Persons I, II,” Heythrop Journal 15 (1974): 166–82, 257–70, with the quotation on 168.

7. For Bracken’s impressive list of scholarly works, see Pugliese, The One, the Many, and the Trinity, 251–58.

8. Joseph A. Bracken, What Are They Saying about the Trinity? (New York: Paulist, 1979).

9. Bracken, What Are They Saying, 80–83.

10. Joseph A. Bracken, The Triune Symbol: Persons, Process and Community, College Theology Society Studies in Religion, 1 (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1985), vii.

11. Joseph A. Bracken, The Divine Matrix: Creativity as Link between East and West (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1995). See the thoughtful reflection on Bracken’s work in the area of interreligious philosophical theology by Leo D. Lefebure, “The Infinite Ground & the Triune God in Interreligious Perspective: The Contribution of Joseph Bracken,” in Seeking Common Ground: Evaluation and Critique of Joseph Bracken’s Comprehensive Worldview, ed. Marc A. Pugliese and Gloria L. Schaab, S.S.J. (Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press, 2012), 235–51, with Bracken’s response, “Response to Contributors,” 263.

12. Joseph A. Bracken, Curriculum vitae, accessed January 30, 2014, http://www.xavier.edu/_application/media/faculty/Bracken%202010.pdf.

13. Joseph A. Bracken, The One in the Many: A Contemporary Reconstruction of the God-World Relationship (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2001), 10.

14. Joseph A. Bracken, Christianity and Process Thought: Spirituality for a Changing World (Philadelphia: Templeton Foundation, 2006), with the description here noted in the present text coming from the back cover of the volume.

15. Bracken, Christianity and Process Thought, xvi.

16. Joseph A. Bracken, Society and Spirit: A Trinitarian Cosmology (London: Associated University Presses, 1991), hereafter referred to as Society and Spirit and usually cited in the text by page number.

17. Bracken, Triune Symbol, 189, and Society and Spirit, 172n33.

18. For a more comprehensive, synthesizing presentation of Bracken’s philosophical process theology, see Pugliese, The One, the Many, and the Trinity, 68–159, with special reference to Trinity on 123–59. Pugliese refers, quite fully throughout Bracken’s corpus, to various themes to which Bracken attends and ideas which he develops over the course of his career. In this way he is in effect documenting a fundamental continuity in Bracken’s thought.

19. Bracken works directly with Whitehead’s technical terminology. For present purposes we will simply follow his lead, while occasionally noting his own brief descriptions, in The One in the Many, 218–21, of what Whitehead meant by specific terms. Here, for example, Bracken refers to “actual occasion” which he notes is “another term for an actual entity.” He in turn describes an actual entity as “a submicroscopic subject of experience which exists only for an instant but in that interval makes a self-constituting decision as to what it is to be” (218).

20. See, for example, Bracken’s summary of what he is saying in the introduction in Society and Spirit, 22.

21. Bracken, The One in the Many, 221.

22. Ivor Leclerc, The Philosophy of Nature (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1986); The Nature of Physical Existence (New York: Humanities Press, 1972). In Society and Spirit Bracken discusses Leclerc’s thought especially on 39–49.

23. “Causal Efficacy: In Whitehead’s philosophy, the more primitive and fundamental mode of perception in which data from past actual occasions are transmitted on a feeling-level to a concrescing actual occasion in a massive but nevertheless vague and inarticulate manner.” Bracken, The One in the Many, 218. In quotations from Bracken italics are as in his texts.

24. Ervin Laszlo, Introduction to Systems Philosophy (New York: Gordon & Breach, 1972).

25. Edward Pols, Meditation on a Prisoner: Towards Understanding Action and Mind (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1975).

26. Bracken also holds that his modified version of a Whiteheadian society, with its further developed understanding of a society’s formal causality, corresponds better, in his reading, to Whitehead’s various remarks on society than do those of Charles Hartshorne and John B. Cobb, who do not go as far as Bracken in attributing such further causality to a society. Spirit and Society, 56.

27. Bracken further states: “I have argued throughout this book … that Whiteheadian societies are functioning ontological unities in their own right” (173n24).

28. See also Society and Spirit, 14, with regard to Schelling, 91, and concerning Hegel, especially 105–06.

29. Martin Heidegger, Schellings Abhandlung über das Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit, ed. Hildegaard Feick (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1971).

30. Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling, “Philosophische Untersuchungen über das Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit und die zusammenhängende Gegenstände,” in Sämtliche Werke, ed. K. F. A. Schelling, vol. 7, 1805–1810 (Stuttgart: J. G. Cotta’ser Verlag, 1860), 336–416. For Bracken’s own analysis of the Freiheitsschrift, see Freiheit und Kausalität, 36–66, with a helpful summary of what he calls Schelling’s “thought model” (Denkmodell) on 17–18 and four conclusions on 121–22, in the last of which he clarifies that divine or human action (Handlung) must necessarily arise out of ground (Grund). But as an act (Tat) it must be independent of ground in order for it to be free. See his conclusions at the end of his analysis of the Freiheitsschrift, on 65–66.

31. Wolfgang Wieland, Schellings Lehre von der Zeit (Heidelberg: Winter Verlag, 1956). Bracken refers to Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling, Die Weltalter. Fragmente, ed. Manfred Schröter (Munich: Biederstein & Leibniz, 1946).

32. Wolfhart Pannenberg, Anthropology in Theological Perspective, trans. Matthew O’Connell (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1985).

33. Prof. Bracken has recently worked with the notion of open-ended system in order to express what a Whiteheadian society, and thus a field of activity, is. See Joseph A. Bracken, Does God Roll Dice? Divine Providence for a World in the Making (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2012), 75–89, 111–24. See also his study, “Whiteheadian Structured Societies as Open-Ended Systems and Open-Ended Systems as Whiteheadian Structured Societies,” in Metaphysics, ed. Mark Pestana (InTech, 2012, ISBN 978-953-51-0646-3), 111–26, esp. 122, accessed March 13, 2014, http://www.intechopen.com/books/metaphysics/whiteheadian-structured-societies-as-open-ended-systems-and-open-ended-systems-as-whiteheadian-s.

34. See, for example, in Bracken, Triune Symbol, 20–24.

35. Bracken describes the Whiteheadian notion of the primordial nature of God as “the ordered relevance of all eternal objects to one another as grasped by God … in a comprehensive vision and progressively employed by God … in guiding the world of creation in its ongoing development.” The consequent nature of God is “God’s prehension of everything that has happened thus far within the cosmic process.” Creativity is “the ultimate principle of existence and activity both for the self-constitution of actual occasions … and for the co-constitution of the various societies to which they belong.” Eternal objects are “objective possibilities of existence and activity for actual entities which are to be found in their fullness (as conceptually ordered to one another) within the primordial nature of God and in a more limited though concrete way within the world of past actual entities.” Bracken, The One in the Many, 218–20.

36. David Griffin, “The Possibility of Subjective Immortality in Whitehead’s Philosophy,” The Modern Schoolman 53 (1975–76): 39–57; Marjorie Suchocki, The End of Evil: Process Eschatology in Historical Context (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1988).

37. See Society and Spirit, 154–59, where Bracken discusses these two thinkers who seemed to show this difficulty: Bernard Meland, Fallible Forms and Symbols: Discourses on Method in a Theology of Culture (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1976); Bernard M. Loomer, “The Size of God,” in The Size of God: The Theology of Bernard Loomer in Context, ed. William Dean and Larry E. Axel (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1987), 20–51.

38. See all of chapter 5 in Society and Spirit.

39. On Bracken’s working with the notion of field in physics, see Marc A. Pugliese, “Orthodoxy or Orthopraxy? Recent Developments in Physics and Joseph A. Bracken as Revisionist Whiteheadian,” in Seeking Common Ground, 97–116.

40. For example, Society and Spirit, 44 and 42. Bracken further discusses Schelling on ground, especially in Schelling’s 1809 Freiheitsschrift, in Divine Matrix, 45–51, 66–67.

41. Regarding the German terms, see, for example, Society and Spirit, 97, 174n19; Bracken, Freiheit und Kausalität, 62.

42. Bracken, Freiheit und Kausalität, 121–22. According to Bracken, Schelling thought of “ground” in relation to both divine and human consciousness and to its consequence in history. The factuality (Faktizität) of free action was, however, independent of this ground. On Schelling’s relating of principles of unity and differentiation with will rather than with mind from 1809 on, see briefly Society and Spirit, 28. We should note Bracken himself argues that Schelling was not finally successful in his attempt to maintain the autonomy of free action while at the same time trying to provide that free action with a more systematic, rational explanation (Erklärung). Bracken sees this as an unresolved tension arising in Schelling’s work from 1809 on through to and including the negative and positive philosophy of the later Schelling. Freiheit und Kausalität, 55, 65–66, 76–77, 81, 84, 89, 90, 119–20, and 122 where Bracken provides an example of the relationship between ground and consequent when he speaks of the later negative philosophy as ground and the positive philosophy as consequent, with the latter following from the former, and yet ultimately including the former, and with the two being related through a free divine act, namely, that of creation. See also Bracken, “Freedom and Causality in the Philosophy of Schelling,” 182n27; Bracken, “Schelling’s Positive Philosophy,” 328–30.

43. “Properly understood” implies recognizing that a society as field arises out of the concrescence of its constituent actual occasions while providing them with a common element of form. On the common element of form, see Society and Spirit, 64–65, 70 and passim. Properly understood also in light of the society-as-field’s many characteristics and functions. By way of example, among these characteristics and functions we could mention its enduring character (69–70), its serving as principle of continuity (62), its having ontological actuality (65), its being self-sustaining and possessing an objective unity (110), its corporate agency (117–18), and its being a functioning ontological totality (118). More recently Bracken has clearly identified the causality attributable to actual occasions as efficient causality and that exercised by society/field as formal causality. “Response to Contributors,” in Seeking Common Ground, 262.

44. Antoon Braeckman, “Whitehead and German Idealism: A Poetic Heritage. “Process Studies 14 (1984–85): 265–86. Prof. Bracken’s citing this article brought it to my attention. Bracken notes Braeckman “argues that for both Schelling and Whitehead the ultimate ground of Being is not an entity, but rather an underlying ontological activity” (Society and Spirit, 175n34, referencing pp. 278–79 in Braeckman’s article). See also further reflection on the thought of Whitehead and that of Schelling in Philip Clayton, “Pluralism, Idealism, Romanticism: Untapped Resources for a Trinity in Process,” in Theology as Process: A Relational Theology of God, ed. Joseph A. Bracken and Marjorie Hewitt Suchocki (New York: Continuum, 1997), 118–45, esp. on Whitehead and Schelling 128–36 with constructive reflection on Schelling’s thought. See at greater length the studies comparing the thought of Whitehead and Hegel in: Hegel and Whitehead: Contemporary Perspectives on Systematic Philosophy, ed. George R. Lucas, Jr. (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1986); Whitehead und der deutsche Idealismus, ed. George R. Lucas, Jr., and Antoon Braeckman (Bern: Peter Lang, 1990). A further avenue by which to examine possible Idealist influences on Whitehead’s thought would be, among others, to follow up on Whitehead’s remark that he is “greatly indebted to Bergson, William James, and John Dewey.” Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology, corrected edition, ed. David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne (New York: The Free Press, 1978), xii. For a helpful wider presentation of antecedents of Whitehead, including various forms of Idealism, see Pugliese, The One, the Many, and the Trinity, 8–22.

45. Braeckman, “Whitehead and German Idealism,” 265–66, where he quotes Whitehead’s own evaluation of his knowledge of Hegel in Whitehead’s Essays in Science and Philosophy (New York: Greenwood, 1969), 116. For a reading of Whitehead’s thought as exhibiting particular similarities to that of Hegel, with reference to further literature on the question, see Robert Ellis, “From Hegel to Whitehead,” The Journal of Religion 61 (1981): 403–21, with brief reference to a possible trinitarian reading of Whitehead on 419–20.

46. Braeckman, “Whitehead and German Idealism,” 274–76.

47. Braeckman, “Whitehead and German Idealism,” 274.

48. Braeckman makes these comparisons in rather intertwined fashion in “Whitehead and German Idealism,” 274–82.

49. Braeckman, “Whitehead and German Idealism,” 282.

50. On antecedents to Bracken’s thought, those with whom he enters into conversation, sources of his thought, and his working with them, see Pugliese, The One, the Many, and the Trinity, xv, 68, 69, with reference, throughout 71–159, 246, to many of these thinkers with whom Bracken enters into discussion. For the record, we should note that in addition to Hegel and Schelling, Bracken dialogues at length with, among many others, such greats as Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, Heidegger, and Hartshorne.

51. Pugliese, The One, the Many, and the Trinity, 76. More generally, Pugliese reflects on Bracken in relation to Schelling on 72–76, 116.

52. Pugliese, The One, the Many, and the Trinity, 81–82n62. More generally, Pugliese reflects on Bracken in relation to Hegel on 81–82, 90, and 91.

Chapter 12

1. When we speak of the Christian experience of God as Trinity and its affirmation we easily think, in these regards, of various forms of trinitarian spirituality as so many points of reference to which we might call attention. Among them, by way of brief example, we could note indications of lived experience of the Trinity witnessed to by various New Testament assertions, Basil of Caesarea’s writing on the Holy Spirit, Andrei Rublev’s icon of the Trinity, Marie of the Incarnation’s recounting of her experiences of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, certain aspects of late Romanesque and early Gothic cathedral structures, Charles Wesley’s numerous hymns to the Trinity, Leonardo Boff’s trinitarian theology of liberation, and constructive reflections on creation’s “groaning” for trinitarian fulfillment.

2. Dale M. Schlitt, Hegel’s Trinitarian Claim: A Critical Reflection (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1984).

3. Dale M. Schlitt, Hegel’s Trinitarian Claim: A Critical Reflection (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2012).

4. Schlitt, Hegel’s Trinitarian Claim, 7 (1984); xxiii and see x (2012).

5. Dale M. Schlitt, Experience and Spirit: A Post-Hegelian Philosophical Theology (New York: Peter Lang, 2007). Usually cited in the text by page number and referred to in notes as Experience.

6. Experience, on Gadamer 73–75, on initial proposals 75–83.

7. On Gadamer’s philosophical journey, as he puts it, one could well note in addition to Gadamer’s many writings on Hegel and Heidegger, Gadamer’s “Reflections on My Philosophical Journey,” in The Philosophy of Hans-Georg Gadamer, ed. Lewis Hahn (Chicago: Open Court, 1997), 3–63. In addition of course to Plato, Gadamer refers in this study to Heidegger throughout, and to Hegel especially on 32–48. In a similar personal vein, see also Hans-Georg Gadamer in Conversation with Riccardo Dottori, A Century of Philosophy, trans. Rod Coltman with Sigrid Koepke (New York: Continuum, 2004), where, for example, on 75–79 Gadamer speaks of Hegel, Schelling, and Heidegger. Among so many studies by Gadamer, one would be remiss if one did not mention his quasi-meditative reflection in “Hegel and Heidegger,” in Hans-Georg Gadamer, Hegel’s Dialectic: Five Hermeneutical Studies, trans. P. Christopher Smith (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1976), 100–16. Along the trajectory from Hegel to Gadamer via Heidegger who so strongly influenced Gadamer, it is fascinating to follow Heidegger’s own move from Hegel on consciousness and thought to Heidegger’s being of beings by way of the notion of skepsis taken as regard or seeing. See Martin Heidegger, Hegel’s Concept of Experience (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1970, 1989), 55–71, and further 109–12, 126–29 as well as passim thereafter; for the transition from being to appearance to experience as presentation and movement, with the last briefly referred to as dialectical and then dialogical, see 113–16. Here and there, for example 129–30, Heidegger uses the rather, in this overall context, strange phrase (perhaps vaguely recalling Schelling and more directly Nietzsche), “the will of the Absolute” (for example, 129), to refer to the role of what would seem to be the Hegelian notion of absolute knowing, but now in the context of his own concern for appearance and presence. Heidegger continues with an almost hymnic description of experience expressed in terms of his own thought including reference to those notions of appearance and presence (120 on). He says, for example, that “experience is a mode of being present, that is, of Being” (120, italics in the translated text). In this study, Heidegger focuses in a fascinating way on what is usually referred to as the “Introduction” to Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, with the introduction being a text written before the body of the Phenomenology and surely worthy of further close study. For several more classic studies analyzing various aspects of what Hegel says in the introduction, see Schlitt, Hegel’s Trinitarian Claim, 281n168 (2012).

8. Experience, for example, 90 with 119–20. See also Schlitt, Hegel’s Trinitarian Claim, 186–92 (2012).

9. Working with both a grammar of experience and a phenomenology of experience has permitted recognizing more fully the richness of experience as relation, process, and result. Experience, 198.

10. In recounting selected aspects of the overall presentation in Experience, but especially in relation to chapter 7, I remain close to the presentation, especially with regard to specific terms needed to express what is being said.

11. In a session of our 2014 PhD seminar in Spirituality of the Trinity, Cliff Knighten reminded us of the complexities around the notion of a resultant sense of wholeness arising out of an experience of God. In situations such as those referred to as a dark night of the soul there is not easily identifiable any such feeling of more immediately resultant wholeness. Further discussion helped us recall that following upon such a dark night experience, there can occur a subsequent experience of wholeness that englobes, so to speak, the prior experience. It would be interesting to pursue this complex question of an experience of God in which there is not as such an experience of resultant wholeness. One might, for instance, take into consideration the notion of the absence of the divine other as a form, in itself, of presence. One might also pay further attention to the more general notions of experience of God and experience of the Trinity as well as possible distinctions between them. As a first remark, one might note that “dark night” would seem to refer more to experience of God whereas speaking of dark night in relation to experiences of Trinity would seem to be considerably rarer.

12. See James D. G. Dunn, Jesus and the Spirit: A Study of the Religious and Charismatic Experience of Jesus and the First Christians as Reflected in the New Testament (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1975), 11–92. We might note, however, that Dunn’s position might well need to be qualified by stressing further the mediating and testimonial roles of the Gospels of Mark and Matthew.

13. “So ist über das Herausgehen des Endlichen aus dem Unendlichen zu sagen, das Unendliche gehe zur Endlichkeit heraus, darum weil es keine Wahrheit, kein Bestehen an im, wie es als abstrakte Einheit gefaßt est, hat; so umgekehrt geht das Endliche aus demselben Grunde seiner Nichtigkeit in das Unendliche hinein.” Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Gesammelte Werke, vol. 21, Wissenschaft der Logik. Erster Teil: Die objective Logik. Erster Band: Die Lehre von Sein (1832), ed. Friedrich Hogemann and Walter Jaeschke (Hamburg: Meiner, 1985), 141, lines 22–26/Hegel’s Science of Logic, trans. A. V. Miller (New York: Humanities, 1969), 154.

14. In a session of our 2014 PhD seminar in Spirituality of the Trinity, August Higgins brought our attention to a somewhat different approach to arguing to the need for an inclusive infinite. This approach would involve starting reflection from the resultant self as such and recognizing directly in it as such a sense of merely finite realization of inclusion so that one could as well maintain a triadic structure to finite forms of the experience of enrichment and here wholeness. These remarks are my formulation of Higgins’s insight and do not necessarily do justice to his intervention which merits further reflection.

15. For an overview of Hegel on the Kingdom of God, see Dale M. Schlitt, Divine Subjectivity: Understanding Hegel’s Philosophy of Religion (Scranton, PA: University of Scranton Press, 2009), 253–95, with brief reference on 284–86 to Hegel’s significant influence on subsequent theological and philosophical understandings of Kingdom of God.

16. Basil continues, “And conversely the natural Goodness and the inherent Holiness and the royal Dignity extend from the Father through the Only-begotten to the Spirit.” “The Treatise De Spiritu Sancto.” A Select Library of [the] Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church. Letters and Selected Works, 2nd series, vol. 8, St. Basil: Letters and Selected Works (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1955) chap. 18, para. 47, p. 29 (New York: The Christian Literature Company, 1895 edition, with same pagination as the 1955 edition, accessed July 11, 2014, http://books.google.com/books?id=ahQNAAAAIAAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false).

17. Robert R. Williams argues to Hegel’s understanding of spirit as an ultimately intersubjectival dynamic. Concerning Hegel and especially Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, he says that “Subjectivity finds its culmination in intersubjectivity … My thesis is that the idealist model cannot account for the social, but the social can include and incorporate the idealist model. Moreover, Hegel concludes the Phenomenology with the social model.” Recognition: Fichte and Hegel on the Other (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1992), 255. On 283n88, he cites my remarks in Hegel’s Trinitarian Claim, 151 and 246 (1984), concerning the modified role of otherness once I’ve critiqued Hegel’s understanding of otherness in terms of negation. He suggests that “Schlitt’s observations cited above tend to undermine his own reading.” However, my observations concerning the constitutively positive and negative aspects of otherness, especially on 246, were made with reference to a transformed reading of Hegel in light of my critique of his thought on otherness rather than affirming what Hegel would say. See also Robert R. Williams, Hegel’s Ethics of Recognition (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997).

18. Succinctly stated, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Gesammelte Werke, vol. 20, Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften im Grundrisse (1830), ed. Wolfgang Bonsiepen and Hans-Christian Lucas, with Udo Rameil (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1992), §§ 161, 240/Hegel’s Logic, trans. William Wallace (Oxford; Clarendon, 1975), §§ 161, 240 (translations here are mine).

19. Wolfhart Pannenberg seems to have sensed years ago something of this idea of generosity as somehow implicit in Hegel’s thought when Pannenberg spoke of the essence of “person” consisting in “self-dedication.” Jesus—God and Man (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1968), 181–82. But Pannenberg may have gone a bit far in his own generous reading of Hegel on this point.

20. In referring to what has here been mentioned in a perhaps more intersubjectival fashion as “relationships,” Duane Alexander Miller uses a rather catching phrase: “Trinity is God’s revelation to humanity regarding his own experience of who he and what he is. Specifically, that God experiences himself in three modes called Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.” Two Stories of Everything: The Competing Metanarratives of Islam and Christianity (Ambridge, PA: Whitchurch Publishing, 2016).

Conclusion

1. Prof. Dr. Ekkehard Mühlenberg suggested these points regarding Neo-Platonism and Christian Trinity several years ago, though the formulation of them is my own and for which I am responsible. See also Giulio Maspero, “Patristic Trinitarian Ontology,” in Rethinking Trinitarian Theology: Disputed Questions and Contemporary Issues in Trinitarian Theology, ed. Giulio Maspero and Robert J. Woźniak (New York: T & T Clark, 2012), 216–21.

Concerning the much discussed question of the notion of freedom that is signally important in Plotinus, and for the moment we are more concerned with divine freedom, see the helpful distinction, concerning the notion of freedom in the thought of Plotinus, made by Cassian Patrick Gorman, “Freedom in the God of Plotinus,” The New Scholasticism 14 (1940): 379–405, “We have seen that his [Plotinus’s] conception of divine freedom is totally different from the Christian conception. In place of the freedom which the Christian places between the nature of God and reality, Plotinus posits a freedom which is intrinsic to the nature of God. The divine liberty is made to coincide with the divine essence. The God of Plotinus is not free to will the Many; he is free to be an essence from which the Many must follow necessarily. His freedom is the realization of his essence” (405). See Laura Westra, Plotinus and Freedom: A Meditation on Enneads 6.8 (Lewiston, NY: Edward Mellen, 1990), for a prolonged and appreciative study of freedom in the thought of Plotinus (e.g., 175), of which she stresses the originality and which she prefers not to see as a precursor of Christian thought (see, for example, 133 and 135, 194). In this study she does not refer to Gorman’s article. Rather, she seems to remain with Plotinus’s own, as she describes it, original understanding of freedom of the One which appears to be close to that to which Gorman refers as freedom coinciding with the divine essence and certainly not freedom of choice, namely, that God could have created or not created. Westra reminds us that “we really cannot affirm anything about the One” (106), though “the only thing we can surely attest to is pure freedom [with regard to the One]” (110). Juxtaposing several brief quotations from Westra’s book will help appreciate the complexity of Plotinus’s thought, and interpretation of it, on freedom with a special focus on freedom in relation to the One and to God, as Plotinus understands God (25, regarding this caution by Westra): “The One does not have Freedom but is Freedom. As Cliento [Vincenzo Cliento, an author with whose interpretation of Plotinus on freedom Westra is in general agreement] puts it: ‘In conclusion: the One is Freedom. He is no thing; He has no essence. He is absolute and complete Freedom in relation to which even Nous’s divine freedom comes second’ ” (96); “In His [the One’s] absolute solitude, in which He is not dependent on or related to anything other than Himself, the One must desire and possess His Act, His Being, for Himself alone (6.8.15). And that, of course represents absolute Freedom” (101); “He [the One] freely creates Himself and everything that is. At that supreme pinnacle He is totally free and alone and is the only example of ‘being freely oneself’ that we can be aware of” (110); Westra quotes Armstrong approvingly: “Plotinus frequently attacks the idea that God first planned the universe and then created it, and insists that it is everlasting and not the result of divine deliberation and choice but of spontaneous outflow of creative power without beginning or end” (154n16) (see A. H. Armstrong, trans., Plotinus: Ennead III [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967], 44–45n1 in reference to 3.2[1].1); “For Plotinus … Freedom does not admit of further choice; therefore, in a sense, it is a freedom that is necessary” (38); and concerning the finite self, “We should acknowledge that when we understand what our ‘real self’ is, we must—ipso facto—realize that it is a necessity of our nature to follow the road back to the One” (103, and see “Freedom and Determinism,” 180–86). On the Cappadocians and their creative modifications, see further briefly in Dale M. Schlitt, Experience and Spirit: A Post-Hegelian Philosophical Theology (New York: Peter Lang, 2007), 45–49. On Patristic efforts to assert freedom more specifically within the Trinity see, for example, John D. Zizioulas, “Trinitarian Freedom: Is God Free in Trinitarian Life?” in Rethinking Trinitarian Theology: Disputed Questions and Contemporary Issues in Trinitarian Theology, ed. Giulio Maspero and Robert J. Woźniak (London: T & T Clark, 2012), 193–207. Zizioulas speaks of freedom within the Trinity as “personal freedom,” in which there is no temporally prior “given” which is free. He does not identify freedom with substance or essence as it would seem Plotinus does when speaking of God. He writes: “Had it not been for the Trinity, God would have been a necessary being, a monad enslaved to its essence, a being incapable of going out of itself. It is the Trinity that makes God free from the necessity of his essence; had it not been for the Trinity God would require an eternal creation in order to be free to reach beyond his essence, and then he would bind himself necessarily and eternally to creation. By transferring divine freedom from the level of substance to that of personhood, the Fathers rescued theology from eternally binding God to his creation, a danger inherent in pagan religions and to a great extent also in ancient philosophical thought” (197). It might be that Zizioulas has, at least to some extent and with great nuance we cannot capture here, transferred the Plotinian notion of divine freedom as identified with divine essence to the level of divine Person.

2. Lewis Ayres, “Into the Cloud of Witnesses: Catholic Trinitarian Theology beyond and before Its Modern ‘Revivals,’ ” in Rethinking Trinitarian Theology: Disputed Questions and Contemporary Issues in Trinitarian Theology, ed. Giulio Maspero and Robert J. Woźniak (New York: T & T Clark, 2012), 17–18 concerning Augustine’s working at least in certain instances with similitudo.

3. More specifically on Hegel, see Ludger Oeing-Hanhoff, “Die geschichtliche Notwendigkeit des Hegelschen Gottesbegriffs,” in Metaphysik und Freiheit: Ausgewählte Abhandlungen, ed. Theo Kobusch and Walter Jaeschke (Munich: Erich Wewel, 1988), 123–24. Oeing-Hanhoff argues that Hegel’s focus on subjectivity and relation, rather than on substance, permitted Hegel and others after him to affirm a mutual relationship between God and humankind which, in turn, established the “space” within which human freedom can be exercised.

4. It should be noted that we have not as such focused on defining and describing further specific trajectories of ways in which Hegel and Schelling, in comparison with each other, have influenced subsequent trinitarian thinking beyond several points mentioned here and there such as, for example, Hegel leading in a more monosubjectival direction and Schelling in a more intersubjectival direction.

5. Prof. Stephen Chase noted this in a discussion on this renewed stress on becoming.

6. We could note that this idea of working with experience fits well enough with recent understandings of spirituality, and the rapidly developing field of spirituality studies, as being concerned with lived experience. See, for example, Sandra Schneiders, “Approaches to the Study of Christian Spirituality,” in The Blackwell Companion to Christian Spirituality, ed. Arthur Holder (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2005, 2011), 16. One might well further say that experience is the basis upon which philosophy, theology, and religious studies themselves ultimately rest.

7. Prof. Dr. Martin Wendte insightfully brought my attention more fully to the relationships Hegel and Schelling developed between their thought on various religions of the world and their thought on Trinity.