A lively debate has been heating up among some of the foremost authorities on Karl Barth as they seek to answer a crucial point of contention: Is the Trinity complete in itself from all eternity or is it constituted by the eternal decision of election? Trinity and Election in Contemporary Theology offers a collection of essays that seek to address this question through rigorous and critical treatment of select topics in the theology of Karl Barth by contemporary interpreters from both Protestant and Roman Catholic perspectives.
Karl Barth and his legacy have dominated theology circles for over a decade. In this volume George Hunsinger, a world-renowned expert on Barth's theology, makes an authoritative contribution to the debate concerning Barth's trinitarian theology and doctrine of election. Hunsinger challenges a popular form of Barth interpretation pertaining to the Trinity, demonstrating that there is no major break in Barth's thought between the earlier and the later Barth of the Church Dogmatics. Hunsinger also discusses important issues in trinitarian theology and Christology that extend beyond the contemporary Barth debates. This major statement will be valued by professors and students of systematic theology, scholars, and readers of Barth.
Robert Letham's award-winning The Holy Trinity receives a well-considered update in this revised and expanded new edition. Letham examines the doctrine of the Trinity's biblical foundations and traces its historical development through the twentieth century before engaging four critical issues: the Trinity and (1) the incarnation, (2) worship and prayer, (3) creation and missions, and (4) persons. The new edition addresses developments in Augustine studies, teaching on the Trinity and election in Barth studies, and contemporary evangelical disputes on the relation of the Son to the Father.
Drawing together scholars whose essays exhibit work after Barth in engaging the doctrine of the Trinity and its related themes. Barth's thought, as evidenced amongst his most expert commentators, allows for a variety of interpretations, the details of which are being hammered out on the pages of academic journals and volumes such as this one. It is this variety of responses to and interpretations of Barth's theology that gives such vibrancy to the essays in this volume by seasoned Barth scholars and voices new to the conversation.
Revision of author's thesis (Ph. D.)--University of St Andrews, 2006 under title: Re-imaging election: the Holy Spirit and the dynamic of election to representation.
In the last half of the 20th century, a consensus emerged that Christian theology in the Western tradition had failed to produce a viable doctrine of the Holy Spirit, and that Augustine's trinitarian theology bore the blame for much of that failure. This book offers a fresh rereading of Western trinitarian theology to better understand the logic of its pneumatology. Ables studies the pneumatologies of Augustine and Karl Barth, and argues that the vision of the doctrine of the Spirit in these theologians should be understood as a way of talking about participating in the mystery of God as a performance of the life of Christ. He claims that for both theologians trinitarian doctrine encapsulates the grammar of the divine self-giving in history. The function of pneumatology in particular is to articulate the human reception and enactment of God's self-giving as itself part of the act of God; this "self-involving" logic is the special grammar of the doctrine of the Holy Spirit.
The book aims at showing the most important topics and paradigms in modern Trinitarian theology. It is supposed to be a comprehensive guide to the many traces of development of Trinitarian faith. As such it is thought to systematize the variety of contemporary approaches to the field of Trinitarian theology in the present philosophical-cultural context. The main goal of the publication is not only a description of what happened to Trinitarian theology in the modern age. It is rather to indicate the typically modern specificity of the Trinitarian debate and - first of all - to encourage development in the main areas and issues of this subject.
Freedom and Necessity in Modern Trinitarian Theology examines the tension between God and the world through a constructive reading of the Trinitarian theologies and Christologies of Sergii Bulgakov (1871-1944), Karl Barth (1886-1968), and Hans Urs von Balthasar (1905-1988). It focuses on what is called "the problematic of divine freedom and necessity" and the response of the writers. "Problematic" refers to God being simultaneously radically free and utterly bound to creation. God did not need to create and redeem the world in Christ. It is a contingent free gift. Yet, on the other side of a dialectic, he also has eternally determined himself to be God as Jesus Christ. He must create and redeem the world to be God as he has so determined. In this way the world is given a certain "free necessity" by him because if there were no world then there would be no Christ. A spectrum of different concepts of freedom and necessity and a theological ideal of a balance between the same are outlined and then used to illumine the writers and to articulate a constructive response to the problematic. Brandon Gallaher shows that the classical Christian understanding of God having a non-necessary relationship to the world and divine freedom being a sheer assertion of God's will must be completely rethought. Gallaher proposes a Trinitarian, Christocentric, and cruciform vision of divine freedom. God is free as eternally self-giving, self-emptying and self-receiving love. The work concludes with a contemporary theology of divine freedom founded on divine election.
This authoritative book introducing Karl Barth is written by leading scholars of his work, drawn from Europe and North America. They offer challenging yet accessible accounts of the major features of Barth's theological work, especially as it has become available through the publication of his collected works, and interact with the very best of contemporary Barth scholarship. The contributors also assess Barth's significance for contemporary constructive theology, and his place in the history of twentieth-century Christian thought. The Companion both sums up and extends recent renewed interest in Barth's theology, especially in English-speaking theology, and shows him to be once again a major voice in constructive theology.
