God For Us: The Trinity and Christian Life.

Some months back, Robert Egan wrote an article in Commonweal bearing the intriguing title, "Why Theology Is Hard to Read (and Why You Should Do It Anyway)" [March 8, 1991]. I thought of Egan's article as I was preparing this review of Catherine Mowry LaCugna's theologically important, intellectually demanding, and spiritually enriching new book. Here, indeed, is a work both hard to read and, without any doubt, well worth the effort. LaCugna cares enough to think theologically and critically; and pays her readers the compliment of assuming they care enough too. She movingly reiterates Augustine's confession in the course of his own Trinitarian reflection: "nowhere else is the error more dangerous, the search more laborious, and the results more rewarding."

Not that the difficulty of the book is the result of LaCugna's style. She is usually clear, provides helpful recapitulations, rises at times to real eloquence. Rather, the issues of Trinitarian doctrine, the Christian understanding of the very nature of ultimate reality, are themselves theoretically demanding. Even more important, they are determinative of what Christians may hope for and what they are called to embody in practice. Traditionally, many of these issues have been framed in categories like "substance" and "hypostasis" now somewhat strange to us and requiring a goodly amount of historical retrieval and imagination to discern their religious and philosophical import.

LaCugna structures her book in two almost equal parts. Part 1, "The Emergence and Defeat of the Doctrine of the Trinity," sketches the New Testament's proclamation of the salvation effected by God through Jesus Christ in the Holy Spirit and examines subsequent theological reflection upon this "economy" of salvation, leading to the formulation of the classical doctrine of the Trinity. Insightful chapters are devoted to Arius and Athanasius, the Cappadocians and Augustine, Thomas Aquinas and Gregory Palamas: an amazing accomplishment in this age of extreme specialization. Though specialists may take issue with one or another of her historical interpretations, her undertaking is an exemplary one and provides informed discussion of the Trinitarian reflections of the authoritative teachers of the Eastern and Western church.

According to LaCugna, however, the supreme irony of this development of the classical doctrine of the Trinity was that it eventuated in the "defeat" of what it sought to preserve. She contends that there developed an increasing gap between the experiential appreciation of God's salvific action whose pattern is Trinitarian - the redemption and return of all humanity through Christ to God in the Holy Spirit (the so-called "economic Trinity") - and the theoretical positing of a separate intra-Trinitarian realm in which the divine persons dwell in sublime isolation, relating exclusively to one another (the so-called "immanent Trinity"). As I understand LaCugna, she views this development as both unwarranted and destructive. Attention shifted from experiential reflection on the mystery of God's loving action on our behalf in the economy of salvation to the abstract and conceptual problematic of how God could be both one and three in God's "inner life."

This unhappy disjunction of the Trinity of the economy of salvation, who is ever God for us, from the presumed immanent and self-sufficient life of God in himself, comprises the defeat of the original intent of the doctrine of the Trinity. The fixation upon God's "inner life," independent of creation and redemption, resulted in a loss of its power to lead into a deeper appropriation of God's ongoing transformation of humanity through Christ and in the Spirit. Hence part 2 of the book, "Re-Conceiving the Doctrine of the Trinity in Light of the Mystery of Salvation," is LaCugna's effort to repair the breach, to reknit the bonds between our experience of God's action on our behalf and our theological affirmations about the very being of God. Her ambitious attempt at Trinitarian aggiornamento exhibits both speculative skill and spiritual sensitivity. It is animated throughout by the sound conviction that the doctrine of the Trinity is of the utmost practical import, with clear consequences for Christian living. I shall highlight some of the strengths that characterize her "re-conception"; and then raise some questions regarding aspects of her enterprise.

LaCugna's first strength lies in her single-minded focus upon the "economy of salvation." Soteriology, reflection upon the meaning of God's salvation through Christ, and pneumatology, reflection upon the Spirit's ongoing transformation of humanity in the image of Christ, thus stand as the wellspring and ongoing reference for every understanding of the triune identity of God. God for Us is imbued with the urgency to keep the God/human relation, revealed and realized in the Trinitarian economy of salvation and confessed in the ecclesial community, as the concrete context for any further theologizing either about God or about humanity. It is charged with its author's conviction, based on the gospel, that "God's economy is not the austere distribution of meager resources but lavish grace, a glorious inheritance, bestowed in prodigal good pleasure, fore-ordained to be consummated." For LaCugna Christology and pneumatology must again become ingredient to Trinitarian theology, not way stations to be left behind once one has attained the speculative heights of Godhead considered in itself, as she holds classical Trinitarian teaching tended to do.

Further, and this is LaCugna's second strength, the privileged setting for such theologizing is the worship of the community, which replicates and reenacts the concrete pattern of our salvation: to the Father through Jesus Christ in the Holy Spirit. This doxological climate is not a decorative "add-on" to theological reflection, but the very condition of its fruitful possibility. "The worship and praise of God is the living context, the precondition even, for the theological enterprise as a whole." It is not surprising, then, to find her showing a predilection for the theology of Saint Bonaventure, as much for its spiritual affectivity as for its Trinitarian acumen. In a lovely sentence, redolent of Bonaventurean sensibility, she writes: "Praise is the creature's mode of ecstasis, its own self-transcendence, its disinclination to remain self-contained." The God who is for us is also to be worshiped for God's Self.

The third characteristic of LaCugna's work is her insistence that "relation" must serve as the key category in fill reflection upon the God who saves us through Christ and in the Spirit. "Person," whether in divinity or humanity, is never self-contained, but always ecstatic, relational. And the God revealed in the ongoing economy of salvation is the tri-personal God, who calls man and woman to covenantal relation with God and with all humankind. Indeed, the purpose of God's economy of creation and redemption is to establish this all-inclusive communion of persons. Following the contemporary Greek Orthodox theologian and bishop, John Zizioulas, LaCugna holds that the Trinitarian economy of salvation makes manifest that communion of persons is the ultimate reality: that to be is to be in communion.

This summary gives but a taste of the range and richness of LaCugna's achievement. Pondering her book also raised a number of questions. Foremost among them stands the concern whether her unremitting effort to overcome the dichotomy between economic and immanent Trinity risks jeopardizing the distinction between God's salvific work for human good and the very goodness who is God and whose action in both creation and redemption proceeds from a sovereign freedom that infinitely transcends created reality.

At times LaCugna seems to be simply underscoring the fact that we are not dealing with different Gods when we speak of economic and immanent Trinity. At other times, however, the insistence is so pressed as almost to abolish the distinction. Thus she pays deserved homage to Karl Rahner for helping to revitalize Catholic Trinitarian thinking; but then criticizes him for being too tied to a "post-Nicene problematic," itself in need of revision, "because of the postulation of an intradivine self-communication." Indeed, so chary is she of speaking of God's "inner life" that the impression can be unwittingly conveyed of a God who is but a function of human community.

At issue here is not whether our only access to the Mystery of the triune God is through the economy, the "missions" of Christ and the Spirit, sent for us and our salvation. All readily concede the point. It is, rather, whether we discern, through this Trinitarian pattern of salvation, a true apprehension of the God who, in God's own life, is communion of persons. There are pages of God for Us which seem to respond affirmatively and thus to transcend a Kantian restriction of our knowledge to the merely phenomenal: a position the Catholic tradition, with its critical realism, vigorously repudiates. Yet other passages hesitate and seem to lapse into a cognitive agnosticism as to whether, for example, God would be triune were there no creation. One senses in LaCugna a divided mind on the matter, with a final position still in flux and formulations not yet fixed.

Beneath the more rarified epistemological debates looms another religiously acute problem. Contrary to the post-Nicene tendency, can Christian theology legitimately attribute suffering to God? By restricting Christ's suffering to his human nature, classical theology seems to insulate divinity from the full experience of incamation and thus not do full justice to the New Testament witness. Modem theology has, since Hegel, brought the issue to the forefront of its concerns: may God be said to be affected by the created universe to the point of, in some sense, sharing its suffering? LaCugna clearly opts for a positive response. She views the anti-Arian reaction as to some degree the triumph of a philosophical view of God's impassibility over the biblical revelation of God's cruciform love in Christ. Unfortunately, she tends here simply to affirm rather than argue the case. This is particularly disappointing in that the doxological consequences of her position alone call for a more extended elaboration.

A final question concerns the legitimacy of the post-Nicene development itself. At times LaCugna appears almost nostalgic for a pre-Nicene, indeed biblical pattern of reflection, predominantly functional in orientation. From this vantage the conciliar development smacks of a "Hellenization" of the gospel, an intrusion of an incompatible ontology. At other times the inevitability of the post-Nicene response is acknowledged, though its one-sidedness is lamented. One wonders, then, whether the book sufficiently differentiates between the doctrine of the Trinity, confessed by the church and constitutive of its nature, and Trinitarian theologies. That is: between the church's normative doctrine, whose parameters are established by conciliar definitions, and theologians' ongoing efforts to appropriate and extend our understanding of the Trinitarian faith we profess. Here again the reader encounters a certain ambiguity that reinforces one's uncertainty about the ultimate intent of the study as a whole. Did the church's doctrine of the Trinity meet "defeat"; or did theological reflection and pastoral discernment fail to realize the doctrine's radical implications?

I am conscious that the questions and issues I have raised are replete with "seems" and "appears." Perhaps this bespeaks the fact that serious theology is indeed hard to read, even for full-time theologians! LaCugna's book is serious theology and very worth the wrestling. Her book will serve as an indispensable reference for future efforts to explore the reality of God for us: the blessed Trinity.