The title of James Alison's publication Undergoing God: Dispatches from the Scene of a Break-in provides one way of thinking about the significance of feminist theologies within the recent widespread revival of the doctrine of the Trinity. The image of a “break-in” communicates something of the disruptive and unexpected. At times the effects of a break-in are immediate and obvious, at other times they are only discovered gradually. A break-in can also cause dismay and anger, which need to be dealt with as quickly as possible so that life can proceed as before. However, in terms of the spiritual life, a break-in has a positive connotation: an in-breaking of the Spirit heralds conversion and transformation. The systematic theologian Anne Carr uses the term “transforming grace” to describe the gift of feminist theology to the church. It is in this sense that I will use “break-in” in this chapter.

In order to explore the contribution of feminist theologies to the evolving reception of the mystery of God as Trinity, I have taken account of the work of feminist theologians from various cultures and perspectives, including womanist, mujerista, and Asian theologians, and then examined the mosaic that came to light. To communicate the essential elements of the patterns that emerged, I will use Alison's evocative image and describe dispatches from five scenes of a feminist break-in on trinitarian discourse. These dispatches will use the theologians' own voices as directly as possible. I will then summarize the various strands of the collective picture.

Hughes’s poetry from his first book to the last can be regarded as expressing one poet’s personal myth of his quest for what Keith Sagar has called ‘healing truths’ that both he himself and his society needed. For Hughes the poet, one way of achieving such insights is by taking a shamanistic approach to thinking and writing about animals. In one of his letters to Moelwyn Merchant in 1990, Hughes explains his long-standing interest in shamanism and the role of animals in it. He said that it was actually shamanism that had helped him see the connection between ‘everything that concerned [him]’, such as his ‘preoccupation with animal life’, his mythologies and a series of his recurring dreams (LTH 579). And underneath them all, what he found was a deeper connection between animal life and the divine world, a world that animals have always been living in and that humans are separated from, a world that is sometimes termed ‘the animal/spiritual consciousness’. In Hughes’s view, what he called ‘the divine being’ is the state of a shaman whose cultural ego has collapsed and who has then plunged back into an animal/spiritual consciousness that is not only his own, but that of his whole group.

Exploring “Trinity in/and the New Testament” is a challenging task. Francis Watson points to some of those challenges when he summarizes certain trends in recent New Testament scholarship in relation to Trinity:

Addressing the question of Trinity in the New Testament could, therefore, be seen among some biblical scholars as a retrospective act, one which entails a looking back anachronistically at first-century texts through the lens of a fourth-century doctrine. Such an approach can lead to survey articles which gather texts across the New Testament containing or hinting at “trinitarian formulae” or the naming of G*d as Father, Son, and Spirit. Recent scholarship has, however, challenged biblical scholars to undertake a more nuanced approach to the task. In this chapter, I propose to explore and lay out some of the contemporary hermeneutical and interpretive issues involved in the naming of G*d as Trinity and/in the New Testament, leading to an articulation of a multi-layered approach. The limitations of this chapter will, however, allow me the space to explore only the first layer of the approach, and I will do this through the gospel of Matthew. It is my hope that this limited beginning will encourage readers to explore further the rich and complex imaging of G*d in the New Testament, only some of which drew later theologians into naming G*d as triune.

In the opening verses of his first letter to the Thessalonian community, among the very earliest texts of the New Testament, the Apostle Paul refers to three dramatis personae, God and Father, our Lord Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit:

What is remarkable is that, even at this early stage, the community is clearly well acquainted with this triadic pattern. No explanation is offered; evidently none is necessary. The pattern is apparently already well established as the distinctively and typically Christian way of speaking of God.

Oscar Wilde remarked that criticism is the only civilized form of autobiography, while Virginia Woolf believed that all Shakespearean criticism is as much about the critic’s self as the dramatist’s plays. Shakespeare is a mirror in which serious readers and spectators see sharpened images of themselves and their own worlds.

Shakespeare was the absolute centre of Ted Hughes’s sense of the English literary tradition. The plays were a major influence on his own poetry, in terms of both linguistic intensity and thematic preoccupation. The world of Hughes’s verse is one in which, as Macbeth puts it, ‘light thickens, and the crow / Makes wing to the rooky wood’. More than any other poet, Shakespeare assaulted Hughes — one of the great literary readers of the twentieth century — with the shock of the as-if-new. An unpublished journal entry dated 22 January 1998 begins ‘The idea of flamingoes. Of clam-dippers. Read with amazement: “Mine eye hath played the painter and hath stell’d” as if I’d never seen it before’. This is what Hughes did throughout his life: read Shakespeare with amazement, as if he had never read him before. The key to Shakespearean acting is to speak each line as if it were being spoken for the first time, as if it were new minted from the thought-chamber of the character who utters it.

One of the striking aspects of Hans Urs von Balthasar's work is the integration of his reflections on the Trinity – on the eternal, inner life of the Trinity, in particular – into the fabric of his thought as a whole. A good deal of recent theology has been preoccupied with the question of what to do with the Trinity: how to make clear the relevance of a doctrine which surely ought to be central, but which, with its “substance” and hypostasis, its “processions” and “relations,” can seem like nothing but a series of technicalities and intellectual difficulties. In the context of Balthasar's theology, such questions simply do not need to be raised. One finds in his work, that is to say, both a very vivid depiction of the inner life of the Trinity and one which is genuinely integral to his presentation of the story of salvation. Whether ultimately he has the right to such a vivid picture of the eternal life of God is a question we shall ask below, as is also whether the integration he achieves requires too resolved a vision – too positive a vision, indeed – of suffering and evil. But we will begin by examining some of the ways in which Balthasar interweaves (to use the usual terms) economic and immanent Trinity.

mission christology and the trinity

In his “Outline of Christology” in the third volume of the Theodramatik (Theo-Drama), Balthasar highlights as the central, defining feature of Jesus’ existence his consciousness of mission. This, especially when coupled with an insistence on his absolute identification with this mission, allows for a striking integration of a reading of the life of Jesus with classic formulations of the Son's eternal procession from the Father.

No trinitarian theology has exercised as much influence on Catholic theology as has that of St. Thomas Aquinas, yet no trinitarian theology has proven as difficult to comprehend either. In this chapter I begin with the ontological constitution of the Trinity in terms of processions, relations, and persons. I then go on to discuss the personal characteristics of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and the logic of the immanent processions as the grammar of God's action in the world. I will end with a brief reflection on his relation to the patristic tradition, East and West, and on his challenges to our contemporary reconstructive tasks. My presentation is largely based on his Summa theologiae (The Summa of Theology) i, qq. 27–43, and Summa contra gentiles (known in English as On the Truth of the Catholic Faith) iv, 1–26.

the ontological constitution of the trinity: processions, relations, persons

The most important systematic question of all trinitarian theology is perhaps the question concerning the origin of plurality or threeness in God, a being whose very essence is so uniquely “one” as to be “simple” in the sense of having no internal ontological composition in the way that finite entities do. How can there be three persons in the one God whose very essence is identical with his existence? How does one show the possibility of this plurality without falling into tritheism or modalism, the two extremes that an orthodox trinitarian theology must avoid? Aquinas takes on this question in the most orderly, systematic way. There are many steps to his answer.

in search of the trinity

In terms of this overview of the Greek patristic theology of the Trinity, it might keep us from sinking into a welter of details to imagine five great acts of a play, each of which is differently weighted, to be sure, but which are all, in their own ways, progressive variations upon biblical premises, mediated through the lived experience of the church. The first is the sparse collection of second-century theologians. The second is the quickening of pace that occurred in the third-century Apologists. The third is the towering genius of Origen of Alexandria, whose work began a revolution. The fourth (a long-drawn-out scene) is the Nicene and post-Nicene reactions to Origen. Finally, Act Five – are we still in it? – is the bemused aftermath, a long quieting-down as the Trinity becomes a fixed dogma, a quieting that often lapses into silence.

This patristic period may be startling because of the speed and variety with which schools of thought during this time spun out new reflections on deeply mysterious ideas about God and his action in the cosmos. Yet it is also illuminating in that it shows how fluid and inter-reactive the early Christian theologians were. In general, for the Fathers, the scriptures and the liturgical mysteries of the church were always more immediately influential than anything else.

the bible as the “exclusive” source of revelation and the “only” authority

The sixteenth-century Protestant Reformation, which is considered by many to be one of the most important events in the history of Christianity, was much indebted to the Renaissance. There is a wisecrack that Erasmus laid the egg and Luther hatched it. In the view of many of the most ardent Reformers, this humorous saying, however, may be an overstatement. There is a sizable consensus that the Reformation was connected to the Renaissance only to the extent that it restricted the Renaissance's call to return to the ancient sources (ad fontes) to an acceptance of the Bible as the exclusive source of faith (sola scriptura). This principle solidified the normative authority of the Bible for all things theological and liturgical in the life of the church. The power of the Word was directly related to the power of the message of the Bible. According to the Reformers, the gospel message had to be emancipated from the oppressive authority of the Roman Catholic Church and its tradition, and thereby was set free to work directly on human hearts.

All biographies are impossible, but Ted Hughes’s is more impossible than others. One of the reasons for this is that he was made a character in the life-story of Sylvia Plath. Witness the title of one of the two Ted Hughes biographies to date: Her Husband: Hughes and Plath – A Marriage. Of course, Diane Middlebrook came to Hughes from an interest in Ann Sexton and Sylvia Plath. Her approach testified to the construction of a personage called ‘Ted Hughes’ that took place early on in his own lifetime, originating in Sylvia Plath’s poems and her extremely detailed journals and letters, which are one of the main documentary sources for any Hughes biographer. The earlier biography, Elaine Feinstein’s Ted Hughes; The Life of a Poet, while still relying heavily on Plath’s writings, had already attempted to broaden the scope of what was then known by using first-hand correspondence and conversations with people who had been personally acquainted with the poet. Of course, huge new sources of information were discovered with the opening in the year 2000 of the Ted Hughes Archives in the Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library of Emory University in Atlanta. This consists of a major part of Hughes’s letters, drafts, notebooks and drawings, and it provides ample material for a literary biography of Ted Hughes that could not but lead to a genuine reappraisal of the figure of both the man and the poet. The full achievement of this remains impossible, however, because part of the archive remains sealed off, withdrawn from public inspection until the year 2023.

In Chapter 2 Paul Bentley argues that part of the shock of Hughes’s first two books arose from his conception of ‘nature’ as what Bentley calls ‘social and even political’. In Chapter 3 Chen Hong shows how Hughes’s early animal poems were actually offered as challenges to human nature. By the time of Remains of Elmet (1979) Hughes had come to regard human culture as nature – industry, farms and people not only embedded in nature in the Calder Valley of West Yorkshire, but suffering the same processes of growth and decay: mill chimneys ‘flower’ before ‘they must fall into the only future, into earth’ (CP 457); over the generations mill workers become ‘four-cornered, stony’ as the local stone, itself ‘conscripted / Into mills’ (CP 463); scattered moorland settlements decay as ‘the fragments / Of the broken circle of the hills / Drift apart’ (CP 485). What is striking is that culture is so deeply embedded in nature that nature can also be represented as culture. Beyond the separations of simile, there is also metaphor working both ways: ‘the silence of ant-warfare on pine needles / is like the silence of clogs over cobbles’ (CP 456); the sky is a millstone ‘Grinding the skin off earth’ (CP 474). A natural silence is like the historical absence of workers’ clogs, but also, just as mill chimneys ‘flower’, weather slowly grinds the earth’s skin off. What is left of that skin are the fragments of gritstone outcrops that, in the final lines of the poem ‘Heptonstall’, can stand for both nature and the fragments of half-abandoned villages. Both outcrops and villages ‘drift apart’ in a geological timescale that changes circles of geography and history in a completely natural cyclical process.

The purpose of this chapter is to discuss the contributions to trinitarian thought of the Reformed theologian Jürgen Moltmann and the Lutheran Wolfhart Pannenberg. To treat them together with regard to the content of their trinitarian theologies is justifiable because in spite of all their differences, these two German theologians both echo and have shaped nearly all the key themes of the doctrine of the Trinity in contemporary theology.

In order to orient the reader to the context and background of these two trinitarian theologies as well as the state of current discussion, a list of key themes follows here:

1. Following Barth and Rahner, both Moltmann and Pannenberg seek to ground the Trinity in revelation and salvation history rather than in abstract speculation.

2. Therefore, Rahner's Rule – beginning with oikonomia (God's actions in history) to speak of theologia (who and what God is) – has become a standard principle.

3. Again, following both Rahner and Barth, the “turn to history” has become one of the contemporary canons of trinitarian reflection.

4. The “turn to history” has made reflection on the relationship between the economic and immanent Trinity a focal issue.

5. Contrary to tradition, threeness is taken for granted, while the unity of God becomes the challenge.

6. Consequently, eschatology has risen to a new position of appreciation in trinitarian theology.

7. Because of the turn to the social analogy under the leadership of Moltmann, the “practical” implications of Trinity are being discussed in a fresh way.

Anyone familiar with the gargantuan theological output of the German Jesuit theologian Karl Rahner (1904–1984) can hardly miss the irony that for someone who is universally hailed as the most influential contributor to the renaissance of trinitarian theology in the twentieth century, at least in the Catholic Church, and who vigorously insists that the Trinity be the center of theology and Christian life, the bulk of his explicit writings on the Trinity is minuscule. His synthetic magnum opus Grundkurs des Glauben (Foundations of Christian Faith) contains barely four pages on the Trinity, entitled “Towards an Understanding of the Doctrine of the Trinity.” Apart from a handful of pieces in his Schriften zur Theologie (Theological Investigations) and two entries in the encyclopedia Sacramentum mundi, Rahner's longest writing on the Trinity is a booklet-length contribution to a handbook of theology.

Why, then, in spite of the paucity of his writings on the Trinity, is Rahner celebrated as the initiator of the rediscovery of the Trinity in Catholic theology? Does this paucity reflect a lack of consistency between Rahner's theory and praxis? Or could it be argued that it is precisely because the Trinity so thoroughly informs the structure and contents of Foundations of Christian Faith that a lengthy treatment of it is unnecessary? What is so significant about his trinitarian theology, and in which ways has it renewed the Christian theology of the Trinity? To answer these questions would require, first, situating Rahner's trinitarian theology in the context of the Catholic neo-scholastic or manualistic theology which was the staple fare in Catholic seminaries until the 1960s and, second, examining in detail, albeit within a very limited space, its major tenets.

There is only one poem in the 1972 Faber and Faber revised edition of Crow: From the Life and Songs of the Crow, the edition used for the Collected Poems, that has never been collected in a US edition: ‘Crowcolour’. The 1972 Faber edition ‘Publisher’s Note’ states: ‘This new edition of Crow contains seven new poems which did not appear in the original edition. They are: . . .’ Since all seven of the new poems had appeared in the 1971 first American edition, the note gives the impression that the only difference between the 1970 Faber first edition and the 1972 augmented Faber are the new poems. The note does not mention that one poem, ‘Crowcolour’, was deleted from the 1970 Faber first edition before the seven new poems were added to the American edition.

Crow poems were appearing regularly in American magazines in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and ‘Crowcolour’ was one of them, published on its own on 14 November 1970 in the New Yorker, its first and last US appearance. The poem is so understated, slipped between the monumental twins of ‘Crow Improvises’ and ‘Crow’s Battle Fury’ in Crow, that one would not notice its disappearance. ‘Crowcolour’ also has the fewest words of any poem in the Faber first edition — thirty-three (‘Glimpse’ has thirty-four).

The first question that faces anyone writing on early Latin trinitarian theology is that of when or with whom to begin the account. The earliest Western Christian texts were written in Greek: should they be considered part of “Latin trinitarian theology”? Should some of these Greek writings be considered “Latin” on the basis of their origin in Rome (or Gaul)? The Greek work Contra Noetum (Against Noetus) attributed to Hippolytus and written in Rome is so like Tertullian's Latin Adversus Praxean (Against Praxeas) written in Carthage that the two works seem almost to originate from the same community. I have opted for the straightforward criterion of language: if a text was originally written in Latin it falls within my brief. This decision allows one to discern continuities of vocabulary across texts, for example. Once this decision has been made, two important facts reveals themselves: the font of Latin trinitarian theology is Tertullian, and the internal disposition – the “logic” – of that theology originates in anti-monarchianism.

“All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit” (Mt 28:18–19, NRSV). So is Jesus reported to have said to his eleven disciples on a mountain in Galilee. While biblical scholars dispute whether these words are Jesus’ ipsissima verba or a baptismal formula of the early church retroactively placed on Jesus’ lips, the verse is an incontrovertible indication that faith in God who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, in whose name (note the singular “name” and not “names”) baptism is administered, is already present in the New Testament itself. It has been correctly pointed out that the Christian faith in the Trinity should not be understood to be based exclusively on explicitly triadic formulae such as the above-cited verse, 1 Corinthians 12:4–6, 2 Corinthians 13:14, 1 Peter 1:2, and so on. Rather, the trinitarian data of the New Testament include all the exceedingly numerous texts that speak of the relationship between Jesus and the Father, between Jesus and the Spirit, between the Father and the Spirit, and among the Father, Jesus, and the Spirit. Indeed, the literary structure itself of most New Testament books is arguably trinitarian. In addition, the reality of the Trinity is present not only in certain New Testament formulations but also in the events of Jesus’ life and ministry, in particular his conception, baptism, transfiguration, and death and resurrection, and at the Pentecost. Finally, it can reasonably be claimed that there are already intimations or adumbrations of the Trinity in the Old Testament such as the many names used for God (e.g., Wisdom, Word, Spirit), the “angel of Yahweh” figure, and some theophanies (e.g., the three men in Gen 18:1–2 or the threefold Sanctus of Isaiah's vision in Isa 6:3).

Noriaki Ito is the Rinban (a kind of abbot or pastor) of the Higashi Hongan-ji Betsuin, a century-old Buddhist community in the Little Tokyo neighborhood of Los Angeles. He is a Pure Land Buddhist of the Jodōshinshū sect. Nori has been my friend for many years. He is also my teacher in matters of Buddhist faith, as I am his in matters of Christian faith. We have spent many happy hours sharing our respective faiths and learning from one another important truths. In this chapter, I want to reflect on certain aspects of the doctrine of the Holy Trinity in light of what I have learned from Nori and other Pure Land Buddhists, both in Los Angeles and in Japan. Especially, I want to reflect on the Trinity in light of the Pure Land Buddhist teaching of the “Primordial Vow” (hongan), in which the ultimate character of all reality is affirmed as utterly selfless compassion. Nori may be my teacher, but the errors in this chapter, regarding both Buddhism and Christianity, are my own. Therefore I am the one “to be beaten with his own stick,” as the Japanese proverb has it. I shall consider this chapter a huge success if these preliminary reflections lead to more Christian thinking about the Trinity in light of the teachings of Buddhism.