Christ and the Cosmos
Christ and the Cosmos
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The concept of the 'social Trinity', which posits three conscious subjects in God, radically revised the traditional Christian idea of the Creator. It promoted a view of God as a passionate, creative and responsive source of all being. Keith Ward argues that social Trinitarian thinking threatens the unity of God, however, and that this new view of God does not require a 'social' component. Expanding on the work of theologians such as Barth and Rahner, who insisted that there was only one mind of God, Ward offers a coherent, wholly monotheistic interpretation of the Trinity. Christ and the Cosmos analyses theistic belief in a scientific context, demonstrating the necessity of cosmology to theological thinking that is often overly myopic and anthropomorphic. This important volume will benefit those who seek to understand what the Trinity is, why it matters and how it fits into a scientific account of the universe.
- Presents a clear Trinitarian account of God that avoids the confusion and needless paradoxes of much traditional theology
- Preserves belief in the unity of God by critiquing the 'social Trinity'
- Provides an explanation of the Trinity that non-Christian monotheists can understand, facilitating interfaith conversation about this divisive issue
Product details
August 2015Hardback
9781107112360
280 pages
235 × 157 × 21 mm
0.53kg
Available
Table of Contents
- Part I. The Threefold Nature of the Divine Being:
- 1. Introduction: talking about the Trinity
- 2. Why we may need to restate the ways in which we talk about the Trinity
- 3. The doctrine of divine simplicity
- 4. Cosmological and axiological explanation
- 5. Divine potentiality and temporality
- Part II. The Biblical Sources of Trinitarian Thought:
- 6. Three centres of consciousness?
- 7. The synoptic Gospels
- 8. John's Gospel
- 9. The Trinity in the Epistles
- 10. The idea of incarnation
- Part III. The Trinity, Immanent and Economic:
- 11. Why three?
- 12. Trinity and revelation
- 13. Hegel and modern theology
- 14. The immanent Trinity
- 15. The identity of the immanent and the economic Trinity
- 16. Hegel again
- 17. What creation adds to the Trinity
- 18. The epistemic priority of the economic Trinity
- 19. The Trinity and naive realism
- 20. The Trinity and the cosmos
- 21. Revelation and the immanent Trinity
- Part IV. The Social Trinity:
- 22. Persons and substances
- 23. The idea of a personal and free creation
- 24. The logical uniqueness of persons
- 25. The divine nature and freedom
- 26. Freedom in God and in creatures
- 27. Persons as necessarily relational
- 28. An ontology of the personal?
- 29. Intra-Trinitarian love
- 30. Infinite goods
- 31. Divine love and necessity
- 32. Love and alterity
- 33. Trinity versus Monotheism
- 34. The passion of Christ
- 35. God and abandonment
- Part V. The Cosmic Trinity:
- 36. The doctrine of perichoresis
- 37. The convergence of social and unipersonal models of the Trinity
- 38. Life-streams and persons
- 39. Modalism and necessity
- 40. The cosmic Trinity.
