Introduction
More than any other English theologian of the late twentieth century, Colin Gunton is known as a theologian who tried to structure his whole theological enterprise from a trinitarian perspective. The doctrine of the Trinity, in combination with the notions of divine personhood and communion, not only gains a prominent place within his theological system but also lends him a helping hand in establishing an overall framework for doing theology which manifests itself in three open transcendentals – substantiality, relationality and perichoresis. With this rather conceptual and cognitive approach, however, Gunton attempts both to enhance our theological understanding of God and the world and to solve some of the problems of our modern culture. Hence I want to suggest that Gunton's ‘trinitarian’ ambitions are easily misunderstood if they are disconnected from his intellectual struggle with modern culture. This article seeks to give a brief account of Gunton's trinitarian approach understood as a direct response to his interpretation of modern culture. To pursue this aim I will divide my article into two parts. In the first part my intention will be to focus on Gunton's trinitarian project, following his thought from a cultural critical starting point finally leading to the establishment of three open transcendentals. After drawing attention to his main arguments, in the second part, then, I would like to offer some critical remarks, highlight inconsistencies and conclude with the proposal that Gunton's strong emphasis on relationality and open transcendentals could be understood as the result of his passionate aspiration to heal the wounds of an egocentric, individualistic and alienating modern culture through an ontology of communion.
Colin Gunton and his trinitarian project
A brief glimpse of his project
Colin Gunton's trinitarian enthusiasm is quite obvious from the very beginning. Theology, he argues in a straightforward Barthian manner, ‘does not begin in abstract observation, but in the work of those who stand in a particular relation to God. . . . To be a human being is to be related to the Father through the Son and in the Spirit, and it is the character of Christian experience to realise that relationship.’Footnote 1 Because revelation history has to be the point of departure for any reflection on God, God is, as he has revealed himself in the economy, as (what he really is in himself) Father, Son and Spirit, namely and first of all, in Gunton's understanding, a threeness of persons. Gunton is convinced that from a trinitarian point of view everything looks different. ‘Theology, . . . is the enterprise of thought which seeks to express conceptually and as well as possible both the being of God and the implications of that being for human existence on earth.’Footnote 2 Subsequently, trinitarian theology has to fulfil two tasks: first, to help Christians express their faith in God in a more appropriate and intelligible way and, second (what one could call the missionary function), to explain the content and the meaning of Christian faith to people who are outside the church.Footnote 3
However, this task can only be accomplished if it is worked out within the problems of modern culture and in dialogue with its key thinkers. His two most influential and acclaimed books, The One, the Three and the Many and The Promise of Trinitarian Theology, undoubtedly reveal and pursue this project. There, Gunton seeks with his trinitarian enterprise to find a way out of some of the dead ends of antiquity and of modern times and to search for new and inspiring ways to regain a theological understanding of God, humanity and creation in a postmodern world. I think it is important to notice that Gunton's theology is not just an attempt to reformulate trinitarian doctrine but rather displays an overall struggle with modernity and a fight against alienating and oppressive forms of human life and its destructive consequences for the world. Modern culture is the place where the modern battle between trinitarian theology, philosophy and modern science takes place. In The One, the Three and the Many Gunton quotes words from Robert Pippin's Modernism as a Philosophical Problem that clearly highlight his motivation: ‘modernity promised us a culture of unintimidated, curious, rational, self-reliant individuals, and it produced . . . a herd society, a race of anxious, timid, conformist “sheep”, and a culture of utter banality’.Footnote 4 What has gone wrong? How do these problems relate to Christianity and especially to the doctrine of God? Where is a way out? These are the questions Gunton is really concerned about. And it is in this context that his trinitarian theology has to be placed and his specific emphases have to be understood. There is no doubt about his conviction. What is at stake in all this is not only ‘the future of the Church, but also the being and flourishing of all humankind’.Footnote 5
Hence, in his struggle with modernity as a Christian thinker, a good portion of Gunton's writing can be marked ‘apologetic’.Footnote 6 His The One, the Three, and the Many can be read as a significant apologetic treatise which tries to heal the ailments of modernity and Christianity through a proper theological usage of trinitarian tools. He tries to unravel misleading threads within the Christian tradition. He tries to pin down where things went wrong and attempts, by doing so, to retrieve and regain a more appropriate theological understanding of the tradition and modern culture. This project leads him to the insight that the Trinity itself lies at the heart of the matter. The Many, that is to say the particular and plurality, were suppressed by the One. He boldly claims ‘that central dimensions of the thought and practice of antiquity and modernity share a common failure in conceiving and practising relationality’.Footnote 7 Moreover, he concludes ‘My contention is that the distinctive failures of our era derive from its failure of due relatedness to God, the one, the focus of the unity of all things. That is the pathos of modernity. In both the failed experiments of modern totalitarian régimes and the insidious homogeneity of consumer culture there is a tendency to submerge the many in the one.’Footnote 8 Gunton's theological analysis claims that it was precisely the loss of an appropriate understanding of the triune God which led to modernity's problems and in particular to the rise of egocentric individualism and the neglect of the central notion of communion. Consequently for Gunton, trinitarian theology is not one discipline beside others but rather the one and only discipline, which integrates all other concerns. His last two major publications, Act and Being and Father, Son and Holy Spirit, leave no doubt about that.Footnote 9 To put matters in a nutshell, what he is looking for is a trinitarian conceptualisation, which allows him to express the being of God and the implications of that being for human existence on earth.
Establishing a complex argument
It is well known that the heart of Gunton's trinitarian theology consists of the concepts of personhood and communion. However, what is probably less well known is the fact that this heart only beats due to its valves, which are called open transcendentals. But before commenting on these key concepts I would briefly like to draw attention to some epistemological questions which are important in order to understand Gunton's search for transcendentals as the valves that make it possible for personhood and communion to flow in and out of the heart of trinitarian theology.
To begin with it is vital to notice that Gunton's hermeneutical and methodological convictions are developed in full awareness of the charges normally put forward against theologians who are in favour of a social doctrine of the Trinity. The crucial point addressed usually is the relation between the doctrine and its implications for human life. It is here that critics raise their voices and warn against double projectionism.Footnote 10 Gunton himself criticises, for example, Catherine LaCugnaFootnote 11 and Ted PetersFootnote 12 for using the Trinity in a too straightforwardly analogical way. ‘That is to say, the doctrine of the Trinity is used as a kind of principle of explanation and ethics. Because God is like this, it is argued, then the world is, or ought to be, like that.’Footnote 13 With regard to epistemology and the quest for truth in a post-foundationalist age, he contends: ‘The quest must therefore be for non-foundationalist foundations: to find the moments of truth in both the contentions, namely that particularity and universality each have their place in a reasoned approach to truth.’Footnote 14 This clearly distinguishes Gunton from other trinitarian theologians who neglect the need for a proper integration of both concepts’ substance (expressing universality and oneness) and person (expressing particularity and communion). From this perspective, then, Gunton's project can be specified as the enterprise of finding a theological concept which is able to hold both the particular and the universal together, the Threeness or the Many and the Oneness, in respect to God and to creation. Due to this concern the notion of ‘conceptual similarity’ emerges as a methodological notion. Gunton envisages the following similarities.
With respect to the Trinity one is confronted with three particulars, that is to say, Father, Son and Spirit, distinct, yet one God. A kind of ‘otherness-in-perichoretic-relation’ structure emerges for Gunton. In regard to the world and humanity one faces a similar state of affairs, namely, many particulars yet one humanity in the image of God and many particles yet one universe. At this point, in regard to the latter, Gunton takes the modern scientific turn to relationality on board, emphasising that also, within the material world, it is possible to view particles as distinct while at the same time depending utterly on the whole, depending on relations. Hence he suggests that it can be shown ‘that much modern physics and cosmology appear to teach the perichoretic character of the universe’.Footnote 15 ‘Everything in the universe is what it is by virtue of its relatedness to everything else.’Footnote 16 Consequently, even in the created world one can perceive a kind of ‘otherness-in-perichoretic-relation’ structure. Finally, with respect to the relationship between God and the world and humanity as creation, there is also a structure of otherness-in-relation to be found. God is other, yet not opposed to the created world. God in Jesus is other, yet not opposed to humanity. It is Gunton's contention that, in order to escape the dangers of deism and pan(en)theism, in order to escape the one-sidedness of negative theology, on the one hand, and the charge of double projectionism, on the other hand, one has to look for conceptual similarities. Universal marks of being can neither be found in traits of human reason nor in bodily similarities.Footnote 17 Therefore, what Gunton is trying to achieve is an elaboration of a new conception of the notion of substance that does not neglect particularity, which obviously plays a major role within God's triune being as well as within creaturely existence, and nevertheless allows him to speak of a kind of universalism and oneness. This leads him to the development of what he calls ‘open transcendentals’. To this matter I will turn in a later section.
What I wanted to show and underscore in this section is that Gunton's argument proceeds on three levels. These levels have to be perceived as a hermeneutical circle in which one level cannot be fully appreciated without the other two. They form, so to speak, a perichoretic unity. On the first level he is concerned with the divine being as revealed in salvation history. The question is: what is the most appropriate conceptualisation for an understanding of God as Father, Son and Spirit, giving enough space to particularity and communion without neglecting the reality of oneness? On the second level, engaging with concepts of creation and human personhood, he is interested in two questions, a) in the relation between the particular and the universal (the one and the many) and b) in conceptual similarities with trinitarian language. Finally, on the third level, Gunton is preoccupied with the search for an adequate understanding of universal marks of being, open transcendentals, which allow him in due course to connect divine and human being. They are, as noted above, elaborated through a hermeneutics of conceptual similarities.
Trinitarian trajectories: divine personhood, perichoresis, communion
Gunton is clear about the fact that trinitarian theology, not neglecting biblical revelation, must go back behind the one-sided Western developments within the doctrine of God (i.e. giving priority to the One over the Three, substance over person) and regain the strength of the Greek Fathers in language and theology. The merit of the Cappadocian theologians, Gunton claims, was to separate and distinguish between the terms ousia and hypostasis, terms which up to their time had been used as synonyms for the discourse about God's being and subsequently contributed to the confusion and obscurity of the interpretation of the Nicene homoousion. At this point, indeed, Gunton observes a theological innovation. The precision of language, the separation of two synonyms and their subsequent fine and accurate distinction, enabled the Greek Fathers to think and conceive something new. The consequence of this move was that the Cappadocians could think of God's being as an everlasting and inseparable community.Footnote 18 Taking up this line of argument, Gunton emphasises that God is a Being-in-communion. In line with the Orthodox theologian, John Zizioulas, he can argue, that ‘[t]he substance of God, “God”, has no ontological content, no true being, apart from communion’.Footnote 19 With this statement he claims that the theology of the Cappadocians rightly observed that God could not be pressed into the conception of a mathematical ‘one’, but rather has to be conceived as a continuous and indivisible community.Footnote 20
The concept of perichoresis thus gains great significance, a concept that originally expressed – in agreement with the Nicene Creed and the theology of the Greek Fathers – the mutual dependency and inter-relatedness of the three divine persons. The notion ‘perichoresis’ expressed that, what one particular divine person is, it is only through its relation to the other two, so that ultimately for the understanding of God neither the number ‘one’ and thus the monas, nor the plural ‘three’ could claim priority. In this way the concept of perichoresis describes the unity of God as an interpenetrating plurality of the three divine persons. The importance of the concept of perichoresis, Gunton argues, lies in its safeguarding function in preventing theology from falling off to one or other side of the balance, leading either to a strict monotheism (with the result of subordinationism or modalism) or to tritheism. Perichoresis supports and conveys the understanding that the three persons of the Trinity only exist eternally in mutual interdependency and interrelatedness. ‘The three do not merely coinhere, but dynamically constitute one another's being’, they exist in ‘reciprocal eternal relatedness’.Footnote 21
Creaturely trajectories: relationality and human personhood
In much else of his work, besides The One, the Three and the Many, Gunton is concerned with the question of where the image of God can be located in anthropologyFootnote 22 and of how the world can be viewed as related to God, as distinct from him but not opposed to him.Footnote 23 Since otherness always implies an unbridgeable distinction between God and creation, the notion of image can only be sought in conceptual similarities, in traces of reflection or mirror images, which allow us to put our hopes in firm non-foundational foundations for the understanding of what it means to be human. ‘If God is God’, Gunton concludes, ‘he is the source of all being, meaning and truth. It would seem reasonable to suppose that all being, meaning and truth is, even as created and distinct from God, in some way marked by its relatedness to its creator.’Footnote 24
Following this path, Gunton investigates three realms, the personal, the material and the cultural world. The notion of relationality plays a major role in these investigations. In all these realms Gunton highlights a structure of perichoresis, that is to say a structure of inseparable relatedness and mutual dependency. To underscore his argument he draws on insights of modern physics as well as social theories and philosophies that stress mutual relatedness. The scientific key example takes up the much quoted insight of the scientists Prigogine and Stenger that physics ‘now recognizes that, for an interaction to be real, the “nature” of the related things must derive from these relations, while at the same time the relations must derive from the “nature” of the things’.Footnote 25 Gunton concludes that we live in a perichoretic universe. ‘Everything may be what it is and not another thing, but it is also what it uniquely is by virtue of its relation to everything else.’Footnote 26 The other example goes in a similar way. Gunton describes human persons as persons who are what they are only in relation to other persons. Drawing on John Macmurray, he insists that initially we have to focus on the community within which individuality takes place and not on the identity of the individual.Footnote 27
Consequently, in regard to anthropology, it is precisely the concept of the person in which Gunton seeks to ground the doctrine of the image of God. ‘To be a person is to be made in the image of God: that is the heart of the matter.’Footnote 28 Since God is a communion of persons in inseparable relatedness, so also are human beings. Gunton supports this argument with an interesting concept of what I would like to call a ‘pneumatological hermeneutics of language’, in which the Holy Spirit – in inseparable connection with the Christ event – functions as a certain kind of divine language appropriator. Because Gunton, on the one hand, wholeheartedly affirms that all words are created realities and that therefore no word is per se qualified to depict divine being,Footnote 29 he is, on the other hand, in need of the guidance of the Holy Spirit who, nevertheless, enables us to formulate truth about God and the world.
Words are those realities by which the Holy Spirit enables created intellects, sometimes, when and as God pleases, to articulate the truth of the creator and his creation. . . . The implication for us is that through him [Jesus], and through him alone, the Spirit enables us to speak truly of God's eternal being, both as it is revealed in time and as it is in eternity. . . . We might venture: Jesus’ parables are the self-presentation of God in worldly language.Footnote 30
Hence, language steered by revelation and by the work of the Spirit and the priority of person over against substance allows Gunton to claim that the word person means the same at the levels of creator and creation.Footnote 31 But it does so by its essence of otherness-in-perichoretic-relation. It has to be remembered that it is not the particular characterisation of the individual, but rather Jesus’ mutual and perichoretic relation with the Father through the Spirit which is revealed through scripture. Jesus’ life does not allow us to build on specific human personal characters; this would lead to projectionism. However, Jesus’ personhood as being a divine person within the realm of creation does indicate what personhood really means because it displays Jesus’ being-in-communion with the Father and the Spirit. What Gunton wants to do is not to project a concept of the person defined by the human sciences onto God but rather to develop theologically a concept of the person through the trinitarian concepts of perichoresis and relatedness, concepts that also seem to be essential within creation. Neither modern individualism nor collectivism will do. Rather, we are in need of a new understanding of personhood in the image of the triune God. Personhood does not consist of something particular but rather finds its essence in its relatedness as an otherness-in-perichoretic-relation. Let me now turn to the third level and connect it with the first and second one.
Transcendental trajectories: substantiality, relationality, perichoresis
Because a theological concept of personhood and communion as the connecting part between divine and human being cannot be derived from human particularity as such, it has to be sought in some sort of universal marks of being, which Gunton now calls open transcendentals.Footnote 32 He calls them ‘open’ because they indicate non-foundationalist foundations and they are open to change if need be. Gunton probably wants to stress that his open transcendentals – as being derived from an investigation of conceptual similarities between the Trinity, human sociality and the material world – do not ground in a given source of accuracy. However, given his account of language steered by revelation and the Spirit, one starts to wonder if this does not rather suggest that one should in fact take his transcendentals as the one and only conceptual starting point for developing true speech about God. Be it as it may, Gunton arrives at three open transcendentals which link God's trinitarian being and the human condition, namely, perichoresis, substantiality and relationality. These transcendentals are indispensable for the triune being of God as well as for the universe and human personhood.Footnote 33 Yet at the same time it has to be kept in mind that God remains other.
Substantiality expresses the insight that the particular is the most real and basic notion of existence. Gunton contends: ‘The mystery of existence is that everything is what it is and not another thing. That is the point of arguing for the transcendentality of hypostasis or substantiality.’Footnote 34 Within the realm of creation, both persons and things, despite their ontological differences, receive their shape from the particularising Spirit. This means that their ‘reality consists, therefore – and this is the crucial difference from other theories of substance – not in the universals they instantiate. But in the shape of their relatedness with God and with other created hypostasis.’Footnote 35 In virtue of this, relationality indicates that the particular is only particular due to its relatedness to other particulars. Perichoresis exhibits the fact that this relatedness is a mutual, reciprocal and dynamic process of indwelling in which one cannot be thought of without the other.
To clarify this a bit further let me connect the three levels of argument. Gunton arrives at these transcendentals precisely by prioritising the Greek notion of hypostasis over against the notion of ousia. Because the three divine persons are what they are, not due to a common substance but due to their mutual indwelling, in other words their perichoretic communion, they are what they are only by virtue of an eternal relatedness. Gunton says: ‘According to this teaching, what might be called the substantiality of God resides not in his abstract being, but in the concrete particular that we call the divine persons and in the relations by which they mutually constitute one another.’Footnote 36 Substantiality, therefore, does not indicate another underlying principle of deity but rather is constituted by three persons in communion. Gunton observes the same pattern in the created world. He suggests ‘that something is real – what it is and not another thing – by virtue of the way it is held in being not only by God but also by other things in the particular configuration in space and time in which its being is constituted’.Footnote 37 And as a further result, he claims that human persons as persons are what they really are only in relation to other persons.
To put matters in a nutshell, substance, for Gunton, does not indicate another underlying principle of deity but rather is constituted by three persons in communion. This shift leads him to the sublation of substance-talk in relationality-talk with the result that the notions of oneness and substance are derived solely from the perspective of the particular as constituted by the whole.Footnote 38 In other words, since Gunton has abandoned the notion of ousia – because he wants to escape tritheism in regard to the Trinity and the problem of individualism with respect to his assessment of modernity – he is forced to anchor the notion of God's oneness in the universal notion of relatedness. Each person is therefore constituted by relationality and hence eternal relatedness becomes the substance of God. Consequently divine reflections in the created world as universal marks of being can only be found in the open transcendentals of substantiality, relationality and perichoresis.
Problems of relationality: a critical analysis
Cappadocian theology and the priority of communion
A closer look at Gunton's trinitarian reading shows that what he does is more than merely a change of emphasis. I would rather call it a violation of a vital distinction. In Gunton the concept of perichoresis, which was used by the Greek Fathers within the realm of hypostasis without abandoning the realm of ousia, proceeds to the higher level of a unifying principle, suddenly connecting the two distinct concepts on a meta-level. Can this shift towards perichoresis and relationality as the very essence of God's being be supported in regard to Cappadocian theology? I do not think so. Gunton's retrieval turns out to be very one-sided. Not only does he seem to assume that there is such a thing as ‘Cappadocian theology’ but also he is very selective in his application of certain interpretations. It is here that Gunton's indebtedness to John Zizioulas’ work is clearly demonstrated.
Zizioulas’ conviction can be summarised with the following statement: ‘God's being, the Holy Trinity, is not caused by divine substance but by the Father, i.e., a particular being. The one God is the Father. Substance is something common to all three persons of the Trinity, but it is not ontologically primary until Augustine makes it so. The Cappadocians work out an ontology of divine being by employing the Biblical rather than the Greek view of being.’Footnote 39 Zizioulas, as does Gunton, concludes that the particular and, because God is triune, the communion is raised to the level of ontological primacy. Richard Fermer has rightly pointed out that Zizioulas and Gunton still have to show why they appear ‘to reduce the concept of ousia (essence/substance), found in the Cappadocians, to the concept of koinonia (communion)’.Footnote 40 Fermer, in my opinion (supported by some Patristic scholars), has persuasively shown, first, that the dichotomy between Latin essentialism and Greek personalism is an oversimplification, second, that there are a variety of strategies and terms in the Greek Fathers (ousia, monarchia, schesis, physis, koinonina, single energia) which are used in order to safeguard the trinitarian unity and, third, that ousia is never equated with koinonia.Footnote 41 This exhibits a reductive development in Gunton's thought. This is underlined by his unwarranted assumption that the Cappadocians ‘made it possible to conceive a priority of the particular over the universal. God is what he is only as a communion of persons.’Footnote 42 What Gunton is effectively doing here is reducing the classical concept of substance to the concept of communion instead of keeping both concepts in a balanced dialectic, a balance that the Greek Fathers tried to maintain.Footnote 43 ‘There is a fine distinction to be drawn between saying that God exists as Father, Son and Holy Spirit, and saying that God's essence is the communion of the trinitarian hypostaseis.’Footnote 44
Relationality and personhood
To my mind the modern turn to relationality functions better as a device against reductionism in our understanding of the universe and the human condition rather than as a superior concept with universal status over against the dialectical and sometimes paradoxical experiences of human life. Concerning the human condition and the cosmos, clear distinctions between assumed opposites or orders of priority such as substance and relation, body and mind, subject and object became less evident and were seen in a new light that acknowledges an indispensable interdependency which does not permit a subordination of one to the other. Within the universe particles remain single entities while at the same time dependent on their relations. Within the human sphere persons always remain single entities despite their dependence on relations. Although it can be said that a human person becomes more distinctly itself through being placed in a specific part of space at a certain time in history as well as through its lived relations, the essence of a person cannot be solely reduced to these relations. An embodied person is also a single, and thus unique matter-mind-stuff, entity, which is also able to influence and constitute the relations and without which there would be no relations at all. The concept of particularity cannot be dissolved into the concept of relations and vice versa. Relations are in need of parts. If this balance is lost we have nowhere to go.Footnote 45
Gunton's analogy rests on the divine persons who are, in their trinitarian context, constituted by their relations. But as Fermer correctly has pointed out, ‘[t]his may be acceptable in the unique case of God, the triune being grounded in a strong conception of ousia, but when it is appropriated to the human realm it appears to be circular; for the implication is that relations precede the particular human person, begging the question of who or what does the relating’.Footnote 46 This example highlights the ambiguous usage of the concepts of perichoresis and relatedness and its inherent analogical problems. Although I believe that it can be claimed that Gunton's open transcendentals do indeed express some kind of universal marks of being, with respect to the concepts of personhood and the particular at least, they do not overcome the crucial distinction between numerical and qualitative identity. The mark of being-in-relation does not unify me with another person in a sense that obviously God is believed to be one. Precisely because each human person is particular and unique no individual can be reduced solely to the mark of relationality and thus lose its singularity. This reveals a major inconsistency and indicates the problem that the three open transcendentals which function as unifying principles in Gunton and thus as the prop to uphold the oneness of God ultimately fail to do so.
To put matters in a nutshell, in regard to the doctrine of God, the concept of relationality must not evoke a new kind of universal, which immediately becomes a new form of reductionism, but rather it should be used as a hermeneutical device against reductionism and thus remind us of the necessity of keeping an appropriate balance between the concepts of the one ousia and the three hypostaseis (and koinonia). These concepts are ultimately incommensurable within human discourse. The dialectic of the one God and the threeness of Father, Son and Spirit, I believe, precisely because it is not a mathematical formula, cannot and must not be dissolved in a coherent superior view but rather has to be maintained and steer our theological enterprise and hermeneutic within a balanced dialogue.
Transcendentals and the implications for human life
I began the discourse by mentioning that Gunton's theological enterprise seeks to express, conceptually and as well as possible, both the being of God and the implications of that being for human existence on earth. What are the concrete implications, one might wonder? Writing about the human creation as reflecting the image of God, for instance, he concludes in agreement with his open transcendentals: ‘To be a person is to be constituted in particularity and freedom – to be given space to be – by others in community. Otherness and relation continue to be the two central and polar concepts here.’Footnote 47 And in context with the non-personal world, he comments: ‘[B]eing in the image of God has something to do with the human responsibility to offer the creation, perfected, back to its creator as a perfect sacrifice of praise. It is here that are to be found the elements of truth in the claims that the image of God is to be found in the human stewardship of the creation.’Footnote 48 These implications are surely important as theological meta-statements but they still remain very abstract and are in need of a more concrete and relevant completion. Similar observations can be made when Gunton wants to ‘move toward an ecclesiology of perichoresis: in which there is no permanent structure of subordination’ but rather the space for ‘overlapping patterns of relationships’.Footnote 49 One can clearly observe that he is very hesitant in formulating concrete implications because they would straightforwardly beg the question of how he arrives, for instance, from an open transcendental such as perichoresis, at the assumption that perichoresis implies non-subordinate patterns of relationship rather than subordinate patterns of relationships.
All this again points to the neglect of the concept of ousia (as irreducible to the concept of hypostasis) which, when abandoned altogether, leaves no space for an appropriate theological concept of the subject. If relatedness is all one can say about humanity then there seems to be no space for aspects or traits of a common human nature. If an ontology of communion takes over the realm of ousia, then this poses the question of how a person is capable at all of finding his or her own identity. If there is only relationality that constitutes my particularity as a person then I can think of only two possibilities to find and live my uniqueness as a person-in-relation. Either there is only one single, concrete and pre-chosen place or there are no fixed places at all. In the former case I would have to look for a single and concrete place in time and history, i.e. a fixed setting where my particular place is and always will be in order to live my life according to my created personality. In the latter case I would have to accept an open and rather arbitrary process because, since I find myself exclusively constituted by relations, my place in the here and now always is what I am. However, if relatedness tells all persons what they are and where they find their true identity and meaning in life, who or what is that relatedness? This example on the level of human personhood shows that, if the necessity of singularity, which cannot be reduced to relations, is neglected, we end up with a situation where we actually can go nowhere because ultimately there is nobody to tell us where to go.
The problem with Gunton's transcendentals is that they are derived from the whole of creation. He wants to escape the charge of projectionism and consequently only allows transcendental status for notions which are valid for persons and things. However, to include the material world in the development of conceptual similarities rather re-enforces the charge of projectionism within Gunton's methodological system because it allows the created world as it is observed by human beings to determine the correct theological language about God and the world. Moreover, with this shift he not only gives the non-personal world more significance as God's good creation but also includes it in the doctrine of imago dei.Footnote 50 This is rather disputable and one might wonder what to do with the linkage of personal terms, which imply consciousness and freedom (initially derived from the perichoresis of the Father, Son and Spirit, for instance, mutuality, indwelling, reciprocity), with impersonal things. This unavoidably leads to an ambiguous situation: while the universal marks of being for human persons are depersonalised, the universal marks of being for things are personalised.
Social critique and the Trinity
To return full circle to the beginning I now would like to end with one question and an open answer. Why does Gunton arrive theologically at this point, following Zizoulas’ interpretation of the Greek Fathers, abandoning the distinction between ousia and hypostasis, and so finally, it appears, losing personal concreteness against his own intentions? Given the fact that Gunton never rejects the notions of God's aseity and freedom and also maintains the necessity of an immanent Trinity distinct from the economic Trinity, it is even more puzzling that he dissolves the classic notion of the nature of God solely into the concept of hypostasis. The explanation I am inclined to offer is that the reason for that shift has to be sought in his interpretation of modern culture. Is this interpretation one-sided and oversimplified?
First, it probably could be argued that Gunton's choice of Heraclitus and Parmenides as a heuristic device already hints at a conceptual oversimplification in his assessment of modern culture and ‘where everything went wrong’.Footnote 51 Is it at all possible to treat a metaphysical and phenomenological approach towards our understanding of being as two polar points of the same investigation? The unavoidable result seems to be that oneness is equated with homogeneity, with the reduction of otherness to sameness and with the neglect of real particularity. Hence it does not surprise that Gunton seeks oneness pre-eminently within the realm of the many. But do a metaphysical concept of the one God and concepts of homogeneity necessarily lead to the suppression of particularity and the many?
Second, Gunton tends to brand modern problems too easily as outcomes of subjectivism and individualism which root in a bad mixture of a Cartesian cogito ergo sum and a certain kind of theism. Subjectivism, always under suspicion, and modernity, as the displacement of God, go hand in hand. This leads to the abandonment of the concept of the subject rather than to a positive reconceptualisation of the notion of individualism as at least one part of human personhood's essence in the image of God.Footnote 52
If there is some truth in that then this would indicate that Gunton's strong emphasis on relationality and open transcendentals – rather than finding its justification in his understanding of the Trinity as such – could be understood as the result of his passionate aspiration to heal the wounds of an egocentric, individualistic and alienating modern culture through an ontology of communion. The Greek distinction between ousia and hypostasis, Karl Barth's emphasis on ‘Father, Son, and Holy Spirit’ as the primary revelation of God's self within salvation history and John Zizioulas’ interpretation of God as a being-in-communion all lend themselves to take up this project. However, Gunton is reluctant to engage in a thorough investigation of human experience and sociality independently of his presupposed ontology of communion. He started off with the question ‘Can there be found a vision of things which unifies without producing totalitarianism or homogeneity?’Footnote 53 He ended up with a ‘Yes’, answering that ‘communion is being in relation, in which there is due recognition of both particularity and relationality’.Footnote 54 From this perspective it can be said that his trinitarian theology exhibits an enterprise of social criticism on a metaphysical level. His abstract transcendentals appear to be a stumbling block rather than a helpful device for spelling out practical implications. This then explains why Gunton is not capable of delivering on his promise to show how everything looks different from a trinitarian perspective and that the doctrine of the Trinity is a doctrine with radical consequences for human life, which is able to contribute to the healing of the modern world. A defensible version of his project, therefore, still awaits adequate realisation.
