The Trinitarian revival of the later twentieth century took what was a speculative doctrine – not least for Schleiermacher, who put it in an appendix to The Christian Faith – and reminted it as lively gospel proclamation. Jürgen Moltmann set the cross at the heart of the Trinity. For Catherine Mowry La Cugna, Trinitarian doctrine confirms the central gospel message that God is precisely God for us. Robert W. Jenson unashamedly insisted that God is only properly known and named as the one who raised Jesus Christ from the dead. James P. Mackey summed up this approach with his apt title, The Christian Experience of God as Trinity.Footnote 2
Hegel’s shift of metaphysical attention to the unfolding of being within history set the scene remotely for this new Trinitarianism. It was heralded in the key of revelation by Karl Barth, whose Triune God was ‘the Revealer, the revelation, and the revealedness’. Karl Rahner famously insisted that the immanent Trinity – God in Godself – was none other than the economic Trinity: that is, God known as three divine persons through the economy of salvation. Meanwhile, John Zizioulas argued that theology’s relational conception of the Trinitarian persons helped define human personhood, while Miroslav Volf rooted his non-hierarchical ecclesiology in this same Trinitarian mutuality.
Sonderegger seeks to reclaim the rational and contemplative heart of Catholic faith without adapting it to this range of more approachable modern categories. But does she wholly avoid modern theology’s more earthbound epistemological concerns? Is God genuinely known and is theosis possible apart from the economy of revelation, salvation and redeemed sociality – a question posed by the mimetic theory of René Girard? In what follows, Sonderegger’s account of the Trinity is set out with these methodological concerns in mind.
I
In the first volume of her Systematic Theology, The Doctrine of God,Footnote 3 Sonderegger departs from more human-centred trends in Trinitarian theology along a scholastic path, emphasising God’s oneness and knowability over revelation and salvation in Jesus Christ (1:14, 394–95). ‘Not all is Christology!’, she insists, ‘and not every doctrine of God begins with the Trinity’ (1:394).
Her guiding Thomistic insight is that God is hidden yet present and active within the world’s own activity. God’s action is a letting be, a bestowal of life honouring creation’s particulars and its proper autonomy while still shining through the multiplicity of created wonders. There just is more to the world; God exceeds creation without diminishing it (1:456). This so-called compatibilism is what we see with the burning bush, ignited by God’s presence though not consumed, and with God’s fiery omnipotence in the Book of Numbers (1:271–87). This is not revelational and remedial according to the economy of salvation but, rather, it is a sign that God is predisposed towards incarnation by nature.
Sonderegger’s sense of a world bathed in uncreated light is rooted in contemplation, prayer and adoration, though without relying on pious awareness (Schleiermacher) or any other foundation in human experience and understanding (1:429). Crucially, for Sonderegger, ‘Our knowledge of God must captivate us … so that we think of nothing else in theology … without also thinking of its Origin and Reality and Perfection in … the One God’ (1:394). Perhaps unsurprisingly, a student at Virginia Theological Seminary once joked that Professor Sonderegger had been seen levitating in the Chapel!
She can dismiss epistemological foundationalism as a doomed undertaking precisely because of God’s hiddenness. The Old Testament God encounters people such as Moses and Ezekiel (1:429) as a defining subject emerging from hiddenness rather than a conjectural object sought within or beyond that hiddenness. This is how Sonderegger makes her contemplative run around modern theology’s epistemological preoccupations, relying instead on what we might call a scriptural mysticism. This is not the flattening literality of Biblical inerrancy, however, which adopts the idiom of modernity’s own search for knowledge (1:516–17). Her compatibilist reading neither separates nor confuses divine and human elements in the text.
For Sonderegger, God is hidden yet present in the encounter that launches the decalogue in Deuteronomy 4.10–14, in the Temple and the ark of the covenant, in the manger of Bethlehem and the incarnate Word (1:17). It is a hiddenness within the sinews of key Old Testament texts – in their repetitions, figures and patterns, as well as in processes of ordering, reception and interpretation that the Old Testament’s literary history shows to be part of the texts themselves. Thus, we are brought into God’s fiery presence through the earthen vessel of Scripture, and on this nuanced conviction rests Sonderegger’s claim for Scripture’s divine authorship (1:509). Clearly, this is not the familiar search for suggestive Old Testament proof texts and metaphors guided by developed Trinitarian conviction.
II
The second volume of Sonderegger’s systematics, The Doctrine of the Holy Trinity: Processions and Persons,Footnote 4 develops these themes. Again, her compatibilist conviction is that the Old Testament God can be with us as God is in Godself (2:74), to which the Trinity gives later expression (2:89). This God is a holy fire whose conceptual claim on Israel belongs wholly to the giver and not to human receivers according to the necessarily subordinate categories of revelation and salvation (2:66, 79) – let alone to psychology, or piety, or in the service of any other human need (2:113, 229, 172). All this is filled out though not superseded in the New Testament (2:26).
By extension, Sonderegger seeks to reconnect Trinitarian thought with the philosophy of being while knowing this to be out of favour with the Trinitarian revival. She insists that ‘the Mystery of the Trinity should be set forth in such a manner that its own intellectual coherence and power are demonstrated, enacted, without defensiveness or timidity, and that … will show the rational probity of this task for any ultimate and searching reflection upon Being itself’ (2:172–73). Sonderegger achieves this by scripturally annexing metaphysical realism, which becomes a ‘commonsense piecemeal parable’ (2:212) of God’s own reality. As she memorably puts it, ‘We are given the God of the philosophers, the God of Georg Cantor and Albert Einstein, the God of the entire cosmos, in the little room that is Israel and Judah, the Sea of Galilee, and a lonely hill outside Jerusalem’ (2:240). Here is a challenge to the Trinitarian revival’s retreat from speculation, because ‘a rational investigation of Reality Itself will encounter structural elements that must be investigated and incorporated, and these will have an echo, a parallel, in the dogma of the Trinity’ (2:173–74).
Metaphysical realism thus becomes a trace of the Trinity for Sonderegger: an adventure of the infinitely real God who pours out the world’s realities, and a mode of thought complementing what Scripture mediates (2:202–03). For example, she sees the world’s creaturely diversity echoing divine processions evident in the days of creation from Genesis, along with the divine conjoining of unity and diversity discerned through structure, pattern and form in Scripture (2:214). This is possible for Sonderegger because she regards the Bible as a fully healed creature – like the Blessed Virgin Mary, with perhaps a nod toward Mary’s immaculate conception. In this way, scriptural patterns can provide a deep figuring of reality in accord with God’s own Being (2:268). Yet divine and creaturely being are not being confused here. ‘Instead’, for Sonderegger, using the image of passing trains, ‘we have something like two complete systems, two “aspects” and entire modes of thought, two “ways of life,” running on independent lines that from time to time … draw near to one another, sound the same signal, and show signs of recognition or likeness’ (2:203).
Israel’s temple and tabernacle provide Sonderegger with the locus classicus for divine initiative and its metaphysical concomitant (2:197). Her stated goal is ‘to set forth, to praise, and to interpret the metaphysical Holiness of God, as betokened in Israel’s tabernacle and temple and brought to Its Consummation in the temple not made by hands’ (2:197). Once again, this grounds Trinitarian discourse in God’s nature rather than external divine acts in the economy of salvation (2:265). It is the language of heaven that is heard in the story of Israel (2:267) according to Sonderegger’s compatibilism, to be completed and perfected by Jesus’s subsequent work in what she calls the ‘great centripetal force of the economy’ (2:299).
Sonderegger deals with Christology’s old problem of the Son’s pre-existence by grounding it in the vision of Isaiah 53 (2:289). This is a procession marked by sacrificial self-giving, following a downward arc of the suffering servant into the land of unlikeness (2:232) – a trajectory echoed in the temple’s sacrificial cultus and furthered by the priestly and Levitical holiness schools (2:352, 367). The cost of this self-outpouring divine love ‘can be found only where the cost is fully counted: the sacrifice of Israel’s altar’ (2:352). Here, we begin to see why one reviewer described Sonderegger’s Trinitarian doctrine as ‘severe and novel’.Footnote 5
Yet let us not mistake what is being commended here. The conceiving of God in line with sacrificial immolation as celebrated in myth and ritual, which René Girard has unmasked as central to functional human religiousness,Footnote 6 is exposed and overtaken by Jesus’s sacrificial consecration.Footnote 7 I suggest that it is such a radical consecration mediated by Scripture rather than the pragmatic immolation characteristic of a pagan mob that Sonderegger has in mind. The temple sacrifice is bloody and terrible, yes, but it is not being invoked here as an image of divine wrath. Rather, its evocation can be simply read as signifying that God is fully in touch with the world’s pain and harshness (2:358–59, 406) – not as their cause or motivation, then, but as creation’s companion amid the bitter realities of suffering and death. Accordingly, the tabernacle and temple are essentially sacraments of God’s self-giving pointing beyond the societal functionality of cult and holiness, as revealed by Girard, toward a more genuine and metaphysical holiness (2:196–97) – to that temple not made with hands which is Jesus’s own self-consecration. Sonderegger’s claim that ‘Israel’s sacrificial cultus is the distillation and sanctifying of the religious impulse that is humankind’s’ (2:397) can therefore be read in accord with Girard’s equally Scripture-based unweaving of the sacrificial cultus and not as its uncritical, unnuanced commendation.
Sonderegger also follows Aquinas (2:428, 431–32) in setting God’s processional nature before its Trinitarian articulation. As she puts it, ‘The Holy Fire of God and its Glory are the Old Testament expression of the Trinitarian processions’ (2:412). The persons complete the processions, as the teloi and perfect icons of the Old Testament’s divine unicity, with Jesus confirming and perfecting what was first encountered with Moses (2:466, 515, 521, 536–37). For Sonderegger, this is a doubled yet single procession of fire manifest jointly as heat and light and terminating in the divine persons (2:436–37) – an approach that helps her to mediate between Eastern and Western emphases (2:433). Specifically, she sees the Father in terms of fiery origin, with the Son and Holy Spirit representing the exitus and reditus that were always integrally alive in God (2:415–16) – a sacrificial holiness poured out into creation then drawing creation back to God (2:435, 466, 468–69, 478). And because the Holy Spirit represents the perfect consummation of God’s processions, Sonderegger regards the Trinity’s third person as ‘recursive on Deity as a whole’, which suggests proceeding from the Father and the Son together. This expresses her avowed commitment to the filioque clause of the Western Church (2:563, 110).
Sonderegger illustrates her position on the triune persons using set theory and transfinite mathematics. First, regarding sets, they do not guarantee their members an identity. A set is simply a collection neither substantially adding to nor providing a transcendent category for whatever its members might be. For example, the set of items on my desk represents a collection that can be grouped and counted in one way or another (e.g., laptop, phone, lamp, stationary, papers, books, decorative objects) though without any proper essence of its own. While this disparate collection may be complete as a set, its members do not constitute something independently meaningful (2:512). As Sonderegger explains, ‘sets do not represent a separate conceptual category: they are a deflationary term, indicating only the elements, gathered together’ (2:549). The point she wishes to make here is that a set made up from the divine attributes evident in God’s processional self-giving need not constitute a distinct divine person (2:551–53). For Sonderegger, ‘we can say that the Divine Person, as such, does not possess a “Separate Existence,” a “quasi-substantial” Identity that stands over against or beyond the Divine Life It consummates’ (2:553).
Then, she addresses the mathematical notion of infinity. For Descartes, unlike Aquinas and Scotus, the concept of infinity is not arrived at by contrast with our native awareness of limited quantities. Rather, it is a distinct idea that is not reliant on projection from human mental capacities (2:504–05) – it is not an over-the-horizon extrapolation from the finite, but something bearing its own completeness. This recalls Sonderegger’s refusal to ground Trinitarian reflection in the economy but instead to orient it beyond human experience and comprehension.
Her crucial next step has to do with the existence of more than one infinity. Georg Cantor, the nineteenth-century German mathematician who theorized transfinite numbers, explored the surprising dynamics of infinite sets, most notably that they come in different sizes – that is, they have different cardinality. Indeed, Cantor revealed a sequence of the so-called transfinite numbers, a hierarchy of infinities.
The technical details are not so important, since Sonderegger’s point here is chiefly heuristic. Such infinite sets can be added together to produce a new, single infinite set. ‘This living energy is a Set, a Completion as the Divine Persons,’ as she proposes, ‘and as Infinite Sets, added together, They are but One, One Cardinal Ordered Infinite’ (2:552). So, Sonderegger’s one true God, sacrificially poured out to draw the creation back to Godself, is a single infinity yet at the same time a thrice-infinite holy fire. The Trinitarian persons thus complete and perfect her picture of God’s nature – God’s outgoing, self-sacrificial holiness – as mediated through the Old Testament but now named Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
III
Sonderegger’s aim throughout has been to restate the Catholic vision of a rational cosmos illuminated by a high, hidden yet intimately involved God, the God of Israel poured out in demanding holiness according to the Scriptures. Here, theology starts from the one God, from above, rather than from below in the characteristic manner of modern theology and its more recent Trinitarian revival. The revelational, soteriological, anthropological and ecclesial lenses applied to God will not bring the divine mystery into focus, according to Sonderegger, but only serve to distort and diminish it. The search for revelation’s epistemological foundations, and seeking God through the economy of salvation, reduces something grander and more comprehensive to something narrower and need-focused. Yet can she wholly discount these epistemological concerns of modern theology, with its reliance on God’s revealing and saving works ad extra? The following four instances might begin to suggest otherwise.
Sonderegger admits that a Platonic and mystical yearning accompanies a sense of God in the world (2:275–76), which certainly seems to suggest an epistemological foundation in the form of a revelational meeting point within the structure of human cognition. This even though her invocation of infinity avoids such a conceptual starting point in humanity’s sense of limitedness. My Catholic question is whether such human incompleteness and yearning, reaching out beyond the confusion and darkness of human existence, plays a part in how God chooses to meet us after all – that God is in the asking and seeking, not just in the answering and finding.
At another point Sonderegger distinguishes between what is appropriate for the ordo cognoscendi, the order of knowing, and the ordo essendi, the order of being (2:435). Yet the metaphysical need no longer be set against the epistemological. The Kantian gap between knowledge as representation and knowledge as participation has been crossed in philosophy by C.S. Peirce.Footnote 8 For theology, it follows that revelation need not be wholly from above. Instead, the path from below intersects with that from above so that revelation is better understood dialogically. Hence, the importance of theological anthropology in modern Christian thought, with God not seen as limited by human limitations. Instead, as Walter Kasper argues, anthropology is completed by theology and humanization by divinization.Footnote 9 Theosis thus begins from below where we start and not just from above where we finish.
Then, there is this uncharacteristic-seeming claim from Sonderegger: that the sign of God’s presence is in its acknowledgement by God’s people (1:220). Again, is this not simply the dynamic of revelation when completed by its human reception? What process has led to that recognition and reception? Might Israel have concluded only through its scripturally narrated history that its God is real – a revelation entwined with undergoing salvation? According to such a perspective God’s identity mediated by Scripture is somehow preserved across many historical contingencies, as argued by Robert W. JensonFootnote 10 and as evident from the Old Testament’s literary history. Jenson’s characteristic conviction that God is truly known and named only through God’s works ad extra, which Sonderegger denies, also appeals to God as narrated by ancient Israel through its Scriptures. Can this God, whose presence is thus recognized, be the holy self-communicating fire of love that Sonderegger commends apart from the historically, experientially infused narrative that renders the hidden God identifiable – as the God of Exodus, the Lord of hosts and as Israel’s deliverer from Exile? Once again, the ordo cognoscendi need not float free from the ordo essendi.
In a revealing admission, while making her characteristic argument that God and not the sinner’s needs must remain theologically centre stage, Sonderegger declares that conversion away from the Cartesian self is necessary for that to be possible (2:34). Yes indeed, but is that not the heart of what salvation must imply for individualistic modern Westerners? This experience of salvation, which allows us to recognize and then enthrone the true God at the heart of reality – where Sonderegger locates and celebrates God – is thus indispensable. The whole Old Testament is about conversion away from false gods who divert and diminish Israel and who never go unchallenged, while the New Testament in every part testifies to the revelatory breakthrough accompanying the personal transformation that salvation through Jesus Christ announces and empowers.
René Girard shows how Scripture mediates a different God from the sort that humans typically confect, with revelation and salvation as two sides of that one anti-idolatrous coin. The Old Testament first announces humanity’s liberation from the false gods of blood and violence along an arc that is indeed completed and perfected though not superseded in the Christian dispensation,Footnote 11 just as Sonderegger would have it. Though I suggest that such a change of perspective – a transformation of life as of mind – comes from participation in the economy of salvation, as mediated in both Testaments. This is just what we might expect from the one, true God of Sonderegger’s ‘severe and novel Trinitarian doctrine’ – her compatibilist God, that is, whose exaltation anticipates rather than disdains the needs and limitations of God’s creatures. The further explication of these and wider themes is eagerly anticipated in her pending third volume.
