This article reviews the late Colin Gunton’s Trinitarian engagement of creation and culture in The One, the Three and the Many. The thread which runs through the book as a whole is, as the title suggests, the problem of the one and the many—a problem that had its source in ancient Greek philosophy in the conflict between the Heraclitean and Parmenidean descriptions of the “real.” For Gunton, the concept of the Trinity provides relational space to mediate between the One, championed in classical times by Parmenides, and the Many, championed historically by Heraclitus. Gunton does not make a convincing case for claiming that the overarching influence of the Parmenidean account of the One inevitably leads to political absolutism. The solution to political absolutism is to move past a Parmenidean view of God as beyond knowing and toward the knowledge of God rooted in Jesus Christ, for where God is truly known in Jesus Christ, there a leveling process occurs. In the course of discussion, consideration is also given to Gunton’s theological methodology and use of terms like perichoresis, hypostasis and sociality in context, which he terms “open transcendentals.” Originally presented to the Reformed Theology and History Group at the American Academy of Religion Annual Meeting in Atlanta, Georgia, November 2003, the essay evaluates as well Gunton’s contribution to Reformed theology and his enduring significance for the theological enterprise. Here it is claimed that Gunton’s legacy for Reformed theology has less to do with his doctrinal proposals than it does with his theological style.
Author: Bruce L. McCormack
Dr. Bruce L. McCormack received his Ph.D. from Princeton Theological Seminary and is currently the Frederick and Margaret L. Weyerhaeuser Professor of Systematic Theology at Princeton. He feels that his most significant contribution to his field can be found in his book Karl Barth's Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology: Its Genesis and Development, 1909–1936. In 1998, due to the significance of this text, he became the first American to be awarded the Karl Barth Prize by the Board of the Evangelical Church of the Union in Germany. "This particular volume offers a genetic-historical treatment of Barth's development that seeks to locate Barth's theology in the stream of late-nineteenth-century developments in theology and philosophy," he says. "What emerges is the contention that Barth's theology is best understood as a distinctive variant of modern theology, i.e., as a critically realistic dialectical theology." As part of his research, Dr. McCormack spent a year on a Fulbright/Swiss Government grant at the Barth Archives in Basel, where he had access to many of the Swiss theologian's unpublished lectures. He hopes to make equally significant contributions as a teacher.