New Wine, New Wineskins

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.

This article explores the thinking of Gordon Kaufman and Sallie McFague to explore how their understanding of theology as mythology leads them to believe that our concepts of God and Christ need to be thoroughly deconstructed and reconstructed in light of our best understanding of ourselves and the world we live in. Kaufman understands God as an “ecological-processive reality” which he equates with the “cosmic evolutionary movement” of the world itself. Since God cannot actually exist in his own right, independent of the world, Kaufman insists that any such realistic understanding of God represents false reification. McFague believes that we can never really know who God is but nonetheless thinks her models of God as mother, lover, and friend better describe God than the traditional view that God is eternally Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Hence she thinks of the world as God’s body and confuses God’s being with the world by saying that the world “is not something alien to or other than God.” Both Kaufman and McFague argue that Jesus can no longer be seen as the unique savior of the world because in an evolutionary context it is impossible to believe that one human being could have the kind of cosmic salvific significance ascribed to him by the tradition. This article contends that in rejecting the fact that God, and not we, determines the meaning of who he is, and that Christ alone saves us because he alone is the Word of God incarnate, Kaufman and McFague argue that salvation must be equated with our attempts at humanization. This form of self-justification not only ignores the reality of sin, but ascribes salvation to us by making our justification by faith and grace irrelevant. This is why McFague believes salvation “is not a once-for-all objective service that someone else does for us” and that the world today needs many saviors. Molnar contends that such thinking changes the good news of the Gospel into the bad news that we are alone with ourselves and in need of new mythologies to help us save ourselves; and until salvation is accepted with gratitude as an act of grace, we will always think that it is we and not God alone who justifies and sanctifies sinners.