The Future of Trinitarian Theology:
Catholic Perspectives
One Day Colloquium
Report by Prof. Lewis Ayres
On 25 November the University’s Centre for Catholic Studies hosted, with the support of The Tablet and the Newman Association, a day conference on “The Future of Trinitarian Theology: Catholic Perspectives”. The day was remarkable for revealing the richness of current Catholic discussion of Trinitarian theology, and for revealing the extent to which discussion of this central theme in Christian thought finds itself opening to a variety of new conversations and voices.
The conference was a deliberately a cross-generational discussion. Two of the giants of US Catholic theology over the past four decades acted as respondents and commentators: Professor David Burrell CSC (who taught for 40 years at Notre Dame and is now Professor of Ethics and Development at Uganda Martyrs University, Kampala) and Professor David Tracy (Emeritus from the University of Chicago). The main papers of the day came from Dr Karen Kilby (University of Nottingham) and myself. Professor Mark McIntosh, the new Van Mildert Professor at Durham, and a number of other figures from the Durham scene took part, including Professor Paul D. Murray, Dr Medi Ann Volpe, and Dr Marcus Pound. Scholars and graduate students from around the UK came to join the discussion.
In my paper I argued that Catholic Trinitarian theology will best move into the future by returning to its roots. Attempts over the past 30 years to claim that western theology has not taken the Trinity seriously, and thus that something new is needed, have been undermined, I argued, by a wave of scholarship on Augustine, Thomas Aquinas and a wide range of other figures. I suggested that this scholarship does not simply “reveal” that critiques of western theology have been unfounded; rather it opens up new conversations within western theology.
Many previous accounts present western theologies of the Trinity as telling a monolithic story: Augustine begins, and Aquinas consummates a few basic western theses. I would argue that the western tradition is constituted by far more of a conversation and a series of arguments, and this tradition continues to be the fruitful source of our theological work.
I ended my paper by suggesting that, rather than a model whereby “systematic” theologians undertake imaginative reconstructions on the basis of historical work undertaken by the “historical” theologian, all theology needs to be historical. To understand the past is already to appropriate its meaning, and new questions are often best approached by a constant turn back to our sources in a search for parallels.
In the afternoon the focus of attention was Karen Kilby’s paper which struck at the heart of much recent “social Trinitarian” theology, attacking what she saw as some of its overly “robust” claims to understand the character of the divine life itself, and then to use this knowledge to offer accounts of everything from the character of the family, political programmes, urban planning, and even the ordering of church architecture.
The centrality of the doctrine of the Trinity for Kilby rests not on its ability to serve as a resource for theologians to imagine the complexity of relationship and unity in the abstract, but to summarise and organise the principles embedded in the story of God’s action in Christ and the Christian life itself, in such a way as to emphasis divine mystery. In this way she underlined the apophatic element to Trinitarian speak.
Both papers were followed by intense discussion, which underlined how whatever the form of our speculation or apophaticism, Trinitarian theology is alive and well.
(A complete version of this text can be found in The Tablet, 12 December, 2009)
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