God's Triune Life: Engaging Thomas Joseph White's Recent Study

God's Triune Life:Engaging Thomas Joseph White's Recent Study Christophe Chalamet "Deus, ut nos in sobrietate contineat, parce de sua essentia disserit."1 At almost seven-hundred pages, Thomas Joseph White's book is an impressive achievement in size and scope, and one of the persons who endorsed the book, Rowan Williams, accurately describes it as "encyclopedic." There are repetitions in it, but these are not easy to avoid in a book that includes a number of surveys on some of the major thinkers in Christian theology. The main thesis of the book is stated both clearly and forcefully by the author: sound Trinitarian theology must learn from Thomas Aquinas that, even if who God is as triune becomes known by human beings through the history of God's act toward and in the world, it is a mistake to elucidate God's own life from that history, since this would state things in the wrong order. It is the processions that ground the missions of the Son and the Spirit, not the other way round. What God does in history does not in any way constitute who God is in God's own life.2 On the contrary, what God does in history, End Page 475 in the economy, is wholly derivative of who God is eternally.3 "The missions of the persons are the processions with an additional effect ad extra in the world."4 We thus see the direction of the movement the author depicts for us: from God's eternal act of generating both the Son and the Spirit to God's involvement in and with the world. This means, conversely, that projecting back onto God some of the characteristics of God's act in history is not theologically sound. It is much more adequate to see what God does as an outpouring of God's own life. To a large extent, this claim seems to be correct to me. Whether White fully abides by it is debatable, but I wish to inquire about something else, indeed about something that troubles me a bit. Is there not a risk of seeing the Passion narrative as an illustration or a manifestation of an eternal relation, a move which might result in some rather strange connotations? I am thinking here of a claim which is found near the end of the book: "The Son's human self-offering to the Father is a most fitting temporal manifestation of the eternal relation of the Son to Father."5 So, is the Son relating to the Father in an eternal gesture of "self-offering"? Is this how we should understand the relation between the Son and the Father? I wonder if we are not coming a bit too close to some well-known speculative waters, namely Barthian waters, in which it is suggested that there is an "above" and a "below" in God.6 Rather than tracing an upward movement, positing Jesus's Passion as a reflection in time of a supposedly eternal relation that bears the same shape of "self-offering," are we not invited by the Gospels themselves to focus instead on what God effects for the world in Jesus's Passion? Is the "self-offering" the Scriptures presents before our eyes not the self-offering of both the Father and the Son, with the Spirit, in and for the world, rather than a self-offering within God from one to the other? Is it not more accurate to state, as White does near the end of the book, that, "in the mystery of the crucifixion, … we come to know who God the Trinity really is in himself"?7 Which then raises the (old) question of the direction or the aim of Jesus Christ's "self-offering" on the Cross. I have begun by highlighting one of the key theses of the book: sound Trinitarian theology moves from God's eternal act of generating both the End Page 476 Son and the Spirit to God's involvement in and with the world, not the other way round. A number of other suggestions are of course made in the course of the seven-hundred pages of the...