‘Ye Worship Ye Know Not What’?

The Apophatic Turn and the Trinity

E. Jerome Van Kuiken

Abstract: This article studies three advocates of the ‘apophatic turn’ in recent trinitarian
theology: Karen Kilby, Sarah Coakley, and Katherine Sonderegger. I evaluate particular uses to
which they put apophaticism in relation to the doctrine of the Trinity, dialogically building a case
for an integrative approach. I conclude by sketching several constructive implications of this
approach.

Christ, in His Divine innocence, said to the Woman of Samaria, “Ye worship ye
know not what”—being apparently under the impression that it might be
desirable, on the whole, to know what one was worshipping.

.....

Q.: What is the doctrine of the Trinity?

A.: “The Father incomprehensible, the Son incomprehensible, and the whole thing
incomprehensible.” Something put in by theologians to make it more difficult—
nothing to do with daily life or ethics.

So quipped British playwright, novelist, medievalist, and lay theologian Dorothy Sayers—herself
a creative adapter of the psychological analogy of the Trinity—in 1939.1 Across the English
Channel, however, this doctrine once neglected and suspected of irrelevance experienced
recovery under Karl Barth and Karl Rahner. Revival became revolution as ‘social trinitarians’
broke with Barth and Rahner by portraying the Trinity as three subjects in perfect communion.
From this perspective, the doctrine had everything to do with daily life and ethics as a paradigm
for sociopolitical relations. The turn of the millennium has witnessed a counter-revolution

1
Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Meat (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1939), n.p. Cited 26 October
2015. Online: http://www.gutenberg.ca/ebooks/sayers-strong/sayers-strong-00-h.html. Dorothy
L. Sayers, The Mind of the Maker (London: Methuen, 1941) finds in idea, energy/activity, and
power a vestigium trinitatis.
 2

against social and social-agenda trinitarianism. 2 Rather than finding in the Trinity a template for
earthly relationships, several of the counter-revolutionaries urge re-emphasis on God's
mysterious otherness. This article studies three advocates of this ‘apophatic turn’3 in trinitarian
theology: Karen Kilby, Sarah Coakley, and Katherine Sonderegger. Without attempting to do
justice to each one’s entire theological program, I shall evaluate particular uses to which they put
apophaticism in relation to the doctrine of the Trinity, dialogically building a case for an
integrative approach. I conclude by sketching several constructive implications of this approach.

Apophaticism for Trinitarian Minimalism: Karen Kilby

In a string of essays, Durham University’s professor of Catholic theology, Karen Kilby, critiques
the trinitarian renewal’s proponents for their confident assertions about God’s inner life. She
warns against the sins of idolatry and pride: idolatry in projecting sociopolitical ideals onto God,
pride in professional theologians’ pretension of superior insight into the Godhead, and pride
again in Christians’ presumption of an understanding of God (hence a model for politics) lacking
in other faiths. 4 Kilby's cure is an ‘apophatic trinitarianism’. To her, the early church developed

2
For the stages of the trinitarian renewal, see Fred Sanders, ‘Redefining Progress in Trinitarian
Theology: Stephen R. Holmes on the Trinity’ in Thomas A. Noble and Jason S. Sexton, eds., The
Holy Trinity Revisited: Essays in Response to Stephen R. Holmes (Milton Keynes: Paternoster,
2015), pp. 11–26 (using the language of ‘revolution’ and ‘counter-revolution’); Sarah Coakley,
‘Afterword: “Relational Ontology”, Trinity, and Science’ in John Polkinghorne, ed., The Trinity
and an Entangled World: Relationality in Physical Science and Theology (Grand Rapids:
Eerdmans, 2011), pp. 185–94.
3
Sarah Coakley, God, Sexuality, and the Self: An Essay ‘On the Trinity’ (hereafter GSS)
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 23; pp. 334–6 have a useful bibliography on
the renaissance of apophaticism.
4
Karen Kilby, ‘Perichoresis and Projection: Problems with Social Doctrines of the Trinity’, New
Blackfriars 81 (2000), pp. 432–45; ‘Aquinas, the Trinity, and the Limits of Understanding’,
International Journal of Systematic Theology (hereafter IJST) 7 (2005), pp. 414–27; ‘Is an
Apophatic Trinitarianism Possible?’, IJST 12 (2010), pp. 65–77; ‘Trinity and Politics: An
 3

trinitarian orthodoxy simply as a ‘grammar’ for reading scripture well. 5 Technical trinitarian
terms like hypostasis and perichoresis are markers of mystery, not of theologians’ gnosis of the
hidden depths of divinity, and so theologians (starting with Augustine) err when they cease to
use trinitarian dogma to understand scripture and instead seek to understand the dogma itself by
means of ‘models’ of the Trinity. 6 Christians are ‘incorporated’ into the triune life and so should
express this reality not vainly (in both senses of the word: conceitedly and futilely) by trying to
examine the Trinity in which they live but humbly by contemplating the Father through the Son
in the Spirit and by taking social action. 7 Indeed, apophatic trinitarianism has political
implications: if God cannot be modeled, then no worldly model of society can be absolutized.
There is, Kilby suggests, ‘a correspondence . . . between a resistance to idolatry in relation to
God, and a resistance to ideology in relation to political systems’. 8 Christians are enabled by the
Spirit to follow Jesus in doing justice in their particular, imperfect settings, not to build utopia
but to honor the Father.9

None of Kilby's concerns are baseless. Given recent commemorations of the grim
centennial of World War I, which both sides saw as a holy war,10 who doubts the danger of
identifying God with ideology?11 Kilby’s outline of chastened trinitarian political engagement is

Apophatic Approach’, in Oliver D. Crisp and Fred Sanders, eds., Advancing Trinitarian
Theology: Explorations in Constructive Dogmatics (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2014), pp. 75–93.
5
Kilby, ‘Perichoresis’, p. 443; cf. Kilby, ‘Trinity and Politics’, p. 86.
6
Kilby, ‘Apophatic Trinitarianism’, pp. 68–76; cf. Kilby, ‘Aquinas’, pp. 414–27, esp. pp. 423–6.
Kilby thus concurs with her social trinitarian opponents in assessing Augustine as the father of
the West’s trinitarian woes. For a balanced analysis of this assessment, see Joshua McNall, A
Free Corrector: Colin Gunton and the Legacy of Augustine (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2015).
7
Kilby, ‘Apophatic Trinitarianism’, pp. 70–72; Kilby, ‘Trinity and Politics’, pp. 84–93.
8
Kilby, ‘Perichoresis’, p. 439; Kilby, ‘Trinity and Politics’, p. 87 (quotation from the latter).
9
Kilby, ‘Trinity and Politics’, pp. 90–3.
10
Philip Jenkins, The Great and Holy War: How World War I Became a Religious Crusade
(New York: HarperOne, 2014).
11
Indeed, the trinitarian and apophatic renaissances emerged from the ideological upheaval of
World War I as Barth rejected pro-war German liberalism; Russian Orthodox émigrés fleeing the
 4

a winsome alternative, one to which we shall return at the end of this essay. Nevertheless, her
worry that all ‘robust’ trinitarian claims promote hubris and elitism bears further scrutiny.
Matthew Levering and Sarah Coakley urge instead that positive trinitarian theologizing may flow
from friendship with or loving submission to God rather than from desire for mastery.12 Indeed, a
divine vocation to teach entails receiving specialized knowledge to share humbly for students’
benefit, so as to solidify and synthesize their prior understanding,13 while also learning from
them. Nor does apophaticism always guarantee exemption from idolatrous pride. Alan Torrance
cautions that ‘a proper theological reverence in the face of revelation may commit us to make
affirmations, by way of the commandeered function of terms, such that it is precisely the refusal
to use the language of the created order that is irreverent and arrogant’.14

Bolsheviks reacquainted the West with the Eastern fathers (including the Cappadocians and
Pseudo-Dionysius); and Roman Catholic war veterans launched the nouvelle théologie. See
Jenkins, Great and Holy War, pp. 220–3, 228–9; Coakley, ‘Afterword’, pp. 185–8; and essays by
Gavrilyuk and Jones in Sarah Coakley and Charles M. Strang, eds., Re-thinking Dionysius the
Areopagite (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009).
12
Matthew Levering, ‘Friendship and Trinitarian Theology: Response to Karen Kilby’, IJST 9
(2007), pp. 39–54; GSS, pp. 42–51. Karen Kilby, ‘Response to Matthew Levering’, IJST 9
(2007), pp. 55–7 grants that some theologizing may be spiritually edifying—just not theologizing
about trinitarian technicalities.
13
E.g., Kilby, ‘Trinity and Politics’, p. 83, suggests that since ‘ordinary Christians . . . might
think to look for their guidance on social vision from the Ten Commandments, the prophets,
proverbs, the saying of Jesus . . ., even natural law and their own intuitions’ but not to ‘inner-
trinitarian relations’, the latter are superfluous to Christian ethics. But each item on her list has a
proper place in a rightly ordered ethical system, with the divine reality (including its triunity) as
foundational. Apprehending that foundation enriches one’s ethics, not least by resolving the
Euthyphro Dilemma: the intratrinitarian communion of love is the ground of all goodness.
14
Alan J. Torrance, Persons in Communion: An Essay on Trinitarian Description and Human
Participation: with special reference to Volume One of Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics
(Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1996), pp. 230. Likewise, one could protest the ‘elitism’ of teaching
apophaticism to students who have a pre-reflective knowledge of God.
 5

But do the affirmations evoked by revelation authorize building trinitarian models? Kilby
suspects such model-making of betraying scriptural revelation for vain speculation. She alleges
that despite many apophatic qualifiers, Augustine ‘sets a kind of precedent’ in the latter books of
De Trinitate as he searches for a model of the Trinity within the human self, thereby triggering
the tragic ‘hunt for the right analogy, the right model’ of the Trinity. 15

Having sketched the charge against Augustine, we must evaluate it. Lewis Ayres has
contextualized Augustine’s intent in De Trinitate. Rather than seeking a single ‘right model’ of
the Trinity, the bishop employs different trinitarian analogies in different writings for different
purposes. In his anti-Manichaean works, Augustine identifies analogues of the Trinity embedded
in the cosmos to defend the goodness of the world as the triune God’s creation. In his De civitate
Dei, his study of civilization detects trinitarian resonances in Greco-Roman society’s three
divisions of philosophy and three requirements for practitioners of the arts. In De Trinitate, he
adopts a series of mental analogies because he is probing ‘the dynamics of fallen self-knowing
and hence of analogical practice itself’ within the human mind.16 In short, he uses multiple
models of the Trinity both to grow his readers’ knowing of the incomprehensible God and also to
base in Christian dogma his cosmological, sociopolitical, and anthropological reflections.

Furthermore, in De Trinitate Augustine does not simply set out on a Platonically-inspired

speculative hunt for ‘useful’ models. 17 Rather, he believes himself authorized by scriptural
teaching regarding the imago Dei. For the mature Augustine, the second plural of Gen. 1:26 (‘in
our image’) proved that humans were made in the image of the Trinity. 18 Based on this exegesis,
Augustine asks which ‘part’ of the human should be seen as the locus of the imago trinitatis.

15
Kilby, ‘Apophatic Trinitarianism’, p. 75. Thanks to Joshua McNall and Martin Westerholm for
assistance with this subsection on Augustine.
16
Lewis Ayres, Augustine and the Trinity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), esp.
pp. 66, 275–80 (quotation from 276), 315–25.
17
On Augustine’s Platonism see Ayres, Augustine and the Trinity, pp. 13–41.
18
Augustine states this in a later amendment to his Unfinished Commentary on Genesis 16.61.
Cf. Confessions 13.22.32.
 6

Along with other pro-Nicenes of the period, he concludes that the only suitable candidate was the
rational mind.19 Thus the next step was to ask how the mind’s faculties might image the Trinity.

In addition to Genesis 1:26, 1 Corinthians 13 proved essential. The text is referenced

more than twenty times in De Trinitate and provides further exegetical impetus for Augustine’s
inward search for sacred triads. Here the apostle figuratively asserts that while now we see ‘in a
mirror, dimly, . . . then we will see face to face’ (13:12).20 For Augustine, such figuration is an
invitation to see in the looking glass an imperfect reflection of the triune God. Hence Augustine
looks, sees himself, and plunges inward to find the vestigia trinitatis.21

While these considerations are not meant to endorse uncritically Augustine’s triune
similitudes, 22 they do suggest that Kilby’s valid concern for humility before the divine mystery
need not rule out all use of models for the Trinity. Church fathers like Augustine developed
multiple complementary trinitarian models not in order to run ‘beyond what is written’ in
scripture but in order more faithfully to grasp and apply its teachings.23 As foundational as their
efforts were, however, we cannot simply rest on an unreflective repetition of established
orthodox formulae: first, the old formulae are not entirely settled, as the thousand-year standoff
over the filioque clause attests. Secondly, shifts in Western metaphysics and the global spread of
Christianity encourage fresh translation of trinitarian orthodoxy into contemporary cultural

19
Lewis Ayres, Nicaea and Its Legacy: An Approach to Fourth-Century Trinitarian Theology
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 326.
20
This and all subsequent quotations NRSV where not clearly otherwise.
21
See De Trinitate 15.8–9.
22
McNall, Free Corrector, pp. 86–90, offers contextualized critique of Augustine’s inward turn.
23
This is particularly clear in the case of one of the earliest trinitarian model-builders, Irenaeus
of Lyons, who draws his ‘two hands’ analogy from scripture as part of a comprehensive anti-
heretical biblical hermeneutic. See John Lawson, The Biblical Theology of Saint Irenaeus
(London: Epworth, 1948), pp. 122–5; Thomas Holsinger-Friesen, Irenaeus and Genesis: A Study
of Competition in Early Christian Hermeneutics (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2009), 149–50.
 7

thought-forms just as the church fathers translated the gospel into Greco-Roman thought-forms.24
Thirdly, we now have greater access to the Hebrew Bible and Second Temple Judaism than the
church fathers generally did, which requires reassessing their exegetical basis for the doctrine of
the Trinity and even refining the doctrine itself. 25 Fidelity to the church fathers, then, consists not
in simply saying what they said but in doing what they did: prayerfully identifying and
explicating biblically faithful and culturally meaningful models of the ineffable God. The next
two apophatic advocates take up this task with passion and learning. Both recently have
published initial installments of multivolume systematic theologies. Evaluation of these primary
volumes, while necessarily preliminary, is still profitable. To the first of them I now turn.

Apophaticism for Trinitarian Subversion: Sarah Coakley

Cambridge theologian Sarah Coakley’s God, Sexuality, and the Self: An Essay ‘On the Trinity’ is
a dazzling exercise in subversion on multiple fronts. She upends Freud: ‘It is not that physical
“sex” is basic and “God” ephemeral; rather, it is God who is basic, and “desire” the precious
clue’ to the realities of intratrinitarian relations and the God-world relationship (this is Coakley’s
‘ontology of desire’).26 She thwarts mentor Maurice Wiles’ contention that ascribing threeness to
God is arbitrary, instead supporting it experientially from the structure of contemplative prayer

24
Jason S. Sexton and T. A. Noble, ‘Conclusion’, in Noble and Sexton, Holy Trinity Revisited,
pp. 156–61. See, e.g., Polkinghorne, The Trinity and an Entangled World; Veli-Matti
Kärkkäinen, The Trinity: Global Perspectives (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2007);
Timothy C. Tennent, Christianity at the Religious Roundtable: Evangelicalism in Conversation
with Hinduism, Buddhism, and Islam (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2002), pp. 211–29; Nozomu
Miyahira, ‘A Japanese Perspective on the Trinity’, Themelios 22.2 (1997), pp. 39–51.
25
Hebrew Bible: G. A. F. Knight, A Biblical Approach to the Doctrine of the Trinity (Edinburgh:
Oliver & Boyd, [1957]), pp. 2–8 (though he overly distinguishes ‘Hebraic’ and ‘Hellenistic’
thinking). Second Temple Judaism: N. T. Wright’s sprawling Christian Origins and the Question
of God series (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1992– ) reconstructs trinitarianism (and much besides) in
Jewish categories allegedly neglected by later Gentile Christians.
26
GSS, pp. 6–15, 56–9, 310–18 (quotations from pp. 10 and 6, respectively; italics hers).
 8

as the answering of God (the Spirit) to God (the Father) in order to conform the contemplative to
God (the Son).27 She runs feminist blockades of classical trinitarian God-talk while
simultaneously undermining its conflation with patriarchy and heteronormativity: in apophatic
contemplative prayer, the Spirit moves the contemplative beyond idolatrously masculinized
views of God and falsely essentialized notions of gender. Through the Spirit, one’s desires are
purified and reoriented Godward.28 Much of the above is commendable, and I shall return to
Coakley’s contributions below after addressing some concerns.

Coakley echoes Kilby in her accent on living contemplatively in the Trinity and in her
rejection of social trinitarian projectionism. 29 Yet Kilby could protest (somewhat justifiably) that
Coakley herself projects her interests regarding sex and gender onto the Trinity. 30 One could
argue that the traditional ‘Apollonian’ patriarchal preoccupations with a) divine unity, b) God’s
Logos incarnate as the man Jesus, c) the imago Dei as rationality, d) creedal orthodoxy, and e)
traditional sexual practices and gender roles simply are replaced with a ‘Dionysian’31 feminist
embrace of a') divine plurality, b') God’s Spirit, c') the imago as erotic desire,32 d') apophatic

27
GSS, pp. 106–44.
28
GSS, pp. 8–15, 318–27, 342.
29
On the latter, see GSS, pp. xiv, 270, 272, 309, 321 n. 22.
30
Cf. Kilby, ‘Response to Matthew Levering’, p. 56 n. 3 on Hans Urs von Balthasar’s tendency
to elevate ‘the act of sexual union’ as ‘the biblical image of interpersonal relations’.
31
This linking of Nietzsche’s Apollonian/Dionysian typology with a masculine/feminine dyad
employs Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson
(London: Yale University Press, 1990). This is not to endorse Paglia’s thesis as a whole or in
various particulars; it is merely to suggest how Coakley’s work is susceptible to such an
analysis—one which her fondness for Pseudo-Dionysius (GSS, pp. 312–24) invites.
32
Elsewhere Coakley explains her rationale for privileging desire over reason: doing so ‘well
includes the neonate, the mentally disabled and the demented, for instance.’ See Sarah Coakley,
‘Desire and Dogma’, Syndicate Theology (11 November 2015): n.p. Cited 8 March 2016. Online:
https://syndicatetheology.com/commentary/on-the-loving-mutations-of-god-sexuality-and-the-
self/#5851.
 9

mystical ecstasy (‘A love affair with a blank’), 33 and e') fluid expressions of sexuality and
gender. 34 One may project onto God a ‘blank’ just as much as an image—and find in that blank a
carte blanche to fund one’s sociopolitical interests. As John Webster once warned, when ‘God’s
own being . . . becomes a blank’, the result is ‘a void which we then have busily to fill with ideas
of our own invention’. 35

In reply, Coakley may plead fairly for forbearance on Christology, which her final
volume will cover.36 She also seeks to skirt subjectivism, in part by broadening the scope of
theological inquiry to include other disciplines. 37 This commitment to a ‘théologie totale’38
expresses itself in expansive exegesis of literary theory, sociology, patristics, postmodern
philosophy, and iconography—but not scripture.39 Coakley rests her constructive trinitarian
proposal primarily on one passage, Rom. 8:9–30. Here she finds ‘the only valid experientially

33
GSS, p. 342 approvingly quotes this description of contemplation by Dom Sebastian Moore.
34
GSS, pp. 1–15, 22–7. Coakley’s definition of gender as ‘differentiated embodied relationship’
(GSS, p. 59; cf. pp. 53–5) is too imprecise: the relationship between, e.g., tall and short persons
constitutes a ‘differentiated embodied relationship’ without implying gender difference.
35
John Webster, Holiness (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003), p. 44. Cf. Joshua McNall,
‘Shrinking pigeon, brooding dove: the Holy Spirit in recent works by Sarah Coakley and N. T.
Wright’, Scottish Journal of Theology 69.3 (2016), pp. 295–308 (esp. pp. 305–7).
36
Sarah Coakley, ‘Response to Reviewers of God, Sexuality and the Self’, Modern Theology 30
(2014), pp. 591–9.
37
GSS, pp. 25–26.
38
GSS, p. 352.
39
Cf. Wesley Hill, Paul and the Trinity: Persons, Relations, and the Pauline Letters (Grand
Rapids: Eerdmans, 2015), p. 47: ‘[M]uch contemporary theology is . . . in danger of dismissing
exegesis, opting instead to engage great thinkers of the Christian past or contemporary
philosophers of religion or social scientists or any number of other disciplines before it turns (or
in lieu of turning) to Scripture.’ Sonderegger raises the same concern in her review of GSS in
IJST 18.1 (2016), p. 96.
 10

based pressure towards hypostatizing the Spirit’. 40 Elsewhere she cites charismatic gifts
(prophecy and glossolalia) as further experiential evidence of the distinct hypostasis of the Spirit
in the Trinity, referring cursorily to some of the relevant biblical material. 41

Coakley’s survey of scripture yields two contrasting trinitarian models. In Rom. 8 (and
incipiently in Lk. 1:26–38), she identifies an ‘incorporative’ model of the Trinity in which the
Spirit is the first term of trinitarian logic and experience, directing us toward the Father and into
conformity to the Son by inserting us into the divine life. She distinguishes this model from the
‘“linear” revelatory model, in which primary focus is given to the Father–Son relationship, and
the Holy Spirit becomes the secondary purveyor of that relationship to the church’, as found in
John’s Gospel and the Ascension–Pentecost sequence of Acts 1–2.42

I propose, however, that these are not two models but the same model viewed from
opposing angles. This proposal may be illustrated by a closer look at the biblical texts. As in the
‘linear’ model, Rom. 8, the chapter on the Spirit, follows seven chapters focused on God the
Father and Christ. Yet in Rom. 8, Paul strongly implies that God raised Christ from the dead by
the Spirit (vs. 11; cf. 1:4),43 and it is this Spirit, the ‘Spirit of Christ’ (8:9), whom the Roman
Christians have received and who directs them in prayer toward the Father and into
Christlikeness (8:14–16, 26–29). Likewise in Luke’s volumes, the Father relates to the Son in the
Spirit (Lk. 1:26–38); Jesus relates to the Father through the Spirit (Lk. 10:21); he instructs his
disciples by means of the Spirit (Acts 1:2); and he ascends and receives the Spirit from the
Father to pour out on the disciples (Acts 2:33), producing Spirit-led prayer and testimony in
relation to himself and his Father (e.g., Acts 4:23–31; 7:55, 59–60). So too in the Fourth Gospel,
40
GSS, p. 113 (emphasis hers); interpretation of Rom. 8 covers pp. 112–15. Complementing the
early church’s experiential pressure toward trinitarianism was the exegetical pressure generated
by the prosopological exegesis of Jewish scripture: see Fred Sanders, The Triune God (Grand
Rapids: Zondervan, 2016), pp. 226–35; Matthew W. Bates, The Birth of the Trinity: Jesus, God,
and Spirit in New Testament and Early Christian Interpretations of the Old Testament (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2015). Coakley nods to this factor in GSS, p. 120.
41
GSS, pp. 102, 116–21.
42
GSS, pp. 102, 111–12 (quotation from p. 111).
43
Cf. Hill, Paul and the Trinity, p. 153.
 11

the Son first receives the Spirit before sharing this gift with others (Jn. 1:32–33) and the Spirit
generates eternal life (Jn. 4:14; 7:37–39), which is an intimate personal knowing of the Father
and the Son associated with sharing in the intradivine union, love, and glory (Jn. 17:3, 20–26).44
In all these cases, the Spirit links the Father with the Son and, once given to believers, connects
them to both Father and Son. In no way is the Spirit’s function merely ‘revelatory’ and not
‘incorporative’.45 The New Testament data are more harmonious than Coakley’s dual-model
schema suggests. The tensions arise in later ecclesial debates over how much of the data may be
transferred from the economic to the immanent Trinity (e.g., the filioque controversy) 46 and over
how much allegedly new movements of the Spirit could deviate from previous Spirit-initiated
activity (the Montanist controversy).47

However contestable her methodological and biblical foundations, Coakley contributes

treasures to trinitarian theology. First, by binding the doctrine of the Trinity to the practice of
prayer, she assists in reversing English Christianity’s historic drift from trinitarian ‘invocation’

44
See Francis Watson, ‘Trinity and Community: A Reading of John 17’, IJST 1 (1999), pp. 168–
83. Cf. Coakley’s incomplete coverage of the Fourth Gospel in GSS, p. 101 n. 1.
45
Pace GSS, p. 111.
46
Fred Sanders, The Image of the Immanent Trinity: Rahner’s Rule and the Theological
Interpretation of Scripture (New York: Peter Lang, 2005), pp. 16–44; even Coakley grants that
her two models may be seen as complementary (GSS, p. 111 n. 12), though her entire volume is
intended to promote the ‘incorporative’ model (pp. 332–4).
47
That is, instead of typifying the Montanist controversy exclusively as the Spirit (embodied in
the Montanists) being subordinated to the Father and Son (represented by the orthodox bishops),
as in GSS, pp. 115–26, one could view it as recent, novel claims to Spirited revelation being
subordinated to established artifacts of the Spirit’s past actions: incarnation, scripture,
sacraments, and episcopacy. Cf. Kathryn Greene-McCreight, ‘He Spoke through the Prophets:
The Prophetic Word Made More Sure’, in Christopher R. Seitz, ed., Nicene Christianity: The
Future for a New Ecumenism (Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2001), pp. 167–75. For a brief challenge to
Coakley’s historical reconstruction of early pneumatology, see Richard Finn’s review of GSS in
Reviews in Religion & Theology 21 (2014), pp. 474–5.
 12

toward mere ‘assent’ and unitarianism. 48 Secondly, while Kilby is chary of contemplating the
Trinity, Coakley does so and restates Augustine’s and Richard of St. Victor’s insights into love’s
triadic structure in a fresh feminist idiom. Thirdly, drawing on Rahner’s Rule, she echoes other
voices calling for more recognition of the mutuality of person-constituting relations within the
Trinity, so that the Son is seen as eternally begotten from the Father in the Spirit and the Father
forever receives that identity back in the Spirit and the Son—the Son who unceasingly cries
‘Abba’ and the Spirit who constantly co-testifies to that appellation’s truth. 49 Finally (and
ironically), her phenomenology of prayer in the Spirit substantiates an ‘I–Thou’ relation within
the Godhead, thus seconding a core conviction of social trinitarians and those influenced by
them,50 her own wariness of social trinitarianism notwithstanding. Her subversive traversing of
the via negativa paradoxically delivers positive content to trinitarian doctrine.

Apophaticism for Trinitarian Deferral: Katherine Sonderegger

Like Coakley, Virginia Theological Seminary’s Katherine Sonderegger is a priest in the

Anglican Communion, a theology professor, and the author of a dogmatics with a premiere
volume marked by beautiful prose, interdisciplinary interest, and accents on prayer and
apophasis. Yet while Coakley creatively assembles ‘fragments’ from various fields51 (including

48
On which drift see William S. Babcock, ‘A Changing of the Christian God: The Doctrine of
God in the Seventeenth Century’, Interpretation 45 (1991), pp. 133–46; Jason E. Vickers,
Invocation and Assent: The Making and Remaking of Trinitarian Theology (Grand Rapids:
Eerdmans, 2008); Paul C. H. Lim, Mystery Unveiled: The Crisis of the Trinity in Early Modern
England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).
49
GSS, pp. 327–34, concurring with Thomas G. Weinandy, The Father’s Spirit of Sonship:
Reconceiving the Trinity (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1995); others include Thomas Smail, ‘The
Holy Spirit in the Holy Trinity’ in Seitz, Nicene Christianity, pp. 149–65; Sanders, Image, pp. 8,
173–87. Cf. the intriguing comments by Ayres, Augustine and the Trinity, p. 247, on Augustine’s
unusual description of the Father as existing propter Filium in Tractatus in Ioannem 19.
50
E.g., Torrance, Persons in Communion.
51
GSS, p. 33.
 13

bits of scripture and theological ontology) into a theology proper devoted to De Deo Trino,
Sonderegger moves stepwise through metaphysically rich meditations on the divine being and
attributes, canvassing the broad sweep of the biblical canon52 and Western intellectual history in
the service of De Deo Uno.53 If Coakley relishes the Many, Sonderegger glories in the One.

Against social trinitarians, Sonderegger insists that the divine oneness, not threeness,
provides the proper foundation for theology, for it grants common ground with other
monotheistic faiths and sums up the whole scriptural witness to God. 54 The repeated biblical
corollary of monotheism is rejection of all idols, whether metal or mental. That YHWH is ‘one’
(echad in Deut. 6:4’s Hebrew) means radical uniqueness, invisibility, ineffability, and simplicity.
At this stage Sonderegger endorses strict apophaticism: ‘There can be no affirmation of God that
is not controlled by the radical negation of form, image, and likeness.’55 Yet affirmations of God
may be made, for scripture reveals the ineffable God a se by means of analogy: echoing Alan
Torrance, she continues, ‘God commandeers our thought. He reaches down and seizes the bridle,
turning our words to his own will and work.’ All this is expressed in the doctrine of
omnipresence, God’s invisible being as indwelling our words and world. 56 In discussing the
cognate doctrines of omnipotence and omniscience, though, apophaticism resurfaces when she
denies any divine volition or intellect; these notions are ‘too anthropomorphic’. God is ‘Subject,
the great I AM’ but not Mind, which might suggest incompleteness due to disembodiedness. 57
Lastly, Sonderegger’s treatment of God’s love follows the via negativa to strip it of any
orientation toward another. She protests Richard of St. Victor’s view that divine love implies an
‘I–Thou’ relation within God: such a view threatens God’s unity by suggesting multiple divine

52
‘This book is biblical theology; just that.’ – Sonderegger, Systematic Theology Volume One,
The Doctrine of God (hereafter ST) (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2015), p. xv.
53
Sonderegger’s second volume will cover the Trinity, according to ST’s dust jacket.
54
ST, pp. xiv–xv, 5–14, 20, 443.
55
ST, pp. 16–21 and §2 passim (quotation from p. 29).
56
ST, §3 (quotation from p. 96; italics hers).
57
ST, pp. 196–8, 246–53, 318, 335–6, 398 (quotation from pp. 249 and 198, respectively).
 14

subjects, hence tritheism. Instead, God’s is the objectless love of ‘one who simply is loving,
much as water is wet . . ., without need or demand’.58

Sonderegger makes a compelling case that, as she puts it, ‘monotheism is not a shame
word!’59 Her regard for the scriptural stress on divine unity is a welcome countermotion to
centrifugal trinitarianisms. Nor is the Trinity wholly absent from her first volume.60 Still, at
points are signs of overcorrection, jeopardizing the genuine gains of the trinitarian revival. To
begin with the word ‘one’: before inflating its meaning via philosophical theology, we should
note that when Deut. 6:4 confesses YHWH as echad, the term does not demand absolute
simplicity:61 for instance, in Genesis’ creation accounts, evening and morning together constitute
‘one day’ (1:5; Heb. yom echad) and man and woman conjoined become ‘one flesh’ (2:26; Heb.
basar echad).62 In the Shema itself, YHWH’s unity summons a corresponding unity of heart and
soul and strength (note the terminological plurality)63 in love for Israel’s God (Deut. 6:5).
Moreover, in the canon the Shema stands near the end of the Torah and sums up all prior
revelation about God. Certainly the creation, patriarchal narratives, exodus, and desert
wanderings have underscored God’s uniqueness in being and power; yet odd hints of multiplicity
appear alongside: the usual Hebrew noun for the one God takes singular verbs but has a plural
ending (elohim); ‘Let us make humankind in our image’ sits alongside ‘So God created
humankind in his image’ (Gen. 1:26–27); the line between theophanies and angelophanies,

58
ST, §8 (quotation from p. 485).
59
ST, p. xiv (italics hers; repeated nearly verbatim on p. 443).
60
E.g., ST, pp. 268–9 and, previously and poignantly, pp. 215–9’s christological meditation on
omnipotence and theodicy.
61
This is not to deny simplistically divine simplicity! For an evaluation of various versions, see
Thomas H. McCall, ‘Trinity Doctrine, Plain and Simple’, in Oliver D. Crisp and Fred Sanders,
eds., Advancing Trinitarian Theology: Explorations in Constructive Dogmatics (Grand Rapids:
Zondervan, 2014), pp. 42–59.
62
The same is true of the Greek word heis/mia/hen in the New Testament, e.g., Jn. 17:20–21; 1
Cor. 6:15–17.
63
This is not to advocate trichotomism or faculty psychology; it is simply to note that in some
manner the Shema presumes a plurality-within-unity in the human person.
 15

including the number of divine subjects involved, blurs at times (more on that momentarily). The
Shema’s ‘one’ has room for all this earlier diversity-in-unity as well as for all the rest that the
completed two-testament canon will bring.64

At this point it bears recalling that monotheism is not monolithic. We must distinguish
the strict unitarianism of post-‘parting of ways’ Judaism and of Islam from the openness within
Second Temple Judaism to the possibility of plurality within the Godhead. The early church used
this inheritance to develop its doctrine of the Trinity, locating evidence of the three persons in
Jewish scripture.65 This development included equating theophanies with christophanies; reading
references to Word, Spirit, and Wisdom hypostatically; 66 and interpreting grammatical shifts
(especially in person and tense) within biblical speeches as intratrinitarian conversations. 67

64
Knight, Biblical Approach, pp. 17, 20–1, 47–8. For a defense of making room for the Trinity
in the Jewish scriptures, see Christopher Seitz, ‘The Trinity in the Old Testament’, in Gilles
Emery and Matthew Levering, eds., The Oxford Handbook of the Trinity (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2011), pp. 28–40. Obviously we are employing canonical-theological
hermeneutics; the historical-critical method accounts differently for the above-listed ‘odd hints’.
65
For variations on this theme, cf. Bates, Birth of the Trinity; Wright, Paul and the Faithfulness
of God (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2015), pp. 619–773; Richard Bauckham, Jesus and the God of
Israel: God Crucified and Other Studies in the New Testament’s Christology of Divine Identity
(Milton Keynes: Paternoster, 2008); Larry W. Hurtado, How on Earth Did Jesus Become a
God?: Historical Questions about Earliest Devotion to Jesus (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005);
Margaret Barker, The Great Angel: A Study of Israel’s Second God (Louisville:
Westminster/John Knox, 1992); James D. G. Dunn, Christology in the Making: A New
Testament Inquiry into the Origins of the Doctrine of the Incarnation, 2nd edn. (Grand Rapids:
Eerdmans, 1989).
66
E.g., Justin Martyr, Dialogue with Trypho 56; Irenaeus, Against Heresies 4.20; Novatian, De
Trinitate 12; Hilary, De Trinitate 4.23–25. For further background, see the essays by Edwards
and Hildebrand in Emery and Levering, Oxford Handbook of the Trinity.
67
E.g., Justin Martyr, 1 Apology 36.1–2; Tertullian, Against Praxeas 11, cited in Bates, Birth of
the Trinity, pp. 27–8, 32–3.
 16

Sonderegger, however, repudiates such exegesis as indicative of modern theologians’

failure to defer to divine oneness in their rush to discuss the Trinity. 68 Siding with Augustine
against earlier tradition (without referencing it), she interprets the theophanies in terms of God’s
hypostatically undifferentiated omnipresence. 69 The blurring between YHWH and the angel in
Jacob’s wrestling match and at Moses’ burning bush simply shows that God can indwell his
creatures.70 The same may be said for the ‘fluidity of speakers’ in Jeremiah’s prophecies. 71 Even
the prophets’ visions of YHWH enthroned have purely ethical, not metaphysical significance,
lest God’s invisible omnipresence be compromised.72 Had such exegesis prevailed in the earliest
church, one wonders how any doctrine of the Trinity (beyond perhaps modalism or adoptionism)
could have developed. Such jealous custody of divine oneness against the claims of threeness is
foreign to the spirit of the Shema and the Second Temple Jewish matrix of Christianity. Like
Abraham with his three visitors, divine unity welcomes divine threeness and in turn the Three
enrich the One. Properly understood, each naturally inclines toward the other.

Just as unity and plurality within God must be thought together, 73 so also must apophatic
iconoclasm and cataphatic modeling, including both the social and psychological models. In his
De Trinitate, Augustine moves from social similitudes (8.8–10 [marriage, friendship]) to
psychological similitudes (Books 9–14 [e.g., memory, understanding, love]), with apophatic

68
ST, pp. 289, 443.
69
Augustine, De Trinitate 2.18.35; 4.31. Michel René Barnes, ‘The Visible Christ and the
Invisible Trinity: Mt. 5.8 in Augustine’s Trinitarian Theology of 400’, Modern Theology 19
(2003), pp. 329–55, explains the milieu and motives involved in Augustine’s innovation.
70
ST, pp. 81–5, 212–14 (quotation from p. 212).
71
ST, 224–5. Here exegetes could benefit from a ‘Coakley-ar implant’: the spiritual experience
of listening in on an intratrinitarian conversation.
72
ST, pp. 435–7. By contrast, consider how crucial Dan. 7’s vision was for shaping the earliest
Christology: see N. T. Wright, Jesus and the Victory of God (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1996), pp.
512–28.
73
See Hill, Paul and the Trinity, for a constructive treatment of this point in protest against
current New Testament scholarship’s tendency to assume monotheism as a known quantity and
then attempt to supplement it with Christology.
 17

mystery over all (Book 15). Gregory Nyssen meshes psychological and social models, arguing in
his Catechetical Oration that God has reason (Logos) and breath (Spirit), yet each is self-
subsisting, equipped with its own volition (Cat. Or. 1–2). How can the one God be hypostatically
three? Here Nyssen appeals to ineffability (Cat. Or. 3). Elsewhere across his writings he
famously uses two- and three-men analogies within an apophatically-accented theology. 74 The
New Testament itself offers a combined apophatic-psychosocial trinitarianism75: thus, in what
quickly became the church’s normative trinitarian formula (Matt. 28:19), baptism is in the
ineffable Name shared by ‘Father’ and ‘Son’ (note the social metaphors) 76 and ‘Holy Spirit’
(arguably a chiefly psychological metaphor).77 The Fourth Gospel complexifies this scheme by
psychologizing the Son as the transcendent God’s Logos (Jn. 1:1, 14) and socializing the Spirit
as the Paraclete (Jn. 14–16). And in Coakley’s paradigmatic Pauline passage, the mysterious
depths of human and divine subjectivity are plumbed by a Spirit with a ‘mind’ who ineffably
‘intercedes with sighs too deep for words’ and a heart-searching God with a ‘will’ and

74
Giulio Maspero, Trinity and Man: Gregory of Nyssa’s Ad Ablabium (Leiden: Brill, 2007), chs.
1–2. Maspero notes that Nyssen uses two- and three-men analogies in his Contra Eunomium I,
Ad Graecos, Ad Ablabium, Ad Petrum, Ad Simplicitum, and Antirrheticus, concluding, ‘This is a
favored example of the Nyssian’ (pp. 7–8). Furthermore, due to Nyssen’s doctrine of the imago
Dei, this analogy is not simply one among many or ‘a purely rhetorical device’ but ‘an essential
theological point’ (p. xiii; cf. p. 75). This analogy has a precedent in Jn. 8:17–18, in which Jesus
compares himself and his Father to two men (Gk. duo anthropon).
75
As recognized by Ayres, Augustine and the Trinity, pp. 324–5 and in Lewis Ayres, ‘“As We
are One”: Thinking into the Mystery’, in Crisp and Sanders, Advancing Trinitarian Theology, pp.
94–113.
76
On ‘the name’ as an allusion to the tetragrammaton and its connection to Father–Son language,
see R. Kendall Soulen, ‘“The Name Above Every Name”: The Eternal Identity of the Second
Person of the Trinity and the Covenant of Grace’, in Crisp and Sanders, Advancing Trinitarian
Theology, pp. 114–29, esp. 116–22.
77
Unless one substitutes the AV’s ‘Holy Ghost’, which adds a more personal nuance. The title
‘holy spirit’ originates from Isa. 63:10–11, where it has a psychological connotation: cf. vs. 10
with Ps. 73:21.
 18

knowledge of the Spirit’s mind (Rom. 8:26–27).78 Sonderegger’s privileging of apophasis at the
expense of both the psychological and the social analogies’ portrait of God as possessing
intellect and volition risks reducing God to a mindless, involuntary Force, especially given other
elements of her presentation: her favored metaphor of God as (Heraclitean) Fire; her (otherwise
intriguing) analogy between divine omnipotence and the ubiquity of energy in the cosmos;79 and
her teaching that God created out of inner necessity. 80 Elsewhere, her portrait of the Trinity in
terms of Platonic Forms could have a similarly depersonalizing effect. 81 Similitudes of Fire and

78
Cf. 1 Cor. 2:9–12 and 16, in which the apophaticism of vss. 9 and 16a yields to revealed
knowledge in vss. 12 and 16b via the psychological model of the searching, comprehending
Spirit (analogous to the human spirit within oneself) in vss. 10–11 and via vs. 16’s social
portrayal of the Lord Christ who has his own ‘mind’.
79
ST, pp. 208–13 (references to God as Fire and Light passim). To answer caricature with
caricature: if God as Mind recalls science fiction’s ‘“brain in a vat”’ or ‘the ghostly,
commanding head of the great and terrible Oz’ (ST, p. 198), then God as never-Mind parallels
the Force, the impersonal living energy field from Star Wars (but cf. Sonderegger’s caveat on pp.
266–8).
80
ST, pp. 305–25, although insisting throughout that God remains free so that, paradoxically,
God could have done what God necessarily does not do (i.e., refuse to create). Cf. p. 95’s
rejection of pantheism.
81
Katherine Sonderegger, ‘The Humility of the Son of God’, in Oliver D. Crisp and Fred
Sanders, eds., Christology, Ancient and Modern: Explorations in Constructive Dogmatics (Grand
Rapids: Zondervan, 2013), pp. 60–73. Here Christ is identified with the Form of Truth (citing Jn.
14:6). Sonderegger links the other trinitarian hypostases with the Forms of Oneness and
Goodness (p. 67). In her 17 Jan. 2013 Los Angeles Theology Conference presentation from
which this chapter originated (available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=suxbuxhMO9A),
Sonderegger clarified that she saw the Father as the Form of Oneness (using Deut. 6:4) and the
Spirit as the Form of Goodness; she excluded Beauty from the Forms (these comments occur at
1:09:48–1:15:08). But this all seems ad hoc: could not one argue just as arbitrarily for the Father
to be the Form of Goodness (Mk. 10:18); the Spirit, the Form of Oneness (Eph. 4:3–4); or Christ
 19

Form certainly have their place—and few can match Sonderegger’s holy eloquence in expositing
them—but require to be complemented by the more personal psychological and social analogies.

As with God as One and as Mind, so with God as Love: the integrative approach
proposed above could relax the tension which Sonderegger senses: ‘Tremendous pressure is
exerted on Divine Unicity here [by the doctrine of divine love]. Two or three Divine Subjects
seem forged from this heat’.82 To articulate an objectless love, Sonderegger appeals to 1 Cor. 13
and, in a gripping exegesis of 1 Samuel, to Jonathan’s loyal love for both David and Saul. Yet in
the latter case, she admits that the narrator saw Jonathan’s love as having David for its object. 83
In the former case, the entire epistle demonstrates that Paul wishes the quarrelsome Corinthians
to be patient, kind, polite, and humble toward one another. Theologically, Sonderegger wishes to
preserve God’s love free from the neediness which reciprocity implies. Here lies a corrective to
potential misappropriations of Coakley’s discussion of divine eros toward creation, which might
be taken in the direction of a panentheistic codependency. 84 On the other hand, Coakley’s
‘ontology of desire’ affirms the insight that love by nature seeks a beloved. Thinking together
Sonderegger’s and Coakley’s concerns yields a resolution: divine love inherently seeks and fully
satisfies itself in the reciprocal intratrinitarian relations. The love of God ad extra produces

the Form of Beauty (the title of Francesca Aran Murphy’s monograph [Edinburgh: T&T Clark,
1995])?
82
ST, p. 478 (emphasis mine).
83
ST, pp. 495–501. Indeed, for Steven D. Boyer and Christopher A. Hall, The Mystery of God:
Theology for Knowing the Unknowable (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2012), pp. 113–14, the loving
bonding of souls between Jonathan and David in 1 Sam. 18:1 reflects in the realm of friendship
the intratrinitarian relations. Joel Green, ed., Wesley Study Bible (Nashville: Abingdon, 2009), p.
358, notes precisely the same language of soul-bonding in the Hebrew of Gen. 44:30’s
description of Jacob and Benjamin’s father-son relationship, ‘his life is bound up in the boy’s
life’—a passage which strikingly anticipates Jn. 14:10.
84
Coakley herself is clear on this point: ‘But in God, “desire” of course signifies no lack—as it
manifestly does in humans’ (GSS, p. 10 [italics hers]; cf. p. 333).
 20

creation and redemption neither by rational necessity nor by purely arbitrary choice or chance
but by the mysterious contingency of free grace. 85

Implications of Integration

Thus far, this study of the new apophaticism has placed a trio of its advocates in dialogue with
one another. While ‘these three are one’ in their rejection of social trinitarianism, they differ
among themselves in a mutually corrective manner. Kilby lays a foundation by prescribing
apophaticism as a solution to pride and projectionism. Coakley and Sonderegger follow her on
the via negativa but arrive at more positive content to the knowledge of God. Coakley’s
distinctively trinitarian insights and Sonderegger’s more generally monotheistic emphasis
counterbalance one another. Already I have begun to sketch an integrative approach to the issues
raised by these three theologians. In the service of this approach, my final section will draw
together several synthetic claims.

Apophaticism and Cataphaticism. At its best, apophaticism summons us to epistemic and

semiotic repentance, an acknowledgement of the finitude and fallenness of our thoughts and
words in the presence of the Holy One. But repentance is never an end in itself. Like Israel’s
prophets, we confess our inadequacies only so that our lips may be purged and our mouths filled
with the word of the Lord (Isa. 6; Jer. 1). Sonderegger puts it well: apophasis is a ‘stagehand’ for
cataphasis. 86 One pilgrims the via negativa en route to the via affirmativa. Giulio Maspero warns
against making ineffability an ignis fatui which leads one astray from creation’s telos and the
incarnate Immanuel. We were created to love God, yet to love God we must know God. We
come to know God through neither Eunomian rationalism nor gnostic world-negation but
through him who is ‘the image of the invisible God’ (Col. 1:15):

In Christ the path has opened which, through the events of his life, his sentiments
and his virtues, in a word, through his heart, leads to the very Trinitarian

85
Thomas F. Torrance, Divine and Contingent Order (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981),
pp. 108–9.
86
ST, p. 97.
 21

immanence. In his heart time and eternity are united forever and man has access
to the heart of the Father. In Christ we can love God with human sentiments,
words and thoughts.

Thus ‘apophaticism finds its completion and end in the face of Christ.’ 87 They are misguided
who reverse this movement, esteeming as but a waystation the Word-made-flesh and as the
destination a divine abyss of formless, wordless darkness—a view that risks re-deifying the
demythologized tehom subdued by God’s primal fiat lux.88

Yet that ‘completion and end in the face of Christ’ is not a settled state in this life (nor, if
Nyssen is correct, in the next). It is the point to which we return again and again as we
experience ever more fully the divine mystery: ‘No matter how paradoxical and apophatic one’s
knowledge of God becomes, for Gregory the entire progression remains thoroughly
Christological at the same time.’89 The need to shuttle between apophasis and cataphasis is,
therefore, constant: it is the dynamic of spiritual and theological progress. For this reason, any
sound ‘apophatic trinitarianism’ must be accompanied by a cataphatic trinitarianism. There is no
gain in steering clear of the Scylla of cataphatic excess (whether social trinitarian or

87
Maspero, Trinity and Man, ch. 2 (quotations from pp. 142 and 137, respectively). Cf. Book 10
of Augustine’s Confessions, in which the bishop surveys the outer, material world and his inner,
immaterial soul to find God, only ever to hear the apophatic refrain, ‘He is not here! We are not
he!’ Finally, Augustine looks to Christ as the one perfect Mediator of divine truth and life.
88
Such a reversal occurs, e.g., in the medieval West’s ‘sundering’ of the Mystical Theology from
the rest of the pseudo-Dionysian corpus—a sundering re-emergent in some postmodern
receptions of the Areopagite (Sarah Coakley, ‘Introduction—Re-Thinking Dionysius the
Areopagite’ in Coakley and Strang, Re-thinking Dionysius, pp. 1–10, esp. 3–4; cf. Oliver Davies
and Denys Turner, eds., Silence and the Word: Negative Theology and the Incarnation
[Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002], pp. 3–4).
89
Hans Boersma, Embodiment and Virtue in Gregory of Nyssa: An Anagogical Approach
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 221–8, 231–45 (quotation from p. 245).
 22

iconographic) 90 only to sink in the Charybdis of an all-swallowing apophaticism. It is no virtue to

avoid the pride of saying overmuch about God if one falls into the sloth of saying too little. And
so, standing in awe before the divine mystery that ever exceeds our speech, we dare to confess
God as both One and Three and to use creaturely analogies to signify the Creator.

The One and the Many. If apophaticism and cataphaticism exist in a dialectic, so too do
unity and plurality within God. Gregory Nazianzen expresses the proper instinct: ‘No sooner do I
conceive of the One than I am illumined by the Splendour of the Three; no sooner do I
distinguish Them than I am carried back to the One. . . . When I contemplate the Three together,
I see but one torch, and cannot divide or measure out the Undivided Light.’91 Here Nazianzen’s
mind perpetually weaves back and forth between divine unity and plurality, and does so by
means of analogy (‘illumined by the Splendour of the Three . . . one torch . . . Undivided Light’).

Among the most important trinitarian analogies employed by scripture and the church
fathers are the psychological and the social. Rather than favoring either analogy or opting for a
purely apophatic ‘neither-nor’ approach, David Bentley Hart urges that both analogies contribute
to a balanced view of the Godhead. He further argues that both are rooted in perichoresis, that
mysterious ‘coinherence, in which the exteriority of relations and interiority of identity in God
are one, each Person wholly reflecting and containing and indwelling each of the others.’ 92 In
this case, the relationship of the psychological analogy to the social analogy approximates the
relationship between the one and the many in the biblical motif of corporate solidarity. 93 Many
90
GSS, ch. 5 canvasses trinitarian iconography, showing how attempts to depict visually Three
who are One often produce monstrosities—including one that resembles a sainted Scylla: an
elongated body with three heads atop outstretched necks!
91
Oration 40.41 (NPNF2 7:375).
92
‘The Mirror of the Infinite: Gregory of Nyssa on the Vestigia Trinitatis’, in Sarah Coakley, ed.,
Re-thinking Gregory of Nyssa (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003), pp. 115–7 (quotation from p.
116).
93
Corporate solidarity should not be equated with the older, more problematic notion of
‘corporate personality’. See Constantine R. Campbell, Paul and Union with Christ: An
Exegetical and Theological Study (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2012), ch. 8; G. W. Grogan, ‘The
Old Testament Concept of Solidarity in Hebrews’, Tyndale Bulletin 49.1 (1998), pp. 159–73.
 23

Israelites could be subsumed under the figure of Jacob (e.g., Isa. 41:14) or Ephraim (Hos. 11:1–
3). Paul could speak of his converts as being of one mind, spirit, soul, and body (e.g., 1 Cor.
1:10; Phil. 1:27; 2:2; 1 Thess. 5:23) and as individual ‘members’ of Christ’s body (1 Cor. 12:12–
27). He even introduces Onesimus as ‘my own heart’ (Phlm. 12). To an infinitely greater degree,
the three persons of the Trinity together are one in mind and will, with the Son and Spirit
portrayed as—though irreducible to—particular ‘members’, ‘faculties’, or ‘attributes’ of the
Father such as Wisdom and Power or Word and Breath. The notions of perichoresis and
corporate solidarity thus serve as bridge-concepts to bind the social and psychological analogies
together rather than leaving them as strictly divergent models.

By means of these bridge-concepts, the devout mind may move between the two
analogies in meditation upon the Three-One God. The goal of such meditation is not
presumptuously to treat the Trinity as a puzzle to be solved and shelved. Rather, the goal is to
allow these biblically-funded analogies to engage one’s reason, imagination, volition, and
emotions in worship. 94 A secondary outcome, as Augustine exemplifies, is that one begins to
integrate all other knowledge and experience, whether cosmological, political, or otherwise, with
one’s vision of the Trinity. This outcome brings us to the final dyad which we will consider.

Imitation and Incorporation. Since ancient times, Christians have believed not only that
they were incorporated into the Trinity (e.g., through the sacraments and prayer) but also that
they were to imitate the Trinity. Gregory Nazianzen, for instance, patterned his relations with
fellow clergy on his view of intratrinitarian relations. 95 During the Arian controversy, the Father-
Son relationship in the Godhead was taken as a model for church-state relations: anti-Nicenes
held that the church should be subject to the emperor just as the Son was subordinate to the
Father, while pro-Nicenes took the homoousios to imply a relation of equality between ecclesial
and imperial authority.96 Similar debates continue today over whether a church or marriage
94
Cf. Ayres, ‘“As We are One”’, pp. 103–7.
95
Najeeb Awad, ‘“Through you, men live endowed with reason”: Gregory Nazianzen’s
trinitarian thinking as a window to his personal character’, Scottish Journal of Theology 68
(2015), pp. 127–42. Cf. Ignatius of Antioch, Trallians 3.1.
96
Mark Noll, Turning Points: Decisive Moments in the History of Christianity, 2nd edn. (Grand
Rapids: Baker, 2000), pp. 59–62, citing George Huntston Williams, ‘Christology and Church-
 24

modeled on the Trinity should be hierarchical or egalitarian. 97 We have found that Kilby and
Coakley both stress being ‘incorporated’ into the triune life but eschew attempts to ‘imitate’
intratrinitarian relations as sociopolitical projectionism. In light of the (often heated) debates just
described, their reticence is understandable. Yet all God-talk is sociopolitically contextualized,
hence vulnerable to the charge of projectionism: Sonderegger and Kilby fit their post-9/11 Sitz
im Leben in stressing divine oneness and otherness, respectively, in order to accentuate Muslim-
Christian oneness and ameliorate Islamic otherness. 98 Coakley prescribes her desire-oriented
trinitarianism as therapeutic for Anglican agonies over sex and gender. 99 Indeed, if one takes
seriously humanity’s creation ad imaginem Dei, the line between projection onto God and
reflection of God becomes blurry.

In scripture, trinitarian incorporation and imitation harmonize. For instance, the Matthean
Christ who ordains baptism into (Gk. eis) the triune Name (28:19) also urges the imitation of his
Father (5:9, 44–48; 18:21–35). Luke’s volumes commend the infilling of the Spirit alongside the
imitation of the Father (Lk. 6:35–36) and the Son (cf. Acts 7:59–60 with Lk. 23:34, 46), as do
Ephesians (3:14–19; 4:32–5:2, 18; more controversially, 5:22–33) and 1 Peter (1:2, 15–16; 2:21–
23; 4:1, 14). The Johannine writings interweave imitation and incorporation (e.g., Jn. 13:12–17,
34; 15:1–17; 17:17–23; 1 Jn. 3–4).100

Rather than denying the sociopolitical implications of these passages, Christians should
prayerfully (thus ‘incorporatively’) discern how best to apply them while respecting the diversity
of particular settings, keeping in mind Kilby’s caution against absolutizing any single earthly
system. Whatever the social system, it is composed of persons who share a common humanity
and so softly echoes the consubstantiality of the immanent Trinity. Likewise, every social system

State Relations in the Fourth Century’, Church History 20 (September 1951), pp. 3–33 and
(December 1951), pp. 3–26.
97
E.g., Miroslav Volf, After Our Likeness: The Church as the Image of the Trinity (Grand
Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997); Kevin Giles, The Trinity & Subordinationism: The Doctrine of God
and the Contemporary Gender Debate (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2002).
98
Sonderegger, ST, p. xiv; Kilby, ‘Apophatic Trinitarianism’, pp. 76–7.
99
GSS, p. xiv.
100
Cf. GSS, p. 309 n. 2.
 25

includes exercises of power and submission, to that extent emulating the economic Trinity.
Imitating the Trinity in one’s particular social setting ultimately means acting in love—a love
which values the consubstantial other as a neighbor to be treated ‘as yourself’; a love which
wields power cruciformally; a love which discerns when submission to God requires willing
submission to human authorities and when it requires resolute resistance to them; and a love
which confesses its own failures and those of its surrounding society rightly to reflect the Holy
Trinity.101 Such imitation springs from incorporation into God’s triune life. As Nyssen taught,
‘participation and imitation are one and the same thing.’ 102 Just as with the apophatic and the
cataphatic, the One and the Three, the psychological analogy and the social, so with imitation
and incorporation: what God hath joined together, let no one put asunder.

Roughly eight decades have passed since Dorothy Sayers, in scolding her compatriots’
ignorance of trinitarian dogma and its implications, quoted Jesus’ words to the woman at the
well: ‘Ye worship ye know not what’ (Jn. 4:22). In that pericope, Jesus apophatically subverts
the Samaritan woman’s politico-religious thought-system (‘neither on this mountain nor in
Jerusalem’ [vs. 21]). At the same time, he cataphatically embellishes her monotheism by
presenting the Spirit as living water (vss. 10–15; cf. 7:37–39); God as Father (vss. 21, 23); and
himself as the anointed one, using one of those ‘I am’ phrases so retrospectively redolent of
deity—‘I am he [Gk. Ego eimi], the one who is speaking to you’ (vs. 26). She herself becomes
incorporated into the trinitarian missions, imitating the Spirit by proceeding from Jesus’ presence
into the ‘world’ of her town and testifying there to him (vss. 28–30). Through this single story
run in due measure most of the themes which have preoccupied this essay. As theologians of the
‘apophatic turn’, Kilby, Coakley, and Sonderegger have deepened our appreciation of several of
these themes. Each has counterbalanced or corrected the other two at points even as all three
have shifted theology’s ballast away from social trinitarianism. This essay has been a further
attempt at achieving theological equilibrium so that—insofar as humanly possible—‘we worship
what we know’ (Jn. 4:22).

101
Cf. Ayres, ‘“As We are One”’, pp. 109–13.
102
Boersma, Embodiment, pp. 224–5 (quotation from p. 224).