The One, the Three and the Many: God, Creation and the Culture of Modernity by Colin E.

Gunton
Review by: Joy Ann McDougall
The Journal of Religion, Vol. 75, No. 3 (Jul., 1995), pp. 438-439
Published by: The University of Chicago Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1205406 .
Accessed: 20/06/2014 16:23

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .
http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of
content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms
of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

The University of Chicago Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The
Journal of Religion.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 188.72.126.181 on Fri, 20 Jun 2014 16:23:05 PM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
The Journal of Religion
steps toward a method of operating are developed. Van der Ven's model is influ-
enced by the methodology of the Dutch theologian A. D. de Groot and his phases
of the experience cycle (pp. 112 ff.).
The course of the research is thus virtually rooted in a fundamentally anthro-
pological approach, which, however, remains fixed in a relatively static mode, so
that the danger that van der Ven's model will be used in a less flexible manner
cannot be excluded.
Van der Ven and his book have made an important contribution to the founda-
tion of practical theology. He has pointed out the significance of empirical re-
search as part of a hermeneutical situational assessment. At the same time, he has
expressly highlighted the contribution of special theologically formulated ques-
tions as part of the situational assessment. Thus, for him, practical theology re-
mains simply theology. It does not become transformed into social science re-
search but takes its place alongside theological discourse.
KARL-FRITZ DAIBER,Philipps-UniversitaitMarburg.

GUNTON,COLINE. The One, the Threeand the Many: God, Creationand the Cultureof
Modernity.The Bampton Lectures, 1992. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1993. xiv+248 pp. $54.95 (cloth); $15.95 (paper).

Colin Gunton's The One, the Threeand the Many, a revision of his 1992 Bampton
Lectures, unites a provocative account of the crisis of late modernity with a bold
theological prescription for its pathos. Gunton analyzes the pervasive "fragmenta-
tion and decline into subjectivism and relativism" (p. 2) of late modern culture,
with the thesis that its roots lie in Western culture's failure to develop a relational
ontology: "an account of relationality that gives due weight to the one and the
many, unity and particularity, relationality and otherness" (p. 7). Guided by the
theological conviction that the Trinity is the ontological clue not only to the rela-
tional character of God the Creator, but to all of created reality, Gunton contends
that a revitalized trinitarianaccount of creation is requisite to heal late modernity's
cultural disarray. In this book, the author sketches the outlines for such a funda-
mental trinitarian ontology via a theory of trinitarian transcendental categories,
which are predicated on the basis of the dynamic economy of creation and salva-
tion. His ultimate aim is to show how this "trinitarian analogy of being (and be-
coming)" (p. 141) provides the conceptual resources for thinking and acting co-
herently with respect to the unity and plurality of being in the world.
In part 1, "The Displacement of God," Gunton presents his conceptual map of
modernity, along with a theological account of the origins of its atheism. He ad-
vances the thesis that modernity's fragmentation and skepticism are far-reaching
consequences of the Augustinian tradition's flawed doctrine of creation. Au-
gustine's "divorce of the willing of creation from the historical economy of salva-
tion" (p. 55) resulted in a monistic view of Creator and creation, which failed to
do justice to the particularity, temporality, and relationality of the created world.
Gunton views modernity as a legitimate and inexorable protest against this drive
toward monism. However, modernity's protest succeeds only in creating its pa-
thos: the displacementof the transcendent deity by surrogate immanent deities-
the individual will or the secular state-which impose their own subversive forms
of monism (p. 28 ff.). For Gunton, modernity, like antiquity, "has tended to lurch
between the one and the many, and through the lack of an adequate mediating

438

This content downloaded from 188.72.126.181 on Fri, 20 Jun 2014 16:23:05 PM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
 Book Reviews
concept, has failed to do justice to the interests of both society and person, one
and many" (p. 213).
Although Gunton falls prey to overschematization in subsuming the history
of Western culture under the classical option of Parmenides versus Heraclitus,
the one versus the many, his analysis proves an effective springboard for his trini-
tarian theology of creation presented in part 2. Situating his project methodo-
logically as a via media between Barth and Aquinas, Gunton argues for a "non-
authoritarian approach to a trinitarian theology of being, meaning the truth": a
trinitarian fundamental ontology predicated on the basis of revelation, but whose
categories "can be shown to correspond to the structures of universal human
rationality" (p. 211). Developing S. T Coleridge's insight that the Trinity is the
"primary Idea" (p. 144), the source from which all universals spring, Gunton
generates three transcendental categories from the divine trinitarian economy:
perichoresis, hypostasis, and relationality. These trinitarian transcendentals, in
turn, supply the coordinates for a relational ontology which essays to give due
weight to both the unity and the plurality of being.
The One, the Threeand the Many is Gunton's most ambitious and complex theo-
logical project to date, synthesizing various lines of thought from his earlier works
(on the Enlightenment, the Trinity, and the doctrine of creation) into a mature
theology of culture. This book ably fulfills its stated intent: to undertake a genuine
dialogue between the truths of Christianity and the culture of modernity. On the
one hand, Gunton integrates the Enlightenment critique of Christian theology
into his account of the flawed development of the doctrines of God and creation
in the West. On the other, he vigorously challenges modernity's immanent deities
and ideologies with his trinitarian conceptuality of God and of the structures of
created reality.
Where Gunton's project proves less successful is in delineating the practical
consequences of his trinitarian theology of creation for the crisis of modernity.
While the author argues convincingly that a theory of trinitarian transcendentals
addresses the metaphysical problem of the one and the many, the anticipated
concrete proposal for a trinitarian vision of culture remains disappointingly
sketchy. Nonetheless, Gunton is to be commended for boldly taking up the classi-
cal challenge of defending the Trinity as the ultimate source of the truth, good-
ness, and beauty of all reality.
JoY ANN McDOUGALL, Chicago,Illinois.

ANDERSON, PAMELA SUE.Ricoeurand Kant: Philosophyof the Will. Atlanta: Scholars

Press, 1993. xvii+ 147 pp. $29.95 (cloth); $19.95 (paper).

This fine book by Pamela Sue Anderson provides a close reading of Paul Ricoeur's
philosophy of the will from the perspective of Immanuel Kant's critical philoso-
phy. Anderson argues that Ricoeur's work is an extension and refinement of
Kant's dual-aspect notion of the subject, in which the subject is understood as
both active and passive, voluntary and involuntary, nontemporal and temporal.
Anderson is particularly interested in the theological significance of Ricoeur's
project, that is, in the way religious stories and symbols have the potential to
mediate the dual-aspect nature of human experience.
The book's first three chapters make Anderson's case concerning Ricoeur's
fundamental indebtedness to Kant's project. Beginning with Ricoeur's earlier po-
etics of the will in books such as FallibleMan (Chicago, 1965) and The Symbolismof

439

This content downloaded from 188.72.126.181 on Fri, 20 Jun 2014 16:23:05 PM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions