Thomas Jay Oord is a theologian, philosopher, and scholar of multi-disciplinary studies. He is a best-selling and award-winning author, having written or edited more than twenty-five books. A twelve-time Faculty Award-winning professor, Oord teaches at institutions around the globe, and is the director of the Center for Open and Relational Theology. To find out more about him or view more of his works, visit his website or the Center for Open and Relational Theology.
This is a review of Keith Ward’s Christ and the Cosmos: A Reformulation of Trinitarian Doctrine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). (Publisher | Amazon) It was originally published in Volume 18, Issue 2, of Philosophia Christi (Evangelical Philosophical Society, 2016). (Publisher)
SUMMARY
Keith Ward is right in Christ and the Cosmos that “the idea of God as a sort of society is a bad idea” (x). Christian theology would make better sense if Christians did not say God is comprised of three persons, each with distinct centers of consciousness, distinct relations, distinct wills, and so on. This formulation of the Trinity is more tritheistic than monotheistic. I argue that for a host of reasons, Christians should conceive of the Trinity as one God who instantiates in three forms. I also suggest Christians would be wise to say God is essentially loving and essentially related to creation.
Keith Ward is right.
Ward is right in his book on the Trinity, Christ and the Cosmos: A Reformulation of Trinitarian Doctrine, when he says, “the idea of God as a sort of society is a bad idea” (x).[1]
Christian theology would make betters sense if Christians did not say God is comprised of three persons, each with distinct centers of consciousness, distinct freedoms, distinct responsibilities, distinct wills, and distinct relations between one another. This formulation of the Trinity is more tritheistic than monotheistic. Christians need not appeal to mystery when the social Trinity’s problematic implications become evident. They should reject the concept of the social Trinity. God is one, and God has one mind and will.
For a host of reasons, Christians should conceive of the Trinity more like Ward does. One God instantiates in three forms that includes other-creation, relationship, and inclusion. A doctrine of the Trinity expressed in these terms should prove more winsome for most 21st century contexts.
In the remainder of this review, I will address what Ward gets right, why the social Trinity has been attractive, and how I think Ward should adapt his view. I’ll argue that Ward should affirm that God necessarily loves creation, necessarily relates to creatures, and necessarily creates.
Ward’s Doctrine of God
Ward is right about the general doctrine of God he proposes.
Ward rightly rejects theologies closely derived from ancient Greek philosophical notions of God, which proposed on divine timelessness and God as a substance. The Greek philosophical aversion to change and its appreciation for static categories fail to fit well the broad biblical witness. These notions fail to match how Christians relate to God in their piety. And they fail to make sense to many people influenced by contemporary philosophy, culture, and science.
Most appealing in Ward’s doctrine of God is his emphasis upon love. A Christian description of God is “guided by the key teaching that ‘God is love,’” says Ward (86). In fact, God’s love is other-creating and dynamic. God’s goodness is understood in relation to creation, because God is compassionate and seeks cooperation from creatures.
Love is also essential for helpful conceptions of the Trinity. “The threefold form of divine love - as creating finite persons, relating in love to them, and uniting them to the divine life - is the manifestation,” says Ward, “of the supreme goodness of God as creative, self-giving, and universally inclusive love” (62). Divine love is expressed “naturally” in these ways.
Ward is right in how he thinks about God’s love and freedom in relation to evil. God must love, says Ward, because God does not have moral freedom. And God cannot choose evil (167). “Yet evil must have its origin in God,” argues Ward, “since God is the cause of everything other than God. Therefore some things originate in God, but not by [God’s] choice. They presumably arise by necessity” (162). God’s freedom is “necessarily conditioned” (165).
Other dimensions of Ward’s doctrine of God are also winsome. Ward rightly says that some aspects of God – the divine nature – do not change, while other aspects – divine personal experience – change. Ward rejects the classic view of divine simplicity, because it undermines the personal and relational aspects of God. God is simple, however, in the sense that God does not have separate and independent parts. God is one subject. The most natural reading of the biblical narrative, says Ward, is that God relates and responds to creation, thereby seeking synergistic cooperation from creatures.
Ward is an open and relational theologian who believes that God essentially experiences time in some way analogous to how creatures experience it. In other words, God is temporal in some respects. This time-full God does not have one, preordained plan to be worked out in a predetermined and precise way. God wills that creatures cooperate in the work to create new expressions of love and goodness, and that plan can take many forms (77-78).
Ward is right to say the language of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit need not be truth of the divine being in itself. In God, there is “one will and experience,” Ward puts it, “necessarily instantiated in different forms by Father, Son, and Spirit” (229). On alien worlds, God would likely not take the form or be expressed well in the language of Father, Son, and Spirit. Ward calls his view of the trinity “cosmic,” because it “conceives of God in relation to a hugely expanded cosmos and not just to humans on this planet” (221).
Why So Many Find the Social Trinity Appealing
If Ward is right that the social view of the Trinity is problematic, why have so many Christians – including leading 20th century theologians like Jürgen Moltmann, Wolfhart Pannenberg, and John Zizioulas – been attracted to it? The answers vary, and Ward addresses them directly.
Scripture
Some adopt the concept of the social Trinity, because they assume scripture supports it. The Bible is at best ambiguous, however, in support for this concept. And unfortunately, says Ward, “the social view arises from a dubious projection of the economic trinity onto the immanent trinity” (221). Scripture can more easily be marshalled to support Ward’s alternative doctrine of the Trinity.
Ward rightly says that the synoptic gospels do not provide a doctrine of the social Trinity. Jesus is not recorded by any of the synoptic gospel writers as claiming to be coeternal with God, for instance, or a coequal in the Trinity. Such an idea, Ward rightly says, comes from Christian theologians later in history who attempted to understand Jesus’ relation to God.
John’s Gospel is most helpful for crafting a viable doctrine of the Trinity. John speaks of Jesus as the Word become flesh. The Word “is an eternal possibility made actual,” says Ward, “first as an eternal Ideal in the mind of God, and then (incarnated) in a finite subject” (57). The Word is not one divine person among other divine persons.
The New Testament letters are also ambiguous when it comes to Trinitarian concerns. They can be interpreted in ways that either support or undermine the concept of the social Trinity. Biblical writers typically speak of the Spirit as an impersonal force or power, however, not a person. “The spirit is a creative energy of God,” says Ward, “which empowers and fills the inner life of Jesus” (81). Few if any biblical passages speak of the Holy Spirit as a distinct person with a will.
Christ expresses divine wisdom. The man Jesus expresses Christ by revealing the nature of God as loving and compassionate. The Spirit is not only active in Jesus but also works with creatures who can express various forms of the cosmic Christ. Christ can be expressed in, as Ward puts it, “a vast throng of created species and forms of life” (71).
Ward’s biblical arguments in Christ and the Cosmos are more extensive than what I offer here. He rightly concludes, however, that the biblical text does not fit well the notion of a social Trinity.
Ward affirms a different concept of the Trinity. “The New Testament, taken as a whole,” says Ward, “speaks of God as a dynamic, creative, and relational reality, a reality known in a basic threefold relation to a created world” (72). This is not modalism, says Ward, if by modalism we mean that God appears as three but has no three-fold reality. Ward believes God has a three-fold reality as creator, relator with creation, and transformer of creation. The words “Father, Son, and Spirit” are symbols of this inherent threefoldness. We don’t need a social Trinity of three distinct persons to affirm this three-fold divine reality.
God as Essentially Relational Love
Like Ward, many believe the Trinity tells us something vital about God’s love. In fact, several influential theologians believe the social trinity affirms the relationality necessary for God’s love. The Christian tradition’s emphasis upon God as “three persons in one substance,” however, has the unfortunate effect of sounding like God is simultaneously three and yet static. Some theologians argue that God is not static, and God essentially expresses love within the relations of the divine persons.
The social trinity ostensibly provides theologians a metaphysical structure for the claim that God is essentially love and essentially relational. If love essentially requires giving and receiving between at least two, saying God is a social trinity of three persons with individual freedoms and intellects supports the view that “God is love.” God can be thought to be everlastingly and necessarily loving, according to this view, because God is everlastingly and necessarily loving within the Trinity.
The Cappadocian fathers and, more recently, John Zizioulas argue for the cogency of three divine persons as necessary for a God who essentially loves. Ward explains their position: “If God is essentially love, then love must exist in God, and so there must be a person or a society of persons to fulfill their own beings in loving one another, and that means God must be a society of loving persons” (149).
The problem with the social trinity consisting of three persons with distinct relations, wills, freedoms, and consciousnesses, as we’ve seen, is that it smacks of tritheism. Three Gods could love each other eternally. But one God, without parts, has no divine relations. “We should not think of Father and Son apart from creation as exhibiting mutual, relational, self-giving love,” says Ward (118). Zizioulas and the Cappadocian fathers rightly stress the “ontological primacy of personhood over impersonal substance,” says Ward, but the social Trinity they espouse results in tritheism (150).
Is there a way to affirm God as essentially loving without adopting the social Trinity and its tritheistic implications? I believe there is.
Must a Non-Social Trinitarian God Create Finite Others?
One way to affirm that God is essentially loving is to say God essentially creates and essentially relates to creaturely others. And God has always – everlastingly – been creating and relating. In fact, I find this proposal the most plausible accounts for the primacy of love in God. It does not require belief in a social Trinity, because it says God everlastingly loves finite creatures whom God creates. When I discovered in Christ and the Cosmos that Ward rejects the concept of the social Trinity but affirms love as essential to God, I wondered what he might think of the idea that God has always been creating and relating to creation.
A key question that quickly emerges in the question of God’s essential love is this: Must God create some universe? I think so. In several passages, Ward seems open to the possibility that God must create. But he’s not committed to it. Ward argues, for instance, that “having a universe is a necessary condition of realizing values of creative freedom, self-development, and cooperative relationship” (26). And because God is, as Ward says, “other-creating love,” one would think Ward should affirm that God necessarily creates some universe.
Ward explains his view: “If God is essentially love,” he says, “then some form of creation of others may indeed be a natural expression of the divine being. That does not mean that God must necessarily and always have created others to love. It means only that the expression of God's nature makes it natural that God will (not necessarily without beginning or intermission or end!) at some point create other persons in order to realize the divine nature as loving in relation to them” (180)
Notice the “may indeed be” phrase in this quote. And notice Ward’s use of “natural.” The “may indeed be” phrase expresses Ward’s hesitancy to commit to the notion that God necessarily creates. But perhaps more importantly, Ward’s use of “natural” twice in this passage is telling. I’ll return to this.
Related to the question of whether God must create is this question: Must God be related to some universe and/or creaturely persons? I think so. Ward is open to that idea too.
Ward argues that “if God is a relational being characterized by love, that relation must be to non-divine persons, and not a sort of secret self-love” (182). Ward’s reference to a “secret self-love” is a jab at the concept of the social Trinity. But more importantly, he realizes that a non-social triune God must be related to creaturely others.
Ward entertains a thought experiment on this issue: “it might be possible to hold that God, if and in so far as God is truly love, must be related to some form of other being. If so, God necessarily creates something other to which to be related.…” (124). Ward is expressing here the position I find most plausible. But immediately after these words, Ward says, “That is an interesting possibility, though most Christian theologians have not accepted it. I admit that I am half-inclined to accept it, though I draw back at the thought of presuming to know what is necessary for God to be God” (124).
Notice again the qualifying language: “might be,” “interesting possibility,” “half-inclined to accept it.” And notice that Ward is wary of presuming God has necessary relations to creation, apparently because he’s not sure this is essential to what it means to be divine.
In this passage and others in Christ and the Cosmos, Ward seems to use “maybe” language, because he is reluctant to speculate about God's nature. “Though we cannot comprehend the divine essence,” he argues, “we are entitled to say that God is essentially personal and loving, knowing, and creative, because these are necessary condition of God’s appearing to us as God does” (127). Ward seems to think it is proper to talk about how God appears to us, but he is wary of making statements about the divine nature in itself.
Yet Ward wants to give some reason for why God appears to us in the way God does. And the word Ward uses to express this reason is “natural.” The word functions in the following quote as it does often elsewhere in Ward’s book: “An agape loving God would have to create some other persons, but they would be qualitatively different from God and would be chosen from among many alternatives. In any case, it is not clear that God necessarily has to love in an agapistic way, even though it might be natural for God to do so…” (192).
In these words, Ward is again pondering the possibility of God necessarily creating others, because a relational God of love requires others to love. It would be “natural” for God to love nondivine others in what Ward calls this “agapistic way.”
Let’s look at one more passage from Christ and the Cosmos that addresses these concerns. Ward says “I am not convinced that God can only realize the divine nature by creating a new universe so that creation becomes necessary to God be what God is. But I do accept that God has actually expressed the divine being as agapistic love by the creation of finite persons. I think this must be seen as a normal and proper expression of the divine nature, but I regarded as a step too far to say that this is what God had to do it and that there is no other way in which God could fully be God” (220).
Again, we find Ward appealing to what is “natural” for God. Creating finite others is “normal and proper.” But he is wary of the idea that creation is necessary to God.
As I pondered Ward’s argument here, I wondered what the word “natural” is really doing. The word is a cousin to another word often used in this discussion: “nature.” It is natural for a thing or being to do what is its nature. Ward admits that some attributes or activities of God are necessary to God’s nature.
At the end of my pondering, I cannot see any real difference between saying God “naturally” creates finite others and saying God necessarily creates finite others. Both “naturally” and “necessarily” derive from God’s nature. The semantic difference is negligible. While I endorse Ward’s reluctance to over-speculate what God must, may, or cannot do, we both eventually end up making claims about at least some aspects of God’s nature. In my view, Ward should set aside his worries and simply embrace the view that God necessarily and everlastingly creates, relates with, and love finite others.
God Everlastingly Creates Out of Creation in Love
Ward considers but is not quite ready to accept the view that God, in love, necessarily and continually creates and relates to nondivine others. He is aware of some typical criticisms of the view. But I was happy to read that he does not find these usual criticisms convincing.
Ward wards off the criticism that a God who necessarily creates could not be free. “Logically speaking,” says Ward, “the necessary creation of some universe of finite persons would not impugn the divine freedom, and it would leave the creation of this specific universe and the persons in it as a truly free divine act” (182). I agree.
Throughout Christ and the Cosmos, Ward seems to have in mind God necessarily creating one or a few universes. But his argument fits just as nicely with the view that God creates continually and everlastingly. In fact, Ward quotes Norman Kretzmann favorably in support this shared logic: “God’s will is necessitated as regards whether to create, but fully free as regards what to create” (255). A God who everlastingly creates also has freedom – although Ward would agree that divine love constrains this freedom – to create various creatures or universes.
Ward wards off a second common criticism of the idea that God creates necessarily and everlastingly. Some argue that this makes God overly dependent upon creation. Ward says that we might “suppose that God is essentially loving… Then it might be true that this entails that God creates some other object to love… It does not follow… that this makes God dependent on creation. It is God alone who wills that creation should exist as a condition of realizing the divine nature as love. That is not a question of God being dependent on something completely independent of God” (194).
In a related passage, he says that “if some creation was necessary to God, that would not make God dependent upon something other than God. God would still be the creator of everything other than God, and creation would then be an essential divine property, rather than as I think it is, a contingent and gratuitous act of divine grace” (220-221). I agree. God can exist necessarily while simultaneously necessarily create and relate to creatures.
A third common criticism of the idea that God necessarily and everlastingly creates is that this notion requires an eternal universe. Ward does not ward off this criticism. And his comments about God necessarily creating make me wonder if it worries him. He writes, “Love may be God's nature, but even supposing that such love entails that God must create an object for God to love, it seems obvious that this object must be genuinely other than God and need not exist everlastingly but only for a finite time” (194).
I agree that the creatures God creates do not exist everlastingly but only for a finite time. But this is not an argument against the idea that God everlastingly creates. After all, God could everlastingly create creatures, one after another, who each exist for a finite time. No one creature would be essential to God’s nature. And each would be contingent. Each creature, world, or universe, to use Ward’s words, “could have been different or might not have existed - God did not have to create this universe in particular” (19). But according to the view I’m proposing, relating to contingent creation would be essential to God. And God would everlastingly be creating contingent creatures whom God loves.
Of course, accepting that God everlastingly creates out of creation in love would mean rejecting creatio ex nihilo. Some might criticize the view because it undermines this long-standing view in the Christian tradition. But I don’t think Ward would worry too much about foregoing creatio ex nihilo. There’s no explicit reference to the doctrine in the Bible. And the tradition has embraced it for reasons that, as I mentioned above, he think are not legitimate. Besides, Ward could embrace an alternative view, something like creatio ex creatione en amore: God always creates out of creation in love
Saying God always creates out of creation in love and has been doing so everlastingly also provides Ward a way to avoid saying, as I quoted him earlier, that God is the source of evil. Ward rightly says the possibility for evil emerges by necessity. But affirming a God who necessarily and everlastingly creates from what God previously created offers a simpler explanation for evil’s origin. The possibility for evil is necessary among creaturely action, because some creaturely causation is at play whenever God creates, and a God of uncontrolling love cannot control creatures entirely.
Conclusion
Keith Ward is right about so much of what he says in Christ and the Cosmos. But I encourage him to endorse that God “naturally” creates creaturely others. I encourage him to say that such creating is necessary for a God who essentially loves. I encourage him to endorse the idea that God has everlastingly been creating finite others. The God who has always been creating others has relational love as an essential attribute. If we endorse this view of God, we need not be tempted to embrace the concept of the social Trinity, with its implicit tritheism.
Notes
Keith Ward, Christ and the Cosmos: A Reformulation of Trinitarian Doctrine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). ↑