Trinity, Freedom and Love: An Engagement with the Theology of Eberhard Jungel

Description

By critically engaging Eberhard Jungel's doctrine of the Trinity, this volume makes a broader, constructive contribution to contemporary trinitarian thought.The argument centers on the question - posed by the inconsistencies uncovered in Jungel's doctrine of God - of how one can assert both divine freedom and the inter-subjectivity of God's trinitarian self-determination. Can one maintain God's freedom in the interest of divine spontaneity and creativity, while remaining committed to inter-subjective vulnerability which the Cross entails as an event of divine love? Malysz suggests that a resolution to this problem lies in a logic of divine freedom, which, next to the trinitarian logic of love, constitutes a different and simultaneous mode of trinitarian relationality. To develop this logic, Malysz draws on Jungel's understanding of human freedom as rooted in the "elemental interruption" of the self-securing subject. Malysz thus not only brings Jungel's view of divine freedom into correspondence with the anthropological effects that Jungel ascribes to it, but, above all, offers an imaginative, new way of closely integrating the doctrine of God and theological anthropology.

Piotr J. Malysz is Assistant Professor of Divinity, Beeson Divinity School, Samford University, Birmingham, USA.

In this highly challenging work, Jungel's theology is subjected to a searching and substantial analysis. Ambiguities in his doctrine of the Trinity are not only pin-pointed but also creatively resolved. Much light is case in the process on his difficult and distinctive ideas of freedom and love. Malysz's work will be a standard point of reference for all those interested in these questions. * George Hunsinger, Princeton Theological Seminary, USA * In this ambitious and carefully argued work, Malysz offers a skilful and illuminating analysis of the core concern of Jungel's project, to rethink the interplay of love and freedom as definitive both for theological anthropology and for the doctrine of the trinity. Malysz provides not only an interpretation of Jungel, but something rarer: a constructive proposal which joins the trajectory from Barth to Jungel, and then boldly carries it further. * Paul De Hart, Vanderbilt University, USA * In this exciting new study of Jungel's trinitarian thought as it relates to the problem of human freedom, Malysz balances immaculately courteous exposition of Jungel's position with a penetrating critique of its final coherence. This is a timely reassessment of Jungel's trinitarianism from a young theologian of notable originality and flair. * Sarah Coakley, University of Cambridge, UK *