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The Thomist 74 (2010): 1-32 THE UNITY OF THE TRIUNE GOD: REVIVING AN ANCIENT QUESTION* BRUCE D. MARSHALL Southern Methodist University Dallas, Texas I CHRISTIAN FAITH in the divine Trinity begins with the Church's confession of the one God. There is nothing puzzling or mysterious about this observation. For many generations of Christians it would have seemed too obvious for comment. On each Lord's day, and on other major feasts, we solemnly confess that the God whom we worship is the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. And we begin that confession of faith in the Trinity with the words, "We believe in one God." Only then do we go on to say who that one God is: the Father almighty, the one Lord Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit, Lord and giver of life. Everything we say about these three stands securely guarded by that beginning: "we believe in one God." Well before the Creed itself came to be, and later entered into the liturgy, Christians understood this confession of the one God to be their birthright as inheritors of the faith of Israel, and to mark them off in a primordial way from the pagan world in which they lived. In this light it is perhaps curious that Trinitarian theology has been much concerned, for over a half-century, with where it ought to "start," or begin. This question has especially preoccupied Catholic theologians, and has tended to have a clear 'This article was originally given as the Presidential Address at the annual meeting of the Academy of Catholic Theology in 2009. I am grateful to the members of the Academy for the many helpful questions they raised, to which I have tried to respond in this published version. 1 2 BRUCE D. MARSHALL shape. It concerns the order of presentation, that is, the sequence in which we take up the topics we think we need to talk about when we speak of the triune God. As is well known, this worry stems from a long tradition in Catholic theology of adhering to a relatively stable order of presentation on this very basic theological topic. First we present a series of questions, or chapters of a treatise, on the divine essence, the divine perfections , or "the one God," and then we present a series of questions or chapters on divine processions, relations, and persons, or "the triune God." First De Deo uno, then De Deo trino. It is imperative, we now often assume, to reverse this traditional order of presentation, or at any rate not to preface our Trinitarian theology with a consideration of the divine essence or of the one God. On overturning the old order of presentation depends, it is claimed, a Trinitarian theology that does justice to authentic Catholic faith in the triune God-a theology, that is, which presents the Trinity as the living heart of the mystery of salvation, and not as an arcane puzzle to be revered by traditionalists or disdained by the avant-garde.1 Exactly why the order in which we present theological topics should have such great weight is, however, less clear. In any complex intellectual undertaking the sequence of topics can, no doubt, be pedagogically useful and suggestive. If one is concerned 1 See already the Katholische Dogmatik of Michael Schmaus, who begins the whole work (after a general introduction to dogmatic theology) with a long "Erster Hauptteil" on "Gott der Dreieinige," which starts with detailed discussions of the triune God's "self-opening" (Selbsterschliepung) in creation (which reveals his existence) and in the history of salvation (which reveals his "personal self"), before proceeding to a consideration of God's essence and attributes, understood as "the fullness of life belonging to the tri-personal God" (die Lebensfulle des dreipersonlichen Gottes). I follow here the sixth edition of Schmaus's Katholische Dogmatik, vol. 1 (Munich: Max Hueber Verlag, 1960), but this opening volume was originally published (at less than half its ultimate length) in 1938. In any case Schmaus was evidently committed to "starting with the Trinity" well before Karl Rahner's 1960 essay "Remarks on the Dogmatic Treatise De Trinitate" (subsequently published in Theological...

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