The Trinity and the Kingdom by Jürgen Moltmann (review)

BOOK REVIEWS The Trinity and the Kingdom. By JURGEN MoLTMANN. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1981. pp. xvi + 256. $15.00. Jlirgen Moltmann's The Trinity and the Kingdom is a provocative, challenging and highly idiosyncratic piece of work. The book is provocative and challenging, because it boldly sets out to abolish some of the most fundamental assumptions of Christian doctrine as we have known it historically in the West. Such elemental topics as monotheism, creation ex nihilo, and the divine lordship over history are radically transformed as the author fixes single-mindedly and intently on the one theological idea which apparently matters to him more than anything else: the suffering of God. God's suffering becomes the master concept before which everything else must yield; and the excessive fashion in which this project is carried out leads to some extraordinary results. The real strengths of this book, in my opinion, center around themes (such as Christ's resurrection) we have heard Moltmann sound before. The book's new material, which might be described as a systematic enlargement upon the deviations of Moltmann's theology, unfortunately leaves much to be desired, although it does raise some extremely important questions. I will summarize my reservations about this work under three heads: method, tritheism and panentheism. Method. It is dismaying to watch Moltmann pursue his theology without any serious methodological reflection. He seems to proceed by sheer intuition, and in this book more than ever before the result is a kind of methodological mishmash. When Moltmann wants to appeal to experience to validate a theological claim, he appeals to experience. When he wants to invoke the testimony of Scripture, he does so. When a general philosophical definition makes sense to him, he brings it in. When he needs a more specifically theological argument, he does not hesitate to construct one. In short, the procedure is rather arbitrary. Let me give some examples. The problem with Schleiermacher, Moltmann argues at one point, is not that he appealed to religious experience to validate his theological claims, but that he didn't do it well enough. Moltmann, too, wants to appeal to religious experience, not only claiming that the Trinity is "revealed " to faith by the experience of suffering, but but also that from suffering faith can even know how we ourselves are " experienced " by God (pp. 8-5) . Moltmann simply states these bewildering ideas and moves on. Unlike Schleiermacher he has no carefully considered 130 BOOK REVIEWS method which might perhaps provide them with some backing. Such claims are apparently meant to be self-evident. Or again, take Moltmann's use of Hegel's definition of what constitutes a person. Moltmann is particularly impressed by Hegel's idea that to be a person means to give oneself entirely to a counterpart different from oneself and then to find oneself through participating in the life of this other. (Never mind that elsewhere Moltmann sharply criticizes the logically connected Hegelian idea of 'the self-identical subject " as an instance of bourgeois individualism.) The idea of coming to oneself by expressing and expending oneself in others is continually commended as the real meaning of human love and subjectivity (pp. 5, 9, 57 and 174). Now the remarkable thing about this idea is the way Moltmann goes on to use it theologically. Applying it directly to the Trinity, he ends up making the doctrine of the perichoresis sound merely like the instance of a class (pp. 173ff.) . Thus is one of the most mysterious of all Christian doctrines levelled down to a more or less intelligible psychological experience . Such unfortunate movements from the general to the particular are commonplace in Moltmann's book, but their rationale is never discussed. More positively, on the other hand, one is almost as likely to find the argument moving in the opposite direction, from the particular to the general, if that should happen to suit the author's purpose. Thus, at least from time to time, we find Moltmann making good on his assertion that " ultimately we must always see to it that the liberating force of the biblical witness is preserved and not obscured " (p. 65) . He does not, for example, allow any...