The Entangled Trinity: Quantum Physics and Theology

6 Contemporary TrinitarianDevelopment

6 Contemporary Trinitarian Development The “economic” Trinity is the “immanent” Trinity and vice versa. –Rahner, THE TRINITY The doctrine of the Trinity is nothing other than the conceptual framework needed to understand the story of Jesus as the story of God. –Moltmann, THE CRUCIFIED GOD The motto of the Renaissance was ad fontes, “to the sources,” and this signified a return to the original sources of Western thought in their original languages. It was a return to what we would refer to today as “primary” sources. This return opened up new avenues of thought and especially deepened understanding of all things human, including the powers of reason. Conflict was inevitable. With these new avenues of thought came conflict with established ways of thinking and with the established powers who benefited from such intellectual structures. We saw this in the Reformation, particularly as the church tried to control what it considered aberrant thought through coercive means first by ecclesiastical order and then imperial power and military force. Luther was worried that during his time a religious civil war would break out that would divide and destroy the Holy Roman Empire and the unity of the church. This did not happen during his lifetime, but it did afterward in the next century. 95 Known as the Thirty Years War, lasting from 1618–1648, this religious civil war laid waste to much of Europe and set family against family, sometimes even within individual families. Protestant and Roman Catholic armies marched around Europe burning rival churches and killing priests and pastors with impunity. It was mutual Christian slaughter, all done in the name of God. When it was all over and settled at the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, the position was affirmed that had first been proffered at the Peace of Augsburg in 1555, namely, that each prince would have the right to determine the religion of his region (cuius regio, eius religio), either Catholic, Lutheran, or Calvinist. With so much bloodshed and emotional pain as well as the growing success of the emerging natural sciences, an intellectual movement arose that took as its primary emphasis the role of reason over emotion and of toleration over oppression. It advocated for individual rights over against the divine right of rulers and through its advocates eventually developed the concept of a social contract theory of government. In the process of these struggles, the Trinity became the forgotten doctrine. 1. The Forgotten Doctrine A. THE ENLIGHTENMENT Beginning in the seventeenth century and flowering in the eighteenth, initially known as the Age of Reason, this movement became known as the Enlightenment. Intellectually, the American and French Revolutions, as well as the Declaration of Independence, were products of Enlightenment thinking, with Jefferson and Franklin being two of its strongest proponents in the “New World.” The Enlightenment sough to bring all thought under the scrutiny of reason, including religious doctrine. The machine was the epitome of Newtonian science and enlightened reason at the time, such that even the concept of God was not immune. As mentioned in chapter 3, this resulted in a form of theology known as deism, where God was basically understood as a mechanical “watchmaker” who assembled the pieces, set it running, and from then on let it carry out its functions autonomously. The Enlightenment was obsessed with the machine and with the rational human ability to understand the fundamental physical processes to construct them. In such a machine paradigm, there was no room for mystery and thus certainly not for something as seemingly illogical as the Trinity, with its paradoxical three-in-oneness. There were very significant critiques of the so-called arguments for the existence of God such as found in David Hume’s (d. 1776 ce) Dialogues 96 | The Entangled Trinity Concerning Natural Religion, as well as John Locke’s (d. 1704 ce) earlier The Reasonableness of Christianity. The Enlightenment reached its pinnacle in the thought of Immanuel Kant (d. 1804 ce) with his Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone and his great Critique of Pure Reason as well as his Critique of Practical Reason. Kant’s predecessors had tried to argue, as most empiricists, including Thomas Aquinas, did, that what was in the mind was first encountered by the senses. The mind was a clean slate (tabula rasa) on which sense experience wrote its images, a passive receiver of information from outside itself. Kant was to change all that...