History of Reformed Protestantism

Trinitarian Theology in the Reformed Tradition (TTRT)

The present-day trinitarian renaissance in Christian theology goes hand in hand with a profound intuition that somewhere in the past a regrettable process of marginalization of the doctrine of the Trinity must have started. Opinions differ widely, however, as to where and when exactly the decline of trinitarian theology and the sheer identification of the God of the Bible with ‘the God of the philosophers’ began. Karl Rahner, for one, accused Thomas Aquinas of taking a wrong turn in his Summa Theologiae by discussing the doctrine of the one God (de Deo uno) prior to that of the triune God (de Deo trino). For others, such as Colin Gunton, the root of the West’s trinitarian oblivion is to be found already in Augustine’s De Trinitate. Still others, Catherine LaCugna being their most well-known representative, claim that the main cause of the problems can even be traced back as far as the post-Nicene Greek fathers, who purportedly isolated the immanent from the economic trinity by one-sidedly focusing their attention on the former.            
There is a fourth group of interpreters, however, who, without denying altogether. the elements of truth in the other historical analyses, point to the seventeenth century as the main period in which crucial shifts took place in relation to the doctrine of the Trinity. According to them, it was very early in the Enlightenment era that this doctrine, which had been central for Aquinas, Luther, Calvin and their contemporaries, fell into rapid decline – a process that they attempt to trace in the writings of post-Reformation scholastics at the time. It is this fourth hypothesis in particular which I want to test and evaluate in TTRT with regard to the Reformed theological tradition.