Hans Kung on Trinity Part 2

This is continued from the previous post on the Trinity. It is taken directly from Hans Kung’s book ‘Christianity: Essence, History and Future’

All this should have made it clear that according to the New Testament the key quesiton in the doctrine of the Trinity is not the question which is declared an impenetrable ‘mystery’ (mysterium stricte dictum), how three such different entities can be ontologically one, but the christological question how the relationship of Jesus (and consequently also of the Spirit) to God is to be expressed. Here the belief in the one God which Christianity has in common with Judaism and Islam may not be put in question for a moment. There no other God but God! But what is decisive for the dialogue with Jews and Christians in particular is the insight that according to the New Testament the principle of unity is clearly not the one divine ‘nature’ (physis) common to several entities, as people were to think after the ne0-Nicene theology of the fourth century. For the New Testament, as for the Hebrew Bible, the principle of unity is clearly the one God (ho theos: the God = the Father), from whom are all things and to whom are all things.

So according to the New Testament, Father, Son and Spirit are not metaphysical and ontological statement about God in himself and his innermost nature, about a static being of the triune God resting in itself and not at all open to us. Rather, these are soteriological and christological statement about how God reveals himself through Jesus Christ in this world; about God’s dynamic and universal activity in history, his relationship to human beings and their relationship to him. So for all the difference in ‘roles’ there is a unity of Father, Son and Spirit, namely as an event of revelation and a unity of revelation: God himself is revealed through Jesus Christ in the Spirit. This is a thought-structure shaped in the framework of the Jewish-Christian paradigm which, as a structure – unlike that of the ‘triune God’ – need not have been absolutely alien to a Jew even down to the present day.

Thus it is not surprising that in the subsequent period, to, Jewish Christianity always insisted on the historical fact that the Messiah and Lord Jesus of Nazareth was not a divine being, a second God, but a human being from among human beings. It is not surprising that during the doctrinal development from the second century onwards, Jewish Christianity imposed restraint on the notion of the pre-existence of Jesus Christ. Nor is it a coincidence that though the Gentile Christian church historian Eusebius had no understanding of Jewish Christianity, as late as the third/fourth centuries he was still reporting about Jewish Christian circles which would not concede that Jesus Christ ‘pre-existed as God, Logos and Wisdom’. Therefore the momentous question arises: since the Jesus of history (who presented only an implicit christology) did not allow a doctrine of the Trinity to arise, where does this doctrine of the Trinity really come from? The answer is that it was a product of the great paradigm shift from the early Christian apocalyptic paradigm to the early church Hellenistic paradigm.