Paul R. Hinlicky - Divine Simplicity: Christ the Crisis of Metaphysics

I first conceived of this book during a decade-long intensive study of Islamic thought following the horrific events of September 11, 2001. My initial hunch was that the Aristotelian version of the doctrine of simplicity, thought thinking itself, taken up by St. Thomas Aquinas owed muchperhaps too muchto the Muslim philosopher Avicenna, who had Neoplatonized Aristotle with a notion of deity as thought thinking and willing itself. This amplification, also known to Augustine, provided dynamism to the notion of the simple deity expressed by emanation to form the great chain of being in the cosmic system. The Christian revision that Thomas accomplished demarcated the Creators act of being as pure actuality in strong ontological distinction from the creatures imperfect actualization, and in this way supposedly blocked emanation and replaced it with repetition by way of analogy. I was further thinking that, liberated from Thomass Christian revision, strong simplicity, by virtue of the power of the negative, progressively outstripped attempts to tame it for Christian purposes until it reappeared in pristine beauty in Spinozas doctrine of an eternal world viewed in the alternate modes of natura naturans and natura naturata . To a degree, these hunches are still at work in the book laid before you now, but no longer are they the matter of central importance as I had originally conceived.

What intervened and now runs like a red thread through this book is the discovery, via St. Augustines difficulty with it, of Paul the apostles ruminations on the oneness of God in his First Letter to the Corinthians. Paul begins with the word of the cross that delivers Christ as the paradoxical power and wisdom of God in 1 Corinthians 1:24; centers the letter in the prototrinitarian confession of 8:6; and culminates it in the doxological theopanism of 15:28. This too is a doctrine of divine simplicity, but in an eschatological rather than protological key and so in an ontologically weaker sense than the tradition that originates with the pre-Socratics, passes through Plato and Aristotle, and achieves its sublime expression among the ancients in Plotinus.

All this is here acknowledged as a brief preface and by way of expressing thanks to Baker Academic and my editor there, R. David Nelson, for their patience as the extended process of investigation produced a book somewhat different than originally proposed. I am also indebted to a veritable stable of theological stallions who in the interim have lent me their aid, reading and commenting on all or parts of this book, beginning with the aforementioned R. David Nelson. So I would also like to acknowledge with gratitude Rob Saler, David Bruner, the lateand saintedStephen Webb, Piotr Maysz, Derek Nelson, Jacob Goodson, Dennis Bielfeldt, and Hans Zorn for their interest, comment, and criticism as the draft evolved.

I think it was Stanley Hauerwas whom I once heard say that his method in theology was to read a lot of books, think hard, and then write his own book. Whether or not Stanley deserves credit for that bon mot, I have made it my own. As it seems to me, it is more important to converse than to monologue, to intervene in a conversation with a timely truth than to silence conversation by pretending to deliver a timeless one. I mention this here by way of justifying a definite selectivity in the authors and treatments of the topic engaged in this book. This selectivity is, among other things, a way of recommending said literature to the reader for fuller understanding. Yet the principle of selection is that these are the works that I have thus far found significant and so worth discussing in public, not to end debate but ecumenically to advance it. Usually, then, as I am giving an account of an author, unless and until explicitly noted otherwise, I should be understood as appropriating that authors line of thought into my own argument, striving to recognize truth even in positions that I will ultimately find inadequate. The proof of this dialogical method is in the pudding, then, whether the book succeeds according to its idiosyncratic way in advancing the argument about what it means for Christians to affirm of the Three of the gospel narrative that they are the one true God. Naturally, success is for the reader to judge.

I intend gender inclusivity, but not gender eliminationism, with respect to our common humanity by the strategy in English of alternating the nonspecific third-person personal pronouns between he and she and him and her. With respect to the divine, I defer to the primary language of faith in the Scriptures and the ecclesiastical terminology based on it that is useful for articulating the strong trinitarian personalism presupposed in this book. My intention throughout is hardly to idolize the masculine gender but rather to signal a specialized usage in theology for the God who is the Father of the Son in the Holy Spirit by capitalizing Him or His when the third-person singular pronoun is used in reference to the trinitarian persons. The divine nature, being nothing but a conceptual abstraction from the Three who are the Beloved Community, could be referred to in the neuter gender, as an It. But such an alienating innovation makes too much of a pseudoproblem that in material fact is under suspicion in the pages that follow.