theism, in which God does not change, has no need of the world, and receives nothing from it. This notion of God as having no real relation to the world is deeply entrenched in Western Christian thought, but has been accurately criticized as inadequate on the basis of Christology,11 its inner incoherence, and its effective history, particularly in relation to women.12 Yet the idea of God as radically transcendent to creation, acting freely in relation to it, out of love but not out of ontological necessity, needs to be preserved for the doctrine of God to be adequate to the biblical witness and contemporary experience.13 One way to do this is to understand God’s being as an expression of God’s goodness.
The Self-Diffusive Nature of God’s Goodness
Central to Jesus’ preaching was an emphasis on the goodness of God as absolute and determining God’s actions in history.14 St. Francis of Assisi (c. 1181–1226) made celebrating God’s goodness central to his understanding of Christian life. This had an influence in Franciscan theology.
According to Anselm (c. 1033–1109 CE), God is absolute as that “than which nothing greater can be conceived.”15 Bonaventure (c. 1221–1274 CE), a Franciscan, applied this to God’s goodness. The good that is self-diffusive, that communicates and further expresses itself, is greater than the good that does not. God’s goodness, as “that than which nothing better can be thought,” must therefore be “supremely self-diffusive.”16 It must also be fully actual, as the good that is actual is greater than the good that is not. According to Bonaventure, the self-diffusion or communication of divine goodness occurs eternally in the generation of the second person of the Trinity and the spiration of the third. Through this God’s goodness is infinitely diffused and fully actual. Thus “the supreme communicability of the good demands necessarily that there be a Trinity of Father, Son and Holy Spirit.”17 Yet while God’s goodness is absolute in being supremely self-diffused in the Trinity in eternity, it remains open to further diffusion in time and space through creation and redemption,18 for the self-diffusive nature of the divine goodness is fulfilled in the eternal generation of the Word and spiration of the Holy Spirit but is not limited by this. Consequently it is open to further expression through the economic Trinity in creation and redemption. For Bonaventure the divine nature does not need this further communication and it adds nothing to God’s already infinite being. But creation and redemption are fitting and appropriate further expressions of God’s self-diffusive goodness.
Jonathan Edwards would develop this understanding God’s relationship to the world further, arguing that while God’s being is absolute it is also open to a relative but still real increase through the further communication of God’s beauty and goodness in creation and redemption.19 This understanding of God’s absoluteness is more coherent with Jesus’ proclamation of the reign of God than classical theism, for in Jesus’ proclamation the final reality is not simply God, but God and the reign of God, or God and the redeemed creation.20 In the gospels God is depicted as radically transcendent to creation yet also internally related to it.
The Franciscan Innovation in Christology
The spiritual vision of St. Francis with its focus on the goodness of God led to another innovation in Franciscan theology that had precedents in patristic theology. In much of Western theology from Athanasius to Anselm, the main reason given for the coming of Christ was to save humanity from sin. However in patristic theologians like Gregory of Nyssa, the ultimate vision of the purpose of the incarnation is not simply overcoming the alienation of humanity and creation from God introduced by sin, but rather the deification of created beings, their entry into an eternal communion with God, “so that ‘God may be all in all.’”21 Here the reason for Christ’s coming is ultimately not to save humanity from sin, but to gather a community about God. Medieval Franciscan theologians took this idea further.
In the 1200s Robert Grosseteste and others argued that Christ would have become incarnate even if humanity had not fallen into sin. These theologians saw Jesus to be the perfection towards which all of creation was oriented. Even had there been no sin he would have still come to express God’s goodness, power, and wisdom.22 This idea found its fullest expression in the Christology of Franciscan theologian John Duns Scotus (1265/66–1308). For Scotus Jesus Christ is the culmination or perfection of creation. If the main reason for Christ’s coming was to save humanity from sin, the “best thing God does in creation would be motivated by the worst thing that creatures do.”23 Scotus considered this view irrational. Goodness, not sin, must be the primary reason for Christ’s coming. Accordingly Scotus argued that the three persons of the Trinity together desire others to join in the praise, joy, and love that they share. Christ became incarnate so as to become the head of “a vast community of created co-lovers . . . destined for the beatific intimacy of sharing in the Trinitarian love-life.”24 Christ’s atoning work is a means to this more fundamental end. Creation is oriented towards the coming of Christ and is fulfilled in and through him. Aspects of this understanding the reason for the incarnation can also be found in the theologies of Friedrich Schleiermacher, I. A. Dorner, and Karl Barth,25 and in the more recent Christologies of Jürgen Moltmann and Marilyn McCord Adams.26
Noting these developments, we turn to understanding the place of Jesus Christ in the truine life of God and the reason for his coming. To do this, we first discuss the relationship of the economic and immanent Trinity.
The Relationship of the Immanent and
the Economic Trinity
The affirmation of the Council of Nicaea that God must be understood in Trinitarian terms implicitly affirmed a difference between the economic Trinity, God as encountered in history in Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit, and the immanent Trinity, God in eternity prior to creation and redemption.27 The latter is the basis of the former. What God is eternally in the immanent Trinity determines what God does in creation and redemption. The latter is a further expression of what is present in the former. The unity of the two must be maintained as Jesus can only mediate salvation if God becomes personally present to humanity and creation through him.28 Yet over centuries the connection between the two weakened in Western Christian thought until the renewal of Trinitarian theology in the twentieth century, when Karl Barth and Karl Rahner insisted that the doctrine of the Trinity was an explication of what was revealed of God or of the experience of salvation in Jesus Christ. According to Rahner, “the ‘economic’ Trinity is the ‘immanent’ Trinity”29 and vice versa.
However, this necessary emphasis on the unity of the immanent and economic Trinity must not obscure an equally necessary distinction between them. The two are not identical, for through “the incarnation the second divine person exists in history in a new way.”30 The second divine person is not crucified in the immanent Trinity, but only after becoming incarnate in the economic Trinity. The distinction between the two developed in order to preserve the radical transcendence of God to sin and evil.31 It remains necessary if Jesus’ crucifixion is to be taken seriously and God is still to be a source of hope for the final overcoming of evil.32
A second reason for preserving this distinction lies in the New Testament’s emphasis that in Christ a new reality appeared that has created a new divine/human situation.33 The new is by definition different in some respect from that which preceded it. John 1:14 indicates that in the incarnation “the divine life of the Logos itself underwent something decisively new.”34 As Karl Rahner argued, while God is immutable in the sense of not being subject to change in God’s self, the incarnation did involve God being “subject to change in something else.”35 The incarnation was a new event in the life of God involving a “becoming”36 on the part of the second person of the Trinity. This cannot be denied without undermining the New Testament claim that in Christ God has done a new thing. Once this is acknowledged the economic and immanent Trinity can no longer be understood as simply identical. Because the second person of the immanent Trinity exists “ in history in a new way” through the incarnation, the economic Trinity needs to be distinguished from it as well as internally connected to it37 in order to preserve divine transcendence and do justice to what is new here in relation to the immanent Trinity.
