Incarnational Realism: Trinity and the Spirit in Augustine and Barth (T&T Clark Studies in Systematic Theology, 21) (Volume 42)

"In the last half of the 20th century, a consensus emerged that Christian theology in the Western tradition had failed to produce a viable doctrine of the Holy Spirit, and that Augustine's trinitarian theology bore the blame for much of that failure. This book offers a fresh rereading of Western trinitarian theology to better understand the logic of its pneumatology. Ables studies the pneumatologies of Augustine and Karl Barth, and argues that the vision of the doctrine of the Spirit in these theologians should be understood as a way of talking about participating in the mystery of God as a performance of the life of Christ. He claims that for both theologians trinitarian doctrine encapsulates the grammar of the divine self-giving in history. The function of pneumatology in particular is to articulate the human reception and enactment of God's self-giving as itself part of the act of God; this 'self-involving' logic is the special grammar of the doctrine of the Holy Spirit."--Bloomsbury Publishing. [Synopsis] In the last half of the 20th century, a consensus emerged that Christian theology in the Western tradition had failed to produce a viable doctrine of the Holy Spirit, and that Augustine's trinitarian theology bore the blame for much of that failure. This book offers a fresh rereading of Western trinitarian theology to better understand the logic of its pneumatology. Ables studies the pneumatologies of Augustine and Karl Barth, and argues that the vision of the doctrine of the Spirit in these theologians should be understood as a way of talking about participating in the mystery of God as a performance of the life of Christ. He claims that for both theologians trinitarian doctrine encapsulates the grammar of the divine self-giving in history. The function of pneumatology in particular is to articulate the human reception and enactment of God's self-giving as itself part of the act of God; this "self-involving" logic is the special grammar of the doctrine of the Holy Spirit Dedication 6 Contents 8 Acknowledgments 10 Abbreviations 13 Introduction 14 1. Augustine and the Problem of the Spirit in Contemporary Trinitarian Theology 30 2. The Exercise of Faith and the Trinitarian Logic of Self-Giving in De Trinitate 1–7 50 3. Pneumatology and the Psychological Analogy in De Trinitate 8–15 68 4. The “Whole Christ” and the Pneumatology of Deification in Augustine 92 5. The Development of Barth’s Dialectical Pneumatology of Participation in the Church Dogmatics 118 6. The Vicissitudes of Barth’s Trinitarianism in CD 4 146 7. Self-Consciousness and Spirit: The Trinity after Hegel 168 8. Incarnational Realism and the Augustinian Logic of the Trinity 188 Notes 206 Bibliography 262 Index 276