Wednesday 15 June 2011

Dongsun Cho: An Apology for Augustine’s Filioque as a Hermeneutical Referent to the Immanent Trinity

This paper will argue that Augustine’s filioque fairly reflects biblical witnesses to the epistemological priority of the economic Trinity in knowing the immanent Trinity. Not a few contemporary Trinitarian theologians such as Karl Rahner criticize Augustine for ignoring the epistemological priority of the economic Trinity in knowing the immanent Trinity. In contrast, this paper proves that Augustine teaches the epistemological priority of the economic Trinity without denying the ontological priority of the immanent Trinity. Augustine regards Christ’s and Spirit’s historical missions as the reflection of their eternal relationship to the Father and to each other in the immanent Trinity. Unlike Rahner’s complaint to Augustine’s allegedly failure to realize the identity between the economic Trinity and the immanent Trinity, others such as David Coffey contend that the Johannine doctrine of the filioque would not endorse Augustine’s attempt to apply the Spirit’s double procession to the immanent Trinity. They assert that Augustine’s filioque inevitably violates the Father’s monarchy in the immanent Trinity. In reply to Coffey, I will demonstrate that Augustine’s filioque resulted from the valid exegeses of biblical data. rather than from his theological speculations, concerning the eternal relationship of three Persons revealed in the economy of salvation. The Gospel of John indicates a clear parallelism between the Son’s way of being and the Spirit’s way of being both in the economic Trinity and in the immanent Trinity. Just as the Son’s historical mission reveals his eternal generation from the Father, so the Spirit’s historical mission also discloses his eternal procession from the other Persons. I will also attest that Augustine’s understanding of the Father and the Son as unum principium in the procession of the Holy Spirit would fit with some Greek Fathers’ – Athanasius and Gregory of Nazianzus – trinitarian theologies.

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