In the second half (or maybe last third) of Keith Ward’s Re-Thinking Christianity he discusses some of the post-Enlightenment developments of Christian thought and the prospects for a 21st century liberal-yet-orthodox Christianity.

Interestingly, Ward attempts a partial rehabilitation of one of the currently most unfashionable theological thinkers of the post-Enlightenment era: Hegel. Since at least Kierkegaard Hegel has been the poster boy for hubristic metaphysical system-building and the attempt to reduce Christian particularity to philosophical generality. But Ward thinks that Hegel still has valuable contributions to make to Christian theology.

Ward concedes that Hegel overreached in identifying the progress of history with the unfolding of Absolute Spirit, and in his confidence in speculative reason. However, he argues that Christianity necessarily involves doing metaphysics and the strictures against “Hellenism” by German liberal theologians like Harnack, et al. aren’t sustainable. On the positive side Hegel contributed a new understanding of God that departed from the static deity of classical Greek philosophy and is more congenial to the biblical picture of God as deeply involved in history. Thus a “chastened” Hegelianism that properly qualifies Hegel’s historical optimism and his inattention to the particularity and importance of Jesus, can still be of some use:

For Hegel, history both expresses and changes God, as it realises aspects of the divine that would otherwise have remained potential in the divine being, and as God truly relates to these aspects in new and creative ways. It is compatible with this view to say that God also has a proper divine actuality even without creation, and certainly without this specific universe. So we may not wish to say that this universe is necessary if God is to be conscious of the divine nature. However, there is a great deal of force in the thought that, if God is to realise the divine nature as love — in the sense of relation to truly free personal agents — then the creation of some universe in which true freedom is possible will be needed.

The sort of love that obtains between God and created persons — a kenotic love that enters into humility and suffering, that seeks those who are lost and reconciles those who are estranged — is not possible solely within the being of God itself. Because of that, the creation of a universe is the necessary condition of the actualisation of kenotic love in God. A stronger stress on the value of personal relationships leads to involving God more in time and change than classical theologians like Aquinas thought. We may not want to follow Hegel in the detail of his philosophy, but this is a move that he was the first major philosopher to make. (p. 156)

This sort of thing is apt to make more traditional thinkers nervous. It seems to imply that the divine being in itself is somehow incomplete and requires the creation of something in addition to God in order for the divine potentiality to be actualized.

There’s a connection here to the doctrine of the Trinity: Ward is suspicious of more “social” versions of the Trinity that emphasize the fully personal existence of each trinitarian person. These models see the “inner” life of the Trinity as a fully complete interchange of self-giving love; consequently, there is no need for creation to actualize God’s nature as love.

Ward writes, in criticism of this kind of view:

In any case, it is hard to see what sort of love could exist between persons who are all parts of the same being. It is as if different parts of a human being with three different personalities could all be said to love one another. That would be a very peculiar, even pathological, sort of love.

[…]

If the love of Jesus is our model for the love of God, then God, as love, must go out to persons who are other than God, who are capable of rejecting God, but who can be healed by divine love and united to the divine life by compassion nad co-operation. This is not a love of one hypostasis of God for another hypostasis of God. It is a love for what is other than God but can be united to the life of God in fellowship. It is a love that requires a created other, perhaps, but not a love that can be operative within the divine being itself, where there is no possible scope for rejection, compassion, healing or a real autonomy of the other. (pp. 76-77)

This is an interesting argument because it suggests that the intra-trinitarian divine love is in some sense inferior to the extra-trinitarian reconciling love that seeks the lost. In some sense I can see the force of this: it does seem that a love where there is literally no possibility of the beloved not reciprocating is somehow diminished in that there is no risk or vulnerability involved.

On the other hand, it is somewhat worrisome to say that God must create a world in which there is a risk of rejection and estrangement in order to actualize this aspect of the divine love. For one thing, this seems to suggest that evil is necessary for God’s being to be fully actualized: for a world in which rejection and estrangement are a live possibility is one that would seem to (necessarily?) contain suffering. This is the same worry I have about Robert Jenson’s theology, that God’s self-determination is so bound up with the historical process that evil becomes part of the very being of God.

Maybe there can be a mediating position: perhaps it’s possible (at least logically) for God to create creatures who are capable of estrangement without necessarily falling into it. In other words, the kind of risky love demonstrated in God’s decision to create free creatures who may fail to respond to the divine love does differ from God’s self-love, and is thus something good to be actualized, but it doesn’t necessarily entail the existence of evil.

Regardless of what we want to say about this, I do think Ward is right to distinguish between the kind of love we might imagine between the persons of the Trinity and the kind of love that exists between God and finite persons, or between finite persons themselves. Some theologians have taken to seeing the relationship between the persons of the Trinity as a model for human community, but this seems like a bad idea for a couple of reasons.

First, a lot of the descriptions of the nature of the love between the Persons is, let’s face it, rank speculation. And using fancy Greek terms like “perichoresis” doesn’t really change the fact that we have only the dimmest idea of what the “inner” life of God is like, much less does it provide some kind of blueprint for human relationships.

Secondly, the life of the Trinity, we’re told, instantiates a perfect union of wills, a unity of wills in fact. The three Persons will all and only the same things. But this is a very bad model of human relationships. There is never perfect agreement of will in human communities, and to try and ensure such unity would be a recipe for tyranny. Conflict is an essential part of human living, due both to our differing interests and limited knowledge about what is good. Human beings are different from each other in a way that the Persons of the Trinity aren’t. So, it is, I would suggest, an inadequate model for human relationships to say the least.