Abstract
Eric G. Flett,
Persons, Powers and Pluralities: Toward a Trinitarian Theology of Culture
, James Clarke: Cambridge, UK, 2012; 272 pp.: 9780227680025, £19.50 (pbk)
Flett’s book offers a fine introduction to T. F. Torrance’s doctrine of God and theological anthropology, and proposes an insightful reconstruction of Torrance’s theology of culture that will prove illuminating for students. The book unfolds in six chapters, the first four largely summarizing Torrance’s grounding of the doctrine of creation in the doctrine of the Trinity. This careful preparatory work paves the way for the thesis’s dénouement, which argues that the ordering of creation by the triune God establishes the possibility for a cultural reflection of the relationality of all reality, as it is grounded in God’s antecedent fellowship. Flett develops a rich account of the place of human culture as a site for the mediation of order, as a place where social beings organize their conceptual and physical tools in order to express the generosity of the triune God, and through that reflection to participate in the unfolding of God’s kingdom. Accentuated by welcome references to jazz, the book provides an engaging and highly valuable contribution to the secondary literature on Torrance’s thought.
Unfortunately Flett’s failure to engage critically with contemporary conversations in Trinitarian theology undermines the persuasiveness of his central thesis. Flett’s proposal of a theology of culture based on Torrance’s theological anthropology pivots on the priority of the immanent Trinity’s transcendence over, and freedom from, the created order. Thereby the author intends to remind us that the created order cannot consummate or perfect God’s being, but simply echoes the relationality of the Trinity through its cultural expression of the image of God. Although Flett’s thesis thereby pursues an established Trinitarian model, the author fails to acknowledge the important critical questions that commentators such as Eberhard Jüngel, Rowan Williams and Bruce McCormack have raised over this particular Trinitarian conception of divine freedom. For these commentators, if the historicity of God’s revealing economy is not itself invested with significance for the identity of the free, triune Godhead, then creation is rendered accidental to God’s being. Flett does not sufficiently assess how God’s humanity is essential to God’s divinity. This in turn raises doubts about the propriety of a theology of culture which must reduce cultural activity to the collection and dissemination of information about God, but cannot be said to constitute a social site in which humanity is drawn into an authentic creaturely space for participation in God’s life. Despite the lucidity and attentiveness of Flett’s introduction to Torrance’s theology of culture, his failure to evaluate critically the defensibility of Torrance’s thought in the light of these prominent issues for Trinitarian theology is a little disappointing, and this reader remains unconvinced by Flett’s confidence that Torrance’s account of divine freedom provides the appropriate basis for a satisfactorily participative theology of culture. Nevertheless, Flett’s book is a perceptive study, and usefully guides us through the complex nuances of Torrance’s theological anthropology.