Pannenberg and the Trinity

I have now read the first two volumes of Pannenberg’s Systematic Theology and have just begun the third. This post is largely a review of the first, as there he deals with his doctrine of God and of the Trinity. The second volume treats the doctrine of creation, anthropology, incarnation, and atonement, which I will undoubtedly give some thoughts on at some point.

Pannenberg argues that the Father is the ‘fount’ of deity, or the originator, only inasmuch as he hands lordship to the Son and Spirit and they hand lordship back to him. God’s relation as Father and as Deity is dependent upon the identities of Son and Spirit and their unity with him. This does well by not making deity a sort of ‘emergent property’ of the unity of the three, nor is deity a common quality that the three share. Deity is their nature – it is the fact of their Eternity and of their lordship. He explains the eternity of God in somewhat platonic terms. Eternity is that which transcends time and also encompasses it. Therefore, God comprehends time but is not reducible to temporal sequence. So, God is Eternal and the perichoresis of the trinity is comprised of their mutual submission to the divinity and lordship of the other – namely, the Father’s entrusting of his identity and lordship to the identity and lordship of the Son, the Son reciprocally returning lordship by entrusting his own identity and divinity to the Father. He explains:

As Jesus glorifies the deity of the Father by his sending and in his own relation to the Father, he himself, in corresponding to the claim of the Father, is so at one with the Father that God in eternity is Father only in relation to him. (p. 310)

The Spirit is first identified by the action of raising Jesus from the dead (that is not to say that that is the first action of the Spirit, merely the activity by which the doctrine of the Spirit as a divine hypostasis originates). The Spirit is the power  of God in the resurrection – the power of life. Therefore, “for Jesus himself, then, the work of the Spirit was to glorify the Father, as in John, where the Spirit glorifies the Son in his fellowship with the Father, and in this way glorifies the Father as well (6:14).” (p. 316) The Spirit is the unity of the mutual lordship between the Father and Son, and by this relationship the identity and lordship of the Son and Father become dependent also upon the Spirit.

Thus, the doctrine of the trinity is an expression of the “self-distinction and unity” of the internal relations in God. It is also a means of expressing the personal nature of God and of explicating God’s nature as ‘love’. This last point is the main place I would try to challenge Pannenberg’s theory. To explain God’s nature as Love, I need to explain Pannenberg’s conception of the Holy Spirit. For Pannenberg, the Holy Spirit is described as a Field of Force, drawing the metaphor from Michael Faraday’s mathematical developments. One of the activities of the Spirit as a field is that of the unity and power of the Father and Son. As the Spirit is the unity of the trinity, the Spirit’s activities are of love. More directly, the Spirit is the Spirit of Love. So, the Spirit’s nature is love; and inasmuch as the Spirit is the unity of God, God is Love.

This seems lacking to me. Traditionally the Spirit has been defined as love or the love of the Father and the Son, so in this sense he’s in the mainline of the tradition. Nonetheless, the affirmation of God as love is that God is love; ie that God’s essential nature is love, not that part of God’s nature is love or that love is a defining characteristic of one of the hypostases of God. Therefore, I think that he has reduced God’s nature as love too far. The Spirit is, rightly considered, a special manifestation of God’s nature as love but is not the primary locus of the divine love.

To present a constructive alternative, I would draw on the work of moral philosopher Harry Frankfurt. His basic argument in The Reasons of Love is this: to love something is to value it. To love someone is to value them and to value what they value. To love someone/something requires that we love ourselves; ie, that we value what we value (and that we value ourselves as someone capable of valuing). Thus, he claims that we cannot love others unless we love ourselves and vice-versa – we cannot love ourselves unless we love someone or something. With this argument, I would supplement Pannenberg by rewriting Barth’s classic trinitarian statement: God loves Himself. God loves Himself through Himself. God loves Himself. And in this sense, the Spirit is not the source or locus of God’s nature as love. God is, essentially, love.

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*Pannenberg, Wolfhart. Systematic Theology vol. 1. Eerdmans Publishing Company. Grand Rapids, Michigan. 1991

*Frankfurt, Harry G. The Reasons of Love. Princeton University Press. Princeton, NJ. 2005