² Rahner, Karl, The Trinity (New York: Scabury, 1974), pp. 10, 14.Google Scholar

³ Moltmann, Jurgen, The Trinity and the Kingdom (N. Y.: Harper & Row, 1981), pp.8fGoogle Scholar.

⁴ The tendency of feminist theology, by contrast, rejects the univocity of a logical model and accepts the equivocation that often reacts to it. Even Sally McFague's ‘metaphorical’ theology — ‘true but not literal’, over against the ‘idolatry’ and ‘irrelevance’ of ‘hierarchical, authoritarian, patriarchal models of Western theology’ (univocity) — equivocates. ‘God the father’, she believes, ‘is a profound metaphor and as true as any religious model available’, but the ‘hegemony’ of paternal models must be supplemented with maternal, as well as nonfamilial and non-gender-related ones (‘God as friend’), because of the ‘discontinuity, skepticism, and relativity between our language and its reference to God and the world’ (Metaphorical Theology: Models of God in Religious Language [Phila.: Fortress, 1982], pp.28f., 145, 178, 194Google Scholar). For a theologically illuminating treatment of God-language that both realfirms and complements the tradition by suggesting the phrase ‘Motherly Father’, see the Church of Scotland's report. The Motherhood of God, ed. Lewis, A. E. (Edinburgh: St. Andrew, 1984Google Scholar).

⁵ See especially LaCugna, Catherine Mowry, God For Us: The Trinity & Christian Life (San Fransisco: HarperCollins, 1991)Google Scholar; Gunton, Colin E., The Promise of Trinitarian Theology (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1991)Google Scholar; The Forgotten Trinity, 3 Vols (London: British Council of Churches, 1989–1991)Google Scholar; Boff, Leonardo, Trinity and Society (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 1988)Google Scholar; Zizioulas, John, Being as Communion: Studies in Penonhood and the Church (N.Y.: St. Vladimir's Seminar, 1985)Google Scholar; Moltmann, The Trinity.

⁶ Rahner, , The Trinity, pp. 112fGoogle Scholar.

⁷ Rahner, , The Trinity, pp. 109, 112fGoogle Scholar. Also cf. Barth's, Karl phrase ‘mode of being’ in his Church Dogmatics, I/1, 2nd ed., ed. Bromiley, G. W. & Torrance, T. F. & trans. Bromiley, G. W. (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1975), p. 363Google Scholar.

⁸ Kasper, Walter, The God of Jesus Christ, trans, O'Connell, Matthew J (N.Y.: Crossroad, 1986), p. 288Google Scholar.

⁹ Ibid., pp. 280, 290.

¹⁰ Gunton, , Trinitarian Theology, pp. 10f., 156Google Scholar.

¹¹ LaCugna, , God For Us, pp. 103, 228Google Scholar.

¹² Barth, Karl, Evangelical Theology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans. 1963), p. 10Google Scholar.

¹³ Gunton, . Trinitarian Theology, pp. 39. 99. 132fGoogle Scholar.

¹⁴ Torrance, ThomasF., The Trinitarian Faith (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1988), pp.230fGoogle Scholar.

¹⁵ Gunton, , Trinitarian Theology, pp. 88ff., 92, 99Google Scholar.

¹⁶ Ibid., pp. 117, 133, 171.

¹⁷ Macmurray, John, Persons in Relation (N.Y.: Harper & Row, 1961), pp. 17, 86, 211Google Scholar.

¹⁸ Idem, Search for Reality in Religion (London: Friends Home Service Committee, 1969), p.72Google Scholar.

¹⁹ Idem, Persons in Relation, p. 215. We must ‘conceive a personal universe in which God is the ultimate reality’, he amplifies, a world as created by God and created agents endowed ‘with a limited and dependent freedom’ (pp. 222, 224; also see his The Self as Agent [N.Y.: Harper & Row, 1957Google Scholar]).

²⁰ LaCugna, , God For Us p. 288Google Scholar; emphasis mine.

²¹ Macmurray, , Persons in Relation, pp. 158fGoogle Scholar. Macmurray also believes that the Church must cooperate with Cod to establish his kingdom on earth, and even writes of its role ‘to save the world’ by transforming human motives through love (Search for Reality, pp. 76f).

²² Being as Communion, pp. 57f., 254f.

²³ See his Search for Reality as a summary and culmination of his mature religious thought. His early traditional Scottish Calvinist beginning and his temporary alliance with Baptist and Brethren associations led to a disillusionment with traditional religion. Despite his central emphasis on personal communion, he lived his religious life as an isolated individual. Despite his critique of theoretical idealism, he only found a spiritual home among the Society of Friends after his retirement from teaching philosophy.

²⁴ See Torrance, James B., ‘The Vicarious Humanity of Christ’, in Torrance, Thomas F., ed. The Incarnation: Ecumenical Studies in the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed (Edinburgh: Handsel, 1981), pp. 127–147Google Scholar.

²⁵ As promised in my essay, ‘The Incarnation as the Hermeneutical Criterion for Liberation and Reconciliation’, Scottish Journal of Theology, Vol. 40 (1987). p. 258, n. 30Google Scholar.

²⁶ Cf. the traditional but unfortunate academic distinction between ‘personal’ and ‘social’ ethics. ‘Ecopersonal’ emphasizes a more unitary approach. I have explored the idea of social ethics as necessarily personal in my essay, ‘Incarnational Social Ethics’ in Incarnational Ministry: The Presence of Christ in Church, Society, and Family (Essays in Honor of Ray S. Anderson), ed. Kettler, Christian D. & Speidell, Todd H. (Colorado Springs, CO: Helmers & Howard, 1990), pp. 140–152, especially pp. 146ffGoogle Scholar.

²⁷ Macmurray, Persons in Relation, chs, 6, 9; Conditions of Freedom (London: Faber & Faber, 1949), pp. 54fGoogle Scholar. Macmurray's early optimism toward synthesizing Christianity and Marxism still regarded Christianity s the truer belief, but Marxism as the superior alternative to the Fascist menace of the time (see his The Philosophy of Communism [London: Faber & Faber, 1933]Google Scholar; Creative Society: A Study of the Relation of Christianity to Communism [London: Student Christian Movement Press, 1935]Google Scholar and ‘Christianity and Communism: Toward a Synthesis’, in Lewis, John, Polanyi, Karl, & Kitchen, Donald K., eds, Christianity and the Social Revolution [London: Gollancz, 1935], pp. 505–526)Google Scholar. His ambivalence toward even democratic socialism is evident during this period. Democracy demands socialism, he believed, to ensure economic democracy (equality, as well as freedom); yet socialism erodes (political) democracy, for the government control of the economy expands the role of the presumed ‘omnicompetent’ state (see his A Challenge to Churches: Religion and Democracy [London: Kegan Paul, 1941], pp. 32fGoogle Scholar.; Constructive Democracy [London: Faber & Faber, 1944], pp. 11ffGoogle Scholar.). Late in his life, he shifted even greater responsibility to the Church, whose ‘main task is to become a real comnuiniiy in the world’, practicing love and unity and freedom that ‘cannot be produced by the compulsion of law and organization, by any form of socialist or communist power’ (Search for Reality, pp. 78f; also cf. his critique of communism as deifying the state and depersonalizing its citizens, despite its noble intentions in Self as Agent, p. 30).

²⁸ Boff, , Trinity and Society, pp. 4ff., 44ff., 77ff., 93, 232ffGoogle Scholar.

²⁹ Ibid., pp. 78, 148f.

³⁰ Ibid., ppp. 150f.

³¹ Even during Macmurray's early enchantment with communism, he was wary of the collectivizing nature of bureaucratic structures: ‘Now serving society or humanity always means in practice serving institutions… And the more you serve institutions the more complicated they become, and the more service they demand… ’ (Freedom in the Modern World [London: Faber & Faber, 1932], p. 200Google Scholar. He also asserted: ‘But serving people in general usually means serving nobody in particular’ (ibid., p. 215).

³² Ibid., pp. 107f., 116, 130, 134, 151, 236.

³³ Novak, Michael, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism (N.Y.: Touchstone, 1982), p.337ffGoogle Scholar.

³⁴ Berger, Peter L. and Neuhaus, Richard John, To Empower People: The Role of Mediating Structures in Public Policy (Wash., D.C.: American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, 1977), pp. 2ffGoogle Scholar.

³⁵ Ibid., pp. 14f. In Knoxville, Tennessee, ‘racial proportion’ is the sole criterion for whether black and white students may attend their neighborhood schools (schools may not exceed a one-third black population). This impersonal mechanism to prescribe where children attend school imposes burdens on families and depletes needed monies by busing students, closing and combining schools, and constructing new schools. Cf. the U.S. Supreme Court 8–0 decision on the DeKalb County, Georgia case in April 1992: ‘Racial balance is not be be achieved for its own sake’. School populations, they reasoned, may reflect the racial composition of their neighborhoods. as well as demographic shifts, as long as ‘racial imbalances’ are not due to constitutional violations.

³⁶ Macmurray, , Religion, Art, and Science: A Study of the Reflective Activities in Man (Liverpool: Liverpool Univ., 1961), p. 68Google Scholar. He also argues that genuine community requires an internationally and interdenominationally inclusive Church (Search for Reality, p. 80); yet mutual ‘I’ and ‘You’ relations respect otherness (Reason and Emotion [London: Faber & Faber, 1935], p. 222Google Scholar). Once again, however, he lacks a trinitarian ontology to ground the plurality-in-unity of social relationships.

³⁷ Gunton warns that ‘relation without otherness’ will result in a ‘blank homogeneity’ or bland unity, but ‘otherness without relation’ tends toward an ‘irrational pluralism’ (Trinitarian Theology, pp. 172f.). Also cf. Pascal: ‘Multiplicity which is not reduced to unity is confusion. Unity which does not depend on multiplicity is tyranny’(quoted in Kasper, , God of Jesus Christ, p. 291Google Scholar).

³⁸ I have criticized a theology of liberation that does not begin with Christ as the liberating reality of the triune God and does not lead to social reconciliation as the goal of liberation in my SJT essay, ‘The Incarnation’.

³⁹ Cone, James H., God of the Oppressed (San Fran.: Harper & Row, 1975), p. 241Google Scholar.

⁴⁰ Idem, My Soul Looks Back (Maryknoll: Orbis, 1986), pp. 61fGoogle Scholar.

⁴¹ Virginia Fabella and Sergio Torres, eds (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 1985).

⁴² D'Souza, Dinesh, Illiberal Education: The Politics of Race and Sex on Campus (N.Y.: Free Press, 1991), p. 17Google Scholar.

⁴³ Ibid., pp. 20f., 229ff., 251ff., He quotes Arthur Schlesinger: ‘the melting pot has yielded to the Tower of Babel’ (quoted on p. 238).

⁴⁴ Cf. Allen's, Woody movie zelig (Orion, 1983)Google Scholar as a satire on the modern loss of selfhood: Leonard Zelig (Woody Allen), a human chameleon, assumes the personality and appearance of anyone he associates with, whatever their race, size, profession, or creed happens to be (e.g., he blends his fragile self into a mass rally for Adolf Hitler). Zelig recovers a genuine sense of otherness only as he develops a romantic relationship with his psychiatrist, Dr. Eudora Fletcher (Mia Farrow).

⁴⁵ Democratic Capitalism, p. 64.

⁴⁶ See the incisive theological analysis and critique of this phenomenon by Torrance, Alan J.. ‘The Self-relation, Narcissism and the Gospel of Grace’. The Scottish Journal of Theology, Vol. 40 (1987). pp. 481–510CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Also consider the ‘New Age’ movement as a union of eastern pantheistic monism and western deified selfism.

⁴⁷ Percy's, Walker alternatively subtitles his whimsical Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book: ‘How You can survive in the Cosmos about which you know more and more while knowing less and less about yourself, this despite 10,000 self-help books, 100,000 psychotherapists, and 100 million fundamentalist Christians’ (N.Y.: Washington Square, 1983), p. 7Google Scholar. For an introduction to the British object relations school, which counters individualistic psychology with a social-relational understanding of the self, see Rayner, Eric, The Independent Mind in British Psycholoanalysis (London: Aronson, 1991)Google Scholar.

⁴⁸ Berger, Brigitte and Berger, Peter L., The War over the Family: Capturing the Middle Ground (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor, 1984), p. 166Google Scholar. Cf. Allen's, WoodyThe Purple Rose of Cairo (Orion, 1985)Google Scholar, in which Tom Baxter (Jeff Daniels) — an ‘archaeological explorer’ — literally steps out of the movie to become a real self who experiences the reality of love and personal relations with Cecilia (Mia Farrow), who also faces the dilemma of choosing between fantasy (movies) and reality (relationships with real people, however unsatisfactory they might be). For theological essays on marriage and family, see Kettler and Speidell, Incarnational Ministry, chs. 15–21.

⁴⁹ Macmurray, , Reasons and Emotion, p. 52Google Scholar.

⁵⁰ Idem, Freedom, pp. 206f. Again, persons exist in relation, especially to friends as ‘the essence of morality’ (ibid., p. 209). Macmurray would eschew any Platonic ideal of friendship, of course, in favor of acting on behalf of real friends.

⁵¹ Idem, Religion. Art, and Science, pp. 37, 58.

⁵² Also consider Allan Bloom's critique of American nihilism and his own Platonic idealism as both lacking a trinitarian-incarnational realism as an ontological basis for personhood (see his The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today's Students (N.Y.: Simon & Schuster, 1987)Google Scholar.

⁵³ For a trinitarian-incarnational view of worship that criticizes anthropocentric views of worship, see two articles by Torrance, James B.: ‘The Vicarious Humanity of Christ’, in Torrance, T. F.. ed., The Incarnation; and ‘The Place of Jesus Christ in Worship’, in Anderson, Ray S., ed., Theological Foundations for Ministry (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark/Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1979), pp. 348–369Google Scholar.

⁵⁴ Goldenberg, Naomi R.The Changing of the Gods: Feminism and the End of Traditional Religions (Boston: Beacon. 1979), pp. 89ffGoogle Scholar. She also writes that ‘male witches are considered Gods’, but ‘women have a higher position in the power structure’ (p. 103). Evidently, for this radical feminist, matriarchy, not equality, is the antidote to patriarchy. Jesus fares no better, for ‘psychoanalytic theory suggest than the image of an antiseptic male god cast in the role of savior could very well be a symptom of the direction toward death which human culture seems to have taken’ (106).

⁵⁵ LaCugna, , God For Us, pp. 267ff., 281f., 290Google Scholar.

⁵⁶ Moltmann, , The Trinity, pp. 198ffGoogle Scholar.

⁵⁷ Ibid., pp. 214ff.

⁵⁸ Kettler, Christian D.. The Vicarious Humanity of Christ and the Reality of Salvation (Lanham, MD: Univ. Press of America, 1991), p. 90Google Scholar.

⁵⁹ Kasper, , God of Jesus Christ, pp. 15, 316Google Scholar.