Gunton, Trinity, Church

Trinity and Ontology: Colin Gunton’s
Ecclesiology1
ROLAND CHIA*
Abstract: Colin Gunton argues that there is a need to develop an ontology of
the church on the basis of the concept of God as triune. There is an analogy
between the being of God and the being of the church. Against the
monistic and hierarchical conceptions of the church, so common in the West,
Gunton develops a communio-ecclesiology based on his understanding of
relationality as a transcendental. In addition, Gunton argues that we must move
towards an ecclesiology of perichoresis in which the church as a community is
the result of the mutual constitutiveness of persons.
In an important essay entitled ‘The Church on Earth: The Roots of Community’
Colin Gunton argues that modern ecclesiology is dominated by monistic and
hierarchical conceptions of the church.2 Gunton maintains that this tendency is
largely due to theology’s failure to reflect more deeply on the ontology of the church.
More precisely, he asserts that the deficiencies in modern conceptions of the
church are due to theology’s failure to ground its understanding of the church in
the conception of the being of God as triune. The doctrine of the Trinity is often
looked upon as one of the difficulties of Christian belief, ‘a kind of intellectual hurdle
to be leaped before orthodoxy can be acknowledged’.3 Consequently, the doctrine’s
relationship with other theological topics is often elusive and its centrality to all
aspects of belief, worship and life is often missed. As a result, the possibilities
the doctrine holds for nourishing a Christian theology of community are not fully or
even adequately explored by theology. According to Gunton, while early efforts to
develop Christology show evidence of attempts to examine the question of the being
* Trinity Theological College, 490 Upper Bukit Timah Road, Singapore 678093, Republic of
Singapore.
1 A Mandarin translation of this article is published in Zhou Zong Min, ed., Trinity,
Creation and Culture: An Interpretation of Colin Gunton’s Theology (Hong Kong: Logos
Publishers, 2007), pp. 204–28.
2 Colin Gunton, ‘The Church on Earth: The Roots of Community’, in Colin Gunton and
Daniel Hardy, eds., On Being the Church (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1989), pp. 48–80.
3 Gunton, ‘The Church on Earth’, p. 49.
International Journal of Systematic Theology Volume 9 Number 4 October 2007
doi:10.1111/j.1468-2400.2007.00274.x
English translation © The author 2007. Journal compilation © Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2007, 9600 Garsington Road,
Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street Malden, MA 02148, USA.
of Christ in relation to God the Father and the Holy Spirit, a similar approach is
almost absent in ecclesiology.
This neglect is seen in both Eastern and Western ecclesiologies. Eastern
ecclesiology, which was developed in a context where Neoplatonism was influential,
betrays a tendency to conceive of reality in terms of degrees and thus to envision a
hierarchically structured world.4 Harnack’s analysis that in Eastern theology the
church is conceived of as the image of a ‘heavenly hierarchy’5 is therefore in some
ways justified. In the West, the conception of the church is derived mainly by analogy
to an earthly empire. Gunton cites Cyprian’s ecclesiology as a classic example in
which the church is conceived as an imitation of a political empire or a military
camp. This hierarchical and authoritarian vision led Cyprian to postulate that the
bishops constitute the ‘real’ church. With Augustine the picture is somewhat more
complex because of the official recognition of the church after Constantine. Although
Augustine understood the church as a community of believers, the changed status of
the church meant that it was a mixed community of believers and unbelievers.
According to Gunton, this led to two significant developments: the first is the stress
on the institutional nature of the church, where the clergy is seen as the real church;
and the second is the platonizing distinction between the visible and invisible church.
The conclusion is inevitable: ‘[t]he real Church – represented by the clergy? – is the
invisible Church, those known only to God, the elect’.6
This survey leads Gunton to conclude that ‘the conception of God as a triune
community made no substantive contribution to the doctrine of the Church’.7
Because the doctrine of the Trinity fails to inform the ontology of the church, rival
ontologies have filled the vacuum. Ecclesiology has as a result been dominated by
monistic and hierarchical conceptions based on an ontology shaped either
by Neoplatonism or some other non-personal metaphysic. Following John Zizioulas,
Gunton maintains that on the basis of the doctrine of the Trinity we can derive a
distinctively Christian ontology. Such an ontology would not only serve as an
alternative to those proposed by the philosophies that shaped the intellectual milieu
of which the church was once a part; it will also be a challenge to modern conditions.
When extended to ecclesiology, this ontology would result in the conception of the
church as community that would provide a needed corrective to the hierarchical and
institutional ecclesiologies. ‘The doctrine of the Trinity, as it comes to us from the
Cappadocian theologians’, Gunton asserts, ‘teaches us that the first thing to be said
about the being of God is that it consists in personal communion’.8 As John Zizioulas
has put it, ‘Communion is for Basil an ontological category. The nature of God is
4 Gunton, ‘The Church on Earth’, p. 50.
5 Adolph von Harnack, History of Dogma, 3rd edn, trans. Neil Buchanan et al. (London,
1897), Vol. IV, p. 279.
6 Gunton, ‘The Church on Earth’, p. 52.
7 Gunton, ‘The Church on Earth’, p. 52.
8 Gunton, ‘The Church on Earth’, p. 66.
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communion.’9 Put differently, there is an analogous relationship between the being
of the church and the being of God – the church as community may be said to be a
vestige of the Trinity.
An analogy of echo
How then are we to proceed to develop the concept of the being of the church based
on the doctrine of Trinity? Gunton maintains that such an attempt should be made
with great care if we are to avoid two common errors. The first is to appeal directly
to the unity of the three persons in the Godhead as the model for the unity of
the church, and the second is to attempt the converse – to make the hypostatic
distinctions the basis of diversity in the church.10 Both attempts are exercises
in abstraction and therefore betray a lack of theological control. The crucial
intermediate step, according to Gunton, in developing an ontology of the church
based on the doctrine of Trinity is a trinitarian theology of creation. Such an approach
rejects all monistic and pantheistic interpretations of the creation because it insists on
the ontological distinction between the Creator and the creature. More crucially, this
distinction rejects any logical link between the Creator and the creature, thereby
replacing the logical conception of the relationship between God and the world with
a personal one. This means that the relation between God and his creation is the
result of the free personal action of the triune God. It implies that the ontological
distinction between God and the world, ‘far from being the denial of relations, is its
ground’.11 The church, in so far as it is part of the creation, is also finite and
contingent, and is thus related to the triune God also through the free personal action
of the latter. How, then, does the church reflect the being of God? ‘The answer ’, as
John Zizioulas has shown, ‘lies in the word koinonia, perhaps best translated as
community (or perhaps sociality, compare the Russian Sobornost).’12
Before we analyse what it means to describe the church as koinonia, let us
examine more closely how Gunton develops the analogy between God and the
church. For Gunton the being of the church is said to be analogous to the being of
God in so far as the former may be said to be a finite echo or bodying forth of the
divine personal dynamics. Thus the analogy between the being of God and that of
the church must be said to be of an indirect kind: ‘the Church is what it is by virtue
of being called to be a temporal echo of the eternal community that God is’.13 This
brings us to the whole question of the analogy of being which Karl Barth discusses
9 John Zizioulas, Being As Communion: Studies in Personhood and the Church
(Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1993), p. 134.
10 Gunton, ‘The Church on Earth’, p. 66.
11 Gunton, ‘The Church on Earth’, p. 67.
12 Gunton, ‘The Church on Earth’, pp. 67–8.
13 Gunton, ‘The Church on Earth’, p. 75.
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454 Roland Chia
in his magisterial Church Dogmatics.14 There seems to be, for Gunton, an analogia
entis between the church and God by virtue of the fact that the church is creatura
verbi, and therefore part of the creation, as the Reformers put it. The converse
question must now be raised: does this imply that the being of the triune God can be
gleaned from the phenomenon of the empirical church? Put differently, can the
church be said to be a vestigium trinitatis? In so far as the church as a redeemed
community of believers can only be apprehended by faith, as the creeds remind us,
analogia entis must be subordinated to analogia fidei. Thus faith is the epistemic
conditio sine qua non that enables us to apprehend the analogy between the being of
God and that of the church.
The trinitarian conception of God as the highest reality serves as the theological
basis for conceptualizing the relation between the one and the many, a question that
has accompanied philosophical discussion in the West since Parmenides. Reflection
on the nature of the church on the basis of the doctrine of the Trinity would result in
a clearer understanding of the church as community. Crucial to the discussion,
therefore, is the way in which the doctrine of the Trinity itself is understood. The
history of theology has shown that there are important differences in the way in
which the doctrine of the Trinity was developed in the Western and Eastern
traditions. Although the most pronounced divergence between the two traditions is in
their understanding of the relationship between the Son and the Spirit (brought to
expression by the filioque clause of the Western tradition), there are also other
equally important differences. It is not an oversimplification to say with Karl Rahner
that while the Western tradition emphasizes the unity of the Godhead, the Eastern
tradition stresses the hypostatic distinction of the Father, Son and Spirit.15 Such
differences in emphasis are important because they influence the shape of the
respective ecclesiologies, especially when the latter are understood in light of
the Trinity.
Doubtless Augustine played an important role in shaping the Western
conception of the Trinity. However, in an essay entitled ‘Trinitarian Theology
Today’, Gunton addresses three fundamental problems in Augustine’s understanding
of the Trinity that have become endemic in the Western tradition.16 Firstly, by
attempting to conceive patterns of threeness apart from the economy of salvation,
Augustine has separated the being of God – what God is eternally – from his act –
what God does in time. Secondly, the perichoretic principle, opera trinitatis ad extra
sunt indivisa, has sometimes meant for Augustine that no characteristic and
distinguishing forms of actions can be ascribed to the Father, Son and Spirit. This
would in the end make the Trinity irrelevant in our understanding of divine action.
And finally, Augustine’s formulation of the Trinity is problematic because of his
14 For discussion on analogy of being, see Roland Chia, Revelation and Theology: The
Knowledge of God in Balthasar and Barth (Bern: Peter Lang, 1999).
15 Karl Rahner, The Trinity (New York: Crossroad, 1998), p. 17.
16 Colin Gunton, The Promise of Trinitarian Theology, 2nd edn (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark,
1997), p. 4.
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inadequate concept of person. This is due in the main again to his failure to grasp
adequately the distinctive personae of Father, Son and Spirit in the one God,
compelling him to treat God unipersonally and to locate personhood in the oneness
not the threeness.
Although all these problems have in one way or another indirectly shaped the
Western idea of the ecclesia, it is the third that is perhaps the most serious. Augustine
has famously said that he uses the concept of person to describe the Father, Son and
Spirit in their distinctiveness ‘in order not to remain silent’.17 Furthermore, he admits
that he does not understand the Greek usage of the term hypostasis and concludes,
wrongly, that the Greeks used this term in accordance with common parlance. He
thereby fails to understand that by using hypostasis to describe the distinctions
within the Godhead the Greeks are both commandeering as well as adapting
philosophical language to theology. Augustine’s failure to appreciate the concept
of person has led him to use Aristotelian categories, often abstract and opaque, to
understand the relations within the Godhead. Failure to understand the Greek usage
of hypostasis led Augustine to an individualistic concept of person. This is blatantly
evident in his assertion that ‘the Father is called person in respect to himself, not in
relation to the Son or the Holy Spirit’ (Ad se . . . dicitur persona, non ad filium vel
spiritum sanctum).18 This is further accentuated by the fact that the analogies
forwarded by Augustine are taken from the soul. The quest for the inner Trinity
within the soul, coupled with the idea that the human likeness to God resides in the
mind, have made it difficult to see how the Trinity can shed light on human
relatedness. Such an approach has in large measure spawned Western individualism
in its various forms. Gunton writes:
Since relations are qualifications of the inner Trinity, and not relations between
persons, it becomes difficult to see how the triune relatedness can be brought
to bear on the central question of human relatedness. God’s relatedness is
construed in terms of self-relatedness, with the result that it is as an individual
that the human being is in the image of God, and therefore truly human.19
For Gunton, the Cappadocians were able to create a conception of God in which
God’s being is understood on the basis of personal commitment. In failing fully to
appreciate the achievement of the Cappadocians, and in dwelling on analogies based
on human mentality, Augustine postulates a singular deity for whom community is
merely an epiphenomenon and therefore secondary. For the Cappadocians, the Greek
hypostasis is used in distinction from ousia to refer to the particularity of the Father,
17 Augustine, De Trinitate, V. ix. 10.
18 Augustine, De Trinitate, VII. vi. 11.
19 Colin Gunton, ‘Trinity, Ontology and Anthropology: Towards a Renewal of the Doctrine
of the Imago Dei’, in Christoph Schwöbel and Colin Gunton, eds., Persons, Divine and
Human: King’s College Essays in Theological Anthropology (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark,
1991), p. 49.
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456 Roland Chia
Son and Holy Spirit in the Godhead. In Letter 236 Basil of Caesarea clarifies the
distinction between ousia and hypostasis thus:
The distinction between ousia and hypostasis is the same as that between the
general and particular; as, for example, between the animal and the particular
man. Wherefore in the case of the Godhead we confess one essence (or
substance), so as not to give a variant definition of existence, but we confess a
particular hypostasis in order that our conception of Father, Son and Holy Spirit
may be without confusion and clear. If we have no distinct perception of the
separate characteristics of fatherhood, sonship and sanctification, but form one
conception from the general idea of existence, we cannot possibly have a sound
account of our faith.
To understand the three as individuals, as is the case in some strands of the Western
tradition, is to miss the point intended by the Cappadocian usage of hypostasis. By
this term the Greek Fathers wish to stress that the ‘three are not individuals but
persons, beings whose reality can only be understood in terms of their relations to
each other, relations by virtue of which they together constitute the being (ousia) of
the one God’.20 By according priority to the concept of person and relation the
Cappadocians transform the meaning of the two terms and consequently the concept
of God, which is now no longer understood in terms of Greek metaphysics but in
terms of communion. As Gregory of Nazianzus has maintained, the nature of the
Trinity must not be understood primarily by attributes like omnipotence, goodness or
eternity but by the relationship between the three members both to each other
(immanent Trinity) and to the world (economic Trinity).21
In Being As Communion John Zizioulas explores the proposals forwarded
by the Cappadocians by arguing that the being of God is constituted by the
interrelationship of the three persons in the Godhead. The thesis in the book is
summarily discussed in an earlier paper titled ‘The Ontology of Personhood’, where
Zizioulas writes:
In God the particular is ontologically ultimate because relationship is permanent
and unbreakable. Because the Father, the Son and the Spirit are always together,
the particular beings are the bearers of the totality of nature, and thus no
contradiction between ‘one’ and ‘many’ can arise. In trying to identify a particular
thing, we have to make it part of a relationship, and not isolate it as an individual.22
20 Gunton, The Promise of Trinitarian Theology, p. 39.
21 Thus in his third Theological Oration (Section 16) Gregory could write: ‘I should have
been frightened with your distinction, if it had been necessary to accept one or other of
the alternatives, and not rather put both aside, and state a third and truer one, namely that
“the Father” is not the name either of an essence or of an action, but is the name of the
relation, in which the Father stands to the Son and the Son to the Father.’
22 John Zizioulas, ‘The Ontology of Personhood’, paper prepared, 1985, for the British
Council of Churches’ Study Commission on Trinitarian Doctrine Today, p. 9.
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The trinitarian postulate una substantia, tres personae is often taken to mean that in
an ontological sense, God is first the one God, and only then exists as three persons.
Such an approach would result in a substantialist ontology, which collapses into a
monism. The formulation of the Cappadocians, as Zizioulas has rightly pointed out,
surmounts this ontology by insisting that God’s being cannot be understood apart
from God’s triune personhood but coincides with it. The philosophical and
theological implications of this move are clear:
(a) The person is no longer an adjunct to a being, a category we add to a concrete
entity once we have first verified its ontological hypostasis. It is itself the
hypostasis of the being. (b) Entities no longer trace their being to being itself –
that is, being is not an absolute category in itself – but to the person, to precisely
that which constitutes being, that is, enables entities to be entities.23
Zizioulas elaborates on this through his exposition of the intratrinitarian relationship
between the Father, Son and Spirit, concluding that God’s existence itself is a free
personal act. In other words, God does not exist because he cannot but exist. The
Father is not only source but ‘cause’ of the Son and the Spirit. Furthermore,
the Father, according to Zizioulas, is the ‘cause’ of the trinitarian unity, and this
means that it is impossible to think of the one God without also conceiving of the
communion that God is.24 Zizioulas concludes, together with the Cappadocians, that
‘[t]he Holy Trinity is a primordial ontological concept and not a notion which is
added to the divine substance or rather that follows it’.25 Without entirely agreeing
with Zizioulas’ (and the Cappadocians’) monarchical view of the Father,26 Gunton
could nonetheless endorse the view that the Trinity must be understood on the basis
of a relational ontology rather than a substantialist one.
The doctrine of the Trinity discussed above implies that God is neither a
collectivity nor an individual but a communion – a unity of persons in relation. This
helps us to reflect on how the church is also a community, analogous to the
being of God. On the one hand, ‘the doctrine of the Trinity as a dynamic personal
ordering of giving and receiving is, in the idea of sociality that it suggests, the key to
the matter of transcendentality that we are seeking’.27 The idea of communion
in the trinitarian relations in the Godhead also presents the conception of personal
space. That is to say, the triune relationality enables us to understand the space
between persons, which allows them to be for and from each other in their otherness.
Put differently, personal space allows persons to confer particularity to and receive it
23 See Zizioulas, Being as Communion, pp. 27–35.
24 Hence Gregory Nazianzen’s famous statement in Orationes: ‘No sooner do I consider the
One than I am enlightened by the radiance of the Three; no sooner do I distinguish them
than I am carried back to the One’ (40.41).
25 Zizioulas, God as Communion, p. 41.
26 See Gunton, The Promise of Trinitarian Theology, p. 196.
27 Colin Gunton, The One, the Three and the Many: God, Creation and the Culture of
Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 225.
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458 Roland Chia
from each other. ‘Father, Son and Spirit through their shape – the taxis – of their
inseparable relatedness confer particularity and freedom on each other ’.28 This is
important because community or communion should not obliterate the particularity
of persons. The conferring of particularity has to do with allowing the space to be.
We shall explore the idea of sociality and relationality in the next section.
The church as community
If, as Gunton has convincingly argued following the Cappadocians and Zizioulas,
communion is fundamental to understanding the being of God, sociality can be
seen as a transcendental, albeit an open transcendental with numerous possibilities
of application. As Dan Hardy has argued in an important essay, sociality as a
transcendental pertains to the church, the redeemed community, but it can be
extended to all created being.29 The aim of this idea, Hardy explains, ‘is to establish
an element which will justify a true society, and thus to inform the pragmatics of
human society’.30 The fundamental intuition behind the argument is surely correct: to
be a human being is to be created in and for God and with other human beings.
Created sociality is made explicit in ecclesiology, which postulates the church as the
true form of the human being, whose particular character is defined and realized
christologically and pneumatologically. Indeed such a theology of sociality is needed
if ecclesiology is not to fall prey to an ideology that privileges either the one or the
many. Either approach ultimately fails to give a proper account of particularity and
relationality, and consequently of reality as such. However, Gunton distances himself
from Hardy’s terminology because an understanding of communion as being-in-
relation does not make sociality a transcendental, since it ‘leaves unresolved the
question of the relation of human society to the material context within which it takes
shape’.31 Transcendentals, according to Gunton, are ‘those notions which we may
suppose to embody “the necessary notes of being”, in the pre-Kantian sense of
notions which give some way of conceiving what reality truly is, everywhere and
always’.32 However, sociality, for Gunton, has an ideal status, which, although it has
much to contribute to ecclesiology, does not yet meet the requirements of the
transcendental that he sought.
Although the concept of sociality enables us to understand the distinctive
character of personal being, it cannot be applied to everything. While it helps to
28 Gunton, The Promise of Trinitarian Theology, p. 110.
29 Daniel Hardy, ‘Created and Redeemed Sociality’, in Gunton and Hardy, On Being the
Church, pp. 21–47.
30 Hardy, ‘Created and Redeemed Sociality’, p. 34.
31 Gunton, The One, the Three and the Many, p. 223.
32 Gunton, The One, the Three and the Many, p. 136. The same may be said of the
Coleridgean notion of social contract, to which Gunton alludes with much admiration
(pp. 221–2).
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clarify the social nature of personal being, that is, that both God and man have their
being in their ‘free-relation-in-otherness’, it does not contribute to our understanding
of the non-personal universe which does not have the marks of love and freedom.
The transcendental that we are seeking, Gunton concludes, is not sociality but
relationality:
Relationality is thus the transcendental which allows us to learn something of
what it is to say that all created people and things are marked by their coming
from and returning to God who is himself, in his essential and inmost being, a
being in relation.33
In regard to God, this transcendental functions as a coordinate which points to the
eternal and free relations of the persons in the Godhead in the particularity of their
respective being and act. In the case of creation, this transcendental enables us to see
how persons and things can be qualified because they bear the mark of their triune
Creator. In the ecclesia, this is fleshed out in the concept koinonia where relationality
transcends mere reciprocity and takes the form of creative subordination in
conformity to Christ.
The Greek word koinonia is the basis of the Latin communio, which broadly
means union with, although it does not specify the members of the union, its origin
or purpose. This word, which became the favourite of Christian writers, especially
Paul, can be found in classical literature, notably in Aristotle’s analysis of
friendship. When used to describe the church, koinonia designates both
communion between God and humankind and within humankind. As Yves Congar
has put it:
Its fundamental Christian meaning designates the community of the faithful
with Christ, hence their common participation in Christian ‘goods’; the faith,
the body of Christ (1 Corinthians 10:16), the Spirit (2 Corinthians 13:13), and
finally, the community which Christians constitute on the basis of all these
things: In that they are in community with God they are also in community with
one another (see 1 John 1:3, 6). Thus the communio is seen to be constituted by
the Christian life in its fullest sense.34
The idea of communion could be traced to the doctrine of creation since God has
created the world such that in its otherness it is called to be in relation with its
Creator. The idea is also implicit in theological anthropology since the human
creature is a being in relation, and humankind has its true being in communion.
‘Positively’, Gunton writes, ‘humankind is social kind’. He adds: ‘It is only when
[Adam] can rejoice in the fellowship of one who is a true other-in-relation that he is
33 Gunton, The One, the Three and the Many, p. 229.
34 See Johannes Feiner and Magnus Löhrer, eds., Mysterium Salutis IV/2, pp. 404–5.
Quoted in Robert Kress, The Church: Communion, Sacrament, Communication (New
York: Paulist Press, 1985), p. 35.
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460 Roland Chia
able to transcend the merely individual state that is the denial of human fullness.’35
This trail from creation leads back to ecclesiology. According to the New Testament,
the human community becomes concrete in the church, whose purpose is to be the
medium and realization of communion, ‘with God in the first instance, and with other
people in the second, and as a result of the first’.36
According to Gunton, it was the seventeenth-century Puritan theologian John
Owen who developed an ontology of the church as a community. Noting that the
Reformers failed to develop a theology of community because of their belief that
reformation was enough, Owen sought to develop a conception of the church which
initially depended on Aristotelian categories but later on Cappadocian trinitarian
theology. ‘The result’, Gunton concludes, ‘is that Owen’s definition of the Church is
an echo of their [the Cappadocians’] theology of the Trinity.’37 From the analogy of
the free relations of the persons in the Godhead, Owen developed a conception
of the church as a free voluntary society. Such an ecclesiology is rooted firmly in the
freedom of obedience to the gospel. The relations between persons that make up
the church, Owen maintains, constitute something new because it is the work of the
eschatological Spirit. As such, it is thus ‘vain to imagine that this state can arise
from or have any other formal cause but the joint consent and virtual confederation
of those concerned unto those ends’.38 Owen’s strong emphasis on the church as a
community of free-relating persons and the voluntary nature of its membership has
historical as well as theological grounds. Theologically, such an ecclesiology best
echoes the eternal being of God characterized by the mutual self-giving of the Father,
Son and Holy Spirit.
The church is therefore the concrete community of the last times, called to
‘realise in its life the promised and inaugurated reconciliation of all things’.39 The
concrete nature of the church means that it becomes an echo of the life of
the Godhead – the church points to the creative and recreative presence of God
to the world. The activity of proclamation and the celebration of the sacraments, so
central to ecclesial life, are therefore temporal ways in which the community is
oriented to the being of God. Proclamation brings the church into an encounter with
the Word, while baptism and the Eucharist – the sacraments of incorporation and
communion – cause her to encounter the love of God mediated by the Son and the
Spirit. As an intermediate community, the church must attempt to hold together two
contradictory pulls. On the one hand it is a community rooted in the being of God,
while on the other it remains a highly fallible community on this side of eternity. This
means that the complexities that attend to the relationship between the church and the
world cannot be superficially glossed over. As Gunton has perceptively put it, ‘The
35 Gunton, The One, the Three and the Many, p. 216.
36 Gunton, The One, the Three and the Many, p. 217.
37 Gunton, ‘The Church on Earth’, p. 71.
38 John Owen, Works, vol. XVI, p. 26. Quoted by Gunton, ‘The Church on Earth’, p. 72.
39 Gunton, ‘The Church on Earth’, p. 79.
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walls dividing church from the world are permeable.’40 Nevertheless, we can say that
the church becomes ‘an echo of the life of the Trinity when it is enabled by the Spirit
to order its life to where the reconciliation takes place in time, that is to say, to the
life, death and resurrection of Jesus’.41
Before taking leave of this discussion, we must return to the critique of the
concept of the invisible church, which stems from the platonizing tendencies
in Western ecclesiology since Augustine, alluded to in an earlier section. The
Reformers, together with Wycliff and Hus before them, opposed the idea that the
church is to be identified with the visible institution of the medieval church without
remainder. In so doing they followed Augustine and spoke of the invisible nature of
the church. Their intention then was not to found an invisible church, but rather to
renew the visible one. The old debate between the advocates of an ecclesia invisibilis
and those of the ecclesia visibilis, it is true, is now long out of date. However, the
enduring influence of Platonism in Western theology has made it vulnerable to the
dualism and spiritualism that inspire the distinction between the earthly church and
the heavenly one. The ontology of the church developed on the basis of the doctrine
of the Trinity has led Gunton to conclude that ‘there is no invisible Church – at least
not in the sense in which it has usually been understood – not because the Church is
perfect, but because to be in communion with those who are ordered to Jesus by the
Spirit is to be the Church’.42 The church is visible as a human fellowship and through
its acts of worship, preaching and teaching, prayers and works of mercy as a
community. Although Gunton does not elaborate, the ecclesia visibilis does not
imply that the church can be reduced to empirical description. Although it is a
community rooted in history, psychology and sociology, and thus can be weighed up
and compared with other human communities, the church is also mystery. That is the
meaning and implication of the credo ecclesiam. Thus, in this sense, the church may
be described as at once visible and invisible. Of course there are not two churches,
one visible and one invisible. Neither is the invisible part the essential nature of the
church, with the visible part merely its external form. The church we believe is one,
both visible and invisible (in the sense of ‘hidden’), because it is mystery.
The limits of analogy
By Gunton’s own admission, the analogy of echo (like all analogous predications) is
limited in explicating the being of the church because when concepts predicated of
God are used to refer to creatures limited to space and time, changes in the intension
of the concepts will necessarily result. Karl Barth has defined an analogous concept
as that which when applied to ‘two different objects, designates the same thing in
40 Gunton, The Promise of Trinitarian Theology, p. 176.
41 Gunton, ‘The Church on Earth’, p. 79.
42 Gunton, ‘The Church on Earth’, p. 80.
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462 Roland Chia
both but in different ways’.43 Analogy therefore refers to similarities amidst ever-
greater dissimilarities.44 One clear example is the concepts of ‘person’ and
‘communion’, which although significant in developing an ontology of the church
nevertheless cannot be used univocally for God and the church. Thus if the doctrine
of the Trinity represents the first mediation between the triune God and the church,
a second and even a third mediation is needed to guard against a univocity which
would either deify the church or strip God of the divine nature. The second mediation
has to do with the fact that because the church is the creation of the triune God, it
corresponds to God only in a creaturely fashion; and the third refers to the distinction
which must be made between the historical and eschatological being of the church.
The communal life of the church is lived between baptism and consummation,
between the historical reality and the eschatological new creation in which
this communion is completed and perfected. The correspondence between trinitarian
communion and ecclesial communion must seriously take into account this inner
dynamic between the historical minimum and the eschatological maximum that
characterizes the latter. This means that for the sojourning church only a dynamic
understanding of the correspondence with the Trinity is meaningful.45
The dissimilarities that obtain between the communion and relationality of the
trinitarian and ecclesial persons must also be carefully pointed out. Although it is
inconceivable for the trinitarian persons to live apart or in isolation from one another,
the same cannot be said for ecclesial persons. Human beings can live as human
43 Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics II/1, The Doctrine of God, ed. G.W. Bromiley and T.F.
Torrance, trans. T.H.L. Parker et al. (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1957), p. 237.
44 The limitations of analogical predications, however, do not undermine the ability of
human language successfully to describe God and, in this case, the church. In Act and
Being (London: SCM Press, 2002), Gunton critiques the via negativa of both the Eastern
and Western theological traditions. The predominance of the negative, as Gunton calls it,
found in John Damascus’ apophatism and Aquinas’ theory of analogical predication,
‘appears to imply that negative attributes are really more true of the being of God than
those described as positive’ (p. 50). Gunton argues that the univocal theory of theological
language, advanced by Duns Scotus, would enable theology to take more seriously the
predicates it uses for God and creatures. It must be pointed out, however, that with this
emphasis, Gunton is not rejecting the analogous nature of theological language. Together
with Scotus, Gunton is simply affirming that the concept of analogy requires an element
of univocity, that is to say, that words used for both God and creature correspond to
attributes which in some sense are common to both. If this is not affirmed, language used
for God and creatures would be equivocal in meaning. For Gunton, as it was for Scotus,
this would mean the dissolution of theology: ‘Unless “being” implies one univocal
intention [i.e., concept], theology would simply perish’ (Duns Scotus, Lectura 1.3.1.1–2,
n. 113). The implication of all this for the present discussion is simply that concepts like
‘person’ and ‘communion’ that are used analogously to describe God and the church say
things which are literally true and univocal about both, despite their obvious limits, so
that it is possible to develop an ontology of the church from the doctrine of the Trinity.
This is because analogy always has an element of univocity.
45 Miroslav Volf, After Our Likeness: The Church as the Image of the Trinity (Grand Rapids:
Eerdmans, 1998), p. 199.
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beings apart from others or even in hatred toward one another, although it may be
said that they are still in some sense constituted by the other, even the one whom they
hate. Ecclesial persons, it is true, cannot live apart from fellowship with each other
because salvation has an indispensable ecclesial structure. Yet, the difference remains
in that the fellowship between persons in the church is not simply communion as in
the Trinity, but is sustained because of a covenant, and is therefore a communion of
will. Secondly, and this refers to an earlier point, ‘ecclesial communion on this side
of God’s new creation can correspond to the perfect mutual love of the trinitarian
persons only in a broken fashion’.46 Two other general points must be made before
we turn our attention to more specific issues. The first is that we must constantly be
reminded of the fact that our notions of the triune God are not the triune God. The
doctrine of the Trinity is the attempt by theology to fashion a model gleaned and
acquired from salvation history with which we seek to approach the mystery of the
triune God. Thus although the doctrine of the Trinity says something which is true
about the being of God, it cannot comprehend the unfathomable God, who dwells ‘in
unapproachable light’ (1 Tim. 6:16). Secondly, the temptation to define the trinitarian
personhood as pure relationality (persona est ratio) must be resisted, for to conceive
of the persons as so transparent that the ‘I’ of these persons dissolves into relations
is to negate the concept of person itself, in that Father becomes fatherhood, the Son,
sonship and the Spirit, procession.
This brings us to the concept of perichoresis and the significance Gunton
accords to it in his reflection on the ecclesial community. Gunton observes that
relations in the church have often been conceived in terms of the subordination of
one group to another. In order for the ecclesial community to mirror more clearly
the free personal relations which constitute the deity, we must move towards an
ecclesiology of perichoresis, ‘in which there is no permanent structure of
subordination, but in which there are overlapping patterns of relationships’.47
Perichoresis is a concept which aims to describe the dynamic interrelations of the
persons in the Godhead on the one hand, and God’s unified yet diverse interaction
with the world on the other. The concept, according to Gunton, can be ‘understood
to be one which was developed by means of a movement in thought from the
dynamic of the divine involvement in space and time to the implications of such an
involvement for an understanding of the eternal dynamic of deity’.48 Although
perichoresis traditionally refers to the concept of coinherence, Gunton, following
Coleridge, maintains that it also implies that the three dynamically constitute each
other’s beings. Perichoresis therefore suggests a specific kind of relational diversity
which is fundamentally different from the Heraclitean flux in that it is not an aimless
flux but one which has a logos, the logic of its own being in relation. More elegantly,
46 Volf, After Our Likeness, p. 207.
47 Gunton, ‘The Church on Earth’, p. 77.
48 Gunton, The One, the Three and the Many, p. 163.
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464 Roland Chia
‘God is not God apart from the way in which Father, Son and Spirit in eternity give
to and receive from each other what they essentially are.’49
In what way, then, can the concept of perichoresis, which seeks to describe the
dynamic relations of the three persons in the Godhead, be said to serve as an analogy
for the ecclesial community? The premise for this assertion is theological
anthropology: if human beings are created in the image and likeness of God, then it
is not difficult to conceive of human beings as perichoretic beings in some way. The
same may be generally said of the created order, and Gunton provides as examples
the proposals of physicist Michael Faraday and the conclusions of some modern
physicists. In their book, Order out of Chaos: Man’s New Dialogue with Nature, Ilya
Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers declare that ‘[Physics] now recognises that, for an
interaction to be real, the “nature” of the related things must derive from these
relations, while at the same time the relations must derive from the “nature” of
things’.50 Regarding the being-in-relation of human beings, perichoresis affirms that
persons mutually constitute each other. ‘Our particularity in community is the fruit of
our mutual constitutiveness: of a perichoretic being bound up with each other in the
bundle of life.’51 Furthermore, the notion of perichoresis enables us to address both
individualism and collectivism because it presents an understanding of relationality
which does not negate particularity. The broad analogous application of this concept
to the church is not difficult to envisage: as a community brought together by the
Spirit of God the church is made up of Christians who are related to each other in a
way in which they mutually constitute each other.
Although perichoresis enables us to understand the nature of relationality at a
deeper level than non-perichoretic concepts of human beings, it is nonetheless
limited, and therefore serves only as an analogy. The limitation has to do with the
qualitative ontological distinction between God and creation. When applied to
the persons of the triune Godhead, perichoresis implies a ‘total and eternal
interanimation of being and energies’.52 But when used in relation to the created
order, that is, to that which is bound by space and time, changes in the ‘intension of
the concept’ must necessarily follow. There can be no direct correspondence of the
interiority of the divine persons to that of human persons. Human beings being
external to each other cannot be said to indwell one another in the same way as the
divine persons indwell each other. While it is true that human beings can embrace
each other or ‘enter emphatically’ into the other, this must be distinguished from the
perichoretic relationship among the divine persons. At the ecclesial level, only what
Miroslav Volf calls the ‘interiority of personal characteristics’ can correspond to the
interiority of the divine persons.53 In the church there is found through the indwelling
49 Gunton, The One, the Three and the Many, p. 164.
50 Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers, Order out of Chaos: Man’s New Dialogue with
Nature (London: Fontana, 1985), p. 95.
51 Gunton, The One, the Three and the Many, p. 170.
52 Gunton, The One, the Three and the Many, p. 170.
53 Volf, After Our Likeness, p. 211.
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of the Spirit among Christians a mutual internalization of personal characteristics, as
each person gives himself or herself to others, and also takes up others into himself
or herself. In this way, the ecclesial human being becomes a catholic person in his or
her uniqueness, mirroring the catholicity of the divine persons.
Two further points must be raised at this juncture. The first is a reminder that it
is not simply the mutual perichoresis of human beings but the indwelling of the Holy
Spirit in individuals and in the church that makes the latter into a communion
corresponding to the Trinity. This point, though in many ways obvious, must be
stressed if ecclesiology is to be totally freed from the grip of secularism. The unity
of the church is thus grounded in the interiority of the Spirit in Christians – and with
the Spirit, in the interiority of the other divine persons. Thus Gunton’s ecclesisology
seeks to give greater emphasis to the church’s constitution by the Spirit: ‘In such a
way we may create fewer self-justifying and historicising links with the past and give
more stress to the arrangements to be constituted by the Spirit.’54 The second point is
best articulated in the following questions: Can the communion of the three persons
in the Trinity serve as a model for inter-ecclesial unity? Can perichoresis, which is
hitherto applied to persons, also help us to understand the relationship between the
‘local churches’?
Although Gunton does not discuss these issues in great detail (as far as I am
aware), it is not impossible to suggest answers to the above questions on the basis of
his proposals regarding relationality and perichoresis. For Gunton, as the above
discussion makes clear, relationality is a transcendental concept which is gleaned
from the being of God and which enables us to understand all of reality. As such, a
concept of relationality which is given shape by the God who is being-in-communion
can serve as a framework within which to reflect upon the inter-ecclesial relationship.
Can the same, however, be said of perichoresis? For Gunton, perichoresis can be
used not just analogically but also transcendentally – to lay to view what he calls
the necessary notes of being.55 Reality therefore is at all levels ‘perichoretic’, a
dynamism of relatedness, and this applies to ecclesial reality, to the relationship not
just of Christians within the church, but also to the relationship between ecclesial
communities. Put differently, the doctrine of the Trinity can provide us with the
coordinates to reflect on the relationship between the local church and the universal
church, and the relationship between local churches. However, the different
trinitarian theologies (between the West and the East, for example) would lead to
different ways in which inter-ecclesial relations are conceived. The priority of the
unity of God in the Western tradition, and its tendency to locate this unity at the level
of substance so that the one substance of God takes precedence over the triplicity of
persons, has meant that the one universal church has precedence over the many local
churches. If the unity of substance in God is that which ‘sustains’ the triplicity of the
persons, it follows that the local churches are churches in the fullest sense only in so
far as they exist from and toward the whole. As Hermenegild Biedermann puts it,
54 Gunton, ‘The Church on Earth’, p. 62.
55 Gunton, The One, the Three and the Many, p. 165.
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466 Roland Chia
‘Just as the unity of the one divine nature and essence as it were “sustains” the
triplicity of persons, so also does a universal church as the common foundation
“sustain” the multiplicity of local churches.’56
By giving priority to the persons-in-relation rather than to the divine substance,
Gunton’s conception of the Trinity, as we have seen, is closer to the Eastern tradition
(especially the Cappadocians and Zizioulas) than to Western formulations. The one
substance of God does not enjoy ontological priority over the persons. Rather the
reverse is the case: because God’s being coincides with personhood, the divine
substance exists only as persons. On this basis, it is possible to draw a trajectory of
thought that would lead to certain conclusions regarding the relationship between the
local church and the universal church – which roughly parallels Zizioulas’ position.
If the one divine substance has no priority over the persons, then, by analogy, the
universal church has no priority over the local churches. That is to say, there is
no universal church behind the local churches, just as there is no substance behind
the three divine persons. This means that every local church is the universal church,
just as every person in the Trinity is God. But in order for the local church to be
identical to the universal church it must be in communion with other local churches.
For Zizioulas the catholicity of the local church is grounded on the eucharistic
presence of the whole Christ, who incorporates the many to himself. The
eucharistic communion is, for Zizioulas, the ‘expression par excellence of
the catholicity of the church, a catholic act of the catholic church’.57
While this line of argument is attractive, one wonders if Gunton would leave
the simple analogy of divine substance = universal church and divine persons =
local church assumed in Zizioulas’ (and the Western tradition’s) formulation
unchallenged. In the case of the Western tradition, such an analogy has led to the idea
of the one divine substance existing in addition to the divine persons. But in the
case of Zizioulas and the Eastern tradition, we have the converse problem of how to
distinguish between the divine persons if each of them has the one divine nature. For
Gunton, the answer must lie once again in perichoresis: the point of departure should
not be the relationship between the divine nature and the divine persons but rather the
relationship of the divine persons as such. If the unity of the being of God must be
understood perichoretically, so must the unity of the church. It is by opening up to
one another diachronically and synchronically that local churches – which are
always creatures limited by space and time – enrich one another, and thus become
increasingly catholic, corresponding to the catholicity of the triune God. The
universal church cannot simply be identified with the local church because the
former is an eschatological reality. It is more accurate to say that local churches
56 Hermenegild Biedermann, ‘Gotteslehre und Kirchenverständnis: Zugang der orthodoxen
und der katholischen Theologie’, Theologisch-praktische Quartalschrift 129 (1981),
pp. 131–42, p. 138.
57 John Zizioulas, ‘Les groupes informels dans l’Eglise: Un point de vue orthodoxe’, in
R. Metz and J. Schlick, eds., Les groupes informels dans l’Eglise, Hommes et église 2
(Strasbourg: Cerdic, 1971), pp. 252–72. Quoted in Volf, After Our Likeness, p. 104.
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are historical anticipations of the eschatological people of God, that is, the
eschatological universal church.
The final issue that must be discussed has to do with the problem concerning the
relation between community and institution in ecclesiology. Gunton’s approach
clearly seeks to de-emphasize hierarchy and what he calls the over-realized
eschatology of the institution in modern ecclesiology. Yet the fact that the church as
an earthly community bears the structures of such communities, which include
hierarchy and institution, cannot be denied. How are we then to understand them in
relation to the communal nature of the church that mirrors the being of the triune
God? It is clear that Gunton rejects a hierarchical model of the Trinity associated
chiefly with the third-century theologian Origen. Nor is he entirely at ease with the
monarchical view of the Father proposed by Zizioulas and the Eastern theologians.
If, as Gunton has emphatically argued, the church is fundamentally a community,
then its hierarchical structure is of secondary importance. The problem with modern
ecclesiology is that it construes relations in terms of ‘permanent subordination of one
group to another, even though the superordinate group has for the sake of
appearances dignified its position with the rhetoric of “service” ’.58 The ecclesiology
of perichoresis that Gunton proposes envisions rather overlapping patterns of
relationships where there is no permanent structure of subordination. Thus, ‘the same
person will be sometimes “sub-ordinate” and sometimes “superordinate” according
to the gifts and graces being exercised’.59 What of the relationship between
community and institution? Gunton would doubtless agree with Dietrich Bonhoeffer,
who wrote:
The whole interpretation of the organisational forms of the Protestant Church as
being those of an institution must therefore be dismissed as erroneous. It is only
by beginning with the church as a community of persons that the Protestant
forms of baptism, confirmation, withdrawal, gatherings of the congregation and
church rules can be understood; only from this standpoint can one understand
the structure of the objective spirit of the church, as it is embodied in fixed
forms.60
58 Gunton, ‘The Church on Earth’, p. 77.
59 By his own admission, this concept may be thought of as ‘hopelessly idealistic’. See
Gunton, ‘The Church on Earth’, p. 77.
60 Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Sanctorum Communio (London: Collins, 1963), p. 178.
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