Leithart has another great thought-porovoking post on trinitarian theology, this time reflecting on the asymmetry of the trinitarian relations. He concludes with a few reflections:
First, it is the failure to reckon with the asymmetry of the relations that has sent certain forms of social Trinitarianism down a blind alley. The Trinity is not a modern egalitarian democracy. The Persons are indeed equal, but asymmetrically so. Second, and this is equally important, more traditional Trinitarian theologies need the help that social Trinitarianism provides. At its best, social Trinitarianism has been a plea to take the Personhood of the Persons seriously; it has been a plea for a Scriptural exposition of the ontological life of the Trinity in which the Persons converse together as they do in the gospel story. Third, the response to Trinity-as-democracy should not be the implicit subordinationism that has infected some traditional Trinitarianism; we don’t need to resort to a unilateral hierarchical Trinity, paternal monarchianism or paternal causality, to avoid the problems of social Trinitarianism. An asymmetrical account of Triune life takes the pleas of social Trinitarianism seriously, and can get at all the dynamism and personal interactivity that social Trinitarianism wants, without threatening to collapse into tritheism.
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