God as Trinity: Relationality and Temporality in Divine Life

After reading this book, I was left with a sense of admiration for Ted Peters ability to be somewhat prophetic, both in his identification of key trinitarian thinkers (e.g. LaCugna, Pannenberg, Jenson) and also for his ability to clearly outline the discussion in such a way that few books on the trinity and its recent resurgence in theology have been able to match it. This book can still be considered a very sharp overview of trinitarianism, which is itself an amazing accomplishment given the fact of the sheer volume of trinitarian literature that has appeared since this book was published. Peter's task is outlined by a question similar to one that Catherine LaCugna asks in her book "God For Us." Where LaCugna asks why the Trinity has been marginalized in theology (and her answer being roughly because of the conceptual split between theologia and oikonomia) Ted Peters asks "why have theologians given us brain-knocking problem(s) and then frusterate us by consigning the answer to the impenetrable mystery of God?" (p.123) He is adamant that the Trinity can be (provisionally) explained by "human attempts," because, "what is in truth mysterious is the being of the inneffable God. But the doctrine of the Trinity is just that, a doctrine. And like other doctrines, it is the analytic and synthetic construction of evangelical explication for the purpose of bringing faith to understand, for the purpose of explaining the significance of what happened in the Christ event." (p.17) Hence Peters chides those who excuse doctrinal obscurity by appealing to divine mystery (p.17). The problem, thinks Peters, is that we have traditionally approached the doctrine of God's relationship to the world in terms of a timeless "relation," to time-bound creation. Hence immediately there seems to be a split between, to use again LaCugna's term, "God-for-us," and God as He is "always," in his eternal life. Hence this entire book is really an attempt to outline and provide a model for understanding the God/world relationship that allows us to understand God in the economy of salvation as that same God-of-Himself, namely that God is not "timeless," but is both beyond and within time as time's condition and consummation (if this sounds familiar to those of you who have read either Pannenberg, Moltmann, or Jenson, this is no coincidence). In doing so, he overviews and gives summaries of traditional problems (briefly) in the first two chapters, attempting to say where he thinks the discussion should be headed (God's relation to the world as essentially eschatological, ala Pannenberg and Jenson, and the "model" of that relation along the lines of LaCugna's chiastic example), and where it fact has been (e.g. the filioque controversy, the arian controversy, feminist language about God, whether or not the Trinity is tied to a 'substantialist metaphysic," etc...) What occurs then is an interesting blend of Pannenberg, Jenson, and LaCugna (with a little Moltmann, though Pete