In chapter thirty-two, White gives witness to these further deviations by looking at the Trinitarian doctrines of creation of two influential modern thinkers, Sergius Bulgakov and Jürgen Moltmann. For Bulgakov and Moltmann, creation is fundamentally an act of Trinitarian self-limitation and self-emptying in order to “make room” for creation to “come into being and thrive.”[1] Although White notes their noble motive to express “divine freedom as love,”[2] he concludes that these kenotic theologies of creation not only paradoxically empty “divine freedom as love” of its real meaning due to the presupposition of the competitive nature of God (who must self-empty for creation to exist), but even worse, leads to a radical “historicized economic Trinitarianism”[3] or “tri-theism”[4] in which the divine persons each become ontologically relative to creation. By contrast, White shows how Aquinas’s Trinitarian doctrine of creation fulfills the very desires that Bulgakov and Moltmann had in developing their theologies of creation. How so? Precisely because the Trinity “transcends creation ontologically,”[5] the Trinity is both non-competitive towards creation and omnipresent to all that exists. Therefore, “creation, precisely as the offspring of all three persons acting as one, bears the trace of the three persons in distinguishable ways”[6] and “divine freedom as love” is truly expressed.
[1] 597.
[2] 596. White notes how Bulgakov and Moltmann put forward valiant efforts to fight against a nominalist idea that creation is arbitrary and “a brute act of the divine essence” (597) by emphasizing “divine freedom for love” (596) as the fundamental driver of creation.
[3] 593, footnote 18.
[4] 595.
[5] 684.
[6] 605. For example, the Father’s creative power can be seen in “the vastness of the physical cosmos” (600) and His paternity can be seen in the substantial generation of offspring.
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