I read Katherine Sonderegger’s Systematic Theology Volume 1 when it came out, and even wrote a review of it for a peer reviewed theology journal. Her prose is elegant, even ‘biblical’ in tenor. But at a material level, because of its formal commitments, her approach, while resourcing the trendy recovery of so called classical theism, is abstract and aloof vis-à-vis God’s Self-revelation in Jesus Christ as attested to in Holy Scripture. She attempts, as do all good contemporary retriever’s of theology do these days, to argue that God’s unicity ought to have privilege over God’s multiplicity (De Deo Trino). In my view, to be as blunt as I can be: this is rubbish! She specifically targets Barth’s approach all throughout her systematic theology. For her, even though she appreciates certain tangential aspects of Barth’s theology, she believes he typifies the modern turn to the emphasis of God’s threeness to the disparity of God’s oneness; when in fact, as she believes, the Bible emphasizes God’s unicity. Here is how she characterizes these things:

Perhaps nothing so marks out the modern in systematic theology as the aversion to the scholastic treatise, De Deo Uno. It belongs not the preface but rather the body of the dogmatic work to lay out the broad movement in present day dogmatics that has pressed the treatise De Deo Trino to the fore; indeed, it crowds out and supplants the exposition of the One God. But even here we must say that the doctrine of the Trinity, however central to the Christian mystery, must not be allowed to replace or silence the Oneness of God. God is supremely, gloriously One; surpassingly, uniquely One. Nothing is more fundamental to the Reality of God that this utter Unicity. Such is God’s Nature; such His Person: One. Oneness governs the Divine Perfections: all in the doctrine of God must serve, set forth, and conform to the transcendent Unity of God….[1]

Barth in his Church Dogmatics II/1 §29 anticipates Sonderegger’s critique, and applies an overwhelming response to her dismissiveness of his and others’ work. He writes:

The fiction which is concealed behind this consideration consists in the fact that, owing to the dazzling effect of the Platonic-Aristotelian idea of being, in which men thought they had attained knowledge of God, it was felt necessary to ascribe as much higher dignity to the idea of the one as against that of the many—so much higher, in fact, that in the application of this idea of the one it was thought possible to speak of God proprie [correctly], as though even in this case God is not spoken of respect nostri, pro nostril captus ratione [‘as far as we are concerned’, ‘by the reason of our understanding’]; as though in view of God’s (own) hiddenness in His revelation it does not have to be totally conceded that our ideas—including that of the one also—are in themselves unsuitable and inadequate for the comprehension of God; and as though on the fundamental assumption that God in His hiddenness has revealed Himself to us and has authorised us to apply our conceptual systems to Him, while realising their limitations, the multiplicity of His being is not to be taken just as seriously as its unity. Yielding to this fiction and on the basis of a philosophical prejudice introducing the distinction between proprie [correctly] and improprie [incorrectly] where everything is in itself to be understood and spoken improprie, but proprie on the ground and after the pattern of the divine revelation, these thinkers did the very thing which they were trying to avoid. On the one hand, they falsely defined the being of God, which they were supposed to be defining proprie, in such a way that it did not transcend but was subject to this notion of unity. On the other hand, they made the multiplicity of the divine attributes, which they wanted to ascribe to God only improprie, dependent on the discursiveness of the human intellect and the manifoldness of the created world. In both cases—contrary enough to the original intention—they worked under the presupposition of an intrinsically fixed order of ideas within the framework of which they thought to do God the honour of including His being in the notion of the one but of excluding it from the supposedly less exalted notion of the many. But the whole point was that they should not have subsumed the idea of God at all in either case, but that they should have done justice conceptually to His revealed being as such. That is, they should have given the glory to God in His multiplicity just as seriously and truly as in His unity and confessed Him unreservedly in His multiplicity as such—God Himself as the One, but as the One who is also the Many.[2]

Thomas Torrance, following Barth et al., rightly, in contradistinction to the letter and spirit of Sonderegger’s abstract conception of God’s oneness, presses the idea, just as Barth has done for us here, that God’s oneness should never be thought apart from His threeness, and vice versa. That is basically all that Barth is alerting us to; he is telling us that allowing the god of the philosophers, the pure beinged God, has no place in an actual development of a genuinely Christian theology proper. It’s as if Sonderegger et al. believe that in order to be catholic that is isn’t possible or laudable to have growth in the grace and knowledge of just who God is. Even so, even the history of the Church, in particular theologians (Athanasius comes to mind), militates against this sort of Sondereggerian notion that thinking God’s threeness and oneness together in concreto is a modern fabrication of things. Barth et al. actually operates better within the spirit of the catholic frame of the Church, particularly when it comes to his laser focus on the trinitarian God in christological concentration, than does Sonderegger.

[1] Katherine Sonderegger, Systematic Theology, Volume One: The Doctrine of God (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2015), XIV.

[2] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics II/1 §29 The Doctrine of God: Study Edition (London: T&T Clark, 2009), 80-1.