Incarnational Realism Trinity and the Spirit in Augustine and Barth

In the last half of the 20th century, a consensus emerged that Christian theology inthe Western tradition had failed to produce a viable doctrine of the Holy Spirit, and that Augustine's trinitarian theology bore the blame for much ofthat failure. This book offers a fresh rereading of Western trinitarian theology to better understand the logic of its pneumatology. Ables studies thepneumatologies of Augustine and Karl Barth, and argues that the vision of the doctrine of the Spirit in these theologians should be understood as a way oftalking about participating in the mystery of God as a performance of the life of Christ. He claims that for boththeologians trinitarian doctrine encapsulates the grammar of the divine self-giving in history. The function of pneumatology in particular is toarticulate the human reception and enactment of God's self-giving as itself part of the act of God; this "self-involving" logic is the special grammar ofthe doctrine of the Holy Spirit.

Travis E. Ables (Ph.D., Vanderbilt University) is Visiting Assistant Professor of Historical Theology at Eden Theological Seminary, St. Louis, USA.

1. The Problem of the Spirit in Contemporary Trinitarian Theology\2. A Pneumatology of the Knowledge of God: The Aporetic of Perfomance and Ascent in The Trinity\3. The Apophaticism of Ethical Performance: The Totus Christus, Relation and Deification in Augustine\4. The Knowledge of God as Election: Barth's Dialectical Pneumatology of Participation\5. The Hypostatic Union and the Vicissitudes of Augustinian Trinitarianism in CD4\6. The Problem of Trinitarian Ontology and the Ethics of Gratuity After Hegel.