Time&Eternity

192 chapter 4
subject other religions to a leveling process or push them into a negative alterity.
31
Vanhoozer bases his concept of identity on Ricoeur’s distinction of
Idem-Identity (mêmeté/sameness) and Ipse-Identity (ipséité/selfhood). 32 The
Idem-Identity corresponds to the God of the philosophers, a perennially
identical God who, according to the Greek model, reduces the alterity of
the Other in an ontology without narrativity. The ipse-identical God, by
contrast, is the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, who, in faithfulness,
proves to be the same over the course of time. Identity thus conceived aims
at a relationship to an Other. It is identity that must be understood narratively.
The biblical stories ascribe to God a “dynamic identity.” This has significance
for God’s relationship to time and eternity, for “it is the narrative
figuration of the economic Trinity—that is, the story of the temporal missions
of Jesus and the Spirit—that alone configures God’s eternity.” 33 Here,
the unity of God is not understood as a presupposition, but is rather derived
from the Trinitarian self-manifestation of God in history. Ontology is
secondary to narration. 34 While Idem-Identity only has room for God’s unity,
the focus of Ipse-Identity includes also the Trinity. This makes it possible
to express both difference and relation in interreligious dialogue.
Just as enthusiastically, Gunton describes the potential of the doctrine of
the Trinity to formulate an appropriate theology of creation:
It is the trinitarian formulation of a doctrine of creation that allows God to be God,
the world to be the world, distinct beings and yet personally related by personal
mediation as creator and creation.l.l.l. [T]he plurality in unity of the triune revelation
enables us to do justice to the diversity, richness, and openness of the world
without denying its unity in relativist versions of pluralism. It is that vision that
trinitarian theology has to offer the fragmented modern world. 35
Trinity does not merely mean that three persons enter into relationships
with one another, but rather that the persons mutually constitute one another
within the relationships. A distinction between being and relating is
possible only in theoretical thinking. Viewed ontologically, there is no difference.
Being and relating are “part of the one ontological dynamic.” 36
Under the motto “relation and relativity,” Gunton attempts to form a
bridge between Trinitarian theology and modern science. 37 He argues to the
effect that the key Trinitarian concepts of freedom, energy, and relation
have a certain similarity to their scientific counterparts. With this argument,
he surely goes much further than most theologians and scientists
would be willing to go:
Indeed, what I want to suggest is that some modern scientific theories look as
though they are the result of a process almost of intellectual evolution, from static