• Christianity’s First Doctrine (logically, not historically)

the doctrine of God’s Trinity is not some further teaching, additional to a teaching which would count as a ‘doctrine of God,’ but simply is the Christian doctrine of God, the Christian account of how the word ‘God’ is to be used.

from Easter In Ordinary (1988), 267, n21; cf. “the doctrine of the Trinity simply is the Christian doctrine of God,” from “Considering the Trinity,” Modern Theology 2, no. 3 (1986): 183.

• Against Misproportioned Deployments of the Creeds’ Articles 

on the basis of experiential differences, now this, now that aspect of the mystery gets presented as the norm or centre of the whole. It is as if the history of Christianity were a struggle for supremacy between the three articles of its Creed; a struggle tempting the participants to polemicise into opposition mutually indispensable distinctions lying at the very heart of Christian (which is to say Trinitarian) apprehension of the mystery of God.

from Theology for Pilgrims (2008), 37.

Comment: I find this a suggestive gloss on the pendulum swings of theological history. I take Lash to be insinuating some of us are so over-determined theologically by apophaticism that our christologies and pneumatologies are underformed and underfunctioning; others of us are so over-determined by Christology that our patrologies and pneumatologies are comparatively anemic; and others of us are so over-determined by pneumatology that our patrologies and christologies are left idling. For a balanced, non-reactionary doctrine of God, theologians will need a sense of proportion so all three loci have room to make their needed contributions. Which is your temptation? Not only will the theologian need to be mindful of their theological scene’s excesses and deficiencies, but, so as not to over-correct, the theologian will also need to be mindful of their personal excesses and deficiencies.

• where the Trinity went after theologians lost interest

According to Walter Kasper, ‘The history of modern thought’ is, at one level, ‘a history of the many attempts made to reconstruct the doctrine of the Trinity.’ ‘Admittedly,’ he goes on, ‘the credit for having kept alive the idea of the Trinity belongs less to theology than to philosophy.’ Now that is an interesting suggestion. It is, not surprisingly, German philosophy that Kasper has in mind. …

What, then, of the other side of the story? While the philosophers were attempting to revitalize, after their fashion, the elements of a doctrine which the theologians had discarded as a dead letter, what was it to which the theologians, for their part, devoted their attention? The answer, ironically, seems to be that those theologians who discarded the Christian doctrine of God selected for their subject-matter that most unchristian entity that came to be know as ‘the God of the philosophers.’

from “Considering the Trinity,” Modern Theology 2, no. 3 (1986): 184-5.