2008/12/18 by Aristotle Papanikolaou · 11 citations
Social Sciences · Arts and Humanities · #Religious, Philosophical, and Educational Studies #Theology and Philosophy of Evil #Personhood #Philosophy #Theology #Art #Epistemology
paper · doi:10.1017/ccol9780521864848.016
published in Cambridge University Press eBooks, 232-245 (Cambridge University Press)
openalex publication_date 2008/12/18 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/30
After centuries of neglect, Christian theologians renewed their attention to the doctrine of the Trinity in the latter half of the twentieth century. This revival of interest in the Trinity was not restricted simply to an understanding of God; perhaps for the first time in the history of Christian thought, Christian theologians were claiming that the affirmation that God is Trinity has radical implications for theological anthropology, i.e., for thinking about what it means to be human. Christian thinkers, of course, had always linked the understanding of being human to the being of God, but only in the twentieth century was the more explicit claim made that, since God's being is persons in communion, then human 'personhood' must be defined in terms of relationality and communion. In other words, humans are truly persons when they image the loving, perichoretic communion of the persons of the Trinity. Orthodox theology in the twentieth century was very much a part of this revival and its influence is noticeable both in the theologies of the Trinity and in the attempt to relate the doctrine of the Trinity to theological anthropology. The Russian Sophiologists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were the first to forge the link between Trinity and personhood. Beginning with Vladimir Soloviev, the father of Russian Sophiology, Russian sophiological understandings of person can be interpreted as applying a trinitarian corrective to the German idealist philosophy of the transcendental ego. The Russian Sophiologists, especially Pavel Florensky and Sergius Bulgakov, identified the ‘person’ with the absolute freedom and irreducibility of the transcendental ego that philosophy discovers through an analysis of self-consciousness.