Venerable Fulton Sheen once famously said that "There are not one hundred people in the United States who hate the Catholic Church, but there are millions who hate what they wrongly perceive the Catholic Church to be ? which is, of course, quite a different thing." What is the true understanding of the mystery of the Church? In Lumen Gentium, the Church famously identifies herself as the sacrament of salvation, and various attempts have been made at developing an ecclesiology rooted in this idea. Another approach, nevertheless, prominent in the opening chapter of Lumen Gentium, is the relation of the Church to the Trinity in light of the divine missions, especially those of the Incarnation and Pentecost. Trinitarian Ecclesiology is an example of this approach to the mystery of the Church that places the divine missions at the head and the heart of the work. The order of Charles Journet's work is based on the four causes of the Church. Journet situates the treatise on the hierarchy in its proper place as belonging to the efficient cause of the Church in order to treat the more central mystery of the Church in her formal and material causes, namely the sanctifying gift of fully Christic charity and its visible manifestation. While Journet's magisterial work may already be identified as a Trinitarian Ecclesiology, recent research into the Trinitarian theology of St. Thomas Aquinas has deepened our understanding of his teaching, particularly in the way that creatures can relate to the divine persons in the divine missions. With a clearer understanding of the relation of creatures to the divine persons rooted in grace and its effects, a deeper vision of the mystery of the Church emerges, one that sees the Church as the visible mission of the Holy Spirit, inseparably joined with the visible mission of the Son in the Incarnation. The Great Mystery of Christ and the Church is the unity of the visible missions of the Son and the Spirit who have been sent into the world for our salvation.

This book explores Basil's Trinitarian thought as the meeting place of the worlds within which he lived, that of ancient Greek culture and learning, and that of Christian faith lived in the liturgy and expressed in the Scripture.

Dumitru Stăniloae is one of the most important but routinely neglected twentieth-century Orthodox theologians. Viorel Coman explores the ecumenical relevance of Stăniloae’s reflections on the interplay between the doctrine of the Trinity and the doctrine of the church in the context of the debates on the ecclesiological ramifications of the filioque. Coman combines a historical and theological analysis of Stăniloae’s approach to the filioque, Trinity, and church. The historical analysis shows the changes that have taken place over time in Stăniloae’s approach to the issue of the filioque and the doctrine of the church. The theological analysis emphasizes the ecumenical contribution of the Romanian thinker to the fields of Trinitarian theology and ecclesiology. Even though this book centers primarily around Stăniloae’s vision on the link between the doctrine of the Trinity and the Church, it places his theological reflections in a solid dialogue with other Eastern (Georges Florovsky, Vladimir Lossky, and John Zizioulas) and Western theologians (Karl Barth, Yves Congar, Karl Rahner, and Walter Kasper).

These select essays, brought together from the 2008 Wheaton College Theology Conference by editors Daniel J. Treier and David Lauber, show both the substance and the importance of the doctrine of the Trinity for our worship, our reading of Scripture and the mission of the church.

Drawing together scholars whose essays exhibit work after Barth in engaging the doctrine of the Trinity and its related themes. Barth's thought, as evidenced amongst his most expert commentators, allows for a variety of interpretations, the details of which are being hammered out on the pages of academic journals and volumes such as this one. It is this variety of responses to and interpretations of Barth's theology that gives such vibrancy to the essays in this volume by seasoned Barth scholars and voices new to the conversation.

Whilst upholding some of the criticisms of Colin Gunton's work, this incisive book argues that there is a Hauptbriefe in Gunton reception that assumes his early classic works, The One, the Three and the Many and The Promise of Trinitarian Theology (1st ed), are definitive of his project and fail to engage adequately with the progressions in Gunton's later thought. Instead, this book offers a fresh reading of Gunton by giving greater prominence to his later writings, which are centred in the mediation of the Son and the Spirit in creation. Andrew Picard argues that Gunton's trinitarian theology of culture emerges from his later trinitarian theology of mediation, creation, Christology, pneumatology, and ecclesiology. Exploring these doctrinal foci enables an understanding of Gunton's account of faithful human culture as embodied worship; a living sacrifice of praise which contributes to the divine redemption and perfection of creation. It is the church's particular calling to embody such praise through its visible life in community. The study concludes by intersecting Gunton's theology with the social sciences to critique ableism and consider the politics of the church's belonging in community.

In its attempt to ascertain the mechanisms of nature, contemporary science seems to be generating unanswerable questions. One way forward might be by appealing to a theistic metaphysics of the fundamental workings in natural science. Moving beyond Barth's objection to natural theology, this work arrives at some of Emil Brunner's exegetical insights indicating that nature is divine communication. This communication and revelation is understood through natural types, or onto-types, building upon the insights of Jonathan Edwards. Edwards proposed messages in nature as a language of God intending to convey spiritual, biblical, and theological messages to the creature as part of God's end in creating. Edwards's insights are brought forth to determine the usefulness of his typological method all the way down to cellular and molecular mechanisms. Edwards also proposed that God's acting in nature reflects the Trinitarian God of the Christian faith. Therefore, a Trinitarian theology of Nature composing a Theo-logy of Nature, a Christology of Nature, and a Pneumatology of Nature explores how each divine person of the Godhead acts in perichoretic unity in the world we encounter. God's Trinitarian powerful and magnificent glory is not merely displayed by what has been made, but is also intimately shared in a gospel of nature.