The Fact of Boff's

As he puts it: "The greatness of images lies in their ability to help us take definite attitudes to the Trinity in itself and to each of its Persons. So when we say `Father' or `Mother,' the words evoke certain resonances in the depths of our psyche" (101).

Beside the item of Boff's declaring the necessity of an attitude of abstraction is the presumption or more(prenominal) exactly governing assumption of his entire work: He is addressing the federation of confidence, and more, he is addressing the community of the corporate trustful, with a view toward explaining to that community what an remove orthodoxy, however fresh, of the doctrine of the Trinity is. To put it other way, skeptics need not apply and probably couldn't understand that crash of the discussion that they might accept. Only a man of faith could write in a highly structured epistemic format that "those who allow themselves to be guided by the fervency of the Spirit accept the Son and those who accept the Son move up to see the paternal and maternal face of God" (101). The subtext hither is that a leap of faith will be ask for acceptance of the doctrine of the Trinity that, as we shall explain shortly, is the appropriate style of acceptance. Shades of meaning do matter, and one moldiness be prepared to ad

[Historicist] theologians reserve themselves strictly to the revelation of the Trinity in history, which they see as God's process. For some theologians the one and only God becomes Trinity in the process of penetrating into creation. So in history a process is started whereby there is a "trinification of the one God by reason of his free decision to communicate himself to creatures, as happened in Jesus. Here the trinity would not be eternal, but would itself try an evolving history. We call this approach "historicist" because it absolutizes history to such an extent that it projects bare-assed realities on to the very mystery of God. It seems to break with the tradition of faith (and has been expressly condemned . . .) and so will not be adopt here (114).

This chapter is the keystone of Boff's entire essay, for it is in this chapter that he identifies differences in fundamental approach to explication of how the doctrine of the Trinity should be viewed in a modern context. He cites "approach roads" to the Trinity, or "tendencies in theological thought that take the challenges of the changed cultural concomitant into account" (113). Overarching the whole discussion is what he refers to as the " sparing" approach, or the view of the Trinity most easily still as a matter of scripture. It is from here that speculative trinitarian piety proceeds.

Boff is at pains to deny the relativist character of the Trinity "in the shade," and he sees "greater value to approaches that try to deepen the conventional concept of `person' than to those that seek an alternative to it" (118). He also notes that the modern conception of "person" differs from the classic theological conception. After Barth, he seeks to adopt a concept of "person" in juncture with the abstraction of the concept of the Trinity as a "mode of coming to be or manner of being" so as to explain the three-person concept fundamental to the Trinity as God (117-118, passim). This elegant conception a
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