For Aquinas, the ideal situation of justice is a situation of equality. Only when the persons acting toward each other are equal is there “justice without qualification.” For an act to be an act of justice per se , it’s necessary that the persons be “absolutely other” and “absolutely distinct,” which is to say that the persons are not defined in terms of each other. (more…) Read more

Richard Bauckham has written two books on Moltmann, and he summarizes his findings in a general article on Moltmann in David Ford, ed., The Modern Theologians . He first traces the development of Moltmann’s work, from the early trilogy (Theology of Hope, The Crucified God, The Church in the Power of the Spirit) to the five volumes that Moltmann describes as “contributions” to theology (rather than a “dogmatics”). At the center of his early work is a dialectical understanding of... Read more

In his book on the Trinity, Veli-Matti Karkkainen gives a superb detailed summary of Moltmann, and offers some pointed, even devastating, criticisms. Moltmann puts the cross as the center of his understanding of God: “the cross of the Son stands from eternity in the centre of the Trinity.” Another guiding assumption is “future as the essence of [God’s] being,” a concept Moltmann borrowed from the Marxist philosophy Ernst Bloch, whose philosophy of hope influenced Moltmann’s work on eschatology. God identifies... Read more

One of the main critics of contemporary interpretations of Augustine has been Michel Rene Barnes of Marquette. He summarizes the case against Augustine, and the fundamental problems with that case, in a 1995 article from Theological Studies. I am also drawing on the discussion of Lewis Ayres’s recent Nicaea and Its Legacy . There is, he says, “a consensus among systematicians on the existence and character of an early ‘economic’ understanding of God,” which “has led, among other things, to... Read more