God for Us

                                       God For Us

Author CATHERINE MOWRY LACUGNA

Publisher HARPER ONE

ISBN 978-0-06-064913-5

Certainly not a book for the faint-hearted.  This treatise represents the distillation of the passion of a forty year old theologian.  She came from a Roman Catholic background and began to lecture in systematic theology at Notre Dame University in 1981 and died at age forty four only four years after the publication of the book and is buried in a cemetery connected with that university.  She was dedicated to a reconsideration of the doctrine of the Trinity and to exploring its implications for our life and worship.  She emphasises ceaselessly the fact that the God is a Trinity of Persons and to know Him as such is the pathway to true personhood for everyone of us.  There is so much in these pages.  She begins with chapters as to the emergence of the doctrine in the second and third centuries and on.  Clearly she has much sympathy with the Cappadocian fathers and when she arrives at a consideration of Augustine and later to Thomas Aquinas she endeavours to acquaint her readers with the deficiencies in their understanding and the outcome of those deficiencies in the churches.  There is much food for thought here.  All the while there is a sense that we are reading the words of a feminist theologian.  When she arrives at the second section of the book covering almost two hundred pages that begin with Gods self communication in Christ and the Spirit and to the very edifying chapters on Persons in communion and the practical outworking of the doctrine, her feminist thought and aversion for any form of complementarity and primacy in the Godhead emerge most clearly in the implication for human relationships.  However, I did not sense that she was banging a drum so much as wrestling with the great mystery of the Godhead and desiring to communicate the implications of that mystery as it bears upon human life.  Some take umbrage at the fact that she is at pains to insist that a theology of God is dependent upon the revelation of God as Three Persons working in creation and salvation.  She is certain that Trinitarian Theology is dependent upon a study of the economic Trinity.  It is how the Divine Persons work together and as Eternal love accomplish creation and salvation that determines what God is like.  As I said earlier, those looking for an easy read should not attempt these pages.  However, those who, like myself, have been convinced that too little Christian ministry begins with serious consideration about the Being of God in Three Persons and the intimate relationships that pertain between the Persons in Their Eternal life, to such seekers, a slow steady read of this book will be profoundly instructive.  

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