Douglas Knight, who runs a very productive blog, has recently possed a stellar essay entitled “Father, Son and Holy Spirit – Colin Gunton and the doctrine of God”. It was really difficult trying to figure out what to quote, because the whole thing is just great. So here’s a bit, but do yourself a favor and read the whole thing.
The concept of the individual is not modern. It is a Christian doctrine: the Church confesses that each of us stands before God, his unique and irreplaceable creature. This confession relates to a promise: Christ will finally enable us to be both unique and together, particular persons, in communion. Our individuality arises within the personal relationships and mutual subordination of the communion of Christ.
But this teaching about the particularity of persons can also be wrenched out of the complete package that makes it Christian. At different times all the various elements in the Christian package have been extracted and re-combined to make an alternative theology with a substandard account of man. In that package we call ‘modernity’ the individual has to assert himself against all others, against society and its institutions, in order to be himself. He has to establish his own freedom, by carving out some deep timeless interior place, in which he can finally be free of all others and alone.
It is the responsibility of the Christian theologian to make the ideology of modernity explicit by describing its place in the history of ideas. This is Colin Gunton’s mission in The One the Three and the Many. ‘The hope is for an engaged theology to counter the ideology of disengagement that is the mark of so much modernity’ (p.168). Among the thinkers who feature in his history are Hobbes, Spinoza, Descartes, Locke, Rousseau, Hume, Kant, Hegel and Nietzsche, some of them hoping to re-launch a simplified gospel, other ferociously trying to rule the whole subject out. They represent this non-Christian tradition, outlined in that book in terms of Parmenides and Protagoras, in which the individual does not concede that he gives or receives anything in his encounter with others. This individual is already entirely himself before he comes into relationship with his peers, and therefore does not really need them or the learning they represent. As a result he does not need a tradition, and indeed the imperative laid on him is to exert himself against all such traditions, and thus against religion.
