I've been working my way though "On Classical Trinitarianism" and this portion from Chapter 34 was very helpful. The point the author is attempting to make is to note how the West's revision of metaphysics affects Trinitarian formulations, but I'm going to pair it with an article I just read. Here's the excerpt:
Now, here's the article. One might argue (well, at least I'm one who will) that Scientists and Engineers are stuck with the world as it is, while the Humanities have been caught up in Critical Theories (or now just plain Nihilism). Now, there's not a small amount of philosophical naivete to think that there are no metaphysical underpinnings to science, but the author is feeling the weight that the Humanities are a dumpster fire that's taking the hard sciences down with them.
From the Dispatch
RADICAL REVISIONISM
Liberal theology in the nineteenth century was dominated by the idea of history as defined in terms of philosophical naturalism. History came to be seen as an attempt to explain the meaning of the past using written sources and artifacts assuming that there is no such thing as the supernatural. The last part was new and often not said explicitly but only assumed. This was the context in which historical criticism became central to the theological enterprise, especially in nineteenth-century Germany. When history encompasses the totality of reality and becomes the context in which even God must be understood, then we have accepted a form of philosophical naturalism.
The central idea in the historical critical movement was that the faith of Israel developed out of its pagan environment by immanent historical forces. The challenges to traditional authorship, identification of sources, and dating all flowed out of the desire to arrange the documents in such a way as to display the natural, evolutionary development from primitive to sophisticated, from pagan to Israelite, and from polytheistic to monotheistic. This just seemed like “common sense” to many who were not inclined to think deeply about the philosophical assumptions at work and yet were immersed in the naturalistic mindset of the emerging research universities. Hegelianism applied to the study of the Bible yielded historical criticism just as Hegelianism applied to biology yielded Darwinism. Hegelianism as a metaphysical system was the “big idea” or the set of organizing principles that the human mind applied to the study of reality. All science actually operates in this way; one set of organizing principles (classical metaphysics) had been exchanged for another (Hegelian metaphysics). For our purposes, the interesting question is, How did this new metaphysical context affect trinitarian theology?
In this chapter we do not have time to go through the theological systems of the dozens of theologians who are important enough to consider in the past two centuries. So we must be selective. In this section, I focus on four important figures: Schleiermacher, Rahner, Barth, and Moltmann. The goal is not to describe their various theological systems but rather to point out how they represent important moves made in revising trinitarian theology so as to make it fit within the metaphysical constraints described above.
Schleiermacher and the feeling of absolute dependence. Fredrich Schleiermacher is often called the “father” of modern theology, which J. G. Machen called “another religion.” In orthodox Christian theology the goal is to speak truly about the eternal and perfect being of God. In Schleiermacher’s system, theology only speaks about the religious experience of human beings. However, the “feeling of absolute dependence,” which is the core religious experience that Schleiermacher seeks to expound, has a strong parallel in Augustinian theology. As Herman Bavinck pointed out, the feeling of absolute dependence is something that orthodox theology agrees is a real feature of religious experience. Humans do indeed experience themselves as dependent on God and one can, if one is so inclined, interpret Schleiermacher’s doctrine in an Augustinian manner as a corrective of the modern idea that human freedom necessitates freedom from God. The difference between Schleiermacher and orthodoxy, however, is not the fact of human dependence on God, but rather the nature of God.
For Schleiermacher, God is the totality of the cosmos, which is to say he is a pantheist. We experience a feeling of dependence on the totality of being. As Schleiermacher unpacks the feeling of absolute dependence, he finds nothing in our experience corresponding to the doctrine of the Trinity as such. So he relegates the doctrine to an appendix in his systematic theology. Schleiermacher represents a Kantian metaphysics insofar as he denies knowledge of things in themselves and advocates a kind of mysticism. We can regard him as “pre-Hegelian,” but he is the first major theologian who operates completely within a naturalistic metaphysics. There is no room for a doctrine of the Trinity in his dogmatics, since he limits dogmatics to what humans know by experience apart from special revelation. Twentieth-century theology, however, felt the need to figure out how to speak of the doctrine of the Trinity in the new metaphysical situation and thus moved beyond Schleiermacher’s basically nontrinitarian theology. But how could it do so?
Rahner’s Rule. In the early twentieth century, the Roman Catholic theologian Karl Rahner offered a way forward in terms of how to speak of a doctrine of the Trinity within a naturalistic metaphysical framework, although he claimed his metaphysic was simply Christian. He enunciated his controversial “rule” as follows: “the ‘economic’ Trinity is the ‘immanent Trinity’ and the ‘immanent’ Trinity is the ‘economic’ Trinity.” He was concerned to “do justice to the biblical statements concerning the economy of salvation … so that we are no longer embarrassed by the simple fact that in reality the Scriptures do not explicitly present a doctrine of the ‘immanent’ Trinity.” An evangelical biblicist could not have said it better! Like the biblicists, Rahner can be interpreted as implying that although the Father, Son, and Spirit are clearly presented in Scripture as acting in history, statements about the immanent Trinity are highly suspect as “speculative” (hence his vitriolic reaction against medieval and Protestant scholasticism).
Much debate has occurred as to what exactly Rahner’s Rule actually means. What is clear, however, is that if the rule functions to direct our attention to the economic Trinity as the primary focus of theology, then it can function as a way of fitting theology into the constraints of philosophical naturalism. If there is nothing (or at least nothing we can know) beyond the horizon of history, then to define God by his actions in history leaves theology with something to do even if it can no longer speak about God in himself. But to go beyond speaking of the actions of God in history is not possible if knowable reality is limited to the cosmos. The point is not to imply that Rahner, and the many theologians who shared his concern, are pantheists (although many were). The point, rather, is that theology in the twentieth century saw it as desirable to focus on that which can be understood within the history of the cosmos—even when talking about God. By consequence, knowledge of God in himself was collapsed into history by those who applied Rahner’s Rule in strict fashion, a conflation that grew critical of the Great Tradition’s articulation of Nicene metaphysics.
Karl Barth and natural theology. This does not mean, however, that no modern theologians wished to speak of a God who is distinct from the world. Karl Barth certainly did. It is not that Hegel’s influence caused all Christian theologians to become pantheists overnight; it is much more subtle than that. The influence that Kant and Hegel exert on subsequent philosophers and theologians is seen in that they defined the new metaphysical parameters within which we can have knowledge of reality. It is not that we cannot believe in a God who exists apart from space and time and transcends the cosmos if we choose to do so; it is merely that we cannot have knowledge of such a God. We must be clear as to the difference.
The category of “knowledge” in post-Kantian thought does not mean what it meant in classical metaphysics. In classical metaphysics one could know God as the cause of the cosmos, but in post-Kantian thought one cannot have knowledge of God by any argument that sees a causal link between God and the cosmos. So God could exist, for all Kant knows. But the point is that we could never know that. We can certainly “believe” it, but that is an entirely different matter. For post-Kantian constructivists, “belief” is roughly the same as what Plato meant by “opinion.” For Plato, “opinion” (doxa) is contrasted with “knowledge” (episteme), and for post-Kantian constructivists “belief” is contrasted with “knowledge” in basically the same way.
This means that when Barth speaks of God, he means to say that God exists as the transcendent Creator of all that is not God. But he does not know that; he believes it. Barth famously rejected all the metaphysical proofs for the existence of God and said a firm “No” to all forms of natural theology. He placed the doctrine of the Trinity in the prolegomena of his Church Dogmatics in the place where the proofs for God’s existence would normally be found in reformed scholastic works. His point is that theology is christologically based. All knowledge of God is derived from the incarnation of God in Jesus Christ. The decision to make the doctrine of the Trinity foundational to his system contrasts sharply with Schleiermacher’s decision to place the doctrine of the Trinity in an appendix to his dogmatics. It shows that Barth is determined to write a dogmatics that is based on special revelation (Holy Scripture) and on faith in Jesus Christ, rather than on the foundation of a rational knowledge of God as Reformed scholasticism and historic Christian orthodoxy in general had done. But Barth is not willing to speak of having knowledge of the eternal being of the transcendent God in the way that the older theology did.
What Barth knows of God is what God is in time and space—in history—but what God is eternally in himself is mere speculation and Barth rejects speculation. His treatment of the eternal decree of God is revealing on this point. For Barth, the worst thing we can do is to posit an eternal decree that is not known by God’s action in history in Jesus Christ because that would make God’s decree unknowable and unpredictable. For Barth, insofar as we have any knowledge of God it is knowledge of God’s actions in history in Jesus Christ. The idea of an unknowable God “behind” Jesus Christ is anathema to Barth. This is why all theology must be christologically based for him. This creates a problem for Barth in that the relation between God and creation is thus known only by faith (fideism). It means that Christian theology is not really “knowledge” but only belief (or opinion). Much of the content of Barth’s theology is thus consistent with historic orthodoxy, but since his theology is not a matter of knowledge, but only belief, it is incapable of forming a firm foundation for scientific law and natural law. Barth tries to do an end run around Kant’s denial that we can know things in themselves by talking of how we know them through Christ. But we don’t really have knowledge of God through Christ, only belief about God.
It is thus apparent that Barth’s theology represents the polar opposite of Schleiermacher’s theology. Whereas Schleiermacher chose to maintain a connection between his theological system and the cosmos through his concept of the feeling of absolute dependence and paid the price of losing a personal and triune God, Barth chose to let that connection go in order to maintain the content of trinitarian and christological orthodoxy and paid the price of reducing theology to mere belief instead of knowledge. Historic Christian orthodoxy had always refused such a choice and, going forward, we must refuse this choice as well. We must recover the ability to speak of our knowledge of the triune God as revealed in creation, in Israel, and climactically in Jesus Christ. But the only way that can happen is if we overcome the metaphysical constraints imposed by Kant’s fateful decision to accept Hume’s critique of causality and the proofs for the existence of God.
Moltmann’s dynamic panentheism. We now turn to the theology of Jürgen Moltmann, who attempts to move beyond Schleiermacher and Barth in such a way as to speak of God as essentially related to the world (like Schleiermacher) but still as triune (like Barth). It is at this point that we see the endgame of modern theology because here the doctrine of the Trinity is completely revised so as to fit into the naturalistic metaphysics of Kant and Hegel, though again, Moltmann thinks he is merely returning to pure Christianity, uncorrupted by Greek metaphysics. How ironic then that here we find the astonishing and totally new concept of “pagan trinitarianism.” “Credit” must be given to Moltmann for being one of the very few thinkers at this late stage of the history of theology to find a way to invent an entirely brand-new heresy!
Moltmann was a student in the generation after World War II that was dominated by Barth’s theology, but he struck off on his own path and by no means followed Barth. In some ways, Moltmann went back to the nineteenth century and picked up where Hegel left off. He can be described as a dynamic panentheist who sees God as existing on the same plane of reality as the cosmos and as in a two-way relationship with it—acting on the cosmos and being acted on by the cosmos. As he says: “We shall start from the assumption that the relationship between God and the world has a reciprocal character.” In speaking of the Trinity, Moltmann says:
The fellowship of the disciples with one another has to resemble the union of the Son with the Father. But not only does it have to resemble that trinitarian union; in addition it has to be a union within this union. It is a fellowship with God and, beyond that, a fellowship in God. But that presupposes that the triunity is open in such a way that the whole creation can be united with it and can be one within it. The union of the divine Trinity is open for the uniting of the whole creation with itself and in itself.
The whole world is united within the Trinity. Moltmann sees the event of the cross as an event in history—both the history of the world and the history of God.
Moltmann rejects both classical theism and protest atheism using the method of Hegelian dialectic. He says that “Christian faith stands over against the theistic concept of God,” and he says of the Christian faith that “metaphysical theism is not applicable to it.” So he rejects classical theism. However, he also says that metaphysical atheism must be rejected because it is too much like theism. In fact, he says metaphysical atheism is the antithesis of metaphysical theism. For those who know Hegel’s dialectical method, one can anticipate what is coming next. He had already declared that “Christianity is not the ‘end of metaphysics,’ ” and now we see why not. He writes:
The only way past protest atheism is through a theology of the cross which understands God as the suffering God in the suffering of Christ and which cries out with the godforsaken God, ‘My God, why have you forsaken me?’ For this theology, God and suffering are no longer contradictions, as in theism and atheism, but God’s being is in suffering and the suffering is in God’s being itself, because God is love.
Here we see a new metaphysics, consisting of a synthesis of theism and atheism, employed to describe the being of God in such a way that the being of God is completely historicized and naturalized. Hegel’s metaphysical naturalism is expressed using the terminology of Scripture with the symbols rearranged to mean something completely opposite to their meaning in historic Christian orthodoxy. Like the Valentinian Gnostics against whom Irenaeus contended, Moltmann uses Christian words as symbols to convey a metaphysical system totally foreign to Scripture and opposite to it in many ways. Here the revisionist project is completed, and the old Christianity is buried under the rubble as the new edifice rises on top of the old. A mythological conception of God eclipses the biblical doctrine that was given to correct the older mythological concept of God.
Moltmann’s social trinitarianism is central to his constructive theological vision. I call his trinitarian theology pagan because it is a social trinitarianism that moves beyond monotheism into polytheism. In his book The Trinity and the Kingdom, Moltmann criticizes Barth’s concept of the Trinity as God revealing himself as Lord, by which Barth means that God is the revealer, the revelation, and the being-revealed. Moltmann comments: “This is really a monotheistic conception of the doctrine of the Trinity.” Monotheism, understood as the interpretation of Christ’s history as that of one divine subject, is egregious for Moltmann because it symbolizes monarchy, hierarchy, and authoritarianism. He sees his own doctrine of the Trinity as an alternative to the kind of monotheism that reduces the message of the Bible to one divine subject. He writes: “The New Testament talks about God by proclaiming in narrative the relationships of the Father, the Son and the Spirit, which are relationships of fellowship and are open to the world.” For Moltmann, it is crucial that the three persons of the Trinity be capable of intersubjective, back-and-forth relationships of love because this is the narrative into which we are invited. Monotheism, he says, fails because it expresses only the “unconditional sovereignty of God” and “the feeling of absolute dependence.” Therefore, he says, our task is that of “revising the church’s doctrine of the Trinity on the basis of the Bible” so that “the liberation of man for freedom” becomes possible. When he says that he wants to revise the doctrine of the Trinity on the basis of the Bible, he means that he wants to limit his doctrine of the Trinity to the economy. His is a theology of the economic Trinity only; the immanent Trinity has dropped completely out of view. Liberation for freedom means us entering the relationships of love between the members of the Trinity in history. For Moltmann, the Trinity thus becomes the model for the kingdom of God insofar as the social Trinity becomes the symbol of human relationships of freedom. Here we see the heart of the modern project, namely the anthropomorphic redescription of God, which is identical with the divinization of humanity, symbolizing the acquisition of absolute freedom by human beings as the culmination of history. The transcendent Creator is eclipsed by the absolutely free human subject who becomes the creator of the future by seizing control of history.
Barrett, M., ed. (2024). On Classical Trinitarianism: Retrieving the Nicene Doctrine of the Triune God. IVP Academic: An Imprint of InterVarsity Press.
Now, here's the article. One might argue (well, at least I'm one who will) that Scientists and Engineers are stuck with the world as it is, while the Humanities have been caught up in Critical Theories (or now just plain Nihilism). Now, there's not a small amount of philosophical naivete to think that there are no metaphysical underpinnings to science, but the author is feeling the weight that the Humanities are a dumpster fire that's taking the hard sciences down with them.
From the Dispatch
Published August 7, 2025
Evan D. Morris
Unyoke the Sciences From the Humanities
Things are going badly for universities. They are in the crosshairs of an erratic and aggressive government willing to threaten anything in its path. While the government may have succeeded at securing promises for needed reforms at Columbia University, it did so by delaying or canceling scientific research funding estimated at between $400 million and $1.2 billion. But even delays that are resolved have their own costs: While a deal will restore this funding, some worthy scientists have lost their jobs and some worthy scientific research projects will not recover. To protect the sciences going forward, radical change to the composition of universities is warranted.
How do academics view the root causes of their own precarious situation? Consider a recent gathering of professors across multiple disciplines for the annual meeting of Heterodox Academy in Brooklyn last month. HxA, as it is known, is a group devoted to fostering the necessary environment and tools for airing of conflicting and unpopular (“heterodox”) views—provided they are expressed civilly. And yet, even among this group, whose members are not prone to marching in lockstep, there was remarkable consensus that the public’s distrust and the government’s ire are directed primarily at faculty in the humanities, because of their often single-minded insistence on identity politics, equity of results over merit, and abandonment of the Western canon.
The best argument I heard at the HxA conference in defense of the humanities in today’s university was: “We cannot afford to lose all of that important cancer research.” Come again? Translation: The humanities are going down and taking the rest of us—grant-funded scientists who focus on medical research or the physical sciences—with them. This begs the question: Do we scientists need them? Or, more to the point, must the fate of the sciences be tied to that of the humanities?
Since January of this year, the sciences have been hit with delays of some federal grants and cancellations of others; proposed reductions in indirect rate costs; and draconian budget cuts for the National Institutes of Health (NIH) going forward. Keep in mind, it is the humanities that have sinned: Why else would the Trump administration’s settlement with Columbia call for an internal review of Middle East programs or for adding new Jewish Studies faculty slots? But if the humanities have sinned, why has the government targeted the sciences for funding cuts? As Willie Sutton purportedly remarked when asked why he robbed banks: “Because that’s where the money is.” Most universities have divisions or departments of the humanities, social sciences, law, business, medicine, and hard sciences. But it is the latter two that bring in the bulk of federal dollars, in the form of NIH and National Science Foundation (NSF) grants.
The more funding science and medicine departments accept, the more leverage the government has to force changes at their universities. I am strongly in favor of shrinking bloated university bureaucracies and reforming or eliminating university entities that have gone over the cliff for social justice activism. But I am also a career biomedical scientist whose work depends on NIH grants, and I am less sanguine about my grants serving as the main component of the government’s leverage to force such changes.
Some will claim that scientists’ hands are not clean, that we endorse rampant DEI, that we misuse science funding for bizarre investigations. But such instances are a few fleas on the fur of a noble hound. We in the hard sciences do work that is largely apolitical, and we are more oriented toward much-needed objective evaluation of data and merit than many of our brethren in the humanities. Yet, the scientists, and all their life-giving and technology-producing work, are being punished for the sins of others because we all live under one roof. I cannot see a compelling reason for our continued cohabitation.
There is nothing that says that universities must or have always included all disciplines. My graduate alma mater (now named Case Western Reserve University) is the product of a 1967 federation (and ultimate merging) of what was the Case Institute of Technology and Western Reserve University. The idea of a large, prominent entity had been under discussion for many years, and may have been driven by the desire of city leaders to put Cleveland “on the map.” Nowadays, Case Western is consistently ranked in the country’s top 100 universities.
But not all unions are good or last forever. In January of 2000, America Online (AOL) and Time Warner merged to secure dominance of the entertainment and digital domains. But only a few years later, access to the internet became widely available for cheap, and AOL’s dominant position in controlling access via dial-up became worthless (AOL’s market capitalization went from $192 billion to around $3 billion in about eight years). When the dot-com bubble burst in 2001, AOL was dead weight that pulled down the stock price of the combined entity until there was nothing left to do but de-merge (called “spinning off” in business terms) in 2009.
More was at play in the AOL/Time Warner debacle than one division’s failed business model: There was a widely reported clash of cultures between the aggressive AOL leaders and the more staid executives of Time Warner. In the university, we also see a clash of cultures. Scientists at research universities run labs that are funded by government grants. To secure those grants, the scientist proposes a circumscribed set of experiments with verifiable (or more correctly, rejectable) hypotheses. Objective truth as it applies to such narrow lines of inquiry is attainable. But objective truth cannot be achieved in the humanities—nor is it the point. Professors in the humanities are trained in a completely different paradigm and culture. Writing about art or history or religion seems to elude any possibility of objectivity that is central to the scientific process. If you are a Calvinist, there may be only one proper way to read the Bible. But that is not the same as there being one objective meaning of the Bible for all of us.
From a practical standpoint, scientists with research labs are running small businesses. The goal of the lab may be a search for scientific truth, but the great bulk of the lab director’s time and focus is dominated by a search for funding, not truth or politics. An investigator in the sciences has little time for writing political position papers or worse, political screeds. Such writings would yield no benefit to one’s reputation as a scientist, nor to the funding and survival of one’s lab. We are trained to write objectively about the results of our experiments: The data are what the data are. In our grant proposals and in our peer-reviewed papers we report those data so that others can evaluate them as well as our interpretations. We must even note data that were excluded (as “outliers” based on objective criteria).
Objective reasoning is an important skill. We as a society depend on those who are trained to state clear hypotheses and analyze data objectively. Pasteur and others gathered data that confirmed the germ theory of disease. You may not like “elites” or the French, but you’d be a fool to let your doctor or dentist operate on you with used, unsterilized instruments.
There are undoubtedly scientists who abuse their positions and their funding to promote their politics. But they are a small or even vanishing minority. My experience from more than 30 years in science research is that my peers take their objectivity seriously. In my four-year stint on a review panel for NIH from 2016 to 2020, for example, I observed a group of 30 scientists of different specialties argue ardently, sometimes quite heatedly, but always civilly, about the merits of each grant we had to review. Never once did anyone impugn a grant on political or ideological grounds. We stuck to the value of the proposed science, the feasibility of the proposed experiments, and the potential benefits that would derive from them. Yes, scientists have sometimes been forced to include DEI statements and sometimes to use bizarre, woke language in papers or grant proposals. (I myself have been advised to write “a person who smokes” rather than a ”smoker” in a grant proposal.) But I would argue that these are mostly actions taken by reasonable people to escape the scrutiny of NIH or university-based language-police.
No matter the level of ideological capture in either, though, sciences and the humanities are organized differently, operate differently, and have different raisons d’être. It is almost as if the respective faculties are different species. Jewish law has something to say on this. It prohibits the yoking together of oxen with asses, because animals of different strengths and different strides should not be forced onto the same team. But the principle can be applied more broadly. In the modern American university, the sciences have historically been “yoked” to the humanities. Who are the oxen and who are the donkeys may be in the eyes of the beholder, but there is no doubt that at this moment, we in the hard sciences and medicine are suffering needlessly for being yoked, organizationally, to our counterparts in the non-quantitative and often ideologically captured humanities departments. Our strides and our strengths are incompatible.
Does this mean that scientists should strive to be illiterate or ahistorical? Of course not. We need to be able to read and write and absorb lessons from history and politics and ethics. But we don’t need to be part of a larger university to do so. For those topics that students need to learn but for which no scientist professor is prepared to teach, our Institute of Technology and Medicine can hire qualified instructors. But they need not be the world’s expert on Shakespeare or Poe to teach writing or English literature to undergrads. And for those polymathic students who want to learn their physics from a famous physicist and their Hobbes from a leading Hobbesian, there can still be such a thing as cross-registering at the nearby Institute of Humanities.
To be clear, I have dear friends who are historians and writers and journalists. They are brilliant, and I delight in their knowledge and in their perspectives. But we do not collaborate on my research on drug development or Parkinson’s disease or cancer, because frankly, they would have nothing to contribute. And we certainly do not need to be employed by the same organization. I am not against history or literature any more than the rabbis were against oxen. In fact, I am a fan of both history and literature. But not every species of academic or their fates must be yoked together.
We are at an inflection point in the public’s valuation of the academy. For good or ill, we academics must each make our own best case for our continued existence and for whatever resources we seek from the public. There is an efficiency and a clarity that can come from unyoking the sciences from the humanities. Let the market of public opinion assess each discipline on its own merits and let the practitioners of each discipline be allowed to make their own case for their continued value. That seems only fair. I am confident I can make my most persuasive case for a university of science, engineering, and medicine, if the humanities are not housed under my roof.
