Apocalyptic Trinity

Thomas Altizer of “death of God” fame is back, advocating for what he calls the Apocalyptic Trinity. This is not your grandma’s “primordial Trinity” that is “the subject of all established doctrines of the Trinity.” That primordial Trinity bring “a total closure to apocalypse, even if there is an actual potency for an apocalyptic destiny” (5).

Besides, that old primordial Trinity underwrites the status quo. It is “the deepest ground of all established authority,” while “the apocalyptic Trinity [is] the deepest challenge to that authority” (6). Radicals can’t do with a front-loaded Trinity, a “backward moving Trinity, or the Trinity whose movement is the movement of eternal return” (4). Radicals need a back-loaded Trinity, an apocalyptic one, a “totally forward moving Trinity” (4).

What might that mean? It means recovering the Joachimite Trinitarianism that comes to modern expression in Hegel and Marx. This is “an evolving Trinity, one whose destiny is an absolute apocalypse, an actual destiny only made possible by an actual beginning or an actual origin.” Radical theology, and radical politics, need to recover the insights of Blake and Eckhart, a vision of “God evolving out of primordial Godhead. Only this evolution makes possible an actual apocalypse, an apocalypse in which God will be all in all.” He can be so only “by ceasing to be the absolutely transcendent God.” If God’s transcendence comes to an end, it must have had an “actual beginning or origin” (3).

So an apocalyptic Trinity is, at least, a Trinity that emerges into transcendence from “primordial Godhead” but will eventually evolve out of transcendence until He is all in all, until (apparently) there is nothing but God.

The confusions here are legion. God’s transcendence is not dialectically at odds with His immanence; each is rather the condition for the other – He is absolutely immanent because He is absolutely transcendent, so that any transcendence of transcendence would involve the destruction of immanence as well. It is also not clear how Altizer’s position really underwrites a radical politics; the emergence of plurality from undifferentiated Godhead, and the absorption of plurality into undifferentiated Godhead hardly seems conducive to an ontology of ultimate difference. Finally, Altizer would do well to read some Derrida: That primordial Godhead appears to be the impossible, a source without a supplement. 

Staid old orthodoxy: It’s as radical as need be, more radical than anything alternatives.