Is the doctrine of the Incarnation prior to & the source of trinitarian doctrine? – Part 2

An interesting and much more recent statement from John Hick, along the lines of my last post.

…Since then [around 1993] the focus of much theological discussion has moved from christology to the doctrine of the Trinity. This is partly because theology always does go the rounds of the traditional topics – creation, sin, incarnation, atone­ment, Trinity, church, heaven and hell – and after a while it feels like time to move on to something else. Why then write more about incarnation instead of engaging with the currently more fashionable idea of the Trinity? Because this doctrine presupposes and depends upon the prior doctrine of the deity (as well as humanity) of Jesus. If Jesus was God incarnate on earth, and at the same time God reigned in heaven, this already creates a binity of Father and Son. When we add the inner experience of God’s presence as Spirit, we have a trinity -the Holy Trinity of Father, Son and Holy Spirit who, to preserve monotheism, are three in one and one in three. But there would have been no occasion for this expansion from the unitary God of Judaism to the Trinity of Christianity without the more basic belief in the deity (as well as humanity) of Jesus. For this reason the idea of Jesus as God incarnate remains basic and foundational, and without it the concept of the Trinity evaporates. If a coherent and believable theology cannot establish its earthly base in a literal, ontological incarnation, it cannot take off into the theological stratosphere of the Trinity. (Preface to the Second Edition of The Metaphor of God Incarnate: Christology in a Pluralistic Age, 2nd. ed. (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2005), emphasis added.)

Put bluntly, Hick is a grizzled old veteran crusader against traditional Christianity. He wants to take it down a notch, so that it is recognized as only one among a great many equally valid culturally-conditioned ways for people to respond to “the Real”. If Christ is God himself, God in the flesh, the unique Son of God, or is even just the one-time greatest and final revealer of God to humankind, then Christianity won’t be just a roughly equal peer of Hinduism, Islam, and Buddhism, etc. This is why he’s long attacked the traditional doctrine of the Incarnation. He hasn’t even thought it worth it, though, to attack the doctrine of the Trinity! This even despite the current popularity of trinitarian theorizing. Why? He holds that the former stands as a foundation of the latter. No need to swing at the wall, when you can just remove the foundation from under it. How does he think he can blast away that foundation? That’s another subject – someday when we get around to focusing more on the Incarnation, I’ll post on that.

Now about this dependence of the Trinity on the Incarnation doctrine, it seems to me that either Hick or many current theologians writing on the Trinity are wrong. For the latter take an opposite view; they seem to treat “the” doctrine of the Trinity as something that stands on its own, not something that must be inferred from or based on revelation, or another theory based on revelation. At least, that’s how thing seem to me. Of course, few theologians nowadays are much concerned with defending or arguing for either doctrine, so issues of evidence and epistemic dependence are usually not their focus. Any theologians out there care to comment?