Theopedia

Colin E Gunton

“The world itself provides the reason why things are as they are.”

Colin E. Gunton1

Overview

Colin E. Gunton (January 19, 1941 to May 6, 2003) was a British United Reformed systematic theologian who taught at King’s College, London from 1969 until his death. His work centered on the doctrine of God, the Trinity, and creation, and he became known for arguing that Western theology, beginning with Augustine, had construed God’s relation to the world in terms that left the two too separated from one another.2

Life and Ministry

Gunton studied literae humaniores (Classics) at Hertford College, Oxford, graduating in 1964, and received an MA in theology from Mansfield College, Oxford, in 1965. He was ordained in the United Reformed Church in 1972 and began doctoral work under Robert Jenson while starting his teaching career as Lecturer in Philosophy of Religion at King’s College London in 1969; his dissertation, a study of the doctrine of God in Charles Hartshorne and Karl Barth, was completed in 1973 and published as Becoming and Being in 1978.3

He became Associate Minister of Brentwood United Reformed Church in 1975, a position he held until his death, and was appointed Lecturer in Systematic Theology, then Professor of Christian Doctrine, at King’s College London in 1980 and 1984 respectively, later serving as Dean of Faculty (1988 to 1990) and Head of the Department of Theology and Religious Studies (1993 to 1997). He co-founded King’s College’s Research Institute for Systematic Theology with Christoph Schwöbel in 1988 and the International Journal of Systematic Theology with John Webster and Ralph Del Colle in 1999. Gunton delivered the 1992 Bampton Lectures at Oxford, published as The One, the Three and the Many: God, Creation and the Culture of Modernity,4 and the Warfield Lectures at Princeton Theological Seminary in 1993.3 He received honorary doctorates from the University of London (1993), the University of Aberdeen (1999), and the University of Oxford (2003), and was made a Fellow of King’s College shortly before his death.5

Theological Contribution

Gunton’s most influential and widely discussed argument concerned the doctrine of God and its bearing on creation. In The Triune Creator, he described a “psycho-socio-physical cosmos” account of reality in which “the world itself provides the reason why things are as they are,” and set his own Trinitarian account of God’s relation to the world against it.1 Following John Zizioulas and other Eastern Orthodox theologians, Gunton argued that Augustine’s doctrine of God kept God too separated from the created order to be genuinely known; in The Promise of Trinitarian Theology, he went further still, following Zizioulas in holding Augustine responsible for the rise of modern atheism.6

Gunton pressed a related argument in his 1992 Bampton Lectures and his 1993 Warfield Lectures on the doctrine of the divine attributes. He held that the attributes had often been construed “largely cosmologically,” prioritizing “timeless relations between the eternal and the temporal” at the expense of God’s activity and revelation in time, and he sought instead to give God’s historical action, revealed in the economy, a constitutive role in theology’s account of God’s own being.7 In Act and Being, he proposed a positive, relational account of the divine attributes that theologian Daniel Castelo later drew on in arguing for a qualified doctrine of divine impassibility.8

Historical Significance

Gunton’s relational account of God’s being and his critique of Augustine were influential well beyond his own writing. Craig A. Carter, a Reformed theologian who later became a defender of classical theism, recalled reading Gunton alongside John Zizioulas, Stanley Grenz, Miroslav Volf, and J. Denny Weaver while drafting a book grounding social ethics in a relational doctrine of God, and described coming to see that “revisionist road” as one that “led logically to some form of theological liberalism” for a number of theologians who followed it, including a tendency to deny God’s wrath and the doctrine of final judgment. Carter’s account is autobiographical reception history rather than a claim that Gunton himself held those denials.9

Gunton’s central charge against Augustine also drew direct scholarly challenge. Keith Wesley Goad’s dissertation on Trinitarian grammars reports that Brad Green’s own dissertation and a related journal article provide “ample evidence that Gunton’s case is overstated,” arguing that Augustine’s account of God’s transcendence does not in fact leave God unknowable, since Augustine held that real knowledge of God was given in the Son’s incarnation and in Scripture.2

Related Doctrines

Further Reading

References

References

  1. Colin Gunton, The Triune Creator: A Historical and Systematic Study (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998), 36, quoted in John N. Oswalt, The Bible among the Myths: Unique Revelation or Just Ancient Literature?, Ancient Context, Ancient Faith (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2009), ch. 10 n. 2. ↩ ↩2

  2. Keith Wesley Goad, “East and West Compared,” in “Trinitarian Grammars: A Comparison of Gregory of Nazianzus and Some Contemporary Models” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2010), 182, citing Brad Green, “Colin Gunton and the Failure of Augustine: An Exposition and Analysis of the Theology of Colin Gunton in Light of Augustine’s De Trinitate” (PhD diss., Baylor University, 2000), and Brad Green, “The Protomodern Augustine? Colin Gunton and the Failure of Augustine,” Journal of Scriptural Theology 9 (July 2007): 328-41. ↩ ↩2

  3. “Colin Gunton,” Wikipedia, accessed September 1, 2026, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colin_Gunton. ↩ ↩2

  4. Keith Wesley Goad, “Bibliography,” in “Trinitarian Grammars: A Comparison of Gregory of Nazianzus and Some Contemporary Models” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2010), citing Colin E. Gunton, The One, the Three and the Many: God, Creation and the Culture of Modernity: The Bampton Lectures 1992 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993). ↩

  5. King’s College London, “King’s Announces the 2003 Fellows” (2003), quoted in Paul Louis Metzger, ed., Trinitarian Soundings in Systematic Theology (T&T Clark, 2005), 1-3. ↩

  6. Keith Wesley Goad, “East and West Compared,” in “Trinitarian Grammars” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2010), 169, citing Colin E. Gunton, The Promise of Trinitarian Theology (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1991). ↩

  7. Steven J. Duby, God in Himself: Scripture, Metaphysics, and the Task of Christian Theology, Studies in Christian Doctrine and Scripture (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2019), 3-4. ↩

  8. Alex Charles Tibbott, “Conclusion,” in “De Impassibilitate Et Satisfactione: An Examination of the Methodological Implications of Trinitarian Classical Theism for the Doctrine of the Atonement” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2024), 315, citing Daniel Castelo, The Apathetic God: Exploring the Contemporary Relevance of Divine Impassibility (Milton Keynes: Paternoster, 2009), 63-66, and Colin E. Gunton, Act and Being: Towards a Theology of the Divine Attributes (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003). ↩

  9. Craig A. Carter, “Prologue: How My Mind Has Changed,” in Contemplating God with the Great Tradition: Recovering Trinitarian Classical Theism (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2021). ↩