These subjects are fundamentally philosophy of religion questions: how high can the "constructions" of constructive theology ascend? Can constructive theology begin with an epistemic foundation, and then circle back on itself in such a way to compromise its original foundations? Is a universalist Trinitarianism subject to undermining a fundamental revelation in Christ by positing a consequently pluralistic explanation of Trinitarian manifestations? [1] This is an interpretation of the question posed: "How do we hold up a Christology high enough to fit a God of Trinitarian self-communicative love yet not so high that it cannot fit within a wider economy of God's action?" [2] To put it another way, if the son is a distinctly unsurpassed "exemplarity" of the mystery of the Trinity from which we can only discern the Trinity, and thus conclude based on his revelation that the Trinity exists in utter exemplarity throughout the World, how do we buttress the Christological axioms with which we started? [3] By doing this, it is my feeling that we are simply tacitly acknowledging an axiomatic presupposition of the existence of a Trinity-like God and therefore supporting Christ as highest exemplarity because of the coherence of his teachings with our tacit ascent. [4] This isn't necessary a relativistic foil—circularity in this way, may only imply dialectic, not necessarily falsity. Particularly if we can begin with an integrated and nuanced methodology of theology, philosophy, natural theology, etc. Panikkar's Trinitarian theology of world religions is a helpful constructive theology, but there is something more to it: it is an apologetic, philosophical truth claim thats rooted in a type of scientific presupposition that the highest and truest theory will be explain the most with the least. He assumes the starting point of "spirituality" as a rational heuristic and the basic for an explanatory framework—could this sort of Trinitarian framework be mapped onto epistemic, socialiological, grounds of reality? [5] Can there exist a duality between the dual, and the non-dual? Theandric as an alternative to a tri-personal God may eliminate and move beyond this "personalism" that has been the key to a mature religion and has moved into Christian in a way to substantiate each person of God as whole, but it is lacking in its understanding of "wholeness." [6] Do Panikkar's "three types of spirituality" tend toward a tri-theistic trinitarianism? Would mapping this sort of epistemological approach onto other intercultural comparisons unearth some sort of unified, holistic framework that worked in concert with Panikkar's more existentially affective mapping over spirituality? If Advaita is being papered over the father, and the personal being papered over the Son, is idolatry being papered over the Spirit? Did Jesus have to exist qua Jesus? [7] Could "Christ" have been someone other than Jesus of Nazareth? Even if he is not accidental, but the grounds of creation, are there limitless possibilities where Jesus is by some other name, in some other time? [8] Likewise, was the crucifixion and

resurrection a moment of actual cosmic rearrangement and/or transformation? Or simply a manifestation of the eternal immanence of God's salvific work and orientation? All of these lead to another question posed by both Delio and Panikkar which is, could/will there be another manifestation in more fullness than the first? [9] When someone makes an attempt to explain history in terms of progressive stages of realization, consciousness or spirituality, it always throws a red flag—supercessionism is an insidious and immanent threat whenever we may use historical heuristics to explain our present and therefore, prescribe future. [10]

Ilia Delio, “Religious Pluralism and the Coincidence of Opposites,” Theological Studies 70 (2009): 822–844, at 824.

Delio, 826.

Delio, 829.

Delio, 838.

Raimon Panikkar, The Trinity and the Religious Experience of Man (1968), 508f.

Panikkar (1968), 533f

Delio, 839.

Delio, 830.

Delio, 840 n. 74.

Rohan Curnow, “Theos, Cosmos and Anthropos: Trinity, Incarnation and Creation in the Framework of Raimon Panikkar’s Cosmotheandric Vision,” Australian eJournal of Theology 6 (February 2006): 17.