In his bombshell recent book All That is in God, James Dolezal has identified these trends, comprising a new theology of “theistic mutualism,” as pervasive among leading Reformed and evangelical theologians and biblical commentators of the later 20th and early 21st centuries. “In an effort to portray God as more relatable,” Dolezal summarizes, “theistic mutualists insist that God is involved in a genuine give-and-take relationship with His creatures.”[3]

At the same time, a radical revision of Trinitarian theology has been underway for several decades, with the fierce traditional insistence on divine unity replaced by a “social trinitarianism” in which a community of three persons—redefined as no longer the mysterious Greek hypostases, but in the modern English sense of individual subjects characterized by personality—either flow in and out of one another in a radical egalitarian dance (if you are socially and politically liberal) or exist in carefully-regulated structures of authority and submission (if you are socially and politically conservative). Such formulations are simply inconceivable from the standpoint of historical Christian orthodoxy, whether Orthodox, Catholic, or Protestant. Equally inconceivable is the fashionable modern talk of “the Father turning his back on the Son,” of the “Trinity being broken” at Christ’s crucifixion, language that originated in Jurgen Moltmann’s radical theological revisionism of the 1960s and 1970s and took only a couple of decades to become domesticated into conservative evangelical orthodoxy.

We could identify many causes for the current chaos—from widespread historical illiteracy, to the appearance of new philosophical challenges or at least intellectual fashions (often Kantian and Hegelian in origin), to methodological biblicism or Christocentricism. At the more popular level, though, I think that much of what drives our theological revisionism is what has always lain behind the human heart’s penchant for idolatry: a hunger for a God who is like me, a God who can relate to me, and meet me where I am, a God who is real enough to be there beside me in the midst of suffering. Whether it’s the anguished search by modern theologians for a God who could make sense out of Auschwitz or the infinitely superficial spirituality of the evangelical condolence card remembering that God will help us “mount up with wings as eagles,” the fundamental drive—emotivist and anthropocentric—is the same.

“Introduction” in GOD OF OUR FATHERS: CLASSICAL THEISM FOR THE CONTEMPORARY CHURCH, ED. BRAD LITTLE JOHN, loc. 241.