I’m quite enjoying the early pages of (the first volume of) Tom Greggs’ Dogmatic Ecclesiology. But unfortunately he has not managed to transcend the post-Barthian theologian’s penchant for the occasional syntactical monstrosity:

But simultaneously, we must recognize that from the side of the created history and time which God has put in place, there is no God aside from the God who is known within the spatiotemporal boundedness of creation—no God aside from the God of the church. God as God self-determines Godself for creation is God in God’s eternal being, known in God’s revelation to the life of the church. This is not because of an overemphasis on the created order over against the sheer magnificent plenitude of God’s being, but because, in the sheer magnificent plenitude of God’s being, God has determined Godself for all eternity to be for creation and to be the God who makes Godself known as being pro nobis for the world by being pro nos within God’s community of the church.

Oof. I mean, it’s comprehensible, if you read it a few times. But should we need to? Perhaps it is fitting that attempts to say meaningful things about the inner life of the Holy Trinity tend to stretch human language beyond not only its metaphorical but also its syntactical capabilities.

(And while there — this is the exact sort of sentence that convinced me, when starting grad school, that capitalizing grammatically masculine pronouns for the Deity was a far preferable solution than the “Godself” locution.)

No knock on Greggs’ book. I’m sure there’s not a modern theologian who has avoided this problem. But it’s representative.