Inhabitatio Dei

The following theses are meant to supplement and complete my introductory theses on radical trinitarianism that I posted a few days ago.  Together, these two sets of theses will form the skeleton from which I shall attempt to unpack a brief trinitarian dogmatics.

1. A truly Trinitarian theology is thoroughly pneumatological.  It is in and through the Spirit of Pentecost that the life of the Trinity as revealed in the cross of Christ is communicated to humankind throughout all nations.  The mission of the Spirit in the economy of salvation is the pentecostalization of the world, that is the bringing together of all persons into one Christic body of communion.  The Spirit is the communal “language” of God (the Logos) transposed into human tongues.  It is from within the outpouring of the Spirit of Triune love that all created persons find their true personhood and destiny.  The Logos of the Triune life does not compete with, but fulfills the logoi of creation, suffusing them with grace and transforming them into occasions of Christic and pneumatic communion.  This is fundamentally what the church is as the community of the Spirit.

2. What the Spirit brings about in the world through the creation of the church is the fulfillment of God’s covenant with humankind.  The telos of God’s work in the world is the being-together of himself with his created people (see Rev. 21:3-4).  The shape of this being-together of God and humanity is life in covenant.  Covenant is God’s determination to be God for us and God with us.  It is his determination for us to be for one another and with one another.  And this self-determination of God as the God of covenant is coterminous with God’s Triune being, and specifically with the history of Jesus Christ in Israel, the Church, and all creation.

3. The history of Jesus Christ narrates the Triune God’s establishment of a new covenant economy.   What this entails is the disruption, and indeed the dissolution of all other humanly crafted modes of social life which determine the identities of human persons in terms of the hegemonic and counter-hegemonic.  The de novo social order that is brought about in the ekklesia of Christ is one in which reconciliation first appears as a reality in the world.  The inauguration of the new covenant economy dismantles the logic of cultural ethnocentrisms, racial hegemonies,  and political nationalisms.  This is the message of Pentecost.  Namely, that in the work of Christ and the Spirit a new covenant has been established which brings about the flourishing of human relationship with God and one another.  To live in God’s new covenant economy is to have our identities radically reshaped by the resurrection and Pentecost.  It is to live within the realm of Christ’s healing compassion and the Spirit’s flame of infinite love which brings about the being-together of all humanity in Christ.

4. In the passion and resurrection of Christ, and the giving of the Spirit, the Triune God deconstructs humankind’s faulty performance of community and thus, of personal identity as ruled by the powers.  What happens in Christ is recapitulation.  Christ submits himself to the machinations of history as ruled by the logic of the powers, and in so doing, unmasks and destroys it.  Thus, Christ re-performs history through the Triune movement of his life, death, and resurrection, and thus draws creation into the new, recapitulated world of the Spirit.  Pentecost, then is the climax of the recapitulating work of Christ to remake the very fabric of human history within his own person, and thus to establish humanity as his own body, in communion with the Father through himself in the Spirit.  To live within the fabric of the new history which Christ recapitulates in his life and breathes out in the Spirit is to live within the realm of God’s own Triune life.

5. The history that is rewoven in Christ’s person through the Spirit is the history of God’s love outstripping, absorbing, and transfiguring the logic of human violence and exclusion.  In Christ and the Spirit, the violence and the will towards death that marks the life of sin is transposed into the life of the Trinity, overcome and extinguished in the enflamed, eternal love of the Triune persons.  This is what death and resurrection means.  In Christ, the infinite peace and serenity of the Trinity is found to be unfathomably deeper than the furthest depths of human godlessness and hell.  Thus, when the depths of Satan are invaded by the luminescence of the Trinity, all darkness is cast away and in this new light, humankind is freed from the fear of death to dwell in the world of Triune shalom.  Triune redemption, both proleptically and consummately is a life of shalom.  The end which we are promised and called to in the Triune economy is a life of infinite peace, where melodrama is transfigured into drama, where discord is transposed into symphonic glory.  In the realm of Triune shalom fasting breaks forth into feasting, thirst is forever quenched by streams of living water and wine.  In short, the realm of Triune shalom is the realm of infinite joy.

6. And this speaks also to the “point” of Trinitarian theology, if there is such a thing.  No theology is Trinitarian if it does anything less than leading the theological community into joy.  For in the end, joy is the perhaps the best description of the life in God which all theologizing about the Trinity seeks to shed light on.  To be a radical Trinitarian theologian is to live in joy.