I seem to have opened a Pandora’s box with my “shit happens” post. Overnight my blog went from rated G to NC-17.
So, my apologies to all parents and concerned Christians out there. I trust that God’s providence will overcome and rightly deal with all of my theological corruptions of today’s youth.
Man, this millstone around my neck is getting heavy…Mother of Mercy, is that the heart of sea I’m being thrown into!?
We now have come to the end of our Trinitarian exploration of divine-human personhood and divine-human relationality. We transition now, more explicitly to the horizontal and the historical. For to engage in a theological exploration of God’s relation to the world as established in Christ is inevitably to ask not only the personal-relational question of human and divine analogy, but also the question of the relationship between the Triune life and created history. Here again, the transcendence of God and the involvement of God in the world in Christ become contentious issues begging many different interpretations. What is the nature of the Triune God’s involvement with the created history that is the world? Does the world affect God in his Triune life of infinite serenity and overabundant joy? Does God suffer? These questions, though similar to the question of divine-human analogy, acquire a more cosmologial significance as the theologian seeks to investigate how we may speak fittingly of God’s involvement with the world in Christ.
In the next three sections I explore a few facets of the relationship between God and created history. First, I look to establish a radically trinitarian theology of divine transcendence. Against any sort of abstract notion of divine transcendence as sheer otherness or over-againstness, a trinitarian theology of divine transcendence is grounded in the inherently non-competitive nature of the Triune’s God’s relationship to created history. As we will see a proper understanding of divine transcendence is grounded not so much in God’s otherness (though that concept is not to be dispensed with), but rather in his non-competitive relationship of covenantal lordship with creation.
Second, I explore further the nature of the God-world relationship on the basis of a theodramatic theology of the immanent Trinity. Our understanding of the relationship between the being of God and history is found in how we understand the relationship between the drama of divine-human interaction in history and the eternally dramatic life of the Triune God. Under the conditions of fallenness it is impossible for us to concieve of drama without conflict. However, I argue that the eternal life of the immannent Trinity, revealed in Christ is in fact the “primal drama” which is the source and basis for the theodramatic movement of the economy of salvation. The eternal dynamisim of Triune fellowship, sociality, and symphonic beauty is the the archetypal drama which forms the context, and indeed the acting space for all created dramatic encounter between God and humanity in Christ.
Finally, I look specifically at the traditional doctrines of the immutability and impassiblility of God and seek to establish a radically trinitarian reconstruction of these classical themes. On the basis of a christocentric and radically trinitarian theological orientation, we are inclined to view immutability in connection with the covenantal faithfulness of the Triune God as seen in the history of Israel and Jesus. Likewise, such a methdology yeilds and understanding of impassiblility as the inexhuastibility and overabundance of the Triune life. These radical trinitarian intonations on these classical themes of the divine attributes and the God-world relation are all designed to complete an introductory dogmatic theology of God and humanity in Christ.
My friend Jon at his new blog Via Crucis has posted an entertaining list giving various denominational and theological views on when and if shit happens. Here’s a few contributions of my own, this time based on theologians:
Karl Barth: “Jesus Christ is the center and circumfrence of all the shit that happens.”
Hans Urs von Balthasar: “The ‘unholy distance’ of shit happening is transposed into the infinite depths of the Triune relations which cannot be conceived as shit-happeninglessnes, but rather a ‘super-shit-happening’.”
Wolfhart Pannenberg: “Shit happens as a propleptic anticipation of the Future happening of all shit.”
Jürgen Moltmann: “In the cry of dereliction, the Father bears the pain of the shit which happens to the Son in the Spirit of the cross.”
Colin Gunton: “To have shit happen to you is to be a person constituted by the shit which happens to other persons.”
Dietrich Bonhoeffer: “Our struggle today is for the happening of costly shit.”
Henri de Lubac: “There is no such thing as ‘pure’ shit happening.”
N.T. Wright: “We cannot understand how shit happens unless we understand Israel’s covenantal worldview.”
Stanley Hauerwas: “Fuck all this shit that’s happening, I’m a pacifist!”
Thomas Torrance: “The shit that happens in Christ is happens for us and in our place, thus we are not thrown back upon ourselves to make shit happen, but are upheld by the Spirit in the vicarious shit which happens in Christ.”
Robert Jenson: “The Spirit is the liveliness of God’s shit happening, which is just another way of saying ‘death and resurrection’.”
John Webster: “We cannot partipate in, extend, or realize the shit which happens in Christ.”
Eberhard Jüngel: “We must learn to think God in union with shit happening.”
Rudolph Bultmann: “Anyone who turns on a light switch or a radio today cannot believe in the mythical world of shit happening.”
Augustine: “Our hearts are restless until shit happens to them in you.”
David Bentley Hart: “God’s being subsists in the luminousitious plenitude of infinite ardorous Trinitarian life and as such – as Pseudo-Denys has most biblically and radically taught us, in contrast to the depravities and obscene vitriolic verbosities of Levinas – has always already overcome the happening of all shit and is immune from the experience of God’s being suffering the happening of any shit whatsoever – and any who would dispute this are sadly delluded by the rancourous, drab, and depressingly tragic theology of Hegel who woefully entangles the apatheia of God in the pathos of the world.”
John Milbank: “Only Christianity is able to stop ontological shit from happening and keep the world from descending into shitty nihilism.”
Anselm: “God is the being greater than which no shit can be conceived to happen.”
Pope Benedict XVI: “We have always taught the same thing about shit happening.”
One of the problems of Christology and theology proper that still is something of a conundrum in theological thought is the issue of the passibility or impassibility of God. Often the discussions of this point degenerate into one of two syllogisms, neither of which I take to be particularly helpful. Either it is:
P1: Christ Suffers
P2: Christ is God
C: Therefore, God suffers
Or:
P1: God is impassible
P2: Christ has a divine and human nature
P3: Christ suffered
C: Therefore, Christ suffered only in his humanity
Now admittedly, the first of these two syllogisms seems more coherent to me. I have always had problems with the idea that a “nature” could suffer in Christ and not his whole person. Suffering is something that happens to persons, not properties of persons and as such we either have to say that the person of Jesus Christ who is the Trinitarian Son of God suffered or didn’t suffer.
However, I want to think about the statement “Christ suffered in his humanity” a bit more. If what is meant by that is that the Godhead did not take the fullness of fallen humanity into itself, fully experiencing the conditions of sin, death, and fallenness, then surely we must be full-blown theopaschitists. The unassummed is the unhealed and our salvation hangs on the reality of Christ taking on the fullness of the human condition and subjecting himself to the fullness of human fallenness and sin.
But, if what is meant by the phrase “Christ suffered in his humanity” is that the person of Christ suffered in this particular human form by virtue of his assumption of humanity in the economy of salvation, then I would not have much of a problem with it. If what we are asserting in saying that the suffering of Christ is particular to his humanity that the suffering of the person of Christ is grounded in the assumptio carnis, then it is correct. Christ suffers in his act of taking on fallen human flesh and submitting himself to death.
However, what we cannot say is that only “part” of Christ suffers. The moment we say that, we become more Nestorian than Nestorius probably ever was. Christ’s humanity and divinity cannot ever become separate centers of consciousness or subjects of action or else we have two Christs. So, then does that leave me guilty of the heresy of theopaschitism? If theopaschitism means that the Triune God is affected by his involvement with the world, then fine, sign me up for that heresy! If, however theopaschitism means that God is the subject of our action, that he is at the mercy of the forces of history, being determined by our action upon him, then surely it is indeed heretical. It is this heresy that the doctrine of impassibility was designed to combat. The trajectory of the doctrine of impassibility is to maintain the inexhaustibility and overabundant dynamism of the Triune life, which can never be overcome or sublimated by a force outside of itself. While classical thought (neoplatonic or otherwise) certainly had a hand in determining the Christian idea of impassibility in the patristic church, the impetus behind the doctrine was thoroughly biblical and trinitarian. The point of the doctrine of impassibility is to say that God’s Triune life is inexhaustible and as such cannot be delimited or brought into forcible subjection by any created pathos.
The solution to the problem of impassibility is not to posit God as either passion-less (neoplatonism) or pathically determined by the world (Hegelianism). Rather, it is to see that the passion of God is infinitely deeper than the pathos which the world would seek to impose on God in Christ. The being of God is an ocean of infinite love between persons who are infinitely distinct from each other. If this is the case, then the “unholy distance” of sin can be transposed into the “holy distances” of the Triune life in such a way that God does indeed experience “suffering” without ever “changing”. Because God’s being is in becoming, the pathos visited upon him in Christ’s suffering, death, and descent into hell are always-already enfolded into the overabundant passion of infinite Triune love.
God is impassible in that there is no abyss deeper than the abyss of God’s love. He is able to take every difference and distance into himself without it ever plumbing the infinite depths of the overabundant Triune love. Thus, to say God is impassible is not to say that he does not suffer in Christ, but rather to say that no suffering visited upon God in Christ can overcome or outdistance the infinite love of God which consumes all suffering in the ardor of the trinitarian super-passion.
While I don’t yet have a definition of the ecclesiality of the church, I do think that any definition of the church’s ecclesiality must include at least six marks. For a given community to be a church it must include:
Again let me emphasize that ecclesiality is the bare minimum of what makes a church a church. It is an attempt to define the esse (being) not the bene esse (well-being) of the church.
What other marks do you think should be included in a statment of ecclesiality?
In the last post in the series, I explored the problem of social trinitarianism and the questions it raises regarding the relationship between divine and human personhood. As was shown there, the proper starting point for considering the relationship between divine and human personhood is not in the search for a concept of personhood but rather in understanding divine and human personhood on the basis of the history of Jesus and the assumptio carnis. The proper theological basis for exploring the nature of personhood, human and divine is not in seeking out basic analogies between divinity and humanity, but rather by fixating all of our attention on the One who is the analogy between God and humanity, the one mediator between heaven and earth, Jesus Christ.
In finding the basis for our understanding of human personhood in Christ, we are compelled to understand the nature of human being in relation to God as that relation is actualized in Christ. In Christ divinity and humanity are united in perfect, non-competitive symphony in which the radical difference between God and humanity becomes the occasion for their communion. Thus, our ontology of human personhood is grounded exclusively in the incarnational movement of God’s eternal Triune life to take on human flesh in Christ. That is to say, we come to know and experience the fullness of human personhood in and through the theodramatic mission of the Son who takes on human flesh, bringing humanity into the Triune life.
The analogy between God and humanity is none other than the person of the Mediator between God and humanity. Jesus Christ, the one who became flesh in the economy of salvation is in his own person and mission the ground and apex of the proper theological understanding of human personhood. The analogy or likeness between divine and human personhood is anything but a creational given. Rather it is an eschatological gift that is given in the mediatorial mission of Christ. We become persons in and through his mission from the Father in the Spirit. Thus, to speak theologically of human personhood is to speak at once of the the Triune God’s theodramatic engagement of the world in the mission of Christ and the assumptio carnis in which Christ in his theodramatic mission takes on, redeems and re-creates human personhood in himself.
We thus begin our understanding and experience of personhood, not through the experience of an underlying sameness (be it an analogy of being or a univocity of being) between God and creation. Rather, we discover our personhood in our theodramatic encounter with the sheer otherness of God in Christ. And yet, of course it is not merely a monstrous otherness that terrifies and overwhelmes, but an otherness-in-covenantal relation which God establishes in Christ. The Triune otherness is the otherness of grace which personalises, redeems, and sustains humanity. It is in Christ that the sheer difference between divinity and humanity stand united “without confusion, without change, without division, without separation” as the definition of Chalcedon stated. In Chalcedonian perspective, all our knowledge of God is given precisely through the sheer difference of Christ from us, in that he is not merely “same” (human), but irreducibly “other” (divine). However, the genius of Chalcedon is its recognition that in Christ we see that sameness and difference coexist in perfect, non-competitive union, and only in its light do we have knowledge of God. A properly christocentric and theodramatic ontology of personhood demands that we view difference, and archetypally, the difference between God and creation as the arena in which non-competitive, salvific communion is established between humanity and God in Christ. What we are confronted with here is a gospel-ontology, a story of being that takes its shape fundamentally from the theodramtic mission of Christ. For a Christian, our story of being must be nothing other than the story of the death and resurrection of Christ. Soteriology is ontology.
In contrast to a gospel-ontology, an essentialist ontology (which finds its continuation in some forms of social and anti-soical trinitarianism) corresponds to a theology of creation, particularly a doctrine of creation in which creation is seen as a cosmos. What exists is fundamentally a “thing” which is what it is by virtue of its internal essence, which is ‘essentially’ timeless and universal, whether that essence be relationality or substantiality. However, in the biblical understanding of creation, what the Triune God creates is not a cosmos, but rather a history. And it is because creation is a history – the history of Jesus – that communion is not only possible, but actualized. If creation is a history, then the only way to formulate a gospel-ontology is to narrate the story of Jesus as the meta-narrative of our own lives. A gospel-ontology, then is to find our personhood as a gift given to us in the theodramtic interchange between God and humanity in history. In a history, what exists is not a static given, rather what exists is what it is in virtue of what it is dynamically becoming in relation to its theodramatic future in the Triune Life. In a history persons shape and form one another as they are drawn toward the end of the story, the dramatic denouement. And if history is ultimately understood correctly as the history of Jesus we can say that in history, persons find their identity, their dramatic coherence in the communion between the Triune God and the world that happens in the history of Christ’s death and resurrection.
Thus, we have our being, not because we possess some essence, even a relationally-defined essence, but because we are included as characters in the dramatic history of Jesus Christ. For Christians, the narrative of Christ is our ontology. Our being exists ekstatically – outside ourselves — precisely in Christ’s concrete history. In Christ, ontology and history are not just united, they are one and the same thing, in perfect non-violent, non-competitive harmony. Our be-ing takes place insofar as the history of Christ incorporates us into its movement, that is into the story of Christ’s love which is just another way of saying ‘death and resurrection’. Insofar as we are drawn by the Spirit to participate in the history of Jesus, we come to be. We come to be precisely as participants in the Christ-history, which is the ultimate story of being, createdness, and salvation. The end of that history, the end of our story of being is thus, not violence or fear, but peace, feasting and joy. The other, the different, which to an essentialist could only be a source of fear and danger, is in the gospel-ontology, pure gift. “Perfect love casts out all fear.” Thus, in a gospel-ontology, we are driven to say the following when we tell our story of being: “To be is to be a part of the drama of the love of God, which is identical with Jesus’ death and resurrection.” To be a person in Christ is to live inside the narrative of God’s drama.
I’m going to be synthesizing my own statement about the ecclesiality of the church (what makes the church the church) soon. However in the meantime, here is what Miroslav Volf says in his book After Our Likeness on this topic:
Every congregation that assembles around the one Jesus Christ as Savior and Lord in order to profess faith in him publicly in pluriform fashion, including through baptism and the Lord’s Supper, and which is open to all churches of God and to all human beings, is a church in the fullest sense of the word, since Christ promised to be present in it through his Spirit as the first fruits of the gathering of the whole people of God in the eschatological reign of God.
So for Volf, in order for a given assembly to be a church it must have the following marks:
What do we think of this? What is missing here that should be here? Or is this a proper summary of ecclesiality?
It is certainly no secret that Protestants have had little theological use for Mary, while Roman Catholics have found her to be so central to the mystery of our salvation that many evangelicals have accused them of making her into a goddess. Personally, I find such a charge to be bogus and quite sad. Mary is one of the most praised individuals in the New Testament, and is one of only three humans to be named in the creed (the other two being Jesus and Pilate). As any good Catholic theologian will tell you, Mariology is only Christology done in its fullness. Protestants miss out on a central theological resource and rich aspect of the Christian tradition insofar as they ignore the person of Mary and deny her any theological and moral significance.
One of the main areas of theology in which the person and life of Mary has great theological import is in ecclesiology. Luke’s gospel in particular gives us some glimpses of Mary that help us to see how she is prototypical and archetypical for our understanding of the nature of the church. The first and most central statement regarding Mary in the gospels is her response to the angel who announced Jesus’ birth by her:
Then Mary said, “Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word.” (Lk. 1:37)
This is the Marian fiat, her receptive, passive ‘Yes’ to God’s Word. Ironically enough, while Protestants have accused Roman Catholics of not maintaining the purely gratuitous nature of God’s work of justifying grace before which we are wholly passive recipients of divine justification, at the heart of Catholic ecclesiology is this fundamental Marian passivity. The essence of the church lies in standing before the Word of God as Mary did and simply receiving it with the receptive affirmation of a servant who in and of themselves contribute nothing to the divine miracle, and yet by grace comes to be a bearer of that miracle. The Marian fiat is the central mode of right human response to God, of Spirit-created passivity and receptivity to the divine act pro nobis. The essence of the church is to do nothing more than to hear the Word of God and respond with the passive fidelity of “let it be to me according to your Word.” The Marian church is the church is the passive recipient of divine grace who stands before God in essential poverty.
The second statement about Mary that I take to be ecclesiologically central is the account of her contemplative engagement with the events in the life of her son, Jesus:
But Mary treasured all these words and pondered them in her heart. (Lk. 2:19)
At the heart of Mary’s relationship to Christ lies her observation at a distance of the divine events that his life mediates to the world upon which she can only meditate and ponder. The life of Mary is spent in treasuring up the story of Jesus, considering it and remembering it. Mary is the prototype of the church here in that the Marian church exists by its remembrance and contemplation of the story of Jesus. As Eberhard Jüngel says, the church is “institution of narration” which has its being only in that it “retell[s] the dangerous story of God” (GMW, 312). The Marian church is the contemplative ponderer and rememberer of the story of Jesus’ life. The church is the church, because it after the pattern of the Marian prototype lives by dwelling on the reality of Jesus’ and remembering his works. The Marian church is the church who is centered on Christological memory, narration, and re-narration.
The final point I want to make from Luke about a Marian ecclesiology is that a Marian ecclesiology is at once centered on doxology and as such is politically radical:
And Mary said, “My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior, for he has looked with favor on the lowliness of his servant. Surely, from now on all generations will call me blessed; for the Mighty One has done great things for me, and holy is his name. His mercy is for those who fear him from generation to generation. He has shown strength with his arm; he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts. He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly; he has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty. He has helped his servant Israel, in remembrance of his mercy, according to the promise he made to our ancestors, to Abraham and to his descendants forever.” (Lk. 1:46-55)
The Marian church receives the Word of God in receptive passivity, it indwells that Word, pondering, remembering, and retelling it, and finally the Marian church responds in the uninhibited outcry of doxology and subversive hope. In light of how the church receives the work of God in its own person, the church can do nothing buy proclaim soli deo gloria. The reception of divine grace, the remembering and retelling of the story of Jesus all have their culmination in the event of overabundant doxological joy. And this joy is by no means the sentimental giddiness of foolish children, rather it is the passionate, prophetic joy of a people who proclaim that the one God has liberated the world through Jesus Christ and thus, all those who pretend at sovereignty have been dethroned.
The Marian church, by virtue of its radical openness toward the invasion of divine justice and life into the world demythologizes, destabilizes, and proclaims the end to all demonic regimes of power and oppression. The Marian church, who lives in passive receptivity and contemplative memory, is likewise the church of radical doxology and radical politics. The church, like Mary knows the truth about the way the world is being redeemed by God and as such finds herself living always and only the realm of the sovereign kingdom of God. To be the passive recipient of divine justification and the contemplative rememberer of the person and work of Jesus is to be transformed into a church of doxological radicalism whose devotion to the Triune God breaks her away from all other rules and authorities. The Marian church is in the end the church who worships God alone and stands opposed to all idolatrous rulers and powers.
Amongst self-proclaimed “postmodern” interpreters of Scripture today there is something fashionable about the assertion (usually in writing, ironically enough) that there is no stable meaning in texts. While there is certainly something to the claim that the meaning of texts cannot be completely determinate, the claim to a total indeterminacy of textual meaning seems ludicrous to me for the following reason: Books are extremely dangerous things in our political world. Why has every oppressive regime in history in one way or another regulated and controlled literary media and expression if texts do not exert and impress thoughts that may run contrary to social opinion and upset the status quo? Texts are dangerous because precisely because they do in fact stand outside of “the way things are” and in the form of prophetic critique can and have changed the face of the world.
In light of the recent document promulgated by the Catholic church on the non-ecclesiality of protestant churches, I have started thinking about what exactly is it that makes the church? What must be present for the church to be present? For the Catholic and Orthodox communions, it is clearly apostolic sucession that is the constitutive element of the church (the difference between the two of them being Papal primacy). For protestants, though? I’m working on formulating a proposal myself, but first I wanted to see people take a crack at answering the question themselves. So, what in your view constitutes the church? When is a gathering of Christians truly a church?
There have been numerous discussions around the blogs of late regarding the authority, inspiration, infallibility, and inerrancy of Scripture. I’ve weighed in on plenty of those, but what I really am interested in is constructive theological reflection on a theology of Scripture. This is what I find lacking in so many discussions about the theological nature of the Bible. While the nature of the connection between the biblical text and events to which they refer is incredibly important, it is not by any means the only subject to which a Christian should attend in their attempt to theologically understand the nature of the Bible
In wanting to contribute to that end, I would like to reflect on what it might mean to think of Scripture in a sacramental way. The idea of a sacrament is utterly complex and contested, but I think most Christians can agree that a central aspect of what makes a sacrament is the fact in some way a sacrament mediates the presence of the Triune God. Two aspects are central here, first sacraments are God’s mediated presence. Second, sacraments are God’s mediated presence. The sacraments are in fact a modality of divine action whereby God makes himself present in a way that is mediate rather than im-mediate. As such sacraments are always God’s mode of being present-in-absence.
While churches stemming from the Reformation have always held that it was “Word and Sacrament” which constitutes the church, we shouldn’t take this to mean that the word of God mediated in the Scriptures is fundamentally different than the sacraments. The word of God encountered in Scripture is profoundly sacramental in that it is in and through the viva vox dei which speaks therein that we are confronted with the continuing presence of the ascended Christ. The Spirit, speaking through the Scriptures actually makes Christ present when those Scriptures are read. This is what it means when we say that the Bible ‘becomes’ the word of God. In the reading of the Scriptures, the Spirit mediates the very presence of Christ, the One to whom the Scriptures bear witness. The Bible becomes the word of God when it is read and the presence of Christ is experienced anew by the community of disciples.
Scripture is not, properly speaking the codification of “God’s word” or a narrative of human responses to God in history, though both of these concepts of Scripture are partly right. Rather, Scripture is a mode of God’s sacramental presence to his people through Christ in the Spirit. What is remarkable about this understanding of the Scriptures is the manner in which is holds together the historical and existential. The presence of Christ which is sacramentally mediated by the Spirit through the reading of the scriptures is the same Christ who is witnessed to in the historical narratives of the Bible. The sacramentally mediated Christus praesens (the present Christ) is none other than the man from Nazareth whose story is told in the Bible. A sacramental-historial theology of Scripture neither collapses Jesus into our existential encounter with God nor historicizes Jesus within an inerrant historical account from the past. Rather, the historical and the existential coinhere as the Spirit sacramentally mediates to the church the very same Christ whose story is told in the narrative of Scripture.
I submit that this sacramental-historical view of Scripture is a higher view of Scripture than the liberal view of the Bible as a collection of human experiences of the divine or the fundamentalist view of the Bible as the inerrant codification of God’s words. To understand Scripture as a sacrament is to recognizes its role in the Triune economy of salvation as a medium of God’s presence whereby we are brought, through the Spirit to be re-membered into the history of Jesus and thus to participate in the Triune life. A view such as this recognizes that we cannot countence a formalized notion of the Scriptures, but rather must encounter and understand them as the community of faith which has its being in the economy of the Triune God’s providential and gracious action in creation and redemption.
In human experience there is clearly a tension between the desire for another and the self-emptying donation of yourself for the sake of another. Often it seems that we either have to be selfish bastards to realize our desire to be with another person (ekstasis) or we have to constantly let ourselves get screwed in the process of giving of ourselves for the sake of others (kenosis). I say that the only possibility for love being an integrated reality in our lives hangs on the fact that God is Triune, which is to say that the Father raised Jesus from the dead in the Spirit of resurrection. If Jesus has been raised than the conflict between ekstatic desire and kenotic self-dispossession is no longer ultimately determinative. In Christ death through self-dispossession no longer means the termination of the ekstatic experience of the most sublimely erotic communion with God and one another. Because God is the God who loves to the point of death and then loves again.
A recent statement released by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith of the Catholic Church reasserted a somewhat conseravtive interpretation of Vatican II’s decree on the Church and ecumenism (Lumen Gentium and Unitatis redintegratio respectively). Essentially, the docment just released states the following five points:
Although these statements aren’t really much of a change from the offical posture taken by the Catholic church since Vatican II, I still find it a bit ecumenically discouraging. I would certainly admit that Protestant and Eastern Orthodox churches are marred and lack the “fullness of communion” without standing in communion with the Roman Catholic church. However, the day I await is when the Catholic church is able to say that they are likewise marred for their lack of communion with Protestant and Orthodox Christians. We all need each other and no Christian tradition should claim ecclesiastical perfection and fullness. But that’s just one sectarian Protestant’s opinion, I guess.
Liturgy is not otherworldly in any way. In fact, it is the most worldly activity a person can do, and people are, in fact doing liturgy all the time. Just go to a shopping mall sometime and you’ll see. What makes Christian liturgy unique (regardless of particular tradition) is that Christian liturgy is the communal enactment of another way of doing world. In liturgy we do everything that is entailed in social life: gathering together, greeting one another, listening to one another, speaking, singing, eating, praying (yes, everyone does this), celebrating, sharing, etc. However, in Christian liturgy the Christian community engages in a radical act of performing ‘the world’ in a new key, transposed if you will from the service of idols, to the service of the Triune God. Liturgy is the ‘worlding’ of the truth about God: that there is a new creation and therefore a new world exists in which we can live and thrive.
Any attempt at dogmatics which describes itself as ‘radical trinitarianism’ must certainly address the nature and significance of the recent popularity of the so-called “social trinity”. Any attempt to ultimately adjudicate the debate between social trinitarians and their detractors is certainly naive. There are and always will be controversies over how to properly describe the relationship between the Triune persons and created persons. The one thing that we do know is that any discussion of divine and human personhood belongs together. The reality of Jesus as the Trinitarian Son forever and inalienably forces the question of the nature of divine and human ‘personhood’ into one form of dogmatic inquiry. This is simply good Christology. Because God has become human in Jesus Christ, and because this man, Jesus reconciles the world to God through death and resurrection, we can never consider what human personhood might mean except in reference to Jesus. Since Jesus is the Trinitarian Son of the Father in the Spirit, divine and human personhood are forever bound together in him.
Social trinitarians have taken note of this and have sought, as much as possible to understand the reality of the Trinity on the basis of continuity between divine and human personhood and divine and human relationally. Thinkers like Jürgen Moltmann, Leonardo Boff, Catherine Mowry LaCugna, Miroslav Volf and others have found in the Trinity the perfect model for understanding human personhood and the proper shape of human social and political relationships. Colin Gunton (a somewhat ambigiously social trinitarian) even goes so far as to state that when we call the Triune hypostases and humans ‘persons’ the term functions univocally. For many social trinitarians human persons, though obviously not divine, are clearly created in the image of the Triune shape of personality.
There are many legitimate questions to ask of a perspective such as this. Does a strong vision of continuity between divine and human personhood allow for a proper understanding of divine transcendence? What political realities really result from modeling our social relations on the Trinity? Isn’t the Son eternally subordinate to the Father? Can conceiving of the Triune persons in continuity with human persons really establish the Triune God as one? These questions are all important, and different social trinitarians are, I think differently challenged when pressed with them. I will not be exploring these questions here, for what I hope to accomplish is to clarify a few points about the nature of the questions at work and then to offer a ‘radically trinitarian’ via media.
The first observation I would put forward is that there are radically varying levels of sophistication amongst theologians who would either self-apply or have been nominated as social trinitarians. While thinkers like Boff and Moltmann have been much more fast and loose with their trinitarian analogies and conclusions, others such as Miroslav Volf and Colin Gunton have been much more careful and precise about how they see the continuities and discontinuities between divine and human persons. Any critique of social trinitarianism must do the hard work of taking this into account.
Now, the baseline for a radically trinitarian perspective on the relationship between divine and human personhood must certainly be, as hinted above, the reality of the incarnate Christ. There is no other analogy between God and man than the reality of Christ, the God-human. What is revealed and thus actualized in Christ is divine-human communion. In Christ human and divine personhood exist in intimate koinonial communion without dissolving the distinction and fundamental difference between the Creator and the creature. What is central in rightly construing the relationship between divine and human personhood is not a conceptual consideration of ’personhood’ at all. Rather, any and all understandings of personhood must be constituted by finding ourselves within the narrative of Christ, which is the story of God’s identity and the identity of humankind as God’s creation and covenant-partner.
The problem with social trinitarianism, fundamentally (and here, I think more centrally of the ‘fast and loose’ thinkers noted above) is that it begins with the search for a concept of personhood (e.g. “to be a distinct particular in relation”) which can apply to God and humans and facilitate proper political and social ends. Now surely all God-talk is political, but we fail to be truly theopolitical in our theology when we begin with a political agenda other than that of God in Christ. The fundamental question about the relationship between divine and human personhood is not whether they are analogous, but rather that given that in Christ God has reconciled us to himself and one another, how then must we understand ourselves as persons?
A radical trinitarian approach to the question of divine and human personhood must begin and end with the reality of enfleshed Word who is identical with the eternal Word. In Jesus Christ we certainly do see that God has become one with us without competition or loss to his Godness. Divine and human personhood are not negations of one another, because Jesus is the eternal Trinitarian Son. Our human personhood has its ultimate home in the Triune relations – but only by virtue of our covenantal adoption in the Spirit into Christ’s relationship with the Father. We live in a graced union with God in which we are ontologically constituted as new creatures by virtue of our covenantal incorporation into Christ. Our being, our personhood is not our possession, but rather the gift of God’s gracious election of all humanity in Christ.
Our personhood is ultimately not realized in bearing the image of the Trinity, abstractly conceived as a circle of pure relational bliss (the social trinity) or perfect self-contemplation (the psychological trinity). Our end as persons is to bear the image of Christ through union with him by the Spirit of the Father and Son. Our personhood is not so much an echo of the Trinity as a non-necessary and gratuitous intonation of the Trinitarian discourse. We exist as non-necessary persons whose being is sustained and upheld by virtue of being included in the Triune conversation which is the being of the One God. In Christ, the One God speaks to us and in so doing, brings us into the circle of speech and response that is the Triune discourse of infinite koinonia. It is this primal koinonia which at once supervenes on and sustains the human koinonia of the body of Christ which is constituted by the Spirit.
To sum up in a different way, the methodological and theological problems of social trinitarianism seem to be avoidable, not simply through an assertion of divine transcendence or divine unity abstractly conceived, but rather in relocating the discussion of the relationship between divine and human personhood. The proper locus for such a discussion is in the self-revelation of God in the incarnate Christ. The reality that is disclosed therein is not, per se that human persons “image” divine persons in some innate sense, but rather that human persons realize their personhood in and through the communion between divinity and humanity actualized in the incarnate Son. The realism of divine-human communion in Christ establishes that divine and human personhood exist in actualized state of noncompetitive symphony in which the infinite difference between Creator and creature is enfolded within the musical intervals of the Triune life. God’s being as Trinity is so infinitely complex that the difference between God and humanity is in fact taken into God and is thus transposed into a new key. No longer is the discontinuity between divinity and humanity an inhibition to ontic and ontological communion, rather in Christ, the very difference between Creator and creation becomes the occasion for that communion.
It is in light of this incarnational and covenantal theology of humanity’s incorporation into the Triune life that we are able to rightly speak of how human persons come to bear the likeness of the Triune communion. By being transformed through the Spirit into the likeness of the Son through union with him, we are brought into the relationship of the Son and Father. As such, our relations with one another acquire, through the sanctifying work of the Spirit, the character of Christ’s relationship to us, for, given the assumptio carnis, we always and only encounter one another through the mediation of Christ. Likewise our relationship with God acquires the character Christ’s own relationship to the Father, for that is the very relationship into which we are incorporated through the Spirit, now calling out “abba Father” as Christ’s sisters and brothers(Rom. 8:15). Thus, we are able to affirm Christ’s prayer that we may be one as he and the Father are one (Jn. 17:33), not because of a theology of generic continuity between divine and human personhood, but because of the gracious act of God in Christ whereby our very difference from God is transposed into the occasion for our communion with him and one another.
We do indeed bear the image of the Trinity in and through the assumption of our humanity in Christ. The imago trinitatis is always and only the imago Christi. We become persons in Christ through the atonement which he has actualized in his life, death, and resurrection. As such, we are covenantally adopted into the Father’s house and organically joined to Christ’s body by the Spirit, thereby partaking of God’s own life which is the history of Jesus Christ. And this is the gospel, not that we inherently resemble God’s personhood, but rather that in our very difference from God, even in the wicked difference of sin, we are rapt in Christ, our humanity enfolded into God. And as such we live in Triune communion, which is to say that we are persons because we participate in the history of Jesus in whom the Triune God embraces the world.
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