Category Archives: Trinitarianism

The false glory of John Piper’s god

Posted by on January 16, 2012 23 comments

Recently I was asked (by Kait Dugan, check out her blog) about how John Piper (check out this video for some context), about whose perverse theology I’ve written about previously, manages to come to understand God’s glory as a sort of self-directed hegemonic tyranny. What are the theological moves that lead one to come to think “the glory of God” in terms of chauvinistic self-aggrandisement? Why would one come to conceive God as a self-directed center of power whose “glory” consisted of simply asserting and impose his own supremacy and domination?

My first instinct in responding to this question is to point out that it really isn’t as much of a formally (and that word is the key qualifier here) theological issue as it is fundamentally an issue of gender and power. Piper interprets God as a self-directed man, concerned ultimately which the maximization of his own power (which is of course “good” because this one particular male really is supreme and thus deserves and warrants this rigorous self-fixation). I think it really is just the upshot of thinking God according to the logic of patriarchy.

If there is a theological reason for it, I’d have to say that it is the functional (though not acknowledged or admitted) rejection of the doctrine of the Trinity. The doctrine of the Trinity speaks of a God that does not seek the maximization of any singular self or, but rather of a united yet multidirectional and primordially other-directed love. The God who is Triune never is concerned with “himself.” Rather “the Father loves the Son and has given all things into his hand” and the Son has come “not to my will but the will of him who sent me” and the Spirit “will not speak on his own, but will speak whatever he hears.”

The Triune God is never concerned with the maximization of a “self” since God is not a self, but rather a singular reality of three identities (to borrow some language from Robert Jenson). No identity of the Trinity seeks their own, but always and only seeks the maximization of the other(s). Thus the Son offers up the kingdom to the Father and the Father places everything in subjection to the Son and so on. The glory of the Triune God is thus the glory of an othering that seeks only to empower, never to claim power for one’s own. Piper’s nontrinitarian theology of self-directed glory is the denial and opposite of this. Indeed the “glory” that he proclaims is nothing less than the projection onto God (at the expense of the witness of the Cross) of patriarchal, homicidal power, the power of sin and death. This is the “glory of God” that he so adores.

Re-viewing perichoresis

Posted by on October 13, 2010 29 comments

In an essay in the forthcoming book, The Great Tradition–A Great Labor, Edith Humphrey makes some interesting comments about the nature of the much-mentioned term in trinitarian theology, perichoresis:

Contrary to the common wisdom, the term perichōrēsis does not come from the root noun chōros (meaning “chorus,” as in Greek tragedy, or “dance”) but from chōra (meaning “place”). Perichōrēsis therefore means “going around and beyond one’s place” or “making room for.” The word refers to the reciprocity, alternation and interpenetration of the Persons of the Trinity. It was not meant to evoke anything so frivolous as a democratic round-dance, but is used to describe the great mystery by which Persons of the holy Trinity occupy the same “space,” yet are “near and towards” each other, in their distinctness. So the talk that we hear in some places about the “dance of the Trinity,” and our entering blithely into that dance, is mistaken.

Interesting stuff, though I’m sure there would be some who would debate the etymology. Regardless, though, it seems to me that Humphrey’s characterization certainly has more theological merit.

A people created by the Trinity

Posted by on February 20, 2010 Comments Off

For Harink, the church is what is — an elect, exilic community in diaspora – because of the radical action of the whole Trinity. Thus he translates 2 Pet 1:2:

To the elect exiles of the Diaspora . . . according to [kata] the foreknowledge of God the Father, in [en] the sanctification of the Spirit, because of [eis] the obedience and blood-sprinkling of Jesus Christ.

The church has its being then, precisely and only because of the Trinitarian act of foreknowing, sanctifying, and justifying which the Father, Son, and Spirit undertake together.

Sacraments, Mission, and Divine Action, ctd.

Posted by on January 30, 2010 18 comments

This is actually a repost of something I wrote over a year ago. In light of recent conversations we’ve been having here, I thought it might be useful. I’ve modified it a bit from the original version to express things better.

By virtue of the church’s union with Christ (the totus Christus), the base-practices of the church—Baptism, Eucharist, the preached Word—which were instituted by Christ in his incarnation bear witness to and proleptically share in the apocalyptic promise of the final communio of the Triune God and the created world. The sacramental practices of the church participate in the christic and pneumatic dynamism of the immanent triune life which is the promised transfiguration of the world in Christ. The sacramental base-practices of the church, rightly understood, bear witness to, and by God’s grace manifest the form and splendor of the inter-trinitarian love translated into the life of humanity through the missional action of the Son and Spirit. In baptism a person is drawn into the circle of triune love, which embraces, heals, and captivates the brokenness of sinful humanity. Through baptism the Spirit unites the believer with Christ, drawing her into the communion of the Trinity, of which the church is a sign and sacrament. Likewise, through the Eucharist, the members of the body of Christ are gathered together by the Spirit in the peace that has been wrought by word of the cross which makes all things one. In the Eucharist the one loaf is consumed by the one body thereby assuming the members together into a truly united, truly catholic ekklesia.

The Word and sacraments are at once a witness to the divine verbum externum (vera visibli) and the sign of the gratuitous unio mystica. They testify to and participate in the sovereign work of God extra nos and simultaneously the divine condescension en nobis. Thus, the church bears witness to and corresponds to Christ because as his body she is united with him by the Spirit, thus being given to participate in the triune life of God. The church and Christ exist as one body in the communion of the Spirit, intimately connected, yet utterly distinct. Therefore, through the sacramental base-practices of the church, the Spirit continually actualizes the reality of divine-human communion in the church which is constantly being transfigured–indeed revolutionized–through the depths of the triune love poured out therein. The sacramental mediation of the church is in a sense an extension of the soteriological mediation of the Son, but the church is only that extension in the mode of pathos, of receptivity, humility, and poverty before the sheer gratuity of God’s action pro nobis in the cross and resurrection of Chist. Thus, the expansive and ubiquitous outpouring of the pneumatic love of God draws the entire creation into the communio, of which the church is a sign, such that in the eschaton all things are found within the infinite agape that is the Trinity.

The church then, in its practice of the Word and sacraments, participates in and recieves the movement of the Trinity into the world. Not in any way because of what she is in herself, for in herself she is nothing. Rather the church’s particiaption in the trinitarian work is wholly due to the gracious outpouring of the love of God by the Holy Spirit which enflames, enlivens, dissolves, and makes new, thus drawing the church into the apocalyptic movement of God into the world. God’s saving action in the world is not static, but gratuitous and infinitely expansive, intruding upon, interrupting, and transfiguring the world of sin and alienation. Thus, through Christ and the Spirit the triune Lord “makes room” for the church within God’s action for the salvation of the world, precisely as humble recipients who praise and witness to Jesus. God’s outpouring of love allows us at once participation in God’s trinitarian mission (which is God’s own eternal life) to drawn all persons into sacramental, spousal communion with God. The ecclesial communion is a sign, anticipation, and sacrament of this divine  promise and base-practices of the church are our fundamental modes of giving ourselves over to God in prayerful anticipation and joy.

Trinity and Passibility

Posted by on December 15, 2009 6 comments

Peter Leithart has an argument about the whole question of divine impassibility versus divine suffering that I think has some promise:

1) God is “pure act,” never unrealized, never anything less than wholly Himself.  Yet, within the Triune life, God acts on God.  The Father begets the Son, and in relation to the Father’s begetting, the Son is “passive.”  The Spirit is breathed out by the Father and Son, and in that breathing-out the Spirit is “passive.”  The Father eternally glorifies the Son in the Spirit, and the Son receives that glory, but the Son eternally responds by glorifying the Father through the Spirit, a glory that the Father receives “passively.”  Passibility in the sense of passivity is a dimension of the Triune life.

2) God acts on God in history.  The Father sends the Son, and having received the Spirit from the Father at His ascension, the Son sends the Spirit to us.  As incarnate, the Son does all that He does to glorify the Father, even as the Father glorifies Him.  The Triune life of gift, reception, and response is worked out in God’s work in history.

3) Here’s key point #1: God acts on God in history, using the world to act on God.  The Father sends the Son, who is incarnate by the Spirit; that’s an act of the Father in regard to the Son, but the Father employs the womb of Mary to send the Son in flesh.  The Father glorifies the Son, and part of that glory comes through the work of the Spirit who turns men to praise.  The Father glorifies the Son through creatures; human praise is a means by which the Father glorifies the Son.  Too, the Father offers the Son as a sin offering, but He does that through the mechanism of sinful man who raise wicked hands against the Son.  In all this, the Son is “passible” in both senses of the word: He is passive in relation to creation (the praise and hatred of men) and He suffers.  But this is not ultimately a matter of the Son becoming subject to the creation, or becoming any whit the less Lord in His passibility.  Rather, because the Father is acting on the Son through the creation, the Son’s “passibility” is the same passibility as His eternal passibility before the Father, though that is worked out in the incarnation in the context of a sinful world.

4) Here’s key part #2, the Reformed/Augustinian part: This construction seems to depend on a strong doctrine of divine providence, which includes a strong doctrine of concursus.  All actions of creation are predestined by God, and carried out by God.  The actions of the creatures are most deeply actions of God in creatures.  Thus, again, all of the suffering and passivity of the Persons in history is ultimately God acting on God.  God remains utterly Lord; God is at the same time vulnerable within his creation precisely because He is Lord, because the creation has no independent power of operation but only operates because it is operated upon.

5) This doesn’t remove all the difficulties, of course.  What is going on when Jesus gets hungry?  We can say that this is the Father using the creation to act through His Spirit on the Son, but what kind of action of the Father through the Spirit creates hunger?  Perhaps we could work this out by positing inter-Trinitarian eros, so that the Son’s hunger is the incarnate form of His eternal desire for the life of the Father in the Spirit.

I would add a bit more to this. While the relations of passivity are clearly not identical or symmetrical, the Father also is the recipient of the Son’s action according to the same quality of passivity. The Father receives the kingdom that the Son hands over to him (1 Cor 15:24) and judges no one leaving all judgment to the Son (John 5:22, 27). Thus there is, at the heart of the Trinity, a fundamental dynamic of receptivity and passivity which clearly involves creation being brought into the dynamic insofar as it is taken up into God’s own intertrinitarian action of active gift and passive reception.

Of course, Leithart’s argument runs into the problem of turning the human violence against Christ in the passion into the active violence of the Father himself against the Son. Clearly that issue merits some further investigation. At least.

Trinitarian Asymmetry

Posted by on November 27, 2009 2 comments

Leithart has another great thought-porovoking post on trinitarian theology, this time reflecting on the asymmetry of the trinitarian relations. He concludes with a few reflections:

First, it is the failure to reckon with the asymmetry of the relations that has sent certain forms of social Trinitarianism down a blind alley.  The Trinity is not a modern egalitarian democracy.  The Persons are indeed equal, but asymmetrically so.  Second, and this is equally important, more traditional Trinitarian theologies need the help that social Trinitarianism provides.  At its best, social Trinitarianism has been a plea to take the Personhood of the Persons seriously; it has been a plea for a Scriptural exposition of the ontological life of the Trinity in which the Persons converse together as they do in the gospel story.  Third, the response to Trinity-as-democracy should not be the implicit subordinationism that has infected some traditional Trinitarianism; we don’t need to resort to a unilateral hierarchical Trinity, paternal monarchianism or paternal causality, to avoid the problems of social Trinitarianism.  An asymmetrical account of Triune life takes the pleas of social Trinitarianism seriously, and can get at all the dynamism and personal interactivity that social Trinitarianism wants, without threatening to collapse into tritheism.

The Trinity and Attributes

Posted by on November 4, 2009 44 comments

To continue on the trinitarian theme, let me ruminate on something I’ve thought for a long time. In a typical discussion of the doctrine of the divine attributes most theologians have been careful to say that all three of the divine persons posses all the exact same attributes equally and identically. Thus, the Father is omnipotent, the Son is omnipotent, the Spirit is omnipotent, etc. Some of this impulse is rooted in the affirmations of the Athanasian Creed. Regardless, though there is a general assumption that the divine persons are identical in every way, excpet in regard to their particular relations. Thus the Father is exactly like the Son in every way except that he is the Father, etc.

Now, obviously this approach has some difficulties. Most notable of which is the fact that its been pretty hard to figure out what “Father-ness,” “Sonship,” and “Holy Spiritude” really mean. The best we’ve ever been able to do is talk about eternal generation-type terms like begetting, being begotten, spirating, being spirated, and so on. Of course what those relations mean and how they are different from each other has never really been well-described.

But, what would happen if we didn’t just assume that the divine persons must be identical in every way except for the illusive categories of relations of origin? Why must we assume that the Father, Son, and Spirit must be exactly the same in all of their characteristics in order to be equally and fully divine? Does it not make sense to see them as perhaps quite different in their attributes, but by virtue of their complete, eternally actual indwelling of one another together constituting one divine reality, the Godhead? This would definitely make sense of the scriptural language which routinely speaks of the divine persons in very distinctive terms. Jesus is “the power and wisdom of God”; the Spirit is “the truth”; and so on.

On this reading it is not necessary to jump through hoops to prove how Jesus was omniscient when the gospels pretty clearly show that there was stuff he didn’t know. Equality in deity does not require identicality of attributes between the persons. Only a prior ontological commitment to what has been termed “substance metaphysics” would incline us to assume that it would. Rather it is precisely the differences between the Father, Son, and Spirit, utterly and sublimely united in one eternal divine reality, that constitute the perfections of the Trinity.

Conundrums of Simplicity

Posted by on November 3, 2009 Comments Off

Peter Leithart has two great posts wrestling with some of Augustine’s questions about the nature of the relations within the Trinity and the question of simplicity, particularly his struggles with the biblical affirmation that Christ is “the power of God and the wisdom of God.” Augustine labors mightily to articulate how this can be true if the Father is supposed to have these qualities himself. Leithart throws out one provocative possible solution:

Does the Father have wisdom “in Himself”? Yes, because the Wisdom that is the Son dwells in Him  by the Spirit.  Does the Father possess His being “in Himself”?  Yes, because the Son is the fullness of His deity, and the Son indwells Him through the Spirit.  Vice versa: Does the Son have wisdom considered in Himself?  Yes, because what is “in Himself” is the fact that the Father dwells in Him in the Spirit, so that His existence “in Himself” is His existence as the Son indwelt by the Father.

And so on.

This allows us to speak of Father and Son distinctly; it also makes it clear that the Father is not Himself except as He has and is indwelt by His Son, nor is the Son Himself except as He has and is indwelt the Father.

To me this seems like a necessary critique of any sort of pyramidal trinitarianism like that articulated by John Zizioulas, for example.

On Not Seeking Glory

Posted by on September 22, 2009 14 comments

“I do not seek my own glory” (John 8:5). With these words Jesus set a precedent for all those who claim to follow him. Fundamental to the call to discipleship is the renunciation of seeking to glorify, to magnify, to enhance and promote oneself.

It is often thought that this calling is based on the distinction between God and humanity. God should be glorified, not us. Therefore we refuse to glorify ourselves and instead glorify God. Indeed, aspects of the Reformed tradition insist that God’s whole aim in being involved with the world is to glorify God’s own self. Thus, we glorify God rather than ourselves because God wants to glorify God’s self rather than humanity.

However, this is all entirely wrong. Jesus, according to the Christian confession is God’s very self come among us. Thus, when Jesus reveals that he does not seek his own glory, he is stating something that is not only to be true about us, but preeminently about God’s own life. God’s life consists in the refusal to seek self-glorification. Rather, the life of the Godhead itself consists in the loving mutuality of the trinitarian persons who only seek the glory of one another. Thus, Jesus seeks the glory of the Father rather than his own, and so also the Father seeks to glorify Jesus (John 7:18). Finally, God also fundamentally desires to glorify humanity: “those he justified he also glorified” (Rom 8:30).

So, we do not reject the quest of self-glorfication to somehow “make room” for God’s desire to self-glorify. Rather we reject self-glorification because that’s precisely what God is like. To reject the quest for self-exaltation is, counterintuitively, the very epitome of what it means to be God-like. We don’t reject self-glorification because self-glorification is reserved for God alone. We reject it because self-glorification in any form is demonic.

What is Confession?

Posted by on September 1, 2009 18 comments

One of the interesting things about reading Augustine’s Confessions is the way it makes one reflect on what the practice of confession means in a full theological sense. Clearly Augustine’s act of confessing in his account includes what we normally think of, namely the public admission of sin. However it is clearly much, much more than that for Augustine. All throughout the Confessions the language is saturated with longing, prayer, inquiry, exultation, sorrow, joy, and hope. In short, the language of the Confessions is the language of the pslams, or more generally, of prayer.

Put even more succinctly, for Augustine, confession ultimately is centered in speaking the truth about God and creation in all its dramatic complexity and contingency. “Confession” means something like profession of the fullness of our faith, proclamation of the gospel in all its dimensions. Confession is the passionate commitment to speak the truth in all its beauty in the face of our own manifest slavery and contradiction. However for Augustine this task is not one of sheer moral resolve, let alone humiliation, rather it is an exercise of joy in God.

To boil it all down, confession must ultimately be seen as the articulation of our own doxological transformation. In confession we recount how we have been and continue to be caught up into God’s radical love which draws us away from sin and futility and towards the fullness of life and joy in sharing in the triune life. In short, confession is doxology. In confession we are drawn to speak (or sing) the truth of God’s intrusion into our lives of sin and slavery out of the excess of the joy that comes from knowing God and knowing ourselves and our neighbors in God.

Confession is not a difficult moral duty. Rather it is an exercise of doxological delight in the beauty of how God has seized in Christ and through the Spirit given us a share in the very life of the Trinity.

The Power of God

Posted by on August 25, 2009 21 comments

In regard to understanding the nature of God’s power, a subject that is much misunderstood and contended over in theological discourse I have found no one as helpful as Arthur McGill. McGill’s book, Suffering: A Test of Theological Method is one of the most under-read books out there. I strongly suggest that everyone get a copy (and a copy of his other book, Death and Life: An American Theology).

In light of recent discussions I think it is worthwhile to quote extensively from McGill on the issue of God’s power. I’ve yet to find another treatment of this issue that puts everything quite as well as McGill does:

It is possible to speak of “evil” as that which contradicts the good of man. But for the Christian life it is not man but God who determines what evil is. The Bible therefore speaks of evil as that which opposes God’s will, or as that which mocks God’s power, or as that which abuses God’s goodness. If God within himself is an eternal interchange of self-giving between the Father and the Son, we must now try to see why acts that are designed to hurt and cause suffering are essentially evil. It is obvious that such acts contradict the good of man when man is a victim of suffering. but in what sense do they also stand opposed to God?

Violent suffering is the product of excessive power. It shows that one thing is able to dispose of something else, is able to break it and shatter it. It represents, therefore, the decisive way by which any agent can prove that it has power over another thing. If God had no character of his own but were simply the bearer of any and every sort of power, if he acted always to vindicate himself at the expense of other things and n that sense were the absolute intensification of all power, then he would have to be honored as the supreme agent of violence. Then all torturing and degradation, all action by which one creature uses his superior power to exploit the weakness of others and to subject them to his control and domination would be an expression of God’s kind of power.

But by his life and teachings, Jesus makes perfectly clear that the divinity active through him is not Absolute Power. That divinity is not a potentially tyrannical force that might just do anything at all, such as produce square circles or smash the world to pieces. Within himself God is the life and power and energy whereby the Father generates the Son as his perfect equal in all regards and the Son adores the Father as his perfect in all regards. Therefore, in his outward actions toward his creatures, God does not act by some other kind of life or power. The energy that informs all his dealings with men is the energy of his own being.

Thus, when God moves toward his creatures, he does not exercise his powerfulness by subjecting them to his domination, or by shattering them with his superior force so as to demonstrate their helplessness before him. The God revealed in Jesus Christ is not brute power raised to the nth degree. This God exercises his powerfulness by his giving, by how much he nourishes his creatures, by how much he communicates his own reality to them. To be sure, their being lifted by him into life may involve pain to them. But this pain is only a means for their elevation not an enhancement of God at their expense. Because of his essential nature as the loving community of Father and Son, God cannot act without conferring something of himself on those toward whom he acts.

Therefore, should God will that certain creatures dry and shrivel up, losing their vigor and life, he does not attain this by acting upon them positively with violent force, for “force is no attribute of God.”[The Epistle to Diognetus] He simple withdraws his action from them. In these terms, then, a creature’s misery and death can only be the result of God’s inaction and absence, not of his active presence.

This leads us to a judgment about the behavior of creatures. When they use force to exploit the weakness of others and by this means establish their superiority and domination over others, they are not then acting by the power of God, they are not then being vitalized by the life of God, and they are not then proceeding in accord with the will of God. In short, they belong to the realm of evil. As Jesus said:

“You know that those who are supposed to rule over the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great men exercise authority over them. But it shall not be so among you. . . . For the Son of man . . . came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for man.” (Mark 10:42-45)

If Jesus is the revelation of the essential power and life of God, then men cannot do violence to one another for their own self-expansion within the area of his Lordship. So far as they do this, they are exercising a powerfulness that contradicts the power of God. They have turned from light to darkness. (p. 84-86)

This is as good a statement about the true nature of God’s power as you are likely to find anywhere. Too many Christians are still tempted to think God’s power merely in terms of unconstrained, raw power. As McGill shows, this is precisely the wrong way to think of God’s power. Rather God is powerful in that God gives, loves, nourishes, sustains, and transfigures. The author of the Epistle to Dignetus was indeed right that “force is no attribute of God.” Rather the power of God must always and everywhere be understood as the power of the cross and resurrection.

Imitators of God?

Posted by on August 25, 2009 65 comments

There is an undeniable stream of thought in the New Testament epistles that call believers in Christ to imitate God. The most clear of all these is Eph 5:1: “Therefore be imitators of God, as beloved children . . .” (cf. 1 Cor 11:1; 1 Thess 1:6; 3 John 11). This stream of thought is vital, both to the Christian doctrine of God and the practice of Christian ethics and mission. Certainly our imitation of God is grounded into our incorporation into Christ by the Spirit. That is clear throughout the New Testament. The call to imitate God is not moralistic in any sense, let alone some sort of call to supererrogation. Rather it is a call to be conformed, in reliance on the Spirit of Christ, to the image of God revealed in Christ. The remainder of the passage in Ephesians bears this out explicitly: “. . . and live in love, as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God” (Eph 5:2). To imitate God is to live, to abide in the mode of Christ’s own agape which was revealed in his cross and resurrection.

The point of all this is to say that when the New Testament calls us to imitate God, it is clearly calling us to take on the agapeic qualities of Christ. For the New Testament authors, this is what God is like. To be like God is to live in and practice the radical agape of Christ through the Spirit of Christ whom God has sent to us.

As such, any image of God which seeks to curtail, modify, or circumscribe this vision of God-as-agape is to be rejected. Any portrait of God’s moral character that seeks to “balance” the love of God as revealed in Christ with God’s “other attributes” is to be rejected out of hand. The litmus test for this lies in the call to be imitators of God. Would anyone be pastorally comfortable calling people to imitate God’s supposed overflowing wrath against sinners? Of course not. The claim is then made that we are not to imitate “those” aspects of God—those are God’s prerogative, not ours, it is claimed. However, the New Testament does not make any such distinction between God’s supposed attributes. The New Testament simply calls us, as those led by the Spirit, to be conformed to God’s own moral character, which is the character of Christ. We are not called to imitate God’s “nice side” and leave God’s “dark side” alone. We are called instead simply to imitate God. And for the New Testament this means manifesting the radical agape of Christ. This is what God is like and anything that seeks to balance or mitigate this is foreign to the New Testament and the nature of Christianity itself.

In short, if your theological image of God is one that you’re not willing to call people to imitate, you probably have some false ideas about God. Any God that cannot be imitated in a way that is moral, righteous, and worthy of praise by human beings is not the God that the writers of the New Testament knew.

God’s Self-Understanding

Posted by on July 13, 2009 19 comments

For my money you can’t do much better than this in talking about the Christian doctrine of God. This is long, but I couldn’t bear to cut the quote off. It’s just too good:

Jesus is God’s word, God’s idea of God, how God understands himself. He is how-God-understands-himself become a part of our human history, become human, become the first really thoroughly human part of our history—and therefore, of course, the one hated, despised, and destroyed by the rest of us, who wouldn’t mind being divine by are very frightened of being human.

In Jesus, says the Christian, we do not understand God but we can watch God understanding himself. God’s understanding of God is that he throws himself away in love, that he keeps nothing back for himself. God’s understanding of God is that his a love that unconditionally accepts, that always lets other be, even if what they want is to be his murderers. God’s understanding of God is that he is not a special person with a special kind of message, with a special way of living to which he wants people to conform. God’s understanding of God could not appear to us as someone who wants to found a new and better religion, or recommend a special new discipline or way of life—a religious code laid upon us for all time because it is from God. God’s understanding of God is that he just says: ‘Yes, be; be human, but be really human; be human if it kills yous—and it will.’ The Law of God is a non-law; it has no special regulations. The Word just says: ‘I accept you as human beings; what a pity you can only like yourselves if you pretend to be super-humans or gods.’ God could never understand himself as one of the gods; only as one of the human race.

Let us be absurd for a minute and try to imagine what it means for God to understand himself. I don’t mean try to think or understand it (of course we cannot do that). But let us try to imagine understanding that limitless abyss of life and liveliness, that permanent explosion of vivacity and awareness and sparkling intelligence and, of course, humour. And remember that in understanding himself God will thereby be understanding all that he has done and is doing, all that he holds in being, every blade of grass and every passing thought in your mind. The concept he has of himself in all this is his Word. This is what is made flesh and dwells among us in the human suffering and dying Christ.

And in contemplating his life in this Word, in this concept, in contemplating all he is and does, God has surely a huge unfathomable joy and immense excitement in all the life that is his and all the life he has brought into being. God takes immensely more joy in one little beetle walking across a leaf than you can take in everything good and delightful and beautiful in your whole life put together. If he gets that pleasure from one beetle he has made, think then what joy he takes in being God. This limitless joy is what we call the Holy Spirit.

To be able, through faith, to share in Christ, in God’s understanding of himself, to be in Christ, is to be filled ourselves also with this joy, this Holy Spirit. It is a joy so vast that we can only faintly sometimes it as our elation and joy—just as our sharing in God’s self-understanding hardly at all seems to us an understanding, a being enlightened. We have a life in us, an understanding and a joy in us, that is too great for us to comprehend. Quite often it has to show itself as what seems its opposite, as darkness and suffering. The Word of God is Christ crucified. But it is God’s way and the truth of God and the life and joy of God. And this is in us because we have faith. We have been prepared to go into the dark with Christ, to die with Christ. And we know that this means we live in Christ. And that life, the divine understanding and joy that is in us, will one day soon show itself in us for what it truly is. And we shall live with the Father, through the understanding which is the Word made flesh, in the joy which is the Holy Spirit for eternity.

~ Herbert McCabe, God Still Matters, 104-6.

The Goodness of Good Friday

Posted by on April 10, 2009 4 comments

It seems almost utterly cliche to speak of what, exactly is good about Good Friday. We certainly have an answer close at hand: what is good about Good Friday is the role that Christ’s death plays in our salvation. It’s good that Christ died because Christ needed to die to bring about our salvation. I suppose there’s nothing inherently wrong with this notion, depending on the sort of atonement theology that this line of thinking assumes, however it doesn’t take us very deep. No matter what it makes the goodness of Good Friday instrumental. It was good that Christ died because, for whatever reason, that had to happen for a bunch of other things to happen that constitute our salvation.

This construction establishes the goodness of Good Friday on the basis of it setting the conditions, as it were, for what is really the truly good thing, the resurrection. Good Friday is retroactively rendered good, as it were by virtue of the light of Easter. This also is fine, as far as it goes. However, it doesn’t go deep enough. What ultimately makes Good Friday good is that it is the actualization in history of the fullness of God’s trinitarian agape. Good Friday is good because it is on this day that we witness, in the person of Jesus the reaches to which the love of God freely goes for the sake of the world. Good Friday is good because the love that loves unto death is revealed to us on this day.

Good Friday is good because on it God in Christ gives himself away to the world, all the way to the point of death, even death on cross. Good Friday is good because it was the first day in the history of the world where we finally knew and saw the fullness of God’s self-expending love. On Good Friday the love of God journeys into the farthest reaches of the human experience under sin. In embracing death, the Son takes the infinite love of the Trinity into the most remote place that humanity could construct in its rebellion against God. What makes Good Friday good is that this is the day when the love of God entered into every last human darkness, leaving nothing out. Good Friday is not simply good by virtue of the resurrection to come. Good Friday is good because on this day, God refused to be absent any longer from any corner of our alienation and death.

“Truly  I say to you, this very day, you will be with me in paradise.” This is the promise of the love that endures Good Friday. And this is why it is good. Very good.

Bit of Balthasar

Posted by on April 4, 2009 Comments Off

“Contemplation’s object is God, and God is triune life. But as far as we are concerned, we only know of this triune life from the Son’s incarnation. Consequently we must not abstract from the incarnation in our contemplation. We cannot contemplate God’s triune life in itself; if we did we would sink into a vacuum, a world without substance, into conceptual  mathematics or day dreaming. . . . In binding our contemplation to the humanity of his Son, God is giving more, not less. He gives us a concrete vision of triune life by involving us in it through grace and our serious discipleship of Christ. This vision is simply the inner illumination of the obedience of faith rendered to the Father, together with Christ, in the Spirit.”

~ Hans Urs von Balthasar, Prayer, 193.

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