The thing about doctrines is that
they are made up of words, and words are only approximations of what they
describe, they aren’t the thing itself.
They are invariably pointers to
what they are trying to signify, they are in fact signs. Take the word “tree:”
when I hear or read the word “tree,” I think of a gracious oak with magisterial,
spreading branches and leaves fluttering in the breeze. Another might think of
a slender pine, or a silver birch. A
shoemaker, however, might think of one of those things you put inside a shoe to
keep it from losing its shape. It's only
when two people see the same tree, when they experience it, that they know they’re speaking of the same thing.
Zen Buddhists have a sutra, a
saying, about this: it’s like “a finger pointing at the moon.” Don’t mistake the means for then end, the
teacher for the taught, the doctrine for what the doctrine describes. They would say “a doctrine is like a finger
pointing at the moon,” it is not the thing it describes. And yet, that is what has been done in the
Church: we mistake words—in the Bible, in our confessions, in our doctrines,
from our pulpits—for the thing they point to.
Back in the day—the day being the
first few centuries after Christ—two ways of describing, two ways of pointing to, the Trinity arose. The first was the so-called immanent Trinity,
which is what we’ve been talking about the last few weeks. It deals with the internal make-up of the
Trinity, the Son begotten by the Father, the Sprit proceeding from the Father
(and in the West, the Son) and the Father being neither begotten or made, preexisting
from time immemorial amen, amen.
Then there was the so-called economic Trinity, which talked about what
the persons did. Thus, rather than concentrating on the
make-up of the Trinity, and whether or not they were of one substance or
whether the Spirit proceeded from the Father and the Son, the economic Trinity spoke of the salvation of the
Son, the love of the father and the comfort of the Holy Spirit. Or the God who creates us, the God who
becomes one of us and the God who teaches us how to pray. And it was more accessible to the everyday
believer, because they could relate, it spoke of something they could experience.
But almost from the beginning, these
two ways of regarding the same thing became separate, almost like they were
describing different phenomena. What’s more, the immanent Trinity, which
named the members by their relation to one another—Father of the Son, Son of
the Father, etc. — became dominant. If you
read most any theology text of the last century, you'll see the majority of
space given over to describing the abstruse, angels-on-the-head-of-head of a
pin nature of the immanent Trinity, and maybe mentioning the economic view in a
page or so.
Enter German theologian Karl
Rahner, who insisted that “the immanent Trinity is the economic Trinity and the economic Trinity is the immanent Trinity.” In other words, you can’t talk about one
without the other: you can’t talk of the Father without talking of creation and
grace; you can’t describe the Son without reference to his saving,
self-emptying sacrifice; and you can’t talk about the Holy Spirit without reference
to its comforting, advocating support.
But wait . . . there’s more! If
one of the bedrock features of the Trinity is that all three persons are
co-equal (even though nobody really believes it) doesn’t that make the actions of each one the actions of each of the others? Doesn’t that make Christ the comforter as well? The Holy Spirit the one who creates? And—hold the phone, here!—doesn’t that also make the Father (upon whom the
title of “God” was early-on conferred) doesn’t make God the one who was crucified?
That’s exactly the title of Jurgen
Moltmann’s influential 1973 work: “The Crucified God,” and that’s when all
you-know-what broke loose. If God could
die, could God feel pain? Jesus did . .
. but I thought God was supposed to be unmovable, never-changing, above all the
human fray, and all that Neoplatonic stuff.
And the fourth-century structure of the Trinity began to crumble, and
people began to remember what First John said, that God is love, which is a verb, an action, a deed, and wasn’t that kind of what Rahner was saying, that God is
the same as what God does? And so, some folks began to think of and
study the Trinity as not this
eternally unchanging, static thing, not in terms of substance, and indeed, not
as “thing” at all, but as action in itself, as process.
Meanwhile, feminist theologians began to insist that that we put our
money where our mouths are when we say that God is neither male nor female, or that God is both.
They began to insist that if we were all created imago dei, in the image of God, we
should make more room in our representations of the divine for the majority of
us, who just happen to be, you know, women. Trinitarian thinking on this ranged from a
preference for using exclusively non-gendered language—like creator, redeemer,
comforter—to re-imaging the Holy Spirit as feminine—to completely reimagining
of the God-head in feminine terms.
No one has been more influential
is this respect than Elizabeth Johnson, the title of whose book She Who Is announced its “radical”
intentions. She begins by observing that
over the centuries, male imagery for God has been used in an uncritically
literal way, and that it has led to a form of idolatry. Further, our experience of God here and now is in the person of the Spirit,
God's continuing creative action and presence in the world. Because the Spirit is the “first person” we encounter,
she proposes that the Trinity be reimagined around her, whom she renames Spirit-Sophia. Finally, she renames the other members and renames
them to reflect this re-ordering: Spirit-Sophia, Jesus-Sophia, and Mother-Sophia.
Now, you all might remember the
foo-for-aw that erupted over our denomination’s support of a conference where
this was, ah, discussed, but I want
to point out a couple of things. First, Sophia
is an aspect of the divine that is well-attested to in our Scripture. She is the wisdom aspect that brings knowledge and comfort and practical help in our everyday lives. Second, a theology that begins with God’s
presence on earth, the wind that blows where it will, is potentially more
relatable to folks in the everyday than some musty, largely incomprehensible
doctrine that came about largely so we wouldn’t look like—gasp!—polytheists.
Johnson’s work illustrates a very
important feature of the modern revival of the Trinity: it arises from below, from lived experience, rather than from above. Orthodox Trinitarian thought began with God
as unified and transcendent, unknowable and apart from us, and proceeded to explain
how God could “come down” to interact with us.
Recent thinking begins with God here among us, in the persons of the
Holy Spirit and Jesus Christ, God who walked among us, and proceeds to explain how
to go from there to divine transcendence and unity. It begins with our experience of God as human beings, here on this earth, and
abstracts it up to a universal, transcendent phenomenon.
Perhaps nobody did this with more
sweeping vision than Spanish priest and theologian Raimón Panikkar. He begins with observations in the world and
constructs a multicultural framework in which the Trinity is the central structure
of reality. His primary interest was
intercultural religious dialog, and while studying philosophy in Mysuru, India
came to experience the strong Trinitarian underpinnings of eastern religions
like Hinduism and Buddhism. He found
that configurations of three are important in many world religions, as in much
of human experience, really—and came to believe that faiths of many cultures
are grounded in a common intuition of the divine. He names this the cosmotheandric intuition, that of a tripartite reality: heaven,
humankind and the world. Or cosmic,
material and human. This is so, he
reasons—using a method that, trust me, you don’t want me to go into—because
that is the nature of being, that there are divine, human and material
components.
Further, based again in part upon
his experience of many cultures, as well as the personal experience of Mystics
of every faith, he posits that these components interpenetrate, that though not identical, they are not separate
either. Again, this is a feature of many
faiths—in Christianity it’s called perichoresis, in Buddhism pratītyasamutpāda, in Hinduism cosmic karma—and it describes the mutual indwelling of the three components of reality.
Because this intuition of an
interdependent, three-part reality
underlies faiths across cultures, Panikkar believed that this view of reality,
codified in a special way in the Christian Trinity, could be the basis of
intercultural dialog and understanding in a world that is in increasingly dire
need of it.
But global understanding aside, because
this is a sermon, not a lecture, we always have to ask what impact all this has
on us middle-class Christians, and I think that one answer is that a bottoms-up
approach to our views of God helps us visualize the God-head in a much more
personal level, and that’s always been
a strength of our faith. After all, although
other religions feature gods come to earth, Christianity is in essence built
around the notion that God so loved the world that God became part of it, part of
us. And as the 21st century wears
on, more and more people distrust a God that doesn’t seem attached, or rather
seems detached, distant from us. Orthodox theology’s emphasis on the
Neoplatonic attributes of an omniscient, omnipotent, transcendent God doesn’t
fly with people who feel anything but, and
who have seen—all too often at first hand—what all-powerful, all-knowing
governments can do.
At the same time, a God that looks
like only 49 percent of the population—no matter how we tell ourselves that we know otherwise—increasingly does not
resonate in a world struggling for the equal treatment and rights of the other 51. If God is
relationship, if the relationships in the Trinity are in some way those
between human beings, are they only relationships between men? Is the Christian
God-head to be represented as one big bromance?
As I think of Raimón Panikkar’s
work, that all of reality is Trinitarian, I think of what that implies about our
humanity. If he is right, and all of
reality is made up of matter, humanity and the divine, all of being, then that applies to us as
well. After all, we are a part of that
reality, we are beings within the whole of being, are we not Trinitarian at the
core? And if we are convinced of this,
really convinced of the divine humanity in each one of this, how can we treat
each other the way we do? I don’t mean
just on a macro scale, as in enslaving other peoples, but in our day-to-day care
for one another and for the world, for the ecos. There is a reason Benedictine monastics
practice seeing the divine in everything and everyone.
Ultimately, I keep coming back to
Jesus, and his own teachings of these
kinds of thing . . . the kingdom of God is among you . . . The kingdom of God
is within . . . and especially his assurances
in John: I in you and you in me. How
more clear a description of perichoresis,
of mutual indwelling do we need? God is
not dead, God has not departed, God is here,
within each of us, within our neighbors, and within the world. As I’ve said before, we just need to
discover—or perhaps rediscover how to
find God. Amen.
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