Category: Trinity

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Jenson on the Origin of Trinity as Doctrine

Reading Jenson, I came across this bit and thought it a particularly helpful glimpse of the development of Trinitarian teaching. I’d tried to gesture toward something of this sort in comments on an earlier post.

“Typical of the titles is ‘Lord.’ Initially the disciples’ unproblematic form of address for their rabbi, it was naturally resumed after the Resurrection. But now their Lord was enthroned at the Father’s right hand and was the giver of the Spirit. In these circumstances, the address could not but resonate with the Bible’s use of ‘Lord’ for God himself—to whom is one speaking when one says ‘Lord’ to the heavens? This resonance is itself the doctrine. Only when Greek theology appears as interlocutor will or need it be asked what kind of ‘being’—divine, human, or mediating—the risen Jesus must have to be truly addressed as Lord.”

Robert W. Jenson, Systematic Theology: The Triune God (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 92.

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That’s the craziest f#$%@# thing I’ve ever heard!

Among the many unsung benefits of entering the discipline of theology is the opportunity to ponder brilliant thoughts from some of the most erudite minds and sensitive spirits of history. Another unsung benefit is getting to read the bizarre nonsense that some of the same erudite minds slough off  along the way.

Along the lines of Stephen Colbert’s occasional segments by the same title, I thought I’d offer two quotes (with commentary) that made me say, “That’s the craziest f#$%@# thing I’ve ever heard!”

Paul Tillich:

“The concreteness of man’s ultimate concern drives him toward polytheistic structures; the reaction of the absolute element against these drives him toward monotheistic structures; and the need for a balance between the concrete and the absolute drives him toward trinitarian structures.” [1]

A Tillich-inspired Recipe:

  1. Take your ultimate concern.
  2. Average the concreteness of your ultimate concern with the absolute element also found therein.
  3. Remove the polytheistic and monotheistic by-products.
  4. Voila! A Trinitarian drive!
  5. Drop the trinitarian drive in your Volvo, and not only will your gas milage dramatically improve, but the circumincessio occuring in your engine is now totally self-lubricating!

Friedrich Schleiermacher:

“Thus, in fact, people become all the more indifferent to the church the more they increase in religion, and the most pious sever themselves from it proudly and coldly. Nothing can in fact be clearer than that seekers of religion are in this association [i.e. the church] only because they have no religion; they persevere in it only so long as they have none.” [2]

Indeed, one excellent measure for just how much true religion a person might have would be the degree of coldness and pride with which that person passes by any religious establishment. People with a wholehearted dedication to the church are clearly (nay, most clearly) the most muddleheaded irreligious shams you could ever encounter!

____

[1] Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology I (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951), 221.

[2] Friedrich Schleiermacher, On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers, trans. Richard Crouter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 172.

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on gender and God :: Gregory of Nyssa

“No one can adequately grasp the terms pertaining to God. For example, mother is mentioned in place of ‘father’ (Song 3:11). Both terms mean the same, because the divine is neither male nor female (for how could such a thing be contemplated in the divinity, when it does not remain intact permanently for us human beings either? But we all shall become one in Christ, we will be divested of the signs of this distinction together with the whole of the old man). Therefore, every name found [in Scripture] is equally able to indicate the ineffable nature, since the meaning of the undefiled nature is contaminated by neither female nor male….Hence the Song says that a crown is placed upon the bridegroom by his mother. Since the nuptials and bride are one, one mother places the crown upon the bridegroom’s head.”

Gregory of Nyssa, Homilies on the Song of Songs, Homily 7.

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Ward :: Love as Economy or Ontology

“The economy of [Christian] desire is not locked into love as not-having [in distinction from some postmodern accounts]. Rather, love is continually extended beyond itself and, in and through that extension, receives itself back from the other as a non-identical repetition. Love construed as having or not-having is a commodified product. It is something one possesses or doesn’t possess. It is part of an exchange between object and subject positions. But love in the Christian economy is an action not an object. It cannot be lost or found., absent or present. It constitutes  the very space within which all operations in heaven and upon earth take place. The positions of persons are both constituted and dissolved. The linearity and syntax of Indo-European languages barely allows access to the mystery of trinitarian persons and processions: where one ends and another begins. As such suffering and sacrifice are not distinct moments, kenoo [emptying] is also and simultaneously pleroo [filling up]. The wounds of love are the openings of grace.”

________________________
Graham Ward, “Suffering and Incarnation,” in The Blackwell Companion to Postmodern Theology (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2001), 205.

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The Suffering God Cannot Save :: Addendum

It seems that a few other folks are poking around with the same question as my recent series of posts on David Bentley Hart’s The Beauty of the Infinite and the question of divine impassibility. Their thoughts are more concise and poignantly articulated than my own stumbling efforts, so if thinking through God’s compassionate suffering is a live question for you, you might do well to visit:

Halden’s post—“Divine Suffering is Divine Impassibility”
Kent Ellers and James Merrick’s—“David Bentley Hart on the Trinity”

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‘The Suffering God Cannot Save’ :: David Bentley Hart, Right and Wrong on Impassibility (Part 4 of 4)

(Back to Part 3)

It is precisely because divine apatheia is not a possession subject to loss or diminution that God does not penuriously guard his life, but opens himself to creation and suffers with it. No one can change God or force God to act, no one can conjure or coerce God’s presence or action-God is never passive. But where God is open in love, he does not stand passively aloof, impervious to the plight of his beloved. God’s unchangeable infinitude is not at risk where God aches with longing and is pained by the dissolute state of creation-this too is an expression of the boundless variation within the unchanging generosity of God’s triune life. Thinking in this way helps us to express both God’s suffering and God’s apatheia in properly analogical terms. Hart correctly insists that “God is incapable of experiencing shifting emotions within himself” (as if manipulative ploys had any foothold), but to this similitudo, we must insist upon a maior dissimilitudo and say that God is not devoid of emotional intensity or insensitive with regard to his beloved creation (355). Likewise, if we are to speak of God’s aching solidarity with those who suffer, a solidarity that transgresses every boundary we can imagine (Hades itself), we must also insist that according to a maior dissimilitudo, God’s suffering does not incapacitate and diminish him (as suffering does to us). God never says, “It would have been better if…” with regard to God’s own boundless life; God’s life always is better in the mutual exchange and enrichment of the divine economy. 

Hart’s positive understanding of divine infinitude is sufficiently capacious to incorporate theological attentiveness to the whole of Scripture’s narrative with regard to God’s immutability and impassibility, including a nuanced account of the emotional intensity and pain ascribed to God’s experience therein. Unfortunately, Hart allows his metaphysical predilection for a more univocal understanding of divine apatheia to eclipse this conceptual openness and thereby falsely constrains his understanding of God and in docetic fashion meticulously evacuates the cross of the divinity hung thereupon. Despite himself, Hart helps us understand how Bonhoeffer is, in my estimation, finally correct: “Only the suffering God can help.” 

 

 

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‘The Suffering God Cannot Save’ :: David Bentley Hart, Right and Wrong on Impassibility (Part 3 of 4)

(Back to Part 2)

Yet, despite insisting that divine apatheia does not override God’s scriptural self-revelation or make the divine pathos out to be an illusion, Hart insists that even the cross holds no suffering for God (355).  Through the Son, God attends and possesses the human suffering of the cross (and does so “inseparably” according to Chalcedon), but, he insists, God (qua God) does not suffer pain there. Hart rightly upholds patristic paradoxes like that of Melito of Sardis, “in Christ the impassible suffers,” but mistakenly goes further to assert that Jesus’ cry of dereliction (“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”) is only his “human voice,” words uttered in the place of all humanity, rather than as a expression of God torn from God.  He argues, somewhat strangely, that if this cry fits into the divine economy at all, it ought to be heard as a darker expression of the same interval whereby the eternally begotten Son is differentiated from the unbegotten Father (360). Hart insists that only the God who is beyond all suffering is capable of saving us. By restricting the suffering of the cross to the Son’s human nature, Hart (like Cyril before him) draws the blinds on the view that his own thinking about God’s infinity has opened up for him. In so doing, he foregoes an opportunity for greater theological fidelity to Scripture by a manifest preference for restrictive metaphysical preconceptions of divinity. Yet, we must be clear, Hart (again like Cyril) is not wrong in his affirmation of divine impassibility; it is just that impassibility is not a univocal description of God capable of expressing God’s character without the qualification of analogical difference. 

(On to Part 4)

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‘The Suffering God Cannot Save’ :: David Bentley Hart, Right and Wrong on Impassibility (Part 2 of 4)

(Back to Part 1)

Hart’s positive expression of God’s infinity opens the space to speak about divine pathos, not as a deficiency, but as another modulation of his unconquerable and incorruptible love. The fullness of divine revelation is found in Jesus Christ and as the gospels tell it, God’s life as a human being progresses inexorably, almost magnetically, toward the cross in Jerusalem where God joins humanity (and all creation) in suffering, alienation, torture, death, and in the very depths of hell. Suffering and pain are not thereby to be understood as an attribute of the unchangeable God, like an incurable affliction, but as yet one more expression of divine openness and sharing of life. The cross is God’s glory (John) precisely because it makes visible the fullness of God’s triune openness and love. The same self-giving love by which the Father begets the Son and sends forth the Spirit (and receives the joy of his life in their return) is the self-giving love that knowingly, willingly, freely, and obediently swallows the suffering and death of creation because it pains God to see his creation languish. God’s pathos is an amplification of his love rather than the weakness of a God subject to the violence, control, or coercion of others. The resurrection shows that even in stretching to encompass pain, death, and the depths of hell, God’s peace is unbroken, God’s love is unconquered, God’s infinity is undiminished. The persistence of Christ’s wounds on his Resurrected body demonstrate that wounded-ness is no diminution of God’s life and that God’s bliss cannot be etiolated by exposure to violence. Nor can it be said that death is a necessary player in this drama, or that suffering is the attribute of God whereby his love is eternally demonstrated; death is exposed as nothing, suffering is revealed to be only the short darkness of a night bounded by endless day. To recognize that God genuinely suffers in Jesus Christ is not to subject God to change because (1) this suffering is not imposed upon God but freely borne, and (2) because God’s immutability is not a flat stasis, but the tireless repetition of a fathomless generosity found both in the Trinity and in the history of salvation.

(On to Part 3)

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‘The Suffering God Cannot Save’ :: David Bentley Hart, Right and Wrong on Impassibility (Part 1 of 4)

Over the next few days I’m going to post the verbal fruit of my wrestling with Hart on the issue of divine impassibility. The reflections here are meant to be experimental—to see whether this line of thinking might be successful, or whether it will fall flat.

Thesis: David Bentley Hart’s strong advocacy of a positive and determinate understanding of divine infinitude provides the framework for an affirmation of divine pathos (in fidelity to scriptural descriptions of divine emotion and pain) that does not negate the traditional ascription to God of impassibility (apatheia). Unfortunately, not only does Hart pass this opportunity by, he also scorns it as he does so.

One of the central tenets of The Beauty of the Infinite is that the infinity of God’s triune life cannot be understood as something like a lack of finitude, or a negative sort of transcendence cognizable as absence from everything immanent. God is not infinite in a way that is bland and indeterminate—like an endless powerful fog—but in sheer abundance and excess. Moreover, God does not suffer from a failure to be finite, nor can infinitude be defined in dialectical opposition to created finitude—God and the universe are not opposites divided by any boundary. In other words, God’s infinity pervades the finite and always exceeds it. God’s transcendence crosses all borders and overcomes all limits. The freedom of God’s love is expressed ever anew in unspeakable creativity, transformed and transfixed in the endless self-giving exchange between Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The surfeit of God’s life is marked by an infinity that cannot be exhausted or circumscribed, but repeats itself in endless modulations and harmonies on the theme of love. Far from standoffish loftiness, God’s infinity is closer than we can dare to think, yet beyond simple capture in any concept, picture, or image.

(On to Part 2)

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Elizabeth Johnson :: gendered language about God

In a passage exploring the difficulty of gendered vocabulary used in naming God, Elizabeth Johnson rejects as inadequate two approaches before moving forward within the parameters of a third. Neither attributing female traits or characteristics to God (who remains primarily “male”), nor speaking of a female dimension within God’s life is finally adequate. Rather, she argues that male and female images of God are equally fitting (and equally inadequate) and therefore ought to be used with greater parity, breaking the dominance of patriarchal imagery. 

Unexamined presuppositions about the doctrine of God itself raise a further theological question about this [preceding] approach [namely, identifying the Holy Spirit as a female dimension of God’s being]. In what sense can it be claimed that God has “dimensions,” let along the the dualistically conceived dimensions of masculine and feminine? Such an idea extends human divisions to the godhead itself. It actually ontologizes sex in God, making sexuality a dimension of divine being, rather than respecting the symbolic nature of religious language.

We must be very clear about this. Speech about God in female metaphors does not mean that God has a feminine dimension, revealed by Mary or other women. Nor does the use of male metaphors mean that God has a masculine dimension, revealed by Jesus or other men; or an animal dimension, revealed by lions or great mother birds; or a mineral dimension, which corresponds with naming God a rock. Images and names of God do not aim to identify merely “part” of the divine mystery, were that even possible. Rather, they intend to evoke the whole. Female imagery by itself points to God as such and has the capacity to represent God not only as nurturing, although certainly that, but as powerful, initiating, creating-redeeming-saving, and victorious over the powers of this world. If women are created in the image of God, then God can be spoken of in female metaphors in as full and a limited a way as God is imaged in male ones, without talk of feminine dimensions reducing the impact of this imagery. Understanding the Holy Spirit as the feminine dimension of the divine within a patriarchal framework is no solution. [1]

Johnson’s approach in this book does two things supremely well. First, she articulates God’s transcendence patiently and persistently. Thinking and speaking about God in exclusively male terms is not wrong because God is beyond all gender and totally outside the known. It is wrong because it imposes false limits upon the God who transcends created gender in a way that encompasses both maleness and femaleness and extends beyond typological confinement in one or the other. Johnson recognizes that the plenitude of God’s inner life extends beyond the boundaries of either maleness or femaleness, while both men and women are “true” images of God. 

Secondly, Johnson recognizes that patriarchal repression of women is an aberration in both thought and practice from the orthodox Christian gospel. Correcting this error, then, does not require an overthrow of the whole tradition and a rejection of the church’s rich theological heritage. It would be naive and simplistic to dismiss a tradition in which so many women have found genuine liberation and genuine self-expression for the reason that the same tradition has been used (perhaps with a great frequency) to subdue and silence them. Johnson recognizes that the language and symbols of tradition do not need to be cast away to start again with a blank slate, but demand to be enlivened  and expanded by filling them out with the suppressed language and experience of the church’s women. When we have understood our theological heritage more fully, we will understand that the dismissal and subordination of women cuts against the grain of the gospel. 

Father, Son, and Holy Spirit remains YHWH’s first Christian name, the most prominent appellation for God given to the Church in both the New Testament scripture and subsequent tradition. Attempts to displace or discard God’s self-revelation in this form are misguided and unnecessarily divisive. Yet, there are other ways of speaking about God, appropriate for both the Church’s liturgy and theology, that rekindle the biblical practice of naming God in feminine terms as Mother, as Wisdom incarnate, as the Spirit who gives new-birth. The church’s language is impoverished and watered down where it neglects the full range of imagery available for its prayers and preaching.  

[1] Elizabeth Johnson, She Who Is: The Mystery of God in Feminist Theological Discourse (New York: Crossroad Publishing Company, 1992), 54. 

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how did God create himself :: Connor’s question

The previous post introduced a question about God from Connor, I’ve since learned that Connor is only five years old.

My instincts were similar to Matt and Grace; that is, to give Connor an answer that will lead him toward years of fresh and different questions in the same vein. So here is the answer I offered.

The Father loves the Son so much that he gives the Son his life; the Son loves the Spirit so much that he gives his life for the Spirit; the Spirit loves the Father so much that he gives his life for the Father. God’s love is so big that everything that God creates, including time, fits inside—and God loves you!

I cheated and used two sentences; but I did write both of them using a green marker!

The fun and challenging part about Connor’s question is that there is no simple answer that will satisfy the question’s underlying motive. Connor understands that speaking of an unmoved Mover begs the question as to whether the infinite regress can “really” end, or whether there is something “beyond” even this unmoved character. The question cannot be answered from within the framework that it is asked, because there will always be one more question searching for the real foundation.

Connor also seems to have a budding trinitarian instinct! He is not asking, “Who created God?” but “How does God create himself?” He seems to know that inquiring about God’s beginning will be a fruitful endeavor only if it receives an answer from within God’s own life. Whether or not he intended to do so, Connor brushes aside the singular, unchangeable, utterly removed, and utterly simple Hellenic notion of Deity. Connor’s questions begins to hint at self-differentiation within God because the notion of Someone without an external beginning is boggling. This is a wonderful question! Both Jurgen Moltmann and Robert Jenson make similar arguments, so Connor is in good company.

Through the self-revelation of the Trinity, we can speak of a logical beginning for God even though we cannot speak of a temporal beginning. God, from all eternity is found in the Father’s begetting of the Son in love, in the Father’s sending of the Spirit, and in the Son’s reflection of the Father’s Spirit of Love back to the Father. Of course, the story of those relationships cannot be said to have “begun.” Never have the begetting, sending, and loving obedience of the three persons ceased or started (from a temporal perspective). Yet, from a relational (or a logical) perspective, it makes sense to speak of God this way because of what God himself has shown us. The Son and the Spirit testify, in the midst of our history, to their relationships with the Father and with one another.

I remember puzzling over questions like Connor’s when I was a young kid. In the years since I’ve learned that they can be framed in philosophical terms and turned into three-hundred pages of dense technical writing, but it is truly remarkable how the questions themselves don’t change all that much. Children are in touch with the deepest mysteries, paradoxes, and tensions in our worldview, even if they don’t have all the “right” words for their questions, and even if they remain unasked. I for one, am thankful!

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an assignment :: one sentence

The pastor of our church handed me a quarter-sheet of paper on Sunday, adorned with red and blue markers. Above a drawing of Jesus on the cross, in excellent seven year old penmanship are the words: 

Dear Pastor, 
How did God create Himself?
From Connor

Being wise, my pastor outsourced his answer to me. Being less than wise, I accepted the challenge. I’ve decided that the only appropriate answer is one written in large block letters with a marker. So how would you answer Connor’s question in one sentence?