Scandalous Presence

In a very fine essay, ‘Scandalous Presence’, almost a mini systematic theology organised around the relational community of the Triune God, Cynthia Rigby gives honourable mention to the late Catherine Lacugna. (Pictured below)

Lacugna’s book, God With Us, was commended by one of our students as one of the more readable and persuasive contemporary accounts of the Trinity. I agree – she’s one of my favourite theologians, and her early death deprived us of what would have been a substantial and innovative work on the Holy Spirit. Her trinitarian thought has been praised widely and criticised extensively – but it will remain (for me at any rate) a passionately engaged expression of what it means to take the relational nature of God with theological and pastoral seriousness.

Rigby says, "[Lacugna’s] attention to the primacy of community and relationality in the life of the Godhead has been helpful in challenging us to rethink what impact God’s scandalous presence should have on the way we live. To confess that God is triune is to know that God is for us in God’s very being. To reflect God’s triune image in relationship to one another, then, is not to lord it over one another. To be God-like, when God is understood to be a community, is not to be self-sufficient but to live in relation".

Lacugna’s point is this. To understand God as a community of self-giving love, and to believe that love at its highest implies mutuality, reciprocal service, uncalculating self-expense and consistent faithfulness, will have major implications for how human life, politics and society are organised. The interdependent and mutual exchange of love within the life of God may not be easily replicated in human community, but it does provide a model which seriously calls in question the societal structures of power and self-sufficiency that drive much of social and political activity.

Just as in a previous post I argued that the imago Dei was an important diagnostic theological insight, so too is the view of God as an eternal threefold relation of mutual loving exchange. I think both these theological realities have serious consequences for how we think about and do those activities we call missional. They also stand as potent critique of any ecclesiology fuelled by self-concern, or immured to the demanding presence of the ‘other’.