Category: Trinitarian Theology

Trinity, Tapestry and God’s Irreducible Ineffability

A couple of years ago I had a first go at trying to express theology in tapestry. I'd been reading several books on Trinitarian theology and wondered if some of the mystery and meaning of God's Triune life of love can be expressed in colour, shape and symbol. The result was this panel, now framed and hanging in our hall.

Some of it is obvious in its references and inner nudges; however overall it plays with ideas without trying to resolve them through overloaded significance. It neither seeks to explain or depict, how could words or images or sounds do that. But it does allow the play of ideas, and an expression through art however limited the mind of the artist, of the desire of intellect and heart to understand and respond as adequately as created finitude can to the One who bewilders by beauty, graces with goodness and touches the heart of all creation with truth.

"God's cognitive availability through divine revelation allows us, Irenaeus believed, to predicate descriptions of God that are true as far as we can make them, while God's irreducible ineffability nonetheless renders even our best predications profoundly inadequate" George Hunsinger, 'Postliberal Theology' in Camridge Companion to Postmodern Theology, ed. Vanhoozer, p.47

The tapestry is called Perichoresis. It is true as far as I can make it…and profoundly inadequate. Like all theology.

16 June 2014
Trinity in Haiku for Trinity Sunday – The Joy of 17 Syllable Theology

Triune God

Holy Trinity!

Grace-filled life in fellowship,

Love in triplicate!

Father

Living Creator,

Creative adventurer,

Father of mercies.

Son

Reconciling Son,

Redeeming Ambassador,

Love as surrender.

Spirit

Comforting Spirit,

Articulate Paraclete,

Truthful Advocate.

God is Love

Perichoresis!

Cappadocian genius!

Love co-inhering!

Written as an exercise in theology pared down to the essentials of language, within the discipline of form, but with appropriate playfulness.

15 June 2014
Jan Van Ruysbroek and Trinitarian Theology – Who? On What?

Years ago I began to read Evelyn Underhill's works on mysticism, and eventually read most of her published writing, her early Mysticism and her late Worship in the Nisbet Library of Constructive Theology, and then including retreat addresses, letters and essays. She reads as one writing from anothet time, now – but why should we be surprised, or think that in itself a disqualification of her as a spiritual writer still worth time and effort to study. Amongst the writers she introduced me to was Jan Van Ruysbroeck, whose name itself is likely to be unfamiliar to any but those interested in medieval mysticism. I must say I never followed up on Ruysbroeck after I'd moved on from reading Underhill. But recently he reappeared over my horizon.

I am doing some wider reading around Trinitarian theology including An Introduction to the Trinity by Declan Marmion and Rik Van Nieuwenhove. This is a very good book which for an introduction is theologically substantial and wide in its reach. There is a section on Ruysbroeck which I found fascinating, intriguing and in turns attractive and unsettling. Van Nieuwenhove referred to his own monograph, Jan Van Ruusbroec, Mystical Theologian of the Trinity and I've just started reading it. This is a study that seeks to redefine the essence of mysticism in terms of human transformation rather than immediate experience of God. I want to take some time to read carefully, assimilate quite unfamiliar ideas and weigh them against Scripture, tradition and experience, and do so in a way that is thoughtful, critically appreciative, humbly receptive and spiritually attentive. In other words to greet new ideas with courtesy, respect and intellectual modesty.

I will report back – for now I am enjoying reading an exposition of how spiritual theology if it is to be lived transformatively must be rooted in Trinitarian theology. The doctrine of the Trinity is diminished if the primary focus is on an exercise in speculative philosophy, or our best energies are expended on rational constructions and constantly revised defences of fixed ideas. The immanent Trinity overflows in an eternal love, the sovereign fredom of God, creating, entering and engaging with all that is as it has come into being through that same eternal creative purposes of the Triune God revealed in Christ through the Spirit.

Far from being a study of abstraction, Trinitarian theology invites openness to transformation as we are caught up into the life of the Father the Sone and the Holy Spirit, to share in that eternal fellowship of self-giving love, inflowing in returning joy, outflowing in constant gift. Ruysbroeck is a Trinitarian theologian for whom mysticism is nothing less than our awareness of conscious surrender to the transforming, renewing and cleansing grace of the God who calls us into relationships of intimacy, sacrifice and joy in God.

14 July 2013
Liberation Theology is the original Gospel – If the Son shall set you free….

Amongst the many debts I owe to Jurgen Moltmann as theologian and disturber of the Christian peace, is his eye for the connection between Trinitarian theology, and the way we structure our lives – in society, in church and in our personal ambitions and lifestyle. A conversation with some students this morning produced another of those enjoyable exchanges – Moltmann's book on the Trinity was tough, at times infuriating, or obscure, they struggled with it, and except for class requirements I think would have given it a body swerve. But they all were glad they persevered, read, wrestled and faced up to Moltmann's theological challenges, and they came away with a changed view of what Christian theology and life can be, what church is, and what it means to talk of the Triune God of love.

In one his less known books, a collection of occasional essays very loosely tied together by the title Experiences in Theology, there is a section of what could almost be called Trinitarian Tracts – 7 pieces amounting to just over 30 pages in total, entitled "The Broad Place of the Trinity". The fifth one, The Trinitarian Experience of God begins like this:

A few years ago, in Granada, Spain, I came across an old Catholic order which I had never heard of before. They call themselves 'Trinitarians', were founded in the eleventh century, and have devoteds themselves ever since to the 'liberation of prisoners'. Originally that meant the redemption of the enslaved Christians from M oorish prisons, but not only that. The arms of the Church of the Trinitarians in Rome, St Thomas in Formis, show Christ sitting on the throne of his glory, while at his right hand and his left are prisoners with broken chains, on the one side a Christian with a crossw in his hand, on the other a black prisoner without a cross. Christ frees them both and takes them into fellowship, with him, and together. 'Trinity' was the name for this original liberation theology more than eight hundred years ago." (Page 324)

It's interesting he talks of the Arms of the Church – because the m osaic does indeed show the arms of Christ reaching out in welcome and firm grasp in a way that is so radically inclusive it must have raised eyebrows and blood pressure amongst the hardliners about who is in and who is out, when it comes to the Church.

It is a beautiful, subversive, inclusive, uncompromising, boundary-breaking image, of a Love that is also all these things.

.

28 March 2013
Living the Justice of the Triune God

A candidate for Baptist ministry was asked if he had enjoyed his time at College.

"No" he said, "But I learned stuff."

"Can you give an example of something important you learned", he was asked – the usual open question on the hunt for evidence.

"The definition of a good book", the wary reply.

"And what is that", the obvious follow up.

"A thin yin", the reply in unadulterated colloquial Scots!

And faur frae bein' wrang, he wis dead right!

I'm reading a thin book – Living the Justice of the Triune God, D Power and M Downey, Collegeville, Liturgical Press, 2012. It is a good book, by any definition.

"The book offers a fresh vision of the justice of the Triune God to a world anguished by deprivation, division, ecological degradation and the loss of a sense of purpose and direction. Their praxis theology of the life-giving Word and love of God made tangibble in the particularities of cosmic and human history speaks to the crises and sufferings of our time."

And so it does.

27 November 2012
A Theological Reflection on Three Mornings of Problematic Commuting!

On the way to College each morning this week I've been delayed.

Monday it was the lolipop man stopping the traffic with a high waving lolipop, stopping the traffic for one adult to cross the road and no children in sight. That got a few irate horn blasts for lolipop abuse.

Tuesday I was a witness to a motor cyclist who came off his bike because a dog on an extension lead (not the electrical kind) had run across the road and created a tripwire. The biker wasn't too badly hurt but was rightly mad – I've no idea what the insurance issues will be.

Wednesday it was the huge articulated European transport Lorry which stopped within inches of the Nitshill Bridge and blocked the traffic both ways. No way to reverse because backed in by the Traffic queue – no way forward because, well because of the bridge.

Not the best start to the working day – not talking about me, but the lolipop man who thought he was being helpful, the motorcyclist who probably has no comeback for the damage, and the lorry driver who stopped on time but had nowhere to go, and surrounded by impatient to hostile commuters!

Hard to go in after such encounters of commuting life and sit down with a cup of tea and pick up where I left off in my reading of the more abstract realities of contested ecclesiologies, patristic Trinitarianism and contemporary approaches to mission for faith communities on the cusp of a culture fuelled by disruptive innovation and recessional panic!

But such is the life of a theologian – and seriously, the social and civic attitudes that underlie anger at a car having to stop for a walking human being does indeed provide food for theological critique of the values we live by;

and the questions raised by the unforeseen accident, the injury to others we intend or don't intend, and how to resolve situations that have gone wrong between people, there is an entire theological and ethical agenda for the church;

and to ask ourselves what resources we have to deal with those situations where we are stuck at a low bridge with no easy way forward or back, and all around us people just wanting to get on with their own lives.

I guess that embarrassed lorry driver mirrors the experience of so many folk trying to work out how to make their lives work and be able to move forward from the mistake they have made.

And I'm pondering the parable of the church as articulated lorry, confronted by a low bridge, trapped by the traffic, nowhere obvious to go, the driver frantically directing traffic around a vehicle made for movement but stuck by its own shape and wrong turnings…….

The image of the Eagle Nebulae always reminds me of the context within which all the strangeness of the ordinary is held, 'In the beginning was the Word…and the Word became flesh and dwelt amongst us'. And whatever the future of the church, that truth is the intellectual, spiritual and and moral directive for how the Church as the Body of Christ is to live in the creative energy of resurrection, and with trust in the God who in Christ is reconciling the world into the life of the Triune God.

23 August 2012
Catherine Lacugna and a Trinitarian Approach to Preaching and Pastoral Practice

Amongst the books on the Trinity written over the past 40 years, God For Us by Catherine Lacugna is one of the most creative and fresh.

The last paragraph is a fine summary of why Christian theology is Trinitarian, what is at stake and why in our preaching and pastoral practice the reality of the Triune God is allowed to inform, inspire and underwrite with the grace of God, the life and spirituality of the Christian community. I've rendered it as a prose poem, which is how it reads anyway:

The doctrine of the Trinity succeeds

when it illumines God's nearness to us

in Christ and the Spirit.

But it fails if the divine persons are imprisoned in an intradivine realm,

or if the doctrine of the Trinity is relegated

to a purely formal place in speculative theology.

In the end God can only seem farther away than ever.

Preaching and pastoral practice will have to fight a constant battle

to convince us,

to provide assurances,

to make the case

that God is indeed present amongst us,

does inded care for us,

will indeed hear our prayer,

and will be lovingly disposed to respond.

If, on the other hand,

we affirm that the very nature of God

is to seek out the deepest possible communion and friendship

with every last creature,

and if through the doctrine of the Trinity

we do our best to articulate the mystery of God for us,

then preaching and pastoral practice

will fit naturally with the particulars of the Christian life.

Ecclesial life,

sacramental life,

ethical life,

and sexual life

will be seen clearly as forms of trinitarian life:

living God's life with one another.

Page 411

26 June 2012
The Mystery of the Trinity and the Beauty of the Infinite

"From an aesthetic perspective, David Bentley Hart offers an impressive trinitarian account of beauty that presents Being as primarily the shared life of the triune God: ontological plenitude and oriented toward another. The beauty of the infinite is reflected in the dynamic co-inherence of the three divine persons, a perichoresis of love, an immanent dynamism of distinction and unity embracing reciprocity and difference. The triune God does not negate difference; rather, the shared giving and receiving that is the divine life may be compared to an infinite musical richness, a music of polyphonic and harmonious differentiation of which creation is an expression and variation."

An Introduction to the Trinity, Declan Marmion and Rik Van Nieuwenhove, (Cambridge, CUP, 2011) page 218.

No, it isn't dumbed down theology – and yes, it is a piece of demanding and precise discourse upon the Trinity. But why would we think any serious contemplation of the mystery of the Triune life of God should be immediately accessible in everyday vocabulary? This is a very good book on the Trinity, one that will find its way into our course on Rediscovering the Triune God. It is written as good theology should be – scholarly, lucid, presupposing serious effort from the reader, and rewarding those readers who love to think and for whom thinking deeply and honestly and openly and receptively about God is a way of loving God with mind and heart.

The drawing by William Blake is one of the most delicately subtle pieces of theological art I know. A print of it hangs in my study.

1 July 2011
Wishful thinking from the standpoint of the cross and the resurrection

A conversation with a friend recently wandered from here to there and eventually to some of the words of Julian of Norwich. As you do! Anyway; the optimism of Julian and the sheer exuberance of her vision of a universe enfolded in the love of God, and in which the promise " all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well", rings with the tone of a perfect eschatological resonance – all this she wondered, was maybe wishful thinking instead of good theology. Nothing if not cultured this friend.

Which set me thinking about wishful thinking, epistemology, religious experience and a liveable theology. Bear with me – this is as complicated as it'll get. Mainly it set me thinking about "wishful thinking". One of those phrases usually preceded by an assumed or stated word couched in the dismissive mood – "mere", "only", "just". Nothing more than wishful thinking, fantasy, make believe, unsupported by universally accessible and verifiable evidence. Quite. In any case, not borne out by some people's life experience. Quite so.

Which for me raises the fundamental question of worldview, and prompts reflection on the underlying disposition from which we look on the world, our experiences and the possible explanations of why our life is as it is in the world. Maybe for now "we see through a glass darkly", but that evocative phrase keeps company with three words that presuppose a fair degree of wishful thinking. Faith, hope and charity.

(Go read 1 Corinthians 13 – in the King James Version please : – the translation choice is deliberate)

The point is, faith is wishful thinking:

not mere wishful thinking,

but the capacity

to trust that the future isn't all catastrophe but comes towards us in blessing too

to believe that faithfulness in friendships and other relationships is not an illusion, but one of life's given miracles

to accept that who we are is loveable because God loves us, and that others are loveable for the same reason

The point is, hope is wishful thinking:

not mere wishful thinking,

but the capacity

to look at darkness and not deny the existence of the sunlight and goodness

to face up to hate and hurt and not give up on forgiveness and healing, for oursleves and for others

to pick up the broken pieces of our own or another's life, and remake them into new patterns that are joy to behold

The point is, charity is wishful thinking:

not mere wishful thinking

but the capacity

to entrust ourselves to others in the mutual holdings of passionate commitment and faithful friendship

to welcome other people as companions discovering together what it means to be human, and to share and exchange blessing

to believe that self-giving, compassion and generosity are part of the gift and the mystery of a truly human life

Wishful thinking is not ill-conceived naivete. It is a standpoint from which to view the world without cynicism. It is a theological affirmation that holds with profound seriousness the truth and reality of God's love. And so, it is God's love that is the fixed point for all our other calculations and conclusions about what our existence and purpose is about.

And no. God's love is not divine wishful thinking. In being crucified divine love took on the full force of all that makes for brokenness and hopelessness; in the resurrection all the fractured futilities of our too human sinfulness was gathered into a newness we could never have imagined. Wishful thinking for a Christian begins beneath a cross and is confirmed outside a tomb where death and all its cronies were defeated.

The chalk image is by Linda McCray, "Heart of the Trinity". You can find her work, which I like a lot, at her blog and website, starting here

12 February 2010
“Glory makes it possible to see glory.”

"Perhaps in no area of theology is it more improtant to keep in mind than in Trinitarian theology, that the object upon which we reflect is another 'subject' or 'self', namely, the God who relentlessly pursues us to become partners in communion.God who is Love chooses to be known by love, thus theological knowledge is personal knowledge.

Theological knowledge is as much a matter of 'being grasped by God' as 'grasping God', of 'being conceived by God' as conceiving God.

God can only be apprehnded, not comprehended, in the union of love that surpasses all words and concepts…to see God is to see with God's eyes. Glory makes it possible to see glory."

Catherine Mowry Lacugna, God For Us. The Trinity and Christian Life (San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1991), page 332)

Hey, we had a fire drill the other day. In a few seconds I found myself outside having left my working library upstairs in my study and never gave a thought to that cliche question, "If there was a fire, which few books would you make sure you saved?" But if I had thought about it, one of them might have been my hardback copy of this book. I'm on my third re-read.

Catherine Lacugna died far too young. A promising and gifted theologian whose theologising was conducted as a literary form of doxology. This is, whatever the adjective means, a "great" book. C S Lewis once decried devotional writing and opted instead for the kind of theology you read with a pipe gripped in your teeth. With apologies to Lacugna for commending her book on the back of comments made by an Oxford Don whose paternalism and patriarchal tendencies are all too apparent, and who thought hard intellectual work required such a masculine symbolic aid to concentration as a chewed pipe, but I know what Lewis meant. Lacugna's book is theology as doxology, passionate thought meticulously researched, written out of personal conviction and an inner vision of the glory and beauty and goodness and truth that constitutes the essence of the Triune God, personal holy love in mutual relation.

She was one of the more conciliatory and authoritative feminist theologians, unwilling to assume hostility in those from whom she strongly differed in theological emphases. Her relational understanding of God provides a foundation for an entire systematics that sadly she did not live to write. And maybe she wouldn't have 'done' a systematic theology – systems are about control, constraint, predictability and management of ideas. Lacugna's theology does not lack rigour – but it breathes the spirit of intuition, privileges relational wisdom, expresses a fearlessly constructive urge, exudes contagious living urgency.

This book is on any reading list I prepare for a study of contemporary thought on the Trinity. Like the best of T F Torrance's work, from which it deeply differs, this is the tue theologian who prays, whose inner life is responsive to the truth she seeks in the inner life of the Triune God. It is not theologically flawless, but as theology offered in the spirit of doxology, it is exemplary. And an important companion in my early morning Advent reading – has anyone ever come across a Trinitarian take on Advent……., hmmm?

5 December 2009