Trinity and Church

(This paper adapts some material by Robert Doyle)

‘It is a kind of analogy of echo: the church is what it is by virtue of being called to be a temporal echo of the eternal community that God is.’ Colin Gunton, p. 79.

‘The church is called to be the kind of reality at a finite level that God is in eternity.’ Gunton, p. 81

1.       The renaissance in Trinitarian thought is perhaps more recent than we realize. Prior to Karl Barth in the 1930s, it was characteristic of conservative and liberal theologies to place the doctrine of the Trinity down the list of important attributes of God (see Schleiermacher and Louis Berkhof, for example). Barth’s ‘rediscovery’ of the doctrine of the Trinity came from his deep theological conviction that Christian theology must be done on its own terms. What could be more distinctively Christian than the Trinity? Another factor in the rediscovery of the Trinity was the way in which Orthodox theologians became increasingly read in the West (Rowan Williams, for example, writes his PhD on the Russian Orthodox Vladimir Lossky in the 1970s). This meant that Western theologians such a Colin Gunton began to challenge the pervasive influence of Augustine in Western Trinitarian reflection, and to re-read the Cappadocian Fathers.

2.       Broughton Knox’s best work, The Everlasting God, pre-empted this discussion somewhat in the early 1980s. Interestingly, he was prompted in his Trinitarian thinking by his reflections on the ecclesiology, and particularly on the notion of fellowship. Was not the fellowship of the Trinitarian persons a model for the fellowship that bound together the members of church gatherings? He did not tarry long on the matter, but the line of comparison was clearly drawn, as it was to be in theological work around the globe in the 1980s and 90s.

3.       The application of Trinitarian thinking to ecclesiology proved to be the theological fashion of the 90s, and was done in a rather cavalier fashion at an academic and popular level. It has not been uncommon to hear church planters invoke Trinitarian concepts such as perichoresis to describe the relations between church members (or between the genders) in both an ontological and an ethical mode. This may sound groovy, but there has been a widely recognized need for a careful rethink of the way in which Trinitarian models are to be applied to the church. Many of these ecclesiological models have projected up into the doctrine of the Trinity their assumptions about the shape of ecclesial life. So, more hierarchical ecclesiologies prompt hierarchical Trinities, and more egalitarian church polities prompt horizontally organized Trinities. In a more democratic age, theologians have hoped that a more egalitarian Trinity would rescue the church from a monistic and authoritarian approach. Debates about gender – usually among evangelicals - have curiously overlapped with this discussion.

4.       Is there warrant for building ecclesiology on the doctrine of the Trinity? Scripture does give us the grounds for Trinitarian reflection on the church, as long as it carefully construed. Whatever we might say, it is at least theologically obvious that the Church of God – on which he bestows his own holiness and righteousness, and which is incorporated into the Son of God by the Spirit – must in some way reflect the character and being of the one who constitutes it. All Christian thinking must be theocentric – but of course, this means that it must also be evangelical thinking: it must relate to God’s activity in the world in and through Christ.

5.       We can see this at the level even of the creation itself. The coherence and glory of the creation is the coherence and glory bestowed on it by the creator, and as such, it is like his coherence and glory. It is the divine wisdom that structures the inward parts of the created order (Job 38:36).

6.       The ‘real ontological link’ (R. Doyle) between divine and created being comes in the person of Christ, who as both man and God and the one who alone mediates between man and God invites us to consider that the being of humankind is determined by the being of God. That is to say (following Doyle, following Torrance):

a.       The NT describes Jesus Christ as the divine agent from whom and through whom comes the order and rationality of the creation (Col 1:15-23, John 1:1-18 etc).

b.      In a minor key, we ought also to point to Rom 1:17-23, in which the divine nature of God is somehow displayed in the things that are made.

c.       A third important theological datum is creation ex nihilo: God created from nothing a  creature to be in fellowship with him and which bears his image. This creature is made not according to its kind, but according to the divine kind. We must read this Christologically: the NT describes Jesus as the one in whose image we are being transformed (2 Cor 4:4-6 et al).

d.      ‘The Church’ is i) a creaturely entity; ii) personal and social; iii) constituted by the special redeem work of the Triune God. Some measure of Trinitarian reflection on the church seems appropriate.

7.       We have also to hand the Scriptural passages that directly invite a comparison between the being of God and the being of the church – though of course, these are often brief. Thus we think of Ephesians 4, John 14-17 and 1 Cor 12 in particular. Especially in the Pauline material we notice the description of an ecclesial unity being grounded in the singularity of God.

8.       Counter-ontologies? Thinking ontologically about the church is necessary in part because of the powerful counter-ontologies that have a persistent and pervasive influence in the world and in the church. It has too often been the case that a prevailing political ontology has simply been mapped on the church without caveat. This complaint cuts both ways of course – it is as true of more democratic churches as it is of more hierarchical ones. The Neo-platonism of the Greco-Roman world saw being as a graded hierarchy. This thought-form crept into Christian theology through Pseudo-Dionysius in the 5^th/6^th century, and was still in circulation by the time of Aquinas. The legal-political ontology of Rome was likewise an attempt to describe true being in terms of its relation to the law and political institutions. Too readily, the Church adopted this notion of relations as being legal-political and institutional in form, constituted by its head (the bishop).

9.       We live in a world no less pervaded by alternative ontologies. The radical libertarianism and egalitarianism has individual autonomy at its heart. Scientific materialism is an attempt to do almost without being – or at least to see relations between things as (and they can’t decide) completely random or completely determined by physical forces. Postmodernity posits a world in which everything is in complete flux – being is difference and change, in other words. (See Richard Florida’s work on Cities). John Milbank has argued that the ontology of the modern democratic state is an ‘ontology of violence’, constituted by blood.

10.   What are the controls on Trinitarian reflection on the church? Both Gunton and Volf are keen to show that they are not in favour of unrestrained and unqualified application of the Trinity to the church. Very obviously, God is God, and as such is perfect; and we as creatures are not. Furthermore, the persons of the Trinity interpenetrate each other and are united to one another more deeply than we as creatures ever could. Even in eternity, we will not become divine. So: what are the safeguards? Miroslav Volf offers three of these:

11.   First, God the immanent Trinity always remains concealed from our direct vision: he dwells in unapproachable light. Though the economic Trinity witnesses truly to the immanent Trinity, there is a remainder – God remains in some sense mysterious to us (as Paul declares in Rom 11: 33-36).

12.   Second, even though the fact of God’s accommodating himself to creaturely understanding in his revelation of himself allows us to move from Trinity to ecclesiology, we need to understand that the concepts we learn from the Trinity are to applied to human experience by analogy. The notions of ‘person’ and ‘communion’ – which are so crucial to our thinking about humanity and church – are not identical with ‘person’ and ‘communion’ in the divine being, but they do resemble, or echo, them. For example: Robert Doyle thinks that applying the term ‘perichoresis’ to human relationships is so misleading that we ought to use other terms to restrain ourselves: ‘mutual communion’ or ‘other-person centred’ perhaps. That is: in church we are dealing with redeemed human creatures, and we need to understand them as such, not as divinized beings.

13.   Third, we echo God only in the midst of creaturely life. We are the inhabitants of history, and being in the church does not escape this context even as there is a true hope, a possession of the Holy Spirit and an eschatological expectation. We are still impacted by sin, both as victims and as perpetrators. The heavenly church lies yet before us – we are on the way to it. Volf writes: ‘If the church remains at a statically understood minimum of correspondence to the Trinity, it misses possibilities God has given it along with its being; if by contrast it reaches for a statically understood maximum, it risks missing its historical reality, and certainly if it claims to realize this maximum, its self-understanding turns into ideology’. That is: we reflect an eternal being, but within time, and as finite creatures. There is in this thought an ethical dimension: that is, it is not simply that the Trinity constitutes our being and gives us our identity; it also serves as the call to us to live according to the reality of our existence and in tune with our hope.

14.   Applying Trinitarian thinking about church to congregational life

a.       At the very least, the Trinity ought to inform the vocabulary we use about God as we address him in prayer and in song. The name of our God is the Triune name: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. (see JB Torrance’s little book, Worship, Community and the Triune God of Grace). The doctrine of the Trinity reminds us that it is the Triune God who gathers the church – that we glorify the Father through the Son and in the power and fellowship of the Holy Spirit. That is: the doctrine of the Trinity protects us from pagan forms of worship!

b.      The ‘one-another’ language of the NT is extraordinarily pervasive. It clearly not simply a nice plea for everyone to get along. It is surely reflective of the very being of the God who constitutes our fellowship with one-another.

c.       We ought to hesitate before we apply Trinitarian categories to church structures or to gender relations – not that this is always going to be inappropriate but that it has been so often the result of a projection onto God of a preferred arrangement of human systems. Nevertheless: we have in the Trinity a clear challenge to the notion that there must be in order an inherent superiority of being.

d.      The struggle for the congregational church is always going to reflect the God-given unity it has while exploring and embracing proper diversity that the divine unity does not suppress.

Christian Spirituality for Teenagers - an introduction

I’ve been asked to address the question of the spirituality of young people; and I think I need to say three things before starting to discuss what it might look like practice. The first is that the word ‘spirituality’ is probably one of the most rubbery and misleading terms ever. In contemporary culture it is highly individualized – it is a way I can talk about myself as vaguely having a religious sentiment without actually committing in the usual way to a religious group. But this is absolutely not a Christian way to think about it – because we think about ‘spirituality’ as having to do with the ‘Holy Spirit’, and because we believe in the Triune God – a unity of three persons – we think necessarily of the Spiritual as having to do with God the Father and God the Son and how they act in the world. Which reminds us that a truly Christian spirituality must centre on the cross of Jesus Christ – the place where God was reconciling himself to the world. The great thing about this is that it reminds us that true spirituality is not about us doing things to make ourselves more acceptable to God, but rather about God and his gracious gift of his Son for us.

The second thing I need to say is that when it comes to spirituality, teenagers are the same as everyone else, but different from everyone else: but their sameness is more fundamental than their differences. This is important to remember because of the demographic segmentation that comes with our market economy. It divides us into smaller and smaller groups, making each group seem alien to the others so it can sell us products. Especially, it has cordoned adolescence off from the rest of us, and made us feel like teenagers are a species apart – with special needs and special interests that only specialists can understand. But spiritually speaking, teenagers are in the same state as adults: they are created in the image of God and so called to respond to God; they share like the rest of us in the Adamic crimes, and the stain of sin is on them, too; and, if they are in Christ, then the Holy Spirit dwells in them and they are fully members of Christ’s body, the church, just as much as adults are. We might recognize for practical purposes that adolescent believers have particular personal and social needs, and so form youth groups and have special ministries for them – and special ministers – these are not because we think teenagers are a different race but precisely because we think of them as being in a kind of triage situation – a point of particular need and particular openness. And this leads me to make two related points for how we develop teenagers as spiritual beings: first, that we are preparing them for lifelong spiritual engagement with the Lord of life, not simply entertaining them or diverting them for a while; and second, that we are separating them from the main congregation (in as much as we do) so that we can connect them.

So: the practices for cross-centred teenage spirituality are not in some ways different from the practices that a Christian adult ought to pursue, though they may be differently applied.

The third thing to say about them is that these practices are all responsive – they are responses to what God has done; and in fact direct us to what God has done (rather than what we do). If that focus is lost, we no longer have Christian spirituality, we simply have religion.