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Can We Recover the Doctrine of the Trinity in Our Experience? Part
4
August 18,
2008
John H. Armstrong
Perhaps the most pressing personal
question we face at the beginning of the new millennium is: “What does
it mean to be a human person?” Scientists and social scientists work
from every angle seeking to give Western people a reason to have
meaning and purpose. I suggest the recovery of the doctrine of the
Trinity, in our human consciousness and experience, is the only
meaningful answer to our quest. Communion with the Trinity What does it mean to be a “person” apart from
face-to-face real relationships where intimacy, mutuality and
accountability are present?
In the West our idea of person is deeply rooted in
the notion that a person is an individual center of consciousness and
self-determination. Our very idea of freedom supports this
understanding powerfully. From a political standpoint this is a good
thing and has supported human advancement in important ways.
But the same culture teaches us that real freedom
from others is the penultimate goal of
life. This is one obvious reason why we have such a hard time being
open to others. Dependence is seen as weakness. Now responsibility for
others is seen as a burden we endure, and woe to the person who becomes
vulnerable to others in any way other than on the surface of human
day-to-day life. The problem is not in
stressing personal freedoms in an ownership society where the market is
seen as a good thing. I support this understanding very deeply. What I
oppose is seeing this as the only way to understand our person and our
actions. Let me explain a bit further. The Erosion of
Community Western social
structures are clearly failing in profound ways. Marriages are breaking
up at record rates, at least until recently, and even now the rates are
still much too high. Our sense of connection to neighbors and family
has fragmented and most of us live to ourselves, often even in the same
home. Neighborhoods are almost non-existent and community involvement
seems to be a thing of the past.
The institution that has perhaps suffered the most
directly because of this loss is the church. Churches are organizations
to service our spiritual needs and little else. We join them to be fed,
to get some help for our busy and rootless lives, to find ministry. But
few of us know anything about the real life of community that the
ancient Church, or even our great-grandparents, knew in the
past. How do we flourish again as human
beings in real relationships that make a difference in our lives? What
would it mean to be fruitfully connected with other persons in the
modern Western world? How do we change our churches and impact our
neighborhoods? The
Communion of the Holy
Trinity Catherine Mowry
LaCugna, a modern Christian theologian, has expressed the answer to my
question well when she writes: “Because God is personal and not
impersonal, God exists as the mystery of persons in communion” (“The
Practical Trinity,” in Christian Century
109:22, July 15-22, 1992, 681). We have seen that the early Church, in the East and the
West, had two different ways of understanding the Trinitarian faith.
These are not opposites, but profoundly different ways of seeing the
same truth. I believe Philip W. Butin is right when he says, “In
different ways, both trajectories centered in the affirmation that God
is essentially relational” (Butin, The
Trinity, 90). In the West,
God’s relational being was expressed through the idea that within the
divine being there were three divine persons—Father, Son and Holy
Spirit. Each has an identity within the Trinity and each has
relationships with the other. In the West we have also seen that there
was a stress upon divine love as defined by self-giving love between
the three persons of the Trinity. In
the East, this relational idea was expressed in the perichoresis—three distinct divine persons
indwelling, inhabiting and existing in one another. I have come to
believe that in this emphasis the relational aspect of God’s being is
expressed even more powerfully. In fact, in Eastern Christian theology
the divine relationships constitute God’s oneness. Let me put this
another way—God’s oneness is a mutuality of personhood expressed in
threefold personhood and in the intimate, eternal intercommunion of
Father, Son and Holy Spirit. This is why an icon used in the East
pictures the Ecuharistic meal in which there are three divine persons
seated around a table sharing a meal together. There is a fellowship—a
divine koinonia—within the Godhead,
and thus God’s existence is eternally relational. What this means for our Christian experience is
profoundly important to the modern Church. Writes Catherine Mowry
LaCugna, regarding the practical nature of the Trinity: Since God is perfectly
personal and relational, and since we are created in the image of God,
then we will be most like God when we live out our personhood in a
manner that conforms to who God is (“The Practical Trinity,”
682). Made in
God’s Image Throughout the
story of creation, and all that follows it in the biblical narrative,
we come to understand that we humans have been made in God’s image
(imago dei). There have been many
arguments about what imago really
means. The subject is vast and hugely important. One thing should be
clear by this point in my writing this series. God is a koinonia of persons and we are thus most
like God when we live as God is, in a fellowship and relationship of
persons. This
koinonia for which we were created is both vertical and
horizontal. John says: That which was from the beginning, which we have heard,
which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked at and our hands
have touched—this we proclaim concerning the Word of life. The life
appeared; we have seen it and testify to it, and we proclaim to you the
eternal life, which was with the Father and has appeared to us. We
proclaim to you what we have seen and heard, so that you may also have
fellowship with us. And our fellowship is with the Father and with his
Son, Jesus Christ. We write this to make our joy complete (1 John
1:1–3). Obviously the vertical
dimension is primary. Without this there is no relationship with the
eternal God. Augustine captured this in his famous statement “You have
made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless until they find their
rest in you” (Confessions,
1.1). When we receive the meal of
communion we are reminded again of our sharing in the divine communio. The Spirit unites us again with
the Father and we receive in the sacrament the Son of God in his saving
work of grace. God has opened up to us a gracious love-relationship
that is rooted in the incarnation, death and resurrection of Jesus. By
the Spirit, working in the Word and the sacraments, we enter again into
this relational experience. This underscores a profound reason for why
so many evangelicals, who have lost interest in a seriously Trinitarian
theology, have little or no interest in communion. But this relationship with God will also manifest
itself in deeply human ways. We pray the “Our Father” and we are
reminded that we pray as the people of God when we say “our.” We even
ask the Father to give “us” this day our daily needs, not give “me.”
The language of liturgy and the pattern of prayer of the ancient Church
is rooted in our oneness as God’s new community.
We are thus reminded that it was the Creator who said, “It is not good
for man to be alone. I will make a helper suitable for him” (Genesis
2:18). The word helper might be translated by words like “counterpart”
or “companion.” It wasn’t until later
in my life that I saw more clearly now the creation story makes it
plain that the divine image is not seen, as God wanted it seen and
experienced, without male and female in companionship reflecting the
totality of God’s inner-communion.
This is why Genesis 1 says: “So he created human beings in his own
image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created
them (1:27). If I may put it in a way that underscores this plainly,
and you will only understand this if you have followed this series
carefully, humans as male and female reflect the divine perichoresis as two distinct yet
inseparable hypostaseis who share one
common human nature. All of this
suggests that apart from human relationships, which are shared in the
divine as community, there is no communion with God. The relational
Triune God made us to live together. This is essential, not
secondary.
Conclusion The primary place
that this communion of persons is to be shared, in the restored new
creation that anticipates the last day and the coming glory, is in the
Church. Here, in various ways and contexts, we are meant to share true
communion. It may surprise you, but I
believe the greatest enemy of the communion that God has intended for
us to share in the Church is the nuclear family. We have so idolized
the family, making it the focus of everything in most evangelical
Christianity in America today, that we know little or nothing of the
koinonia God has designed for the
Church. I am not saying the family is not important. It is very
important. But one cannot read the words of Jesus about the
nuclear/biological family and the priority of his kingdom and not be
impressed that we have missed something rather important by stressing
family as everything in human relationship. I have written so much on this over the years that I
will not belabor it here. I will conclude by simply saying that I am
not sure we can have this kind of relational Christianity without
persecution. I am sure we cannot have it unless we become deeply
intentional about this and pursue real friendships that are deep and
lasting. This will
not only require that we seek it our but that we protect it through
long periods of our life. I am sure of
this one thing—it is through my human relationships in the body of
Christ that I have come to know God and his love so much more
deeply. Next
Week: Can We Recover the Doctrine of the Trinity in Our Experience?
Part 5
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