Mike's musings

Rampant trinitarianism

I see the doctrine of Trinity in itself almost an impulse to God's act of creation? If God were a truly monotheistic, single entity then where would God's motive be? God would be either so self-sufficient that creation wouldn't matter, or so needy for relationship as not to be truly God.

It's the nature of Trinity that love is shared - and then shared again. That open-ness to sharing provides the dynamic for Creation - where the love between Father and Son is shared with the variety and multitude of creatures.

... agreeing with Gary here ( don't be so shocked Gary) but I also see the the open-ness to sharing as providing the dynamic for creation; exisitng in the Spirit, moulded by the son and created by the Father- from God through God and in God (Moltmann)...this concept of trinitarian creation binds together the immanence and transcendence of God....

The mystery is that this act of creation is ongoing and we are invited to participate-

"We are all in him enclosed and he is enclosed in us."- Julian of Norwich

Mike says:

I'm just not convinced. How do we _know_ all of this about the Trinity? It's becoming clearer to me than ever that a good part of my theology is apophatic, that is, I'm happier describing concepts of the Trinity (in this case) in terms of what it is not: in particular, enjoying the ineffability of the Trinity (this is the via negativa espoused, in particular, by Pseudo Dionysios, which says that God is _not_ effable, _not_ mortal, etc.). My concern about making statements about creation - and (see my upcoming essay) particularly about very human concepts such as mission - by saying "it's like this, which is something we don't understand", is pushing the boundaries of what we know. I'm happy to say that there are aspects of the Trinity which are, of course, echoed in the creation, because the creation was an act, an impulse, that proceeded from God (ooh, see that credal language, just see it there). But to say that God had to create because the Trinity is a creative partnership? Well yes, but only because we've defined creation as something that the Trinity does. It's a circular argument.

It's for similar reasons that I'm very happy to talk about the feminine nature of God. If there's one thing we can know about the naming "Father" it's surely that what God isn't constrained by the thing we think of as fatherhood: in fact, our concept of fatherhood is a shallow mockery of Fatherhood as it should be expressed, and we know from biblical witness and from personal experiences that God's relationship with us is also expressed in ways that we tend to think of as "motherly".

Interestingly, there's one point for me where we _can_ be kataphatic (make positive statements) about God: it's in saying that God is human. Because we know that in the person of Jesus Christ, he came and lived as a fully human being.

This is interesting stuff, and is giving me food for thought. As I mentioned above, I'm intending to write an essay which says that it's dangerous to say that mission should be shaped by Trinitarianism, simply, for me, because we shouldn't be shaping things against things we don't know.

A little more here. I take a very post-structuralist approach to binary oppositions: I don't like them. To say that y != x (y does not equal x) does not mean to say that we can say that x != y. For example, to say that something is not light is not to say that it is dark. Or to say that worship is not formal is not to say that it is informal. (To choose a germane example. *cough*)

To ground this in what I'm saying above: I believe that the three persons of the Trinity are not separate: but that doesn't mean that I know what it is for them to be as one. I just don't, and I can't, and that's great, because it's that creative gap, that unbeing at the centre of meaning, that allows things to happen. Deconstructionist thought is - largely - about breaking down these binary oppositions and allowing the creative meaning out, freeing it from x and !x (not x).

"The centre cannot hold : the centre cannot but hold".

# posted by MikeCamel @ 7:47 pm