Reconstructing the Trinity: A Proposal
I'm posting this for Dwight Welch, a recent graduate of Christian Theological Seminary, and soon to be the pastor of a congregation of the United Church of Christ. Dwight has posted here before and once was a regular blogger himself, until seminary got in the way -- so here is his contribution to the Trinity Sunday conversation as to whether the doctrine is viable!
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John Shuck, a Presbyterian pastor, asks a potent question.
When one reflects on doctrines in church history, like the Trinity, why should
we feel compelled to take those doctrines on today? Is it simply because of the
age of the doctrine? A good number of ideas throughout church history from
views about women to anti-Semitism are best left behind despite their age. Other doctrines were developed in such a
different period of time that the presuppositions behind them hardly relate to
what we believe about the world today.
But I think it is still possible for religious progressives
to relook at certain doctrines, like the trinity. If a doctrine has had a
commanding influence over a period of time and a range of communities it
suggests that it may touch on something about human life and experience.
Doctrines which fail to do that largely can’t survive. Those that do, even if the
language is not what we would use today, whether it is about redemption and
sin, heaven and hell, and even the trinity, speaks on some level to human
experience.
So it becomes our responsibility to wrestle with this, to
find what is being attended to. One does this because whatever that is, could
be important for us, even if we would need to reconstruct the language for
today. For instance with ancestor worship, one could dismiss this as
supernatural, as entailing beliefs about some “spirit realm” or we could
imagine why a society would want to revere it’s ancestors, imagining how those
that came before us provided for the context that is our world today.
So one is engaged in an imaginative project to imagine how
those doctrines spoke to a group of people and if the language was
reconstructed could still have power for us today. So while we may speak of God
as creator differently post Darwin, there is still a connection with other
periods of time who have known God as creator.
Sometimes this imaginative move happens to learn what we
want to avoid, such as anti-Semitism and how communities are often built
through an alienated other and the ways we need to be attentive to that in our
own context. Sometimes it can be positive, in imagining how human meaning or
justice or sense of self might be preserved in the language religious
communities have spoken about the after life.
The idea is that whatever achievements in wisdom and
knowledge has been had throughout a given tradition, ought to be retrieved if even
reconceived so the language can speak to us and our time and place, given what
we know of the world. For instance, we still need a world redeemed even if how
we would speak to this need could have forms of connection and disconnection
with how this has been related to in the past.
Bob Cornwall, a Disciples pastor, makes such a move by looking at how the idea of the trinity,
provides a means to speak of both God as internally related and how that is
played out in the world. We get a bit of this in John 17, imagining how we can
be interrelated with each other. Trinitarian metaphors about God highlights
this in a potent way.
If I was to extend this metaphor a bit, it might start by
asking what is it that allows us to be interrelated to each other in ways that
serve as a blessing for each other and our world?
There would need to be a form of individuality which allows
people to be themselves and bring their unique histories, sense of things,
gifts, and experiences to the table. Often communities exist to squelch
difference, to make us one by leavening out what makes us us. The Spirit of God
in the Bible though seems to highlight the role of difference. In Genesis the
spirit separates the elements in the creation story. Abraham is separated out
from the place of his birth. In Pentecost the church is given a unique
identity. Naming often happens, Jacob to Israel, Saul to Paul, which highlights
this new identity.
If we try to squelch differences in the name of unity, we may
be not just ignoring what God might have for us as expressed in the very things
which make us as individuals. Of course if we were content to just be
individuals, then we’d be isolated. And communities can do this as well,
separating themselves from the wider world, and one could tell a story of
American individualism and gated communities. Abraham is separated out, but
this is done to be a blessing to the nations.
Christ may be a way of speaking of how one moves from self
to the other, interrelating in ways which are transformative for both. So that
individuals and communities can creatively engage each other. Christ is the
name for what allows us to bring out unique gifts to a table. And any number of
stories of Jesus crossing barriers could highlight this. The communion table is
an apt symbol of this move. And the church could be a visible representation of
bringing people together.
The result of such a move could be the expansion of the divine
commonwealth. God might be made more real, evident, when people are able to
develop themselves in ways that can in relation to each other build communities.
This would, like the trinity, be impossible to cut up this process except for
analysis. That is, we become individuals in communities, and yet communities can
be transformed by the individuals so created, in ways that can make God more incarnate.
Remove community and this falls apart, remove individuality and communities are
dead in the water.
I won’t pretend this is what the crafters of the classic
creeds were after. But it does connect with a vision of relationality that one
finds in the tradition, one which bears on the question posted by Plato which
has haunted the west of the One and the Many. I probably borrowed from Charles
Sanders Pierce to make some of my moves but I think that is what reconstruction
is about. It’s taking ideas, doctrines, notions from the past and reworking
them, hopefully keeping faith with their genius, but refitting them in a more
fitting manner today, so that they can do transformative work in the world.
Comments
The first person I encountered who reflected on the trinity in such a way as to say that it implies that God's very being is community was William Placher.
I'm confident that had Christianity taken root in another time and place the trinity would not have developed. It was a tool to understand the nature of Christ. That said, Christianity as we know it came from a specific time and place. The weird stuff like the trinity can be rejected if harmful, or enjoyed if harmless. Since the trinity is harmless, and weird, we can enjoy it! It makes for good fun and deep meditation. There really is no way to be wrong, unless it leads to harm.
Peace!