Trinity in Name Alone:  Divine Love without Agency

By Rev. Larry Golemon, PhD
Minister Member, San Francisco Presbytery
Lecturer Dominican University and
San Francisco Theological Seminary

[4-1-04]

A study paper entitled "The Trinity: God’s Love Overflowing" has grown out of three years of work by a Trinity Working Group established by the General Assembly, and working under the Office of Theology and Worship.  At this summer's General Assembly, the General Assembly Council will recommend that this paper serve as the basis for a series of consultations on the Trinity throughout the church. A final report will be made at the General Assembly in 2006.

The paper is available in PDF format on the PC(USA) website.

Responding to the paper, theologian Larry Golemon argues that while it is helpful, it could be much more helpful by taking current thinking more seriously, as it emphasizes God’s nature as social/relational, and as dynamic – God as becoming rather than static being.

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The new paper by the G.A.’s Trinity Working Group is commendable on many levels:  it emphasizes the social nature of Trinitarian theology; it links Trinitarian discourse to Christian practice; it explores Trinitarian aspects of the liturgy; and it suggests a Trinitarian shape to Christian mission.  All of this helps return Trinitarian discourse to the heart of Reformed theology, worship, and mission in a vital and timely way.  However, I wonder if the Working Group took the G.A.’s charge too literally:   by focusing on the Trinity and language for God, they may have skewed the entire discussion toward the internecine politics of gender and  God-language in the denomination. If so, the document was predestined to fail by preferring a proliferation of God images without direction or agency, at the expense of the deeper forms of Trinitarian thinking, especially from the last 100 years.

There have been two significant developments in modern Trinitarian theology.  The first is to clarify the social nature of God’s being as a relation between “others.”  Through the revitalized Trinitarian frameworks of Barth and Rahner and their followers, the recovery of 4^th century Cappadocian thought by scholars like Lacugna,  the rediscovery of the Trinitarian shape of eucharistic prayer,  and the exploration of social and political implications of the Trinity by liberationists, this doctrine has become the touchstone of God’s self-giving as a process of self-othering.  Instead of God replicating God’s-self in a pattern of identity in the three persons, God “proceeds” in a process of differentiation, whereby each “person” is different from the others, while fully participating in their shared life and “essence.”     In short, God’s own being is one of becoming (Jungel), in and through the relation of each divine person to the others.   While the Working Group emphasizes the social nature of the doctrine, it does so without any sense of God’s own processional “time” or becoming.    Consequently, it shows a bias toward the classic language of stasis—that of “being” or “communion”-- instead of the more contemporary language of movement—that of “agency” and “sociality.”  For example, the paper entirely overlooks the Cappadocian’s favorite translation of “perichoresis” as a “divine dance.”  The net result is to soft-pedal the divine ethics of God’s becoming through a process of self-differentiation, whereby “difference” is valued as much or more than “sameness” and “identity.”  The truly social understanding of the Trinity affirms that God is not a safe and harmonious relation of enmeshed, look-alike personalities, but a risk-taking God, whose self-giving is toward the “other” that responds in freedom, especially in the incarnation of Christ. 

The second major development in 20^th century Trinitarian thought has to do with the historicity of God's social nature and becoming. Since Rahner's careful coordination of the immanent (“inside”) and economic (“outside”) Trinity, and Barth's re-insertion of Jesus' story into the very heart of God, many theologians now see the Trinity as God’s own becoming in and through history itself.  Whether one stresses this becoming in human history as “the Humanity of God” (Barth) or as the “Crucified God” (Moltmann), the very shape and intentionality of Triune relations must be reconceived in an incarnational direction.  No longer does the mutually indwelling Godhead sit at the edge of history, overflowing its love into all creation and life (Edwards); instead, this self-same God enters the fray of history's powers and sins, and takes them up into God's own being for their redemption.   As the crucifixion enters the very heart of God, the door is open for human life to participate fully in that divine struggle to vanquish the powers of history, as the resurrection promises.  Our participation is not a matter of extending God’s intent to our own missional activity, as the paper suggests, but rather, it is a matter of “joining” and “following” in God’s movement in the cross, so that we are taken up into the very activity of God’s Triune struggle for redemption.

What kind of document on the Trinity does the Church need at this time?  One that teaches the Trinity as a "summary" of the gospel in this sense:  in the Trinity we catch the basic movements, direction and agency of God, as reflected in Scripture.   The direction of Scriptural salvation cannot be read in a Christian fashion without Trinitarian patterns of sociality, otherness and cruciform agency becoming deeply formed in our members. That the power of Trinitarian doctrine lies more in its "grammars" or patterns and forms, than in its actual use of "images" is surely right (Lindbeck).  It is by recognizing Trinitarian grammars and employing them in liturgy, personal devotion, and mission that we learn to read what God is doing afresh, in and through the Biblical narrative and our world.   Then, and only then, can we recognize the gender issues for what they actually help us do in theology:  explore different models of the “person” — including subjectivity and agency -- by which we recognize God's own being and work.  The point of all these images is not to enhance our own ability to identify with the Godhead, but rather to recognize the strange and miraculous ways that God has chosen to identify with and claim us.   What we need is a paper that lays out viable Trinitarian grammars and their practices for today—in liturgy, discipleship, and mission-- so that we can truly recognize and participate in what God is doing anew. Until then, this paper asks us to use the traditional Trinitarian formula as an “anchor” for all other God-talk, which unfortunately keeps the Presbyterians tied down in the backwaters, untouched by the traffic and flow of contemporary Trinitarian developments.   
 

Theologians referenced:

Barth:  Karl Barth, Swiss Reformed theologian that shaped mid 20^th century “neo-orthodoxy” in the U.S.

Cappadocians:  An early church school of theologians (Basil, Gregory of Nyssa, and Gregory of Nazianzus) from the 4^th century, who stressed the three distinct persons of the Trinity and their dynamic relations.

Edwards:  Jonathan Edwards, 18^th century American Reformed theologian who “modernized” Puritan thought in terms of the Enlightenment.

Jungel:  Eberhard Jungel, 20^th century Protestant theologian of Europe, and major interpretor of Karl Barth.

Lacugna:  Catherine Lacugna, 20^th century  Catholic theologian who recovers the social nature of God’s revelation “for us” in the Trinitarian relations.

Lindbeck:  George Lindbeck,  living “post-liberal” Protestant theologian of the Yale school, who argues for doctrine as “grammars” or rules by which we appropriate Scripture and creeds.

Moltmann:   Jurgen Motlmann,   living Reformed theologian of Europe, who affirmed a social doctrine of the trinity that embraces the full implications of the crucifixion.  

Rahner:  Karl Rahner, Roman Catholic theologian of the 20^th century, who refashioned traditional Catholic thought in modern terms, and had a strong influence on Vatican II.