December 22, 2024

God is unifying love: a personal experience

The Trinity is not an abstract concept; the Trinity is a potential experience.

God the Trinity is three persons—Abba, Jesus, and Sophia—united through perfect love into one God. We are made in the image of God to overcome the illusion of our separation and reclaim our natural unity. In this series of essays, I am trying to think through this Trinitarian thought and its implications for ethics and life.

Trinitarian thought produces Trinitarian action, which produces the Trinitarian experience of graced time. The Greeks called graced time kairos. We can call it “eternity,” so long as we define eternity to be time-as-blessing.

In our experience, thinking, acting, and feeling are themselves triune, both one and three, distinguishable but inseparable. Each influences the others, as each is influenced by the others. And these three are entirely relational. The entirety of each is affected by the entirety of the others. Thinking, acting, and feeling are conceptually separable yet experientially united, distinguishable from yet perfectly open to their counterparts.

Trinitarian thought produces Trinitarian action which produces Trinitarian experience.

At the risk of self-congratulations, for which I apologize, I would like to share a Trinitarian experience. My church was on a mission trip to northern New York one summer, to do rural rehab on houses in an impoverished area of the country with brutal winters. We would try to fix up the houses and make them “warmer, safer, and dryer,” so their inhabitants would feel protected from the elements, and loved, even in a cold world.

I was partnered with Keith, a high school student who knew ten times more about construction than I did. At one of the houses we worked on, a small hole in the roof leaked water directly onto the bed of the six-year-old girl below. Any time it rained in the middle of the night, she would wake up sopping wet. At this point in our workweek, we had completed our main project on the house and had only one day left for projects. We could fix the girl’s roof only if we could do it in eight hours.

We decided to try. The program had galvanized steel panels available for a metal roof. The problem was their slipperiness. Keith and I needed to drill screws through the tin into the rafters, but we would slip while doing so and risk falling over the edge. The ground, mind you, was a perilous six feet below.

So, Keith and I figured out a system: standing next to each other, we grabbed the peak of the roof with our outside hands to keep from sliding. Then I held the screw with my inside hand while he held the drill with his inside hand. In this way we were able to attach the metal to the beams without falling off the roof.

Our activity was meaningful, purposeful, and united. I disappeared into the flow of the action so that, even though I was acting, the action felt effortless. Such was the coordination of our activity that Keith and I seemed to act as one, although the job could be achieved only by two. Time itself—the medium through which our activity occurred—flowed as gracious opportunity. Temporarily freed from the burden of our egos through the synthesis of our egos, we found that relationship—to the person you act with and the person you act for, the little girl below, watching us—can render time eternal.

Love is vulnerability, and within God, this vulnerability is absolute. It penetrates to the core of each divine person’s being, flows through that core, then surfaces again, unceasingly. The persons of the Trinity do not possess any independent, preceding identity that then enters into relationship with the other persons. Instead, every person depends, has always depended, and will always depend, on every other person for their divine being—as do we.

If God is anything in itself, then God is relationship itself, infinite relatedness expressed as interpersonal love mediated by time. When we participate in this divine reality, when we manifest God on earth, we may discover a Holy Spirit—an undertow of grace that bears us to our goal—God’s beloved community. And, if we look closely, we may see its image reflected in the eyes of a six year old girl who will be warm, safe, and dry next winter. (adapted from Jon Paul Sydnor, The Great Open Dance: A Progressive Christian Theology, pages 61-63)

December 17, 2024

God the Trinity is passionate and emotional. We are made in the image of God for the experience of passion and emotions.

The doctrine of the social Trinity embeds feelings and emotions within God.

Passionate people have lives of meaning and purpose. They are vital. Oddly, traditional Christian theology has declared God, the Source of Life, to be dispassionate—beyond passion, beyond emotion, beyond feeling. As the Actor who is never acted upon, God cannot be affected or influenced. God transcends our complex, interacting world, which produces so many passions. Therefore, God is dispassionate.

This questionable theological move is worsened by our contemporary use of the word “emotional,” which is usually used in a pejorative sense: “Oh, he’s so emotional.” Using the adjective “emotional” as a shorthand for “emotionally dysregulated” makes the only good option to be unemotional.

In its technical language, Christian theology has declared God to be, not unemotional, but impassible: unaffected by the events within creation, beyond the influence of human activity, hence incapable of any humanlike emotional response. The concept of impassibility derives from the categories of Greek and Roman philosophy and never had any basis in the Bible. It also rejects the great blessings of spiritual existence, such as the hope and joy that accompany love. Therefore, we reject this classical attribute of God and propose instead that God is very, very passible.

Interpersonal relations within God, coupled with God’s openness to creation, generate a complex of feelings and emotions within the divine. God does not just feel; God feels absolutely. Moreover, negative emotions such as fear cannot diminish the divine capacity for feeling because God is love, and perfect love casts out all fear (1 John 4:18). Hence, the feelings and emotions offered to us by the universe are holy. They are not to be overcome; they are to be celebrated.

God is love, and love is openness.

Indeed, increasing openness to feelings and emotions is part of our theosis, or divinization. God feels, and God feels absolutely. But God also feels perfectly. That is, God’s emotions are always appropriate to the situation. We human beings, on the other hand, may have unhelpful responses to certain situations. We may feel a tinge of celebration at the suffering of a friend because we are aware of our own suffering but doubt the reality of others’, and their obvious suffering reassures us within our hidden suffering. We may feel envy at the success of a friend due to deep-seated doubts about the value of our own contribution. Insecure and desiring prestige, we may seek power over rather than service of. We may seek to move up the hierarchy of value rather than celebrate our God-given equality.

When these feelings arise, they are grounded in a sense of separation that God abhors. But God is empty of any excluding, occluding self. All separation is illusion and God, as all-knowing, is not deluded. As a result of God’s perfect wisdom God feels perfectly, which is to love perfectly. In other words, God feels what should be felt as deeply as it can be felt.

Within God there is no capacity for celebrating another’s pain or envying another’s success, because God is perfect. “Perfect” does not mean unchanging, but changing perfectly.

This concept of God transforms our interpretation of human life. Now, the source of every human affect (our deepest emotions) is the divine affection. And for every sacred affect there is a sacred season, a time to laugh and a time to cry, a time to dance and a time to mourn (Ecclesiastes 3:1–8).

Our experience of Jesus as the Son of God affirms these sentiments. If God doesn’t feel anything, if God is impassible (as Christian theology has so often asserted), then why does Jesus the Child of God feel so much? A detached God would be incarnated as an aloof automaton, but Jesus was an emotional prophet. A self-sufficient God would be incarnated as a reclusive hermit, but Jesus was social, passionate, and vital.

For the Parent, for the Child, for the Spirit, and by way of consequence, for all beings, to live vividly we must love dangerously. Love risks life, and God as love lures the universe into this risk, into the fullness of being.

When God chose to be love, God chose to be time.

My parents raised me in a moderate, mainstream church outside Richmond, Virginia. At Tuckahoe Presbyterian, almost everybody accepted Darwin’s theory of evolution, no one expected Jesus to come back next week, and nobody talked about other religions going to hell. The community was loving, not controlling.

Yet one teaching bothered me. In conversations, prayers, hymns, and sermons, I learned that God resided in eternity, but humans resided in time. I wasn’t exactly sure what eternity was, but I could tell that it was other than time, and it was better than time. Fortunately, I was reassured that one day, after I died, I would be in eternity with God and everybody else I loved who had died before me.

Even as a child I found this teaching confusing, and it made me feel a little resentful toward God. If God loves us, and if God is in eternity, and if eternity is better than time, then why did God put us in time? I felt like God sent us from the palace out to the woodshed before we’d even done anything wrong. Sure, the woodshed is better than the woods, but why aren’t we in the palace with God? God’s creation of the universe, and placement of creatures therein, seemed inhospitable.

I wish that I could blame my childhood dismay on an undeveloped feeling for language. But in English, “eternity” is too often associated with “timelessness.” The Oxford English Dictionary defines eternity as “in expressed or implied opposition to time,” “existence with reference to which the relation of succession has no application,” or most simply, “timelessness.” It provides an example from an 1853 theological essay: “Eternity, in relation to God, has nothing to do with time or duration.” The Oxford English Dictionary even explicitly associates “eternity” with the afterlife: “Opposed to ‘time’ in its restricted sense of duration measured by the succession of physical phenomena. Hence, the condition into which the soul enters at death; the future life.” It then provides an example from Shakespeare’s Hamlet: “All that lives must die, Passing through nature to eternitie.”

As an adult I still believe that contrasting God in eternity with humankind in time is harmful, so harmful that we should reject the definition of eternity as timelessness. If we are on earth and God is in heaven, then God is elsewhere. And if we are in time and God is in a timeless “eternity,” then God is elsewhen. Too often, traditional theology worships a God twice removed—not in our place, and not in our time.

Yet, given our knowledge of God as God has revealed Godself to us, such separation is not God’s mode of operating. The God of the universe who enters the universe as a person—Jesus, who clothes divinity in matter, who locates divinity in space, who moves divinity through time—that is not the type of God who would reside in a more privileged state than creation. A distant God would not choose incarnation.

To participate in relationship is to participate in time.

God incarnates in Christ to relate to us more intimately. To relate to one another is to both cause and effect one another. Without this change there is no relatedness, and without relatedness there is no personhood. Hence, when we assert that God is loving relationality, we are also asserting that God is internally timeful, since persons can interact only through time.

Relatedness and time are as inseparable as two sides of the same coin. Hence, when God chose to be love, God chose to be time. In this view, God is not being itself; God is becoming itself.

But asserting that God is timeful does not imply that God exists within the history of this universe, within our own space-time, as it were. God is present to us here and now, but God is not limited to our here and now. As noted earlier, since Einstein’s theory of general relativity, we have lost belief in absolute time. Multiple different times characterize our universe—gravity and velocity both dilate time—so time here may be quite different from time there. How fast would time proceed for God, and which time would be God’s?

Instead, in asserting that God is timeful we are asserting that change characterizes God’s internal life, which is an interpersonal life. God is related, within God’s self and to our selves and to our universe. The medium of relationship is time. Hence, God is timeful.

For a relationship to be real, it must be open—open to the free action of the other, open to the risk that vulnerability entails, and open to the future that no one person controls. It must be open to change, hence open to time.

Openness renders God timeful, but being timeful does not render God fickle. God remains everlastingly characterized by ḥesed—loving kindness or covenant faithfulness. God’s character never changes, but God’s character expresses itself in various ways due to the changes that occur within time. Confronted with injustice, ḥesed expresses itself as anger. Confronted with justice, ḥesed expresses itself as approval. Confronted with moral evil, ḥesed expresses itself as condemnation. Confronted with contrition, ḥesed expresses itself as mercy.

We are made in the image of God to relate to one another faithfully through time, which is to relate to one another lovingly through time. Through the fulfillment of this image we can render time kairos. Kairos is an ancient Greek word for time as graced. Eternity is not other than time. Eternity is time rendered holy. (adapted from Jon Paul Sydnor, The Great Open Dance: A Progressive Christian Theology, pages 58-61)

*****

For further reading, please see:

Cobb Jr., John B and David Ray Griffin. Process Theology: An Introductory Exposition. Louisville: Westminster, 1976.

Hartshorne, Charles. “The Dipolar Conception of Deity.” The Review of Metaphysics 21, no. 2 (1967) 273–89. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20124563.

Oord, Thomas Jay. Pluriform Love: An Open and Relational Theology of Well-Being. Idaho: SacraSage, 2022.

Rice, Richard. “Trinity, Temporality, and Open Theism.” Philosophia 35 (2007) 321–28.

Thatamanil, John. The Immanent Divine: God, Creation, and the Human Predicament. Minneapolis: Fortress, 2006.
Zizioulas, John. Being as Communion: Studies in Personhood and the Church. Crestwood: St. Vladimir's Seminary Press, 1985.

December 14, 2024

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December 8, 2024

What if Christians actually celebrated the diversity and difference that God sustains?

Christians must celebrate difference, so Christians must celebrate the social Trinity.

The Greek gods Zeus, Poseidon, and Hades are certainly different from one another, but not in a good way. They struggle against one another, to the destruction of those around them. For some, the mismanagement of their differences incriminates difference itself. Who needs polytheism, if the many gods are conflictual? The desire for harmony produces a desire for pure unity, one perfect God who holds all power and makes all decisions, thereby avoiding all conflict.

But there is a better way to negotiate difference that unites the many, rather than replacing them with the one. Too often, even the Christian tradition has shied away from this option. Indeed, in its concern to avoid tritheism while advancing Trinitarianism, the Christian tradition has frequently advanced a slightly triune monotheism. And when the three are mentioned, they sometimes become identical triplets with little distinction, as if all difference produces disunity.

Gregory of Nyssa, for example, asserts that the only difference between the three persons of the Trinity is their order of being: the Son is begotten of the Father and the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father; otherwise they are indistinguishable. But if integration necessitates sameness and difference threatens unity, then a homogeneous God offers our diverse world little hope.

Moreover, if the three are virtually indistinguishable from one another, then there is no reason for them to be three. All conversation would become monologue, offering as much novelty as talking to yourself. All interaction would become mirroring, denying all surprise.

Difference, on the other hand, invigorates community and stimulates creativity by provoking sameness out of its torpor. Sameness is static, but difference is kinetic. Sameness roots us to the present, but difference opens us to the future.

For example, Charles Hartshorne argues that the intensity of aesthetic experience depends on contrast. Artists fill a blank canvas with varying colors, recognizing that diversity integrated is beauty created. Composers fill a score with varying notes, creating dissonance that resolves into consonance. All creators recognize that great diversity, perfectly unified, produces the most intense beauty, such as that we see in the cosmos.

Divine diversity establishes and endorses human diversity.

Jürgen Moltmann places this aesthetic insight within the very heart of God. For Moltmann, the three persons of the Trinity are truly different persons of the Trinity, throbbing with communicable life. We have already argued that if God is a self-identical subject (a single person), then God cannot be love, because love implies relatedness. Now, we argue further that vitality implies difference. Hence, the superabundant creativity of the Trinity implies difference within God.

Moltmann expresses this insight by asserting the true uniqueness of the divine persons, who differ from one another in function, experience, and memory. Functionally, the Spirit inspires the prophets whom the Father sustains and the Son perfects. Experientially, the Son suffers death and (the feeling of) abandonment by the Father, while the Father laments his Son’s suffering. At the ascension, the Son relinquishes physical presence to the church so that the Spirit can animate its ministry.

In the Christian scheme of salvation, God prefers cooperation over mere operation. Different functions produce different perspectives, which produce different experiences, which produce different memories, all of which distinguish the Trinitarian persons. Hence, the persons of the Trinity are in no way interchangeable. As distinct centers of subjective experience, they are true persons, with a strong sense of self that they place at one another’s service.

These three persons, characterized by perfect internal presence and perfect external openness, are by their very nature equals. God is uniqueness loving uniqueness, difference loving difference: creation, incarnation, and inspiration are not the sequential activities of one person in three different historical guises, as suggested by Sabellius’s modalism. Nor is God a primary substance hosting secondary difference. Instead, distinct persons generate divinity through love.

Interpersonal uniqueness energizes the divine community, such that unity-in-difference is the very source of all reality. In contrast, if we predicate uniformity as our sacred ideal, then intolerance becomes our sacred mission. If unity necessitates sameness, then ethnic cleansing is a necessary precursor to national community, churches are right to practice racial exclusion, and the spirit is best conjured by homogeneity. A truly Trinitarian faith, on the other hand, will enthusiastically embrace diversity.

The doctrine of the social Trinity celebrates interdependence.

The difference embedded within God—the uniqueness of the divine persons— grants their relations freedom and consequence. They respond to each other in different ways, at different times, for different reasons. The various combinations of such uniqueness, amplified by an openness to time, offer inexhaustible possibilities for interaction.

Within God, history never repeats itself, nor does it echo. Such an understanding challenges the traditional interpretation of aseity. Aseity means “self-causing,” that God is the source of God’s own being, that God has no cause other than God’s self. Early Christian theologians borrowed the concept from Greco-Roman thought. Believing that religious ultimacy demands metaphysical independence, they insisted that transcendence excludes relationship. In this view, God needs no one and relies on no one for his (and it’s always a he/him) being or satisfaction. Creation is thus an utterly gracious act, meeting no need of God’s, who generously grants us life in this beautiful universe.

Feminist theologians have argued that the ascription of self-sufficiency to God improperly exalts traditionally masculine qualities like emotional invulnerability, thoughtless self-assertion, and condescending paternalism. Societies who worship such a self-sustaining God will also exalt lone wolf males who act unhindered by any concern for the broader society. According to this critique, the doctrine of aseity does not provide insight into God so much as it reinforces male privilege while stunting male psychology.

We are reinterpreting the doctrine of aseity by asserting that, while God is uncaused, the three persons who constitute God are co-originating. That is, the Trinity does not depend on an external source for their existence. Yet simultaneously, the persons within the Trinity are interdependent. God has invited creation into that interdependence. If God ever had the capacity for perfect self-satisfaction, then God has forsaken that capacity for us.

Rejecting isolated self-sufficiency, God instead chooses increase-through-relation. Each person in the Trinity says, “Ubuntu—I am because you are,” to the other persons. Eternal self-sufficiency makes a bold choice for everlasting relationship and all that relationship entails—vulnerability, exultation, despair, joy, suffering, and love.

The doctrine of the social Trinity celebrates freedom.

This capacity for choice implies that God has no nature. God is free, unconstrained by a cause or an essence or a universal law or even goodness itself. God is decision before attribute or being. God asserts this divine freedom in Exodus 3:14. If we translate the Hebrew verb ‘ehyeh in the future tense, then God states, “I will be who I will be.” God is choosing to become who God is, and God is love.

The divine choice for love is absolute, so that God’s love becomes spontaneous. This spontaneity makes the divine love appear natural, since that love penetrates to and emanates from the divine core. Nevertheless, it is a continuously chosen identity. God could very well choose otherwise, but will not, because God has also chosen to be ḥesed. Ḥesed is the Hebrew word for loving-kindness, steadfast faithfulness, and great mercy (Psalms 86:5; 107:43; etc.). As the covenantal love and loyalty that God shows to us, and the covenantal love and loyalty that we should show to one another, ḥesed is the ideal of relationship. Ḥesed keeps its promises, even at great personal cost. God is trustworthy because God has chosen to be trustworthy, not because God is constrained by an unchangeable nature.

If God did not have this freedom to choose, if God were constrained by an essence, then God would not be a person. Reality would be defined by the nature that precedes God, not God’s choice for communion. And the most basic substrate of the universe would be an impersonal force, analogous to gravity, rather than an interpersonal God sustaining relationship with and between persons.

If God is not free, then God is not love. And if we are not free, then we cannot choose love, which is to choose divinity and fulfill the image of God within us. (adapted from Jon Paul Sydnor, The Great Open Dance: A Progressive Christian Theology, pages 55-58)

*****

For further reading, please see:

Gregory of Nyssa. “On ‘Not Three Gods.’” Translated by H. A. Wilson. From Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, edited by Philip Schaff, 2nd ser., 5. Buffalo: Christian Literature, 1893. Revised and edited for New Advent by Kevin Knight. https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/2905.htm.

Hampson, Daphne. “The Theological Implications of a Feminist Ethic.” The Modern Churchman 31 no. 1 (1989) 36–39. DOI: 10.3828/MC.31.1.36

Hartshorne, Charles. Creative Synthesis and Philosophic Method. Chicago: Open Court, 1970.

Moltmann, Jurgen. The Trinity and the Kingdom: The Doctrine of God. San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1981.

Rea, Michael. “Gender as a divine attribute.” Religious Studies 52, no. 1 (March 2016) 97–115. DOI: 10.1017/S0034412514000614.

December 6, 2024

Christmas playlist!

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December 2, 2024

Progressive Christians may feel despondent now, but God invites us into love and joy.

The doctrine of the social Trinity shifts our priority from barren individuality to abundant community.

Our natural tendency in the West is to think of ourselves as individuals with our own unique being, or “substance”. Individuality and substance are important, and overly dominant, concepts in Western philosophy and theology. They pervade our culture and form our worldview, frequently without us even realizing it.

The French philosopher Rene Descartes defines substance as a “thing that exists in such a way that it doesn’t depend on anything else for its existence,” noting that only God possesses such independent existence. Descartes then defines worldly substances as “things that don’t depend for their existence on anything except God.” This definition asserts the dependence of all things on God, then asserts their essential independence from each other. Descartes’s vision unites all reality to God, then fragments that very same reality.

Such a metaphysic implies, intentionally or accidentally, separation from our neighbors. If God has created us to be metaphysically separate from one another, then what motivates us toward unity? If, on the other hand, our sustaining God is Trinity, then our sustaining God is relationality, or being-toward-another. Because we are made in the image of God, we have received the imprint of our Sustainer. Hence, we are dependent not only on God, but on one another as well. We are fundamentally communal.

This mutualistic interpretation of life implies universal communion, thereby rejecting all forms of estrangement, domination, and hierarchy. Such a relational metaphysic may disorient us, since we (in the West especially) are more accustomed to the belief that things and people possess an underlying essence granting them a stable identity. In this view, a “thing” is what it is, and is not what it is not, forever.

But contemporary physics calls into question the existence of any underlying essence or unchanging substance. Quarks, for example, are the most basic units of protons and neutrons. According to quantum physicists, quarks have neither parts nor dimension, nor can they exist independently of one another—there is no such thing as a “free” quark. Yet, quarks combine to produce the atomic nuclei that grant the cosmos weight and solidity. Metaphorically, we could say that quarks function only in relation to one another.

Theologically, the social doctrine of the Trinity renders relationality, or communion, the most fundamental metaphysic in Christianity. God does not have relations; God is relations. Or, as Peter Phan writes, “In God relation is pure esse ad, facing-each-other, pure being-oriented-toward- each-other, pure self-giving and receiving-of-another.” Within the Trinity, each divine person possesses a centrifugal nature that seeks fulfillment in their neighbor.
God invites humans into the same metaphysical extraversion.

As a reinterpretation of our most basic reality, the Trinity forces us to reconceptualize our relationship to God, one another, and the cosmos. If reality is most basically communion, then to be real is to be in communion, and to be separated is to be less real. Division diminishes being. Prior to relation, in the eternal nothingness that is the absence of relationality, any isolated being is a nonbeing. A solitary being is a nonbeing that yearns to be yet can receive its being only through another. By divine decision, without relationship there is nothing, even for God.

The social Trinity completes the personal concept of God as an interpersonal concept of God.

Catherine Mowry LaCugna writes, “The identity and unique reality of a person emerges entirely in relation to another person.” The Bible has always insisted that God is personal, not abstract. Hence, you are not a glorious accident of cosmological evolution; you are a divinely intended gift, given by means of cosmological evolution. And within the universe is an unending desire for your well-being: “I alone know my purpose for you, says YHWH, my purpose for you to thrive, and my purpose not to harm you, my purpose to give you a future with hope. At that time you will call upon me and come and pray to me, and I will listen to you. You will seek me and find me when you seek me wholeheartedly” (Jeremiah 29:11–13a).

In the biblical view, unrelated personhood is unfulfilled personhood: “It is not good for [someone] to be alone” (Genesis 2:18 DRA [gender neutralized]). We can observe this truth today: newborns denied physical contact develop reactive attachment disorders, inmates left in solitary confinement go insane, lonely people become depressed. Without other persons, personality is lost, because personality is fulfilled only through inter-personality.

The doctrine of the Trinity expresses this theological insight by insisting that God is more than personal; God is interpersonal, and lovingly so. Since humans are made in the image of God, the more we love the more joy we receive. Since we cannot deny to God our richest personal experiences, we ascribe to God their consummation. Perfect love and its correlate, pure joy, both belong to God, who invites us into their union.

The doctrine of the social Trinity does not imply polytheism or tritheism (the worship of three separate gods).

Critics of social Trinitarianism argue that, if the Trinity implies three unique centers of consciousness, then Christianity has rejected monotheism and adopted polytheism or, more specifically, tritheism (the worship of three gods rather than one God in three persons). But Trinitarianism is not tritheism.

One way to distinguish the triune God from three gods is by contrasting the Christian Trinity with the Greek troika of Zeus, Poseidon, and Hades. These three gods are separate: ruling separate realms, marrying separate women, and pursuing separate lovers. They are ranked in power, over which they argue and for which they compete. They distrust one another; when their desires clash, they clash. Their disordered intentions produce a disordered world, as each wields power against the others in support of his arbitrary favorites.

In the Trojan war, for example, Zeus favors the Trojans, but Poseidon favors the Achaeans. When Zeus’s sexual attraction toward Aphrodite distracts him from the war, Zeus’s wife Hera advises Poseidon of this development, and Poseidon seizes the opportunity to strengthen his side. Later, upset by Poseidon’s intervention, Zeus sends him a message:

Go on your way now, swift Iris, to the lord Poseidon, and give him all this message nor be a false messenger. Tell him that he must now quit the war and the fighting, and go back among the generations of gods, or into the bright sea. And if he will not obey my words, or thinks nothing of them, then let him consider in his heart and his spirit that he might not, strong though he is, be able to stand up to my attack; since I say I am far greater than he is in strength, and elder born; yet his inward heart shrinks not from calling himself the equal of me, though others shudder before me.

Zeus, Poseidon, and Hades rule the cosmos but threaten chaos. Hades lusts after Zeus’s daughter Persephone and abducts her, with Zeus’s permission. Her mother Demeter, goddess of agriculture, threatens to destroy the harvest and starve humankind, and thereby deny the gods their sacrifices. Zeus must plead with Hades for Persephone’s return. Even the natural order is not safe from these three gods’ cravings.

Zeus, Poseidon, and Hades are three gods, and in no way one God. They exemplify tritheism, and in the worst way. Many things are triune, both three and one, in which the three are distinguishable but inseparable. A musical triad is three different notes that make one chord. A triangle is three unique sides that make one shape. The French tricolor is three different colors that make up one flag. Hydrogen cyanide is three different atoms (HCN) that compose one molecule. Deuterium is three different particles—proton, neutron, and electron—united into one atom. To assert that any of these examples is one but not three, or three but not one, is foolish. Likewise, the Trinity is three persons united through love into one God, both three and one, hence triune.

We all of us, in all our diversity, are made in the image of God. May we, who are many, so unite that we become one: perfectly unified difference, perfectly harmonized complexity—e pluribus unum. Such will be the Kingdom of God, which is the Reign of Love.

*****

For further reading, please see:

Descartes. Selected Philosophical Writings. Translated and edited by Anthony Kenny et al. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009.

Hesiod. Theogony, Works and Days, Testimonia. Translated by Robert W. Most. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006.

Homer. The Iliad of Homer. Translated by Richmond Lattimore. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011.

Kohl, Christian Thomas. “Buddhism and Quantum Physics: A strange parallelism of two concepts of reality.” Contemporary Buddhism 8, no. 1 (2007) 69–82. DOI: 10.1080/14639940701295328.

Lacugna, Catherine Mowery. God for Us: The Trinity and Christian Life. San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1993.

Olson, Roger E. and Christopher Hall. The Trinity. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002.

Phan, Peter C. “Relations, Trinitarian.” In New Catholic Encyclopedia, 2nd ed, edited by Berard L. Marthaler, vol. 12, 45–6. Detroit: Gale eBooks, 2003.

Zizioulas, John. Being as Communion: Studies in Personhood and the Church. Crestwood: St. Vladimir's Seminary Press, 1985.

November 24, 2024

The social Trinity can inform a new, agapic, progressive Christianity

We can ground an agapic, progressive Christianity in the social Trinity.

The open, vulnerable relations between the three persons of the Trinity provide a ground for Christian progressivism, because they model egalitarian relations that challenge our unjust social structures. As such, the Trinity provides a powerful analytical method by which we can transform society in the image of our loving God.

We find a tripersonal (based in three persons) experience of salvation in the New Testament, which is where we’ll begin our exploration. Within the Christian tradition, the most consequential speculation on the nature of God occurs in the unrecorded period between the resurrection of Christ and the writing of the New Testament. We have no writings from this period, although we do have writings about this period, such as Acts. But with regard to the Trinity, we have no description of the origins of Trinitarian worship or thought. Although the earliest followers of the Way (Acts 9:2; 19 , 23; etc.) were Jewish worshipers of one God, their experience of salvation was tripersonal. That is, they experienced one salvation through three persons, whom they called the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

They expressed this tripersonal salvation in their liturgy (their language of worship), which the authors of the New Testament then incorporated into their writings. For instance, Paul provides a Trinitarian benediction, probably drawing on preexisting liturgical language: “May the grace of our savior Jesus Christ and the love of God and the friendship of the Holy Spirit be with you all!” (2 Corinthians 13:14). The earliest Gospel, Mark, describes the baptism of Jesus in a Trinitarian manner, referring to Jesus himself, the descent of the Spirit upon him in the form of a dove, and a voice from heaven declaring Jesus the Beloved Child of God (Mark 1:11). In the Gospel of John, Jesus declares, “Abba and I are one” (John 10:30) and promises to send a Counselor (the Holy Spirit) to the new community of disciples (John 14:16). So transformative was the community’s experience of tripersonal salvation that the rite of entry into the church became a rite of entry into Trinitarian life: “Go, therefore, and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of Abba God, and of the Only Begotten, and of the Holy Spirit” (Matthew 28:19 The Inclusive Bible).

Since no historian recorded the transition from Jewish monotheism to early Christian Trinitarianism, we cannot know exactly how or why it happened. But given the vigor of the young church, we can infer that the liturgical expressions recorded in the earliest Christian scriptures were generated within the Christian community and resonated with that community’s experience. In worship, they preached, prayed, and sang the healing that they had received, a healing which came through three persons but led congregants into one body.

In other words, the early Christian community’s experience of salvation was Trinitarian—one salvation through three persons as one God. To assert that their experience was Trinitarian is not to assert that their theology was Trinitarian. The earliest Christians did not think the same way about God that later Christians would think. They felt that their lives had been transformed by the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, whom they worshiped as one. (Please note: when discussing historical theology, we will use the traditional, gender-specific terminology of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. As the series of blogs progresses, we will substitute our own, gender-inclusive terminology.)

The early Christians’ liturgy expressed their experience and laid the foundations for tripersonal (three person) theology on the experience of tripersonal salvation. By the time the church wrote its new Scriptures, it could not talk about the Creator without talking about Jesus and the Holy Spirit. Euclideans needed three lines to draw a triangle; Christians needed three persons to talk about God. So John writes: “There are three who give testimony in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost. And these three are one” (1 John 5 DRA).

How did a monotheistic Jewish justice movement become Trinitarian Christianity?

As mentioned above, Jesus and his first followers practiced Judaism, a religion replete with commandments to worship God alone: “I am YHWH, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. Do not worship any gods except me!” (Exodus 20:2–3). Jesus’s favored prophet, Isaiah, reiterates the exclusive status of the one God: “Thus says the Lord, the King of Israel, and his Redeemer, the Lord of hosts: I am the first and I am the last; besides me there is no god” (Isaiah 44:6 NRSV).

Jesus himself affirms Jewish monotheism. In Mark, the earliest gospel written, when a scribe approaches Jesus and asks him which commandment is the greatest of all, Jesus responds by quoting (and embellishing) the Jews’ beloved Shema: “This is the foremost: ‘Hear, O Israel, God, our God, is one. You must love the Most High God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength’” (paraphrasing Deuteronomy 6:4–5). Jesus then couples love of God to love of neighbor by quoting Leviticus 19b: “The second is this: ‘You must love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no commandment greater than these” (Mark 12:29–31).

So, when asserting the greatest commandment in Mark, Jesus offers the preamble of Deuteronomy 6:4 (“Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one”). Deuteronomy refers to God with the proper name of YHWH. For the Deuteronomist, God is one deity with one personality bearing one name. But in Matthew 22:35–40 and Luke 10:25–28, which were written after Mark, the greatest commandment conspicuously lacks the monotheistic preamble: “One of them, an expert on the Law, attempted to trick Jesus with this question: ‘Teacher, which commandment of the Law is the greatest?’ Jesus answered: ‘You must love the Most High God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ That is the greatest and first commandment. The second is like it: ‘You must love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments the whole Law is based—and the Prophets as well” (Matthew 22:35–39).

Both Matthew and Luke were written fifteen to twenty years after Mark. Was the early Christian community already shying away from pure monotheism? This historical development may seem to come out of nowhere, but it has some precedents in Hebrew thought. Prior to the rise of Christianity, and presaging the Trinitarian inclination, Judaism had a “rich tradition of speculation about heavenly intermediaries.” These celestial beings could be the angel of the Lord (Zechariah 1:12), or personified Wisdom (Proverbs 8:22–36), or the sons of God (Genesis 6:2–7), or Satan the accuser (Job 1:6), all of whom fulfilled roles within the heavenly court. For this reason, the earliest preachers of Jesus and the Holy Spirit, all of whom were Jews, could have initially identified Jesus and the Spirit as figures in the heavenly court, then seen their status increase over time.

In his analysis of John’s Prologue (John 1:1–14), Jewish scholar Daniel Boyarin quotes this passage from Philo of Alexandria, a Hellenistic (Greek speaking) Jew who wrote before the birth of Jesus:

To His Word [Greek: Logos], His chief messenger [Greek: Archangelos], highest in age and honor, the Father [Greek: Patēr] of all has given the special prerogative, to stand on the border and separate the creature from the Creator. This same [Logos] both pleads with the immortal as suppliant for afflicted mortality and acts as ambassador of the ruler to the subject. He glories in this prerogative and proudly proclaims, “And I stood between the Lord and you” [Deuteronomy 5:5].

This passage presages the early Christians’ experience of Jesus as an advocate for humankind to the Father, and as a revelation from the Father to humankind. Further, in his speculative work On Dreams, Philo goes on to offer language anticipatory of the Trinity itself: “The Divine Word [Theios Logos] descends from the fountain of wisdom [Sophia] like a river. . . . [The psalmist] represents the Divine Word as full of the stream of wisdom [Sophia].”

Remarkably, Philo is working with an explicitly tripartite spiritual experience: of a Sustaining God who provides a Mediator to humankind, that Mediator being full of Wisdom. If read in a Christian context, then Philo’s Logos anticipates Christ and Philo’s Sophia anticipates the Holy Spirit. While we cannot know the exact genesis of his thought, Philo’s theology may represent a widespread, pre-existing notion among Hellenized Jews. If so, then for some this expectation was fulfilled by Jesus of Nazareth, then ratified by the appearance of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost.

The social Trinity exemplifies agape—the universal, unconditional love of God.

Whatever the historical source of Trinitarian thought, these first Jewish-Christians sensed the love of the Parent, salvation through the Child, and inhabitation by the Spirit. They sensed that three persons were producing one salvation. They sensed the Trinity. In keeping with their monotheistic tradition, they also sensed a unifying quality of those three persons: love.

Whenever Jesus speaks of God, Jesus speaks of love—love of God, love of neighbor, and love of self (Matthew 22:37–40). This law of love admits neither exception nor compromise: Jesus teaches his followers that outsiders will recognize them by their love (John 13:35) and commands them to love their enemies (Luke 6:35). Indeed, Jesus so deeply associates God with love that John later declares, “God is love” (1 John 4:8).

Love cannot be abstract; love needs a beloved. All love is love of; hence all love implies relation. If God is love then God must be love between persons: biblically, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The early American theologian Jonathan Edwards writes: “God is Love shews that there are more persons than one in the deity, for it shews Love to be essential & necessary to the deity so that his nature consists in it, & this supposes that there is an Eternal & necessary object, because all Love respects another that is the beloved.”

So, according to Edwards, when John asserts that God is love, he necessarily asserts that God is internally related. Indeed, if he asserts that God in Godself is love, then he asserts that God in Godself is interpersonal—inherently more than one. Love is not the Godhead beyond God, a singular, pure abstraction. Instead, love is the self-forming activity of the triune God, the most salient quality of each divine person, and the disposition of each person toward the other—and toward creation.

Paradoxically, Christianity has inherited an experience of God as one and many, singular and plural. The tradition has articulated this experience by adopting a both/and epistemology, a way of knowing that preserves creative tensions rather than resolving them into a simplistic absolute. God is both three and one; God is tri-unity; God is Trinity. This concept of God presents Christianity with its greatest challenge and its greatest opportunity: to think, act, and feel as many who are becoming one. (adapted from Jon Paul Sydnor, The Great Open Dance: A Progressive Christian Theology, pages 42-47)

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For further reading, please see:

Boff, Leonardo. Trinity and Society. Oregon: Wipf & Stock, 2005.

Boyarin, Daniel. “John’s Prologue as Midrash.” In The Jewish Annotated New Testament, 2nd ed, edited by Amy-Jill Levine and Marc Zvi Brettler. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017.

Gerstner, John H. Jonathan Edwards on Heaven and Hell. Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1980.

Juel, Donald. “The Trinity and the New Testament.” Theology Today 54 no. 3 (October 1997) 314–24. DOI: 10.1177/004057369705400303.

Keating, Daniel A. “Trinity and Salvation: Christian Life as an Existence in the Trinity.” In The Oxford Handbook of the Trinity, edited by Gilles Emery and Matthew Levering, 442–53. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Oxford Academic Online. Accessed 14 Nov. 2022.

Moltmann, Jurgen. The Trinity and the Kingdom: The Doctrine of God. San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1981.

November 17, 2024

Christianity is in a political crisis and must change toward God, which is to change toward love.

Our image of God creates our image of ourselves.

Our image of God creates us, even if we don’t believe in God. For theists, a punishing God creates punishing people, just as a merciful God creates merciful people. Sometimes merciful people turn away from a merciless God and call themselves atheists. Their mercifulness suggests that they have faith, but if the concept of God bequeathed them is all judgment and fear and wrath, then atheism becomes the only sensible option.

Bad theology drives good people out of faith. Theology is what we think and say about God. To define what good theology is, we must first define what good faith is. Many people believe that God loathes them for their imperfection, or controls everyone like a puppeteer, or causes their tribulation as punishment, or hates the same people they hate. Such faith arrests development, induces anxiety, and sanctions hatred.

But if we truly believe in a benevolent God, then faith becomes something more life-giving. Faith becomes the enacted conviction that there is more available than the immediately obvious would suggest or even allow. And within this faith, God becomes the ever more— ever more love, ever more joy, ever more peace, meaning, and purpose.

Faith is not the assertion of truth claims that we have never experienced; faith is the discernment of a trustworthy extravagance within and beyond the universe. Faith suspects that there is always more than we can receive. This type of faith experiences the world as luminous and trusts the source of that illumination.

Rather than discounting religious experience as a disturbance of the psyche or accident of evolution, faith celebrates the capacity of these experiences to render the ordinary extraordinary. Early humans expanded geographically by chasing the horizon, repeatedly trusting that new opportunities lay beyond. In much the same way, contemporary humans expand spiritually by chasing the horizon, trusting that new ways of being await us. And like our distant ancestors, we experience this movement as a journey homeward, toward a land that is where we are supposed to be. Rejecting the path of least resistance, faith instead chooses the path of most promise.

Theology must heal, not harm.

Theology is faith at thought. But faith can only express itself in thought humbly. Theology does not try to “get it right” so much as it tries to help. We can’t get our thinking about God right: “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways, my ways,” says YHWH. “As high as the heavens are above the earth, so high are my ways above your ways and my thoughts above your thoughts” (Isaiah 55:8–9). We can’t think comprehensively about God, but we can think beneficially for humans, and we can trust that such beneficial thought fulfills the will of God because God is beneficent, a very present help in times of trouble (Psalm 46:1).

This practical attitude toward theology includes criteria of evaluation. Since we are made in the image of God, we must ask what kind of self this theology makes. Does it make a loving self or a hateful self? Does it make a courageous self or a fearful self? Our struggle to think as beneficially as possible, to receive the abundance that is already present, requires attentiveness. It also requires perseverance, because so much inherited religious thought blocks the love of God instead of transmitting it.

We can ask two questions: What do Christians believe? And what should Christians believe? Far too often, the most astute answers to those questions will diverge. Some Christians have believed and still believe, and some Christian denominations have taught and still teach, that women are subordinate to men, non-Christian religions are demonic, LGBTQ+ identity is unholy, extreme poverty and extreme wealth represent God’s will, God gave us the earth to exploit, God loves our nation-state the best, human suffering is divine punishment, dark skin marks the disfavor of God, and God made the universe about seven thousand years ago in six twenty-four-hour periods. Such bad thinking produces diseased feeling and harmful behavior.

Recognizing this problem, we must unlearn every destructive dogma that we have been taught, then replace that dogma with a life-giving idea. Ideas are brighter, lighter, and more life-giving than dogma. Dogma ends the conversation, but ideas fuel it.

This project, of deconstruction followed by reconstruction, demands that we examine every received cultural inheritance and every authoritative dogma, subject them to scrutiny, then renounce those that harm while keeping those that help. Along the way, we will generate new thoughts, or look for thoughts elsewhere, if the tradition doesn’t offer those we need. The process is laborious, tricky, and unending, but our ongoing experience of increasing Spirit legitimates the effort.

Faith needs better questions, not static answers.

Questions fuel this project of emancipation. Because God is infinite and we are finite, we are invited to grow perpetually toward God. Because God loves justice and our societies are not perfectly just, we are invited to work perpetually toward their improvement. The infinite God invites finite reality to move like a stream. But without questions, we do not move. With unchanging answers, we do not move. Only ceaseless questioning propels us over the horizon. For persons and communities committed to growth, answers are not the answer. Having questions—intense, consequential, burning questions—is the answer.

Eventually, good questions may produce better theology. When I was a young man, I preferred philosophy to theology. Reason and observation themselves would save me, I reckoned, and I didn’t need any old gods or ancient superstitions to cloud the process. But over time, I came to suspect that philosophy itself was either predicated on a hidden abundance (that was the philosophy I liked) or blind to that hidden abundance (that was the philosophy I disliked). Theology always engaged the abundance, even if I did not always find its conclusions attractive. Nevertheless, I saw that theology could ascribe great potential to existence and provide a ground for the experience of all reality as sacred. So, I cast my lot with theology.

In so doing, I cast my lot with God. At the time, I didn’t think of God as Trinitarian, as three persons united through love into one God. I wasn’t sure who Jesus was, and the Holy Spirit seemed like an abstraction. But over the years, I have pondered certain questions: What worldview promotes human thriving? What worldview will allow us to say, on our deathbeds, “Yes, that was a good way to live my life”? What worldview produces abundance in all its forms—spiritual, communal, and material?

The social Trinity invites us to progress toward social justice, which is the Reign of Love.

Over the years, I have come to believe that the social Trinity—the interpersonal Trinity characterized by agapic nondualism, by unifying love—provides the best intellectual ground for thinking through the fullness of life, both individual and social. The social Trinity is an inherently progressive concept of God. The social Trinity models relations of openness, vulnerability, and joy. The recognition that we, who are made in the image of God, fail to express such perfect love invites us to change toward God. But change toward universal, unconditional love necessitates transformation, and entrenched power always resists transformation. That resistance will be worn down by the perseverance of the saints, as water wears down the rock.

Before considering the transformative implications of the social Trinity, we will have to consider one of the great mysteries of Christian history. Jesus of Nazareth was a Jew, a devout practitioner of a monotheistic religion, a religion that insistently worships only one God. In the Gospel of Mark, drawing from his own Scriptures, Jesus repeats the central monotheistic refrain of Judaism, the Shema: “Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one” (Deuteronomy 6:4; Mark 12:29). How did a monotheistic prophet of a monotheistic religion inaugurate a movement that became Trinitarian? Since all of Jesus’s original disciples were Jewish, to the best of our knowledge, how did they end up talking about three persons—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—whenever they spoke of God and salvation? No consideration of the Trinity can proceed without first delving into this historical mystery. In my next blog, we will consider the first appearance of Trinitarian language in the tradition. (adapted from Jon Paul Sydnor, The Great Open Dance: A Progressive Christian Theology, pages 39-42)

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For further reading, please see:

Merton, Thomas. New Seeds of Contemplation. Boston: Shambhala, 2003.

Voss, Michelle. Dualities: A Theology of Difference. Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2010.

#progressivechristianity #progressivechristian #progressivechurch #trinity #socialtrinity #socialjustice #faith #theology #kingdomofgod

November 10, 2024

What if Christian theology was actually founded on love?

What if Christian theology was actually founded on love?

Jesus preached love.

Jesus taught love of God, love of neighbor, love of self, and even love of enemies. The apostle John, attempting to summarize the teachings of Jesus, simply declared, “God is love” (1 John 4:8).

Oddly, the two most prominent creeds in the Christian church, the Nicene Creed and Apostles Creed, do not contain the word “love”. As theologians attempted to understand the Christ event and the appearance of the Holy Spirit and summarize their implications, they missed the mark. Perhaps a new basis for Christian theology is needed, one that is more faithful to the truth of God revealed in Christ and inspired by Sophia, the Holy Spirit.

A Christian theology that is broad in scope, centered around one central insight, and addresses multiple aspects of Christian thought is called systematic. Here, systematic is used as a synonym for internally coherent or rationally consistent. Thus, to be systematic, a theology should not present accidental contradictions. It may utilize paradox, tensions in reason that spur the mind to deeper thought, such as those used by Jesus: “If you would save your life, you will lose it; but if you would lose your life for my sake, you will find it” (Matt 16:25). Contemplation of this challenging statement is intellectually fruitful, even as it denies us any easy answer or quick resolution. But in general, theology should make sense and not accidentally present claims that do not cohere with each other. Accidental contradictions produce only confusion.

The uniting theme of my systematic theology, as presented in The Great Open Dance, is agapic nondualism. As noted above, agape is the unconditional, universal love of God for all creation. Nondualism asserts that everything is fundamentally united to everything else; reality is interconnected. Agapic nondualism, then, claims that the love of our Trinitarian God, who is three persons united through love into one God, expresses itself within our infinitely related universe, such that nothing is separable from anything else, and no one is separable from anyone else. This insight will guide our thinking about God, creation, humankind, Christ, etc., allowing us to reinterpret them in a consistent manner.

The danger of systematic theology is over-ambition, the mistaken belief that this particular theology is comprehensive and answers all the important questions, thereby providing resolution. No theology can present a totalized interpretation of reality, and no theology should try, since totalization would reduce God’s overflowing abundance to an understandable system, thereby eliminating the available riches. Indeed, intellectual resolution would be a spiritual tragedy as it would stop all growth. Any claim to final adequacy masks a manipulative spirit that seeks control over the reader instead of humility before God.

Love, interpreted as agapic nondualism, can only produce a progressive Christian theology.

Although theology is about God, it is for humans, and it is for humans in their God-given freedom. Hence, we cannot achieve theological mastery or know God in Godself. Even as we trust that God’s self-revelation is truthful, God’s inner nature will spill over our minds like an ocean overflowing a thimble. By way of consequence, all theological proposals, including this one, are intrinsically partial and inadequate. Put simply, the power of the transcendent will always shatter any vehicle that tries to contain it. Old wineskins cannot hold new wine, and no wineskin can hold revelation (Mark 2:22).

Still, the effort of thinking about God is worth it because our concept of God will influence the quality and conduct of our life: “The belief of a cruel God makes a cruel [person],” writes Thomas Paine. Can belief in a kind God make a kind person? What if we believed in a kinder God?

In hope of a kinder God and our own transformation in the image of that God, this theology is progressive, in two senses of the word. First, the theology presented here will be ethically progressive regarding the pressing issues of our day. It will praise LGBTQ+ love, argue for the ordination of women and nonbinary persons to Christian ministry, advocate for equality between all races, cherish the environment, learn from other religions, condemn the militarization of our consciousness, and promote a more generous economics.

Just as importantly, the theology presented here will be fundamentally progressive. That is, it will present a theology of progress toward universal flourishing. God has not created a steady-state universe; God has created an evolving universe characterized by freedom. As free, we can grow toward God or away from God, toward one another or away from one another, toward joy or into suffering. God wants reunion, with us and between us, but does not impose that desire, allowing us instead to choose the direction of our activity, while always inviting us to work toward the reign of love.

God invites us into the great open dance.

Jesus’s first miracle was to turn water into wine (John 2:1–11). This miracle suggests a festive aspect of Jesus rarely expressed in Christian art. Jewish weddings in Jesus’s day were weeklong affairs of food, music, storytelling, and dance. The participants were segregated by gender, but everyone danced. So, although the Bible does not state that Jesus danced, from historical evidence we can infer that he probably did. After all, he wasn’t a Calvinist: Jesus inherited a religious tradition, Judaism, that reveres dance as an expression of the joy found through relationship with God: “Then the young women will dance with joy, and the young men and the elderly will make merry. I [YHWH, Abba] will turn their mourning into joy; I will comfort them, exchanging gladness for sorrow” (Jer 31:13).

Jesus implies his own love of dance. In his story of the prodigal son, the father hosts a party with celebratory dancing upon the lost son’s return (Luke 15:21–29). And Jesus condemns his own generation as one that does not dance even when music is played (Matt 11:16–17). The apocryphal gospel Acts of John (second century) explicitly depicts Jesus dancing with his disciples. In the ascribed words of the disciple John:

He [Jesus] gathered us all together and said, “Before I am delivered up to them, let us sing a hymn to the Father, and go forth to what lies before us.” So he commanded us to make a circle, holding one another’s hands, and he himself stood in the middle.

He said, “Respond Amen to me.”

He then began to sing a hymn, and to say: . . . “Grace is dancing. I will pipe, dance all of you!” “Amen.”

“I will mourn, lament all of you!” “Amen.” . . .

“The whole universe takes part in the dancing.” “Amen.”

“They who do not dance, do not know what is being done.” “Amen.”

The text reveals not just that Jesus dances, but why he dances. His dancing is tied to his openness to life—music and mourning, play and lament. Indeed, God and heaven join in this dance, as well as the disciples. They ratify Jesus’s perfect Amen, his sacred Yes to the agony and ecstasy of this-worldly being. For Jesus, who is the Christ, life is a great open dance into which we are all invited.

The Christian tradition is insufficiently loving.

Jesus’s great open dance is intimately connected to the God of love whom he preaches. His sense of loving interdependence—agapic nondualism—is not new to the Christian tradition, although it has generally been a minority report. The Great Open Dance will represent the Christian tradition through the lens of agapic nondualism, or divine love.

At times, this representation may seem untraditional, but traditionalism does not concern us. Given Christ’s revelation of God as agape, the Christian tradition must justify itself as agapic. Agape need not justify itself as traditional. We proceed in the conviction that agapic nondualism dovetails with Jesus’s great open dance, just as Jesus’s great open dance dovetails with agapic nondualism.

Too much Christian theology has been soul-stifling dogma rather than life-giving thought. No longer are people willing to practice faith out of denominational loyalty, tribal identity, or fear of divine wrath. Instead, people want faith to give them more life, and people want faith to make society more just, and people want faith to grant the world more peace. I am convinced that Trinitarian, agapic nondualism can do so.

To develop agapic nondualism I will, in the words of Kenneth Burke, use all that can be used, drawing from multiple thinkers to flesh out a theology of infinite relatedness. Our palette will include process, feminist, liberationist, womanist, and classical theologians, among others.

I will also present my theology as a story, tracing the biblical narrative from beginning to end: from the God of creation, through the incarnation of Christ, to the inspiration of Sophia, and concluding in the consummation of time. Theology functions as narrative because we love stories. People read more novels than essays and watch more movies than documentaries. Perhaps because we find ourselves within time—within a story—we also find ourselves intrinsically open to the power of narrative. Recognizing this openness, I have attempted to write my theology as narrative nonfiction. I do so fully recognizing that, as John Thatamanil notes, “Voyages to uncharted territories cannot be made with map in hand.”

To begin our journey, let us first consider our understanding of the social Trinity, developing a concept of God as three persons who cooperatively Sustain, Exemplify, and Animate the great open dance in which we all participate. (adapted from Jon Paul Sydnor, The Great Open Dance: A Progressive Christian Theology, pages 34-38)

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For further reading, please see:

Burke, Kenneth. The Philosophy of Literary Form. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957.

Hikota, Riyako Cecilia. "The Christological Perichoresis and Dance." Open Theology 8, no. 1 (2022) 191–204. DOI: 10.1515/opth-2022-0202

Paine, Thomas. Collected Writings. Edited by Eric Foner. New York: Library of America, 1995.

Thatamanil, John. The Immanent Divine: God, Creation, and the Human Predicament. Minneapolis: Fortress, 2006.

November 4, 2024

How other religions can help progressive Christians to think better

Thinking across religious traditions holds great promise for interreligious relations.

In earlier posts, we have encountered two great images from two great traditions. The Mahayana Buddhist tradition presents us with the image of Indra’s web, that glittering network of jewels in which each jewel reflects all others, while simultaneously being reflected within all others, in one shimmering matrix of light. In that tradition, Indra’s web symbolizes the fundamental openness of the universe and the beauty that offers itself if we participate in that openness.

The Christian social Trinity presents us with the image of the dance, elegant movement through time, in which the three persons who constitute one God process with, in, and through one another, in everlasting reciprocity.

We have also encountered Ramanuja of the Hindu tradition, who teaches that all reality is divine Being in three modes: that of God, human souls, and the material universe. These three modes of God (Vishnu, in this case) are both one and three, distinguishable but inseparable, perfectly united yet never identical.

Certainly, these three visions hold promise for one another. If we can compare them, if we place them into conversation, then they will transform one another. Scholars call the deliberate comparison of thought across religions comparative theology. The novel and burgeoning discipline of comparative theology is a powerful method for gaining critical insight into our inherited worldviews.

More importantly, the critical insights gained through comparison can produce constructive theology or, in other words, revised and renewed worldviews. Through comparison, by placing our worldviews into a new context, we can ask original, unfamiliar questions of our traditions. Then, we can speculatively suggest possible answers to those questions, responding to the challenges raised. New comparisons produce new questions, new questions produce new answers, and new answers constitute new theology.This practice demonstrates the incisive power of comparative theology to generate critical tension, as well as the creative power of comparative theology to resolve that very tension.

Comparative theology responds to the times in which we live.

Religious plurality (religious “difference”) is a fact. Religions have different beliefs, different practices, different symbols, etc. Human beings respond to difference, especially religious difference, in varying ways, some helpful and some harmful. As the world becomes increasingly globalized, and as we are brought into contact with otherness more frequently, how we react to otherness will become increasingly important. Our response will affect us personally, and it will have geopolitical implications.

Some people are repulsed by religious difference and attempt to insulate themselves from it. Other people are fascinated by difference and see it as an opportunity to learn more about “the other”—the one who is different from us, the one whose very existence challenges all our assumptions. For these intellectual extroverts, otherness provides a powerful means of insight. Religiously, the other presents an opportunity to compare and contrast our beliefs, practices, and moods with different beliefs, practices, and moods, and to reform ourselves in the light of difference.

This comparative practice brings hidden aspects of ourselves to awareness. Most of our beliefs and behaviors arise from our subconscious. We are not aware of them, do not choose them, and cannot analyze them. They have been bequeathed to us by our culture, family, and personal history, and we have absorbed them unknowingly from childhood to adulthood. Since these beliefs and behaviors are unchosen, they are unfree. We are determined (unfree) whenever our thoughts or actions are instinctive rather than conscious. If we desire freedom, then we must become aware of who we are. We must bring to consciousness that which now lies hidden. Then we can analyze our beliefs and actions and revise them in accordance with consciously chosen values. This process will never be complete, but the more we do it the more free we become.

Our deepest beliefs and values tend to be associated with our religion. Here, I am using the word religion loosely. For our purposes, religion can include theism (believing in God), atheism (not believing in God), agnosticism (not knowing whether God exists or not), materialism (believing only in matter), or nontheism (rejecting belief in God but still believing in transcendence).

Everyone has an orientation toward reality, an “ultimate concern,” a worldview, a personal philosophy, etc. Much of what we believe may be vague, or we might not even know what we believe, and we may act on beliefs we are unaware of. This, sadly, is the unstudied human condition. Thankfully, comparison interrogates sameness—the familiar, the obvious, the assumed—through otherness. The other’s difference provides a contrast to our subconscious beliefs, raising them into consciousness, depriving them of their obviousness, and subjecting them to the vitalizing scrutiny of doubt.

In other words, comparative theology grants us greater awareness of our own faith by encountering a different faith. Once we have encountered this other faith, we have multiple options. We can leave ours the way it was, thankful for the increased awareness. We can revise our faith according to the challenge presented by the other. Or we can borrow aspects of the other faith and incorporate them into our own. We can even attempt to synthesize the two faiths into one. Conversion is the final option, and it must be a real option for comparative theology to be effective. Comparative theology seeks to transform theology, and transformation demands risk.

Comparative theology, by finding value in the religious other, helps us progress toward interreligious peace.

To gain a place at the table of theological method, comparative theology must become constructive, pastoral theology. It must produce new (constructive) theology that is helpful to the church—to priests, pastors, and parishioners alike. Once comparative theology achieves this, then theological method will broaden and comparative theology will become theology itself.

On first view, comparative theology might appear colonialist. It does have some similarities to colonialism. It searches the other for resources and appropriates them, usually without the permission of the other, occasionally against the will of the other. It unites other and same into one world economy of ideas, in a process of globalization that will not treat all participants equally. It enriches self by importing the other. At its worst, it merely decorates its theological drawing rooms with curios from foreign lands. For these reasons, comparative theology is condemned by some critics as an inescapably colonialist endeavor.

These critics, however, tell only half the story. Comparative theology seeks transformation of the self by the other. To achieve this transformation, comparative theology renders the self existentially vulnerable to the other—not a common practice among colonialists. Indeed, comparative theology acknowledges the other as sacred, as a legitimate revelation of the holy. As holiness relating to holiness, comparative theology seeks exchange rather than extraction. Colonialism, on the other hand, denigrates the colonized to justify their colonization.

In a sense, comparative theology reverses colonialism. Colonialism is a physical, historical invasion of native lands by foreign forces. Comparative theology is an intellectual invitation of the foreign to transform the native. When practiced hospitably it engenders a symbiotic relationship between the compared parties. No longer does only one benefit from the other. Now, both are potentially enriched through a newly established relationship of mutual challenge and mutual benefit.

To deem any beneficial relationship a colonial relationship implicitly rejects all community. If all benefit is parasitic then isolation becomes the only moral choice and even the possibility of community is denied. Comparative theology, as a practice of mutual respect and mutual benefit, seeks the construction of interreligious community. As such, it is a practice of global citizenship. Its fundamental postulate is that theology profits from comparison, so the religions are (at least intellectually) interdependent.

This interdependence is increasingly disclosing itself—we are because they are, and we become more as they become more, together. In the past, religious difference has been abominated at times, tolerated at times, sometimes even appreciated. Now, difference is becoming sacralized. At last, we are coming to see the holiness of the other. Difference is a gift of God, from the heart of God. And through comparative theology, as we have seen, difference becomes a blessing rather than a threat. At its best, comparative theology expresses the hope that we, all religions and all religious people, may become benedictions to one another. (adapted from Jon Paul Sydnor, The Great Open Dance: A Progressive Christian Theology, pages 31-34)

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For further reading, please see:

Clooney, Francis Xavier. Comparative Theology: Deep Learning Across Religious Borders. New York: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010.

Clooney, Francis Xavier. Theology After Vedanta: An Experiment in Comparative Theology. New York: State University of New York Press, 1993.

Hedges, Paul. "The Old and New Comparative Theologies: Discourses on Religion, the Theology of Religions, Orientalism and the Boundaries of Traditions." Religions 3, no. 4 (2012) 1120–37. DOI: 10.3390/rel3041120.