January 19, 2025

God is in Nature: you can feel the sacred permeating the cosmos

God is in Nature: you can feel the sacred permeating the cosmos

God the Creator has placed beauty within nature. Most people experience awe at the beauty of nature. Whether it be a sunset over the ocean, majestic mountain view, or campfire dancing against the night, the magnificence of the natural world enchants us. This enchantment runs so deep that some people experience nature itself as holy. American naturalist John Muir writes:

Long, blue, spiky-edged shadows crept out across the snow-fields. . . . This was the alpenglow, to me the most impressive of all the terrestrial manifestations of God. At the touch of this divine light, the mountains seemed to kindle to a rapt, religious consciousness, and stood hushed like devout worshippers waiting to be blessed.

The beauty of nature overwhelms Muir, to the point that he deems it divine. For him, natural beauty is not merely a pleasing arrangement of objects; it is an expression of God. Serving God-in-nature, Muir campaigned to protect America’s wilderness, eventually inspiring Teddy Roosevelt to establish America’s national park system.

Tragically, although Muir’s experience of God in nature was beautiful and produced beneficial change, the weight of the Christian tradition would deem it heretical. Traditional, dualistic Christianity insists that God is above the world (transcendent), not within it (immanent). The tradition worries that, if some people experience matter as holy, they will lose their sense of a personal God.

Traditional Christian theology denies the presence of God within the universe. Scholars of religion call the limitation of God to nature pantheism. Pantheism is constructed from the Greek roots pan (all) and theos (God): all is God. According to pantheists, the material universe is sacred, but there is no transcendent Creator in heaven. Prominent atheist Daniel Dennett observes:

Is this Tree of Life a God one could worship? Pray to? Fear? Probably not. But it did make the ivy twine and the sky so blue, so perhaps the song I love tells a truth after all. The Tree of Life is neither perfect nor infinite in space or time, but it is actual, and if it is not Anselm’s “Being greater than which nothing can be conceived,” it is surely a being that is greater than anything any of us will ever conceive of in detail worthy of its detail. Is something sacred? Yes, say I with Nietzsche. I could not pray to it, but I can stand in affirmation of its magnificence. This world is sacred.

Dennett’s vision appeals to atheists because it denies deity but preserves awe. It avoids the constraints of stifling religion, while celebrating science as aesthetic pleasure. Unbound from God, we are fascinated by nature. And in that fascination, we find new meaning and purpose.

This (non)religious, pantheistic vision is so attractive that traditional monotheists feel compelled to argue against it. Fearful that recognizing the divinity of nature will result in the elimination of God, these dualistic theists, who emphasize the Creator-creation distinction, exclude God from nature. They insist that God is utterly transcendent and in no way immanent, beyond but not within. Anglican theologian N. T. Wright sounds the alarm:

Biblical theology [makes] the case that the one living God created a world that is other than himself, not contained within himself. Creation was from the beginning an act of love, of affirming the goodness of the other. God saw all that he had made, and it was very good; but it was not itself divine. . . . Collapsing this distinction means taking a large step toward pantheism.

For Wright, the divine presence within matter threatens to annihilate the divine presence in heaven. This concern is legitimate, as we have seen with Dennett’s declaration that nature is sacred but impersonal. Pantheism also risks decaying into mere materialism, the firm belief in matter’s existence coupled with a denial of all religious realities.

But Wright doesn’t merely critique pantheism; he also implicitly critiques panentheism. Panentheism is constructed from the Greek roots: pan (all)—en (in)—theos (God). All is in God, even as God exceeds that all. Thus, panentheism is the belief that God emanates the universe from God’s very own being, such that the universe participates in divinity. Panentheism recognizes nature as sacred, while also preserving the personal God of theism.

God is the soul of the universe. But how can God reside in the cosmos while also exceeding it? Panentheist theologians have objected that classical, dualistic theism divides the world (matter) from God (spirit), thereby dimming the brilliance of creation. As a correction, they assert the presence of God within the world through a soul-body analogy: God is the soul of the universe, just as the universe is the body of God. The soul-body analogy allows us to sense God within the universe even as God exceeds the universe, just as the soul resides within the body even as it exceeds the body.

In the passage above, “God” refers to either God the Sustainer (Abba) or God the Trinity, or both. Since Abba’s openness to Christ and Spirit is perfect, Abba’s soul is Trinitarian—living, open, and dynamic. Abba bears primary responsibility for creating and sustaining the universe, but Abba’s support thereof is inherently Trinitarian.

The soul-body analogy articulates our experience of God as both immanent and transcendent, both within and beyond. It ascribes the holiness of the universe to a source beyond, thereby celebrating the divinity of all reality, while preserving the personhood of God.

The soul-body analogy also implies that God feels the universe, just as we feel our own bodies. God the Sustainer (Abba), God the Participant (Jesus), and God the Celebrant (The Holy Spirit Sophia) are all God the Open, affected by creation just as creation is effected by God. Therefore, the divine sustenance of the universe is a continuous process that permeates the very being of God, rendering it the becoming of God.

The Bible warrants panentheism. We find warrant for panentheism in scripture. Even as the Hebrews visualized God on a heavenly throne, they were careful not to limit God’s presence to that throne. The Chronicler proclaims: “Who can build a house for God, whom heaven itself, even the highest heavens, cannot contain?” (2 Chronicles 2:6).

Not only does God’s personality fill the universe, God’s very being fills it as well. God is within all things, even as God exceeds all things. The book of Sirach states: “It is by God’s plan that each of these fulfills its own purpose; by the word of YHWH, they are held together. No matter how much we say, our words are inadequate. In the end, God is everything” (Sirach 43:26–28).

And in the Christian Scriptures, the apostle Paul takes up this sentiment multiple times: “Who has given God anything to deserve something in return? For all things are from God and through God and for God” (Romans 11:36); “There is one God and Creator of all, who is over all, who works through all and is within all” (Ephesians 4:6); “In [God] we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28). In Paul’s view, God is in all things, but not contained within them; and separate from all things, but not isolated from them.

Cosmic beauty comes from our cosmic God. From a Trinitarian perspective, the act of creation, which is continuous, includes all three persons: the Bible describes the cosmos as created through Christ, in whom the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and in whom all things hold together (Colossians 1:15–20). Likewise, the Hebrew Scriptures describe Wisdom, whom Christians would later identify with the Holy Spirit, as a manifestation of God, pervading all things, and more active than all active things (Wisdom 7:22b–25 DRA).

In this Trinitarian view, the Sustainer creates through both Christ and Spirit, so we find the imprint of the relational Trinity on our relational universe and within our relational selves. There is beauty in relatedness, especially loving relatedness. And we can see this beauty, whether it be a sunset over the ocean, majestic mountain view, or a campfire dancing against the night. When we are so enchanted, let no one deny that the experience of beauty is an experience of God. (adapted from Jon Paul Sydnor, The Great Open Dance: A Progressive Christian Theology, pages 71-75)

*****

For further reading, please see:

Ali, Mukhtar. “Islam and the Unity of Being.” In Nondualism: An Interreligious Exploration, edited by Jon Paul Sydnor and Anthony J. Watson. Maryland: Lexington, 2023.

Dennett, Daniel C. Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meaning of Life. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014.

McFague, Sallie. Models of God: Theology for an Ecological, Nuclear Age. Minneapolis: Fortress, 1987.

Stetson, Lee. The Wild Muir: Twenty-Two of John Muir's Greatest Adventures. San Francisco: Yosemite Conservancy, 2013.

Ramanuja. Vedarthasamgraha. Translated by S.S. Raghavachar. Madras: Vedanta, 1956.

Wright, N. T. Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church. San Francisco: HarperCollins, 2008.

January 12, 2025

Traditional concepts of God impede progress: we need a progressive concept of God

Why does God create and sustain the universe?

Abba, our Mother and Father, rolls the stone away from the tomb of being, freeing us to emerge from nothingness. Here, within the divinely sustained creation, we participate in the interplay of cold and warmth, darkness and light, silence and sound, and all the mutually amplifying contrasts that grant life its passion.

Abba continually overcomes nonbeing to grant us, not just being, but becoming—diversity and difference transforming one another through time. Everything that is, is of God, including us: “I lie down and sleep; I wake again, for the Lord sustains me” (Psalm 3:5 NRSV). But this claim raises the question: Why does Abba, our divine Parent, create and sustain the universe at all, especially with its suffering? Why doesn’t Abba just retreat into blissful divinity?

Unlike us, God chooses God’s nature, and God the Trinity has chosen dynamic, interpersonal love as the divine core. This love is superabundant. It will overflow our concepts, overflow our language, and even overflow itself. Traditionally, Christianity has deemed God to be infinite. We will deem God to be an ever-increasing infinity.

Infinity can increase infinitely.

We may deny infinity the capacity to increase. Infinity is, after all, infinite. But first, the divine majesty cannot be limited by our human logic. Second, work by mathematicians on infinity suggests that it can increase. In the 1920s, David Hilbert pointed out that if you had an infinite hotel with an infinite number of rooms, and the hotel was full, then it could still accommodate one more guest, if each guest simply moved one room number up (1 to 2, 2 to 3, 3 to 4, etc.), thereby leaving the first room open for the new guest. So, infinity can increase by one, so long as there is movement.

But Hilbert also points out that infinity can increase by infinity. That is, if a hotel with an infinite number of rooms, all full, were to be visited by an infinitely long bus of new guests, then the hotel could accommodate all of them by having each current guest move from their room number n to room number 2n (1 to 2, 2 to 4, 3 to 6, etc.), thereby leaving an infinite number of rooms free for the infinite number of new guests, so long as there is movement. Hilbert then went on to prove that any infinite hotel could accommodate an infinite number of buses with an infinite number of new guests, but that math is over my head.

Infinity is capacious and always increasing in capacity. But again we ask: If infinity is infinite, then why is it not infinitely pleased with itself? Why isn’t God self-satisfied? Christian theologians, following Plato, have insisted that since only imperfect things can develop or increase, and God is perfect, God cannot develop or increase. Divine development would imply divine imperfection. For this reason, creation can add nothing to the being of God, who is already perfect and not in need of development. Therefore, God’s creation of this universe is an act of sheer grace, doing nothing for God but everything for us.

Intentionally or accidentally, this concept of God condemns change. If God is immutable—static and unchanging—then to be static and unchanging becomes our highest ideal. If God is immutable, then by implication that which is must take priority over that which could be. All change becomes decline. Divinized immutability reinforces social rigidity, preserving entitlement and preventing reform.

Such stasis was never the intention of the Hebrew prophets or Christ Jesus. Above, we have shown that infinity can increase. Now, we argue that if infinity can increase, then the divine perfection demands that infinity increase infinitely, forever. Because God’s choice is to continually overflow God’s self, God is by nature creative. In fact, God is infinitely creative, ever increasing, and ceaselessly self-surpassing, without depletion or dilution.

This concept of divine development does not suggest that God is deficient in love, wisdom, or joy, always grasping for more. Instead, this concept insists that God is superabundant, overflowing with all three, in everlasting self-donation. It also implies that we, being made in the image of God, can become more. Godward change is humanity’s purpose.

The Trinity offers time-as-blessing.

God’s creativity is deeply tied to God’s trinitarian, interpersonal nature. In the Christian view, God had already decided to be interpersonal relationship, three persons as one God, “prior” to creation. This “prior” does not refer to priority in time, but to priority of being. God creates and sustains our time from God’s own time, which the Greeks call kairos, or time-as-blessing.

God is the many-as-one for whom the blessedness of time always abides. We call this blessedness eternity. According to the Christian tradition, God has chosen not to be a perfectly self-satisfied unity, a blissful One without a second. Instead, God has chosen to be love, and to overflow as love. But love gains reality only when it is concrete. God could not be content with an abstract love for abstract persons in an abstract place, so the ideal sought expression in the actual, and the universal sought expression in the particular.

This desire for particularity, for definite form in a specific location, necessitates limitation. For love to flow, those who are beloved must be somewhere rather than everywhere and someone rather than everyone. Differentiation allows agape to move: from here to there, from now to then, from me to you, from us to them.

Because limitation coupled with time puts love in motion, it is better to be limited than unlimited. Limitations are the means of God’s grace, because they permit completion through one another; they permit love. Our inabilities are completed by their abilities, while their inabilities are completed by our abilities. Through interanimation we find completion. Paul asks, “If the body were all eye, what would happen to our hearing? If it were all ear, what would happen to our sense of smell?” (1 Corinthians 12:17).

Divinity is beauty shared.

Abba also creates to share the divine beauty. An Islamic hadith states: “I was a hidden treasure, wishing to be enjoyed, so I created the world that I might become enjoyed.” Now, the act of creation is a gift from Abba to us. Again, Abba is evermore: evermore beauty creating evermore beauty to be enjoyed by evermore perceivers.

Crucially, Abba participates in this enjoyment, because Abba creates, sustains, and resides within the enjoyers (us), feeling what we feel. Abba is both the beauty that is enjoyed and the enjoyment of that beauty. This process is continual: we are the isthmus between Creator and creation, fully participating in creation while ever growing in awareness of the Creator.

Because our potential is never actualized, we can forever progress in our awareness, forever drawing closer to God, forever bringing pleasure to God, “for whom and through whom all things exist” (Hebrews 2:10). We are the conduit through which God’s infinite mystery is everlastingly revealed to itself.

Completion by another is better than self-contained perfection. The universe is not designed for independent self-sufficiency. It is designed for deep relationality, because even for God continual increase is better than unchanging completion. By divine design, mutual influence and related freedom produce ongoing novelty, rendering time everlastingly new. (adapted from Jon Paul Sydnor, The Great Open Dance: A Progressive Christian Theology, pages 68-71)

*****

For further reading, please see:

Ali, Mukhtar. “Islam and the Unity of Being.” In Nondualism: An Interreligious Exploration, edited by Jon Paul Sydnor and Anthony J. Watson. Maryland: Lexington, 2023.

Edwards, Rem B. “Axiological Reflections on Infinite Human and Divine Worth.” Journal of Formal Axiology 11, no. 1 (2019) 11–38.

Gamow, George. One, Two, Three—Infinity: Facts and Speculations of Science. London: Dover Publications, 1988.

Plato. The Republic. Translated by Tom Griffith. Edited by G.R.F. Ferrari. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

Whitehead, Alfred North. Religion in the Making: Lowell Lectures, 1926. New York: Macmillan, 1926.

January 4, 2025

If we are going to be true to the Bible, then God the Creator should take they/them pronouns

The Creator and Sustainer of the cosmos bears male, female, and nonbinary qualities.

According to both the Hebrew prophet Hosea as well as Jesus the Christ, YHWH the Father God (Abba), the Creator and Sustainer of the cosmos, is compassionate.

In the Hebrew Bible, compassion is something you feel in your womb (rechem or beten). Scholars translate the Hebrew words rechem and beten as “womb,” “bowels,” or “heart” when referring to the body, and as “mercy” or “compassion” when referring to a feeling.

Both rechem and beten provide maternal imagery for God. When Babylon conquered Israel and took its leading citizens from Jerusalem into exile, many Jews felt forgotten by their God. But the prophet Isaiah (or his followers in the Isaiah school), writing in the voice of God, assures them: “Can a woman forget her nursing child or show no compassion [rechem] for the child of her womb [beten]? Even these might forget, yet I will not forget you” (Isaiah 49:15 NRSV). And, sensitive to the yearning of the exiled for home, Isaiah also writes, again in the voice of God: “As a mother comforts her child, so I will comfort you” (Isaiah 66:13).

Sometimes, the Hebrews’ maternal imagery for God is explicit birth imagery. Frustrated that Israel so quickly rushes to other gods, Deuteronomy accuses: “You deserted the Rock who gave you life; you forgot the God who bore you” (Deuteronomy 32:18). Later in the Hebrew scriptures, God declares to Job, “Has the rain a father, or who has fathered the drops of dew? From whose womb did the ice come forth, and who has given birth to the hoarfrost of heaven?” (Job 38:28–29 NRSV). And there is substantial evidence to justify translating El Shaddai, traditionally “the Almighty,” as “the Breasted One.”

Such passages deny YHWH the Creator, whom Jesus called “Abba,” any single gender with which to identify. Instead, they implicitly declare YHWH/Abba to be omnigendered or nonbinary.

Jesus also asserts Abba’s transcendence of all gender categories.

Jesus continues this Jewish tradition, revealing the intimacy of Abba through the imagery of father and mother. Jesus had innumerable Hebrew images for Abba to choose from, male, female, and neuter: Creator (Genesis 1:1), King (Psalm 99:1), Lawgiver (Exodus 20:2–17), Judge (Psalm 7:8–11), Lord (Exodus 4:10), Jealous (Exodus 34:14; “Jealous” is capitalized as a proper name), Fire (1 Kings 18:38; Exodus 13:21), Warrior (Exodus 15:3), Potter (Isaiah 24:8), Rock (Psalm 31:1–8), Shepherd (Psalm 23:1), etc. But in his own teaching, Jesus chose imagery of warmth and care: God as Father (Luke 11:22; following Mal 2:10) and God as Mother (Luke 15:8–10; following Deut 32:18).

In contemporary English, persons who identify with both genders, or are nonbinary, use the pronouns they/them. Their decision to use these pronouns follows the English language tradition of substituting “they” for “he” or “she” when the gender of someone is indeterminate. For example, if you see an individual person far away and can’t tell if they’re male or female, then you might ask, “What are they doing?” “They” here serves as a stand-in for indeterminate gender. Today, we use “they” to refer to persons who identify as neither male nor female, or as both male and female.

In keeping with this practice of language, for the remainder of this book (The Great Open Dance), we shall assign they/them pronouns to Abba, our Creator and Sustainer.

Abba—God the Creator and Sustainer—should be referred to with they/them pronouns.

We do so for several reasons. Historically, the church has always recognized that God the Creator is beyond all gender categories. The Catechism of the Catholic Church summarizes this long tradition: “We ought therefore to recall that God transcends the human distinction between the sexes. He is neither man nor woman: he is God.”

Problematically, historical language for God has been exclusively male: God the Creator is a “he,” God the Christ is a “he,” God the Spirit is a “he,” and God the Trinity, those three persons as one God, is a “he.” Exclusively male language for a gender transcendent God misrepresents the divine nature; hence, it is theologically inaccurate. Moreover, exclusively male language for God misrepresents males as more divine than females and nonbinary persons, distorting our thought and, inevitably, our societies.

Everyone is made in the image of God, no matter their gender identity. Therefore, our language for God should allow everyone to see themselves in God. Referring to Abba, God the Creator, as “they” corrects the tradition, allowing nonbinary persons, so often excluded both socially and theologically, to understand themselves as manifestations of divinity. (Later in the book, we will introduce the Holy Spirit as Sophia, who is metaphorically female, thereby providing a gender-inclusive image of God the Trinity.)

We should refer to God the Creator as Jesus taught us, as “Abba”.

For the rest of this book our primary term for God the Creator and Sustainer will be Abba rather than the customary terms such as Creator, Sustainer, God, or Father. As noted above, Abba is the Aramaic term of endearment for Father, although (as noted above) it conveys more affection and closeness than its English counterpart. Jesus spoke Aramaic and used the term explicitly in his prayer life: when pleading to be freed from the pain of crucifixion, Jesus prays to “Abba, Father” (Mark 14:36).

This usage continued in the early church. The apostle Paul promises that, because Christ refers to the Creator as Abba, Christians can do so as well: “Those who are led by the Spirit of God are the children of God. . . . Through the Spirit, God has adopted you as children, and by that Spirit we cry out, ‘Abba!’” (Romans 8:15b–16a). Today, many Jewish children in families familiar with Hebrew will call their father Abba, which is more readily translated as “Dad,” “Daddy,” or “Papa.”

Not only is the term Abba entirely biblical and appropriately intimate, it offers several additional advantages. Relative to the word God, Abba suggests the warmth of a person to whom we can relate rather than an abstraction that we ponder. Relative to the word Father, Abba suggests less formality and greater familiarity. And relative to the words Creator or Sustainer, Abba refers to the whole person rather than a function thereof.

Regarding gender, the Aramaic word Abba is clearly a masculine noun. Fortunately, for our purposes, it has the advantage of ending in the letter a, which provides it with a feminine tone in many European languages: for example, Maria and Antonia are feminine; Mario and Antonio are masculine. This fortuitous ambiguity in the word provides us with some flexibility as we try to develop a gender-inclusive concept of God.

Finally, since we will call God the Creator Abba, for the rest of this book the term God itself will refer primarily to God the Trinity, the community of persons—Creator, Christ, and Spirit—united through love into one living divinity.

Theological language should be dynamic and flexible.

These references will not be perfectly consistent. Theological language should be sufficiently precise so as not to confuse, but sufficiently elastic so as not to obstruct the divine plenitude. When writing about faith, there is always a tension between precision and transparency, logic and metaphor, reason and imagination.

Moreover, the perfect cooperation of the three triune persons deeply involves them in one another’s work; even though they have distinct responsibilities, they fulfill their distinct responsibilities alongside one another. This co-involvement consolidates their activity, rendering it distinguishable but inseparable. From the perspective of theological language, God the Sustainer, God the Christ, and God the Spirit together form God the Trinity, granting the word God an indefiniteness appropriate to divinity’s overflowing nature. (adapted from Jon Paul Sydnor, The Great Open Dance: A Progressive Christian Theology, pages 66-68)

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For further reading, please see:

Biale, David. "The God with Breasts: El Shaddai in the Bible.” History of Religions 21, no. 3 (February 1982) 240–56. DOI: 10.1086/462899.

Bacon, Hannah. “‘Thinking’ the Trinity as Resource for Feminist Theology Today?” CrossCurrents 62, no. 4 (2012) 442–64. http://www.jstor.org/stable/24462298.

Loughlin, Gerard. “What Is Queer? Theology after Identity.” Theology & Sexuality 14, no. 2 (January 2008) 143–52. DOI: 10.1177/1355835807087376.

United States Catholic Conference. Catechism of the Catholic Church. Merrimack, NH: Thomas More College Press, 1994.

December 30, 2024

Why is there something instead of nothing?

Is the universe a divine gift or glorious accident? Does it come from God or God-knows-where?

This question is the most basic of all the unanswerable questions that we must answer. By “unanswerable,” I mean “cannot be answered with certainty,” unless that certainty is manufactured by the answerer. By “must answer,” I mean that we answer the question with our very lives: how we interpret them, feel them, and act within them. We inevitably choose. For this reason, we should choose consciously.

Our traditions cannot make the decision for us. Fundamentalists may insist on a literal reading of Scripture and claim that Genesis is perfectly accurate as a historical and scientific text. In so doing, they reject scientific claims about the origins of the cosmos, creating an artificial conflict between science and religion.

But science cannot make the decision for us either. Science-believing Christians accept our powers of observation and reason as divine gifts. For these Christians, science is a sacred practice. At this point the Big Bang seems to be the best explanation for the origin of our universe, but we still have a hard time explaining what produced the Big Bang. In attempting to explain the origin of the universe, we end up in an infinite regress: If the multiverse produced our universe, then what produced the multiverse? Or, even more intractably: What produced the physical laws that govern the multiverse?

Eventually, our powers of inference reach their limit. Theists stop the infinite regress by positing God as Creator and Sustainer of the unceasing process. Science can neither prove nor disprove this claim, leaving us, as rational beings, with the freedom, necessity, and consequence of choosing our religious orientation.

A question is an opportunity.

For many people the question “Why is there something instead of nothing?” begins a spiritual search. The question invites us to consider the very real possibility that there could be nothing instead of something, and this nothingness would be absolute. Instead of this vibrant, pulsing universe, and our living experience within it, there could be naught but a cold, dark silence, with no one to lament its emptiness.

But even the words cold, dark, and silent are only metaphorical descriptors of this desolation, which cannot be thought or spoken. Absolute nothingness lies beneath all qualities and beyond the reach of language. It is the tomb of being, and it is a very real possibility. We, and this cosmos that we inhabit, might never have been. At any moment, we could not be, were it not for our Creator and Sustainer.

What is the Creator and Sustainer of our universe like?

Our Creator is our divine parent. In keeping with the warmest strains of his own religious tradition, Jesus calls God the Creator “Abba,” Aramaic for “Father” or, more warmly, “Dad.” In Jesus’s Bible, Hosea provides one of the most affectionate descriptions of God as Abba, writing in Abba’s own words:

When Israel was a youth, I loved them dearly, and out of Egypt I called my children. . . . I taught Ephraim to walk, taking them by the arm—but they don’t acknowledge that I was the one who made them whole. I led them on a leash of human kindness, with bonds of caring. I was to them like those who lift infants to their cheeks; I bent down to them and fed them. (Hos 11:1–4)

Abba—the Creator and Sustainer of the universe, our divine Parent—is not cold, distant, or unfeeling; Abba is present, compassionate, and attentive. In choosing the symbol of YHWH as Father (and Mother, as we shall later see), Jesus is declaring that the Creator and Sustainer of the cosmos cares for each individual. The full attention of the ever-increasing infinite is directed at every one of us, personally. Thus, Abba is omnipresent in two ways: Abba is everywhere, and Abba is undistracted. We may feel forgotten in the numberless masses, but we are precious in the sight of Abba—so Jesus assures us. (adapted from Jon Paul Sydnor, The Great Open Dance: A Progressive Christian Theology, pages 64-66)

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.