On Johnson's Feminist Trinity: Dissonance

Dissonance

I keep lobbying for the sign of my church to read “Ask about our Threesome,” on Trinity Sunday, not to be glib but to stretch the imaginations of those who would dare to think three times about God, the very least consequence of which might be a lesson on the original meaning of erotic love and our continuing degradation of it. And the very greatest consequence might be a discussion of the consideration of the physical in regards to the sacrosanct and the divine.

But, of course, it’s never going to happen. Too bad. The history of theology is the history of believers with great intelligence but perhaps too little imagination. Johnson is right to suggest that we move beyond the one model of Trinity, though, perhaps not for the reasons that she believes. She would have us resign the Father and the Son and to a lesser degree the Spirit because they are inherently patriarchal – a point well taken, but perhaps not necessary and certainly occasionally overstated.

One wonders if words can be inherently anything, and one notices also that the patriarchy in fifteenth-century Europe was perhaps considerably different than the patriarchy in the Ancient Near East. The biblical fathers are given us as almost unimaginably lax. They are not particularly authoritarian; however hard the priestly laws may seem one has a great deal of trouble imagining Jacob having Joseph stoned.

The point of the metaphor of Father and Son was thus only partly about the delineation of authority and also about the conveyance of blessing: “this is my Son, with whom I am well pleased.” The language of masculinity fails then not because patriarchy fails to describe the Godhead (though it does) but also and I would say primarily because masculine language because of semantic drift fails the experience of canonical patriarchy itself. We suffer from the eternal impoverishment of words.

And we always will. Jesus came to tell us the name of God (it turns out to be Abba) but the problem comes because we still try to speak it and have spoken it for two thousand years. The term has become not heart-stoppingly intimate but heart-breakingly casual. We glibly think that God is Father. The solution, I would then propose, is not to find another substitute name for God – none are adequate, or ever will be, not even She – but simply to never repeat it, to never step into the same Trinity twice.

We would thus never stop speaking about God or hopefully to God but might well pause to listen for the breath of God in each analogy, to not just use the forms of God our fathers handed to us but to hand a profusion of forms of God to our daughters and our sons. There are not nine billion names of God as in the science fiction story but simply all names of God. For Christians, reality is not only plural but is in fact infinite.

The created poverty of words means that we cannot exhaust the uncreated reality of God; with regards to Trinity then we can thus stop worrying. We don’t have a handle anyway. Think of the possibilities! For the ancients: the God of Holy Wind, the God of Loving Water, and the God of Warming Fire. For the moderns: God the Web Server, God the Web Page, and God the Holy Hyperlink. For the cathedral scene: God the external sunlight, God the illumined window, and God the light-wash throughout the room.

Or, perhaps existentially: God the Spirit of Awe, God the Spirit of Clarity, and God the Spirit of Authority. Instead of the Greek Orobouros, the snake that swallows its own tale, the River of Life could be its own Source, Mouth, and Stream – who wouldn’t want their names written in that! These things could really flow.

For tropical situations: God the concealing fog, God the dappling dew, and God the saturating humidity. For the scholars: God the Text, God the Word, and God the Holy Page. For those of a celebratory nature: the Inviting God, the Insisting God, and the Bringing God, so long as it’s all the same party. Or for the philosophers: the Proposition, the Argument, and the Proof, so long as every word is true.

The point is not that any of these would work, but that none of them would, and that we would work out for ourselves how best to call the One(s) we love in each incarnation of our lives. Word by word, one Trinity at a time.

On Johnson's Feminist Trinity: Consonance

Consonance

“The circular dynamism within God spirals inward, outward, forward toward the coming of a world into existence, not out of necessity but our of the free exuberance of overflowing friendship.”

One can understand Trinity not as a noun or even as an adjective but as a verb or perhaps as Verb. God is not Trinity but is like Trinity insofar as God, in fact, Trinities. God repeats Godself both to God and to creation. That is what God does, not in a modal and thus ontological sense but in the phenomenological and thus, yes, Trinitarian sense.

God loves, and God loves, and God loves and together they are not one love but three loves; we rock in the three waves of God’s fathomless devotion, the ocean that is God-for-us. We are splashed, created and re-created by God’s love as God’s love. This is the sense of it, yes? My love is my act, my disposition and my being-toward a person and also that person him or herself, who beings-back-toward me. We begin a letter saying, “My love,” and close by writing, “Love, ….”

We would be loved back. Love is narcissistic, not in the sense of self-absorption but in the sense of self-involvement. Even in love, we cannot stop knowing ourselves because it is through knowing and comprehending ourselves that we know the beloved: “Oh, that’s just like that time…” But the beloved is not the self and so one encounters limitations: “I can’t believe you just did that!”

All of this is not to go astray from the Tripartate creed but is instead to ask the question: What happens when God Trinities? We know that this is love, that God is love, but do we know what love is? What love does? The scandal of transcendence and immanence is not that God exists in confounding mathematical puzzles but that both transcendence and imminence pervade the very fabric of our lives, our loves.

We are in the image of God but not as the image of God; humans are not what happens when God looks into a reflecting pool, but humans are what happens when God looks into the pools of our beloved human eyes. God must see his handiwork “Before I formed you in the womb…” but must also be surprised: “Why are you hiding from me?”

This should not be difficult to understand. We are present to each other and know each other as friends and lovers but never know each other all the way down, to the very toes. We know each other as mystery revealing itself, as simultaneously self and other, or if you prefer different language both as promise and as secret. Would the love of the Trinity seem so sweet?

“I and the Father our one,” and “Only the Father knows the hour.” Perhaps, yes? Or perhaps as Molly Bloom would have it: “yes I said yes I will Yes.” God’s Trinity-ing or Trinity’s God-ing thus becomes the threefold affirmation of both creation and God as good, very good, and very very good without any goodness being quantified but only repeatedly emphasized. Who, after all, would measure a wave? One only listens for the sound of each, both like and unlike the others.

We are rapt. This is what relation, what being-for does, doesn’t it? We engage the paradoxes of love, of self and other, similarity and alterity, secret and promise not by negating any side in binary elimination but in taught penetration: we tell more intimate secrets and make more abiding promises, even extravagant ones that seem quite dubious in retrospect: “this generation will not pass away until all these things…”

What happens when humans love is that humans become unhinged: we act strangely, we are not ourselves and are in considerably less control. What happens when God Trinities is that God becomes unhinged in love. God makes promises. God gets passionate. God gets pledged, betrothed. “Batter my heart, Three-Personned God,” writes John Donne perhaps to invite a rape but perhaps also to signal that he is finally ready to participate.

Because this is the problem, yes? “No greater love hath he…” but the history of humanity is the history of refusing to be caught up in the love of God. The history of Trinity, on the other hand, is the story of God’s declining to accept our resignation, our returning of the ticket, as Mr. Karamazov would have it. So what happens when God Trinities? Everything, of course. Or, at least, everything that matters, ever has mattered, or ever will.

Notice: It's my Tetraversary!

On October 3, 2005 (four years ago this Saturday!) I moved from my Pennsylvania homeland to my exile in Minneapolis, the implosion of my savings account, the forfeiture of my fledgling 401k, the last of my health insurance, a 30% drop in average income, a personal 50% unemployment rate, the completion of two novels, acceptance to a seminary, and the rekindling of my faith and my heart.

How do you think I ought to celebrate? I'm very open to suggestion.

on John 18:1-13: Christus Victor

Matthew 12:20 "A battered reed He will not break off, And a smoldering wick He will not put out, Until He leads justice to victory” (NAS).

John 18:1-12 presents Christ victorious on a field of battle against the darkness of Enemy; the spoils of the battle, so to speak, are Jesus’s own disciples and the believers they will subsequently gain for the faith – ie whoever might believe in Him. This was the theology of atonement present in the early Church when John was written, and, I would argue, the one present in the text itself. That this victory would come in apparent defeat was of course something of the purpose, and underscores the sharp contrasts of the earliest Christian theology: as life was achieved through death, so Christ’s victory is achieved through his acquiescence to Roman binding and Temple jurisdiction.

The theology of Christus Victor is present from the beginning of the text, at least in part: Jesus and his followers cross the brook of Kedron, itself a site of military import to Davidic history, where he fled his son Absalom. More, the language of the text suggests Jesus at the head of his followers as a captain would be at the head of his unit. He is, in military parlance, “leading from the front.”

That Kedron was a Davidic retreat rather than a triumph only further underscores the type of victory Christ is about to accomplish. That the garden is familiar terrain in John’s gospel, and that Christ knew all the things that were to come, similarly mimics a captain choosing the field of battle. Judas comes similarly at the head of a Roman cohort and Temple officers; the sides are joined, though we might wonder what becomes of the captain of darkness afterward (Judas doesn’t lead from the front for very long). The cohort comes with “lanterns and torches and weapons” amounting to a military inventory of the kind long synonymous with battle: equipment matters in the warring world.

Jesus then steps forward as in a military parley: “Whom do you seek?” The question is perhaps not as important in this case as is the fact that Jesus asks first; Jesus initiates; Christ is in command not only of his own “troops” but of the opposition. He fires the first volley, strikes the first blow. With his acknowledgement that he is the one they seek; the cohort collapses. Falling back, they break good Roman formation. The men should have stood together. But the men fall over, testimony both to the power of the Word of God and the shallow nature of the victory the forces of the world are about to gain.

Again Christ rejoins the conversation; this is to be not a battle of blades but of words, and here Jesus clearly has the upper hand. With his second acknowledgement he suggests (declares? orders?) that with his captivity, his men are no longer needed by anyone, “let these men go.” He thus secures their freedom from both arrest and death. He himself is the only casualty of battle: “I did not lose a single one of those whom you gave me.” (Do they flee? Or just choose a retreat? A rearguard action?)

That Peter subsequently draws a sword is both entirely appropriate and entirely misdirected; he rightly feels the contest but wholly misinterprets its nature, threatening the victory as if he were some soldier out of place and exposed to harm. Christ’s command is swift and precise: “Put your sword back into its sheath.” This is both because the victory is already being accomplished and because Christ Victorious is not Christ Militant – most of the earliest Christians were pacifist. The soldiers, officers and Jewish police, not knowing that darkness is already being defeated, arrest and bind Jesus as though, indeed, he were a slave or common prisoner taken from the field of battle – something which all good Christians would know that he of course was not.

on Benedict's Rule

On the Rule of St. Benedict

Noll continues his mostly positive – and occasionally triumphant – discussion of Christianity’s turning points with the resounding, though not unmixed, successes of the Rule of St. Benedict, founder of the Benedictine order. Notes Noll: “almost everything in the church that approached the highest, noblest, and truest ideas of the gospel was done either by those who had chosen the monastic way or by those who had been inspired in the Christian life by the monks.”

And this is rightly said. The monastic tradition has given modern Christians translated Scripture, Trinitarian liturgy, classical theology, robust missions, and church history. What the Rule of St. Benedict did was to flexibly but firmly curb the excesses of the monastic movement that gave us all of the above: the early asceticism of the desert fathers at times amounted to a denial of the material world in Gnostic fashion.

The Rule of Benedict restored prayer to the center of monastic life, re-centered Scripture as the fount of spiritual life, and grounded the more esoteric of inward religious experience in the common lot of work, study, food and rest. One wonders if monasticism could in fact have given the Christian world as much as it did without Benedict’s wise and gracious Rule. Like many monks, Benedict began monastic life as a reaction to the moral degeneracy of the late Roman city, though by his time the persecutions at least had ended.

Indeed, the social legitimization of Christianity by Constantine and successive Emperors provided Christians with stability, access to power, and a reasonable means of income – an offer that not all Christians could take in stride. Indeed, were self-sacrifice and humility to be found at all in the comforts and grandeur of the old Roman Empire? Monasticism’s emergence as “the conscience of Christianity” meant throwing aside the trappings of Empire even as the social fabric of that world was coming undone.

The appeal of the monastics came both through their pseudo-Scriptural affinity for virginity and their vision of the world as spiritual battleground; this struck the psychology of the times so positively that a pillar-sitting monk might well have helped the pronouncement of Chalcedon gain popular acceptance. But where Benedictine departed from his predecessors was in his desire to reform the monastic movement itself.

Where the first monks left the cities with a self-proclaimed vow to abandon all property and follow Christ in accordance with scripture, Benedict made dispossession a rule outright. The Rule also not only established prayer as the central spiritual weapon of those who came under it, but codified the manner of that prayer as humble as if “asking some favor of a powerful man.” Where Scripture suggests hospitality as the invitation of Christ, the Rule urges care especially for strangers and the sick.

It was the clear elaboration of such already-extant realities that so marked the Rule of Benedict and brought together the varied and somewhat individualistic ways of the first desert monks. Primarily, the Rule was one of living together, and became more important as men and women both began to do this in Cenobite community. Common practices such as the keeping of the common Benedictine day became catholic missions that spread Christianity through barbarous Europe by cruce, libro, et atro – with cross, book, and plow.

The trend of the Middle Ages is the story of the monastery in parallel relation to the Church – though one, Noll notes, not without its conflict, as abbots and bishops in a region often understood common problems differently. What is certainly true is that throughout the Church’s history, the monastery would continue to be the conscience of the Christian faith, mirroring all of its renewal, decay, and reform.

It is in his truly bizarre and entirely extra-textual coda, however, that Noll would criticize the monastic movement himself, as though Benedict had not done quite enough. His assertion that a Protestant might well ask the question of works-justification in monastic life entirely misses the origin of monasticism not in the search for salvation but in the quest for loving obedience, to simply follow the words of Jesus. Whatever happened to it afterward would not then be not the fault of monastic life but the consequence of the human heart itself.

Noll might begin to understand this when he asks if the disposal of the body would necessarily affect the deepest seat of sin – but misses that Jesus Christ himself seems to have thought at least something of the kind; one can hardly imagine our Lord and Savior “settling down.” Finally, Noll suggests that monastic life as a rejection of the world undervalues Christ’s benediction of it – a point better taken if Noll did not assume what neither the first nor the modern monastics assume: that the denial of world must be lifelong.

Rather, it is through periods of both denial and embracing of the world that Christians learn our rightful place, to be in the world and not of it. If the denial never happens, the benediction doesn’t either. Jesus didn’t die naked on a cross so that we could sit lifelong in upholstered chairs, quaff wine, and muse about the justification resulting from his sacrifice. We are indeed, supposed to do something about it, not in order to re-accomplish it, but simply in order to recognize and accept it. The monastic life has taken many people at least part of the way down that pilgrim road.

Dissonance: on Peter's 'God, the World's Future'

Dissonance

The history of creedal Christianity is the history of bishops proclaiming accord without elaboration. We agree, but damned if we do not gloss over the details. Says the Athanasian creed: “Uncreated is the Father; uncreated is the Son; uncreated is the Spirit,” and “there are not three uncreated and unlimited beings, but one who is uncreated and unlimited.”

This is the problem when Trinity crosses from story into doctrine: I challenge any living man or woman to explain to me exactly how the above is possible. It boggles the mind. It staggers the consciousness. This does not mean the Athanasian creed is incorrect but does imply that Peters consistently misevaluates the symbols. Peters assumes that we can understand them.

We must comprehend the symbols if we are to use them to explicate word and world alike. That is the only way the theological methodology of Peters functions. Though placing them at the edge, at the metaxy between reality and transcendence, Peters would also have the markers that identify the experience of revelation function something like revelation itself. If we would explicate these symbols, they must be explicable. Peters would have them bring something more than ontological shock.

He would have us embrace, at least half of the time, the kataphatic assumption that “humans know what life is on the terrestrial plane”, and in so knowing, “can speak of eternal life on the heavenly plane.” But I would assert that humans know nothing of the kind. We have no idea what life is like here; if we did, one supposes that we would be much better at it. The incarnation of Christ came in many ways in order to highlight our incapacity in precisely this regard: “they do not know what they are doing.”

And God’s disclosure of God-self in Christ was no simple manifestation; the crucifixion concealed from this world the ultimate triumph of Christ at the end of time and history; else the book of Revelation would have little to uncover. This should not surprise us, as no disclosure occurs without concealment: to say anything is to choose not to say something else entirely, even another truth. We know each other by our faces, we recognize our neighbor at a glance, but we are not our faces and dwell behind our masks.

We have no idea what keeps our neighbor awake at night. We answer to our names, but our names do not describe us. Transcendence does not stop at the edge of this world but shoots entirely through it. Three things we do not understand, and these three things are everything there is: self, other, and universe. We have full definitions of none of these things, and, one might argue, lack the cognitive equipment to form such, or recognize that we have. Yet these are with us everywhere we go; we cannot escape these mysteries.

How should we then explicate the symbols of God, if we cannot unpack the symbols of ourselves? Or, rather, we find that we are always unpacking without ever getting to the package; God is a Russian toy containing endless Russian dolls. Symbols lie at the edge, says Peters. The edge of what? What edge? Of course reality is more than what we perceive it to be; our perceptual set does not even include the fullness of material reality itself.

Nietzsche was indeed wrong about the truth; it is not a woman. God is the woman; truth is God’s beckoning finger. God is a tease. Gospel is God’s come-hither stare. The symbols of the gospel truth are the gestures God makes toward creation. They are precisely the things which are not meant to be explicated, but to be answered.

This is best done not by transforming narrative into doctrine but by joining the narrative oneself; one better understands the Triune pronouncements of the creeds not by their content but by their contest, by their context, by their place in the mouths of those obfuscating bishops. By committing to explicable symbols as semi-doctrinal doors between divinity and humanity, Peters consistently misses the story that the wall has long since crumbled and the kingdom of God is already experientially at hand.

on God, the World's Future: Consonance

Consonance

“God is the transcendent One who has become one with humanity in the person of Jesus Christ and through whose Spirit we and the whole cosmos are being brought to fulfillment” (86). Thus the Trinity at its core is not a doctrine but a story; from the story we get the doctrine but not vice versa. The problem of Trinity is neither story nor doctrine but the tension between the two.

How we answer Heidegger – why is there something rather than nothing? – determines whether we will end up with the classical theists (God cannot die) and their non-contradictory God or with the shall-we-call-them-orthodox theists (God did die in Christ) and their paradoxical God-man. There is something rather than nothing because God discloses God-self through that which is not God: “Let us make man in our image.”

So begins the story. It culminates with making God in man’s image, so to speak, and ends with the promise of finally making all things in the imagination of God. Along the way it picks up me, or as Luther said “I believe that God has created me and all that exists.” We participate in the story. The tale of the Trinity invites us in. We are by necessity alone, but by grace called to meet someone beyond our wildest imaginings.

But where is God, yes? “When we listen for the call of the Beyond, we listen with the silent and secret hope that the call comes from within as well as without.” That God reveals God-self through finity implies that God God-self is involved with me, not in the classical Platonic ontological sense but in orthodox Hebraic time: I am an agent in God’s historic romancing of the universe, blessed to be a blessing to the nations: “And they will know that I am YHWH.”

God is an event, God-self disclosed in history. We should expect no less of Trinity. Thus Christ “though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself…so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend…and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.” In Christ the self-disclosure of infinity through finity comes to fulfillment: God becomes human, finds triumph through powerlessness and in death brings life anew for all creation.

The cross is thus not the negation of God but the fullness of God and the face of Trinity. It is not that Jesus Christ is subordinate to the Father but that Jesus Christ subordinates himself: this is the identity of Christ. He does so in and through the Spirit of God. The Athanasian position is that this simply discloses what has been going on forever, without us, all along. The Trinity immanent in the world through the revelation of Jesus Christ is the Trinity transcendent beyond the world and hidden behind the name of God, the Trinity that we shall one day see face to face; God’s glory has shined in the face of Christ.

Part of the scandal of the Trinitarian tale is not that this has changed the world, which any encounter with divinity might do, but that in the incarnation “redefines divinity to include humanity, the humanity of the historical Jesus.” Believers are bound to Christ and thus to God. Salvation is inclusion; the relatedness of the Trinity one to each other extends to the Trinity relating to creation, to the world, to me.

This makes God no less God because the Hebraic story means that eternity is not timelessness but everlastingness that takes all things into itself. In other words, God has always been becoming Trinity just as Christ has always been subordinating Son to Father. In God the relatedness of history in finity becomes the relatedness of history to eternity not by binding infinity but by opening God and creation both to possibility, to God’s own acts of imagination.

That God is the divine community of persons implies humanity as humane community of persons and the Kingdom of God which Jesus Christ proclaimed. The transcendent God whose name we cannot know and whose face we cannot see becomes God-for-us, whose face we have seen and in whose name we have believed, “dancing with all creation” (126). In Christ we are taken up in God or as Peters has it: “our awareness of human dignity and equality is itself an expression of the divine Spirit…part of the larger drama of the godhead’s redeeming and reconciling work within the world.”