Sadly, too often our forebears wielded a warped and jagged understanding of the Trinity as a weapon. In so doing, they reinforced violent, static, dualist, hierarchical and exclusive understandings of God. But it’s still not too late. If we open our hearts, we can feel the Spirit guiding us now to let the healing teaching of the Trinity continue its joyful revolution. Perhaps we are now ready to bear it … and to dare to practise it. Because if God is not violent, static, dualist, hierarchical or exclusive, neither should we be.
To join the movement of the Spirit is to let our trinitarian tradition continue to live, learn and grow … so the hostile one-versus-otherness of Earth can become more like the hospitable one-anotherness of heaven. From beginning to end, the Spirit leads us into vibrant diversity and joyful unity in beautiful harmony.
- from Brian D. McLaren, We Make the Road By Walking: A Year-Long Quest for Spiritual Formation, Reorientation and Activation, ch. 45, “The Spirit of Unity and Diversity”. It is a chapter on the doctrine of the Trinity, that the Trinity shifts our understanding away from God as violent, static, dualist, hierarchical, and exclusive. I used it (slightly altered, in its entirety) as my Trinity talk on Sunday. Extracts here...
After much dialogue and debate, a radically new understanding and teaching about God emerged. They had to create a whole new term to convey it: Trinity. There were, naturally, three parts to the teaching.
First, through Jesus and his good news they had come to know and relate to God in a parental way....
Second, in Jesus they came to see a child-ness in God, a given-ness of the child-life corresponding to the giving-ness of the parent-life....
Through Jesus and his good news, they had also experienced a third reality: the loving, harmonious Spirit that flowed in and between and out from the first and the second. This loving and unifying presence, this primal harmony this deep, joyful, contagious communion they called God the Spirit.
This all sounds highly speculative, but it was a sincere attempt to put into words the radical way they were rethinking and freshly experiencing God in the aftermath of their experience of Jesus. By God’s parental love, through Christ’s beautiful life, death and resurrection, and through the Holy Spirit, they felt that they had been caught up into this divine communion themselves. God could never again be for them a distant, isolated One to whom they were ‘the other’. Now they knew God as a dynamic and hospitable one-another in whom they lived, moved and had their being. The Trinity described how they experienced God ‘from the inside’. ...
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