Anglimergents return to the importance of Trinitarian Ecclesiology

[Ian Mobsby]

Some have asked what is the new thing behind Anglimergent. I want to argue that the new thing is the new old thing, it is a commitment to quest with the deep theology and Christian practice that comes from a Trinitarian understanding of the Christian faith. Many of the post-reformation traditions of church have travelled light to the Trinitarian basis of the faith in reaction to a culture defined by modernism. I want to argue that a Trinitarian Ecclesiology has much to assist us un how we do worship, mission and community. Mission becomes perichoresis - catching up with what God the Trinity is doing, prayer becomes joining in with the Trinity, and community becomes something modelled on transformation, radical justice and inclusion. All this gives Anglimergents and Ancient Future perspective, so rather than throwing the baby out with the bath water, we are challenged to seek the ancient reframed into the post-secular post-religious and post-modern context. Whether we like it or not, all post-industrial western nations run to the logic of spirituality and spiritual tourism. So our challenge becomes how do we shift people from being spiritual tourists to Christian pilgrims..... I want to argue this is the fundamental starting point for Anglimergents - that as with the Anglican divines who founded the faith as a form of unity in diversity drawing on a mystical communion and trinitarian ecclesiology, so must we engage with this ongoing tradition....

If you are interested in this subject in more detail, see my two books here

[Chris McLeod]

Ian, my first post. I fully agree with your theological foundations. Quite simply our theological 'structure' can only be built on God, who has revealed 'godself' as Trinity. Where else would we start? What we have as Anglicans is a solid tradition of Trinitarian thinking based in a prayerful relationship. The sadness, for me, at least, is that many anglicans, in recent decades, have abandoned belief in the Trinity in an attempt to win over 'moderns', or have struggled themselves with faith in an 'anti-faith' context. The complexity of our post-modern situation provides a fresh environment, where diversity is norm and complexity is taken for granted. A fresh appraisal of the doctrine of the Trinity is timely in an environment that values dialogue and 'relational' truth. It seems to me, we could find no better paradigm for 'emergence' than the Trinity.

[Tim Mathis]

I'm right with you here Ian. For a bit of personal narrative to reinforce your thesis, during the period that I initially intentionally started becoming Anglican, I was working on a thesis on Jurgen Moltmann's theology of creation (at the University of Otago in Dunedin, NZ, by chance), which is both strongly Trinitarian and strongly tied to/informed by his ecclesiology. I found Moltmann's Trinitarianism through the Rev. Dr. Polkinghorne, and Moltmann himself has (you probably know) been strongly influenced by Anglican and Orthodox scholarship in this area. The one thing I would add here is that Anglicans and emergents alike seem to be re- or explicitly emphasizing a panentheist understanding of God's relationship to creation which also informs ecclesiology. That is, creation is seen in Trinitarian terms as a participant in the divine dance, as is the church, humanity, etc. I tend to view this as a really helpful foundation for the development of an authentically Anglican and Christian ecclesiology and theology of creation informing extremely relevant ideas about the meaning of environmental justice, social justice, church structure, the place and role of authority, etc. etc.

Thanks for bringing this up. As I find myself saying often on this site, it's good to hear that I'm not the only one thinking these things. I haven't done so yet, but I'll hunt down a copy of your books.

[Ian Mobsby]

Thanks Tim & Eric

I agree with you both. Though I would want to agree with the focus on panentheism. I think some emergents go into panethism which is a bridge too far for me. But yep I agree with you - which is exciting. The books are shown at the bottom of the Anglimergent front page.

The challenge then is for us to get her hands dirty and actually create Anglican and emerging forms of Christian community - not always that easy to do.....

Ian

[Shelley Chesley]

I must concur with "not always that easy to do...." dear Ian! As one trying to discern and co-create the way to discipleship here in the land of spiritual tourism central--northern California. The Macrina Community in Marin is in parallel play with a lot of your thinking and yearning. Loving paradox, I thank you for the phrase "Ancient Future." The "theological structures" that bring me the most vigor and hope, as well as places to start, are panentheism and perichoresis. I have found the foregoing and after-following dialogue most engaging (mostly) but I must say your warm, wise quizzical face was the most compelling of all. So thankful to see a reminder of you. It IS all about relationship. Fondly, Shelley Chesley

[Christopher Rushlau]

"Panentheism" is not in the Merriam-Websters' Online dictionary--I have to go to the "unabridged" for-pay one to see when this term came into use.
Let me suggest, with respect to you and the other responders, a different approach, that, I suppose, pioneered by Karl Rahner, Gabriel Marceau, etc.--what you might call the psychologists of faith. How do we have ideas about God (one might ask)? Well, how do we experience anything?
It turns out that everything is an experience of God, of the mystical, of the incomprehensible, of the co-natural, of the co-creative--there's my own jargon-coinage, maybe. So mission is not venturing out from the safety of here and now, it is trying to escape the danger of here and now, the crisis (krinein, to sift, or decide): to meet what the inscrutable God has lain down before me. To escape to where? To the place and time where questing is at an end. I note that, though I may be wrong, "adventure" does not mean "go out from" but "coming in to here"--like in Advent! Life is an adventure, and mercy is the only way to handle an adventure--but "mercy" is over-used--so let me call it tenderness.
By the way, and not to dismiss your main axis of inquiry, the trinity has to be explained somehow, and I try to explain it in terms of brain-modeling, the way we experience anything, and that has required me to expand it to a quadrinity. My "text" is the chestnut of ancient wisdom that says that there are four types of cause: final, formal, material, and efficient--so Creator is final, Word is formal, Spirit is material, and Holiness, an act not a state, is the efficient cause of the idea of God, which, as Aquinas would say, is the idea of being.

[Ian Mobsby]

Hi Christopher
Responding to your points...
1. Not sure the Trinity does need to be explainable in modernist scientific language - I think it is about enabling people to experience the Trinity, and the values that a Trinitarian God envibes about being church. What ever language we use, we need to use relational language with the idea of the person of God or we dumb down on God the Trinity and in particular on the Spirit. Sorry - but I wouldn't use the language you have described for naming God because it reduces God naming language away from experience of people to process language.... I have written a lot about this and commend my second book'the becoming of g-d' to you if you are interested in this. So then prayer and worship becomes joining in with the Trinity, and mission becomes catching up with what God is already doing. Yes it is mystical - but importantly relational.
2. Mission is not escape or going outside - it is focused on the way we live and also on how we are focused on those who are not part of any church. So it is about catching up with Christ who wandered, spoke to, and munched his way with outsiders throughout the synoptic gospels. The vision is of theosis - relationship to the divine. Mission is however about risk and not all about ME and my needs - my actualisation or fulfillment in isolation from others - the danger of a purely mystical form of faith - it also needs to be about others and justice and the ordinary stuff of life. Really like your use of the word Tenderness.

3. There's a good description on panentheism on wikipedia
4. I like the people you quote and use some of their thinking - but I want to suggest that an approach to faith in a new context needs to be theological informed in what has become known as the pastoral cycle - that allows theology, philsophy and psychology and in fact all the humanities to dialogue - but without dumbing down on Christian theology. Otherwise we make the same mistake about the nature of God from the same great heresies of Modalism or Arianism - so we need to be informed. So a good theology of the Trinity I want to argue is what makes us Christian rather than one of the other Abrahamic faiths, and the Trinity prevents up from taking away the focus on who God says God is through the experience of many people in the bible and now, that keeps us rooted into an ancient future faith. This then enables us to work out the quest 'how should we then live IN contemporary culture but not OF contemporary culture'.

Aquinas is a good start to understanding the different approaches to Christian spirituality, but we need to be careful that we don't dumb down on the inherent spirituality of the faith in a post-secular post-religious culture, which should be about opening up the tradition to people. I really don't think people will get church as the visible expression of the invisible kingdom of God, unless they understand that God chooses to live out these same values in the way that God is God. Something since the reformation the church has not done because it tried to understand the nature of God using truth language rather than experience language. Thank God we don't have to be in a culture that only uses rationalist and reductive approaches to understanding anymore - we are therefore for me, in hopeful times.

Finally - I think we need to focus on the idea of Human Becomings rather than Human beings - the former implies that we are constantly changing and growing in discipleship the latter is static and I think does not understand the ideas of Kenosis, Panentheism or Perechoresis. And it is this Perechoresis at the heart of God, that I want to commend to you, which is the basis of all my thinking and writing, which comes from a deep Trinitarian Ecclesiology that we have impoverished in the West which is rich in the East. So through all of this - we grapple again with the theology which I want to argue us at the heart of Anglicanism.

So thanks Christopher for your thoughtful response.... it has got me thinking.

[Christopher Rushlau]

I am sleepy from successive overnight bus rides to and from Washington, DC (I live in Portland, Maine, six hundred miles away), where we "marched to the Pentagon" and I also took a walking tour of the FDR, Jefferson, and surrounding memorial grounds near "The Mall". The first-mentioned walk (a pretty disorgranized march, with two internal demonstrations-against-our-own-demonstration popping up and the march organizers' parade marshalls being thin on the ground and without communications) took us over the Potomac River to Arlington, Virginia, past the Pentagon and to a street, Crystal St., where you find, in serried ranks, office highrises labeled "Boeing", "General Dynamics", "KBR" (offshoot of Halliburton), etc., (some stretches of this district, on this day, being defended by mute stolid armored--breastplates and grieves--members of the Pentagon Protective Service (whatever that is)--speaking of "serried ranks"--but isn't any rank serried--well, these were ranks one man deep, so "single ranks" is the term I want--no, it turns out "serried" means "compacted", not relating to a series). It was quite an experience.
Truth.
Mutual indwelling. Rahner speaks of communicatio idiomati: what can be ascribed to one of the members of the Trinity can be ascribed to the others.
There are also hotels, food courts, coffee shops,, etc., and a delightful diversity of people on Crystal St., even on a Saturday morning--including members of the county police force and the sheriff's department, who were generally more chatty than the Pentagon Protective Service--but all responded to me once I found the right tone of repect--it just being the case that some people are harder to "reach" than others, probably reflecting their institutional loyalties.
I have a slogan, "strength in diversity". Rahner's catchphrase--after "anonymous Christianity", anyway--was "unity in diversity".
The ancient question was of the one and the many.
How do we avoid doctrinaire thinking? That is the scandal of faith, the stumbling block. Doctrinaire thinking embodies itself in authoritarianism: institutions devoted to preserving their officers' benefits of belonging, whatever the cost to the supposed clients of the institutions.
Is The Church an institution? Is a school accredited to, as it were--as it is, credential (as a verb) officers of The Church, an institution?
You hear the phrase in art criticism: "found object". I like the idea of a "found community"--God is present among us in the group of people where we now find ourselves, be it in a torture chamber or reception line, or on a long-distance bus or blog.
Who is the Redeemer in "found community"? How do we recognize this person?
Must we crucify this person before we come to recognize this person?
"Person", the mask the ancient Greek dramaticians spoke their parts through, should be understood, nowadays, as some combination of the following words: imagination, life-style (or conventions of living in the particular case, mine or yours), self-understanding, and skill. (I really find the use of the four causes almost unavoidable.) So we can, then, speak of whole and damaged persons, in terms of breadth of imagination, non-violence of conventions of living, humility of self-understanding ("humility" stems from the same source as "humus"--meaning "ground") (as in "ground of being"?, heh, heh), and degree of skill (in what I still like to call "getting out of my own way").
So then we can imagine and model the personality of God.
Thanks for the marvelously stimulating discussion.

[Christopher Rushlau]

My facetious, not to say twitting, final remark pains me. I did not draw any pastoral conclusions. I insist on the centrality of the imagination in the life anyone lives. Two Biblical references, in English at least, to the word "heart" are "out of the heart pours deceit" or words to that effect and then a promise that "the desires of one's heart" shall be granted. Clear contradiction?
Let me repeat and emphasize what I take to be Rahner's point. Thought occurs in the imagination and is thus ephemeral, or indeed momentary. We do not live in a world of knowledge. We live in a world of impressions impressed upon the substance of our imaginations even while this substance is also subject to the pressure of our wishes, fears--the things Buddhists warn us about. "There is no knowledge without the sensory impression". That means, there is no immediate (unmediated) explicit knowledge of anything outside the imagination--the imagination being where we can retain, momentarily, an impression gained by our senses.
My mother said to me when I was ten or something (??), "Existentialism means there is no God." It was worse than she said. Existentialism means there is no knowledge, not if you regard knowedge as a place, perhaps a library or museum or laboratory, in which you can take refuge and be with truth unguarded, so to speak.
"Out of the heart pours corruption". Whose thoughts are free from corruption? "I shall grant you the desires of your heart". Yet only in thought are we free ("die Gedanken sind frei"), and so only in thought can we at least approach truth. Thomists say we do all that we do under the species of Good. So somewhere under all the corruption with which we tamper with our sensory impressions and abstracted essences is a love of truth and a capacity to be "all that you can be" (Army recruiting slogan in the US) by conforming our thoughts to truth.
I apply to this situation Paul's phrase "spiritual warfare". Though indeed I allow in that phrase the intermixture of other spirits that Catholics might have in mind in the phrase "communion of saints", not to mention all those incubus/succubus things. Allowing (for the evident fact) that one's thoughts are a madhouse at the best of times and a conspiracy against virtue the rest of the time--this is the reformation of one's life that prophets promise and demand? No wonder that prophets are never honored in their own lands. "It's no wonder God has so few friends--look at how God treats them," said Teresa of Avila.
So my pastoral point? We have to be very gentle with ourselves, and very gentle with others. "Gentle" means "a member of the gens". The nation. The tribe. Who is in my tribe? Everybody. I have to listen to everybody and I have to listen to myself. Spiritual discipline comes down to this one point: listen to yourself, stop telling yourself to shut up. Is it true where you are that people so often flee conversations fearing being made to look stupid (I assume)? They regard a conversation as a sporting event and they hate to lose, at least in front of their friends? They have staked out certain positions and they cannot be seen to back away or down from these positions?
Here is the pastoral situation in a nutshell, then. We need to listen to ourselves so as to see the virtue in our internal madhouses. Then we need to listen to others so as to encourage ("hearten") them to listen to their internal madhouses. Finally we have to exhort them to encourage others, in turn, to listen to these internal madhouses that the authorities of our day--the authority of "the world"--of "the flesh"--require us to to reject and disown in favor of the official mind and official personality that are promulgated and marketed to us as the pristine palace of sure truth (in such authoritative, but never explained, formulas as "the normal", "the healthy", "the well-adjusted", "the sane")--as long as that sure truth, that is so free of doubt (but are you free to doubt or even question it?) and so universally acknowledged (are you allowed--or willing--to ask around to see who actually believes it?), is good for business and favors the current enmities being sponsored by Authority.
The essential argument of Authority, of the Beast, of "real life", of "the Empire", is that truth is a fungible (incremental) commodity and if you don't have your unit or package, you'd better sell everything you have, such as your grandmother, in order to buy your kit. And, oh, by the way, when you open this package and hear this truth, it won't make any sense and it will offend you deeply--the box will be empty. But you ain't going anywhere without that sheepskin, buddy.
The person of biblical faith replies, "I have my own source of truth, one that I can have total faith, put total reliance, in: the evidence of my own senses and the assurances of my own reasoning--with the one proviso that not only will this confrontation cost me my goods, my life, my destiny, but the very means I use to calculate or even identify my possessions, my self." "Come, sell all you have, give the money to the poor, and follow me." "Where, Lord?" "The son of man has no place to lay his head."
Here's the testable claim in Jesus's gospel. If you invest all you have, you shall profit thirty, sixty, or a hundred fold.
If you can quit trying to watch yourself live, quit trying to be in the palace of official truth while simultaneously doing whatever that palace of official truth supposedly tells you to do, you will become graceful and your works shall succeed (and your leaves shall not wither).
The pastoral point is to grasp that your thoughts occur in your imagination, so, briefly, you have to learn to manage your thoughts to maintain the integrity of the process--like an artist's studio, a theatrical stage, a court of law, a laboratory, a confessional. What is the gist of managing thought? "Manage" means to "take by the hand". Your thought is the hand of your freedom. It is that by which you grasp what is. "Capere" and "sumere", as in "concept" and "presumption" respectively, both mean "take".
So take gently. And be grateful.
Thank you, Ian, for my guest pulpit. The last word is always God's.

[Jeff Kursonis]

Hey Christopher,

I love reading your thoughts I find it very stimulating. I find just a hair too much of an individualistic perspective in most of it though (hard not to do when it is the individual, us, thinking and writing I know) - I wonder if you could take everything you're thinking and re-imagine it more in terms of the back and forth of relationship, and a variety of types of relationships - for me that would take it to another level and I'd love to see where it goes...for example, "quit trying to watch yourself live" then you will become graceful, etc....how would this work if it was more than just you watching yourself live, in your own palace, and you expanded it to a more communal setting?...I'd love to see all that your saying which I love to be expanded in this way - it's very selfish of me, but that's where my madhouse is right now and I'd love your crazy mind to be unleashed in that direction for my own benefit...

[Christopher Rushlau]

You've identified my founding principle--or the observation I made that led to this aggressive criticism, this modeling of the life, universe, and everything.
The principle is that, as I put it to myself in 1976, when on a field term in Chicago (a semester spent hanging out in Chicago, "Chicago Urban Studies" program of the Associated Colleges of the Midwest) in conversation with a Catholic woman from Wisconsin (I had a father from Nebraska whose father was a Methodist minister and a mother from NYC/Delaware whose father was an Episcopalian priest): you cannot simultaneously do something and know what you are doing.
That relationship with her led somehow to another BA at a Catholic college where a priest imposed Karl Rahner on me, or infected me with him.
1999 or so I was taking a para-legal course and the lawyer teaching, supposedly, interview techniques provoked me to say that he seemed to view us as struggling actors and he was Ingmar Bergman casting for a new film. This provoked him to reply that he spent his life watching himself over his own shoulder. I have to say he'd been talking about going on the Geraldo Rivera show for some reason.
So let me ask you a question. Have you identified my topic or identified something in my conduct? What editing would you do of what I've said, what conclusions would you reach from my argument with that correction made?

[Jeff Kursonis]

Oh, no, no correction whatsoever. I just sense a tendency to think as an individual (which is of course perfectly normal and how we must often think) and given the new sense people are having of community/communion based in Perechoresis I'd love to hear the whole of your developed ideas run through that filter and see what comes of it - for my own selfish reasons.

And this is based on very little info, which is why I would never dream to attempt to imagine I barely understand what you are getting at and therefore could never even be in the same galaxy as a corrective suggestion - it's just that because your gift that produces your insights is not in me, and I love your thinking so much that I wish I could hear it after running it through the relational/communal filter so that I could gain more from it simply because that's my thing. I hope you understand I'm not saying this is something I think you need...it's like I'm asking a specialist consultant in one area to apply his thinking into another area - and that's just because I would benefit from it, but of course he may not have the time or inclination.

As to your founding principle, that, "you cannot simultaneously do something and know what you are doing"...well I wish I had some insight about that, in a kind of "helping you to help me" kind of way, but I don't. I do remember sometimes kissing a girl and thinking, "Wow, I'm kissing a girl"...so I'm not totally sure I understand why you can't know what you are doing, it seems to be a little out of step with "consciousness" to my thinking, but that's probably because I don't fully understand it. But this I do know - that I heard you saying some interesting things that really inspired me and I didn't even consider that you were making an "argument" from which I might reach, "conclusions". I thought you were talking to some friends in a comment section and thus building community and creating the culture that we are living in, and so I thought I'd join in - and I'm wondering if the contrast between the last two sentence's might suggest something of the different approach I'm curious about.

[Christopher Rushlau]

Which two sentences?
What do you make of "consciousness"? How can one be "in step with" it?
An argument is a claim, some evidence, and a statement of its significance--why someone should listen to it. Your argument in the last paragraph is that some of my statements are not in accord with friendship and comments about the Trinity, and your evidence is that consciousness is the means by which we know what we're doing while doing it, the significance of which is self-evident.
If perichoresis means anything--I'm trying to redeem the concept with the materials offered--the doctrine of the Trinity--it means that there is an end to argument--that fully paying attention to what the claimant is going on about leads to some "meeting of the minds" where in fact, there is a common mind, common purpose, where scruples have been laid to rest, doubts answered, in that moment, in that situation, among those people involved.
We think because we have a problem. But actually it's the "I" that comes into being in the attempt to see what is plaguing this body in which the "I" introduces itself as a literary device to unravel the plot of justice denied. That is conscience. It is not consciousness. It cannot simultaneously solve its problem and watch itself do so.
This is easier to grasp when there is an audience (but when is there not an audience?). A successful resolution of the problem heals the community. An agreement to disagree, by contrast, or a grosser personal offense, neither resolves the issue of conscience nor restores the community.
The assumption underlying the assumption that consciousness does not exist is that the inconceivable is good, reliable, enduring, in a word, "nice". What all is here now is nice. So the fact that I cannot catalog a zillionth part of it is no inconvenience. It is still here.
The only reason I would have for trying to catalog any of it (like Adam and Eve) would be someone having a scruple--a "sharp stone". "What's the problem, bud?" Some expectation has been disappointed. Was the expectation justified in the first place? Maybe not entirely, but maybe it was, in answer to some prior expectation that was even more unjustified. So an analysis, some investigation, is required to vindicate the later justification against the earlier one.
Did the gentleman in fact park his very large, very expensive automobile on a small child, a thing he is reporting, with some tones of regret, to the clerk in the store?
Well, is he kidding the clerk? A conversation ensues . . . but only if one is desired by both. As individuals we can only offer to participate. If the underlying assumption for my rule that "consciousness" does not exist is that what is actually there, occult and inscrutable, is nice ("the nicest thing I can imagine", I like to say), that niceness includes the other people ("other people!") who are just there.
I took that paralegal course in 1989, not 1999. So I've been watching people try to live their lives watching themselves over their own shoulders for at least twenty years--watching it with that phrase in mind. Does that rigor help me or them to be more spontaneous? It reminds me not to aspire to it, no matter how popular it is. Paul in Romans on law.