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

[Pam Smith]

I don't think the trinity has to be explained! It seems to me the biggest mistake we make is to think that mission is about making people understand or think - whereas it is about drawing people into relationship. Most of us don't fall in love or into a friendship by making a thorough assessment of the facts about someone and deciding if we want them in our lives - though I suppose some may - so asking people to decide on the basis of explanations to join us in following Christ seems to be offering a certainty that we can't deliver as people move into faith.

I've lost track of the sermons I've heard propounding the ice/fire/water or father/son/brother explanation of trinity.I think modalism has taken such a hold precisely because it offers an explanation - no matter that it's wrong!

Perichoresis is a long word for a very simple concept. 'God is love' means something quite different if we imagine God as relationship.

Otherwise we are just left with the lonely old man on a cloud who created us as a cross between pets and toys. Not a God I would particularly want to follow - which is why I wasn't a Christian until I had some kind of insight into another way of looking at him.

[Christopher Rushlau]

One of Karl Rahner's themes was the possibility of metaphysics. If God is incomprehensible ("it is not so much that we know as that we are known"), then there is no insight about being. His answer was that this description of blankness IS metaphysics: this lack of insight, the impossibility of peeking behind the curtain to see what really exists, the need to accept "what is" on faith, as (incomprehensible) signs of God's love for us: this is the limit of thought. However, this is not nihilism or fatalism. The TV does not work but we can still go outdoors and play, because, as he put it, we have a preapprehension of being, a Vorgreif--"pre-grip". I call this skill. We all have a skill at engaging with "what is", including in that term each other: we know how to do interpersonal. There is no explanation beyond that--we are here together. To try to explain it beyond that is to put up doctrinal barriers and find some of us on the inside and some on the outside--like the late arrivals at the bomb-shelter: "sorry, too late".
Where does this view leave God? I ask myself now. Is Catholicism too harsh in this insistance on personal crucifixion and resurrection? Rahner's brother wrote a book about play. Can we play life? My experience--you may see that in my profile photo of me in Iraq with an Iraqi casual laborer named "Nathir" ("warning")--is that play and living with death are the same thing--a devil-may-care attitude, "on with the show", don't try to clutch at the moment but let it slide through, and caress it--
If you can pack all that in the word "relationship", well, I suppose I can see it, kind of. There is no here and there, there is just all around.

[Christopher Rushlau]

That is very well said.

[Christopher Rushlau]

John Lennon (I'm assuming--from the bitter wittiness of it) has a line in "Penny Lane", "and even though it seems you're in a play, you are anyway."
That is, the most sublime, just as the most foul, ideal is just a notion flattering our imaginations, accompanying us as life comes along in endless advent. Once we get used to that, and start to search for the best "scripts", more inclusive and less invidious, etc., we do find our experience gets richer and easier. Bob Dylan: "oh, but I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now."

[Christopher Rushlau]

Humility is for lesser persons--I should say, lesser sub-species. No, that's for the website where autism is something-something speciation.
Why are our conversations so vague? "How's the weather?" "Well, funny you should ask, because it's absolutely, er, something something."
It's because they remind us to not be know-it-alls.
The first idea that crossed the mind of man, and in those days, they were real men, was "I am the smartest man who ever lived." I was looking at Ozymandias by Shelley yesterday. The rest of human history has been the attempt to escape this psychosis. As Rahner says, there is a history of revelation. Okay, where are we now in that progressive apocalypse? We have got Aristotelian categories that make language possible, we have got the imagination (Hume's "theater of the mind"?) identified as the place where language hangs a term on an experience, we have got social science to track the regimentation of imagination/experience, and we have liberal institutions--the marketplace of ideas--to use all this lore in the war on egoism.
But this leads to the search for a binding idea, a description of what all this is and does. Obama says it's all about change.
Let me quote another song. "I'm wrapped up, tied up, tangled up in Jesus--no one can do me no harm."
Once you start playing around with the Trinity (I've upgraded to Quadrunity--love it!), you end up sympathizing with Aldous Huxley's "Perennial Philosophy" in which he said--at which point I quit reading--"I" and "God" are equivalent terms. "I'm in the Father, the Father's in the Son, the Son, the Holy Ghost, they all make one--I'm wrapped up, wrapped up, tied up, tangled up, yoohooo." Add to that "you are in me" and "may they all be one" and you get "we" and "God" being equivalent terms. My come-back to Huxley was, "Well, why don't I remember creating heaven and earth?" My every thought creates heaven and earth. Until I think about it, them, it isn't, they aren't real for me. I can live in blissful ignorance of it, them. Because I'm the smartest man who ever lived.
So the history of revelation is not finished. Who was the French Jesuit in on the Piltdown fraud, with his theory of convergence? Teilhard. He was a victim of the fraud, as a callow youth Jesuit anthropologist. So maybe it taught him to be skeptical. And that gets you hoping these days--skepticism--"show me"--seems to be the result when "the center cannot hold" enough to allow consciences to be regulated, nor liberal inclinations stymied. I am so small, the world is so great.
God is always greater. Allahu akbar. It becomes a balm, rather than a rabbit disappearing down a hole. My striving after wind does not cease, but I feel confidence that I will never catch the wind.
So, not humility as an aspiration, but humility as the brutest fact. But I like brutes. God says to Job, where were you when I created heaven and earth? Job says to God, where were you when your pal Satan killed my wife and children, and my donkeys and cattle and sheep and slaves, and gave me these boils? And God says, "Your point is...?" And Job says, "Never mind."

[Christopher Rushlau]

Let me translate your words into what you mean. Most of what I wrote was teasing the Authorities. The part that is concrete and sincere was about humility being what you find after you give up aspiring to virtue.
I wouldn't tease you.
Now, then. The fourth person of the Quadrunity is action, or time, the first three being states, or dimensions. This all has to do with how the brain models things, I suspect. People have groped toward that artificial quality of knowledge since the beginning. The trinity is the spatial quality of thought, which you might accept being a matter of being a stranger to yourself, a darkness, a cloud of unknowing, out of which you confront the stuff of imagination and the life of the mind--in the theater of the mind--in the imagination, and in which you in turn confront the world of phenomena, none of which you can directly engage nor retain, so in its own way is as enigmatic as yourself.
That trinity is the state of thought at any moment, but the motion through time, in which you move from one theatrical event--one moment of consciousness--to the next--is the fourth aspect of thought.
In classical terms, in the privacy of my silent soul, what is is the Father (God is existence--Aquinas); what is is present to me in the life of the mind, the drama of a human moment, the Son, the personification of being; and that moment is thrust into the outer darkness--I take my thought with me into that darkness I've tried to model in the given thought--into the spirit. Rahner's doctoral thesis is called "Spirit in the World".
So my fourth member of the trinity is holiness. Holyness is an attitude. Openness. Not pinched.
So humility is in one respect the understanding of this aspiration to openness, and in another, it is the attitude, the commitment, in thought, in the style of thought, its tenor or tone or rhythm, to openness.
Virtue is somewhat of a second-hand description of human power (it means "strength" or "manliness"). The "glory of God [is/of] a man fully alive" (Ireneus) flows directly from one's being unassuming, unpresumptuous. A thought must be a beautiful poem that is forgotten as soon as it is created.

[Christopher Rushlau]

Reply by Heidi Hileman 13 hours ago
I can relate to the way you described our human experience with the trinity. It has been the same for me.
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My computer didn't display a "reply to this" button under this latest comment of yours, so I am replying to it up here. Perhaps you did not want a further reply.
I want to add a tiny note to your initial comment, at least initial on this page (2). You seem to see the life of faith as coping. I seem to see it as overcoming, vanquishing evil-doers, finding and fulfilling quests. It could be that this is a bunch of fury in order to avoid other people or even myself. Or it could be that you are looking for a place to hide away. Eh? What about quests, and does God send them--like Viktor Frankl's theory of logotherapy--finding the reason you are here and fulfilling it--your mission?

[John Alchin]

G'day Ian,

T.F and J.B Torrance's Trinitarian works have been instrumental in changing both my theology and praxis in recent years. I was, for many years, a functional unitarian (to use J.B's phrase from Worship, Community and the Triune God of Grace), despite my creedal affirmation of the Trinity.

These days I'm in communication with Dr. C. Baxter Kruger of Perichoresis, Inc. I've found that he has made much of the Torrance's work quite accessible and is perfect for pastors to read or hear. I similarly recommend Dr. Ray S. Anderson of Fuller Seminary for pastoral application of Torrance's Trinitarian theology.

Kind regards,

John.

[Michael J Pailthorpe]

same

[Ian Mobsby]

I am really loving where this discussion has gone. A few further thoughts.

I think Anglimergent has done well at grappling with the values associated with imitating the Trinity, and the focus on perichoresis. I think the challenge (as Paul Fiddes book says more elequently) is to move from imitating to participating in. I think we need to dig deeper into what it means to have a spirituality centred on participating with and in the Trinity. In this way, we do catch up with the ancient future perspective, join in with a long tradition which was owned by mystics, monastics and contemplatives. I do think the future of the church requires this shift from orthodoxy to orthopraxis around living communities with a a deep christian faith.

To do this, I think we are going to have to shift majorly from 'attractional models of church' which is all about worship and getting people in, to something more around a 'missional model of church', which is more about being sent out and sharing our lives - much more demanding than worship services.... I think this is the major challenging question coming out of a Trinitarian vision - how should we live in a world addicted to consumption and over use of resources that are now destroying our world? How do we in this world catch up with what God is doing? How do we make our communities accessible to seekers? How do we do forms of Christian worship that are communal and centred on contextual expressions of joining in the with Trinity? These issues are the ones I think we next need to grapple with... seeking the sacred in the secular.... seeking to build communities that then become imperfect visible expressions of the invisible Kingdom of God... This requires us to apply the principles of perichoresis to how we do worship, mission and community, which is something we can learn from the premodern Friars.... to recontextualise and reframe into a postmodern context.

I have been reading again Rediscovering Christianity by Vincent Donovan, and I am really convinced by the process he followed. This is starting out with prayer, getting to know local people relationally without doing anything, then seeking discernment for some form of loving action (no where near trad church) which then hopefully will form community that then does discipleship/catachesis - which then births contextual forms of worship. This incarnational approach reflects the life of Christ, and requires us to seek the sacred in the secular in a commitment to relationality. There is going to be a great story on this by Rob Ryan a Pioneer Ordained Minister at Rochester Cathedral in the UK - see here from the beginning of June. So I think the Trinitarian call is not just a 'love in' but something that calls us to Kenotic mission activity. As the Creator Sent the Son and the Spirit - so we are sent to seek the reconciliation of all things to the Trinitarian God. Being Sent is the consequence of a strong Trinitarianism.

[Christopher Rushlau]

You ought to run all this you suggest by a few Catholics--Roman variety. They've never departed from trinitarianism, probably because they've never, for the most part, thought about it except as a prop of triumphalism. But you want to embrace it rationally, which I endorse, not just as a pew-filling device or even worse yet, as a pleasant fog.
Karl Rahner for one--and the method to detect there, to take away from it, is a fiendishly determined effort to define terms and use them strictly as defined.
The game shifts, you might say, from the merely ecclesiastical to the deeply personal. It may run straight up against an insularity that one person might consider a national cultural and another might consider the result of centuries of violence--physical, familial, artistic. In a word: "bloody-mindedness". Someone coming out of the culture of bloody-mindedness should be happy to achieve insularity--some protection--but health and wholeness are in the entire overturning of the bloody-minded culture--to where your neighbor's body is your body, so if he needs a pat or a rub, you rub him just as you would your own sore shoulder.
Perichoresis? Yes, I think so.

[John Alchin]

Hi Ian,

Graham Buxton is an Anglican priest in Adelaide, Australia, who directs the Postgraduate Studies in Ministry and Theology program at Tabor College. Graham has an excellent entry-level book titled: Dancing In The Dark: The Privilege Of Participating In The Ministry.... Very helpful in moving from 'imitation to participation'. It is the stripped down version of some of the chapters within his book The Trinity, Creation and Pastoral Ministry: Imaging the Perichoret.... It is part of the Paternoster Theological Monographs series, with a great foreword by Jurgen Moltmann.