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

[Graham Buxton]

Hi John

A short time ago I responded to your blog on this website focusing on some thoughts that I developed in The Trinity, Creation and Pastoral Ministry - see my response to you on http://anglimergent.ning.com/profiles/blogs/perichoretic-themes-in.

[Michael J Pailthorpe]

Thank you Ian. I'm glad to come across your thinking. It is quite refreshing. I am a reader of Barth, Torrance's, Baxter Kruger and have been wondering how the resurgence of Trinitarian theology has impacted Anglicanism. This is good news. I have get your book now.

[Kieran Conroy]

Thank you for you post, Ian. I REALLY like your move from tourism to pilgrimage. Helping people find rootedness from which to appreciate visits to others holy places is a beautiful model, and one which helps actually improve conversation across pluralism by honoring all traditions, not simply mish-mashing them in a spiritual soup.

It also deals with some of the broader struggles many religions and traditional culture, language and people groups are struggling with in the face of globalization/western homogenization. I work on indigenous issues, and this is a HUGE issue... the pressures of globalization are taking over where colonialism left off, and many communities which finally have access to education and some legal power are struggling to use it in a way that builds up their community, but doesn't scatter it to the four winds.

I think Christian trinitarian theology can present one radical counter-narrative among many, helping people reflect on how the incarnation calls us to a deep appreciation of human diversity, how the relationality of the Trinity challenges us to have deeper, truer relationships, and how God's ever-self giving love, expressed in the Trinity can serve as a model for deeply incarnated, locally responsible work for understanding and justice with one's neighbors.

Thanks for sharing your books, I look forward to learning more of your thoughts on this.

[Christopher Rushlau]

This is not the one you requested to hear from. I detect a glimmer of sincerity in your remarks--globalization where colonization has left off. So how does the doctrine of the Trinity help you? Someone in this blog said that you must not explain the Trinity--credo quia absurdum est. It makes a nice blurred background for your pastoral work?

[Errol Lloyd Narain]

The concept of Trinity brings with it a whole lot of orthodox historical baggage.Usage of church in its various forms is also not above the criticism of Imperial organization.
A hind-sight reading of history according to Cox identifies 3 distinct periods -- faith, belief and spirit.
Our context of living out our faith is global.
Can we still hold onto human ideas of God such as Trinity? Is not this idolatrous?( C.S.Lewis, McClaren, etc.).
How do we talk to people of faith in other cultural settings?
Do we convert them with our bright ideas of our own creating, or, do we show them a new way of living.
Others like Callahan use congregation for church. There are other words from the faith era- the first 500 years of people in the way.
What is faith? A set of beliefs, doctrines, dogma or an encounter with that unnamed awe that makes us religious beings, people in the way of Jesus, pilgrims on a path of personal transformation, a new human being (loving, compassionate, generous and bringing timely help to those who hurt and hope in this world.
Is the emergence this awful transformation of ourselves into new beings for the transformation of this world or some old new forms of ritualistic worship styles?

[Christopher Rushlau]

Absolutely correct (if it is not blasphemous to ascribe such qualities to a human work).
My theory, somewhere in these comments, is that "trinity" is an attempt to explain to ourselves how we work. It is a psychological term. A Muslim has no difficulty rejecting the blank statement that God's son--anything. God is that which cannot be added to nor multiplied. So "God's son" is some sort of metaphor. In the Old Testament, "son of God" meant a righteous man.
Trinity is indeed an artifact from fifteen hundred years of the failure of separation of church and state. The Church-state was thinking out loud how authority works, what can be known, what knowledge consists of, etc. Aristotle, via Aquinas, and recently Karl Rahner, established that knowledge is ephemeral, an event in the imagination when the sensory impression, there momentarily sequestered, is rejoined by the essence/definition abstracted from it by the intellect. This is the conversio ad phantasma--"phantasma" being "that which appears". There is no knowledge without the phantasm, is a bedrock statement from Rahner, and likewise of Catholic doctrine. If we can know God, or anything else as God knows it, why would we need faith?
So if knowledge itself is the problem, then how can we know that a doctrine like the trinity helps us? All it can do--as all the commenters to this site would agree--is weaken our reliance on what we call knowledge. But that weakening, that delivery, cannot be half-hearted. "Be hot or cold." I do get the strong feeling that most of the commenters to this site seek in this word, trinity, some new undergirding for ecclesiastical authority, some new shibboleth to cow the masses and taunt the stranger. Otherwise they would regard mystery more squarely. Either everything is mystery, or everything is exactly as it appears. I more and more savor Rahner's particular abhorrance for what he called "the numinous" and his zeal for "de-numinizing". If this is numinous, evocative of the holy, then what about that over there? What about the other thing behind it?
Perhaps Karl Rahner did not take the last step in his argument, except, perhaps, cryptically, when he said, In the end, it is not that we know, but that we are known.
If we know absolutely nothing for sure, then what demand can we make of God? Who can intercede with God for us in this circumstance?
"The end of knowedge is to reason well," said Goethe. Reasoning about faith is all we have to do in this life. May we hold no special briefs for any terms or institutions.

[Chris McLeod]

Hi Christopher. I'm not quite as cynical as you regarding the Trinity as something to 'cow the masses and taunt the stranger'. Trinity evokes mystery as we seek to honour Scriptures proclamation of Jesus as 'Lord and God' (John 20: 28). Also, we seek to do this in a way that honours the long tradition of Trinitarian reflection - albeit one that has, sometimes, been misguided in the use of the Trinity to defend the abuse of authority and power. What many, and I include myself in this, have found in holding onto the doctrine of the Trinity is that a God who is' community in equal relationships' has something to say to our church and world. What I think might be missing from your viewpoint, if I understand it correctly, is a sense of revelation, and an acknowledgment of the 'implicit' Trinity found within Scripture. Your epistemological foundations seem to be apophatic - nothing wrong with that - but, perhaps, they lead you to miss the 'hints' of Trinity in the pre- church/state environment of earliest Christianity as recorded in Scripture. Earliest Christianity, as Scripture records (e.g. Matt: 28: 19) began this teasing out of God as Trinity and so it continues. If 'knowledge is reasoning well' then to exclude the testimony of the earliest Christians is to reason with arrogance.

[Christopher Rushlau]

as my photo might suggest, "don't tell me--tell a Muslim".
Matthew is, what, 90 CE? How about the trinity is Paul?
I think the trinity is just what you suggest--part of a "church-state environment". Reason with me. The Romans used Greek culture. Plato was the big name. Plato had his great chain of being, at the top of which is the One and next to it is the demiurge. This is all in Augustine's confessions. Suddenly it struck me--the One is the father and the demiurge is Jesus! How convenient! I don't have to change anything!
The demagogic use of confusion would be an interesting topic. I always imagined that Hannah Arendt had written a great tome on authority. "If you can't dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit."
Let me see if I can dredge up Rahner's theory of revelation. The key element was that it was continuing. He loved to tie people in knots, in an entirely playful way, like Socrates with no cup of hemlock in the offing. God is not a trick rabbit you pull out of your sacred hat, would be my summation of his position. Miracles, shall we say? He said that a miracle cannot be a bending of nature's laws for someone's convenience. That would cheapen God. So a miracle is something that happens just when I need a nudge to remind me--to put this in my own terms now--that I am not God--or that I am not the only intelligence in existence. So a sunset can be miraculous, or a found set of keys, or a lost set of keys that somehow doesn't drive me crazy with self-disgust.
Let's not cheapen God. Let me look up Matt 28--oh, well, now my sarcasm shall know no limits--that passage absolutely defeats me absolutely and ultimately.
My theory of exegesis is gained, as I recall, from Robert Mack's "Who Wrote the New Testament". Or is it? Who was it showed me how you can peel a Gospel passage almost line by line, like geological strata, showing the different styles, diction, and so on, corresponding to changing ideas of what the passage should mean. Or it's like one city of Troy built on the ruins of the previous city of Troy, back twenty generations. The Q Gospel, etc. The end of Mark is an obvious add-on. So where do the last couple of verses of Matthew date from?
If there is an "historical Jesus", he may have been a cynic--a "dog"--a wandering philosopher who would present his critique to passers by in the form of a single brief proposition, such as "if a woman lost a gold coin, would she not turn over her entire household looking for it?"
Is this religion, what we're doing here? I said to a Christian fundamentalist that the fundamental discipline of faith is managing one's imagination. "Vanity of vanities, all is vanity".
I don't think epistemology can be apophatic, but spirituality is nothing else. "What do you know for sure?" "Well, maybe I'm here or maybe I'm Bishop Berkeley warming his tootsies by a fire dreaming he's me." In the end, is there not the silence of awe?

[Chris McLeod]

I'm sorry, Christopher, I didn't realise you were expressing view points from outside the Christian tradition. I presumed you were an Anglican writing from within Christianity and that's what I thought this 'blog' was for: a discussion on Anglicans returning to a Trinitarian ecclesiology.

[Christopher Rushlau]

You've lost me there. But I'm patient.

[Christopher Rushlau]

I should have said that Mack's first name is Gilbert.
I was scandalized when a Catholic priest referred to "the Jesus myth", and rebuked him, saying, "There has to be come concrete historical reality behind the Church."
What if that background is nothing more than an itinerant "cynic" who impressed people as an alternative to Judaism, on the one hand, and Roman "philosophy", on the other, leading these people then to employ academic standards of the day (see Mack, or consider the provenance of many of the "letters of Paul") to dream up Christianity? Who is to dictate to God how God will reveal Godself?
May I conclude from Chris McLeod's latest comments that I've entirely undone him with my lore and expertise? Again, is matching wits religous? I did not intend to deprive him of his sacred assumptions, but only in general to raise the question of whether assumptions are what is properly intended by "faith". An assumption can by definition be disproved. Faith cannot by definition be disproved.

[Christopher Rushlau]

Patience is all?
Am I a Christian? Am I an Anglican?
How do we tell?
I will, as Rahner often said in his writings, prescind from consideration of the relationship between assumptions, which can be proved wrong, and faith, which cannot be, except to say that as long as we have minds to think with we will make assumptions with them, including about what we have faith in. So we must be prepared for the terms of our faith to change.
That comment indeed opens my argument. My scriptural text will be: "those who try to save their lives will lose them, and those who lose their lives for my sake will save them."
Who was Jesus? My best guess is that he is Siddhartha, the Buddha. That is to say, the idea that had evolved over five centuries or more in Asia had finally penetrated to "the west" and found acceptance because it answered a lot of outstanding problems in what we call religion and philosophy. I am told that Asian cultures do not recognize this distinction. ? The Buddha is the one who says with authority that all explanations explain only the explainer and only to herself. (Law of dependent origination, tat tvam asi) Enlightenment is letting go of the need/desire to explain. Nirvana: winking out. "What?" is the sound of one hand clapping. We would translate "explain", in religious circles, as "justify myself". That term simply means "locate myself in the larger context". "Justice is everything in its place."
Is this a fair description of the (can I label it) Western malaise? We always claim to know where we are and where everybody else is--where we all "stand", and what it signifies? I.e., our self-righteousness?
What does our Jesus say? If you read the scriptural passage I gave with "self-justification" inserted for "life", you will find a coherent claim that also describes what we now might call the escape from anxiety. Only when you cease searching for the meaning of life do you discover it, and in particular only when you quit trying to prove yourself worthy of eternal life do you find that you've inherited it.
If that's Christianity, I'm striving for it. If that is Anglicanism, because Anglicanism is the application of enlightenment values--essentially the systematic doubt of Descartes--testing ideas to destruction--to Christianity, then I am an Anglican.
I am anxious to put my anxiety about the worth of my life behind me so that I may more fully enjoy my life--which seems the only obvious reason a God of my understanding would have put me here like this.
Anglicans also like their fun, I suggest.