A Transforming Vision

Knowing and Loving the Triune God

George Westhaver

• Publisher: SCM Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780334055686
• eBook ISBN: 9780334055709
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

The study of Christian theology in the last half century has seen a major renaissance in Trinitarian thought which has attempted to connect Trinitarian theology to all aspects of Christian faith and practice. This revival has often addressed the unfortunate split which has haunted much modern theological endeavour between theology and both prayer and practice, the disjunction between thought about God and the movement of the heart toward God in transformed lives. Drawn from papers given at a Pusey House conference in 2015, the contributors to this collection explore what it means to know and love the Triune God, and how the knowledge of God can be a transforming and saving knowledge.

PART ONE

Surveying the Mystery

Sermon

Trinitarian Communion

jonathan goodall

Solemn Eucharist for St Peter and St Paul, Wednesday 29 June

Lectionary: Zechariah 4.1–6a, 10b–14; Acts 12.1–1; Matthew 16.13–19

Surely it can be no accident that this conference is beginning with a celebration of the apostles Peter and Paul: Peter the first disciple called by Jesus in the narratives of the synoptic Gospels, the rock of the Church; and Paul, the ‘last of all’, as he calls himself (1 Cor. 15.8), neither a disciple nor one of the Twelve but nonetheless ‘the Apostle’, the missionary par excellence.

The New Testament tells us about their callings and labours, and gives us their teachings, but it does not tell us about their ends. Ancient tradition tells us they were both martyrs, victims of the savage persecution against Christians in Rome, and thus founders of the Church in the imperial city, and for this reason it became the Church that presides in love and is rich in mission. Moved by an inner strength, by an apokálypsis (a revelation) that could only come from God, whether at Caesarea Philippi or Damascus, they had believed that Jesus was the Messiah, the Son of God. The first- and last-called, two lives offered for the cause of Jesus and the Gospel; so different in personality and earthly witness but so united by the manner of their deaths that their traditional image – a tight embrace, face to face and seen in half-profile – must have been well known before the famous fourth-century marble found at Aquileia was carved. ‘Whether it was I or the other apostles,’ says St Paul, ‘God’s grace was the way we proclaimed Christ raised from the dead, and God’s grace was the way you have come to believe’ (1 Cor. 15.10–12).

And this is where, for the Church, our doctrine of God begins: in the apostles’ experience and testimony to God’s act and initiative. They are the eyewitnesses of God’s self-revelation and self-proclamation in the person of Jesus Christ. When God the eternal Son came in human form, he gathered people to himself, he called them close, to teach them, to challenge them to repent, to help them to see and believe. He invited them to stand in his shoes, to see the world, human sin and human need, God himself, and his mercy, through his eyes. He drew them into a quality of relationship where following means carrying his cross, sharing his suffering, being baptized with his baptism, dying to self and living to God. The apostles found themselves immersed in a frightening and exhilarating mystery, something they could barely comprehend, much less control. They were being caught up into the movement of the Son’s love, in the Spirit, for the Father – the ‘movement of his own self-offering’ as ARCIC put it – and into all that that transforming vision would mean and promise and cost.

It was discipleship that involved repeat learning: being called, standing alongside Christ, misunderstanding, falling and failing, being forgiven and recalled; until, on the far side of the most devastating failure, they find themselves alongside the risen Christ who now tells them that, filled with his Spirit, they are to go, to baptize others in the name of the ‘threefold love’ and to teach others to grow in holiness. They are to go and invite others to join them standing in Christ’s place, praying Christ’s prayer, breathing Christ’s Spirit.

And it is out of that experience – fellowship, mission and above all baptism and the Eucharist – that doctrine about the Christian God, the Christlike God, arises. Learning repeatedly to identify with Christ and his sacrifice, using his words in order to return love to the same Father, seeking the anointing and energy of his Spirit, the Church of God came to understand that it lives in and from the Holy Trinity. It is a living presence so deep and real that the early Christians could easily grasp that – to use the title of the Anglican-Orthodox Commission’s 2006 report – the Church is the ‘church of the triune God’, totally shaped and marked and filled with the Trinity. ‘The Church’, says Origen, ‘is full of the Trinity’, and moreover, ‘he who is in the church inhabits the universe’ (Selecta in Psalmos 23.1, PG 12:1265B).

What is revealed – and learnt – through the mystery of Christ’s Incarnation is precisely that Christ is not a single individual but a divine person and as such is the fullest possible relation to the Father and the Holy Spirit. Likewise, the Father and the Holy Spirit do not simply verify the identity of Jesus Christ as the only-begotten Son of the Father, on whom the Holy Spirit rests (Matt. 3.16–17 and par.; John 1.29–34); they are also united with the incarnate Son in the fullest possible relation, present in him from his conception and into the new creation. The life he reveals, the life that is revealed through him, the life that is given in him, is a participation in an eternal and perfect communion of irreducibly distinct persons in love, a permanent freedom of mutual self-offering of each, and of all of them to the world (John 10.17–18; 17.4; Phil. 2.6–11; Heb. 9.14).

So while we shall hear in the coming days a great deal to help us to think through and explore this overwhelming mystery, we need at all times to recall that the place of the Holy Trinity’s fullness in the world, and the place where the gathering together of creation begins, is in the Church, which De Lubac calls the ‘mysterious extension of the Trinity in time’ (Ecclesia Mater, 237), among the adopted sons and daughters of the Father, a people united by the unity of the Trinity (St Cyprian, De orat. Dom., 23).

And of course it is here, in the celebration of the Holy Eucharist, that our life in the Holy Trinity comes most energetically and joyfully to life. Here we take on ourselves Christ’s Spirit, we speak with his words and ask his Father that the life that is in his Son will also come alive in us. And it is also from here, from this living fullness of eucharistic experience, that the work of ministry and mission flows most transformingly for the salvation and healing of the world.

So today we are giving thanks for the revelation of God as Holy Trinity in the experience and in the teaching of the apostles, especially in Peter and Paul, the twin pillars of the Church. And we are giving thanks that that life has not come to us in words alone but through the eucharistic identity of Christian communities throughout history. In societies painfully racked between globalization and individualism, the Church must offer this witness of communion in every aspect of its mission. It is a reality that comes from nowhere in this world but is a mystery rooted in the presence of the triune God himself. The spiritual and theological deepening of the doctrine of the Trinity by contemporary theology will help lay a new foundation for a rediscovery of the mystery of the triune God as the source, the model and the ultimate goal of both the human and the non-human world.

1

Eucharistic Priority in Trinitarian Theology: Retrieving a Patristic Idea

jarred mercer

Introduction

‘Who would the Saviour have to be . . . to rescue human beings?’, reads the description on the back of a very influential and important book on Christology. This statement in many ways encapsulates what I think is an epidemic in contemporary theology: God in God’s self, Theos, is no longer a suitable object of theological enquiry. Theology has in too many ways become another consumer service for our own perceived needs or agendas: we are no longer understood in relation to God but God in relation to us – God is who we need God to be. This is particularly evident in the way Trinitarian theology has become an essential ecclesiological and anthropological prolegomenon. Human communion, it is assumed, must reflect the triune communion. So Miroslav Volf contends: ‘Today, the idea that the church as a community should take its shape from the communion within the Holy Trinity enjoys the status of an almost self-evident presupposition.’1

Contemporary discussions typically assume that this seemingly self-evident link inherently necessitates that triune relations exist as a ‘model’ for human ones. The Trinity must be relevant in some way; it must ‘say’ something to the human condition and to the interrelations of human beings in society.2

The need felt by many theologians to restore the doctrine of the Trinity to ‘relevance’ has led to, I believe, not only problematic solutions but a misdiagnosis of the problem itself, principally by assuming that the purpose of Trinitarian theology is to be relevant to human relations at all, and further by replacing a foundation of classic Trinitarianism, Creator–creature distinction, with an epistemological gap between the human and divine, something that is to be bridged through human conceptualization projected on to God. This projection creates a vision of the Trinity that is necessarily anthropocentric, and makes bold presumptions regarding the ability of the human mind to access the divine. Through these processes, divine and human relations have become comparable things and, I will argue, Trinitarian doctrine is led into the very irrelevance it has sought to avoid.

This chapter seeks to contribute to contemporary discussions through exploring how the Eucharist is for Hilary of Poitiers a fundamental point of access to knowing the triune God. Hilary gives a eucharistic priority to Trinitarian theology; that is to say, there is a primacy for the grammar of God as triune given to the Eucharist.3 His journey of thinking towards God takes eucharistic shape. Hilary is a choice source for constructing Trinitarian theology in this way, as his perspective is quite unique among theologians of his time.4

Hilary’s offering of the Eucharist as a point of access into Trinitarian theology levels both strong critique against and constructive insight into our current situation, as it confronts the way contemporary theologians conceive of the Trinity functioning as precursor to anthropology – in other words, how divine relations and human relations are related to each other.

The Current Conversation: Socialization and the Need for ‘Relevance’

The most prominent Trinitarian model contemporary theologians use to answer this question, and the one that shows the most utility for Trinitarian ‘relevance’, is most certainly ‘social Trinitarianism’. This view holds that the Trinity is a tightly interwoven community of distinct persons on a very close analogy to that of human persons, allowing Trinitarian ‘society’ to serve as a model for human society.

In considering the Trinitarian impetus for human relations, social Trinitarianism has become the ‘typical pattern of Trinitarian reflection’;5 indeed, Kilby notes, ‘it has become the new orthodoxy’.6 The basic assu...

Table of contents

• A Transforming Vision
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• John Webster – A Tribute
• PART ONE: Surveying the Mystery
• Sermon
• 1 Eucharistic Priority in Trinitarian Theology: Retrieving a Patristic Idea
• 2 ‘A Semblance more Lucid’? An Exploration of Trinitarian Space
• PART TWO: Foundations
• 3 Theophany as Divine Hospitality in Origen and Chrysostom
• 4 The Gospels on the Knowledge of God
• 5 Knowing and Loving the Triune God: The Pauline Epistles
• 6 The Trinity in the Mystical Theology of the Christian East
• 7 Wisdom as True Worship: From Augustine’s
• PART THREE: Explorations
• Sermon
• 8 Humanity Created for Communion with the Trinity in Aquinas
• 9 Cranmer’s Gnadenstuhl: Continuity and Change in the Liturgy
• 10 Hooker’s Trinitarian Theology and the Everyday
• 11 The Gothic Revival, Pre-Raphaelitism and Trinitarian Art in Britain
• PART FOUR: The Trinity in Prayer, in Life and in the Church
• Sermon
• 12 Father Sergii Bulgakov on the Doctrine of the Trinity
• 13 Hans Urs von Balthasar: The Trinity and Prayer
• 14 Participation in God: An Experiment in Trinitarian Philosophy
• 15 The Trinity and the Moral Life In memoriam John Webster
• 16 Sermon: Foretaste of the New Creation
• Conclusion Knowing and Loving the Triune God