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3. Digging Deeper Mission as Participation in the Trinity

The walker who is lost in the fells will not only look back along the route they have come. They will also consult their map, a human document of abstract symbols that represents the key features of the hills and valleys all around. In a similar way, as we seek to get our bearings on the nature of mission, it is worthwhile consulting the maps that have been produced by the Christian community, as it were, because they can direct our attention to the key features of God’s mission in the world.

The last chapter established that the Willengen Conference, under the influence of Karl Barth, marked a rediscovery of one very significant map for mission, the doctrine of the Trinity. Since then a number of theologians have explored and interpreted the meaning of this map and drawn out its implications for Christian mission, and to them we now turn.

Background

The doctrine of the Holy Trinity, articulated in the pronouncements of the Councils of Nicaea (325) and Constantinople (381), states that God is three hypostases (Greek) / personae (Latin) / persons (English), in one ousia (Greek) / substantia (Latin) / being (English). This doctrine has always been at the heart of belief in the Eastern Orthodox churches but was down-played in the Western Church for many centuries. Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834), the great German Reformed theologian who is often described as ‘the father of modern theology’, placed the doctrine at the end of his systematic presentation of the Christian faith, almost as an afterword. But theologians over the last 80 years have rediscovered its centrality in a significant way. Karl Barth, whom we have seen to be a pioneer in these matters, argued for the foundational importance of the doctrine of the Trinity to all Christian thinking. He famously placed discussion of the Trinity at the start of his Church Dogmatics, reminding the churches that because God has revealed himself as inherently three in one, all theology, ethics, and pastoral work must begin, and end, here.

After the Second World War two Protestant theologians, Wolfhart Pannenberg and especially Jürgen Moltmann, made an important connection between the Trinity and human history. The Trinity was seen as intimately involved within human history through the ministry of Christ: ‘It is not the church that has a mission of salvation to fulfil in the world; it is the mission of the Son and the Spirit through the Father that includes the church’ (Moltmann 1977, p. 65). Christian mission, then, has its roots in an eternal sending within God, so that participation in one is participation in the other.

But what is the precise connection between the two: how is participation in one participation in the other? A number of theologians have recently provided some answers to this question.

Leonardo Boff

Boff is a Roman Catholic Franciscan priest who has worked within the tradition of Latin American liberation theology since the 1980s. He had his licence to teach as a Roman Catholic theologian removed by the Vatican over some of his views. In one of his most famous books he made an explicit connection between the Trinity and human society, suggesting that the perfect relationships of the three equal persons within the one society of God provide a model for human society to strive towards. In Trinity and Society, first published in Brazil in 1986, he wrote that, ‘The community of Father, Son and Holy Spirit becomes the prototype of the human community dreamed of by those who wish to improve society and build it in such a way as to make it into the image and likeness of the Trinity.’ This revolutionary view sees the Trinity ‘as a model for any just, egalitarian (while respecting differences) social organisation. On the basis of their faith in the triune God Christians postulate a society that can be the image and likeness of the Trinity’ (Boff 1988, pp. 7, 11).

The missionary role of the Church alongside other groups in society therefore becomes this: to struggle to move the human community away from current unequal relationships of exploitation and oppression and towards this perfect kind of society, a society like the society of the divine Trinity.

Catherine Mowry LaCugna

LaCugna, on the other hand, an American Catholic theologian who published God for Us: The Trinity and Christian Life in 1991, did not see the Trinity as presenting a template for society but as issuing an invitation to enter a relationship. She has become an influential figure in the renewal of understanding of the Trinity. She built her understanding on the insight that persons are not isolated self-contained entities but beings in relationship, who exist for communion. She believed that human life expressed its true nature and meaning when persons come together in a loving fellowship, and the essential meaning of the Trinity is that God reaches out to the world in Christ, through the power and presence of the Spirit, and invites all people to enter into a loving communion of human and divine persons:

Trinitarian theology could be described as par excellence a theology of relationship, which explores mysteries of love, relationship, personhood and communion within the framework of God’s self-revelation in the person of Christ and the activity of the Spirit. (LaCugna 1991, p. 1)

In the 1990s there have been a number of British theologians who have taken these ideas further, including the late Colin Gunton at King’s College London, and David Cunningham in his book These Three Are One of 1998. Cunningham also moves from analysis of human personhood and relationships to an exploration of the doctrine of the Trinity, suggesting that the way to fulfilment of persons is through imitation of the Trinity. Cunningham talks about the Trinitarian virtues of ‘polyphony’, ‘participation’ and ‘particularity’ which can be lived out in human interaction.

Paul Fiddes

But a recent and important book by the Baptist theologian Paul Fiddes, Participating in God: A Pastoral Doctrine of the Trinity (2000), while also seeking to make connections between the doctrine and pastoral practice, does so in a different way. He distances himself from the earlier books by saying he is not looking to the Trinity as a picture of a social group to imitate. Such an approach is reductionist – it reduces the otherness and divine mystery of God through trying to conform him to a human image of community (p. 29). Put the other way round, how can a group of human beings begin to represent the utter transcendence and mystery of God?

Fiddes looks to the doctrine of the Trinity not for a picture of a kind of society or community but for an analogy, a point of connection between two very different realities. Drawing on Barth, he says that because God in revelation has ‘seized’ words to make them capable of meaningful talk about God, ‘by God’s grace they have been made into analogies which speak truly and reliably about God’ (p. 30).

The doctrine of the Trinity, for Fiddes, provides one very special analogy which has not been clearly enough recognized in the recent literature. It is based on the way that Christ has revealed God to be a father, that is, someone who does not exist on his own but only in relationship with a son, who is Jesus himself: it is not possible to be a father without the existence of a child, and it is not possible to be a child without the existence of a parent. Christ has revealed the familial nature of God and therefore of the mutual participation of the persons of the Trinity. This means that within the Trinity there are distinct contributions but unity at the same time. In this kind of relationship the very existence of the distinct contributions depends on their participating in each other’s life: you cannot have one without the other.

So he uses a Greek word, perichoresis, first used by Pseudo-Cyril in the sixth century, and then by John of Damascus in the eighth century, literally meaning ‘around dancing’ and more deeply meaning ‘reciprocity and exchange in the mutual indwelling of the persons’, to express how each person can permeate and coinhere with the others without confusion. There is a perichoresis of the persons of the Trinity within the unity of their substance (p. 71).

It is this concept which provides a guiding analogy for human living. It suggests that persons truly exist through their participation in each other. It suggests we should not think of persons in relationship, but persons as relationship (p. 50). Fiddes wants to get away from a different kind of thinking which tries to observe personal agents on the ‘ends’ of relationship. Rather, he is seeing persons as constituted in ‘sharing, in speech and worship, in the flow of relationships themselves’ (p. 72) He is recalling a famous point made by the Scottish philosopher John Macmurray in his Gifford Lectures of 1954, Persons in Relation, who argued that ‘the self is constituted by its relation to the Other; it has its being in its relationships and this relationship is necessarily personal’ (see LaCugna 1991, pp. 255–60).

A dance involving two or more people can be an example of this kind of relationship, where the dance is an improvisation formed by the flowing interaction of the dancers (rather than pre-rehearsed set-piece dancing). One of the dancers on their own could not create the dance: it depends on the interaction of all the dancers. But in ‘this dance the partners not only encircle each other and weave in and out between each other as in human dancing; in the divine dance, so intimate is the communion that they move in and through each other so that the pattern is all-inclusive’ (Fiddes 2000, p. 72).

So when people are in a relationship with each other, reaching out in friendship, risk, challenge, service, sacrifice, finding a new identity in the sharing of their differences, their lives are being conformed, in one crucial respect, to the life of the Trinity.

But they will not only be like God. Fiddes emphasizes that this kind of relationship also allows them to participate within God’s life itself – they will be joining the divine interrelationship. So, speaking of the life of a Christian congregation, he writes that ‘communion in the body of Christ is not just a model of the Trinity, but a means of entering the relational movements of the triune God’. There is a reality of participation which allows the people ‘to share in God rather than attempting to observe God’. In other words,

to understand divine persons as relations is to foster a participative model of the churches . . . To do so, I suggest, is to be drawn into a communion where the saying of ‘Amen’ by every member becomes a sharing of the Amen of the Son to the Father; so the ‘Amen’ of the congregation to the liturgy of the eucharist is not simply a passive reception, but an entering into a divine activity which will be expressed as the exercising of a charismatic gift. (Fiddes 2000, pp. 88–9)

This quotation re-establishes a connection with Moltmann who, when talking of the Holy Spirit, described how it was possible for human beings to enter into the divine life:

The fellowship of the triune God is so open and inviting that it is depicted in the fellowship of the Holy Spirit, which human beings experience with one another – ‘as you, Father, are in me and I in you’ – and takes this true human fellowship into itself and gives it a share in itself: ‘that they may also be in us’. (Moltmann 1992, p. 60)

Conclusion

All of this has fundamental implications for mission: ‘the mission of God flows directly from the nature of who God is. It is impossible to be more basic than that. God’s intention for the world is that in every respect it should show forth the way he is – love, community, equality, diversity, mercy, compassion and justice’ (Kirk 1999, p. 28). The doctrine of the Trinity, in other words, ‘is not a piece of “high theology” reserved for the professional scholar, but something that has a living, practical importance for every Christian’ (Kallistos Ware in Bevans and Schroeder 2004, p. 274).

Bevans and Schroeder, in their wide-ranging update of Bosch’s Transforming Mission, summarize this practical application in the following helpful way:

The mutual openness of Father and Son, Son and Spirit, Spirit and Father as a model of relationship, the constitutive nature of relationship for personal identity, the inclusion of diversity in community – all these vital truths and practices are rooted in Trinitarian reality and existence. (Bevans and Schroeder 2004, p. 274)

They add that it has been Orthodox theologians like Vladimir Lossky, John Meyendorff and John Zizioulas who have helped theologians in the West understand the Trinity as ‘an ec-static communion of persons, always involved in the world, always inviting all of creation to share in the triune life of communion-in-mission’ (Bevans and Schroeder 2004, p. 274). It can be added that these writers have themselves been drawing on ancient patristic and mystical writings.

To be part of mission, then, is not just to be an agent, at arm’s length, of someone else’s project: it is to participate in the very heart of who God is, to be caught up within and contribute to the interactive and flowing interrelationship of Father, Son and Holy Spirit, a relationship that gives life and gives it abundantly.

Discussion questions Think of examples of the way different relationships help to constitute you as a person. How does this affect your understanding of the divinity of Christ? How does it affect your understanding of mission?