what on earth is a trinity [Music] on sundays we started a series called the forgotten god and we're looking at the idea specifically of spirit a commons we talk about being intellectually honest and spiritually passionate that's always our goal but often it can feel like spirit is secondary to intellect around here that's largely due to my own baggage and experience with charismatic christianity but still we do want to remind ourselves of a more healthy balance from time to time however
to talk about spirit i thought it was important to talk about trinity as a foundation for that conversation and the interesting part about that is just how fraught with theological terror trinity can be i mean there are just so many ways we can get this one wrong yet i really have no interest in talking about the nature of god as a gatekeeping exercise now truth is all of our god talk is provisional or at least it should be we're talking about the nature of god after all and we're using language
that's drawn from our experience of the world granted god has offered us language and metaphors images and ways to think and talk about the divine but to imagine that our theology can ever contain god seems at least a little naive and probably more than that quite arrogant that said trinity is really important to my conception of god and i wanted to talk a little bit about why now the first two sermons of that series are available here on the channel that you can check them out if you're
interested but here are a few thoughts about trinity first of all doctrines of trinity should at their best i think help us to be more creative about the divine not to close down our imagination of god here's an example of how that works theologically we could say god is like water because water is a liquid but if you freeze it it can become a solid and if you boil it it's a gas it's one molecule with three different realities just like god that's nice helpful even maybe except
it's also technically heresy this is a form of what we call modalism and that's the idea that god isn't really three persons but just that god appears or seems that way now you can use modalism as a doctrinal club and call someone a heretic and get angry at them if you want to i suppose but what we're really trying to protect by ruling something like modalism out of bounds isn't so much a description of god that we can hang our hat on it's actually about protecting the mystery of divine love
see the christian conception of god imagines a divine community of shared love within the godhead from before there was anything else god is the singular source of all that is and god is an eternal dance of gift and reception so when we say that modalism has a reticle we're not saying that we understand god and you don't we're good people and you're not as much as we're saying that we have to hold on to we want to protect this mystery of divine love to believe that god was loving that god
could be loving before there was anything else to love and not only that that is this divine love shared and expressed in community that sits at the foundation of everything in the universe to say that we believe in trinity is to say that expressed love defines god and this is why the specifics of trinity are far less important to me than that we hold this mystery tightly in our imagination and we have these beautiful images of father son and spirit or creator redeemer sustainer that's good and
sacred language gifted to us to speak of the divine but the point is not to get hung up on father and start picturing god as a man or to fixate on some specific hierarchy within the godhead the point is to always come back to the expanse of imagination of god as loving community from before there was anything and one of the most important implications of this comes from the 1960s with a catholic theologian named carl rauner he formulated what later became known as
rauner's rule and it went like this the economic trinity is the imminent trinity and the imminent trinity is the economic trinity now he's using some technical theological language here so let's parse it out quickly when he says the economic trinity he's talking about god as god works in history so god with a mission or god with a purpose everything that god does in the world to save humanity any time we are talking about atonement or creation or salvation we are talking
about the economic trinity on the other hand the imminent trinity sometimes you might come across this named as the ontological trinity is who god is within god's self so whoever god was or whatever god was doing before there was a universe and what ronner says is that however we conceptualize god in history however we make sense of the cross for example that has to be coherent with or consistent with who god is within god's self who god has always been as this
perfect community of gift and reception and if you let that be the foundation for how you make sense of the divine that inevitably begins to shape how you read your bible how you experience a sense of god in your life how you understand god woven throughout the text of human history as we have all of us tried to find our way back to god god is shared love period and this is why our theology is at its best not when it's trying to explain god to us but when it is doing just enough to
help us learn to love like god in community and so this is also why in the second part of the series when we wanted to talk about listening to the voice of spirit in our lives i wanted to talk about listening for that gentle welcoming invitation of the spirit now everybody's experience is different but early in my christian story i was around the charismatic movement now i'm not sure that was really ever my bag but i was in that orbit for a time and i certainly don't want to
characterize that all as bad it wasn't and there are a lot of things that added to my journey from that period in my life things that i want to hold on to but i did also see witness expressions of toxic authority and manipulation that were associated with sometimes even attributed to spirit there was a sense that spirit could be used as a trump card for anything but again here's where our conception of god rooted in trinity becomes really helpful because if god is an eternal dance of
give and take if god has only ever known perfect community it seems to me likely at least that the voice of spirit in our lives should reflect that divine reality the way to distinguish the voice of spirit from all of the other voices that vie for your attention is to train yourself to listen for the most peaceful the most gentle voice you can possibly distinguish the voice of spirit is the voice that gently listens back to you and i don't mean by that that god never
speaks clearly to us or that god never tries to correct us very clearly there are times we fall short of love our actions do not promote justice and healing in the world and god continues to call us to repentance in these areas that's part of what spirit does in our lives but what i mean by this is that i'm not sure the christian imagination of god makes room for a god that speaks outside of the context of loving relationship that's all god knows that's what god is
so god doesn't speak at you god speaks to you god doesn't demand from you god invites you to become more and sure god is angry at sin but the nature of god reminds me that god is angry at what sin does to me and what sin does to those around me god is not angry at me god isn't love expressed in relationship god is against therefore anything that damages relationship and this is why even though in my life and my career and my ministry i tend to focus on the way of jesus in the world
how we live toward each other by following jesus i think it's very helpful from time to time to jump out of that into the exotic world of discussing the nature of god as long as that orients us back toward each other in love and it doesn't leave us debating theology endlessly so god is an eternal dance of gift and reception from before there was anything we call this perikeresis but god is also the singular source of all that has been made the foundation of
universe and those two concepts together in the mystery of how they coexist this is what we call trinity this is also what calls us back to loving relationship with everyone we encounter in god's world