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BlogHere are the thoughts and news of the people in our community. Leave a comment as you wish. If you want to join the blogging ask Mark.
Friday, July 22, 2005Trinity
 I have just started reading a Eugene Peterson [of 'The Message' fame] book on 'spiritual theology' called Christ Plays in Ten Thousand places. To be honest, I find Peterson's books quite hard to read - I think it is because he has long chapters. I read a brief section today on the Trinity. It captured my imagination a little. Peterson says: "Perichoresis is the greek word for dance and was used by the Greek fathers as a metaphor for the trinity. The theologian Karl Barth said "perichoresis asserts that the divine modes of existence condition and permeate one another mutually with such perfection, that one is as invariably in the other two as the other two are in the one"." Peterson goes on to compare it to a folk dance with three people moving and intertwining to such a pace that it is hard to track the individual movements or actions within it. The trinity is a mystery. It is supposed to be. I had heard the metaphor of a dance before but not really taken it seriously. Perichoresis I think is better described as 'interpenetration' - very much as the Barth quote indicates. But it reminded me of the Celtic Trinitarian symbols - three 'points' but clearly one line [see the picture]. If you add the idea of a dynamic dance to that picture - like lines indicating the 'path' of the 'persons' of the trinity, you get a very dynamic picture of God. One of the things I have thought something about is what it means for God to be outside of time. It sounds so static - how do you 'persuade' a god like that to break out and do something. But the understanding there is faulty. The great "I AM" is God in the eternal present, everything that God is, worked out, the totality of being and action is taking place in the eternal present. And it is in our present, our 'now', that we connect and engage with that God. Add to that this picture of the Trinitarian dance, a dynamic interpenetration, and we begin to get the concept that God is not static and distant, but a working, moving, loving community. A working, moving, loving community that we also can participate in as we are drawn into the dance, into the life of God, through the Son and by means of the Spirit. Can we live in that reality? This life of the Trinitarian community is our life source. It is the crucial basis of our understanding of the God we call upon to act in our lives and in the world. Right now, in the present. Posted by: Mark | 11:31 am |
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