Multiculturalism and the Trinity
“In the West, the Trinity has in practice been relegated to such an extent that most Christians are little more than practical modalists.” [1]
In the evangelical church today the understanding and practice of the Trinity within the congregation has seem to have lost its footing as a forefront and essential theological dogma. The trinity has often been relegated to a footnote within the preacher’s sermon as a dogma or doctrine that is not to be explained, embraced, and explored within the daily life of the laity, but is rather often cast aside as a high and lofty doctrine which can only be explored with those with a theological education. The Western individualism that drives the cultural narrative of the West has caused much of the Western church to think of God as a solitary monarchical God. [2] The lack of trinitarian understanding of the Godhead has also led to a loss in understanding of the trinitarian nature that the body of Christ possesses. This essay seeks to explore the trinitarian nature of the Church through two different areas of study, first, the churches union with Christ as a reflection of the unity of the Godhead, second, the multicultural nature of the church as a reflection of the trinitarian nature of the Godhead.
Union with Christ as the Homoousian of the Godhead
Before proceeding with a discussion on the unity that the body of Christ possesses through their union with Christ, it is necessary to state that apart from the incarnation and work of Jesus as messenger, mediator, and high priest there can be no discussion of the reflection that the church has of the Trinity. As Augustine has written about in his works,
“the mediatorial work of Christ is necessary in order to contemplate God. Indeed, apart from Christ’s ‘soteriological and epistemological mediation,’ humans cannot know the invisible God.” [3]
It is only through the mediating work of Christ that Christians can partake in the divine dance of the Godhead, and it is only through the work of Christ that Christians can display the divine dance within it of itself.
The important soteriological doctrine of Union with Christ has been a tradition that has been seemingly lost in much of the evangelical tradition of today. As a result of the capitalistic and hyper-rationalization of the West, the penal-substitutionary work of Jesus Christ on the cross has been elevated as the primary and sole means that Christ has brought humanity into communion with the Father. The recent omission of the importance and role that union with Christ plays has been influenced and perpetuated by the individualistic nature of the cultural West. This has led to a very strong emphasis on the relationality of God the Father to the people, but hardly is the common union with Christ that the Christian has, exalted as an essential part of the soteriology of the gospel. As John Murray said,
“Nothing is more central or basic than union and communion with Christ. Union with Christ is really the central truth of the whole doctrine of salvation not only in its application but also in its once-for-all accomplishment in the finished work of Christ. Indeed the whole process of salvation has its origin in one phase of union with Christ and salvation has in view the realization of other phases of union with Christ.” [4]
Murray’s emphasis on union with Christ being the central truth of doctrine of salvation is better in line with Paul’s exhortation in 1st Corinthians 12:12–31, where he reminds the Corinthians to remember that, “for just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. For in one Spirit we were all baptized into one body — Jews or Greeks, slaves or free — and all were made to drink of one Spirit.” [5] The oneness that the body of Christ possesses is lost in much of the Western churches practice, which has seen schisms and splintering increase and multiply throughout the past 5 centuries.
This line of thinking has been often stated and emphasized within the Eastern Orthodox Church and Roman Catholic church as an exhortation to move forward with an ecumenical movement between the various churches that hold to the Apostolic and Nicene council. [6] This motivation can be seen in their concern for Jesus’s commandment in John 17:21,
“that they may all be one, just, as you, Father, are in me, and I in you, that they also may be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me.”
Logically it can be seen that the unity that Jesus desires for his body is a reflection of the unity and of the homousious nature that the Godhead possesses. As Augustine has said in his works, “the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit are of one and the same substance or essence.” [7] The parallels that the “many but one” [8] nature that is commanded for the body of Christ is seemingly a reflection of the three in one nature of the Trinity. So the question remains, how is the trinity reflected in the Church, and how is the Church to reflect the trinity?
Social Trinitarianism as Reflection and Manifestation
As said earlier, “the notion that the church is the image of the Trinity is gathering momentum in the evangelical and Western world and is no longer a concept embraced solely by the Eastern Orthodox Church.” [9] The interest in understanding the church as the representation of the Godhead has come from an overemphasis on the personal relationality of the believer to the Godhead, and in most instances the emphasis being in the relation to the Father. However, this distorted view of the Church’s relationship to Christ contradicts the daily life of society, in that the world is made up of many persons. This point is brought in Vanhoozer’s writings, he says that,
“the atomic view of human society, plainly the Trinitarian understanding of God, in which relatedness is constitutive of the divine being, corresponds to a view of society that understand(s) the human person in his or her relatedness to others.” [10]
Vanhoozer here is stating that is in the Trinitarian understanding of the Godhead, the church can better understand itself and in how it should function. There is an essential nature in that the union that the church has with Christ, is also a union into participating in the divine dance that the Trinity in its essence has.
A necessary remark to state is that the ontological nature of the Trinity is assumed before the nature of human community is assumed into the Trinity. To project human community into the Trinity is a disservice and distortion to a proper exegesis of the trinity in the trinitarian passages that mention the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The guiding framework of the nature of the Trinity is provided in the ecumenical creed of Nicea. The saying of Gregory of Nazianus,
“no sooner do I conceive of the One than I am illumined by the splendour of the Three; no sooner do I distinguish Three than I am carried back into the One,” [11]
This displays a key affirmation and summary of what affirmations are necessary in the discussion of the Trinitarian nature of the body of Christ.
A common concern that many theologians have with the notion of the trinity as an image for the church is the possibility of implying a divine status in man. This is a concern that Miroslav Volf has addressed in his work titled ‘The Trinity is our Social Program,’ extensively and provides a key distinction when it comes to understanding the Trinity as a model for the body of Christ. Volf clarifies in his work that,
“ontically human beings are manifestly not divine,” yet, “Trinitarian concepts such as ‘person’, ‘relation’, or ‘perichoresis’ can be applied to the human community only in an analogous rather than a univocal sense.” [12]
This key distinction is essential in guardian against any misunderstanding of Christ’s words in John 17:21 where he said, “that they may all be one, just as you, Father, are in me, and I in you, that they also may be in us.” This distinction guards against any notions of mankind possessing divinity or the possibility of mankind ascending to the status of divinity in the future.
Volf, in his writings also mentions the perichoretic nature of the Trinity as a picture for how the Church itself should function in its interactions with one another. In a day and age where the self is glorified and independence from need of another is considered the ideal, the church is losing its ground in what it means to be an interdependent community. The fact of the matter is that many secular people will echo Karl Marx in saying that religion is the “opium of the masses.” [13] Much of the church’s practice has struggled and found its own theology succumbing to the individualistic nature of the cultural West. Volf in his writings argue that the perichoretic nature of the Trinity
“describes the kind of unity in which the plurality is preserved rather than erased. But the resources of perichoresis for thinking about identity are as rich as for thinking about unity. For it suggests that divine persons are not simply interdependent and influence one another from outside, but are personally interior to one another.” [14]
The need for an orthodox understanding of the Trinity and its pericheroitic nature is seen in Volf’s argument for perichoresis being an essential aspect of the nature of the Trinity. It is from this understanding of the perichoretic nature of the Trinity that the body of Christ can find a clearer understanding of how it is to live and function.
But, the question remains as to how an orthodox understanding of the Trinity is translated practically into the relationality of the different cultures of the world with each other. The Western context of today has often led the Church to live out with distorted understandings of how the Trinity functions. Oftentimes in the West the individualistic cultural mindset that has been ingrained in Western culture, has led to a unitarian view of how the trinity functions. Jurgen Motlmann in his writings echoes this concern saying that,
“the unitarian model tends to validate patterns of domination in human affairs….Those who argue in this way can point to the influence of a kind of evolutionary theory that sees all things in terms of the battle for survival and supremacy, a view reflected in the horrifying escalation of violence as a normal part of life in “modern” societies. Against this, it is argued, a trinitarian understanding of God provides us with an ontology of love to replace an ontology of violence. The ultimate reality is the eternal mutual self-giving-in-love of the three persons of the Blessed Trinity.” [15]
Moltmann’s concerns of a unitarian understanding of the Trinity have led to the schismatic nature of the protestant church today. The unity of the Church is often disregarded in exchange for the preeminence of keeping doctrine not as doctrine, but rather as dogma.
Another cultural influence that has influenced the Western church to an improper understanding of the Trinity and the nature of the church, is it’s influence from Aristotelian logic, where there is little to no middle ground. P.J. Saher in his study of Eastern and Western thought has noticed this disadvantage that the West possesses in its mode of thinking. He says,
“the either/or way is predominant in the Western way of thinking and is closely linked with the Aristotelian logic of the excluded middle. According to this exclusive way of thinking, things have to be either this or that, either good or bad, either true or false. There are no alternatives between them.” [16]
This mode of thinking has led to the criticisms made famous by renaissance men like Thomas Jefferson, saying that, “ridicule is the only weapon which can be used against unintelligible propositions. Ideas must be distinct before reason can act upon them; and no man ever had a distinct idea of the trinity. It is the mere Abracadabra of the mountebanks calling themselves the priests of Jesus.” [17] Today many secularists and materialists will echo these remarks in saying that the Trinity is an illogical and unintelligible conundrum that will never be solved. This mode of thought has also deeply affected Western Christians from having an orthodox understanding of the Trinity. The fact that much of the writings of the New Testament were written by those with an Eastern cultural mindset also contributes to the problem that the West often has with encountering mystery. This is not to say that the Western mind has not brought into the theological discussion any good, it is to say that a purely Western/rationalistic view of the Trinity can lead to an incomplete view of the Trinity.
Reflections in the Cultural Context of Asia
The contribution that an Eastern view of the Trinity brings to understanding the nature of the Trinity has often been undermined in the Western church. Much of this thinking has come from the lack of understanding that the Western Church has of the Eastern church. In the West the goal and epistemological method for knowing is to establish in its essence, what something is. However, in the East the epistemological method for knowing is done beginning with stating what something is not. It is in this method that the conclusion that the East can often come to is to leave mystery, where in the West certain areas that would be left to mystery would be desired to be articulated, known, and determined using the laws of logic and their own epistemic capabilities. The Korean-American theologian Jung Lee in his book The Trinity in Asian Perspective brings to light the value and better understanding that an Eastern cultural context brings to understanding the Trinity. Lee in his book brings a key concern in terms of how the West is often dismissive or ignorant of Eastern understandings of theologies and often misses out on other cultural contexts and ways of knowing. He says in his book
“An Asian perspective complements a Western or an American perspective because Christianity belongs to both Asia and the West simultaneously. If Christianity is a Western religion only, non-Western perspectives on Christianity should be regarded as subsidiary to the Western perspective…As long as Third World theologies continue to attempt to validate their work according to Western theologies, they will continue to be supplementary to Western Theologies” [18]
These concerns are valid in that in the current day of social unrest, the concerns and voices of those who do not fall into the Western cultural mindset are often dismissed and ignored. Lee in his writings brings up the point that the Western cultural framework is based on an anthropocentric approach to cosmology, while the East is concerned with a cosmological approach to anthropology. [19] The cosmological approach is reflective also of the collectivist approach that Eastern culture approaches their society with. In the East the collective is thought of before the individual, while in the West the individual is thought of before the collective. The methodology of thinking of the collective before the individual is reflective of Paul’s exhortation to the Corinthians in 1 Cor. 12:12 where he said, “For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ.” This command for the individuals within the church to think as one body, is much easier for those who are of an Eastern cultural background to comprehend.
Another philosophical picture that remains imminent in the Eastern mind is the symbol of the yin and yang. In the Toaist imagery of yin and yang, the notion of two separate entities having one essence is reflected better than most Western analogies that are given to describe the church. The black and the white are separate, yet compose of one entire circle. But, an important distinguishing figure of the yin and yang is that the black has a dot in the white and the white has a dot in the black. In this picture the intermingling, inter-dwelling, and interpenetrating nature of the two essences are represented. In the Eastern mind this idea of inter-dwelling, wholeness, and separateness, all composing one entire entity is a familiar notion that does not bring confusion but rather understanding to their world. It is this advantage that the Eastern thinking mind brings into understanding the Trinity, in that mystery is a familiar concept, and is not something to be rejected as many rationalist and enlightenment thinkers have done.
The contribution that an Eastern view of the Trinity brings to understanding the nature of the Trinity combined with a Western understanding of the Trinity provides an example of how the Church needs to understand its Trinitarian nature. The Western Church and the Eastern Church are both in need of one another’s perspectives to come to a proper and more fuller understanding of who God is. The West has done the service of articulating doctrines and in composing various creeds and confessions which guard the church from heresies. While the East brings the other side of the balance in reminding the West about the collective nature of the Church and the importance of mystery being at the center of the Godhead. The diverse viewpoints and roles that different cultures play in reflecting different attributes of God more effectively than others, shows a desperate need for the various cultures within the Church to dialogue and understand the various perspectives. These different viewpoints reflect the plurality of the Godhead, while it is in the Union that each believer has with Christ, that the oneness of the Godhead is reflected.
In conclusion, the multicultural nature of the Church is reflective of the Trinitarian nature of the Godhead. The union that each believer has with Christ, calls the Church to be one, and the plurality of the Godhead calls the Church to interpenetrate one another in dialogue, in life, and in love. What God has called the church to be is to remember the essence of the Trinity, which is to be “‘in the image and likeness of God’(which) is to be in communion, to be simultaneously ‘one’ and ‘many.’ [20]It is to remember what Gregory of Nazianzus said
“No sooner do I conceive of the One than I am illumined by the splendour of the Three; no sooner do I distinguish Three than I am carried back into the One.” [21]
Citations:
1 Letham, Robert. The Holy Trinity: in Scripture, History, Theology, and Worship. P&R Publishing, 2019, p. 407.
2 Vanhoozer, Kevin J. The Trinity in a Pluralistic Age: Theological Essays on Culture and Religion: Eerdmans, 1997, p. 5.
3 Gioia, Luigi. The Theological Epistemology of Augustine’s “De Trinitate”. Oxford University Press, 2016, pp. 33–34.
4 Murray, John. Redemption Accomplished and Applied. William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2015, p. 161.
5 The Holy Bible: English Standard Version (ESV), Containing the Old and New Testaments. Crossway Books, 2011.
6 Bidwell, Kevin J. ”The Church as the Image of the Trinity”: a Critical Evaluation of Miroslav Volf’s Ecclesial Model. Wipf & Stock, 2011, p. 11.
7 Ayres, Lewis. Nicaea and Its Legacy: an Approach to Fourth-Century Trinitarian Theology. Oxford University Press, 2009, p. 55.
8 British Council of Churches, Forgotten Trinity, 1989, pp. 27–34.
9 Bidwell, Kevin J. ”The Church as the Image of the Trinity”: a Critical Evaluation of Miroslav Volf’s Ecclesial Model. Wipf & Stock, 2011, p. 12.
10 Vanhoozer, Kevin J. The Trinity in a Pluralistic Age: Theological Essays on Culture and Religion: Eerdmans, 1997, p. 6.
11 Gregory of Nazianzus, Orations, 40.41
12 Volf, Miroslav. “‘The Trinity Is Our Social Program’: The Doctrine of the Trinity and the Shape of Social Engagement.” Modern Theology, vol. 14, no. 3, July 1998, pp. 405
13 Marx, Karl. Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. Aristeus Books, 2012.
14 Volf, Miroslav. “‘The Trinity Is Our Social Program’: The Doctrine of the Trinity and the Shape of Social Engagement.” Modern Theology, vol. 14, no. 3, July 1998, pp. 409
15 Moltmann Jürgen. The Trinity and the Kingdom: the Doctrine of God. Fortress Press, 1993.
16 P.J. Saher, Eastern Wisdom and Western Thought: A Comparative Study in the Modern Philosophy of Religion
17 “Thomas Jefferson to Francis Adrian Van der Kemp, 30 July 1816,” The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, Retirement Series, vol. 10, May 1816 to 18 January 1817, ed. J. Jefferson Looney. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013, pp. 277–278.]
18 Lee, Jung Young. The Trinity in Asian Perspective. Abingdon Press, 1996, pp. 12.
19 Idid., p. 18
20 British Council of Churches, Forgotten Trinity, pp. 27–34. 21 Gregory of Nazianzus, Orations, 40.41
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