In introducing the second article of faith in our church family constitution, I would like to quote the frontier, unorthodox American emergent, Tony Jones, who still retains descriptions of Trinitarian orthodoxy.

In his book, The New Christians:  Dispatches from the Emergent Frontier (Jossey-Bass, 2008), Tony shares an analogy of the Trinity with his child, only to reveal his later misgivings over the illustration. 

But I was humbled when I was out to lunch a week later with LeRon Shults, a theologian of the highest pedigree.  “You can’t analogize God.  You can’t compare God to something,” LeRon told me.  “You can’t say what God is, only what God is not.”  I was making the mistake of comparing God to a ceiling fan, a great insult indeed to the creator of the universe.

As you might guess, I was crestfallen.  But I was also challenged.  In LeRon’s own writings, he challenges us to consider the Trinity from a different angle. Instead of looking at the three persons per se, Le Ron asks us to look at the relationships between them.  God is, he says, ultimately, a “Being-in-relation,” and we humans are “beings-in-relation.”  It’s the relationship that defines us.  In the case of the Trinity, divine love is the relational bond that unites Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  “We cannot prove the doctrine of the Trinity,” he writes, “or secure our knowledge of the Trinitarian God on the foundation of any finite analogy.  However, we may identify ways in which the biblical experience of the trinitarian God illuminates the human experience of longing for truth, goodness, and beauty.”  I might say it this way:  the Trinity is too beautiful not to be true.

LeRon is far from the first point to the relationships between the Father, Son, and Spirit as the key to understanding the Trinity.  Hilary of Poitiers (c. 300-367) reflected on Jesus’ affirmation that “I am in the Father and the Father is in me.”  It seems incomprehensible to us that “one should permanently envelope, and also be permanently enveloped by, the Other, whom yet He envelopes,” writes Hilary, and yet this is exactly the key to understanding God’s existence.  And along with LeRon and Hilary is a long tradition in the Eastern church of emphasizing the mutual indwelling, the eternal interpenetration of Father, Son, and Spirit.  The Eastern Orthodox call it perichoresis, which means “going around” or “envelopment,” and again, it emphasizes relationality (since something can only be enveloped by something else) as the starting point for understanding God. (165-166)

Tony touches on the paradoxes of beautiful truth.  He emphasizes the relational aspects of the Trinity for our application; but I would equally assert, let the exclusive uniqueness of the Trinity be proclaimed as well. 

The Trinity is the unique, true, one God of all.

This leads me to the second article of faith in our traditional (un-emergent) church constitution:

II.  THE TRUE GOD

We believe that there is one, and only one, living and true God; an infinite, intelligent Spirit, the Maker and Supreme Ruler of heaven and earth; inexpressibly glorious in holiness and worthy of all possible honor, confidence and love; that in the unity of the Godhead there are three persons:  the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, equal in every divine perfection, and executing distinct but harmonious offices in the great work of redemption. (Genesis 17:1; Exodus 15:1; Exodus 20:2,3; Psalm 83:18; Psalm 90:2; Psalm 147:5; Jeremiah 10:10, Matthew 28:19; Mark 12:30; John 4:24; John 15:26; Romans 11:33-36; I Corinthians 8:6; I Corinthians 12:4-6; Ephesians 4:6; I Timothy 1:17; Revelation 4:11).

What do you think?

Our first “For His Glory Conference” in Southeast Idaho is scheduled for Saturday, May 3, 2008 (more details later).  My session will be devoted to the one, triune God.

You all must come.