Sacramental Living

Trinitarian theology is just about as interesting to me as sacramental theology. And I’ve been noticing of late how the Trinitarian lens through which I see the world has shaped me for missional life.

For example, God’s inner life, God’s relationship with the world, and God’s role as the source of all our understanding of who God is are threads woven together by God’s own producing of God’s self.  God is eternal and thus time is always present-tense from God’s perspective.  There can be no ordering of events in specified orders–”whether temporal, logical, or otherwise.”[1] To maintain a trinitarian grammar, there can be no producing without a producer and a product.  As David Cunningham states God’s activity of producing: “God produces God . . . God produces the world . . . God produces our knowledge of God.”[2]

In God’s producing of God, there is not mere self-duplication.  God gives over God’s self to an Other, so that there might be an Other.  Cunningham uses the example–a vestigium, perhaps–of pregnancy to illustrate this internal self-differentiation.  The Father, as Source, produces the Son, as Wellspring, and the Spirit, as Living Water.  Yet, verbal forms of these processions would be even more accurate, though more abstract.  Because, the differentiation within the Godhead is relational; the processions consist of relations constantly relating within each other.

God produces the world as gift.  And God awaits the return of this gift with our ‘Yes.’  God enables us to sustain this ‘Yes,’ as God continues to create, redeem, and sanctify the world.

God produces our knowledge of God.  No authentic understanding of God is possible outside of the “communally-normed reading of the biblical narratives that is made possible by the Spirit-filled Church.”[3] The vestigia trinitatis are supplementary to intimate corporate knowing of God.  God has already revealed all of God’s self.  God now continues to illuminate our hearts and minds to his truth and revelation.

It’s this understanding of God’s producing of reality that paves the way for incarnational living.

[2] Ibid., 58.

[3] Ibid., 83.

Related Posts:

• “We are such stuff / As dreams are made on”
• On Reading the Hebrew Scripture — Part 1
• The ShadowPath of YHWH’s Open Story — Part 2
• On Reading the Hebrew Scripture — Part 2
• Lessons from Tea