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.

Many would argue there is a dichotomy of coercion and persuasion as means of authority. See here … and here … and here. The former would involve violence enacted upon one in relationship, the latter would involve non-violent enticing or invitation into relationship.

But this seems to be a false–or at the least, superficial–dichotomy. If we are examining life within the Triune God, displayed as God with us in the life of Christ, and continuing in the Church, then a fully trinitarian account of power and authority must not ignore the role of the Spirit as a relationship of perpetual disturber and innovator.

God the Holy Spirit is always opening up new possibilities. This even takes place through the power of suffering; a power that is able to change events. Non-violent actions are not synonymous with non-forceful actions. The Spirit is always disturbing our status quo. For newness to come, we must be stripped–sometimes forcefully (violently?)–of the old.

When the Triune God acts, when God directly participates with his creation to create and re-create newness, it is a violent act from the perspective of the created. God’s triunity is maintained when God’s authorship is displayed in opening up spaces within the divine dance for new participants. This is how God swallowed death into himself.

This does not give the Christian license to act violently. But it does mean that all Christ-followers must not squelch their roles as prophets in the biblical idiom. Prophets speak newness into existence, sometimes tearing down and destroying the old. Also, the church must continue to defend the defenseless, most often from the ‘nation-states.’

How can this be done without appearing forceful to the nation-state? Violence must be carefully defined. When God acts to create newness, God does not act violently from God’s perspective. It is God’s love that is in action, to create, redeem, sanctify: to reconcile.

This same love must be in us as we participate in the community of divine love that brings newness.

SO TELL ME SOMETHING:
How do you see the Triune God informing coercion and persuasion?

——

Brian Niece
www.brianniece.com
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So what is a minister supposed to be and/or do?

A good question for me to wrestle with (being a vocational pastor and what not).

First, let’s look at this question from the perspective of “religion.” Now by religion (specifically the Christian religion) I mean the system of organized doctrine and practices instituted by human initiatives and based on an underlying story of God’s initiatives. And an individual who looks at the world through the eyes of religion tends to separate the world into two parts: sacred and secular.

This is not the lens through which I see the world.

Instead, my worldview is filtered through the person of the Triune God. This means I’m adverse to the definition of “What Is a Minister?” that follows.

The religious person expects to see the minister as profoundly serious and deliberate in his/her approach to life. The minister shoud be dignified in his/her denouncement of the world. The minister should attend to the needs and wants of the religious under his/her care and separate oneself from the world.

The religious person will be decidedly disappointed with me as a minister.

Seeing the world through the lens of the Triune God means I don’t see a separation between sacred and secular. All is of God. All is good. All space and time is sacred space and time. “For everything comes from him and exists by his power and is intended for his glory. All glory to him forever!” (Romans 11:36). I confess being influenced by Aquinas and his theology of glory.

Consequently, the world is my parish.

Part 2 will answer this question from the perspective of “the world.”

SO TELL ME:
What is a minister to you?

Tags: minister, pastor, Christian, religion, doctrine, practices, story, sacred, secular, Triune, God, sacred space, Aquinas