trinity -- the community of God and the community of God

The Greek word “perichoresis” is one of the most important concepts in Christian theology. The word itself is a compound of two Greek words: “peri” (from which we get our word perimeter) which means “around”; and “choreia” (from which we get our word choreography) which means dancing. Perichoresis literally means “dancing around.” And it turns out that the church for this. In fact, historically the church has been more in favor of this than most anything else. You see, the way in which the early church was best able to describe the practical functioning of the trinity was to employ this particular word: perichoresis. The trinity is the Father, the Son, and the Spirit “dancing around” together. What if that means that the trinity is not so much an ancient artifact[1] of abstract theology and questionable mathematics, but rather is “a steady call and invitation to participate in the energetically active life of God”?[2]

At the heart of the Christian faith is a unique understanding of God.[3] I think that most Christians would wholeheartedly profess belief in the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, but are skeptical as to what the practical, real life, lived-out daily payoff is for that belief. We question how something with so little impact on our lived out faith can actually be all that important. And so we begin to relegate the trinity from the center of the story to the margins of the story. But there is a problem with that… the trinity is the center of the story.

The God who is Father, Son, and Spirit dancing around together is our story.

I like this dancing metaphor, and I think that it has several useful applications. First, unless you are my five year old listening to Weezer, you usually don’t dance alone. So we find out that Christians believe that God is three—Father, Son, and Spirit. Now these three are all unique—each has their own identity (the Father never becomes the Son, the Spirit isn’t confused with the Father). God is an eternal diversity.

Now, these three must relate to one another. And this ancient metaphor of dancing recasts the way we understand relationships—not only in terms of God, but all relationships. We see that instead of jockeying for position and maneuvering for power, the God that dances around reveals relationships of mutuality, trust, and cooperation—or in one word, unity. While the Father, Son, and Spirit are all different, they are unified in their divine essence—their interrelationship, their dancing around with each other. God is an eternal unity.

One of the greatest things about the Christian doctrine of the trinity is the power of the declaration that God is eternally a community of beings—Father, Son, and Spirit together forever from before the beginning to after the end. God is an eternal relationship of Father, Son, and Spirit, which means that that God is essentially—in God’s essence—relational. Community is not simply something that God likes; community is something that God is!

God is eternal, perpetual relationship. Because of this we come to realize that the trinity is not a theological puzzle to solve; rather, it is the frame inside of which we solve our theological puzzles. We cannot simply forego the “difficult” or “demanding” discussions of the trinity because we do not understand them, opting instead to talk about God’s love, because we cannot speak of God’s love without understanding that God’s love is communal and relational—a mutual submission and empowerment, an eternal giving and submitting in perfect equality.

Divine reality is communal, and this has profound and broad reaching implications. The God who is community created us for community—both now and eternally. And so we find that the church’s belief in the trinity is not simply an exercise of humdrum orthodoxy, archaic vocabulary, and sketchy math. Rather, our embrace and proclamation of the trinity is a witness to a renewed, practical, powerful, and essential way of seeing reality.

God is community—Father, Son, and Spirit dancing around together forever.

God calls community—the church in its relationships mirrors the divine community in equality, humility, unity, and love. As the body of Christ, the church is caught up into the divine dance.

           

God builds community—the church’s mission to show the world what community can really be invites the world to embrace the community of the kingdom of God. We teach the world a better way to dance.

God fulfills community—When Christ returns and the kingdom of God is the only reality left, we will experience the community for which we were created, for which all creation longs, for which God sent his Son to redeem us. We will enjoy the dance of God together forever.

So please, Christians of the world, for the love of God and for the sake of the world: dance.

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[1]     “In fact, the entire Christian belief system stands or falls within the confession of God's Trinity. It is the core of the Christian faith, the root of all its dogmas, the basic content of the new covenant... It is in the doctrine of the Trinity that we feel the heartbeat of God's entire revelation for the redemption of humanity. We are baptized in the name of the Triune God, and in that name we find rest for our soul and peace for our conscience. Our God is above us [Father], before us [Son] and within us [Spirit].” (Herman Bavinck, 1903)

       “This monumental dogma seems to many even within the Church to be a museum piece, with little or no relevance to the crucial problems of contemporary life and thought. (Whalen & Pelikan, 1972)

[2]      Eugene Peterson, Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places,  45-46.

[3]      Stanley J. Grenz,  Created For Community,  41-42.  “No dimension is closer to the heart of the mystery of our faith than our confession, “I believe in the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.” Above everything else, this conception of God set Christianity apart from the religious traditions of the world. Consequently, no teaching lies closer to the center of Christian theology than does the doctrine of the Trinity.”

scripture and the community of God

The Bible is not one book. It is a library of books--all different kinds of books. There is law, history, poetry, biography, even letters. What unifies the Bible is that it is one story that is being told in as dynamic a way as possible. It is multiple voices, perspectives, and relationships speaking about the truth, who just happens to be a person.


The Bible contains the story of how God created and loved the world, how sin confounded creation, how God overcame sin and is restoring the world through Christ, how God called his people who were first a nation then a multi-national community of faith, how they follow God in the face of all sorts of opposition and challenges, how there is a true hope and coming victory for those who call upon the name of the Lord and serve the true King. 


The shorthand title for this story is: redemption.


Perhaps one of the most troubling and repeated mistakes of the church, though, is that the people of God have failed to appreciate the complexity of the Bible. Instead of hearing it as it was written, we have tried to sum up the entire story of redemption with just one genre of literature. 

And so some Christians have tried to make the Bible a science book or a history book. While those elements are present in scripture, neither are present exhaustively. No matter how badly some want to know the exact age of the planet or what happened to the dinosaurs, the Bible does not contain answers to those questions. But that is okay. It was not written to provide those answers. No one gets mad at the phone book for not containing a chocolate chip recipe or yesterday's news headlines. Scripture contains history and science, but it is not exhaustively either of those things. 


And some have tried to make the Bible a rule book. After all, it is the Basic Instructions Before Leaving Earth, right? There are laws in scripture, but not all of scripture is law. My own tradition has its own spin on this rule book approach in that we have often read scripture as a how-to manual for Sunday morning worship services--the "you cans" and the "you cannots" of how to do church. Imagine our surprise when we realize that almost none of the Bible is really written about Sunday morning alone--it has a lot more to say about life as a whole and the every day lives of God's people. 


What happens is that by focusing on the narrow voice of one part of the story, we miss the richness of the whole story. We get so focused on one instrument, we lose the symphony. We get so focused on one small part of the book that we lose the plot and miss the story. 


The sooner we can embrace the whole of scripture as God's unified story of redemption, the sooner we can adapt our discipleship to more faithfully resemble the faith of Jesus. Jesus did not engage scripture as a science book, a history book, or a law book alone. Jesus saw in scripture a dramatic and dynamic unfolding narrative, and he engaged the story as his story. He interpreted all of Scripture as pointing to him and his kingdom.


For far too long that Bible has been seen as territory to hold onto in a debate between faith and science. Christians have spent too long trying to force the Bible to live up to standards that God never set for it or for us. When we talk about the Bible, we fall into tireless arguments about inerrancy, inspiration, and authority. And there is need for us to understand what we are saying about scripture, but often we seem to care more about winning those arguments about the Bible than actually engaging what it is the Bible is saying. But when we do that, we turn the Bible into something it was never meant to be and we rob it of the chance to do what it is supposed to do. It is not an idol to be worshiped, but a witness to be heard. It is not a good luck charm to ensure our victory, it is collection of voices speaking truth. It is not a smoking gun in the biggest most important game of religious king of the mountain, it is a story to be embraced.


And an amazing thing happens when we engage scripture as a story again--in all of its contours, complexities, and contexts... we find that the story isn't finished. We are engaged, called, captivated, and empowered to hear the Master Storyteller weave our lives into the fascinating plot of redemption. 


Now that is a book worth reading.