Chapter 2 - Perichor... What - Draft for class PDF

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Summary

Conversational Street-Sweeping
Part One: Putting Our Minds in Service of the Ministry of Reconciliation
Chapter 2—Perichor… what? Glimpsing More of God’s Beauty
“Before this week’s discussion about the ministry of reconciliation, I had a somewhat
underdeveloped understanding ...

Description

Conversa)onal Street-Sweeping Part One: Pu7ng Our Minds in Service of the Ministry of Reconcilia)on

Chapter 2—Perichor… what? Glimpsing More of God’s Beauty

“Before this week’s discussion about the ministry of reconcilia8on, I had a somewhat underdeveloped understanding of the Gospel. To an extent, I mentally separated the Good News from this central theme of reconcilia8on, and thought of the Gospel more on the Sunday-school level of, ‘Jesus died, was buried, and rose again on the third day and conquered death’. While this is in no way untrue, it misses the target of this idea of reconcilia8on, which is at the heart of the Gospel. I realized the disconnect in my thinking when reading Reeves’ ar8cle. ‘But with the triune God, what good news we have!’ he writes. ‘The eternally beloved Son, the delight and joy of his Father, comes to share with us the same love the Father has always given him’. Combining this knowledge with the understanding that Jesus died to make a way for this communion to exist again, I felt like I’d understood the Gospel like I’d never before. Then I wondered why I had missed it, why so many Chris8ans I’ve known also seem to miss it.” 1

“God is love because God is a Trinity.” That’s how Michael Reeves opens his wonderful and important book, Deligh,ng in the Trinity.2 Chris8ans should have put Reeves’ book at #1 on the New York Times Bestsellers list. I would suggest that you put this book down, read that, and then come back to this book with a renewed love for God and a desire to see Him praised for His beauty. Reeves is right. God can only be love because God is triune. If God is not triune, then God cannot be love. When we turn to consider God in His deepest beauty, what we find is the triune life of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. And—astoundingly—through the work of each person of the Trinity, people like me, who struggle to love God and to love other people consistently, find ourselves invited to take a place prepared for us in the eternal divine dance of love. My guess is that right now you’re feeling a bit of a disconnect. Love and beauty and divine dances probably do not leap to your mind when you hear the word “Trinity.” When you hear “Trinity” you may start thinking of dry dogma and funky math. It’s an “intellectual debacle,” one of my students said. “How can one God be three Gods?” (Note: He can’t. That’s not what the Trinity is. More on that later.) Yet when a student I taught earlier in my career recently described himself as a “reluctant Trinitarian,” I was struck by the divergence in our paths over the years—years that have found me becoming more deeply and joyfully Trinitarian the more I have thought about it. That said, so many see the Trinity as an

1 Student

Paper (XXXX-Name Removed-XXXX), 7 February 2016. The student is quo8ng from a short ar8cle I assigned at the start of the semester: Michael Reeves, “Three Is the Loveliest Number,” Chris,anity Today XXXXXXXXXXXXX. 2 Michael

Reeves, Deligh,ng in the Trinity: An Introduc,on to the Chris,an Faith (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic,

2012), 9.

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embarrassment or a problem or an intellectual irrelevance debated by professional theologians and wholly removed from life where they’re living it. I get it. It makes sense, given how lifle the average Church does to help us here. In my own experience growing up in the Church, I never gave any serious afen8on to the basic ques8on, “Who is God?” un8l I returned to my home Church ager college and asked a professor from a nearby seminary to lead a Bible study for our “college and careers” group. 3 Think about that. I had never really considered God in any careful way in the Church. What does it mean that God is love? That He is holy? That He is just? Jealous? Merciful? And as for the Trinity… well, that was an intellectual curiosity that I knew was “important” in some remote way, but I sure didn’t see God’s Triune being as the very reality that made sense of singing of the love of God and seeking the beauty of right rela8onship with Him and living into the rela8onal logic of lovingly obeying such a good God (consider Jesus’ words: “If you love me, you will obey what I command,” John 14:15; see also 1 John 5:3). In the Trinity we find all of this, and we desire to be with Him—to share in the love of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Like the student quoted in the epigraph to this chapter, I had missed how the Triune God is the root of it all. She and I are not alone in having missed it. The hour is late, but pockets of the Church are star8ng to reclaim our beau8ful Trinitarian heritage, realizing its vital significance for everything we think and say and do. Of course the Trinity has been a hallmark of the true Church’s teaching for nearly two millennia, but reci8ng the Nicene Creed or Apostle’s Creed—as important as that is—is a long way from seeing all this Trinity stuff as relevant to your day-to-day life. Yet nothing could be more relevant. I love watching my students put the pieces together: “The Holy Trinity lived in community for eternity. ‘The loving unity of the Father, Son, and Spirit gives us a ra8onale for why men and women, black and white, introvert and extrovert should come together, not to be iden8cal, but to be united in love’ (Reeves, 45). What a beau8ful picture and example of how we were created to be! We are to be united as individuals by one truth, one love.” 4 As another student put it, “emphasis on the triune God reveals much about the heart and character of God Himself. Without the Trinity the afributes of God, such as, ‘God is love’ (1 John 4:8), His delight in fellowship (John 1:3), and His grace and mercy (1 Cor. 12:9), would not be viable afributes… as they all deal with the complexity that is living in community or the ‘perichoresis’ (‘dancing around’) that is ogen used to describe the Trinity… By failing to present the Trinity as it truly is, in all its wonder and complexity and, some8mes, strangeness, we fail to truly present God.”5 So, there’s our word—perichorēsis—and this student has 8ed it to God’s love and the union of fellowship in diversity we were created to reflect. What on earth does the word mean?

3 My

deep gra8tude to Perry Downs… again! Not only for hos8ng and guiding that Bible Study, but for helping this clueless guy find Kiersten, for the premarital counseling, and for joining us in marriage before the Church. Perry also had the good sense to marry Sandy, and their open, loving home—with such good food—has blessed so many. Our thanks to you both. We owe you a lot. 4 Student

Paper (XXXX-Name Removed-XXXX), 8 February 2016. The student is quo8ng from Reeves, “Three Is the Loveliest Number.” 5 Student

Paper (XXXX-Name Removed-XXXX), 9 February 2016.

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I remember the first 8me the word perichorēsis (perry-co-RAY-sis) really sank in for me. As I prepped a sec8on of an entry-level theology course (“Faith and Learning: Da8ng, Marriage, and Sex”) that my wife and I were going to team teach, I read Cornelius Plan8nga’s helpful lifle book, Engaging God’s World. Plan8nga noted that “at the center of the universe, self-giving love is the dynamic currency of the trinitarian life of God… When early Greek Chris8ans spoke of perichoresis in God, they meant that each divine person harbors the others at the center of his being. In a constant movement of overture and acceptance, each person envelops and encircles the others.” 6 The reality 8ed to this ancient Chris8an word needs to sink deep into our lives. It’s a Greek word, and the roots of the word itself— perichorēsis —help picture the reality. But, come on. Isn’t the Trinity an intellectual debacle aLer all? The Greek “peri” means “around” (think of Some have thought so, and some Chris8ans have even rejoiced in thinking so. submarine captain purng Søren Kierkegaard, for example, the father of existen8alist philosophy and a up the periscope to have a deeply Chris8an man, thought that the intellectual scandal of Chris8anity is just 360° look around), and the

what forces us to make a radical choice to obey God. Perhaps. But for my part,

Greek “chorēsis” means “dance” (think of choreographing a dance

while I see Kierkegaard’s point, I think he overstates the mafer.

rou8ne). So, perichorēsis refers to the “dancingaround” of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in holy desiring-and-self-givinglove of one for the other. Thus Tim Keller firngly 8tles a chapter of The Reason for God “The Dance of God” (this chapter alone is worth the price of his book). Far from a selfish, megalomaniac God that is the stuff of nightmares, the one true God always has delighted in an everdeepening and glorious dance of self-giving and other-receiving love. As Keller puts it, “each person of the Trinity loves, adores, defers to, and rejoices in the others. That creates a dynamic, pulsa8ng dance

Among my students, at least, much of the sense that the Trinity is an intellectual debacle comes from simply misunderstanding the teaching. Many students think that the teaching is that there is one God who is also three Gods or one person who is three persons. If that were the teaching it would be an intellectual debacle; indeed, it would be an intellectual non-starter that could not possibly be true (along the lines of both 2+2=4 and 2+2=5 in exactly the same sense). That would be a logical contradic8on. (We’ll talk more about such things when we talk about the “problem of evil” later.) But the teaching of the Trinity is that there is one God who is three persons (Father, Son, and Holy Spirit). It would be foolish to think that we could demonstrate that or reason our way to it (it is disclosed to us, rather than concluded by us). But afempts to show that there is a logical contradic8on here, such that the Trinity could not be true, are notoriously difficult to demonstrate and require a lot of confidence about what is required for something to be of one nature or just what is required to be a person. Although the Trinity is above our understanding, that doesn’t mean that we’ve shown that it’s logically impossible and thus cannot be true. (The scien8fically minded might consider some of the puzzles of quantum mechanics here.) The difference between “above our understanding” and “shown to be a logical contradic8on” is important here. What is disclosed to us in the Scripture about God’s triune being reveals the most beau8ful of all reali8es: Eternally, God is love. What was God doing for all eternity? Far from being bored, God was exploring and reveling in inexhaus8ble depths of the shared love of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

6 Cornelius

Plan8nga Jr., Engaging God’s World: A Chris,an Vision of Faith, Learning, and Living (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2002), 20-21.

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of joy and love.” 7 This one God, with neither division nor conflict, unifies a perfectly harmonized love of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—three persons who are one God. Let me allow my students to drive this all-important point home so you can see and feel alongside them the transforming power of realizing and loving more fully the Triune God’s beauty. Near the start of Chapter 1 we saw one student express her worries that maybe God was selfish and set a horrible example for those made in His image. Reading Reeves’ ar8cle, “Three Is the Loveliest Number,” led her to “a wonderful breakthrough” upon realizing the beauty of the Trinity. “When I truly marry this concept with my picture of God, it clears up several of my concerns. God is not a selfish god because he is not simply one God. He is three in one! Of course, He cares for Himself, but He cares for the other parts of Himself. Though I know this understanding is s8ll yet shallow and poor, it brings me considerable relief and peace in one of my difficult ques8ons.” 8 As this student notes, her understanding is in process (for example, it would be befer not to talk about God caring for other “parts” of Himself, but instead that each person—the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—partakes in and cons8tutes the perfect dance expressing God’s love).9 But you can hear how this process of coming nearer to God’s Triune being has begun to release her from fears that God might be ugly and self-focused in ways that would undermine His love. Or, again, we find another student reflec8ng on the barriers that block people from turning to God in faith at the Cross of Jesus Christ. “One barrier in par8cular that has been raised to my view throughout this week of class is the barrier of having this false idea of who God is. So many people today have this idea of who they think God is that is so very opposite of who He actually is. People think that God is some ‘loveless dictator in the sky’ (Reeves, 45).” Indeed, she con8nues, some “people seem to not believe in God because they have imagined Him to be someone He is not.” Their misconcep8ons of God can run so deep that they end up “imagining God to be the enemy, Satan. This thought s8rs inside my heart and greatly moves me. I know who my God is, and that is not who He is.” 10 The worry is that the one true God is like Loki in The Avengers. Perhaps you remember the scene in the first Avengers movie where Loki and Captain America bafle outside a theater (if you don’t, you can find it on YouTube: “Iron Man and Captain America vs. Loki”). The bafle is cool (though not nearly as sweet as Iron Man vs. Captain America and Bucky in Captain America: Civil War); but what interests me here is what Loki says to all the people just before Captain America shows up. “Kneel before me. I said, KNEEL!” Loki screams. Ager they kneel he says smugly: “Is not this simpler? Is this not your natural state? It’s the unspoken truth of humanity… that you crave subjuga8on. The bright lure of freedom diminishes your life’s joy in a

7 Keller,

The Reason for God, 215.

8 Student

Paper (XXXX-Name Removed-XXXX), 8 February 2016.

9 To

any academic caviling here, I simply reply: Let’s let this book be what it is. I could hedge all of this about with 50 pages of academic nice8es—and those have their place. But in doing so, I would lose the reader of this book and the important steps I’m trying to encourage them to make into the inexhaus8ble realms of beauty and thought 8ed to God’s Trinitarian being. For what it’s worth, I think both Augus8nian reflec8ons on the oneness of the one Triune God and Cappadocian reflec8ons on the rela8onal plurality cons8tu8ve of and expressive of that one God both deserve to be celebrated, worked out, and brought into crea8ve synthesis. In any case, let’s let this book be what it is, and let’s not blame other equally (more?) important books for closing out the vast majority of readers who might pick up this book—even while those books fill the important roles they’re seeking to fill. 10

Student Paper (Kate Gannon), February 2016; the quota8on is from Reeves, “Three Is the Loveliest Number.”

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mad scramble for power. Your iden8ty: You were made to be ruled. In the end, you will always kneel.” Then an old man stands up and defies Loki: “Not to men like you.” “There are no men like me,” declares Loki. “There are always men like you,” the man rightly replies. 11 Loki is self-absorbed, pefy, and vicious; he cares nothing for people around him, trea8ng them only as slaves who should kneel obsequiously before him. Depressingly enough, many think of the God of the Bible in these terms. Rightly, they want nothing to do with a “god” like that. And we cheer when—later in the movie—Hulk smashes Loki back and forth on the ground like a rag doll and disdainfully declares what we all think: “Puny God!” Loki’s puniness is—first and foremost—moral. Smashing him on the ground is more firng than bowing before him. But as my students were grasping more fully, God is nothing like that, “for God is triune, and it is as triune that he is so good and desirable.”12 One student put this point so well: “This is a key dividing point from the gods of the world and the Trinitarian God… The fact that God is not a single person means that He is about love. ‘By defini8on, a single-person God is not inherently about love and rela8onship’ (Reeves, 44); on the contrary, such a single-person god is concerned with self. It is this altruis8c triune God that sent His Son to extend God’s selfless love to all of us. The same love that the Father has for His Son also includes us, broken sinners; we are raised to the level of children of this God. This love that we receive, we must also pass along to others by not only showing our love to others, but also by accurately represen8ng a Trinitarian God that loves perfectly and eternally to allow us to have fellowship with Him.” 13 An infinite chasm yawns between this expansive and lovely Triune God and the puny, cramped, narcissis8c Loki-image that too many people imagine the Chris8an God to be. Undoubtedly this tragic misconcep8on is partly the fault of the Church. Too frequently we somehow fail to see who God revealed Himself to be at the Cross, and our own mistaken ways of portraying God can make Him seem Loki-like. Should we wonder that people want nothing to do with such a God? Yet other factors also play into it: smaller gods who stake smaller claims on our lives can be more comfortable for people (like me) who struggle (migh8ly, in my case) to turn outward toward others in perfect love. The uncompromised love that confronts us in the God who is love makes me uncomfortable—precisely in being uncompromised and uncompromising. I know I can’t live up to it, and in my failure I will need forgiveness and help. Yet I also know that what I fail to live up to is, in fact, beau,ful. If there really does exist a God who is perfect in love, we find here an undeniably beau8ful pafern for our life together—perfect, outward-turned love—and a reality worth telling other people about: God is love because God is a Trinity. We’ve started to see the gulf that separates the Triune God—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—from our culture’s images of a narcissis8c, pefy, tyrant-god. But it’s so important to see just how wide that gulf is. “God’s love in perichoresis is ac8ve,” one student notes. “Since God is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, he has been in an eternal communion of love within himself (Reeves, 45). This is not a narcissis8c love, because God’s love is con8nually exchanging within the Trinity. God’s love has overflowed to love for

11

XXXXXXXXX The Avengers XXXXXXXXXXXx

12

Reeves, Deligh,ng in the Trinity, 9

13

Student Paper (XXXX-Name Removed-XXXX), 9 February 2016; the quota8on is from Reeves, “Three Is the Loveliest Number.”

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But the Trinity isn’t even men)oned in the Bible, so why are you making such a big deal about it? The Church’s teaching about the Trinity emerged out of the Apostles’ rela8onship with Jesus. Jesus blew open the doors on the Apostles’ understanding of God; they had to try to make sense of Jesus, but Jesus didn’t fit into their old ways of thinking about and rela8ng to God. To be sure, the Old Testament hinted that God was more than an absolutely single, rela8onally solitary being. In Genesis 1, the Spirit of God hovers over the waters. Scripture said that no one could see God and live (Exodus 33:20), and yet people did see God and live (Genesis 18; Deuteronomy 34:10; Judges 13:17-23; Isaiah 6:1-13, cf. John 12:40-41). Prophecies claimed that the coming Messiah would be more than merely human, but could rightly be called “the LORD Our Righteousness” (Jeremiah 23:6) and even “Mighty God” (Isaiah 9:6). Indeed, the coming “son of man” in Daniel’s prophe8c dream would come “with the clouds of heaven” and “was given authority, glory and sovereign power; all peoples, na8ons and men of every language worshiped him” (Daniel 7:13-14)—even though Scripture was crystal clear that God alone was to be worshiped (Exodus 34:14, 20:1-6; Deuteronomy 6:4-14; Jeremiah 7:9-11) and that God would not give His glory to another (Isaiah 42:6, 48:11). It was not without reason that the Apostles held th...