JACK JOHNSON FRAGMENTS MEANING SERIES

The first is a story of the Church’s adventures and misadventures regarding the doctrine of the Trinity. What I like about Elizabeth Johnson’s chapter on the Trinity is that she finds ways to give God a story with some action in it. (See note below.) There’s knowledge and love, but here knowledge gets first place. We get to sit and enjoy the “beatific vision.” As someone who has trouble sitting still for any length of time, I’m hoping my eternal rest is more active than that. I now have to wonder what I ever found attractive in a divine trinity described so bloodlessly.Įven my favorite part of the theory, our participation when we enter fully into that family of love, has a strangely sedentary name. They hang around eternally staring at each other, God staring at God’s own self in the first place.

The three eternally loving divine persons, in the Trinity as I learned it, don’t seem to be doing much, either. God, for the Greeks, would have to be unchanging. Any change would be a step down from perfection. The ancient Greeks allowed no possibility of change in their imagination of perfect being, or God.

It’s a very calm Trinity, and it answers well to a Greek concept of perfection. (I always liked that part of the theory.) Perfect and changing? We have been adopted into the divine family of love that existed from all eternity. God did create a world, and the Son came to this world and declared us his brothers and sisters. This, I learned, is what God is like whether or not God created anything. (This part always seemed less convincing, but I supposed if knowledge can be a person, so can love.) The Father and the Son love each other with a love so profound that this love is a third person, the Holy Spirit. The Son looks back at the Father and returns that love. (This part seemed to make sense.) That copy is another person, God the Son, whom the Father loves. God knows God’s self, and this knowledge is so perfect that it is an exact copy of God. God is perfect in all ways hence, God’s knowledge is perfect. Quite a bit less technically, the version of the doctrine I learned went like this: While it gave lip service to divine incomprehensibility, Catholic neo-scholastic theology … engaged in luxuriant technical description of God’s inner self-differentiation ….” (p. Oddly enough for something no one could understand, I was then given a neat explanation. Like, I guess, the queen in Alice’s Wonderland, who could believe six impossible things before breakfast.

I learned early on that the Trinity is impossible to understand and that belief without understanding is not only OK but even a Christian virtue. … should the doctrine of the Trinity have to be dropped as false, the major part of religious literature could well remain virtually unchanged. … despite their orthodox confession of the Trinity, Christians are, in their practical life, almost mere ‘monotheists.’ As long ago as the late 1960’s, Karl Rahner laments that Her final chapter, “Trinity: The Living God of Love,” has helped move my own thinking on the Trinity forward.Ī renewal of thinking about the Trinity began with the realization that this central doctrine didn’t have much impact on Christian piety and life. It surveys with lucid explanations new developments in Christian theology. (I wrote an introduction to this book some months ago.) Johnson’s book accomplishes what its subtitle suggests. This is the last of the many contemporary issues in theology that Elizabeth Johnson tackles in her 2007 book Quest for the Living God: Mapping Frontiers in the Theology of God. The doctrine of the Trinity has become a fruitful area for Christian scholars to contemplate anew in the past half century or so. What kind of love is that? Now I’m wondering: Does anything actually happen in the Trinity’s perfect love story? What kind of love characterizes the three-Person God, who conceivably might not ever have created a world to love, but still would be, somehow, loving? Renewal of theology on the Trinity Narcissus doesn’t do anything about his love except sit around and stare and eventually pine away. So it’s not like Narcissus, but there’s another problem with the Narcissus “love” story that thinking about the Trinity ought to avoid.

JACK JOHNSON FRAGMENTS MEANING SERIES

Three Persons, and it’s only one God, a paradox that comes into a later post in this series on the Trinity. The Father is not the Son, who is not the Spirit, who is not the Father. The Christian doctrine of the Trinity improves on the Greek stories by seeing in God’s own being the otherness of the object of genuine love. But what else is there for God to love? Maybe God is in love with God’s own self from all eternity, like another mythical Greek, Narcissus. That must mean God didn’t just fall in love after creating a world to fall in love with – like Pygmalion falling in love with a statue he made.

Jack johnson fragments meaning