Title: Trinity and Process: Relevance of the Basic Christian Confession of God
Abstract: THIS SHORT essay aims at contributing something to the appreciation of the relevance of the Trinity. Since it has been traditionally the central mystery of the Christian faith, any effort in this direction can hardly be misplaced. The doctrine of the Trinity stands starkly expressed in the lapidary formulas of the Christian confessions: In there are three divine the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit; God is one in essence and three in Persons, and so forth. The immediate relevance of such a mystery is not clear. And it is becoming increasingly less so. The question is asked openly, or experienced privately: Why should my faith be so complicated? Surely the contemporary believer has enough problems in keeping a simple and straightforward belief in God, without complicating the issue with an insoluble mathematical problem that seems to owe more to Greek speculation than to genuine Christian experience. Why need modern Christians hold to such a complicated faith? Perhaps the orthodox would reply that the question is wrong from the start, If ood has revealed Himself, He reveals Himself in the fulness of what He is. A dissatisfaction at the complexity of what is serves merely to indicate that the supposed believer has fallen into a typical state of hybris. He is just not prepared to accept for what He is, to let Him be Himself. He is not open to the fact that God, through revelation, has shown us the reality of God. For the present, it is not to our purpose to pass judgment on the question or its rejection. Nonetheless, one thing is clear: there is a decided tendency at all levels of Christian thought today to bring out the integral humanism of the gospel we believe in. A rich burgeoning of theological themes along anthropological, existential, and secular lines attests this. The problem remains with regard to the tying together of all these aspects into a coherent whole; but this lack of completion does not distract from the widespread sense that our salvation is a human salvation, and that the mysteries that are presented to our faith do have a human meaning. Yet what of the Trinity? It does not readily appear to us as our mystery. It remains, still, more on the side of mystification. When cognizance is taken of this state of affairs, the following possibility opens up: to present the Trinity as a process necessarily involv-
Publication Year: 1970
Publication Date: 1970-09-01
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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