Sculpture: The Divine Dance by Scotty Utz, Camp Rockmont, North Carolina
The doctrine of the social Trinity shifts our priority from barren individuality to abundant community.
Our natural tendency in the West is to think of ourselves as individuals with our own unique being, or “substance”. Individuality and substance are important, and overly dominant, concepts in Western philosophy and theology. They pervade our culture and form our worldview, frequently without us even realizing it.
The French philosopher Rene Descartes defines substance as a “thing that exists in such a way that it doesn’t depend on anything else for its existence,” noting that only God possesses such independent existence. Descartes then defines worldly substances as “things that don’t depend for their existence on anything except God.” This definition asserts the dependence of all things on God, then asserts their essential independence from each other. Descartes’s vision unites all reality to God, then fragments that very same reality.
Such a metaphysic implies, intentionally or accidentally, separation from our neighbors. If God has created us to be metaphysically separate from one another, then what motivates us toward unity? If, on the other hand, our sustaining God is Trinity, then our sustaining God is relationality, or being-toward-another. Because we are made in the image of God, we have received the imprint of our Sustainer. Hence, we are dependent not only on God, but on one another as well. We are fundamentally communal.
This mutualistic interpretation of life implies universal communion, thereby rejecting all forms of estrangement, domination, and hierarchy. Such a relational metaphysic may disorient us, since we (in the West especially) are more accustomed to the belief that things and people possess an underlying essence granting them a stable identity. In this view, a “thing” is what it is, and is not what it is not, forever.
But contemporary physics calls into question the existence of any underlying essence or unchanging substance. Quarks, for example, are the most basic units of protons and neutrons. According to quantum physicists, quarks have neither parts nor dimension, nor can they exist independently of one another—there is no such thing as a “free” quark. Yet, quarks combine to produce the atomic nuclei that grant the cosmos weight and solidity. Metaphorically, we could say that quarks function only in relation to one another.
Theologically, the social doctrine of the Trinity renders relationality, or communion, the most fundamental metaphysic in Christianity. God does not have relations; God is relations. Or, as Peter Phan writes, “In God relation is pure esse ad, facing-each-other, pure being-oriented-toward- each-other, pure self-giving and receiving-of-another.” Within the Trinity, each divine person possesses a centrifugal nature that seeks fulfillment in their neighbor.
God invites humans into the same metaphysical extraversion.
As a reinterpretation of our most basic reality, the Trinity forces us to reconceptualize our relationship to God, one another, and the cosmos. If reality is most basically communion, then to be real is to be in communion, and to be separated is to be less real. Division diminishes being. Prior to relation, in the eternal nothingness that is the absence of relationality, any isolated being is a nonbeing. A solitary being is a nonbeing that yearns to be yet can receive its being only through another. By divine decision, without relationship there is nothing, even for God.
The social Trinity completes the personal concept of God as an interpersonal concept of God.
Catherine Mowry LaCugna writes, “The identity and unique reality of a person emerges entirely in relation to another person.” The Bible has always insisted that God is personal, not abstract. Hence, you are not a glorious accident of cosmological evolution; you are a divinely intended gift, given by means of cosmological evolution. And within the universe is an unending desire for your well-being: “I alone know my purpose for you, says YHWH, my purpose for you to thrive, and my purpose not to harm you, my purpose to give you a future with hope. At that time you will call upon me and come and pray to me, and I will listen to you. You will seek me and find me when you seek me wholeheartedly” (Jeremiah 29:11–13a).
In the biblical view, unrelated personhood is unfulfilled personhood: “It is not good for [someone] to be alone” (Genesis 2:18 DRA [gender neutralized]). We can observe this truth today: newborns denied physical contact develop reactive attachment disorders, inmates left in solitary confinement go insane, lonely people become depressed. Without other persons, personality is lost, because personality is fulfilled only through inter-personality.
The doctrine of the Trinity expresses this theological insight by insisting that God is more than personal; God is interpersonal, and lovingly so. Since humans are made in the image of God, the more we love the more joy we receive. Since we cannot deny to God our richest personal experiences, we ascribe to God their consummation. Perfect love and its correlate, pure joy, both belong to God, who invites us into their union.
The doctrine of the social Trinity does not imply polytheism or tritheism (the worship of three separate gods).
Critics of social Trinitarianism argue that, if the Trinity implies three unique centers of consciousness, then Christianity has rejected monotheism and adopted polytheism or, more specifically, tritheism (the worship of three gods rather than one God in three persons). But Trinitarianism is not tritheism.
One way to distinguish the triune God from three gods is by contrasting the Christian Trinity with the Greek troika of Zeus, Poseidon, and Hades. These three gods are separate: ruling separate realms, marrying separate women, and pursuing separate lovers. They are ranked in power, over which they argue and for which they compete. They distrust one another; when their desires clash, they clash. Their disordered intentions produce a disordered world, as each wields power against the others in support of his arbitrary favorites.
In the Trojan war, for example, Zeus favors the Trojans, but Poseidon favors the Achaeans. When Zeus’s sexual attraction toward Aphrodite distracts him from the war, Zeus’s wife Hera advises Poseidon of this development, and Poseidon seizes the opportunity to strengthen his side. Later, upset by Poseidon’s intervention, Zeus sends him a message:
Go on your way now, swift Iris, to the lord Poseidon, and give him all this message nor be a false messenger. Tell him that he must now quit the war and the fighting, and go back among the generations of gods, or into the bright sea. And if he will not obey my words, or thinks nothing of them, then let him consider in his heart and his spirit that he might not, strong though he is, be able to stand up to my attack; since I say I am far greater than he is in strength, and elder born; yet his inward heart shrinks not from calling himself the equal of me, though others shudder before me.
Zeus, Poseidon, and Hades rule the cosmos but threaten chaos. Hades lusts after Zeus’s daughter Persephone and abducts her, with Zeus’s permission. Her mother Demeter, goddess of agriculture, threatens to destroy the harvest and starve humankind, and thereby deny the gods their sacrifices. Zeus must plead with Hades for Persephone’s return. Even the natural order is not safe from these three gods’ cravings.
Zeus, Poseidon, and Hades are three gods, and in no way one God. They exemplify tritheism, and in the worst way. Many things are triune, both three and one, in which the three are distinguishable but inseparable. A musical triad is three different notes that make one chord. A triangle is three unique sides that make one shape. The French tricolor is three different colors that make up one flag. Hydrogen cyanide is three different atoms (HCN) that compose one molecule. Deuterium is three different particles—proton, neutron, and electron—united into one atom. To assert that any of these examples is one but not three, or three but not one, is foolish. Likewise, the Trinity is three persons united through love into one God, both three and one, hence triune.
We all of us, in all our diversity, are made in the image of God. May we, who are many, so unite that we become one: perfectly unified difference, perfectly harmonized complexity—e pluribus unum. Such will be the Kingdom of God, which is the Reign of Love.
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For further reading, please see:
Descartes. Selected Philosophical Writings. Translated and edited by Anthony Kenny et al. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009.
Hesiod. Theogony, Works and Days, Testimonia. Translated by Robert W. Most. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006.
Homer. The Iliad of Homer. Translated by Richmond Lattimore. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011.
Kohl, Christian Thomas. “Buddhism and Quantum Physics: A strange parallelism of two concepts of reality.” Contemporary Buddhism 8, no. 1 (2007) 69–82. DOI: 10.1080/14639940701295328.
Lacugna, Catherine Mowery. God for Us: The Trinity and Christian Life. San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1993.
Olson, Roger E. and Christopher Hall. The Trinity. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002.
Phan, Peter C. “Relations, Trinitarian.” In New Catholic Encyclopedia, 2nd ed, edited by Berard L. Marthaler, vol. 12, 45–6. Detroit: Gale eBooks, 2003.
Zizioulas, John. Being as Communion: Studies in Personhood and the Church. Crestwood: St. Vladimir's Seminary Press, 1985.
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A friendly note to all Daily Kos readers. I am a progressive like you, only from a Christian perspective. In support of progressivism, I am trying to articulate a progressive Christian political vision. After all, no progressive leaders will be elected without the progressive religious vote. As I argue for progress from a Christian perspective, I am in no way asserting the superiority of faith to atheism, or Christianity to any other worldview. I am just trying to advance humanity from my own particular perspective. I think that God prefers kind atheists to mean Christians. My hope is that we can all cooperate across worldviews to create a more just, inclusive, and peaceful world. Thank you.
