Battlestar Galactica, Monotheism, Terrorism and Trinity

I'm not the big sci-fi guy in my family. Josh and Nancy are far more devoted to that genre, but I go along for the ride from time to time. In the last few years that has meant time with Battlestar Galactica (not the old one with Lorne Greene, but the new one with James Edward Olmos). It's well done, and interesting for a lot of reasons, not the least of which is its theology.

The basic story line revolves around a long conflict between the human race and their rebellious creation, the Cylons. The Cylons have evolved from "robotic" soldiers (what humans call "toasters") to human-like characters who cannot be detected within the normal human population. OK, I know, but its amazing how easy it is to suspend belief here because the story is well-told.

But here's the thing. The humans are polytheists, the Cylons monotheists. The humans thank the gods for their world, the Cylons view the world in relation to one source. This is a pretty interesting flip on things, one worthy of its own post by someone with more knowledge of both the show and systematic theology.

But here's the other thing. There's a new spin-off from the BG phenomenon that tells the back story, Caprica. The creation of the Cylons, it appears, comes out of a terrorist attack (in a round about way) committed by a religious cult that is interested in serving "the one true God." Monotheism and terrorism are related. The link is explicit. The belief in one God as the source for everything is inherently violent. With one God, there are only two sides, good and evil, with us or against us. The implication is that this is inherently violent.

I've stewed over this for a number of years now. Christianity is not only monotheistic, but historical. That is, the primary issue for Christianity is the outcome of history, and that is certainly a contested reality. I'm not saying that Christianity is inherently or inescapably violent, but I am saying that a monotheistic, historical faith has certain temptations along these lines.

Moltmann makes similar observations to those made by the BG crowd (don't want to oversimplify BG here, the question of God is dynamic, not wooden or static). Moltmann is critical of any theology that is monistic, by which he means any notion of God as a single source. He suggests that such a view of God results in an over/against view of the relationship between God and world. Much of Christian theology is susceptible, for Moltmann, to the label "monist." This is particularly true of Christian traditions, including most of Western Christianity, that define God in relation to a single substance (ousia) that is prior to an understanding of God as three persons. Pannenberg piles on at this point as well, criticizing any notions that reduce God to a single-acting-subject.

The antidote for both to Christian monism is a more biblical understanding of God as Triune. For Moltmann, if you start with philosophy, you emphasize one God and then try to explain the three persons. If you start with the biblical testimony, you start with the relations of the three persons and move from there to God's unity. As Moltmann works the biblical witness, particularly as it relates to the "history of the Son" and the drama of the Kingdom of God, we find a dynamic God with different centers of action and reciprocal relations. This God is not closed, like the god of classical theism; immutable, simple, persisting, free. The God of Scripture is open, passionate, understood as making room for the other in love.

For me, this is precisely the importance of the Trinity, especially as seen in the work of theologians like Moltmann and Pannenberg. It keeps God in history without the amplifier of monism. It guards the Christian imagination from an easy us vs. them. It makes possible visions of God's future that are rooted in non-violence which corresponds best to the story of Jesus found in the gospels.

God, World, Church

This story is becoming increasingly familiar to me. A church spends a lot of time focusing on its identity. It does this primarily in relation to certain beliefs or ideas. These get shaped into a mission or vision statement, perhaps even a strategic plan if the church is really aggressive. The idea is that if identity can be established before hand, then action will follow. Great theory. It seldom works.

It seldom works for a lot of reasons. The biggest of these reasons, and perhaps the source of all the rest, is that identity discovery is a complex matter requiring more than just self-reflection. We don't know who we are fully before we act. And we don't know who we are fully apart from our life with others.

When we think of identity as something we settle before mission, then the world ends up being only the place where we deliver the things that have already been decided. The world becomes an extension of our project, a target of our good intentions, a passive recipient of a benevolent patron. Often, we define our identities over/against the world, and when we offer them our already determined lives we find them less than impressed. We are often irrelevant to their lives.

The great thing about the missional church movement from my perspective is that is insists that the church only understands its life as a church in mission, as a church in relation to others. Some who write about the missional church still want to define the church's identity before engagement with the world. They talk about the church's essence as something that comes before mission. The church is and then the church does.

But if our identity is truly an identity in God's mission, then we cannot know who we are, not completely, apart from a real life engagement with God's world. We discover who we are in relation to others.

This view of mission makes more sense in relation to a particular view of God. If God is just a set of enduring characteristics, an essence, or enduring substance that is unchangeable or unaddressable, then there is no need to consider the other in terms of our identity or mission. This, however, is not the biblical view of God.

In our last post, we noted that the Cappadocians (you remember them, Basil, his brother Gregory of Nyssa and his other brother Gregory Nanzianzus, well only the first was his actual brother) held together the three persons of the Trinity as one by defining personhood in relation to otherness. We find our personhood only in relation, in this case God as Father, Son, and Spirit. The Cappadocians, however, still wanted to protect the Father from the otherness of the world. God is known primarily only in the inner relations of Father, Son, and Spirit, and the world participates in God only through the Son. The otherness of the world tells us nothing of who God is as a person.

Recent theologians, however, have taken the Cappadocians view of personhood and tied it to the biblical narrative in a way that brings the world back into view. We don't know who God is as Father, Son, and Spirit, apart from a fallen, suffering world. God's identity as Father, Son, and Spirit is only fully revealed in the concrete circumstances of the world, and in particular in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. We know God as Father, Son, and Spirit only through God's suffering participation in, with, and for the world. Our identity, as well as God's, cannot be defined in essential categories, but only in suffering participation with the world.

God, World, Church, 3

What accounts for some of our practices in church? For instance, what accounts for various practices of communion? In congregations of my ecclesial tradition we typically pass trays down rows and urge people to turn inward, to reflect on the meaning of the death of Jesus for them personally. This is not the way churches have always practiced the Lord's Supper. We read no description of this kind of practice anywhere in the literature of early Christianity? What accounts for this practice?

Several things would have to be answered to get a question like this. Our practices bear many meanings and not all of them are readily accessible. But at the very least there would be issues related to what we think of God and what it means to be human, and in turn what it means to be saved.

I've been making the point that in the Western theological tradition, God tends to be thought of as a single subject with three different roles (creator, redeemer, sustainer). Personhood is related to the acting subject. This not only applies to God, but also to humans. I am a self-contained individual. I count as a person because I am a self. Salvation, therefore, is primarily an encounter between Jesus and the self. It happens to me, in me, as a self-contained individual. It makes sense, in light of this, to practice "table" as a private experience with individual portions and inward thoughts.

This applies to more than just communion. This kind of individualism accounts for much of what we experience in worship. I often hear prayers or calls to worship that invite us to put the cares of the world aside so that we can focus on God, as if we could understand God apart from the cares of the world. I have invited students to observe worship to determine the "horizon" of the congregation's awareness. What is it that the worship service is aiming at? What horizon accounts for its practices, its language, etc. It becomes pretty clear for them that our practices cannot be understood primarily in relation to the world, or to a community, but in relation to individuals and most directly to their inner lives.

This is not wrong, in and of itself. It is, however, limited. And ultimately, if it is the primary imagination of the congregation, it makes otherness a problem. And I think this is rooted in part by our understanding of God.

This is not, however, the only way that God and humanity have been conceived in the Christian tradition. As we noted before, the Eastern church emphasized the thre persons of the Trinity. They had to account for God's unity in some way that did not diminish the three persons. They did this, in part, by redefining what it truly meant to be a person. We are not persons as individuals. We are persons only in relation to an other. Personhood is not defined primarily by individuality, but precisely in our recognition and engagement of the other. We understand personhood more completely when we imagine God as three.

Eastern theological notions have recently gained more currency in ecumenical discussion in large part because our understandings of personhood are changing in the Western philsophical tradition. Descartes' "I think, therefore, I am," has been expanded. There is no, "I think," apart from the recognition of an other. There is no "I" apart from a "Thou." Our identities are inescapably social. Ricouer, Levinas, Volf and others have written powerfully about our obligation to the other on the path toward personhood. It is not surprising, in light of this, that the Trinity has come more into focus in Christian theology. And social understandings of the Trinity have changed the way I think about what happens at church.

But here's the bigger payoff in my book. When we see God this way, the world becomes something other than the target at the end of the church's strategic interests. The church cannot know its true identity apart from its koinonia, its sharing participation, with the world. More, it is in God's love for the world that we truly see the nature of God, the love of the truly other. God's participation with the world, not just the church, is necessary for us to see God as a person, for his righteousness to be revealed. This kind of imagination about God would radically change our practices related to mission.

OK, I've gotten some of the big pieces out there, though in an overly simplified way. Let me see if I can break it down over the ext few weeks. Some of you have confessed eye glaze when you read this kind of stuff. I'll only invite you to love me as an other and I'll try to love you as a reader better as I unpack this.

God, World, Church, 2

All of us have an imagination related to God, church, and world. That is, we have imagined a world that accounts for the relationships between these three realities and this imagination authorizes any number of practices. Paul Ricouer (a moment of genuine respect at the mention of his name) sees the imagination as a productive human capacity that mediates the relationship between beliefs and practices. And people like Graham Ward and Charles Taylor argue that this imagination is a social thing. It is something that communities share, a repertory of sorts, that makes us competent in a common life.

The question then is what elements are being tied together in our shared imagination. And here's the thing, the most powerful things in a shared imagination are the things we can take for granted, the things we can assume. For instance, I assumed that all the cars on the road today had a basic respect for red and green lights. It allows us all to function together. We simply assume it. Can you imagine how terrifying it would be to drive to work if you couldn't assume that shared repertory? And these assumed things tend to be the last things that we question.

So, as a theologian (I'm a certain kind of theologian), I'm interested in how our beliefs and practices are tied together in congregational imagination.

One of the beliefs I'm interested in is our functional understanding of God. A congregation's shared imagination is different from what its individual members might believe. There might be a 1,000 different understandings of God in a congregation, but there is a shared life that assumes a common understanding., or at least a range of understanding. So, the real theological question is what view of God best accounts for the practices of a congregation.

Much of a congregation's imagination is not deliberately cultivated, but inherited, and from many sources. It takes something of an archaeology, what cultural anthropologists call a thick description, to uncover the various layers of a congregational imagination. That's what I'm trying to do with regard to our understandings of God, world, and church. Here's the thing: once it rises into view, it can be addressed.

All that to say...

Our practices in mission are embedded in certain understandings of God, and those understandings have to do in part with how we view the relationship of Father, Son, and Spirit. And even if we have an allergy to the word Trinity in our congregations or rarely talk about it in our congregations, we have functional understandings that have been in the water of Western Christianity since Augustine.

Last time I mentioned that Western views of Trinity tended to emphasize God's oneness (the shared being between the three), while Eastern views tended to emphasize the three persons. Both emphases are susceptible to distortions. The Western view can turn into modalism where Father, Son, and Spirit are thought of as just different modes of the same single acting subject. The Eastern can so emphasize each person that you end up with three gods.

These are more than just ideas to fight about. These differences have practical implications and tend to form a different kind of imagination about things like mission. Western views of God tended to focus on the mode of sending. How do you describe the relationship between Father, Son, and Spirit? Mainly in relation to the activity of sending. The Father sends the Son, the Father and Son send the Spirit.

The Eastern views of God tended to focus on the relatedness of the three persons. They are one through an interpenetrating communion, what is referred to as perichoresis. God is less a series of movements, and more a model of social life.

At the risk of a massive oversimplification (which is what I do best), we can at least begin by observing that these traditions produced very different notions of salvation and mission. The history of mission in the West often falls under the word, "expansion." It's how we think about things. The church is on the side of God in a series of sending. We're conquering, expanding the borders of the Kingdom. Eastern mission was thought of more as getting people to church, to experience the mystery of communion.

I want to come back to both views in more detail, especially as the Eastern impulse has been further developed in more recent Trinitarian thought. But for now, I want to point out that in both views the view of the world is problematic. In Western mission, the world is just a target. It's simply on the receiving end of a series of sendings. It has little impact on God's relational identity and plays no positive role in the story of redemption. The church here is both enlarged and reduced. The church is on the side of God and the things of God in the sequence of sendings. It has all the goods. But the church is also reduced to an instrument of God, a way for God to get things done.

It is interesting in light of this to think about Protestant missions in the 19th and 20th centuries (well, maybe intersting is too strong of a word). Mission was thought of almost exclusively in terms of sending to preach to individual souls. The question of establishing congregations was clearly secondary. We've experienced this with crusade evangelism (think Billy Graham or Louis Palau). It's always been a problem to think about how these individuals who have welcomed Jesus into their hearts belong to a community of God's people. And for most mission endeavors in this period, mission was not done by congregations, but by mission societies. Mission was a mode of the church's existence that could actually be done better outside of the congregation by a mission society. Mission is not the church's relational identity to God and world. (Yeah, interesting is really too ambitious for this paragraph).

In Eastern Christianity, everything that counts happens within the mystery of communion and communion happens only within the church. The world can only observe. The gulf between God and world is so wide and massive, that God can only commune with the world in Jesus, and by extension through baptism, the eucharist, and the bishop.

What both of these views of God hold in common is a certain understanding of being itself, an ontology, that has a stake in keeping God safe from the imperfections of the world. This hasn't always been the case in Christian theology, and more recent explorations of Trinity have proceeded from different understandings of God and being. But that's for another day.

To Perform the World Beyond the Reach of Pharaoh

On of the benefits of sojourning at a seminary is that you get to hear the guys who write the books. Today, my favorite author on matters pertaining to Scripture (particularly the Old Testament) is on campus. Walter Brueggemann just spoke on Exodus at a conference on Engaging Scripture for the Sake of the World. WB never disappoints, and so I have a little theology geek buzz going.

I'll just mention one point that WB made today that presses some on what I've been blogging about of late. WB sees the decalogue (10 commandments) as counter commandments, standing in contrast to Pharaoh's commandments about production, bricks, and straw in Exodus 5. Against the insatiable culture of slave production under Pharaoh's control, the way of YHWH provides a coventantal neighborliness that allows acts of kindness toward others.

In the middle of this wonderful exposition of Scripture, Brueggemann made comments about God and the world. He was taught in seminary, he told us, that if you begin theology with God's initiative you're likely doing good theology (I was taught the same thing). Problem is, he said, the biblical writers weren't clued in to this little theological key. Brueggemann refers to the middle part of Exodus as the narrative of departure and noted today that it is human initiative that pushes the story along. Pharaoah produces a cry through oppression, Israel cries out againts Pharaoh's reach, and God responds to the cry of Israel.

The initiative of the Exodus is located in the cry of the slaves that move beyond Pharaoh's reach. The cry is the refusal of a dehumanizing way of life built around insatiable production. The one who is other than Pharaoh (the holy one of Israel), hears Israel's cry and calls them into the performance of a counter story.

I simply want to point out here that creation is active in the drama of redepmtion. The story of God-world is not just a story of God's initiative. God is moved by human initiative. This is not to say that humans can provide their own deliverance, or that God is not an initiator. It is to say that God's relationship with creation is ust that--a relationship. The world is not simply a passive recipient of God's irresistable plan. The world is a real participant in the drama of redemption.

This dynamic view of God suffers with the negotiations made by early Christian apologists with a Greek thinking world. Stan Grenz, and others, refer to the theology that emerges in this period as onto-theology. That is, thinking about God that is rooted in a certain notion of being, namely a substantialist perspective that divides the world into subjects and objects. And in this world, God only works if God is impassable, that is not affected by the world. God is a persisting subject--omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent. In Trinitarian thought, great pains were made to shield the Father from the suffering of the Son.

We still live with much of this today. With regard to mission, we have used passages like Matthew 28 and the biblical language of sending to support a substantialist notion of God. God sends the Son, sends the Spirit (a point of contention between East and West), sends the church. The world is simply an object. The church simply an obedient instrument of God, on the side of God in a series of sendings. The result is a strategic view of mission rooted in a paternalism, often resulting in a heavy-handed imperialism or ethnocentrism parading as the kingdom of God.

The biblical story is not one of an impassable God, a persisting Subject, but of a God who is revealed in relation to human cries, whether of the cries of slaves in Egypt, or of the Son in the Garden of Gethsemane.

WB always raises the spectre of an unmanagable God who if faithful, consistent, precisely in response to human suffering. This, I believe, is the necessary starting place for "Engaging Scripture for the Sake of the World."

God, World, Church

Theology matters. And everyone does theology. Might as well be good at it. Especially if you want to do anything connected to the word missional.

What you think about God is inescapably connected to what you think about the church and the world. This is obvious in some ways. If you think of God as a wrathful judge, than you tend to treat your neighbors one way. If you think about God as merciful and loving, you treat your neighbors another.

What is less clear is that how you think about God as Father, Son, and Spirit is connected to how you treat your neighbors. But it is connected, and because its less obvious, may be far more powerful and determinative. The things we take for granted are the things that control us the most. And because the Trinity is a complex matter, it tends to be something we assume.

Making this tougher is that Scripture nowhere uses the term Trinity and is not interested, it seems, in defining the relationship between Father, Son, and Spirit. And because it seems to have little interest in defining these relationships, the various pieces don't always fit that well together.

Further complicating matters is the fact that once the church did become interested in defining these relationships, finding agreement proved to be a problem. There are two things, at least, that have to brought together in any doctrine of the Trinity--unity and personhood. The Western tradition (think Roman Catholic, Augustine, Aquinas) tends to emphasize unity, while the Eastern tradition (you can't even think about this, but if you want to try, think the Orthodox church and the Cappadocians) emphasizes the three persons. This is a complicated deal. Its enough to make you throw up your hands and give up, which is precisely what churches in my tradition did.

But here's the deal. We have been profoundly influenced by the Western tradition, like it or not, and it has influenced our understandings of mission. This is a complicated story, but let's just begin by saying that the challenge of seeing something as a unified subject is that it turns the everything else into objects. And mission practices tied to a subject-object view of the world tend to be imperialistic. One can't tell the story of Western missions apart from words like imperialism and colonialism (aka, the White man's burden).

Trinity is important in defining mission. In fact, the birth of the missional church conversation coincides with a rediscovery of sorts of Trinitarian theology. (Trinity had fallen on hard times under the rational gaze of the Enlightenment). The roots for the term missio Dei (mission of God) are often traced to Karl Barth who begins his theological writings with a return to Trinity. The conversation has moved beyond Barth, but he demonstrated again that the way forward in mission depends to a large degree on what we think about the relationship between Father, Son, and Spirit.

I hope to spend some time the next few weeks inviting you into this important conversation.