Trinity as ultimate reality means reality is relational. Ultimate reality is not a monism or one thing in three modes, nor is it three substances within a single abstraction, but the Trinity is a relational dynamic. This has implications for nearly everything; for how we conceive human experience, the church, creation and relationship to God. As Nicholas Lash describes, Trinitarian doctrine is the grammar, the structure, of the Christian school of discipleship.[1] This Trinitarian grammar provides for a creative and generative dynamic, which the early church and the church today is continuing to realize.
The Unpredictable Nature of Trinity
The problem is, the Trinity has political, social, anthropological, and even economic implications, which are impossible to predict. As Raimon Panikkar notes, “The Trinity is an irritant to any monarchic ideology, be it religious (monotheism), political (imperialism and colonialism), economic (global market), academic (pensée unique), or even lifestyle (technocracy).”[2] The Trinity is a doctrine to be realized, and “the world” mitigates against this realization in its attachment to an ever collapsing dualism (an identity through difference that reduces to sameness). This collapse (the violence of the world) in its various political, ethnic, and psychological antagonisms is predictable, but the positive overcoming of the mechanism of violence (peace) cannot be predicted or captured in a theory. Paul describes it as passage from slavery to sin to freedom in the Trinity.
The Passage from Trinitarian absence into Trinitarian Realization
In Romans 7, Paul pictures the ego pitted against the law as controlled by death, which amounts to a Trinitarian absence, which becomes clear in Romans 8, with the Son displacing the isolated ego, and Abba displacing the law, and death being displaced by the Spirit. Human violence against the self and the world is working out its trinitarian absence, a struggle undone through entry into the Trinity: “For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set you free from the law of sin and of death. . . For you have not received a spirit of slavery leading to fear again, but you have received a spirit of adoption as sons by which we cry out, ‘Abba! Father!’ The Spirit Himself testifies with our spirit that we are children of God . . . (Rom, 8:2, 15-16). Slavery to sin is characterized by fear and death and the impenetrable law which split the ego. This is displaced by a relation to Abba, in the Son, which is life in the Spirit. The realization of this unity not only shows itself in a psychological reorientation but in bringing together categories which were seemingly beyond reconciliation. God and world, matter and Spirit, heaven and earth, typically pitted in a dualism, are harmonized in a Trinitarian synthesis. Quite simply, realization of the truth of the Trinity is entry into peace and reconciliation, which is salvation.[3]
The Organic Nature of Salvation
This is not so much a cultural project (Christendom) or an institution or religion (Christianity) but it is this realization, corporately and individually of the wholeness to be found in the Trinity. According to Jesus, “The kingdom of God is not coming with signs to be observed; nor will they say, ‘Look, here it is!’ or, ‘There it is!’ For behold, the kingdom of God is in your midst” (Luke 17:20-21). God does not indwell an organization or a civilization but people. The civilizational and religious project have tended to obscure the point of the faith, to enter into Trinity and to live out the implications of being the kingdom. Christendom is on its last legs and Christianity as an institutional religion is in sharp decline, but this opens up the opportunity to the reality of “being in Christ” as a personal realization.
Which is not to say the project is individualistic, but the point of the ecclesia is as an organism and not an organization.[4] This organic understanding means not just personal growth, but recognition that relation to this truth is not like that of a religion or organization but is entry into the full realization of relationship. We are realizing but have not yet realized the fullness of this truth, either as it relates to ourselves, to other religions, or to the world as a whole, but we can participate in this growth without full comprehension. We are growing into Christ who, through us, is growing in the world, but we can only follow the form from our present perspective. “But to each one is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good” (1 Co 12:7). The kingdom is in process and is not historically complete, and this unifying work, certainly involving knowledge (beyond full comprehension) is giving rise to an intelligibility.
The kingdom is in your midst for the common good, but no single mind or organization or hierarchy controls or has a handle on this kingdom. It is a process of discovery and realization, which cannot be predicted or conceptualized or reduced to a set of doctrines or propositions. It is an unfolding story, which involves who God is in Christ. As Rowan Williams describes, there is no single institutional project or clear course of engagement with other traditions, other than the concrete future of a Christlike humanity, that is a humanity “delivered from a slavish submission to an alien divine power and participating in the creative work of God.”[5] It is not our place to provide a universal theory or explanation of how this might work in particular places, cultures, and religions. Though we may not know the universal how, we do know that it is in and through specific human encounter with the ever-expanding story of Jesus Christ and the church.
Conclusion: The Process of Salvation as a Trinitarian Realization
The unfolding relational nature of Trinitarian theology could never assume to speak the last word. “To the extent that the relation of spirit to logos is still being realized in our history, we cannot ever, while history lasts, say precisely all that is to be said about logos . . . We know that the unification of all things through Christ is not a matter of a single explanatory scheme being manifested to us, but of the variousness of human lives being drawn into creative and saving relation to the divine and to each other.”[6] We are in the midst of the purposeful groaning (Rom 8:26-27) working itself out in creation and the body of Christ. “Being Christian, if it means acting for these goals and for these reasons, is believing the doctrine of the Trinity to be true, and true in a way that converts and heals the human world.”[7]
[1] Nicholas Lash, “Considering the Trinity,” Modern Theology, vol. 2, no. 3 (1986), 183-96. Cited in Rowan Williams, “The Trinity and Pluralism,” in Christian Uniqueness Reconsidered: The Myth of a Pluralistic Theology of Religions, Edited by Gavin D’Costa (New York: Orbis Books, 1990), 13.
[2] Raimon Panikkar, The Rhythm of Being: The Unbroken Trinity, (New York: Orbis Books, 2013), 224-225.
[3] The experience of the synthesis of the Father and Son, time and eternity, Creator and creation, is through the Spirit. The Spirit is the realization of synthesis in an ever-abiding dynamic (Rom 8:26–27). Trinity as the structure of reality shows itself in being between (creation in process), and this relational betweenness constitutes not just a third, but is the truth of the whole. Time is not pitted against eternity, as if God is incapable of the temporal, but in Christ the Creator is groaning with creation (Rom 8:22). Just as the Father is through the Son, so too the eternal is in time. Panikkar calls it “tempiternal” in that just as the Father and Son cannot be separated neither can time and eternity be separated.Ibid, 226.
[4] Raimundo Panikkar, “The Jordan, the Tiber, and the Ganges: Three Kairological Moments of Christic Self-Consciousness,” in Hick and Knitter, The Myth of Christian Uniqueness: Toward a Pluralistic Theology of Religions, (New York: Orbis, 1995), 104
[5] Williams, 11.
[6] Ibid, 12.
[7] Ibid, 13.