RoboPreacher

Lately we've been touching on how the Trinity is involved in liberation, but we haven't spoken to it exactly. Here are some specific words from Gustavo Guti é rrez: "The Gospel is, therefore, 'that divine secret kept in silence for long ages but now disclosed... made known to all nations, to bring them to faith and obedience.' (Rom. 16:25-26). This mystery is the love of the father ( sic ), who 'loved the world so much that he gave his only son' (John 3:16) in order to call all humans, in the Spirit, to communion with God. Human beings are called together, as a community and not as seperate individuals, to participate in the life of the Trinitarian community, to enter into the circuit of love that unites the persons of the Trinity. This is a love which builds up human society in our history." (Obviously I would like to expand Guti érrez's vision to include human environment.) I think there is a lot to take in here. What is helpful? Wha

(This photo has been cropped and digitally edited to avoid giving the impression I am endorsing a particular church.) To go back to ecology and the Trinity, I read theologian, Amos Yong's synthesis of Moltmann's notion of Trinity: "If in trinitarian theology the Father ( sic ), Son, and Spirit are divine precisely insofar as they have their identity in subsistence (interpenetrating) relations with the other two persons, so also in a trinitarian theology of creation particular things are valued for what they are precisely because they are constituted by their unity in dynamic relationship with others (other things, creatures, human beings, and God.)" I liked this summary, and I think Yong articulates the implications well: "This framework prevents and overly anthropocentric understanding of the created world, even as it enables proper emphasis on humankind with a more cosmocentric perspective. " Yong's particular interest is not ecology, though. Yong, em

This post on the Trinity is intrinsically related to ecology (only if readers reject platonic dualisms which separate humans from nature). This post, however, broadens the dialogue a little. "The Liberating power of God the World's future begins in divine relatedness that is coming to articulation in the doctrine of the Trinity ." God: "The ineffable God cannot tolerate human oppression and suffering and thus leave (so to speak) the realm of ineffability to become one force among others working toward redemption and reconciliation." Jesus : "God enters the struggle as a concrete identity, Jesus the Son. As a concrete identity the Son can be distinguished conceptually from the ineffable source out of which the Son derived. This give the ineffable an identity it would not otherwise have had, namely a face or persona of the Father ( sic )." Holy Spirit: "In addition, the Spirit of conviction working within us is the identifiable divine persona that o

I hope you all had a blessed Easter. As we patiently journeyed through Lent I mentioned I was excited to talk about some other dimensions of the Trinity. With that in mind, I would like to discuss how our image Trinity affects our ecological attitude. Given, that lately I've been focusing on Moltmann, I will begin our thoughts with a quote by him ( which, this time I do not apologize for my reliance upon him ). Rather than laying out the argument about Christianity's history of an abusive relationship with the earth, I will build off the assumption that we all agree about this history. If, however, any readers are curious about the history, I commend Lynn White's wonderful essay, The Historical Root of Our Ecological Crisis . Anyway, how are Christians to begin living into a new attitude? Moltmann suggests something quite easy and historical: "We need only return to the original wisdom of our own religious tradition and rediscover what was repressed by the absolutist a