I've been listening to a lecture by Graham Cole, Trinity without Tiers (HT Mike Bird). He made one point which really struck a cord with me:
There is a way of doing Christian ethics that actually leaves the Gospel out. That is you reconstruct the inner life of the essential Trinity and then draw applications to family life, marriage, the church, even for some the wider society. And yet I believe the genius of the NT is to always go through the narrative of Christ and what he has done for us.
[...] instead of trying to imitate the inner life of the essential Trinity, I think Thomas a Kempis got it right - we imitate Christ. Did Jesus say: "this new commandment I give to you, that you love one another as I love the Father"? No, "as I have loved you". And behind that is the footwashing of John 13 and the self-sacrifice and the humility that represents.
1 Corinthians 11:1: Paul says "imitate me as I imitate Christ".
1 Peter 2:21 says he left you an example to follow in his steps when it comes to unjust suffering.
1 John 2:6 says we're to walk as he walks.
I could show this over and over again that that is where the accent in our NT falls. The narrative of Christ is crucial to the shape of a cruciform Christian life. A life that is shaped by the cross.
He then discusses the wonderful text of Philipians 2:1-11, before concluding:
notice he doesn't say be other person centred like I have always been in the eternal godhead. He goes through the story of Christ, the evangel, to make his point. The imitation of Christ is, I think, the NT accent.
I don't think it is an either/or but I agree that we ought to accent the cross. More generally I disagree with Cole on quite a bit, not least in being more positive about a strict ruling of Rahner's rule and its application to ethics. I loved Tom Smail's Like Father, Like Son: The Trinity Imaged in Our Humanity. Maybe some kind of distinction between (creation?) ethics based on being created in the image of God, and (redemption?) ethics based on how we engage a fallen world like Christ did in dying for his enemies (although creation and redemption is all of one piece [thanks Isaiah, Ienaeus, Wingren, Wright etc] there is some kind of differentiation)?
More thought required.
I've been thinking similar thoughts to your main Cole quote here. There's an exciting renaissance of trinitarian thinking in our circles at the moment but some of how it gets rehashed loses the very things that gave it birth. For me trinitarian thinking arises precisely out of the economy and out of a determination to be a Christ-alone theologian. But some of what I hear in people's enthusiasm for trinity becomes an
ReplyDeleteenthusiasm for divine love in the abstract, divorced from Christ and Scripture and gospel.
Interesting that the John quotes from Jesus *are* explicitly grounded in the Father-Son love (e.g. John 13:3ff; John 15:9); 1 Corinthians 11 goes on to v3; 1 Peter has already told us 1:20 and 1 John is full of the intra-trinitarian love. But yes, to skip over Christ in the gospel is worrying indeed.
Glen
Thanks for last paragraph especially Glen.
ReplyDeleteMaybe we should plagiarise Gregory of Nazianzus: "I cannot think on the Father's eternal love for the Son without quickly being encircled by the splendor of the the Son's love for us in dying for us; nor can I discern the Son's love for us without being straightway carried back to the Father's love for the Son."
Its a perennial problem of abstracting and losing the narrative. Sometimes I wonder if Rahner's rule is used so that we can leave behind the economy to get onto the ontology - when actually I think it should encourage us to trust fully in the economy and never leave it behind.
I find Christ's example - preeminently his death on the cross - rather more of a spur to action than reflection on the trinity.
ReplyDeleteI would have thought human relationships - family life, marriage etc - are analogies to help us understand the trinity rather than the other way around.
Yes, what Glen said.
ReplyDeleteAnd remember, Cole is going to argue the way he does because he's an egalitarian. he gave a talk at oak hill on why women can preach/ teach etc. and it was pretty weak, with some less than satisfactory trinitarian theology in there too (he separated the economic from the immanent, did away with 'eternally begotten,' and when I asked him at the end whether he thought it had to be the Son who was sent and not the Father he didn't really get the question, answered a tentative yes but didn't seem to know why that should be the case). Nice bloke, good on lots of things. Not at his best on this sort of thing, imho.
Hi Steve,
ReplyDeleteI can't decide about your second paragraph. Will have to think.
Hi Pete,
Yes he does separate the economic and immanent. He also critiqued complementarians for letting there understanding of men/women's roles effect their Trinitarian theology. He called it the tail wagging the dog. I imagine the criticism cuts both ways.
Rahner's rule should make us obsess with the economy - the gospel. It's a perversion when it's used to make us ignore it!
ReplyDeleteBut it also means that reflections on the death of Jesus *are* reflections on the triune love (e.g. John 17) - so it's not an either or.