Chapter Seven Trinity and Church
Church – a community of believers, a communion of local Churches.
The Eucharist is the Church, effecting and manifesting that communion.
Ecclesiology – fourteenth century.
Early centuries – Unity.
Later – Membership for salvation, the episcopate, catholicity, validity of sacraments.
13th Century - Papacy and Collegiality.
The Second Vatican Council articulated its ecclesiology in terms of the missions of the Son and Holy Spirit (LG 14; AG 2-4; NA 2), an understanding of the Church as mystery, "a people made one by the unity of the Father, the Son and the holy Spirit" (LG 4) and as sacrament "of communion with God and of the unity of the entire human race" (LG 1,5; SC 5), as universal sacrament of salvation (LG 48; GS 45). It invoked notions of the Church as the Body of Christ (LG 3, 7), the pilgrim people of God (LG 9-17), and community of faith (LG 4, 8). A new understanding of fellowship, subsidiarity, collegiality, and what effectively amounted to a "communion ecclesiology" emerged. Lumen Gentium and the ecclesiology it expressed were indeed a momentous development.
Leonardo Boff: The Trinity as our Social Programme
Drawing an explicit connection between the Church and the Trinity, Lumen Gentium describes salvation history in trinitarian terms (§§2-4), and Gaudium et Spes presents the life of the Trinity as model for and source of interpersonal relations in human society: "The Lord Jesus, when praying to the Father 'that they may all be one ... even as we are one' (Jn 17:21-22) ... (implied) that there is a certain similarity between the union existing among the divine persons and the union of God's children in truth and love" (§24). Inspired by Vatican II, Leonardo Boff has articulated a distinctly trinitarian ecclesiology. He is focused on questions like: How is the Trinity good news? How does our faith in the Trinity inspire and motivate us to live our lives in a fuller and freer and more Christian way? How do we, as individuals and as Church, become "a sacrament of the holy Trinity"? (LG 48; GS 45). The primary concern of Leonardo Boff is not with the systematic intelligibility of the mystery or with orthodoxy, but with trinitarian faith as a matter of orthopraxis. He is interested in making the mystery of the Trinity meaningful and liberating for the poor.
Boff finds the answer in an understanding of the Trinity by means of what we may call the social model, wherein the mystery of the Trinity of the three divine persons is envisaged as a communion of coequal subjects that is characterized by relatonality and mutuality. The icon of the Trinity by Andrei Rublev expresses this great mystery of love; this holy society. Rublev's icon depicts a communion of three coequals that is characterized by mutuality and reciprocity, mutual giving and receiving, wherein each of the divine persons exists in and with and for the others, and which excludes any sense of subordination or marginalization. The society that is the Trinity, Boff proposes, serves as a prototype of human society; thus motivating social and historical progress, here and now.
The mystery understood in this way itself functions as an analogy for human community. Boff effectively reverses the direction of the analogy here. Society is summoned to transform itself after the model of the trinitarian communion. Trinitarian faith implies and indeed demands a commitment to social transformation, to a socially and politically responsible praxis. The Trinity effectively constitutes a social project, a project to be accomplished in this life. "The Trinity is our social programme."
This understanding of Trinity effectively inspires a model of society and of Church that is characterized by equality, inclusion, participation, and hospitality, without subordination or marginalization. It would respect and protect diversity, esteeming unity, not uniformity. There would be no subordination of one person relative to another in a society modelled on the Trinity; there would be neither glaring inequality nor grossly uneven distribution of wealth and resources, such as prevails in our world today. A spirit of hospitality and reconciliation would prevail.
Similarly, the ecclesial community in its visible social reality should model the Trinity through an egalitarian and communitarian organization. Boff observes that a hierarchical conception of the Roman Catholic Church prevails, with centralized exercise of sacred power in the clerical corps concentrated in the figure of the pope, and a rather authoritarian manner of leadership of the laity, involving little participation and reflecting a monarchical conception of power. This hierarchical structure is not consistent with our faith in a trinitarian God. It is more consistent with a monotheistic conception of God, wherein God is the pinnacle of the pyramid, a notion that serves to legitimate a correspondingly pyramidal structure in earthly organization. A consideration of the trinitarian communion ought to prevent the concentration of power and open the way for broad egalitarian participation on the part of all. He returns to the scriptural sources and the sense in the early Church that the Church is a community of believers, each member bearing his/her own gifts and talents, to be exercised for the benefit of all.
Now the unity of the Church was a vital concern in the early Church and a rather monolithic monotheistic understanding of the unity of the Church emerged, reflected as we saw above in the writings of Cyprian and centuries later in the declaration of Vatican 1. But, in contrast to any juridical or bureaucratic understanding of unity, Boff explains: “The unity of the Church does not consist in a bureaucratic uniformity, but in a perichoresis among all the faithful, in the service of others (mission). The unity of the Trinity, which is always the unity of the three divine Persons, is reflected in the unity of the many who make up one community.... (The Church) becomes "the body of the Three" not by merely existing as a Church and calling itself such, but through its continual efforts to become a community of faith, celebration and service” (Trinity and Society, p.106-7).
Boff's considerations regarding the communion of the three distinct beings of the Trinity result in a critical attitude to personhood, community, society, and the Church. Being a person means acting in a web of mutual relationships. Being a community means acting in a web of mutual relationships that are participatory and inclusive, not hierarchical or elitist. Being a society means respecting differences; it means mutual giving and receiving; it means fellowship, equality, and openness to personal and group expression.
Boff argues that episcopal collegiality, wherein the many bishops in the Church form the one episcopal body, finds its best theological basis in the communion of the Trinity. His intention is not to question the primacy that belongs to the papacy, but rather to situate it in its proper place, within the Church community of the faithful, not above or outside it. Similarly, while there are many local churches together, united through the risen Christ and through the Spirit, they make up the one Church of God. As Boff comments: “The trinitarian vision produces a vision of the Church that is more communion than hierarchy, more service than power, more circular than pyramidal, more loving embrace than bending the knee before authority. Such a perichoretic model of the Church would submit all ecclesial functions (episcopate, presbyterate, lay ministries, and so on) to the imperative of communion and participation by all in everything that concerns the good of all.”
Boff stresses the vital role in the Church of the Spirit, who acts through the sacraments, especially confirmation and Eucharist: “The Church is the sacrament of Christ and also that of the Holy Spirit.... The Church stands on these two columns: the incarnate Son and the Spirit poured out on all... A Church without charisms, without legitimate space given to the Spirit, without the vigour and strength that give it youth and a spirit of inquiry, is not a Church in the image of the Trinity, the true church of God.”
Limits
1 Theology maintains that the human person is made in the image of God (Gen 1:26) and that it is our human vocation to be fashioned in the image of God. An understanding of the analogy must therefore also take into account that our most proper human calling is to be conformed to God. Still, to insist that social relations should reflect the trinitarian relations is to fail to take into account that God is God and that we are not God. The human being is not divine and is ontologically separated by a vast divide from the Godhead. An understanding of the Trinity as the model for human community must respect our creaturely difference from God. Given our necessarily limited understanding of God, such trinitarian notions as person, relation, and perichoresis can be applied to our understanding of human existence and community only in a strictly analogical, not a univocal, sense. In other words, the meaning of "person" and "communion" as used in reference to the doctrine of the Trinity is not identical with the meaning of "person" and "communion" in ecc1esiology. We use the terms analogously, always recognizing both a similarity and an ever greater dissimilarity. Our notions of the triune God are but notions of God, who dwells "in unapproachable light" (1 Tim. 6:16). God's triune nature forever remains a mystery to us, which we can worship but not in the end imitate. The social model of the Trinity is just that, a model, a way of approach to the mystery that remains forever unfathomable mystery to our limited creaturely understanding.
2. A creaturely imaging of God is necessarily limited, because human being is marred by sin, evil, and transitoriness. As human beings, we are sojourners. The Church is a sojourning people, on the way from baptism to the eschatological new creation and communion, which is our destiny. The proposition that the human ecclesial community should be modelled on the Trinity is limited because human beings can correspond to the triune God only in historically appropriate ways within the conditions of history.
3 The divine perichoresis, the notion traditionally used to express the mystery of the divine unity, cannot serve as a model of intra-ecclesial unity because there can be no correspondence at the human level to the interiority of the divine persons. Human persons simply cannot be internal to one another in the way that the divine persons are, and so their unity cannot be conceived in a perichoretic fashion. Theologically, the social model of the Trinity risks a certain tendency to tritheism and it struggles to render satisfactorily the mystery of the divine unity. Ecclesiologically, the unity of the Church is grounded and continually sustained in the interiority of the Spirit. It is not the mutual perichoresis of human beings, but rather the indwelling of the Spirit common to everyone that makes the Church a communion corresponding to the Trinity, a communion in which personhood and sociality are equiprimal. Just as God constitutes human beings through their social and natural relations as independent persons, so also does the Holy Spirit indwelling them constitute them through ecclesial relations as an intimate communion of independent persons.
Still Boff undoubtedly makes a genuinely significant contribution to contemporary trinitarian theology. As for any model of the great mystery of the Trinity, the social model undoubtedly functions best when complemented by other models or analogies.
The Local Church and the Universal Church
Trinity as Mystery of Communion and Personhood
For Orthodox theologian John Zizioulas trinitarian theology and ecclesiology are intimately related. He perceives the Eucharist as the pre-eminent point of the nexus between trinitarian theology and ecclesiology. Zizioulas understands that from the moment a human being becomes a member of the Church, he/she takes on God's way of being, which is the way of relationship with the world, with others, with God. Church, then, is an event of communion, and it is as a communion of persons that the Church is an image of God. Since God's being is relational, the being of the Church is relational. Since God's being is persons in communion, so the Church's being is persons in communion.
Zizioulas appeals to the theology of the Cappadocians as the foundation of his theology and particularly to the notion that the Trinity has its source in the person of the Father, as personal originating principle from whom the Son and Spirit proceed. The insistence on the monarchy of the Father in the begetting of the Son and the breathing out of the Spirit means that being is traced back to person, not to substance, with profound existential ramifications for our understanding of personhood. Personhood thus emerges as a relational category and as the highest ontological principle, with primacy over the category of substance. Moreover, difference between persons emerges not as the cause of disunity but as the ground of communion. Otherness is constitutive of unity, not consequent upon it. Otherness and communion coincide in the mystery of personhood. In this understanding of being, there is no being without communion, and no communion without persons, and no communion without difference.
In regard to the question of the relationship between the local Church and the universal Church, Zizioulas observes that "Roman Catholic ecc1esiology before Vatican II ... tended to identify the 'catholic Church' with the 'universal Church' ... thus considering the local Church as simply a 'part' of the Church.” Zizioulas also notes, however, that, "in certain Protestant Churches, the local Church ... retains priority and almost exhausts the concept of Church."
In the early Church, the unity of the Church is constituted and realized in the celebration of the Eucharist, over which the bishop presides. There is an integral connection between Eucharistic communion, ecclesial communion, and bishop. The role of the bishop, as presider of the Eucharist, is primarily to effect unity. The bishop is the center of unity of the particular Church. Unity is, indeed, the essential ministry of the bishop: the unity of the Church is unity in the bishop.
Zizioulas holds that the local Church is not simply part of the Church; rather it is completely identified with the Church; it is "one, holy, catholic and apostolic" but "a local Church, in order to be not just local but also Church, must be in full communion with the rest of the local Churches of the world."
He is wary of juridical institutional notions of Church and critical of centralizing universalizing tendencies in the Church. Instead of a permanent center of unity, there is the principle of mutual recognition of each of the local Churches, as expressed in the convocation of local synods and the institution of ecumenical councils. The structures of ministry which are aimed at facilitating communion among the local Churches must not become "a superstructure" over the local Church. “All Church structures aiming at facilitating communion between local Churches (e.g. synods, councils etc.) do possess ecclesiological significance.... But they cannot be regarded as forms of Church.” Neither Protestant provincialism nor Roman Catholic universalism is justified by early Church sources. It is important to keep an adequate balance between the "local Church" and the "universal Church" and to avoid both extremes. Neither the local nor the universal takes precedence or has pre-eminence; such questions are transcended in the Eucharist, he explains: "it is the Eucharist itself which will guide us in this, for, by its nature, it expresses simultaneously both the 'localization' and the 'universalization' of the mystery of the Church, that is the transcendence of both 'localism' and 'universalism."'
For Jean-Marie Roger Tillard, the inculturated local Churches play a constitutive role in the Church; indeed, there is no universal Church that exists apart from the local Church. He affirms that each local Church is wholly Church, while also affirming that no particular Church can be the Church in isolation. The nature of the local Church is to be in communion with other local Churches. Tillard explains that the Church, as early tradition understands it, is "Church of Churches"; it is "a communion of communions," "a communion of local Churches, spread throughout the world."
When Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger was Prefect of the CDF, he agreed that one can see the universal Church as "a communion of Churches," and that the unity or communion between particular Churches in the universal Church is rooted in baptism and above all in the Eucharist and the episcopate. Still, he explicitly argued that the universal Church is both "temporally and ontologically prior," over and above and as distinct from every individual particular local Church. The term "communion" is not a univocal concept; it is applied analogically: In order to grasp the true meaning of the analogical application of the term communion to the particular Churches taken as a whole, one must bear in mind above all that the particular Churches, insofar as they are "part of the one Church of Christ," have a special relationship of "mutual interiority" with the whole, that is, with the universal Church, because in every particular Church "the one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church of Christ is truly present and active." For this reason, "the universal Church cannot be conceived as the sum of the particular Churches, or as a federation of particular Churches." It is not the result of the communion of the Churches, but, in its essential mystery, it is a reality ontologically and temporally prior to every individual particular Church (CDF, Some aspects of the Church Understood as Communion, § 9).
Here it seems that a trinitarian theology that focuses more strongly on the divine substance, as distinct from the communion of three divine subjects, supports an ecclesiology that accords priority to the universal Church (represented by the Catholic Church) in relation to the individual identities of the respective various local Churches. In an ecclesiology where the universal governance of the Church is conceived in terms of central administration, a hierarchical order under the authority of the papacy with a more monarchical than collegial model of operation, then the one divine nature acting externally as one (opera trinitatis ad extra indivisa sunt) corresponds to the one Church, constituted as one person, in Christ. The "one" (not the "three") is structurally decisive; the one divine nature, the one Christ, the one pope, the one bishop, and this results in, and effectively legitimates, a strongly hierarchical structuring of the Church. While Cardinal Ratzinger argued that the nature of ecclesial unity is trinitarian, since God is trinitarian, and that "the Church's action and behaviour must correspond to the 'we' of God by following the pattern of this relationship,” the principle of unity and structure that he propounds is effectively monistic. This is in contrast to the patristic vision, a vision that is effectively expressed in terms of a theology of communion, wherein the full mystery of the one Church is realized in a communion of the many local Churches.
A trinitarian model also demands that the structure of the Church cannot be conceived only by way of ‘the one,’ but must give significance to ‘the three’, to collegiality. Cardinal Walter Kasper argues for a more perichoretic view of the relationship between the local and the universal Church: ‘The universal Church certainly does not come into being through any subsequent union, addition and confederation of individual Churches, yet the individual Churches are, with equal certainty, never merely a subsequent administrative partition of the universal Church in individual provinces or departments. The universal Church and the individual Church are mutually inclusive. They dwell within one another mutually. That is why it is part of the essential structure of the Church to have two focuses, like the two focuses of an ellipse: it is both papal and episcopal,’ (Theology and Church, p.160).
Besides, conceiving ecclesial communion in a trinitarian fashion leads us to examine this same correspondence at different levels in the ecclesial community. So not only the pope-bishops relationship, but the bishop-priests, priest-parish community, ecclesial leader-small Christian community and Christian parents-family relationships are called to correspond to the trinitarian relationships. What is entailed is extending the institution ‘downwards’ from bishop and diocese, to priest and parish, to ecclesial leader and local community. So, perceiving the Church in a trinitarian fashion implies that the principles of monarchy and collegiality are utilised as principles for every ecclesial grouping or community throughout the Church. The reciprocity of the relations of the trinitarian persons finds its correspondence in the image of the Church in which all members serve one another with their charisms, co-ordinated by the office of leadership, which is expressed in a collegial manner. Like the divine persons, they all stand in a relation of mutual giving and receiving.
Chapter Eight Trinity and the World Religions
Two biblical principles serve to inform our considerations: First, God's salvific will for all; "God wishes all to be saved and to come to the full knowledge of the truth" (1 Tim. 2:4); and, "There is no other name by which we are saved" (Acts 4:12), which describes Jesus Christ as unique saviour and universal mediator of salvation. How, then, from a Christian perspective, are we to regard other religions and their adherents? Can Christian and Catholic theology affirm that the non-Christian religions traditions have, per se, positive significance as means of salvation? What is the role of the Church and of Christian mission?
Extra Ecclesiam Nulla Salus. It would appear that the axiom was at this stage directed to those who culpably refused to enter the Church or who, as heretics or schismatics, deliberately separated themselves from it. However, in later centuries it symbolized the Church's essentially negative stance toward the possibility of salvation outside the Church and to the salvific power or efficacy of non-Christian religions. Until relatively recent times, the goal of Christian evangelizing mission was conversion, a goal motivated by the belief that there was little, if any, hope of salvation outside of explicit faith in Jesus Christ and membership in the Church. Just before Vatican II, Pope Pius XII affirmed the axiom but he explained that actual membership in the Church is not required for salvation and that one can be related to it in desire or in longing, even implicitly.
Vatican II stated that "those could not be saved who refuse either to enter the Church, or to remain in it, while knowing that it was founded by God through Christ as required for salvation" (LG 14). It pressed forward to a much more optimistic and positive stance in its regard to other religions. First, it affirmed the salvific efficacy of other Christian Churches, while maintaining that "the fullness of grace and truth" resides in the Catholic Church (UR3). Then it recognized the possibility of salvation outside of the Christian communities (LG 16 & NA 2) While recognizing "seeds of the Word" (AG 11, 15), "a ray of that truth which enlightens everyone" (NA 2), and "elements of truth and grace ... a sort of secret presence of God" (AG 9) in other religions, however, Vatican II does not acknowledge other religions as mediators of salvation. The emphasis and concern are rather on the issue of the universal possibility of salvation and so Vatican II states "since Christ died for everyone, and since all are in fact called to one and the same destiny, which is divine, we must hold that the Holy Spirit offers to all the possibility of being made partners, in a way known to God, in the paschal mystery" (GS 22).
This expansively inclusivist position had been prepared for earlier in the century by new thinking, especially that of Karl Rahner. His theology of non-Christian religions arose out of his theology of grace, which recognized that grace is operative and effective in the lives of people who are not Christian. The universality of grace then provided the context for the possibility of universal salvation. Rahner recognized that the human response to the divine offer of salvation could be either explicit or implicit. His notion of "the anonymous Christian" refers precisely to the universal divine self-communication and the universal possibility of human response. Rahner recognises that the non-Christian is saved not simply in spite of his/her non-Christian religious convictions but positively through them and through the mediation of non-Christian religions, which are therefore accorded positive salvific significance.
The theology of the anonymous Christian clearly preserves the absolute claim that salvation takes place only in and through the person of Jesus Christ. While non-Christian religions can be regarded as legitimate and positively salvific, there is no question of admitting the equality of those religions with Christianity. Rahner's notion was criticized for compromising the proclamation of Christ, for relativizing Christian faith, for undermining the need for explicit Christian faith and making mission redundant. Moreover, it was accused of imperialism in its assimilation of non-Christians, of presumptuousness to that effect, of not really taking other religions seriously, and of basic lack of respect for the freedom of other religions.
Still Rahner's theology attends with deep respect to the non-Christian religions, with the attitude that Christians can truly learn from them. Mission is not, then, a matter of bringing God to the godless, or grace to the graceless. But neither is the Church's missionary effort negated, nor is it rendered superfluous. Rather, such an understanding of the universality of grace prompts a new theology of mission, whereby mission is recognized as serving the incarnational dynamic of grace.
Ad Gentes explains the Church's mission in terms of the trinitarian mission of the Son and Spirit: "The Church on earth is by its very nature missionary, since, according to the plan of the Father, it has its origin in the mission of the Son and the Holy Spirit. This plan flows from 'fountain-like love,' the love of God the Father" (AG 2). Note Pope John Paul II proposed a new version of interpretation of the axiom, "without the Church there is no salvation.”
The Salvific Efficacy of Non- Christian Religions.
The new questions regarding non-Christian religions are partly prompted by the keen awareness in modern historical consciousness that no culture is normative or absolute, that all are historically conditioned, necessarily limited, and essentially relative, and that even concepts as fundamental as those of justice and rationality are tradition-constituted and tradition-constitutive. In this context, relativism has become a central issue. In its strongest form, it expresses the notion that concepts such as rationality, truth, reality, right, and good are ultimately relative to a specific conceptual scheme, theoretical framework, culture, or society. In this light the question of the relationship of Christianity and its truth claims to other religions and their truth claims emerges anew, given that the central tenet of Christian faith is that in the particular historical person of Jesus Christ is found the absolute saviour and the unique and unsurpassable revelation of the one true God. In the context of modern understandings of cultural, religious, and moral relativism and in the relatively slight impact to date of Christian missionary activity in Asia, it is problematic.
So new questions emerge now. Are the non-Christian religions a part of God's salvific plan for humankind? Is religious pluralism part of God's creative salvific plan, in principle (de iure), not just as a matter of fact (de facto)? In regard to this issue, Dominus Iesus, (2000) clearly rejects any theory that argues for religious pluralism in principle. However, Dominus Jesus assumes that religious pluralism in principle necessarily involves rejection of uniqueness of Jesus Christ as universal saviour, the central tenet of our Christian faith. But are the two mutually exclusive? The challenge is to hold to the Christian tenet regarding the uniqueness of Jesus Christ as universal saviour while constructing a distinctly Christian theology of religions and for interfaith dialogue that is neither vacuous nor imperialistic.
Jacques Dupuis: The Enduring Universal Action of the Word and the Spirit
Jacques Dupuis explores how "those elements of truth and grace and which are, as it were, a secret presence of God" (AG 9) can be discovered in the other religious traditions. He describes the trinitarian rhythm of God's dealings with humanity throughout the history of creation as manifested in the active presence of the Word of God throughout history (Jn 1:1-5,9) and in the universal dynamic action of the Spirit of God in the world. From the very beginning of creation, God has revealed himself to humankind, through the Word and the Spirit.
God’s self-communication in the person of Jesus Christ is the apex and summit of God’s self-revelation in salvation history. As the incarnate Son of God, Jesus Christ is constitutive of universal salvation. He is the Saviour of the world. But Dupuis argues that God's self-revelation in Jesus does not exhaust the divine mystery. So, while Jesus is constitutive of the salvation of all, this does not exclude other saving figures or traditions. He proceeds to situate a theology of world religions within the broader trinitarian framework of God's gracious dealings with humanity throughout history. Scriptures attest, in Jn 1:1-3, that God created all things through God's Word, who throughout history, before as well as after the incarnation, has been "the true light that, by coming into the world, enlightens everyone" (Jn 1:9). The true light here refers not to the Word incarnate but to the Word, who is known in the Jewish scriptures as the Wisdom of God. The action of the Word is not constrained by the particularity of the incarnation event and similarly, the Holy Spirit is universally present and operative throughout salvation history and is not exhausted or limited by being communicated through the risen Christ. Both the Word and Spirit of God are universally present and active before and after the incarnation of the Word in the person of Jesus Christ. Dupuis thus proposes a trinitarian Christology as an avenue of approach to a Christian theology of religious pluralism.
This trinitarian approach affords Dupuis the possibility of viewing other religious traditions as mediators of God's salvation in the economy, through the presence of the Word of God and the Spirit of God. Dupuis proposes a theology of religious pluralism in which the other religions traditions converge in God's one creative plan. So, it is legitimate to speak of "complementarity and convergence" between Christianity and the religious traditions. From this perspective, other religious traditions emerge as "ways" of salvation, and religious pluralism emerges as not just de facto but de iure, intended and willed by God.
Dupuis, in constructing a theology of religious pluralism, explicitly combines the essential Christian tenet of the universal saving significance of Jesus Christ with the conviction that other religious traditions have saving power for their adherents. His theology rests on a distinctly trinitarian understanding of God, wherein each of the divine persons is present and active in its own distinctive way throughout salvation history. He insists that Christian faith in a trinitarian God, the trinitarian plurality of persons, of itself provides no necessary foundation for religious pluralism, nor the evidently plural nature of reality itself. Rather, Dupuis explains: “It belongs to the overflowing communication of the Triune God to humankind to prolong outside the divine life that plural communication intrinsic to that life itself. That God spoke "in many and various ways" before speaking through his Son (Heb 1:1) is not incidental; nor is the plural character of God's self-manifestation merely a thing of the past. For the decisiveness of the Son's advent in the flesh in Jesus Christ does not cancel the universal presence and action of the Word and the Spirit. Religious pluralism in principle rests on the immensity of a God who is love.” Dupuis recognizes that the reality of religious pluralism finds its foundation in the mystery of God who is Love.
A Trinitarian Approach to Non-Christian Religions and Interfaith Dialogue
Raimon Panikkar observes that Logos Christology has been a strong universalizing element in Christianity since the teachings of Paul and John. While a Logos Christology arguably offers a useful and constructive point of entry for encounter with Judaism and Islam, the concept of the logos is not so helpful or fruitful in encounter with Hinduism or Buddhism. Panikkar notes that neither Hinduism nor Buddhism has a grounding in a concept of logos, and indeed they both negate it. Buddhism seems to affirm a notion of nothingness, and the fulfilment of human existence is understood not in terms of dialogue but rather as dissolution into the Absolute, while Hinduism seems to affirm a kind of pantheism, a kind of undifferentiated union as the goal of one's spiritual journey. Buddhist spirituality emphasizes silence, darkness, and negation and resists any attempt to make formulations about ultimate reality, for it understands that the ultimate state of enlightenment is beyond words.
Panikkar suggests the realm of spiritual experience and spirituality as a way of approach to interfaith dialogue, rather than creeds and doctrinal formulations (logos constructions). He recognizes three essentially different forms of spirituality in the world religions, and he relates these to three concepts of the divine: (1) a silent self-emptying apophatic dimension of spirituality, such as is found in the Buddhist experience of nirvana; (2) a personalistic dimension, as is expressed in the spirituality of the person of the Son in Christianity, which has its history in Judaism and Yahweh's revelation to the Jews; and (3) an immanent dimension, which is found in Hinduism and its spirituality of non-duality of the self and the Absolute, and of undifferentiated union with the Absolute. Panikkar relates these three different spiritualities and spiritual understandings to the Christian experience of the three persons of the Trinity.
Panikkar first relates the Christian understanding of the person of the Father in the Trinity to the Buddhist sense of the Absolute. The earliest trinitarian formulas speak not of Father, Son, and Spirit but of God, the Christ, and the Spirit. The Father is the Absolute, the only God, ho theos. The Father is the unbegotten, the one from whom the Son and the Spirit proceed, and the one who is the ultimate source and origin of all creation. The Father is the one whom no one has ever seen, except the Son. Everything that the Father is he gives to his begotten Son. “We may say: the Absolute, the Father, is not. He has no ex-sistence, not even that of Being. In the generation of the Son he has, so to speak, given everything. In the Father the apophaticism (the kenosis or emptying) of Being is real and total. Panikkar asks: “Is it not here truly speaking, in this essential apophatism of the "person" of the Father, in this kenosis of Being at its very source, that the Buddhist experience of nirvana and Simyata (emptiness) should be situated. One is led onwards towards the "absolute goal" and at the end one finds nothing, because there is nothing, not even Being. "God created out of nothing" (ex nihilo), certainly, i.e. out of himself (a Deo) - a Buddhist will say.”
From this perspective, any attempt to speak of the Father is effectively a contradiction in terms. Rather, a profound apophaticism is appropriate in regard to the Father, who is the source of all being and who has no being. It is necessary not to speak, and to be silent. Panikkar thus relates Buddhism and its apophatic silence to the Christian experience and understanding of the Father, the Father who himself is silent, who dwells in inaccessible light, and expresses himself through the Son.
While silence characterizes the Father, speech characterizes the Son. Indeed, Panikkar argues for the unique personhood of the Son: “Only the Son is Person, if we use the word in its eminent sense and analogically to human persons: neither the Father nor the Spirit is a person… Correctly speaking, then, it is only with the Son that man can have a personal relationship.” Panikkar thus relates Judaism, Islam and Christianity, as religions that claim personal divine revelation in words, as religions of the Word, to the Christian experience of the person of the Son, who mediates between God and humankind and through whom all creation has been made and has its being.
Third, Panikkar treats the spirituality of the Spirit as quite different from that of the Word. Similarly, it is quite different from that of the Father, for, while transcendence characterizes the Father, immanence characterizes the Spirit. Panikkar makes the connection between the immanent dimension of the spirituality of advaitan Hinduism with the Christian understanding of Spirit, who is the union of Father and Son and who dwells in our hearts. The spirituality of the Spirit consists in a "consciousness" of the divine immanence and a "realization" that one is enveloped in, known and loved by the mystery of reality. A kind of passivity is appropriate to the spirituality, for faith in the Spirit cannot be formulated; it too is silent. So, Panikkar summarizes the spiritualities of the world religions in terms of apophaticism, personalism, and divine immanence and identifies these three essential dimensions of spirituality with the three persons of the Trinity: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
Panikkar's trinitarian theology is described as advaitic Trinitarianism. Panikkar's point is that "the Trinity may be considered as a junction where the authentic spiritual dimensions of all religions meet." In his approach to a theology of religions, the plurality of divine persons in the Trinity is the ultimate foundation for the plurality of world religions. Indeed, in Panikkar's theology of religious pluralism, the Trinity itself is the ontological foundation for the very existence of religious pluralism.
Most important of all, a trinitarian approach of this kind offers a comprehensive, constructive and hopeful meeting ground for the religions, recognizing their different spiritualities, and without doing violence to their fundamental intuitions. From this trinitarian perspective, the Christian is able to recognize and respond to the different spiritual traditions and their spiritualties as interrelated dimensions of each other. Panikkar would persuade us that ultimately we as Christians have not plumbed the depths of Christian faith in the Trinity unless and until we have entered into encounter with the spiritual experience of Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, and Judaism.
In Augustinian teaching the vestiges of the triune Creator of the cosmos are recognized in the physical world, in the human person, and in human interpersonal community. The plurality of world religions fits within this "vestige doctrine." Secondly, in the trinitarian doctrine of creation of the Greek fathers, creation is recognized as a trinitarian act of the Father, as the primordial cause of all things, through the Son and Spirit. Redemption and sanctification are also recognized as the dynamic trinitarian act of the three persons. Thirdly, the strategy of appropriation, which emerged in trinitarian theology in the West, affirms that, although all essential divine attributes or perfections are possessed by all three persons, certain attributes are associated with or appropriated to individual divine persons by virtue of the inner-trinitarian processions or their roles in salvation history, for example, power to the Father, wisdom to the Son, and love to the Holy Spirit. Thus, Panikkar's proposal to situate a theology of non-Christian religions in the context of a theology of the Trinity sits comfortably with the tradition of Christian thought whereby everything in creation is seen as coming from and reflecting its trinitarian creator, the Trinity of the divine persons.
Panikkar's trinitarian approach to a theology of other religions and to interfaith dialogue positively allows for religious pluralism by grounding the patterns of religious experience in their plurality and yet affirming a deeper unity in that diversity. The Trinity emerges as the comprehensive reality within which to situate and make sense of human spirituality as expressed in the various patterns of religious experience.
Conclusion
A trinitarian approach undoubtedly affords Christian theology a much broader and more generous and gracious horizon within which to reconsider questions concerning the other world religions, compared with that afforded by more traditional fulfilment theologies, wherein the world religions find their fulfilment in the mystery of Christ. Stretching beyond the confines of a narrowly Christomonistic and ecclesiocentric approach, a trinitarian imagination and approach to the question of the world religions allow a new openness, a basis for inclusiveness, a respect for diversity, a glimpse of unity, and a more hopeful horizon for genuinely dialogical interfaith encounter, as well as a new appreciation of the trinitarian depths of our own Christian religious experience.
Chapter Nine Trinity, Spirituality, and Worship
To speak of Christian spirituality is to speak of one's lived experience of a distinctly and explicitly Christian way of being in the world that encompasses the full gamut of engagements which together constitute one's being: one's relationships with God, others, self, and the social, political, and economic realms of one's existence.
Given that we believe that we are created in the image of God, the doctrine of the Trinity throws light on our life, on what we are created and called to be, on our sharing with each other and in the divine life, the communion of love that is God. Christian spirituality is surely intrinsically trinitarian, for it ultimately concerns the invitation to each and everyone of us, individually and in community, to participate in the very life of the triune God, through communion with the Son in the power of the Holy Spirit.
Spirituality
A Christian spirituality which is Trinitarian through and through is shaped by 'gift', for the doctrine of the Trinity expresses for Christians a way of speaking of the mystery of God's constant, eternal giving as gift. The gift is Love, God's very being, the divine self-gift, given and giving as gift. The language of gift serves to clarify the language with which we speak of our experience of God as Giver, Given, Gift/gifting. "By the Spirit who is Gifting, dwelling within our hearts, we behold the mystery of the Trinity in the Incarnate Word, Given, whose life, words, mission, passion, dying, and rising are the very love of the Giver of all life and love. At the same time, the distinctive manner of self-giving varies by virtue of the uniqueness of the relation of Father, Son, and Spirit: Giver, Given, and Gift/Gifting. The Father is originating Lover; the Son is the self-expression of Love; the Spirit is the inexhaustible self-giving of Love. Because gift-giving is always in relation to another and because prepositions express relationship and relationality, the “language of gift" is expressed well in prepositions, such as "through," "with," "in," "to," "for," and "toward."
Trinitarian spirituality is thus a way of perceiving the gift of God's love in the mundane, ordinary and routine details of everyday life. It is not that the Trinity is a model for how to live the Christian life. Rather, understanding the doctrine of the Trinity helps us to live freely in and from the gift given through the Word and in the Spirit and to speak the Trinitarian mystery with our whole lives.
Various aspects of the spiritual life, such as prayer, meditation, contemplation, and asceticism can be identified as means of effecting ever-fuller participation in God's triune life, ever-deeper communion with the divine three-in-one Love. All these indicate the truth that learning to receive is a lifelong process, never an entirely accomplished fact. Christian spiritual life is not only gift but task; it is both gift and task. We are invited to participate in the missions of Word and Spirit, through which the world is transformed by Love into a communion in the one Love. A Trinitarian spirituality is at once personal and relational, inclusive of every human concern and commitment, giving particular attention to the last, littlest, and least of the earth, to those who are most wounded and weak in the Church and in the world. Such a spirituality demands the work of charity and justice. The task is ultimately one of deification, the notion that was so strong in early Christian understanding, through which we enter into and participate in the very life of God. This indeed is holiness. Holiness rests in becoming persons conformed to the image of God in us, being toward and for another, for others and for God. Being holy is being alive in the glory of God that transforms.
The term "perichoresis" describes the active, mutual, equal relations, without subordination, between the Father, Son, and Spirit. If the doctrine of the Trinity not only expresses what and who we think the divine persons are, but also articulates what human persons are called to be and become, then, in trinitarian perspective, human beings are to cultivate, nurture, and sustain the kinds of relationship that are reflective of this perichoresis.” If we live from a trinitarian spirituality, then dualisms – such as secular/sacred, lay/clerical, action/contemplation, world/Church, mundane/spiritual – are essentially untenable, for we see the whole world and everything within it as the place of the triune God's presence and action. Such dualisms are contrary to the notion of the trinitarian perichoresis. Rather, a trinitarian spirituality recognizes that all creation is the arena of God's self-giving love, providence, and salvation, that all is embraced by God who is love, through Jesus Christ in the Holy Spirit.
The mystery of the Trinity grounds the communion among human persons and indeed their communion with other living things and all creation. A trinitarian spirituality thus implies and impels the journey to ever more complete communion with and between persons both divine and human. It is because of the doctrine of the Trinity, or the truth that this doctrine expresses, that we can point to the love between people and say quite literally: There is God. Ubi caritas et amor, Deus ibi est, ‘Wherever there is charity and love, there is God (Holy Thursday Liturgy).
Paschal Dimensions of Trinitarian Spirituality
From the anthropological perspective, the paschal mystery of Jesus Christ shows that, in Jesus' choice of divine communion in preference to any autonomy of existence, the perfection of being, at the interior of the life of God, lies in communion, as distinct from any autonomy or independence. The paschal mystery of trinitarian love, then reinforces the utter importance of the principle of communion, as opposed to any notion of autonomy and independence, which also emerges strongly from the social model of the Trinity. Second, the paschal mystery shows that entry into communion with God necessarily passes through a stage of death. It shows that God's self-communication and offer of communion require a renunciation of existence on the part of the human person, a surrender and transcendence of the self, a radical dying to self, and ultimately physical death. Indeed the paschal mystery reveals that the possibility of this total ekstasis of self-an "excentration" or "decentering" of self in a radical other-regarding relationality-is our ultimate meaning and vocation: precisely through it, we enter into the life of the trinitarian communion and exchange.
The paschal mystery of Jesus Christ reveals that entry into communion with God necessarily passes through a stage of death. It shows that the transfiguration of our existence into the new life of the resurrection requires a real renunciation of our this-worldly existence, a radical surrender and transcendence of the self. Physical death is the ultimate expression of this radical surrender. The paschal mystery reveals that this transcendence of self in radical other-regarding relationality is our ultimate vocation and destiny: we are invited to it and, through it, we enter into the life of the trinitarian communion.
From the event of the cross, from the event in which God totally identifies himself with forsaken humanity, the Spirit is poured forth upon the world, the Spirit of healing and reconciliation. This outpouring of the Spirit from the cross grounds the Christian spirituality of compassion. The suffering and sin of the world touch the divine heart, so that the three persons of the Trinity involve themselves in our suffering and redeem it. On the basis of such a vision of God the only legitimate Christian response is a spirituality of compassion. The Christian is summoned not to withdrawal from the world but to overcome the threat of apathy, and, like God, to open himself or herself to the suffering of his or her brothers and sisters.
Since God has identified himself with the poor and the abandoned in the cross of Christ, the Christian wants to place himself where God has placed himself. The more one grows in love, the more one chooses the form God himself has chosen: poverty, humiliations, insults. It is a Christian choice motivated by an identification of love. Rather the Spirit, poured out from the cross, drives the contemporary believer to an identification of compassion with the contemporary Christ, with the Christ who has identified himself with the God-forsaken, and who therefore can and must be found hidden under the form of his poor and suffering brothers and sisters.
Since at the trinitarian level, unity is constituted through perfect love, which is the very nature of God and through which the divine persons exist in one another, the relations between persons in the Church must reflect the mutual love of the divine persons. Even though the divine persons are personally interior to one another, they do not cease to be distinct from one another. Their interpenetration presupposes their distinction, without dissolution or obliteration of the self. Nor is their identity self-enclosed. In the Trinity, the personal identities of the divine persons are shaped through twofold relationships to the other two divine persons. The self is thus shaped and enriched by making space for the other and by giving space to the other. This complex and dynamic notion of identity that is in this way inscribed in the doctrine of the Trinity can speak powerfully to contemporary debates about identity.
Besides, the notion of perichoresis presents the notions of self-donation and self-reception to and from others. The Trinity as our social vision means that our social practices image the Triune God's coming down in self-emptying passion in order to take human beings into their perfect cycle of exchanges in which they give themselves to each other and receive themselves back ever anew in love. Similarly, a trinitarian spirituality involves giving ourselves to each other and receiving ourselves back in love.
Trinity and Prayer
A trinitarian approach to prayer highlights the communal, social, and indeed public character of all prayer. Through communal prayer, a trinitarian spirituality seeks ongoing participation in a communion of persons, both human and divine. Based on the conviction at the heart of the doctrine of the Trinity that God is with us, for us, in us, Christian life is to the Father, through the Son, in the Spirit. We make the sign of the cross in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. We pray to the Father, through the Son, in the Spirit. When we pray, we pray not just as creatures but as children of God. "For you have received the Spirit of sonship. When we cry, 'Abba! Father!' it is the Spirit himself bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God" (Rom 8:15-16). This means that, when we pray, we are not just creatures calling upon our Creator. We are joining in and entering into the eternal dialogue of the Son and Father, in the Holy Spirit; we are, as we say, in the Spirit: our worship is "in Spirit and in truth," (Jn 4.23). That we are taken into the very life of God lies at the very core and center of our faith and our spirituality. Here also the language of gift prevails. In prayer, I am held in the knowledge that all that I am and all that I have is first and finally gift. Prayer is a way of living with, in, and from that gift. All the time.
The fourth and final section of the Catechism of the Catholic Church treats Christian prayer. "Prayer and Christian life are inseparable," the Catechism explains, "for they concern the same love and the same renunciation, proceeding from love; the same filial and loving conformity with the Father's plan of love; the same transforming union in the Holy Spirit who conforms us more and more to Christ Jesus; the same love for all men and women, the love with which Jesus has loved us" (#2745). The Catechism concludes with a reflection on the Our Father. What is particularly striking is that the Catechism's beautiful exposition on the mystery of Christian prayer is thoroughly trinitarian in its approach. The role of the Holy Spirit emerges with particular vividness and remarkable beauty: "The Holy Spirit, whose anointing permeates our whole being, is the interior Master of Christian prayer. He is the artisan of the living tradition of prayer" (#2672). The Holy Spirit is "the interior Teacher of Christian prayer" (#2681), "the living water 'welling up to eternal life' in the heart that prays" (#2652).
Trinity and Liturgy
Prayer finds its public expression in communal liturgical worship. Christian worship, like Christian spirituality, is necessarily trinitarian. The Trinity forms the basis of all liturgical prayer. The trinitarian confession is concerned with the 'Glory be to the Father through the Son in the Holy Spirit.' In fact, Christian faith in the Trinity was first expressed in prayer and worship, long before that faith found expression in dogma. The biblical testimony to the experience of the threeness of God is probably more liturgical than confessional. Worship serves to express the lex orandi (the law of praying) of the Christian community, and as such effectively functions as a custodian, so to speak, of Christian faith and revelation, and as guide in and criterion for the discernment of the lex credendi (the law of believing) of the Church, as has been evident at a number of significant points in the tradition. For example, in leading up to the Council of Constantinople, Nazianzus argued for the divinity of the Holy Spirit on the grounds that the Holy Spirit along with the Father and Son was being invoked in baptism and in liturgy. The lex orandi informs and determines the lex credendi. It is in liturgy that our theology and our spirituality find their fullest and most explicit expression. Alexander Schmemann explains: “The formula lex orandi est lex credendi means nothing else than that theology is possible only with the Church as she participates in the leitourgia.”
The presence of the Trinity is felt in the key prepositions 'a', 'per', ‘in', and 'ad'. Everything comes from the Father and returns to him. Liturgical prayer is always addressed to the Father. The prayer is addressed to the Father per Filium, through the mediation of the Son, and the action is performed in the Holy Spirit. In our liturgy we pray to the Father, through, with, and in Christ, in the unity of the Holy Spirit.
The Eucharist and the Trinity
The Eucharist in particular provides a vital context for the expression and confession of our faith in the Trinity. In it one passes from hearing the Word, to the thanksgiving offered to the Father and to the memorial of the sacrifice and to communion in it thanks to the prayer of epiclesis uttered in faith. Since the very early Church, indeed, the Eucharist has been understood and celebrated in the light of the mystery of the Trinity. The Second Vatican Council in a number of texts stressed the trinitarian character of the Eucharist, for example SC 47.
The eucharistic liturgy is first encompassed in a eucharistic-trinitarian inclusion, with the trinitarian invitation in the form of the sign of the cross, "In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit," at the outset, and the trinitarian blessing together with the sign of the cross at the conclusion, "May almighty God bless you, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit." The triumphant hymn of praise, the Gloria, takes up the trinitarian opening note and rises to a trinitarian hymn of praise. The Liturgy of the Word prepares for the Liturgy of the Eucharist, where the eucharistic prayer, celebrating the history of salvation, is fashioned along explicitly trinitarian lines. The liturgy culminates in the eucharistic prayer, a prayer of thanksgiving and sanctification. While the eucharistic prayer is essentially addressed to the Father, as the one to whom the Church addresses its thanksgiving (Eucharist), the prayer unfolds with strong christological and pneumatological tones, each echoing the other.
There are three great testimonies to the presence of the Trinity in the Mass. First, the 'Deus' to whom the orations of the mass are addressed is the Father. Such prayers normally end with a reference to the mediation of the Son, per Christum Dominum nostrum. A second important witness is the doxology at the end of the eucharistic prayer. Finally, there is the structure of the anaphora itself. The Father appears as the principium quo and the terminus ad quem of the Eucharistic action. Christ, the incarnate Son, appears there as the High Priest; through whom we perform the same priestly action. The Holy Spirit appears there as the in quo, He in whose presence the same action is completed hic et nunc.
The trinitarian rhythm of the liturgy unfolds in three stages:
1. Eucharistia.. The Eucharist is a sacrifice of thanksgiving to God for all that God has done in creation, redemption, and sanctification, for us and for our salvation. The prayer is addressed to the Father.
2. Anamnesis (remembrance). The Eucharist is a commemoration or a "memorial" of the death, resurrection, and glorification of our Lord Jesus Christ, who was crucified and who rose and ascended into heaven, and who becomes present to us in the eucharistic gifts of bread and wine, which become his body and blood. It is our sacramental calling to mind, our anamnesis, of Christ Jesus. The Catholic tradition, especially in the West, has stressed the sacrificial character of the Eucharist. Christ himself is the priest as well as the victim in the Eucharist. Because of the controversies at the time of the Reformation, the Catholic tradition has stressed the words of consecration pronounced by the priest and the resulting transubstantiation. There is recognition today that one should not rigidly limit the moment of consecration to the words of institution. The early Church recognized the whole anaphora as consecratory.
3. Epiclesis (invocation). In calling on the Holy Spirit, we ask that the bread and wine be made into the body and blood of Jesus Christ, and that believers be transformed into one body and one spirit in Christ. The epiclesis of the Spirit is addressed to the Father.
Since Christ is the High Priest and the ordained priest acts in the person of Christ, there is a danger of christomonism and excluding the role of the Holy Spirit. It is the pneumatic Christ who acts in the Eucharist, and the body of Christ which we receive in the eucharist is the Easter pneumatic Christ, Christ penetrated by the Holy Spirit. It is important not to neglect either the christological or the pneumatic aspect of the Eucharist or to create an opposition between them.
The eucharistic epiclesis effectively culminates in the invocation of the Father as Our Father. The Our Father rightly follows the eucharistic epiclesis, for it is in the Spirit that we call the Father "Our Father, Abba": "God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying 'Abba, Father'" (Gal. 4:6). The reception the Eucharist (Holy Communion) unites us to and in Christ: "Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood abides in me and I in him" (John 6:56). The celebration of the Eucharist, the taking of communion, is a participation in the eschatological banquet of the Kingdom; it is "pledge of future glory" (SC 47), an anticipation of the eschaton, the end-time, when all creation will be transfigured and transformed by the Holy Spirit, when God will be "all in all" (1 Cor. 15:28). The purpose of Holy Communion is the divinization of the believer, the union of the believer with the Father through Christ, and also the union of believers with one another. The fruit of the Eucharist is meant to be the unity of the ecclesial community. The Eucharist can only produce all these desired effects through the action of the Holy Spirit.
Finally, the solemn doxology offered at the conclusion of the eucharistic prayer also points to and reinforces the trinitarian context, structure, and rhythm of the liturgy: "Through him [Christ], with him and in him, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, all honour and glory is yours almighty Father for ever and ever." Then, in the concluding rite, following the blessings at the end of the Eucharist, is the instruction: "Let us go in peace to love and serve the Lord... Thanks be to God." Here is the last and indispensable dimension of the Eucharist: mission. Having partaken of the body and blood of Jesus Christ, we enter into the process of divinization, our indwelling in the Son and the Father through the Spirit, and we receive a share in the trinitarian life and trinitarian mission. We are therefore sent out, commissioned to share in the redemptive mission of Word and Spirit in the world.
In summary then, we can say that the Eucharist as the culmination of the Church's prayer and as the representation of the paschal mystery bears witness to the complementary action of the Son and the Spirit in their respective missions from the Father. Through these missions the Father is made known to us and we are divinized as we are drawn into the trinitarian economy of salvation.
Conclusion
A spirituality that is attuned to our trinitarian faith will mine the boundless depths of our faith that God is Trinity, a communion of three divine persons in the one God. It will be attuned to an understanding of our very being as oriented toward and constituted by our relations with each other, with the cosmos, and with the triune God. It will not fear or resist the essentially paschal dimension of the Christian life, for it will recognize and acknowledge that the invitation to ever-fuller participation in the communion of the triune God involves a real self-denial, a renunciation of self, and ultimately physical death. It also inspires and motivates us to ever-fuller participation in our communion with others. This is the fullness of life to which we are called. We are created for nothing less than communion with the trinitarian God who is Love.
