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The Experiences of a Trinitarian God.
By Administrator | September 10, 2007
The Experiences of a Trinitarian God.
By Rev. Scott Elliott
In the Christian tradition there have been three general roles by which we name our experiences of God’s thinking, feeling and acting in relation to the world. 1 These roles are generally referred to along the lines of Creator, Christ and Holy Spirit and are collectively known as the Trinity or The Trinitarian God.
Unfortunately the idea of the trinity has become quite muddled so that one can end up literally taking it all in to mean that is some sort of three headed being out there acting as one God. It does not have to be so odd or confusing. The Trinity is for me a way of picturing how our One God does things, it is a metaphor for explaining the otherwise unexplainable.
For example, a traditional way to think of the Trinity is expressed by Daniel Migliore: “[t]he love of God comes originally from the one called ‘Father,’ is humanly enacted for the world in the sacrificial love of the one called ‘Son,’ and becomes a present and vital reality in Christian life by the one called ‘Spirit.’”2
But there are also other ways to consider the Triune nature of God, for example our Puritan ancestors thought of God the Father as choosing who would be saved, God the Son as accomplishing their redemption and God as Spirit making it effective.3
Another example is modern theologian John Cobb’s view that one could think of God as being experienced as the Creator who has made all things, as Christ the embodiment of God in creation, and as the Holy Spirit the embodiment of God’s Reign to which we aim to achieve.4
Or perhaps more simply one could think of the Trinity as God experienced in the past (Christ), present (Spirit) and future (Creator/Mother/Father).5
There are many ways to use the metaphor of the Trinity to understand God and how we experience God, and for me it is always important when thinking of the Trinity to never forget that any experience of what we might call one or more members of the Trinity is always an experience of the One we call God.6
1. I have a very strong belief that the Triune nature of God is a matter of God’s personas or roles being experienced. It is my understanding that persona in “the ancient texts refers to the mask worn by actors in Greek and Roman theaters. Masks were not for concealment, but corresponded to roles.” Borg, Marcus, The God We Never Knew, San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, (1997), 98
2. Migliore, Daniel, Faith Seeking Understanding, (Grand Rapids: William Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2004), 69.
3. Noll, Mark, The Old Religion in a New World, Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans (2002), 38
4.This interesting view of the Trinity was culled from John Cobb’s Christ in a Pluralistic Age, Philadelphia: Westminster Press, (1975) 259, 261-262. See page 8, infra, on Spirit for a summary of Cobb’s assertions.
5 This notion finds support from Christian theologian John Riggs whom I understood to explain in a course on Baptism and Supper at Eden Theological Seminary that the Trinity boils down to explaining Christian understandings of the One God in the past, present and future.
6.Cf., Borg, 98. Prof. Borg asserts that the “persons” of the Trinity in the ancient Greek and Latin texts refers to masks worn by actors to “correspond to roles,” not to individual persons. “To speak of God and three persons is to say that God is known to us wearing three different ‘masks’ – in other words three different roles.”
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