#Moltmann reflections: a trinitarian eccelsiology? at (Ir)religiosity

#Moltmann reflections: a trinitarian eccelsiology?

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If I had to pick one point where Jürgen Moltmann has made the most significant impact on my own theology it would be his social doctrine of the Trinity.¹ In fact, it wasn’t until I read The Trinity and the Kingdom of God that I was actually excited about being Trinitarian! Moltmann is not interested in the old heresies and old debates surrounding substance, or essence, or autonomous personhood. Instead he is interested debunking monarchical monotheism, which inscribes domination and hierarchy into the very nature of God (not to mention humanity!) where God the Father — and here nobody would have a problem with the masculine, phallocentric language — sits at the top of the order, below him sits the Son, and last (and more often than not least!) sits the Spirit — because by this logic it only makes sense that the more feminine of the persons be at the bottom of the hierarchy! Moltmann claims that all Trinitarian formulations at least since Augustine and surely since the insertion of the filioque into the Nicene Creed by the West are captive to this type of monarchical monotheism.

Obviously this creates all sorts of problems, especially if you believe that the human order should, more or less, mirror the divine order. Then you have domination and subjugation writ large. Enter Moltmann who, as we can already see, is more interested in the social and political implications — in other words, what all this means for the Imago dei — of the Trinity than modalism, Arianism, or any other ancient -ism that really has no bearing on contemporary theology.

Over against the hierarchical models, Moltmann imagines² a more egalitarian approach (I don’t know that he uses that word himself and I don’t know if he would take issue with it; I certainly don’t) which emphasizes the “community of God” that is comprised of the three persons and the perichoresis, the mutual indwelling, that binds them together as one. For Moltmann, kenosis is not limited to the second person and the incarnation alone, indeed it is such kenotic love that holds the Trinity together, each person giving and emptying itself for the sake of the other. In this relationship the identity of each person is inextricably linked to each of the other persons and through that bond each person sees the other as part of the Other and in the process sees itself as (an)other.³

In Moltmann’s larger theology this has deep political and social implications. If the divine hierarchy is deconstructed then the human hierarchy must be too, and a radically new community — an order steeped with kenotic love and perichoretic unity that jettisons any form of domination — replaces it. To be created in the image of God is to be a relational being, a mirror image of members of the the divine community.

You probably already see where this is going. My question is what might happen if we not only took Moltmann’s social doctrine of the Trinity seriously but let it infiltrate our eccelsiology as well. What would happen if our ecclesial structures and our relationships with one another in the community we call the church were guided not by hierarchy and power but self-emptying, kenotic love and perchoretic egalitarianism? What if we reversed the polarities of the order of power in the church and not only upheld our responsibility to the other but saw ourselves as (an)other too and deeply dependent upon the embodied connection between our subjectivity and the other’s subjectivity? Is that not what Moltmann was getting at in his book title — “The Trinity and the Kingdom” — where the church doesn’t mirror the power structures and regimes of domination that rule this world but the very community of God in which persons are persons only in self-emptying relationship with other persons? Is it just me or is it hard, if not impossible, to do that when the church is beholden to uneven power dynamics?

The relational Image of God: embracing the other (blakehuggins.com)

His argument in The Crucified God apropos to God’s suffering is a very close second, but I’m not sure Moltmann goes far enough. The suffering, abandoned God in Christ on the Cross would be much more salient and radical if Moltmann let go of omnipotence, but he wants to hold on to it. I think we have to let go of that idea. Not to mention the residual theodicy issues that are still very much at work under the surface. I may take this up later at some point. [↩]
This is really is nothing new. Eastern Orthodoxy has always held this view and it dates back to at least the Cappadocian Fathers. I think it is fair to say, though, that Moltmann certainly popularized it, especially in the Western tradition, and extrapolated its political and social effects a bit further. [↩]
Ok, Moltmann doesn’t exactly use this sort of postmodern accent, but I can’t help it. I hear when I read him — especially on the Trinity. [↩]

Written by Blake Huggins

September 18th, 2009 at 8:00 am

Posted in Uncategorized

Tagged with Church, Eccelsiology, Emergence Christianity, Emergent Village, Jurgen Moltmann, Moltmann Conversation, Theology, Trinity

nathanmattox

http://wesley.nnu.edu/wesleyan_theology/mreview...
maybe you don't like links in comment bar, but I'll try that again

nathanmattox

haven't ya'll read The Shack? Everything is perfectly and clearly distilled there! :) I'm sort of kidding. For all the snooty reviews it got from the academically minded, it was a pretty good "personification" of perichoresis that laypeople seemed to "get," in my opinion. I read it in a book study in my church.
And I agree with you, Blake. Our scriptures are a rich resource for faith, but we Protestants do well to remember our pre-1500 tradition too. Wesley did. WWWD? We'll have a jump on everyone else when we find hard evidence that Methodism is a clandestine Orthodox mission in America anyway

Blake Huggins

I never really understood all the negative reaction to that book either. Seems like a pretty good metaphor to me (just as long as we recognize the limits of all metaphors). Thanks for that link, by the way. I've been looking for that ever since you mentioned it.

John Meunier

Does Moltmann derive his construction of the Trinity from biblical sources or does he start with social and political commitments and read them onto the Trinity?

The biblical materials on the Trinity don't seem to me to be a good resource for constructing a social and political agenda for the church. While the trinitarian language is clearly present in the NT and can be read into the OT, a development of the nature of the relationship is not at all clear. Hence all the debates in the early days of the church.

While I think I understand the issue with the filoque, it is not the case that removing that would solve the matter of hierarchy and monarchialism. Isn't the Orthodox alternative that the Holy Spirit and Jesus procede from the Father? There is still a top dog in the Trinity here, which Jesus seemed to say in more than one instance, as well.

All of which is not an argument against a program of radical egalitarianism, which I think you could find resources for in the Bible outside trinitarian issues. I'm just not sure why the program needs to be derived from trinitarian theology. Maybe I'm missing something. I often am.

Blake Huggins

As bad as it will probably sound, I don't really understand the push for being strictly "biblical." If you really wanted to go that far then why be Trinitarian at all? A pretty convincing argument can be made from the silence in the bible. Sure there isn't a full blown doctrine of the Trinity and its nature in the text, that is why Moltmann is drawing from the tradition. I guess I'm not understanding the need to bypass that and go back to the text alone. And, for what its worth, I think we all "read onto" the text. But that's a different subject altogether.

Moltmann thinks that the Trinity (dervied from biblical materials and the richness of church history) is precisely the best place to start for the church's social and political agenda mainly because it fosters a completely different way of thinking about the nature of God. That's what I was trying to get at in the post. To be honest, there are some others that do it in a much more lucid manner: Miroslav Volf, Leonardo Boff, and Catherine LaCugna come to mind.

Based on what I've read I think Moltmann would just disagree with you about the East. I'm not enough of an Orthodox scholar to know about their internal battles so I'm sure there a instances of this type of monarchical monotheism in the tradition. But Moltmann believes at it's core it jettisons the hierarchy, not just with the rejection of the filioque but with the emphasis on perichoresis especially. To be sure, the Spirit does proceed from the Father but does not make the Father the "top dog" of the Trinity, it removes the hierarchical ordering and the tendency toward subordination (Father --> Son --> Spirit). Because of the mutual indwelling each person is bound up within the other making a top-down ordering impossible. I'm oversimplifying here as Moltmann goes into great detail on all these points, especially their appropriation in the Cappadocians. But the point I'm trying to make is that Moltmann reads the Eastern tradition in such a way that escapes monarchical monotheism. As for the words of Jesus, I'd have to go back and look through the book, but, as you might except, Moltmann read those in his favor too emphasizing some of the Johannine language ("I am in the Father and the Father is in me," etc.) to support perichoresis.

The larger point though, is that Moltmann is interested in recovering and reclaiming Trinitarian thinking because, contrary to what you are saying, he thinks it is the best way to foster a social and political program of egalitarianism in church since that egalitarianism is inscribed into the very nature of the Godhead. For him we can't just talk about the immanent Trinity, it must lay claim to our own communities, thus the immanent Trinity is the economic Trinity and vice versa.

John Meunier

Thanks for the response, Blake. I'm in no position to critique Moltmann. My comment was more query than argument.

I appreciate your summary. So, is it correct to say he is not rejecting TRADITION, but setting various parts of the tradition in tension with and argument with each other? My knowledge of Orthodox theology of the Trinity is quite limited, so I probably should not have even brought that up.

At the base of it, I don't understand why Moltmann draws the Trinity into the argument over social and ecclesiastical structure at all. It has obvious polemical force. If you can say God is this way then you can justify and enforce a program of social change based on the logic that we should be like God. But isn't this exactly what the tradition did. It looked at God the Father and saw a king. So, it constructed the Trinity in terms of its earthly political commitments and then used that to justify violence and oppression.

Why repeat these moves with a different construction of the Trinity? Why not admit what seems fairly certain - the relationship of the Trinity is mysterious and should not be used to prop up any form of earthly politics - the kind we like or the kind we oppose.

Again, I'm not an academic theologian, so I know some of my questions probably miss the point of the conversation. I appreciate the time you take in your responses.

Blake Huggins

Thanks, John. I appreciate your comments too. I'm on my way out the door for some afternoon meetings. Here are some quick thoughts.

You're right. Motlmann is putting the tradition in tension with itself and trying to remedy what he thinks is a dangerous tendency in the West.

I get the polemical aspect. I'm not sure I'm necessarily against that on the face of it; but then that itself is a dangerous statement for me to make. I'd need to think about it some more. I certainly am against what passes as that in church and secular politics. It's just not helpful or constructive.

Based on what I've read though, it seems that Moltmann's tone isn't so much polemical as it is invitational. He approaches the idea of a social Trinity in the same manner we might the statement: God is love. It would be self-defeating to enforce the idea that God is love by imposing it on others, enforce that idea by bearing faithful witness to it. I don't want to put words in Moltmann's mouth, but I imagine he might say the same about the social doctrine of the Trinity. He has profound implications for the alternative social body called the church, which should normatively be bearing witness to that reality through it's word and deed. At the same time, though, Moltmann really does believe this egalitarianism is the best thing for the church and thus, by it's nature, not as oppressive as other notions. In essence he has saying that we in the West have gotten it wrong in the past and that the social doctrine is a better of relating to one another. It isn't enforced violence because it's entire character jettisons that idea. The question of whether that only serves to buttress a personal agenda is a good, but then again I think that is a question we must always be asking about every theology. There may be instances where that is okay, there are surely many instances where it is not.

I would definitely want to maintain the mystery of the Trinity and I think Moltmann can be read in a way that does just that. He thinks it necessary to extrapolate what the Trinity means for the nature of God and for the church because otherwise we would be lost. But at the same time he leaves the enigma of the Trinity itself untouched in a way that some of the early debates did not. He isn't interested in essence, or being, or substance, etc. Those go a long way toward explaining away the Trinity, but he holds that the Trinity, viewed by the standards of the world, makes no sense! It is not logical (the whole 1+1+1 doesn't equal, but does equal, 3) like p or not p. Yet it still has an important affect on God's relations with Godself, God's relations with us, and our relations with God and others.

Jeremy

Ok, so I understand why you think Caputo 'goes all the way' whereas Moltmann grasps for straws to hold onto omnipotence, but (and I'm sorry to do this for you) do you ever worry that by advocating that you really hijack God from the Jews? I mean unless you want to disregard so much of the Jewish understanding of God as being nationalistic propaganda, I have a hard time seeing how you could reconcile a weak God with so many of the books in the Hebrew Bible.

Also, I absolutely loved the Trinity and the Kingdom of God on my initial read. But in retrospect, I feel as if he forces so much of his reading of the gospels to be Trinitarian. I don't feel as if a Trinitarian paradigm really illumines the Synptics and to read it in the Hebrew Bible is just ridiculous. It'd be better to go ahead and admit all of the latent polytheistic aspects in the Torah.

With regards to power structure, I'm totally there with you in viewing a church that needs to more radical egalitarian. But, I feel as if this is an easy abstract critique of the church. I mean what does that mean pragmatically? Do we actually have to take Jesus seriously and do away w/ social structures like marriage and rebel against capitalism? Do we have to actually recognize that we are all one in Christ Jesus? I mean talking to many emergents I feel as if their typical response to say feminism, is yeah they have a good point we really should rescue more feminine aspects of God. But, at the end of the day they still attend churches run almost entirely by men (save for the children ministry). I mean to what point does that advocating egalitarianism within the church really function as ideology?

One last thing, you should read Schneider's Beyond Monotheism, AUFS hosted a book event here: http://tinyurl.com/lldc6m, she uses parts of Moltmann's critique of monarchical monotheism (which really goes back to Schmitt's Political Theology).

Blake Huggins

Sorry it has taken so long to respond. It's been a busy week.

Thanks for the comments. To be honest, until you brought it up I hadn't really thought about doing violence to the Jewish tradition like that. I'm still not completely sure where I stand because that is a valid criticism and one that Christianity, if it is at all honest, runs the risk of perpetuating. So, for now, I would say that I simply read the text differently than my Jewish sisters and brothers. My reading isn't anymore valid or invalid than theirs and I have absolutely no interest in imposing my reading upon their understanding. I believe that would be to do violence to the text and the tradition. So I think there is way to maintain the difference in humility here without "hijacking." At least that is what I would want to do. That being said, I think it is possible to read the Hebrew text in support of the weakness of God. Caputo and Catherine Keller's reading of Job as a warning against the temptation of omnipotence comes to mind, for instance.

Forcing a Trinitarian reading on the gospels is a fair criticism of Moltmann. And I think he would probably recognize that his being a social Trinitarian guides his reading of the text. Viewed form the vantage point of historical criticism there is absolutely no reason to believe that either the gospels or the Hebrew text can support a Trinitarian reading, as you point out. But Moltmann is not a biblical scholar or a historical critic and he reads them in a different manner as a constructive theologian. I think he would probably be pretty honest about that too: he simply reads the text as a Trinitarian.

Your last point about practically fostering this radical egalitarianism has had me thinking all week. It's tough. Somehow, we have to find a way to live with the tension of this ideal on the one hand, and the reality on the ground on the other. Part of me wants to say that if someone is in a church that reinforces this bad thinking then they should cut and run, but at the same time I think we are in desperate need of people who are willing to fight it out. Most people just get tired of pushing against the grain, I think. Then they give up.

What I think we need more than anything is more constructive dialogue between the academy and faith communities. There is a huge gap there and until it is mended I'm afraid that most of this stuff will remain the intellectual property of those in the ivory towers and won't be practiced by those on the ground. In that respect, I think we are in desperate need of one another.

Thanks again for the comments.

(Ir)religiosity