(Ir)religiosity

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?

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

1. 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. [↩]
2. 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. [↩]
3. 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. [↩]

I think the best way for me to reflect on the Moltmann Conversation will be in a series of posts on a few key thoughts that were brought up over the course of the conference and have stuck with me.  Before going I figured I would just post my notes but I can’t do that because, well, I don’t really have any “normal” notes.  I wasn’t really able to take notes like I normally do because the conference was, more or less, a sound byte conference, which would be interesting to talk about in itself.  Free wifi was provided so just about everyone was either tweeting or liveblogging.  A screen was up behind the stage displaying some of the #moltmann tweets.  Then there wast the twub.  So the whole time I was trying to listen to the questions, listen to Moltmann’s answers (many of which were gems and very tweet-able), watch the Twub, watch the screen and tweet.  So in a sense my tweets ended up being my notes.  Weird, I know.  But that’s how it worked out.

During the first session Moltmann spoke to his own life experience (something he develops on a large scale in his autobiography, a book you should really read if you get a chance) and I was immediately struck by the notion of theology as biography.  His personal experiences as a POW and instances of deep tragedy and suffering led him to questions similar to those of Christ on cross:  where is God in the face of death and suffering?  In many ways, these experiences send Moltmann on theological trajectories that determine the bulk of his life’s work.  A Theology of Hope and The Crucified God are two of the most prominent examples.  The former views the whole of theology from an eschatological perpsective in which the church looks with hope to the future while standing firmly in the confidence of the resurrection and eagerly anticipating the incoming of God’s promise of a new heaven and a new earth; the latter is, of course, the other side of this hope: the cross of Christ through which God enters into the suffering of the world and identifies with the victim not as the stoic deity of Greek philosophy who is disaffected by the cries of the oppressed, but the God of the Hebrew scriptures, the God of pathos who is capable of deep suffering and likewise capable of deep love.  It is in this way that Moltmann re-frames the theodicy question, not as something to be answered — because as he stated at the conference “no answer will satisfy us” — but something to be wrestled with; indeed as something to be wrestled with together with God.¹

The theological particulars of each of these are interesting in their own right, but for me, after hearing Moltmann tell his story, the fact that both emerged from his personal experiences and his desire to develop a theology “after Auschwitz” cannot be overstated.  His is a perfect example of theology as biography and biography as the working out of theology.  Of course this happens both individually and collectively.  In that vein I appreciated Tripp Fuller (who I was finally able to meet in person!) raising the question in the panel of how 9/11 has effected the biography of younger (and even older) Americans in the same way WWII did for Moltmann’s.  At this point I think it may be too early to tell exactly how theology in the 21st century will take shape in the aftermath of that event.  But I think Moltmann provides us with a good model. I think we will be and are presently asking some of the same questions he did in response to suffering and tragedy.  And I think the way in which he poses those questions and attempts to re-frame them may be helpful too.

But the larger point for me is still theology as biography and biography as the incarnational outworking of theology.  And the more I think about the more I realize that is always our “background music” whether we realize it or not.  Perhaps our becoming conscious of it will make us better theologians.

1. Here I will resist the temptation to put Moltmann in conversation with John Caputo’s “weak God.” [↩]

By now I’m sure most everyone has at least heard of Focus on the Family chairperson Dr. James Dobson‘s so-called “Letter from 2012.” You can read the entire diatribe here. To be honest I haven’t read it all — based on what I know of Dobson and his think tank, I consider it to be a colossal waste of time.

I won’t take the time to critque it or add my comment (there are some good ones worth reading here and here).

Being the good Web2.0 junkie that I am, I created a Wordle cloud from the text of the letter.  It is below.  Pretty revealing I think.

Click for larger view