"Teología de la Esperanza" por Jurgen Moltmann

Teología de la esperanza jurgen moltmann from ICZUS ICZUS

Moltmann: “Eschatology is not only about the future,but about the present of that future."

“Eschatology is not only about the future,
          but about the present of that future.” -Moltmann
Article :This week in the apocalypse- Fred Clark 

Trinity, Cross, form and content

Roderick T. Leupp:

Moltmann further states that "the content of the doctrine of the Trinity is the real cross of Christ himself.  The form of the crucified Christ is the Trinity."  No life is possible without form and content. Form gives life structure, and content gives lkfe depth.  The form and content of the Christian life is inescapably triune, and living the cruciform life, in full cognizance of the triune cross, is the life God desires for every human being.

          

-"Knowing the Name of God: The Trinitarian Tapestry of Faith, Community and Worship," p. 116

--

Excerpts from a later book of Leupp's on the Trinity here

theopaschism: old heresy/new orthodoxy:

Helpful 1985 article (quoted in Jenkins' "Jesus Wars")  excerpted below:

The Suffering God: The Rise of a New Orthodoxy

by Ronald Goetz

.....Indeed, despite all the real and intractable differences among theologians, a curious new consensus has arisen. The age-old dogma that God is impassible and immutable, incapable of suffering, is for many no longer tenable. The ancient theopaschite heresy that God suffers has, in fact, become the new orthodoxy.

A list of modern theopaschite thinkers would include Barth, Berdyaev, Bonhoeffer, Brunner, Cobb, Cone and liberation theologians generally, Küng, Moltmann, Reinhold Niebuhr, Pannenberg, Ruether and feminist theologians generally, Temple, Teilhard and Unamuno. 

...What is particularly remarkable about the theopaschite mind-set has been its development as a kind of open secret. The doctrine of the suffering of God is so fundamental to the very soul of modern Christianity that it has emerged with very few theological shots ever needing to be fired. Indeed, this doctrinal revolution occurred without a widespread awareness that it was happening...


...The theological implications of the theopaschite revolution are enormous. Every classical Christian doctrine -- the Trinity, the two natures of Christ, creationex nihilo, the atonement theories, sin (original or otherwise) , predestination, etc. -- was originally formulated by theologians who took divine impassibility to be axiomatic..

 ..Thus, we have only begun to see where systematic theologies grounded in the suffering God might lead.:


The decline of Christendom

The rise of democratic aspirations.

The problem of suffering and evil.

The scholarly reappraisal of the Bible.

...Two lines of defense have become popular among theologians who find themselves, for whatever reasons, unable to speak of God as ontologically limited and yet unable to affirm the predestinarian highhandedness of an impassible, immutable God.


The first is the so-called Irenaeian theodicy (after the second-century theologian Irenaeus) : God permits suffering and evil in order that by them we might come to sufficient maturity so as to be able to inherit eternal life. The problem with such an argument is that while it offers a very helpful insight into the question of why we suffer and endure hardship, it says nothing about real evil. For real evil, as we experience it, does not build up and develop its victims; it corrupts, corrodes and destroys them.


The other line of defense can easily incorporate the Irenaeian theodicy, and indeed, might even seem to strengthen it. In this view, the statement "God is love" is virtually synonymous with a kenotic (self-emptying) (Phil. 2:7) view of the incarnation. God’s love is supremely revealed in his self-humbling. God is a fellow sufferer who understands not because God cannot be otherwise, but because God wills to share our lot.


Here, as in the case of a limited doctrine of God’s being there is a certain immediate psychological comfort in the notion that God does not require of us a suffering that he himself will not endure. However, if this comfort is to be any more than a psychological prop, it must show how God’s suffering mitigates evil. This explanation has been, to date, curiously lacking in the theodicy of divine self-limitation.


To anyone who feels compelled to affirm divine suffering, the fact that God is deeply involved in the anguish and the blood of humanity forces a drastic theological crisis of thought vis-à-vis the question of evil. The mere fact of God’s suffering doesn’t solve the question; it exacerbates it. For there can no longer be a retreat into the hidden decrees of the eternal, all-wise, changeless and unaffected God. The suffering God is with us in the here and now. God must answer in the here and now before one can make any sense of the by and by. God, the fellow sufferer, is inexcusable if all that he can do is suffer. But if God is ultimately redeemer, how dare he hold out on redemption here and now in the face of real evil?


My own view is that the death of God’s Christ is in part God’s atonement to his creatures for evil. Only on the basis of God’s terrible willingness to accept responsibility for evil do we have grounds to trust God’s promise to redeem evil. Only in God’s daring willingness to risk all in the death of his own son can we have confidence that God finally has the power to redeem his promise. Others may not agree with this radical rethinking of the atonement, but it seems apparent that comprehensively to affirm the almighty sovereignty of the self-humbled God requires a drastic rethinking of traditional doctrine.  -Goertz, full article here

Molltmann: God/church only revealed in opposite

"God is only revealed as 'God' in his opposite: revealed in the cross of Christ who was abandoned by God. His righteousness is revealed in the unrighteous and in those without rights, and his gracious election in the damned . . . This makes it easier to understand what Jesus did: it was not the devout, but the sinners, and not the righteous but the unrighteous who recognized him, because in them he revealed the divine righteousness of grace, and the kingdom..
...If a being is revealed only in its opposite, then the church which is the church of the crucified Christ cannot consist of an assembly of like persons who mutually affirm each other, but must be constituted of unlike persons"
 -Moltmann, "The Crucified God, pp 27-28, HT, Travis Mamone

quiz: how many times is 'pastor' mentioned in the NT?

I love reminding peope of the community/communitas nature of the church by saying something like "Guess how many times the word 'pastor' shows up in the New Testament?  Only once, and in passing: Ephesians 4, where is it mentioned only as part of the shared leadership the church is called to have."

BUT I was wrong!  Thanks to Gary Amirault for straightening out my math and theology:

The word “pastor” doesn’t occur in the New Testament (KJV, NIV, NASK, NRSB) at all. Shocked? I was. The word “pastors” occurs ONCE in the N.T. in Ephesians 4:11 and NOT as a title.  Gary Amirault 

Okay, that may evoke a groan, and seem like only a technicality to you.

BUT, remember in  a parallel way, "saint" also appears a total of ZERO times in the Bible.

It also only shows up in the plural.
And quite a few more times than "pastors."

It would seem the early church expectation was multiple saints with the gift of pastor are inevitably embedded in the local body.  And this likely has nothing to do with multiple pastoral staff.  It  has to do with many "laypeople" (a word that shows up nowhere is scripture, singular OR plural...so glad Moltmann highlights this, "The Source," p. 95) walking in their gifts..
whether in the gathering, or (more importantly) in the "world" (I remember commissioning Regean as the "pastor to Jiffy Lube").

I realize one might count "shepherd" as the same biblical term as pastor, which opens up other references..but this gets just as subversive, if as in John 10, a "shepherd/pastor is to know all her/his sheep BY NAME."
All this might entail blowing up the 22nd row of pews  (better yet all pews...is that word in the Book?).
More? Chain saw the pulpit..

Related:

A Crash of Rhinos...a Committee of Buzzards

--
Related..I often say this, too.  Will I have to append or amend it?

"All American pastors know that  the Bible knows nothing of a weekly meeting where a pastor preaches a sermon.

Moltmann on why he is not a universalist

hilarious but profound answer at 62:35 mark:


(The intro also has an interview w/Moltmann about his first cry to God through watching the soldier next to him be blow apart, and the power of psalms of lament.."when i read the deathcry of Jesus...why have you forsaken me.. I knew this  is someone who understands"..)

Moltmann: abandon the pastoral church

"If Christianity 
is to become aware of what it is,
we must abandon the pastoral church 
which takes care of people,
which is the usual form
of the Western church.
Instead,
we have to call to life a
Christian community church."  

-Jürgen Moltmann, "The Source of Life," p. 96

Moltmann: church marketing and practiced atheism

Moltmann:

The privatization of religion has as its presupposition its de-politicization and as a consequence its marketing. What is called modern multifaith and multicultural society is nothing other than the total market society. Religions and cultures are on display in this market in just the same way as political options, commodities and services. Religions become the spiritual services on offer in the religious supermarket of the modern world. Individual religious liberty is certainly a powerful protection for every person’s own human dignity, but because of the typical Western concept of the consumer’s freedom to choose or dispose, that same freedom has turned religion into a commodity, where the customer is allegedly always right. Marketed religions take on the characterisitcs of goods on sale…
In the multifaith consumer society, peace reigns between the religious communities. That is a fact. But this religious peace is achieved through the political shut-down on religion, its privatization and marketing- not through recognition and esteem, but by reducing religion to insignificance. One does not have to be a fundamentalist to see this as practiced atheism.

       -God for a Secular Society , Moltmann's  chapter “Theology in the Modern University. "

Moltmann: fellowship and friendship as church reform

Moltmann ,"The Church in the Power of the Spirit: A Contribution to Messianic Ecclesiology p.317":

"The church will not overcome its present crisis through reform of the administration of the sacraments, or from the reform of its ministries. It will overcome this crisis through the rebirth of practical fellowship.... Fellowship in word and sacrament, fellowship in the profession of faith, fellowship in the institution and the  hierarchy, become lifeless and are petrified into formalities with which people can no longer identify themselves, if fellowship among the congregation’s rank and file is lost, and if friendship is not recovered from the ‘grass-roots.’”  Link

Moltmann on communion: everyone should see each other (missional sacraments part 16)

PHOTO CREDIT

Moltmann on communion (Via Tony Jones). I was glad he included #5, for the reason I'll share in tomorrow's post::

Moltmann, in The Church in the Power of the Spirit, lists six characteristics of the Lord’s Supper that he considers imperative:

1. Communion must be central to the Christian community, must be integrated into the heart of the worship service (not tacked on at the end), and must be celebrated with bread and wine.
2. The table must be open to those of varying theological views.
3. Baptism and confirmation must not be prerequisites for the fellowship of the table.
4. Everyone who follows Christ is qualified to administer the sacrament, and everyone is called upon to offer and distribute the elements.
5. Not only should the person performing the liturgy face the congregation, but the entire worship space should, if possible, be redesigned to a “‘common room’ in which the participants can see and talk to one another.’”
6. Communion should always be followed by “a common meal, and the proclamation of the gospel by a common discussion of people’s real needs and the specific tasks of Christian mission.”[]Moltmann

Moltmann: "An individual is not a person"

From Danielle Shroyer's (danielleshroyer.com) blog:

The individual is not a person

          By Danielle Shroyer

February 7th, 2011 — 10:25am

I realize I’m prone to these kinds of statements about Moltmann, but honestly, the paragraph below is absolutely mind blowingly fantastic. It’s so good, I’m not going to say any further commentary about the content itself, other than encourage you to read it, and think about the vast amount of application it has for our lives and the way we structure them if we want to live into the “social program of the Trinity.”  It is, to use a term I’ve coined for just such a moment, a Moltmann WWF Smackdown.  I have read thousands of pages of philosophy on human identity. None of them describe the problem with modern individualization and the true purpose of human identity and personhood as powerfully as Moltmann does here…in one short paragraph, no less.  Philosophers of the modern and postmodern age, consider yourselves smacked down.

“For the last 200 years Western industrial society (and now modern society in general) has experienced one thrust towards individualization after another. The last of them bears the name ‘postmodern’. The opportunities for choice open to individualized men and women are enormously increased, and anyone who has the means can also take advantage of these opportunities. But this power is paralleled by the growing powerlessness of the individualized people, who can certainly look on at events and the world through the media, but can do nothing to change them. An individual is not a person, but–as the Latin word individuum says–something that in the final analysis is indivisible; it means the same as the Greek word ‘atom.’ As the end-product of divisions, the individual has no relationships, no attributes, no memories and no names. The individual is unutterable. A person, unlike an individual, is a human existence living in the resonant field of his social connections and his history. He has a name, with which he can identify himself. A person is a social being. The modern thrusts toward individualization in society promps the suspicion that a modern individual is the product of that age-old Roman principle of dominance: divide et impera- divide and rule. Individualized people can easily  be dominated by political and economic forces. There is only resistance for the purpose of protecting personal human dignity if people join together in communities and decide their lives socially for themselves.
These few pointers may suffice to show the public relevance of the trinitarian concept of God for the liberation of individualized men and women, and the relevance of the trinitarian experience of community for the development of a new sociality.”
- Experiences in Theology, p.333

Moltmaniacs Keep Theology Weird... and Better Than a Phone Book

I am such a fan of Moltmann,

.................as well as a fan of "keeping theology weird"..

.............that I couldn't help but shout when I heard the news.

I so loved the childlike joy that Tony Jones expressed upon announcing the news that i also can't help but insert the classic Steve Martin clip he used in his announcement:

The news gets better:

Chapter one is a free PDF here.
Beats a phone book any day..


Oh, on the "weird" thing:


>>The book is "Specific, Strange and Special” ...see Bob Cornwall's review here, it uses that title..


>>>and click this title below of the Tripp Fuller's review of the book: 
"Keep Theology Weird!”.


see also:

3 Leadership Paradigms for the Church

Review: "Sacred Unions, Sacred Passions"

Dan Brennan's splendidly readable, and charitably subversive,

"Sacred Unions, Sacred Passions:

Engaging the Mystery of Friendship Between Men and Women"

definitely came along at the right time for me. Brennan's unique, straightforward, and engaging way of tackling the topic; and his unique, straightforward, and engaging way of tackling the topic connected dots for me among three growing convictions:

• A reductionist view of sexuality almost inevitably becomes seductionist. We are (g)not gnostic. By obsessing with rules, we end up being ruled by obsexxing. Ironically, that's when we may be most vulnerable. We in the Protestant tradition can all these (5oo!!)years later still define ourselves primarily by what we are against, and not by what/Who we are for. We desperately need to incorporate insights from Catholic and Eastern streams to keep center, and steer away from gnostic ditches.
• The Trinitarian nature of life, relationships, church/ecclesiology....of, well, everything...has profound ( and profoundly untapped) implications for....well, everything.
• The promise of the rabbinic tradition of "elevation" (which Bono of course has prophetically endorsed/sung about/prayed about) is uniquely applicable our current juncture in postmodernity and church history.

Bottom line: The books is on cross-sex friendships, and a defense of how they can work.

That no other evangelical Christian-oriented book has even been dedicated to this topic at all..

...let alone challenged the deeply-embedded conservagelical party line (which ironically sounds like the folks Paul is poking fun at in the "Do not handle! Do not taste! Do not touch!" of Colossians 2:21)....

in our lifetime (part of the point, earlier writers, many of them...gasp!...Catholic, have done well here) is enough to recommend it.

But the way he traces church history (I recently learned a lot about church history...by teaching it! That the "holy kiss" commanded in the New Testament was counterinuitively on the lips, even when cross-gender, nailed me...but not as much as the profound reason for that, see this link) and interweaves solid biblical exegesis, and knows just the right quote from hugely helpful thinkers as Leanne Payne, Rob Bell, Scot McKnight, Marva Dawn, Rodney Clapp, catapults this to a five-star review.

I am about to confess:

I have been known to occasionally meet publicly with women at Starbuck's.

!!

I am not sure I would be comfortable with doing so at a full-blown restuarant, indoors, as a meal. (Except, say, with a pastor friend and colleague in our network.....who just happens to be named Nancy......... and female).

Right or wrong, I still generally keep the Saddleback/Billy Graham guidelines (which the book weighs).

Though I am certain the Holy Spirit will lead me to break them a bit more (biblically, even though I am not a binitarian bibliolater...read this).

And yes, I am aware that even the Starbuck's level meetings can be risky

(see "Uncle Ernie at Uncle Harry's" and
"God, beach and breasts"),

and that we men (in particular) risk over-sexualizing.

But since that infamous Scripture that nine out of ten evangelicals would swear (well, promise) on stack of Bibles was in the Bible ("Avoid the appearance of evil") is nowhere in the Bible (and the one Scripture we confuse for that one actually makes basically the opposite point, please read this link from Tia Lynn)..

..the risk I am worried about should not be "what will people think."

The risk I may be indeed taking is that I won't grow as a disciple of Jesus, unless I do occasionally partake in such "sacred order" encounters.

I am in sin if I "avoid all appearance of evil."

Well. for the two readers that are left, I continue (:

I don't intend to write a review that is a summary of the content, or even one that fully divulges where he lands, but one that references and quotes the book briefly, through the grid of the three topics I laid out above (and copied below).

I sincerely hope you are already sold on the book, and my comments will intrigue you into cutting the deal.

I highly recommend reading chapter one (or watching this video interview with the author) if you have any doubt; then I would double dare you not to finish the book in one setting.

Onward:

1)A reductionist view of sexuality almost inevitably becomes seductionist. We are (g)not gnostic. By obsessing with rules, we end up being ruled by obsexxing. Ironically, that's when we may be most vulnerable....

Rob Bell, who is quoted wisely throughout the book, asserts that

"our sexuality is all the ways we strive to reconnect with our world, with each other, and with God."

If that is so (and the Bible backs it, see Brennan's studies of Genesis, for example), how can we avoid (or why should we) what the author calls "embodied relationships" that are inevitably sexual, but not romantic or erotic?

Such is what the amazing "cloud of witnesses" throughout church history that Brennan invokes and quotes attest to (Why have we never seen these quotes elsewhere?)

As I wrote about it in The Reduction of Seduction posts (here and here) I do get how we in leadership cannot help but complicate relationships with "parishoners" or others who view us in a pastoral/God-figure role. The "woman in the 22nd pew" has permanently messed up my life, thank God.

And there is need to always remember the names we'd like to forget (from Swaggart to Haggard).

But it is precisely we as leaders, with our drive to control, that hinders the Spirit's work in our communities. In the name of carefulness, we abdicate prayerfulness. We inadvertently (??) bless legalism, sell gnosticism, and endorse immorality.

Really?

What if I simply quoted two of the most acceptable standards among evangelical writers here

These are the killer quotes (if read thrice and pondered) that Brennan brilliantly introduces us to:

"It is therefore easy to see why Authority frowns on friendship.

Every real friendship is a sort of secession, even a rebellion." (C.S. Lewis, p. 145)

"[Seeking intimacy, at any level} is not a venture that gets the support of many people.

It is inefficient." (Eugene Peterson, p. 150).

No wonder we (I) hijack our sermons and framejack our pastoral counsel;

we feed (our) power, and fear (the peoples) freedom.

Much better to be found faithful and inefficient

(Read Ellul, please....as well as the Marva Dawn "I cast you out, foul spirit of effectiveness" article here).

Thus, our sermons on "thou must" create musterbation.

We "should" on people.

Also, that this author (like hardly anyone else you read today, save the Godsend N.T. Wright) radically gets what Scripture means by "New Creation" is worth the price of the book. Any serious study of 2 Corinthians will reveal that the only way it cannot be translated is the way we pastors have always preached it (and likely the only way you have ever heard it: "If anyone is in Christ, they are a new creation," When a straightforward reading of the Greek is "If anyone is in Christ, there the new creation is [in part].

New Creation is Kingdom Community. How ridiculous to downsize such a term so it implies one re-created person is "all that."

Every pastor worth his or her salt knows that's what it says, but who preaches it?

"New Creation" throughout the Bible is a corporate manifestation of the Kingdom of God; the Kingdom of the future partly and partially consummated in the present life,and on earth.

Yes, I see that hand. I know all the dangers of an overly "realized eschatology." Yes, I know the Corinthian church bough it hook line and sinker, and it led to sexual (and other) immorality.

But I also know the danger of not realizing the fourth petition of the Lord's Prayer

(Read Ladd, Wright, et al...or how about the Bible in context for a change and get back to me!)

And check Brennan's quotes below.

The fact that he incorporates the biblical worldview of New Creation in passing; without even defending or commenting on it like I just did, is refreshing and revolutionary, timely and telling:

"in the new creation, men and women are not limited to stark contrasts where we must choose between romantic passion or inappropriate sex/infidelity." (p.. 17)

"rethinking male-female oneness in the new creation...in this new age, the New Testament makes clear there are new social intimacies." (71-72)

"in the beginning of the new creation...with his resurrection, Jesus met Mary Madgalene, an unmarried woman, alone in a garden.." (99)

How tragic that those who preach the most on "not being of the world," don't often preach on "being in the Kingdom."

As Len Sweet says, "We are in the world, and not of it...but not out of it yet, either."

In this world we will have troubles...but also delightful marital sex, and delightful non-romantic cross-sex relationships! If that word "Delight" trips you up, do NOT read one of the strongest section in "Sacred Passions' on that D-word!

2)The Trinitarian nature of life, relationships, church/ecclesiology....of, well, everything...has profound ( and profoundly untapped) implications for....well, everything:

I was thrilled to find extensive coverage of the practical ramifications of a Trinitarian worldview, ecclesiology, and sexology. I have often quoted Len Hjalmarson and Jurgen Moltmann on this lens (see labels marked "trinity" below), so found these additional quotes confirmational:

"our trust in the Trinity's embrace frees us to love more fully with triune types of love--fostering deep relationships that involve solid friendships without sexual innuendo"

(Marva Dawn, p. 77)

"It is precisely the one triune God in whose image all human beings are created who holds the promise of peace between men and women with irreducible but changing identities."

(Miraslov Volf, p. 146)

"Like the Trinity, we are called to understand who we are not as isolated individuals who have to make contracts to protect ourselves, but as persons with faces turned towards God and each other." (Edith Humphrey, p. 169)

If you are thinking this all sounds like theological gobbledygook, or a "sloppy agape" "free-love" orgy, you are far from the point. We cannot theologize, or make practical decisions without the Bedrock doctrine (and lifesource) of the Triune God who is intrinsically relationship ( liminally and missionally).

3)The promise of the rabbinic tradition of "elevation" (which Bono of course has prophetically endorsed/sung about/prayed about) is uniquely applicable our current juncture in postmodernity and church history.

On this final point/thesis of mine....maybe one related quote from Brennan which radically re-paints a category such as "chastity" as positive will suffice:

"Chastity, then, becomes the relational skill of choosing freedom to dance with personal beauty, goodness and truth in embodied relationships (138).

On this point, I can do no better than point you to rabbis...and Bono:.

We start with Rabbi Cohen (not quoted in the book):

For the chasid, prayer is not something one recites, it is rather an exercise that one performs, or an
experience that one enters into.... There is no room for inhibition...singing and dancing are essential means by which ...he expresses his emotional cleaving to God….but
that desire for God has to be so overwhelming that any extraneous thoughts are excluded…If distractions are erotic in nature…and (one) faces up to the predominance of the sexual urge at both conscious and subconscious levels, and
its capacity to intrude even during prayer...then he has learned to take measures…Chasidism dealt with this by introducing the doctrine of the "elevation of strange
thoughts." This...technique not of sublimation, but of thought conversion, whereby the beauty or desirability of the woman is latched upon and used not as a sexual but rather as a mental and spiritual stimulus.... taught to "elevate" these thoughts by substituting the beauty of God for the
physical beauty that is currently bewitching us. (The pray-er) has learned to immediately contrast the pale reflection of beauty that humans are endowed with, on the one hand, and the supreme Divine source of authentic and enduring beauty,
on the other…
link

Any U2 fan will immediately and clearly connect all this to the U2 song, "Elevation."

(Read more, and exegete and watch the song here...ideally it's a soundtrack to this great book)

---

So please, buy the book.

Read it...at Starbucks...with a friend.

Nancy?

---------------------------

(Reprinted at Ooze Viral Bloggers)

Trinity in chiasm, time, and pericherosis

Any dissertation with all those terms, let alone quoting Moltmann, has got my attention (as you can see by my "labels" on those terms at bottom)..Excerpt:

Moltmann also pushes the idea of movement within
the divine. He argues that movement is absolutely necessary for God’s redemptive acts in history. To deny movement in the Trinity is to reject the Trinity and the entirety of the Christian faith: “Anyone who denies movement in the divine nature also denies the divine Trinity. And to deny this is really to deny the whole Christian faith. . . the lack of any creative movement would mean an imperfection in the Absolute.”

An integrative and symmetrical model requires dynamism. Static notions of God
make integrating trinitarian perichoresis and the revelation of Jesus Christ impossible.

Yet the Trinity is not trapped by a perichoretic egalitarianism that is removed and
unrelated to time and space. The Trinity is also not limited to the revelation of God in creation. The Trinity incorporates both of these notions and exists both within and beyond time and space. The Trinity exists in a dynamic perichoresis that incorporates our life into the divine life. By understanding the dynamic Trinity as the God who enters into the world in creation, redemption and sanctification, we can understand the perichoretic movement of God and the movements of God in human history as one and the same.
-link, The Egalitarian Trinity: A Descriptive Trinitarian Model that is Symmetrical, Integrative, and Dynamic
Steve Dancause

-link

---------------

Interview excerpt:

So what would you say were your main findings?

I became convinced of the egalitarian necessity in trinitarian theology. Here I am indebted to numerous theologians, particularly Miroslav Volf, Jürgen Moltmann, Wolfhart Pannenberg, and Robert Jenson. I also was convinced that trinitarian models needed to be symmetrical to avoid Subordinationism. Robert Jenson and Catherine Lowry LaCugna have brilliant trinitarian models that integrate the economic and the immanent trinities (God in and for Godself beyond time and space and God in and for us within human history), yet I found their models to be asymmetrical. LaCugna’s model in God For Us is a wonderful work but it maintains the patriarchal understanding of the Father as absolute God as over and above the Son and the Spirit. Jenson’s model attempts to correct this and he makes a bold move towards symmetry in The Triune Identity, but his reliance on the traditional understanding of the Father ultimately leaves his model asymmetrical as well and therefore not fully egalitarian. What makes my project compelling is that it removes the traditional notion of the Father as the anchor of absolute divinity and instead understands the Trinity as the anchor of absolute divinity. This unconventional move, however, is also what will make the work controversial, and rightfully so I think.

After researching integrative models like those put forward by Jenson and LaCugna, I realized that any model I might imagine also needed to be integrative if it was to understand the Trinity holistically. Basically the egalitarian perichoresis of the three divine persons needed to be integrated with the submission of the Son and the Spirit to the Father within human history. I felt that we essentially needed a model that integrated the immanent and the economic trinities.

I was unable to find any convincing models that were both integrative and symmetrical. Nor was I able to imagine any static trinitarian model that met both criteria. This is where my advisor, Rev. Dr. Dwight J. Friesen, aided me in imagining the trinitarian life as dynamic rather than static. We might think this to be common sense, but I discovered that traditional theology, largely because of it’s close to ties to Hellenistic philosophy, demands static rather than dynamic views of God. In these models the Father is always the fixed and absolute point. We became persuaded that any Trinitarian model needs to be dynamic rather than static in order to achieve a heresy free model that doesn’t create the false notion of two distinct trinities. And this is how I arrived at the title – The Egalitarian Trinity: A Descriptive Trinitarian Model that is Symmetrical, Integrative, and Dynamic. While I offer my own model in the last section of the paper, I mean it to be descriptive, and not prescriptive of the divine community. I hope that anyone who reads it becomes convinced that we must view God as dynamic rather than static, holistic rather than dualistic, and egalitarian rather than subordinationist.

What are the implications of these findings from your perspective for the emerging church?

Being someone who is sympathetic towards egalitarian ecclesiologies, I was surprised to discover that my findings actually legitimate rank and hierarchies within both divine and human community. The key distinction, however, is that rank and hierarchy are entirely contextual and in a dynamic system of mutual submission. No one can look to the Trinity to legitimate any subordination as a static representation of how things are. This simply is not what the Trinity reveals to us. No one can claim that hierarchy in the church is scripturally or ontologically how things are supposed to be. To do so undermines our understanding of the Trinity at a fundamental level. And since it is the Trinity that makes Christianity a faith in its own right, patriarchal and subordinationist systems stand against the foundation of the Christian faith.

A further implication involves the emerging church at a fundamental level. Here I am indebted to my wife, herself a minister familiar with the emerging church, for this observation: The emerging church can idolise the completely organic and egalitarian congregation and it has a tendency to deconstruct anything that is other. At its best this is a holy longing for divine community. At its worst it can be a reveling in chaos that can be unhelpful. The dynamic and egalitarian Trinity certainly removes legitimation for hierarchy and structure, but it certainly does not remove its necessitation. Relationality cannot be used to justify chaos. As the egalitarian Trinity shows us, all relationships have structure, but relational structure is dynamic, reciprocal, mutual, and appropriate to its context. This is trinitarian relationality and the core of what my thesis is about. Similarly, I have seen emerging church leaders use relationality and/or egalitarianism to deny the power, privilege, and position that their context gives them. This is a gross error in my judgment. Abdicating responsibility while enjoying privilege is not what the egalitarian Trinity shows us. Service, leadership, and taking responsibility as appropriate to the context is what the egalitarian Trinity embodies.

Finally, while the project may be in line with emergent sensibilities, there is no way that I could have arrived at the finished product without dialogue with other Christian traditions. Emerging churches usually understand contextuality, yet they need to remember that they stand within a larger context of the greater Church. Just as my work would not be nearly as strong without engagement with the saints who have gone before, emerging churches are at their best when they hold in high esteem ancient as well as divergent contemporary traditions.

-link, full interview

Audio of Moltmann: life story

What a gift: audio of Moltmann interview, where he talks about overlap of his life story and his theology:
here

Related:

Moltmann Wrestles With God in POW Camp

(see also "labels" below)

Two-stage shaming, Naked at the Cross, Trinitarian unity when separated

Stephen Seamands, in "Wounds That Heal," (much of it a free read here) stirs me to wonder if shaming is always perpetrated in two stages:

1)forced/involuntary/public nakedness (literal or emotional) nakedness of soul may be even worse)
2)the promise of continued shaming beyond death (by dishonoring our name after we are gone, or sending us to hell in the afterlife ).

Seamands quotes the most important theologian you have never heard of, Frank Lake, and that section reminds how vital it might be to doggedly defend the doctrine (that most evangelicals seem to think is unspeakable, even though  very conservative Dallas Seminary professors claim it is necessary, let alone Martin Hengel in his classic book "Crucifixion)"that Jesus died completely naked...especially that he might completely identify with, incarnate; convert and subvert our shame, particularly of sexual abuse or memories:

Crucifixions were purposely carried out in public..Executioners heightened the shame by turning the gruesome personal ordeal into grisly public entertainment.. In most paintings, films and artistic depictions, the crucified figure of Jesus is partially covered with a loincloth. But in the ancient world, the victim was always crucified naked. The shameful exposure often continued after death since it was common for the victim to be denied burial.. Hengel explains, ...'What it meant for man in antiquity to be refused burial, and the dishonor that went with it, can hardly be appreciated by modern man.' ...Frank Lake expresses the truth powerfully in describing Christ's experience of shame in nakedness: 'He hangs on the Cross naked. Both the innocent who were not loved and the guilty who have spurned love are ashamed. Both have something to hide. Clothing is the symbol of hiding what we are ashamed to reveal. In His own innocence He is identified with the innocent in nakedness...He was so deprived of His natural clothing of transfigured beauty and glory that men, seeing Him thus, shrank away from Him. The whole world will see this King appearing in all beauty and glory, because He allowed both..to be utterly taken away.' -Seamands, pp 49-50

More posts on Jesus dying naked?  See:.
 See:  "Jesus died naked..but not in Christian art and movies."
and"The Last Temptation of Movie Boycotters,"

That some well-meaning folks suggest we should never mention his nakedness,
 that doing so is so wrong as to be satanic...
 that we should fear thinking about genitalia,
 is represented here:

That he may have been naked is as about as important as what kind of nails were used to nail him there. Copper? Bronze? Iron? Who cares?! Was the crown of thorns made of Briar thorns or Thistle? Who cares?

Did Jesus die? Who cares? (Bear with me).

Did Jesus lay down his life willingly and by his own power, and then take it back up again just as willingly and just as powerfully? THAT is the point.

Don't get distracted by images of genetalia! [sic] And let's face it; as soon as you hear someone say "Jesus died naked on a cross", that's the first thing that pops into your carnal, fleshly, sinful mind. As soon as you hear it, you are IMMEDIATELY distracted.
That man who is telling you that may not know that he's being used as a servant of Satan; but he is.
-link

Of course, I feel for this position, and am aware that the naked Jesus doctrine could be terribly abused...But I fear that ironically, it may be crucial to recover/uncover.
It may not be a "required doctrine,"....but..

Anyway..

Several pages later, Seamands, in a discussion on the practical relevance of the Trinity (Note:see his entire wonderful book on this important topic):

'My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?' On the cross, Christ gave expression not only to his own sorrow and disappointment, and ours, but also to God's...At the foot of the cross, our mournful cries of lament are always welcome...

...This cry is the only place in the gospels where Jesus didn't address God with the personal, intimate, 'My Father,'...

..On the cross, the bonds of trust between the Father and the Son seem to disintegrate. As theologian Jurgen Moltmann says, 'The love that binds the one to the other is transformed into a dividing curse.'....Yet at the cross, the Father and the Son are never more united, never more bound together. They are one in their surrender, one in their self-giving. The Father surrenders the Son...The Son, in turn, surrenders himself...So {they} are united even in their separation, held together by their oneness of will and purpose
-Seamands, 67-68

More on the dynamics of God forsaking God here, and more on the trinitarian centrality of all this by clicking the "trinity" label below this post.

Finally, Seamands helps me grasp that Jesus died not only for our shame, but our rage
(rage, of course, is often enacted as a reaction to shame). Rage, ironically, is what literally killed Jesus (and shamed him into nakedness):

Christ became the innocent, willing victim of their rage. But not only their [those at the cross] rage -ours too. Frank Lake is right: 'We attended the Crucifixion in our crowds, turned on our Healer..' -Seamands, 69

Which of course, leads to Jesus healing us precisely when we deserve it least and need it most.
Naked and (un)ashamed.

If you pray, Pray nakedly. be naked prey. -The 77s
-------

related?
See:

"The Lord Be With You...Even When He's Not!"

a Trinity teaser

I present this teaser below from an important paper by Len on Trinitarian leadership. The whole paper should be read as it wrestles well with Snyder, Moltmann, Seamands, Pinnock et al, and asks the right questions (hierarchy, social/economic etc) in the right way (a rare gift). Searching the word "trinity" on Len's blog will be one the most fruitful adventures of your day.

This brings us full circle to the nature of Trinitarian leadership – it is mutual, vulnerable, joyful, and loving, a dance at once mysterious and filled with purpose. Many questions remain: 1. is “leadership” a useful paradigm to overlay biblical revelation on the nature of God and of spiritual community? 2. if we conclude that Trinitarian community is the goal, do we exclude a developmental model that may have elements of hierarchy? I believe the extended family offers the best analogy and developmental model for human community, but families pass through stages from early to late and roles and functions shift. Our church communities tend to set roles and functions in stone.
-Len Hjalmaerson, link

more shifty envelopes

Still working on pushing envelopes (and "pushing towards the unobvious," as usual) re:

epistemology, emergence, and shift in wineskins..

I was glad to recently find this, in an article on panentheism:

Emergence:
Describes the process involved in supervenience. Emergence occurs when a new property arises out of a combination of elements. The traditional example is that water emerges out of the combination of oxygen and hydrogen atoms in certain proportions. There are a variety of types of emergence that have been identified. In part-whole emergence, the whole is more than the total of all the parts (Corning 2002). Strong emergence understands evolution to produce new and ontologically distinct levels characterized by their own laws or regularities and causal forces. Weak emergence holds that the new level follows the fundamental causal processes of physics (Clayton 2004, 9). Strong emergence is also known as ontological emergence and weak as epistemological emergence.
link

The research on panentheism was a follow-up on noting that Falk (p. 198) portrays Einstein's Godview as being "roughly" pantheism, when actually the rough connection be might more helpfully be coined "panentheism," (depends on how much personal God one reads between the lines in Einstein..I am guessing more than most see)....drives me nuts when folks confuse the latter with the former. (Check out the proposed term "poly-panentheist" (:...)

Wondering if our current epistemological shift is in sync with

• missiological shift,
• old>new wineskin shift and
• pan to panentheistic shift..

Guess it will pan out in the end...

Gentle Rage Against the HospitalMachines

From fear of death, Man sows death; as a result of feeling a slave, he desires to dominate. Domination is always constrained to kill. The state is always subject to fear and therefore it is constrained to kill. It has no desire to wrestle against death. Men in authority are very much like gangsters.
-Berdyaev, "Freedom and The Spirit," p251

Anyone familiar with Pink Floyd knows they are hardly The Archies.

So no surprise that "Welcome to the Machine" is sad, sarcastic, bitter, hopeless;
that is, classic Pink Floyd.

But why is it also so.... fun... even prayerfully cathartic... to enter into?

The song, most



obviously about the manipulative, heartless"machine" of the record industry (peruse some suggested interpretations here)
also speaks prophetically to all things

• "system,"
• "institutionalolatry,"
• "matrix"
• "it"

It is actually freeing to psalmically admit out loud (in a song, on paper, in a sermon or prophetic act) that

Machine doesn't care;
that the system is never the solution,
that the inevitable corporate systemic evil that becomes embedded
(and no one is at fault..that is the catch) in any principality
is all about spreading the gospel of death.
All structures are partly fallen, and largely lean towards death and hell.

They'd like to take us with them.

No need to be overly Luddite;
no need to drain your Ipod with the bathwater..
just a need for awareness that systems in and of themselves cannot care..
and cannot not kill you.

Even as you are free to dance in reckless abandon, and pray with wild hope,  to all that they project or soundtrack. '
Even though medium is message, the Message is far more sovereign.

I am not all that familiar with the group Rage Against the Machine (except that their brilliant guitarist was the God-haunted Tom Morello, who along with other former Rage members now are the core of the God-haunted group Audioslave along with the God-haunted Chris Cornell) or all that they may mean by that title. But it sounds like something we..of all people.. are called to do.

All this to tie into "Hospitals (and Those In Them) Need the Word of God," Chris Erdman's amazing chapter 14 in "Countdown to Sunday,"  four pages that for me are as chillingly accurate,
and practically pastoral,  as anything in the massive "pastoral help" library.

As a pastor still wet behind my ears, I truly felt intimidated by the bravado of hospital technology and shrank before it. I didn't know then that the hospital itself, as much as the patients I went to visit, also needed to hear the Word of God in order to be what God intended it to be--an agent of divine grace, occupying its place as servant, not master...

I might not always carry a Bible [on hospital visits], but I always carry a text in mind that I speak among all the bleeps and blips and pokes. Hosting the text there among the gods of steel and electricity and drugs and know-how is vital work. The technology no longer intimidates me...

..So today, as I enter hospital doors and walk those hallways and sit beside beds and in waiting rooms and open those texts of ours. I don't stand and shout the Word--it's a power that doesn't need my strength or my energy. As I do, I not only see the persons who need this Word leaning in, but I sense the walls themselves bending near...The real weapons that bring wholeness and peace are not machines but words, as small and feeble as they may seem. And all we have to do is mutter them.
Chris Erdman, "Countdown to Sunday," pp 71-73.

Reading this in the very real context and contour of a week of hospital visits to the sweetest saint imaginable; surrounded helplessly but not hopelessly by those bleeps and pokes and machines has brought tears to my eyes and whole images from Chris's chapter to bear on the situation.
I have never been one for wanting to look very pastorly/religious on hospital calls. I don't even park in the clergy parking!

And like a good stealth pastor, I keep my small pocket Bible tucked away.

But I can now pull it out to pay a pastoral (and prophetic) call on the relentless beeping heart monitor. Gently, I rage against the machine; I do not welcome myself to it or its domain.
Instead, I Word it back to its creative and redemptive purpose. And I have seen, like Chris, "medical people who know firsthand the limits of these gods and who themselves long to hear the Bible read in this place that often intimidates them too--they've seen the soft underbelly of the beast that demands their homage."



Today, on the way to the hospital,
to bolster my faith,
and lose my professional preacher facade that I accidentally (?) picked up as a System-Citizen,
I will read Chris's book (at the stoplight, OK, Mom?)

and

listen not to Pink Floyd's "Welcome to the Machine,"
but to one or more of it's more biblically-balanced cousins:

Even though on the surface, “Vertigo” is a “a nice little ditty that makes you want to kill yourself,” Bono laughed; in the context and clothing of the disc and book, “Vertigo” is actually a hearty “hello”, amen and allegiance to the song/dance of life; which when sung, counters and counteracts; defuses and dismantles the “goodbye, goodbye” death-song that dominates these days. link

Of course, the whole point and mission of that U2 CD/book might be nothing less than to “dismantle the lie that death and destruction hold the cards.” (Beth Maynard).
.

"Resistance is the protest of those who hope,"
as Jürgen Moltmann has it ( "The Power of the Powerless").

On to the hospital.
Armed with gentle violence.

And to utter a mere, raging and healing word to, and against, the machines.