What if Christians actually celebrated the diversity and difference that God sustains?

[The Great Open Dance]

Christians must celebrate difference, so Christians must celebrate the social Trinity.

The Greek gods Zeus, Poseidon, and Hades are certainly different from one another, but not in a good way. They struggle against one another, to the destruction of those around them. For some, the mismanagement of their differences incriminates difference itself. Who needs polytheism, if the many gods are conflictual? The desire for harmony produces a desire for pure unity, one perfect God who holds all power and makes all decisions, thereby avoiding all conflict.

But there is a better way to negotiate difference that unites the many, rather than replacing them with the one. Too often, even the Christian tradition has shied away from this option. Indeed, in its concern to avoid tritheism while advancing Trinitarianism, the Christian tradition has frequently advanced a slightly triune monotheism. And when the three are mentioned, they sometimes become identical triplets with little distinction, as if all difference produces disunity.

Gregory of Nyssa, for example, asserts that the only difference between the three persons of the Trinity is their order of being: the Son is begotten of the Father and the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father; otherwise they are indistinguishable. But if integration necessitates sameness and difference threatens unity, then a homogeneous God offers our diverse world little hope.

Moreover, if the three are virtually indistinguishable from one another, then there is no reason for them to be three. All conversation would become monologue, offering as much novelty as talking to yourself. All interaction would become mirroring, denying all surprise.

Difference, on the other hand, invigorates community and stimulates creativity by provoking sameness out of its torpor. Sameness is static, but difference is kinetic. Sameness roots us to the present, but difference opens us to the future.

For example, Charles Hartshorne argues that the intensity of aesthetic experience depends on contrast. Artists fill a blank canvas with varying colors, recognizing that diversity integrated is beauty created. Composers fill a score with varying notes, creating dissonance that resolves into consonance. All creators recognize that great diversity, perfectly unified, produces the most intense beauty, such as that we see in the cosmos.

Divine diversity establishes and endorses human diversity.

Jürgen Moltmann places this aesthetic insight within the very heart of God. For Moltmann, the three persons of the Trinity are truly different persons of the Trinity, throbbing with communicable life. We have already argued that if God is a self-identical subject (a single person), then God cannot be love, because love implies relatedness. Now, we argue further that vitality implies difference. Hence, the superabundant creativity of the Trinity implies difference within God.

Moltmann expresses this insight by asserting the true uniqueness of the divine persons, who differ from one another in function, experience, and memory. Functionally, the Spirit inspires the prophets whom the Father sustains and the Son perfects. Experientially, the Son suffers death and (the feeling of) abandonment by the Father, while the Father laments his Son’s suffering. At the ascension, the Son relinquishes physical presence to the church so that the Spirit can animate its ministry.

In the Christian scheme of salvation, God prefers cooperation over mere operation. Different functions produce different perspectives, which produce different experiences, which produce different memories, all of which distinguish the Trinitarian persons. Hence, the persons of the Trinity are in no way interchangeable. As distinct centers of subjective experience, they are true persons, with a strong sense of self that they place at one another’s service.

These three persons, characterized by perfect internal presence and perfect external openness, are by their very nature equals. God is uniqueness loving uniqueness, difference loving difference: creation, incarnation, and inspiration are not the sequential activities of one person in three different historical guises, as suggested by Sabellius’s modalism. Nor is God a primary substance hosting secondary difference. Instead, distinct persons generate divinity through love.

Interpersonal uniqueness energizes the divine community, such that unity-in-difference is the very source of all reality. In contrast, if we predicate uniformity as our sacred ideal, then intolerance becomes our sacred mission. If unity necessitates sameness, then ethnic cleansing is a necessary precursor to national community, churches are right to practice racial exclusion, and the spirit is best conjured by homogeneity. A truly Trinitarian faith, on the other hand, will enthusiastically embrace diversity.

The doctrine of the social Trinity celebrates interdependence.

The difference embedded within God—the uniqueness of the divine persons— grants their relations freedom and consequence. They respond to each other in different ways, at different times, for different reasons. The various combinations of such uniqueness, amplified by an openness to time, offer inexhaustible possibilities for interaction.

Within God, history never repeats itself, nor does it echo. Such an understanding challenges the traditional interpretation of aseity. Aseity means “self-causing,” that God is the source of God’s own being, that God has no cause other than God’s self. Early Christian theologians borrowed the concept from Greco-Roman thought. Believing that religious ultimacy demands metaphysical independence, they insisted that transcendence excludes relationship. In this view, God needs no one and relies on no one for his (and it’s always a he/him) being or satisfaction. Creation is thus an utterly gracious act, meeting no need of God’s, who generously grants us life in this beautiful universe.

Feminist theologians have argued that the ascription of self-sufficiency to God improperly exalts traditionally masculine qualities like emotional invulnerability, thoughtless self-assertion, and condescending paternalism. Societies who worship such a self-sustaining God will also exalt lone wolf males who act unhindered by any concern for the broader society. According to this critique, the doctrine of aseity does not provide insight into God so much as it reinforces male privilege while stunting male psychology.

We are reinterpreting the doctrine of aseity by asserting that, while God is uncaused, the three persons who constitute God are co-originating. That is, the Trinity does not depend on an external source for their existence. Yet simultaneously, the persons within the Trinity are interdependent. God has invited creation into that interdependence. If God ever had the capacity for perfect self-satisfaction, then God has forsaken that capacity for us.

Rejecting isolated self-sufficiency, God instead chooses increase-through-relation. Each person in the Trinity says, “Ubuntu—I am because you are,” to the other persons. Eternal self-sufficiency makes a bold choice for everlasting relationship and all that relationship entails—vulnerability, exultation, despair, joy, suffering, and love.

The doctrine of the social Trinity celebrates freedom.

This capacity for choice implies that God has no nature. God is free, unconstrained by a cause or an essence or a universal law or even goodness itself. God is decision before attribute or being. God asserts this divine freedom in Exodus 3:14. If we translate the Hebrew verb ‘ehyeh in the future tense, then God states, “I will be who I will be.” God is choosing to become who God is, and God is love.

The divine choice for love is absolute, so that God’s love becomes spontaneous. This spontaneity makes the divine love appear natural, since that love penetrates to and emanates from the divine core. Nevertheless, it is a continuously chosen identity. God could very well choose otherwise, but will not, because God has also chosen to be ḥesed. Ḥesed is the Hebrew word for loving-kindness, steadfast faithfulness, and great mercy (Psalms 86:5; 107:43; etc.). As the covenantal love and loyalty that God shows to us, and the covenantal love and loyalty that we should show to one another, ḥesed is the ideal of relationship. Ḥesed keeps its promises, even at great personal cost. God is trustworthy because God has chosen to be trustworthy, not because God is constrained by an unchangeable nature.

If God did not have this freedom to choose, if God were constrained by an essence, then God would not be a person. Reality would be defined by the nature that precedes God, not God’s choice for communion. And the most basic substrate of the universe would be an impersonal force, analogous to gravity, rather than an interpersonal God sustaining relationship with and between persons.

If God is not free, then God is not love. And if we are not free, then we cannot choose love, which is to choose divinity and fulfill the image of God within us. (adapted from Jon Paul Sydnor, The Great Open Dance: A Progressive Christian Theology, pages 55-58)

*****

For further reading, please see:

Gregory of Nyssa. “On ‘Not Three Gods.’” Translated by H. A. Wilson. From Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, edited by Philip Schaff, 2nd ser., 5. Buffalo: Christian Literature, 1893. Revised and edited for New Advent by Kevin Knight. https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/2905.htm.

Hampson, Daphne. “The Theological Implications of a Feminist Ethic.” The Modern Churchman 31 no. 1 (1989) 36–39. DOI: 10.3828/MC.31.1.36

Hartshorne, Charles. Creative Synthesis and Philosophic Method. Chicago: Open Court, 1970.

Moltmann, Jurgen. The Trinity and the Kingdom: The Doctrine of God. San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1981.

Rea, Michael. “Gender as a divine attribute.” Religious Studies 52, no. 1 (March 2016) 97–115. DOI: 10.1017/S0034412514000614.

[Autumn]

1. Read your bible. Cover to cover and you will understand that the biblican god is really

not a fan of diversity. Not at all. As for him being the god of love? Again read the bible. Cover to cover. Personally I wouldn't date a man with his abusive personality, much less worship one.

[eppur_se_muova]

2. My mother likes to say "Well, if God made them that way, you're saying God made a mistake".

Apparently that "working in mysterious ways" thing is open to some kind of vote, in the eyes of the most stridently "religious" ostensible Christians.