The Trinity and the Church

The Trinity and The Church

In Christianity no discussion of ecclesiology should begin without addressing the nature of the One who gives the church meaning and purpose. It is the Triune God that brings the church; unity of substance, differentiated in personhood that is understood in perichoretic co-activity. The universal church received God's full self-revelation in the person and work of Jesus Christ, and God's Holy Spirit communicates that revelation to us even today. To what purpose? It is in the universal Christian church that God creates a matrix of categorical understanding in Jesus Christ and through the Holy Spirit. Within that Christian context, the universal church becomes the "Body of Christ" where all people from various Christian movements and denominations come together with the purpose of building a society based on relationship instead of wealth, power and glory.

Why did God endure history, transform history, in the first place? The answer goes to the very heart of the Trinitarian relationship; a relationship humanity struggles to explain fully even two millennia after God's full self-revelation, but humanity begins to understand when the community of faith reflects upon the whole scriptural witness. The passage in the Christian text that most effectively summarizes the relationship between the persons of the Trinity is found in 1 John 4:8, "God is love" (1 Jn. 4:8, New International Version). Love is the very being and essence of the Triune God, and that love constitutes the relationship between the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Here, I agree with Torrance (1996, p. 155) that "the divine relationships are intrinsic and constitutive; being a person is being in relationship."

It might then seem that the Trinity's activity must be differentiated into different "modes" of God's salvific activity but God's work of grace is not split into pieces. Every act of grace proceeds from the Father, is mediated in Jesus Christ and is communicated through the Holy Spirit. The work of the persons of the Trinity is manifest in perichoretic co-activity; all three are involved in every divine act, not serially or progressively, but co-active. Such unity of being in persons with distinct activity toward a common goal points to divine activity expressed in "will-to-relationship." This "will-to-relationship" is witnessed to throughout history in the witness of faithful followers recorded in sacred texts: the Tao de Ching, The Baghivad Gita, The Vegas, The Torah, The Qur'an and The Bible and diverse reflections on those primary collections of codified human wisdom. Beyond the witness of Abraham, Isaiah, Jeremiah, David, and others given throughout scripture, are the witnesses of John of the Cross, Martin Luther King, Oscar Romero, Billy Graham and Mother Theresa, a vast cloud of witnesses whose lives reflect