thanks adrian!
adrian has written a riposte to my mission-shaped church article on fulcrum - he is also a cartoonist, in fact i think that a few other fulcrum team have been at the end of his brush, fab.
of course i disagree with him in his discussion about the place of the trinity in the mission dialogue, but to be honest, i don't think this is anything remarkable, adrian being liberal in his theology and me being, well not.
the christian tradition understands God as revealing something of himself to us and so what we say about him as trinity is not simply guesswork, nor just our own projections from what we see of God as human beings, but rather is understood to have been graciously revealed to us by the God who chooses to move towards the other for the flourishing of that other; mission.
of course we do view God from our own perspective, that is true, and from this perspective we try to use language which gives some explanation to what it is that we see. but mostly we have to admit that our language is a ragged equation with the reality we are trying to describe - even augustine struggled with the 'persons' analogy, and in the end says something like 'well we had to use some word, so persons had to do - better that than use nothing'.
but that is not the same as saying that we are only doing that. we believe that God reveals himself as One who is for the world, for his creation, active and present within it, holding it together, and who ultimately reveals himself in the person of Christ. of course, as adrian says, the trinity also tells us something of what it means to be defined by relationship, but this is not 'yet another metaphor' attached to the trinity; it is better to say that we can say that 'God is mission' rather than 'God does mission' because the ontological place of mission in the trinity is an expression of the ontological principle of relationship.
but anyway, enough high falutin' talk, i'm enjoying my cartoon adrian :-)
adrian has written a riposte to my mission-shaped church article on fulcrum - he is also a cartoonist, in fact i think that a few other fulcrum team have been at the end of his brush, fab.
of course i disagree with him in his discussion about the place of the trinity in the mission dialogue, but to be honest, i don't think this is anything remarkable, adrian being liberal in his theology and me being, well not.
the christian tradition understands God as revealing something of himself to us and so what we say about him as trinity is not simply guesswork, nor just our own projections from what we see of God as human beings, but rather is understood to have been graciously revealed to us by the God who chooses to move towards the other for the flourishing of that other; mission.
of course we do view God from our own perspective, that is true, and from this perspective we try to use language which gives some explanation to what it is that we see. but mostly we have to admit that our language is a ragged equation with the reality we are trying to describe - even augustine struggled with the 'persons' analogy, and in the end says something like 'well we had to use some word, so persons had to do - better that than use nothing'.
but that is not the same as saying that we are only doing that. we believe that God reveals himself as One who is for the world, for his creation, active and present within it, holding it together, and who ultimately reveals himself in the person of Christ. of course, as adrian says, the trinity also tells us something of what it means to be defined by relationship, but this is not 'yet another metaphor' attached to the trinity; it is better to say that we can say that 'God is mission' rather than 'God does mission' because the ontological place of mission in the trinity is an expression of the ontological principle of relationship.
but anyway, enough high falutin' talk, i'm enjoying my cartoon adrian :-)
1 comment:
For this to be so you have to say, I would argue, that Greek culture and its logic is no accident, no product of humankind, otherwise you would have other concepts of God to deal with that would lead to quite different metaphors. You then end up with a world that is like a puppet on a divine string, whereas evolutionary and chaotic systems suggest that the world and its changes is far from that.
It's not that language is a faulty but close way to some truth, but that it is a made symbol system that makes truth, especially in the arts and matters of faith (where objectivity simply cannot be pinned down).
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