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Triquetra (a.k.a. "Trinity Knot") |
"The dance is perichoresis, the Greek word for dance. The term was used by our Greek theologian ancestors as a metaphor to refer to the Trinity. Perichoresis, wrote Karl Barth, “asserts that the divine modes of existence condition and permeate one another mutually with such perfection, that one is as invariably in the other two as the other two are in the one.” Imagine a folk dance, a round dance, with three partners in each set. The music starts up and the partners holding hands begin moving in a circle. On signal from the caller, they release hands, change partners, and weave in and out, swinging first one and then another. The tempo increases, the partners move more swiftly with and between and among one another, swinging and twirling, embracing and releasing, holding on and letting go. But there is no confusion, every movement is cleanly coordinated in precise rhythms (these are practiced and skillful dancers!), as each person maintains his or her own identity. To the onlooker, the movements are so swift it is impossible at times to distinguish one person from another; the steps are so intricate that it is difficult to anticipate the actual configurations as they appear: Perichoresis (peri = around; choresis = dance).
The essence of Trinity, the centerpiece of Christian theology and sometimes considered the most subtle and abstruse of all doctrines, is captured here in a picture that anyone can observe in an American neighborhood barn dance or an Irish ceilidh.
Trinity is the most comprehensive and integrative framework that we have for understanding and participating in the Christian life. Early on in our history, our pastors and teachers formulated the Trinity to express what is distinctive in the revelation of God in Christ. This theology provides an immense horizon against which we can understand and practice the Christian life largely and comprehensively. Without an adequately imagined theology, spirituality gets reduced to the cramped world reported by journalists or the flat world studied by scientists. Trinity reveals the immense world of God creating, saving, and blessing in the name of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit with immediate and lived implications for the way we live, for our spirituality. Trinity is the church’s attempt to understand God’s revelation of Godself in all its parts and relationships. And a most useful work it has been. At a most practical level it provides a way of understanding and responding to the God who enters into all the day-to-day issues that we face as persons and churches and communities from the time we get out of bed in the morning until we fall asleep at night, and reaches out to bring us into participation on God’s terms, that is, on Trinitarian terms. It prevents us from getting involved in highly religious but soul-destroying ways of going about living the Christian life.
Trinity understands God as three-personed: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, God in community, each “person” in active communion with the others. We are given an understanding of God that is most emphatically personal and interpersonal. God is nothing if not personal. If God is revealed as personal, the only way that God can be known is in personal response. We need to know this. It is the easiest thing in the world to use words as a kind of abstract truth or principle, to deal with the gospel as information. Trinity prevents us from doing this. We can never get away with de-personalizing the gospel or the truth to make it easier, simpler, more convenient. Knowing God through impersonal abstractions is ruled out, knowing God through programmatic projects is abandoned, knowing God in solitary isolation is forbidden. Trinity insists that God is not an idea or a force or a private experience but personal and known only in personal response and engagement.
Trinity also prevents us from reducing God to what we can understand or need at any one time. There is a lot going on in us and this world, far exceeding what we are capable of taking in. In dealing with God, we are dealing in mystery, in what we do not know, what we cannot control or deal with on our terms. We need to know this, for we live in a world that over-respects the practical. We want God to be “relevant” to our lifestyle. We want what we can, as we say, “get a handle on.” There is immense peer pressure to reduce God to fit immediate needs and expectations. But God is never a commodity to use. In a functionalized world in which we are all trained to understand ourselves in terms of what we can do, we are faced with a reality that we cannot control. And so we cultivate reverence. We are in the presence of One who is both before and beyond us. We listen and wait. Presumption —God-on-demand on our terms —is exposed as simply silly. Defining God down to the level of our emotions, and thinking and then demanding that God work by the terms of our agenda, is set aside in favor of a life of worship and prayer, obedience and love —a way of life open and responsive to what God is doing rather than one in which we plot strategies to get God involved in what we are doing. Trinity keeps pulling us into a far larger world than we can imagine on our own.
And Trinity is a steady call and invitation to participate in the energetically active life of God —the image of the dance again. It is the participation in the Trinity (God as he has revealed himself to us) that makes things and people particularly and distinctively who they are. We are not spectators to God; there is always a hand reaching out to pull us into the Trinitarian actions of holy creation, holy salvation, and holy community. God is never a nonparticipant in what he does, nor are any of us. There are no nonparticipants in a Trinity-revealed life. We need to know this. It is a lot easier to guide, motivate, plan, and direct from a distance, whether in our homes or in our work. So we keep a little distance, find ways to delegate so we don’t have to get too involved. But the reality of the Trinity does not permit it. If we are going to know God we have to participate in the relationship that is God. We discover ourselves as unique participants —each of us one-of-a-kind —in the life of God. The Christian life is not preprogrammed; it is a release into freedom. Trinity keeps us alert and responsive to the freedom that derives from participation in the life of God. And every act of participation is unique.
Every expression of spirituality, left to itself, tends toward being more about me and less about God. Spiritual theology counters by giving witness to the living God, using the largest and most comprehensive and involving terms possible. Trinity provides these terms, a theological language that enables us to maintain our Christian identity in God’s image rather than in what we see in our mirrors each morning."
(Peterson, Eugene H. Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places: A Conversation in Spiritual Theology. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans. 2005. 44-47.)
