Trinitarian Therapy
I just finished participating in a two-week intensive January course at ANTS entitled, “The People of the Book: An Introduction to Jewish Texts.”
The unofficial title of the course was “What Christian Clergy Need to Know about Judaism.”
It was led by Rabbi Or Rose and faculty members from Hebrew College and it was transformative for me and for the sixteen ANTS students who listened, prayed, sang, and debated. I won’t review all the details. Take the course yourself (we will offer it again) or a similar one.
But I will tell you what was transformative. All of us Congregationalists, Baptists, Unitarians, Roman Catholics, and Methodists came away convinced that we needed to become as articulate and passionate about our faith and sacred texts as our Jewish sisters and brothers who shared with us are about their faith and texts.
The experience left me in need of some Trinitarian counseling.
Christians and Jews worship the same God. The God revealed to ancient Israel as Yod-He-Vav-He is the One revealed to Christians as the Triune God; in traditional terms: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The preceding sentence is the very kind of dogmatic formula that my education and life experience have conditioned me to resist. But there it is. It’s my story and I’m sticking to it.
The idea of the Trinity, however true or false, however beautifully or clumsily expressed, is the Christian contribution to the discussion of what it means to be alive in a universe that has a Creator. So this week, in the light of two weeks of intensive reading and discussion about the Jewish faith, I am curious about the Trinity and how to understand it at a level deeper than dogma.
So where does a seminary Bible professor go when in need of some Trinitarian counseling?
Mark Heim is right now across the hall from me in his office, but he’s a busy guy so rather than interrupt him, I pulled his book down from my shelf: The Depth of the Riches: A Trinitarian Theology of Religious Ends (Eerdmans, 2001). Here are the “three” (see, the Trinitarian thing is already working on me) sections I underlined.
1. The Christian idea of the Trinity can be reformulated as:
God above us,
God alongside [us and]
God among us.
“The Trinity is an account of God that says these are experiences of the same reality, not different ones, and yet each has its own irreducible integrity” (p. 132).
2. The basis of Christianity’s theology of the Trinity is “the disciples’ conviction that . . .”
their encounter with Jesus could be correlated
with the encounter with Israel’s one God
and with the new life they experienced within and among themselves as a result of Jesus.
“These were not identical experiences, but they were encounters with the same God” (p. 133).
3. Mark, our Evangelist, restates this idea in his next couple of sentences and I like them too. These three encounters . . .
with the God of Israel who is not to be named or imaged,
with the concrete humanity of Jesus,
[and] with the indwelling of the Spirit . . .
“were revelations of the constituitive pattern of God’s relation to humanity and of God’s own relational nature” (p. 133).
S. (for “Steven”) Mark Heim: blessed are you for sitting in your office (when you’re not being interrupted) and for studying in India and for taking walks and runs around Newton Centre, all the while cogitating on the notion of Trinity. And Or Rose: blessed are you for inspiring Christians to dig deeper into our faith while also treasuring yours.
You see, this Jewish-Christian relationship on Institution Hill is not about Christians making nice with folks we’ve misunderstood and mistreated for a couple of millennium (although you can’t help but leave this encounter with the words “Never again” painfully branded on your heart). It is about nothing less than the renewal of the most vital and redemptive expressions of Christianity and Judaism that both communities can muster in our generation.
This train is bound for glory. Get on board.
Gregory Mobley
Associate Professor of Old Testament
The unofficial title of the course was “What Christian Clergy Need to Know about Judaism.”
It was led by Rabbi Or Rose and faculty members from Hebrew College and it was transformative for me and for the sixteen ANTS students who listened, prayed, sang, and debated. I won’t review all the details. Take the course yourself (we will offer it again) or a similar one.
But I will tell you what was transformative. All of us Congregationalists, Baptists, Unitarians, Roman Catholics, and Methodists came away convinced that we needed to become as articulate and passionate about our faith and sacred texts as our Jewish sisters and brothers who shared with us are about their faith and texts.
The experience left me in need of some Trinitarian counseling.
Christians and Jews worship the same God. The God revealed to ancient Israel as Yod-He-Vav-He is the One revealed to Christians as the Triune God; in traditional terms: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The preceding sentence is the very kind of dogmatic formula that my education and life experience have conditioned me to resist. But there it is. It’s my story and I’m sticking to it.
The idea of the Trinity, however true or false, however beautifully or clumsily expressed, is the Christian contribution to the discussion of what it means to be alive in a universe that has a Creator. So this week, in the light of two weeks of intensive reading and discussion about the Jewish faith, I am curious about the Trinity and how to understand it at a level deeper than dogma.
So where does a seminary Bible professor go when in need of some Trinitarian counseling?
Mark Heim is right now across the hall from me in his office, but he’s a busy guy so rather than interrupt him, I pulled his book down from my shelf: The Depth of the Riches: A Trinitarian Theology of Religious Ends (Eerdmans, 2001). Here are the “three” (see, the Trinitarian thing is already working on me) sections I underlined.
1. The Christian idea of the Trinity can be reformulated as:
God above us,
God alongside [us and]
God among us.
“The Trinity is an account of God that says these are experiences of the same reality, not different ones, and yet each has its own irreducible integrity” (p. 132).
2. The basis of Christianity’s theology of the Trinity is “the disciples’ conviction that . . .”
their encounter with Jesus could be correlated
with the encounter with Israel’s one God
and with the new life they experienced within and among themselves as a result of Jesus.
“These were not identical experiences, but they were encounters with the same God” (p. 133).
3. Mark, our Evangelist, restates this idea in his next couple of sentences and I like them too. These three encounters . . .
with the God of Israel who is not to be named or imaged,
with the concrete humanity of Jesus,
[and] with the indwelling of the Spirit . . .
“were revelations of the constituitive pattern of God’s relation to humanity and of God’s own relational nature” (p. 133).
S. (for “Steven”) Mark Heim: blessed are you for sitting in your office (when you’re not being interrupted) and for studying in India and for taking walks and runs around Newton Centre, all the while cogitating on the notion of Trinity. And Or Rose: blessed are you for inspiring Christians to dig deeper into our faith while also treasuring yours.
You see, this Jewish-Christian relationship on Institution Hill is not about Christians making nice with folks we’ve misunderstood and mistreated for a couple of millennium (although you can’t help but leave this encounter with the words “Never again” painfully branded on your heart). It is about nothing less than the renewal of the most vital and redemptive expressions of Christianity and Judaism that both communities can muster in our generation.
This train is bound for glory. Get on board.
Gregory Mobley
Associate Professor of Old Testament
posted by Andover Newton News at
3:01 PM
