Bogosity

Tonight was my first lecture in Triune God at St Francis College .

Some notes from the lecture:

The trinity is our attempt to make sense of the Christian experience of God in Jesus and the Holy Spirit. It’s formulation was a process influenced by various cultural pressures and competing ways of thinking in the early church. The various doctrines of the trinity are responses to the thinking of the times.

The trinity is a mystery. However we think that it is eschatological which means that it will be fullfilled at the end of time and our understanding of God will be complete then too. When I say end of time, I’m kind of talking about now as well because the end of time is linked with the completeness of all time (when thinking of God as transcending time).

We also think that we participate in the trinity through being the body of christ. Again this is fullfilled at the completion of time. (which might be when the universe collapses back in on itself or when the unix timestamp rolls over in 2038, or even Sunday, December 4, 292,277,026,596 15:30:08 UTC – i’m not sure)

We find it difficult to relate to the trinity. Most of us pray to one God – we either address God as God, Father, Lord, Jesus and rarely we pray to the Spirit. But generally we stick to the one. We may find in coming years that we start to relate more to the trinity as the theology that has been developing through the twentieth century (and stuff we borrow from the Orthodox) starts to find its way into our religion (praxis?). (Actually, the trinity has appeared in our liturgy since whenever we started having liturgy which was very early on)

Most of us can’t avoid gravitating to one of the various ‘heresies’ when we think of the trinity. We seem to have straightened out pretty well what the trinity isn’t!

I also reflected during the lecture on the relation of the trinity to the world. I was thinking about how Jesus and the ‘material universe’ share a solidarity in that both the world and Jesus suffer, they are both also loved by God. God creates in them, breathes in them and the Spirit moves in them, revealing and healing. So we are all drawn into the trinity as God works in the world. The question in my mind then is whether God also judges? Will there be a divide at the end of it all where some is thrown out? (I’m guessing the answer is yes but I don’t understand why)