GIGANTIC SPOILER ALERT!
So, a couple of my close friends struggle with wanting to know God as we know each other - they seem to want to know His "inner life," so to speak. They don't really have a sense of God as a Person-with-a-capital-P; he's like a number or a logical proposition to them.
Christian writers often bemoan the limits of language as they attempt to talk about God. When C.S. Lewis tries to talk about how the Trinity shows us that God is love because God is relationship, it sounds fuzzy and abstract - he uses an indistinct image of dancing a lot (as do a lot of other writers of the same time period). Even Scripture doesn't spell out what the "inner life" of Trinitarian love is like. We learn something from the father-son language - but what don't hear much about what that feels like for the father (other than that he is "pleased"), and the only words we hear from the son on this point are sort of terrifying ("why have you forsaken me"). We also learn something from Jesus's insistence that his every action flows from his connection to the father - but this still doesn't go very far to show us what God's relationship looks like and feels like to God. It doesn't picture the Godness of God to us - that self-sufficient, timeless love flowing from each member of the Trinity to the other (or from God to the Son, and generating the Holy Spirit in the process, depending on what corner of the church you hail from - these distinctions are beyond me). Maybe Phillipians 2:6-11 is the closest Scripture comes to telling us about the Trinity's Personal experience of itself.
The Shack is kind of fascinating because it tries to picture the love-relationship of the Trinity concretely - without the fuzzy abstractions of theologians. But I really bristle at the picture of Trinitarian love as Jesus, Sarayu, and Papa dealing with broken plates and spilled food in a kitchen (see pp. 104-105). It doesn't work for me because it's too ... ordinary, small, human. Mack sees the Trinity only through the lens of sin: "He knew that it didn't matter whose fault it was ... How different this was from the way he treated the ones he loved." I guess I bristle because the image doesn't help me much: of course God / Jesus / Holy Spirit wouldn't argue over a broken plate. Maybe my objection is silly.
Anyway, to come to the whole point of this post: If you think it's possible to talk about the love within the Trinity apart from God's relationship to creation, then what images / metaphors / situations would you use to try to describe God's "inner love life," or the love that the members of the Trinity share?
12 years ago
8 comments:
Blog hopping over here.
www.chronicchicktalk.com
will come back when i have time to read, which is something i love to do.
I agree. The Trinity in the book seemed more like a happy human family--completely understandable, without mystery--than an all-knowing, all-creative, all-powerful, wonderful GOD. I don't think it is possible for us to know His dialogue in and with Himself; maybe He doesn't even talk amongst Himself, he just knows and Is infinitely. His ways are above our ways, in my opinion even in interaction. Young makes God too human for me.
I actually liked this part of the book. I understand the struggle though that you state. I'm not sure if the Trinity that he describes is actually like this, but I found it fascinating. First lets remember this is a presumably fiction book. But one thing he says throughout the rest of the book,(don't worry i wont spoil anything) is first that Papa is appearing to him in a way that Mack can understand with his human eyes and experiences. Also, he says many times that God limits himself in an expression of love for us. Our Papa is limitless, yet he chooses to limit himself as an expression of love...now that i understand and even more so after reading the following chapters. In this chapter, I believe that Young was portraying God in ways that would first of all throw off what Mack was expecting(better understood in following chapters). Second, the accident in the kitchen i think was to make Mack at ease and to show the love and kindness of the Trinity in a way that Mack could understand. How many times when a cup is spilled, a dish gets broken or a pot overturned do we laugh and go pick it up? Our human response is to blame someone or scold them for making a mess or breaking a dish. Jesus, Papa and Sarayu just laugh and picked it up. Notice that Jesus washed off Papa's feet?(top of pg 105)
"All three were laughing so hard that Mack didn't think they were breathing. Sarayu said something about humans being clumsy and all three started roaring again." (pg 104)
But to your question, I'm not sure what other ways to explain the relationship of Love that the Trinity shares? I think Young does a good job of continuing to explain this relationship in the following pages and to me it makes sense. And in a way, makes it easy for me to follow how the three are one, yet still three. So I won't spoil it.
This makes me think of the Trinity at creation. Out of this relationship came the original art.
It's supposed to blow our minds, I think. Creation does blow mine.
melody - we should have images of God that are too human simply because we are too human. that was a major intention of God the Father - to become overly human so that we could learn to be overly supernatural and divine through that example. it's a great image to wrestle with.
schell - good stuff. God meeting us where we are, revealing the Kingdom on our terms so we can grasp it and not lose it, yeah, that smells like the gospel of Jesus at work. thanks for sharing.
amber - i liked this statement: "Out of this relationship came the original art." i've never heard a phrase like that before. "original sin" i've heard enough to make me hurl on the floor in a packed sanctuary, but "original art" - now that's really nice. i especially appreciate how this "original art" is so evident in your art, in your ability to capture life with seth and your sons in a way that make others long for the goodness of the Lord in family and marriage and parenthood. dang. i'll be chewing on that phrase for a few days.
O (that is going to be your new nickname as far as I'm concerned),
I appreciate this post, and I do not feel that your objection is unwarranted. Amber and I were discussing some of the Trinitarian dialogue in this book this morning, and I think that I will write a post sometime this week regarding the same. I think it will be a bit more of the same, however, after reading your post. Maybe we can expand these ideas more, though.
Let this comment will serve as a sort of foreword. I do not have difficulty viewing God as "P"ersonal nor do I have difficulty acknowledging his ever-presence in my life. However, I do have a problem with personal portrayals of any particular part of the Trinity that undercuts what we know to be true about discrete Trinitarian parts. This book is difficult for me because much of the Trinitarian dialogue sounds more like feel-good, pop-psychological speak and less like God. The interactions seem to trite and too comical and I wonder if our quickness to accept the Shack-atarian theology (or at least identify with it)would not make the ancients fall on their face, begging God for the forgiveness of our sacrilege.
O, I understand that you are not intentionally taking it as far as I have, but I'm about to take it even farther with passages that I find particularly troublesome. Stay tuned, and thanks for prodding this discussion.
O is my nickname in real life!
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