open source theology

I have been reading a blog by Matt Stone (http://mattstone.blogs.com/) about the hazards of the Emergent Church losing its Trinitarian foundation as it lunges forward into new territory. He feared it would start looking like a non-creedal faith if they were not careful.

I respect Matt very much, and wanted to reconsider the Trinity. What was in there that I wasn’t ‘getting?’ And what is the significance of the Church’s Creed?

There wasn’t much new that I found since my father preached it when I was a young man. It was actually startling the complexity of it as I read up on the subject. I had always realized that the common parishoner didn’t care about the intricacies of it. It is only significant to the highly learned. It is about structure.

At first I realized how the extreme intellectualism in Christianity began at the Council of Nicea. In other posts I have pointed to the hyper-intellectualism in the Emergent Church. But it is only the child of the Church, itself hyper-intellectual. The Trinity points to the birth of this phenomenon at Nicea. It was meant to shut down the debate about the nature of Christianity, to codify the belief to bring order and structure to Christ’s Church on earth.

Until this reconsideration, I had never seen the fundamental conundrum so clearly as the simple problem of monotheism. I had been looking at its symptoms, not the source.

What a problem to lick! How do you keep Christianity monotheistic in its Jewish roots when there were three elements of God at work, each seemingly independent. At the same time, how do you keep polytheism from creeping in, especially when the Church was surrounded by it in popular society?

It took some extreme mental labour to get it all under control. What came about was the complex doctrine of the Trinity. This defines the Church between both the Jewish and polytheistic beliefs.

The question of the Trinity always annoyed me. What was the need for this highly intricate description? Wasn’t God obvious? It leads one to question the condition of the Church’s spirituality.

Three questions arise. What was the nature of Jesus? What is the nature of the Holy Spirit? And what is the nature of God? None of these would be an issue with more spiritual knowledge. But the conditions of the Church didn’t allow it. Reality was defined simply as God, humans and inert matter. There was nothing outside of this that was allowed to be known. The specific consciousness of God, removed to ‘the Source,’ unknowable and all-powerful; the Father as the manifestation between the transendent God and the Son, Jesus. The Holy Spirit as a ‘control mechanism’ to help the Church on its path, also sent from ‘the Source’ but not wholly the Source.

We are allowed to know aspects of God, but He is by definition unknowable. To prevent the mistake of thinking that we ‘know’ Him, we must understand the limits that both Christ and the Holy Spirit place upon falling into this conceit. Jesus was/is a human soul. In our human experience in this limited existence, we can come to know something of God, a connection, through Christ. But we can never rise up and ‘master’ God like many polytheists believed they could through negotiation with their gods. We are humans stuck in this world of limited life. Despite Adam’s curse of living through knowledge instead of wisdom, for those who long for God, the Creator grants His help in compassion and mercy.

It is through this limited port hole of Jesus that this approach to the unknowable, removed God-as-Source can be attained. We believe God IS immanent through Jesus and the Holy Spirit, while remaining transcendant from the limits of human perception. The limits of knowing the one true God of Israel, growing out of that tradition.

It is quite a triumph of perception by the early Church. Few have been granted direct contact with the specific Consciousness of God. The prophets were afforded this. And Jesus was granted the condition of Oneness with the Source through the manifestation of the Father. We are left with glimmers of the Almighty through their witness, their wisdom, and the Spirit of Christ to help us get our souls through this life without it being destroyed by it finite limits.

This, in a nutshell, shows the spiritual limitations of Christianity, but also its strength in resisting falsehoods that alternative spiritual knowledge could fool the individual into believing. Since we are in a limited state of spiritual perception because of our finite nature as animals, the golden calf of Moses times, and the polytheism of the ancient world pointed to the ease of which this could happen. Jesus is the only secure avenue to God-as-Source.

I have not appreciated how the dialectic (trialectic?) of the Trinity has spawned so much rebellion in Church history. The Roman Catholic Church bases its authority as much in its embodiment of the Holy Spirit as it does in Jesus Christ. The bride and the groom, who left their father’s house to become One, separate from the father yet ‘genetically’ still part of him. The new house. The new creation. Separate but a part of the firmament of the ultimate spiritual Creation.

From my experience growing up in a Protestant minister’s household, the Holy Spirit is de-emphasized, giving greater weight to the reality of God-through-Christ, the personal linear connection that circumvents some of the Church’s authority as motherly arbiter in this ‘house of three.’ Protestants are far more linear than Catholics. Far more masculine. And more intent on establishing the empowerment of the individual that, in some respects, the original doctrine of the Trinity was trying to mitigate.

The Protestant rebellion was against the abuses of the Catholic Church. It was hard to see the authority of the Holy Spirit in the indulgences of the medieval Church. This crisis of authority forced the Protestants to look for earthly spiritual authority in another form, the Bible. The Word of God held the Holy Spirit. There the Trinity could be discerned with more accuracy, clarity, without the middle layer of Church historical tradition getting in the way. Petrarch proved how history had mucked up, over time, the original meaning of the Church in the beginning. They perceived how the Church had become an idol of humans, percisely what the Trinity was meant to avoid. They needed to get humans out of God, to return to the spiritual purity afforded by Christ Himself.

And so a new phase of intellectual pursuit began in the grand tradition of the Council of Nicea, with the same purpose of re-affirming the Trinity.

But by re-opening the debate, the triumvirate of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit seemed to lose emphasis on the latter. The question became ‘what is the Son,’ with little interest in ‘what is the Holy Spirit.’ Today it has been renamed by the buzzword pursuit to create ‘community.’

This is the envelope of the Church as a whole. How do we perceive God within the limits that the Trinity confines us to? The doctrine of the Trinity from the Council of Nicea is quite arcane and involved. It points to our intellect, our minds, trying to grasp the spiritual reality, the spiritual question of the life of Jesus of Nazareth.

It is the conundrum of living in the heritage of Adam’s choice, to live through knowledge, deciding for ourselves what is reality. We exist in a two-pronged perception, where wisdom and knowledge battle with each other for pre-eminence. As Christians, we use our intellect in service to wisdom, by taking what we know, knowledge, and applying it in the closest way that wisdom works.

But it is a balancing act. When does knowledge overpower wisdom? When do our ideas block the flow of wisdom through our hearts? How do we judge the meaning of the wisdom that comes. After all, we are mind-man, born into civilization that uses its growing knowledge to live this life.

The Church is not immune to this condition. The mind in the Church constantly battles with the heart of the Church. Paul continually debating Jesus. The cultural versus the spiritual. Our minds are thankful that Paul puts Jesus into more meaningful form to help us perceive the Jesus phenomenon. But by doing so compromises the purity of the wisdom and reality of Jesus. Paul defines Christ, but the very nature of that definition converts Jesus into knowledge that the mind can use. It forces us to decide instead of accept. The wisdom comes to the Church, and we have to fit it into our doctrines, beliefs, and tradition. What does the wisdom mean in the context of who we are.

This is the orbit of the Church, Given to us during the time of the ascendant mind. We wish to rid ourselves of the Original Sin of Adam, living through knowledge, and return to the Original Wisdom that he left. But our mind keeps getting in the way.

What has our mind accepted as its limitations in pursuit of this dream? Jesus said we cannot break out of it until an unspecified time in the future. So we try our best until that time, trying to put knowledge to good use through the bits that we have been Given about the spiritual nature of reality.

In this age of deconstruction, perhaps it is time to do so with the condition that we are in as mind-man. What is the mind? What does its dominance in our lives do to us? What is it like to live without the compromises of the mind in our lives? Is it possible to break its strangle-hold on the structure of our consciousness? How truly entangled are we in it? What would it take to let it go? How has it prevented the heart of Jesus from being fulfilled in the world we live in?

Is it possible to do with the tools we have inherited? What do we need to let go of if it is not?