Although much of my attention outside of work this last week has been focused on the preparation for the music for Trinity Sunday, there has been an undercurrent of "theological angst" that has been running just beneath the surface. Quite honestly, although I enjoy making music, Trinity Sunday is not a feast day that I look forward to with great anticipation. As we are all fond of saying, it is the only Sunday of the church year that is devoted to a dogma, and this one is, of its nature, a difficult one, particularly for someone who has moved away from supernatural theism.
Although the Bishop was careful to not delve too deeply into the "mystery" of the Trinity, he did bring up an idea that has been around in Western Christianity at least since Augustine, probably before, namely, that the Trinity of God is reflected in a Trinity in humanity. The attribution is that, a humanity created in the image of God, would have a Trinitarian identity as a reflection of that divine "imaging" process.
I must say that I found the Trinitarian reflections less personally simulating than the restatement of the idea of the "divine" image in humanity. For the traditional supernatural theists, the incarnation of God in Jesus cum Christ is a, if not the unique event in the history of the universe. For some eastern incarnational theologians, the incarnation is the purpose of all creation. For a non-theistic Christian, this is much harder, but I might get to "the same place" as my supernatural theistic friends by another route. If I see the universe as not a "creation" of God but as a "birth" from the "substance" of God (i.e. a pantheist or panentheistic or pandeistic view), then the "incarnation" was not something "added on" to creation in Christ, but a pre-existent "fact" that is at the very nature of the world itself. The "incarnation" is, therefore "before all worlds." We find, therefore, the incarnation in all of "creation," ourselves included. Not just Jesus, but every human is a unique "son" of God. To take it a step forward (which is where I would lose my theistic and orthodox friends), all humanity (not just Jesus Christ), is fully God and fully human, as this is what, in essence, humanity is. In the same, but different way, my cat Charlie is fully God and fully feline. My sock is fully God and fully sock. Each element of creation is a reflection of the image of God, because it is, in its deepest essence God/part of God because all of the universe is "God."
In my mind, then, I hear directed at me the question that was posed to Father Telemond in the film, Shoes of the Fisherman, when he (playing the role of Father Teilhard de Chardin) is asked "What think you of Christ?" As I have been trying to reconstruct, as it were, a new way of faith out of the shards of the one that I lost, I must truly ask, what is the place of "Christ" in this "non-theistic Christianity" that I and others are exploring? I am not sure, frankly, what I want to say in answer to this question, at least as regards a fully developed "Christology" to accompany the developing "Theology." A partial answer may be that, it was in the human Jesus (fully God and fully human) that we were given a first or "unique" view of this pre-existent reality. We, meaning the community of Christian believers, were given a unique glimpse or demonstration or revelation of the incarnation. Jesus, in his own person, "showed us the Father." Because we have "seen" Jesus, we have also "seen" the "Father." By walking in the way of Jesus or following him as his disciples, we too can be brought to a more complete or "higher" awareness of the unity of humanity and God and experience it i ourselves. This "Theosis" is not something to "achieve" as it were, but is an "epiphany," a revealing of something that we had all along, but of which we were, largely, unaware. We might find, then, a correspondence or a point of communication with our Buddhist brothers and sisters who look for "Buddha nature" in themselves and the universe. In Taoism, we might look to the concept of "pu" the "uncarved block" or "original essence." In a "missional" or "evangelistic" sense, the Christian believer has something worthwhile to offer the non-Christian world if it helps potential believers to "self-realize" their "divine" nature.
I know that, for "orthodox" Christians, this is the "one step too far." It is also the step that so many mystics have taken who have been condemned as heretical. It was, I think, the "error" of Eckhart and Origen. But is it an "error?" It is a truism that, often, today's orthodoxy is born from yesterday's heresy. We shall see....
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