KAREN KILBY
INTRODUCTION
“The Trinity is our social program.” So Miroslav Volf, an alumnus and former professor of Fuller Theological Seminary, entitled a 1998 paper in Modern Theology.1 Volf, who was also a student of Jürgen Moltmann and is currently a professor at Yale, finds a place on most people’s list of social trinitarians; indeed he works with a breadth and sophistication that make it plausible to look to him as one of the most substantial and serious proponents of the approach.
Volf’s use of this phrase as a title, it should be said, is a little more complex than it might first seem. “The Trinity is our social program” is a quotation from the nineteenth-century Russian thinker Nicholos Fedorov (originally Nikolai Fyodorovich Fyodorov, but Volf uses an Anglicised version of the name), and nearly the first thing Volf does in the essay is to distance himself from Fedorov: “No arguments need to be wasted on showing that Fedorov’s proposal is specious and his vision chimerical.”2 These are surprisingly strong words, but not so surprising when one learns that the Russian thinker proposed that not only immortal life but also the resurrection of the dead were to be achieved through scientific progress. Whatever his excesses, however, he was, according to Volf, onto something. Even if Fedorov’s own social program was manifestly mistaken, and even if his slogan needs to be hedged around and used with great care, still Volf does in fact make the slogan his own.
One can see why he would want to. To say the “the Trinity is our social program” is to capture, in a pithy and powerful way, a significant part of the appeal of social trinitarianism. The attractiveness of social models of the Trinity has not just been that they make the obscure clear, but even more that they make what had seemed arcane relevant and practical. The doctrine of the Trinity is not a point of difficulty deep in the technical bowels of theology, but something useful, applicable, motivating — it provides us with a social program. Right at the heart and centre of the Christian faith, we can say, is something with deep and wide practical application.
Social trinitarianism has been criticised on a number of fronts, and it has been criticised, it seems to me, to great effect.3 But I am not persuaded that all of these attacks have made it go away. If one wants to dislodge an approach that has gained a wide grip on the theological imagination of a generation, criticism alone may not be enough. Something like this is, I take it, one of the premises of this conference: a more positive and constructive alternative is needed. To this I would add that it is necessary to get some sense of the appeal, the pull, of social trinitarianism, to understand its power. I think much of this power is captured precisely in the phrase “The Trinity is our social program.”
My own view is that the proper alternative to the promotion of a social model of the Trinity is not the promotion of some other model of the Trinity — with perhaps even more impressive social and political consequences — but rather a certain asceticism as regards models, deriving from a shift in our understanding of what the proper task of theology with regard to the Trinity is. The Christian life is lived in the midst of the Trinity, drawn by the Spirit into the movement of the Son toward the Father, and this is also where Christian thought is most fundamentally situated. We do not find ourselves in a position, then, I think, to view the Trinity as though from a distance and to develop an intellectually satisfying model of it.
If we call this — which I will expand on further in due course — an apophatic trinitarianism, then what I want to explore in this essay is where such an apophatic trinitarianism stands in relation to politics, in relation to having, to use Volf’s language, a social program. If one’s approach to the Trinity is all about mystery, about what we cannot know, what we do not understand, and of which we cannot form a satisfactory grasp, is it bound to lack the appeal and the relevance of the social trinitarians and their social programs? Will we have to say that theology, or at least trinitarian theology, caught up with policing the boundaries of its own unknowing, can have no relevance to political struggle and political reform? Will an apophatic trinitarianism be part of an inward looking, politically neutral, perhaps even escapist approach to theology? Must it encourage the church into passivity and disengagement, and therefore, by default, an implicit support of the status quo? These are the questions I hope to explore in this paper.
I will begin, however, with a little more on Volf, because he offers an unusually careful and qualified exploration of the practical consequences of the doctrine of the Trinity, conceived according to a social model.
VOLF AND THE SOCIAL PROGRAM
As we have seen, nearly the first thing Volf does in his paper is to distance himself from the thinker from whom he derives its title. In fact he locates his own position by setting up a contrast between Nicholas Fedorov on the one hand and Ted Peters on the other. Each is taken to represent an extreme position: Fedorov attempts “to imitate the Triune God in blatant disregard for the fact that we are not God”;4 Peters insists absolutely on creaturely difference from God. But we do not have to accept these as the only alternatives: between “copying God in all respects” (so seemingly Fedorov) and “not copying God at all” (so seemingly Peters) lies the wide open space of human responsibility that consists in “copying God in some respects.”5 We need neither say that the Trinity is in every regard and entirely a model for human community, nor rule this out altogether; the real question, according to Volf, is “in which respects and to what extent [the Trinity should serve as a model for human community].”6
Human community should be modeled on the Trinity, then, but, a little more concretely, we should be aware of two kinds of limit to this modeling. There is an intrinsic limitation deriving from our creatureliness, which means that trinitarian concepts can only analogously be applied to human community; and there is a contingent limitation deriving from the fallen and historical character of our current lives.7
Volf’s social trinitarianism is marked, in fact, by multiple layers of caution and qualification. We have seen two so far: first, his distancing himself from his own slogan, or at least from the unfettered enthusiasm he sees for it in Fedorov; and second, his insistence on the limits of the way the Trinity can model human community. In a third stage, Volf presents us with a methodological consequence from this limitation: trinitarian theology must work from below as well as from above. It is not a one-way matter of reading off from the triune God a pattern of human community: the “conceptual construction of correspondences,” he writes, “must go back and forth on a two way street,” taking into account our created and sinful nature as well as the Trinity as an ideal model.8 So we cannot pretend to read off a social program directly from the Trinity: we have to acknowledge the process is more complicated than that.
Volf introduces two further qualifications. First, he actually prefers “” to Fedorov’s “social program.” This is because the doctrine of the Trinity “does not constitute . . . a plan or system of action” but gives us “the contours of the ultimate normative end toward which all social programs should strive.”9 He acknowledges that “the road from the doctrine of the Trinity to proposals about global or national social arrangements is long, torturous, and fraught with danger,” and so keeps his focus on “the character of social agents and their relations” rather than “the issue of social structures”;10 the focus, in other words, is to be on how to think of people in relation to one another rather than how to think of, say, neo-liberalism or socialism or globalisation.
The final qualification arises from Volf’s commitment to working with both immanent and economic Trinities, and indeed to focusing more heavily on the economic, “build[ing] mainly on the narrative of the Triune God’s engagement with the world.”11 If proposals about the nature of human community drawn from reflection on the immanent Trinity are not somehow related to or situated within a discussion of the “narrative of divine self-donation” (i.e., the economic Trinity), he suggests, these proposals will be “underdetermined,” “too formal,” “overly diffuse generalities,” even “theologically empty.”12
Volf’s own constructive proposals, then, are offered in two main sections, the first drawing from reflections on the immanent Trinity, and the second, as he presents it at least, rooted in the economic Trinity. In fact, however, really in only the first of these sections does Volf sounds like a social trinitarian. The focus of the second section is not on relations within the Trinity — whether immanent or economic — but on God’s relation to the fallen, sinful world and what we should learn from this for our relations to the world. This part of the essay might more easily be understood if it were entitled “the cross is our social program.” This is not to say that Volf here becomes somehow untrinitarian. What he sets out in this part of his essay is a perfectly reasonable example of Christian theology, and so it naturally has a trinitarian dimension. But one can no longer really say that he is principally focused on the doctrine of the Trinity at this stage.
So let us turn to the first of the sections that I have mentioned, which starts from the immanent Trinity. Here, after briefly affirming allegiance to an egalitarian rather than a hierarchical understanding of the Trinity, Volf sets out to develop an understanding of identity from the concept of perichoresis. Perichoresis teaches us that the divine persons are “personally interior to one another,” but that their “interpenetration presupposes their distinctions.”13 What this means for identity is exemplified by Jesus’ capacity to say, in the Gospel of John, “my teaching is not my own. It comes from the one who sent me” (John 7:16). The interplay of the “my” and “not mine” here suggests the two corresponding principles, that “identity is not self-enclosed” and that “identity is non-reducible.”14
It is interesting to consider the detail with which Volf expands on these principles. In relation to identity as “not self-enclosed,” he writes of the boundaries of the self as “porous and shifting,” of the self as “in a state of flux stemming from ‘incursions’ of the other into the self and of the self into the other”; and he speaks of how the self is shaped in various ways by the other, including “by re-examining itself when the other closes his or her doors and challenging the other by knocking at the doors.”15 In relation to the nonreducibility of identity, he writes about “the need for boundary maintenance — a certain kind of assertion of the self in the presence of the other.” He also writes that “since negotiation of identities is always conflictual, non-assertiveness of the self in the presence of the other puts the self in danger either of dissolving into the other or being smothered by the other.” And so “to ward off [the] dangers [of obliteration of the self], we must attend to the boundaries of identities by enforcing rules that protect identities and by providing environments that nurture them.”16
Volf’s presentation of the self in relation to the other is, it seems to me, appealing. It can be a useful way to think about one’s own sense of self, for instance, as it slips and slithers around in relation to interactions with spouse, friends, colleagues, parents, children, even people met at a conference. It’s helpful both to face the reality of the instability of one’s own sense of self, the way my sense of who I am is very much dependent on day-to-day reactions from others I meet. And it is helpful to remember that one is not just these incursions, that I need to, and that I do, assert and defend myself at times. It is commendable, furthermore, that Volf notices the tension between his two principles, and acknowledges that he has no algorithm to specify how to handle this tension: “How does one know,” he asks “when to close the boundaries of the self in order to stabilize one’s identity and when to open them in order to enrich it?” His answer is that no answer can be given in advance, that everything depends on the particular cases, that one must “seek supple wisdom rather than stable rules.”17
It may be that the patterns of thought Volf lays out can also be useful in thinking through various kinds of group identity — this at least ought to be expected from the way he introduces the theme of identity itself into the article, pointing as he does to the importance of identity politics in our time. Perhaps something about being a woman over against men, or being straight and encountering gay people, is captured by this dialectic of the incursion of the other into the self and the need for boundary maintenance — although one might wonder whether the balanced symmetry of his language of self and other is helpful in some of these cases.
Nevertheless, on the whole his supple and evocative language of self and other is appealing and to a large extent plausible. What is not so plausible is that it is supposed to be derived from an understanding of the immanent Trinity. Can one really get from the concept of perichoresis and the biblical portrayal of Jesus in relation to Father and Spirit, to this general understanding of the self’s identity? If the sheer quantity and detail of what Volf can find to derive from perichoresis does not give pause, then some of his phrases should. In what sense can we say that from the trinitarian perichoresis we learn of identity as a matter of flux, of shifting boundaries, of incursions of self into other, of the proper response to the other “closing doors,” of the danger of dissolving or being smothered by the other? All the overtones contained in this language of change, of threat and of loss, are simply antithetical to the way trinitarian relations have traditionally been understood.
But perhaps this is just an expression of Volf’s “two way street,” of his conviction that in developing correspondences between Trinity and human sociality one needs to work from below as well as above, from the facts of our creatureliness, historicity, and sinfulness as well as from the ideal provided by the triune God? Perhaps. It’s striking, though, that for all the methodological self-consciousness that is manifest in other parts of the essay, Volf here, in the discussion of the significance of perichoresis for understandings of identity, gives no hint or signal that he is beginning to introduce considerations drawn from finitude and sin into his discussion of the meaning for identity of perichoresis. The transition is unmarked. On the other hand, it’s also striking that everything that gives this discussion of identity, of the self/other relation, its richness, plausibility, and interest, is introduced precisely when considerations drawn from limitation, historicity, and fallenness quietly find their way into the discussion — precisely when Volf leaves behind anything that could possibly apply to or be derived from the Trinity.18
I have spent some effort exploring Volf’s essay because it is instructive to examine a social trinitarian who proceeds — on the whole — with such care, with such an alertness to the dangers and possible difficulties of the project. In fact, one might ask why, given this awareness, Volf continues at all to espouse a kind of social trinitarianism. If he realizes the limitations of modeling creaturely, historical, and sinful human relations on eternal, perfect, divine relations; if he realizes the dangers of abstraction and theological emptiness that loom over general deductions about human relations deriving from the inner-trinitarian life; if he thinks that the primary weight must be given to the narrative of the divine engagement with the world — why then does he not simply abandon the project of gaining political wisdom from the examination of inner-divine relations?
Is the answer simply biographical? Is it that, while Volf is alert to the difficulties involved in this kind of project, he finds himself already too enmeshed in it, given his history of working in an ecumenical context on communion ecclesiologies, and given that he is a student of Moltmann? Perhaps. Certainly none of the indications Volf gives in the paper itself for why we must “copy God to some extent” could be considered inescapable arguments pushing us towards a social trinitarian project: he mentions that we are made in the image of God (something which can be, and has been, taken in all kinds of ways), that we are made for communion with the Trinity and that Jesus commands his disciples to “be perfect . . . as your heavenly Father is perfect.”19
THE APPEAL OF SOCIAL TRINITARIANISM
Perhaps, then, we could look for an explanation of Volf’s espousal of social trinitarianism simply in intellectual biography, but as I’ve suggested I think it is also important to be aware of the appeal, of the attraction, in social trinitarianism. And this is very much present, in spite of all the qualifications, in Volf’s paper. There are two dimensions to this appeal. One is what I have already indicated: the very ability to announce “the Trinity is our social program” (or even “social vision”) is somehow deeply pleasing. It is satisfying because it implies that theology really does have something special to contribute, something definite and distinctive and practical to show for all its labours. “The Trinity is our social program” suggests, on the one hand, that theology has something distinctive to say as against mere secular thought,20 its own unique trove of ideas to source social and political theory. On the other hand, it also carries the suggestion — maybe less consciously — that the theologian has something distinctive to say by contrast with ordinary Christians. After all, most believers who haven’t been exposed to formal theological study might think to look for their guidance on from the Ten Commandments, the prophets, proverbs, the sayings of Jesus, their understanding of the love of God and of the nature of Christian discipleship, even natural law and their own intuitions, but they wouldn’t think to look, I suppose, to the nature of inner-trinitarian relations. So if they enroll on courses of systematic and practical theology, they’ll have something new to take home — they’ll have gained something quite concrete. We theologians can justify our salaries.
The second dimension of the appeal has to do with the nature of some of the technical trinitarian concepts themselves and the kinds of reflection to which they lend themselves. Kathryn Tanner suggests that the trinitarian concepts just happen to be well adapted to the kinds of political questions that currently preoccupy us, and this explains why the Trinity is in recent years such a popular site of political theology.21 This is right, I think, but not the whole story. There is also the enticement of having such an elusive, even paradoxical concept to work with; something like perichoresis, a notion that we don’t really understand, has, precisely because it is paradoxical, elusive, and not really understood, a distinct flexibility. It is not hard to weave into it our best insights about the complexities of human identity, relationship, community. It lends itself, one could say, to conceptual play. Nearly any understanding I hold of self and other, individual and group, person and community, could be spun as perichoretic.
It is at this point, of course, that the attractiveness of social trinitarianism is also closely bound up with what can be most problematic in it. For all his care, caution, and qualifications, when Volf begins to reflect on perichoresis, he seems to become enthralled with the intellectual possibilities of the concept, with the richness of thought it allows him to discover in trinitarian theology. Careful distinctions among the sources of our knowledge and cautious attention to the ways in which God is not like us disappear under the force of the speculative and dialectical attractions of the notion of perichoresis. Or to put it another way, the project of discovering in trinitarian relations the way we humans should relate seems able to bear interesting fruit precisely at that moment when the caution, the attentiveness to limits, slips away.
Volf offers what looks at first like a sober, restrained form of social trinitarianism, one that, rather than unthinkingly assuming that the Trinity should serve as a model for human community, will instead carefully consider “in which respects and to what extent” it should do so. But a closer look at Volf’s work suggests, I think, that what we in fact need is not a restrained and careful version of this business of finding in the Trinity a model for human community, but a different approach to trinitarian theology altogether.
TRINITY AND POLITICS: AN ALTERNATIVE APPROACH
I’ve suggested above that I don’t think the different approach should involve locating some key concept that can replace community, some alternative master idea that we can suppose is at the heart of the doctrine of the Trinity. I think it is perfectly possible to say that the proper stance of Christian theology in face of the doctrine of the Trinity is non-comprehension, not knowing, not being in possession of a unifying grasp, idea, or model. It is perfectly possible to say, that is, that the doctrine of the Trinity should intensify rather than diminish our sense of the unknowability of God, that it presents us with a pattern we cannot understand, rather than with a specific set of insights and concepts on which we can draw.22 If this is the case, then rather than searching for the right model for understanding the Trinity, we should perhaps be seeking to resist our own penchant for making models.
“What then is the point of the Trinity?” one might ask. If it so thoroughly defeats us intellectually, in what sense can it make any difference to affirm faith in the doctrine of the Trinity? In what sense can it be significant for Christianity? Can something that so radically transcends our understanding have anything to do with us?
One way to answer this question is to consider that perhaps we cannot understand the Trinity, the three-in-oneness of God, not because it is so far from us, but because it is so near. We are caught up in the Trinity. The Christian life is a life of being brought into the Trinity — not a contemplation from a distance or a mimicry at a distance, but a genuine incorporation, a being taken up by the Spirit into the movement of the Son from and to the Father.23 Perhaps we are too much in the midst of the Trinity — too close, too involved, in other words — to be able to form an overarching conceptualization.
From this perspective, in fact, the business of attempting to construct models of the Trinity can come under suspicion of idolatry. Is there not something problematic in imagining that I can lay aside my actual position in relation to Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in order to play around with ideas of triangles or three leaf clovers or psychological or social models and gain some sort of a grasp on a concept of the Trinity, as though Father, Son, and Spirit can become a kind of intellectual object over which I dispose? Maybe the language of idolatry is too inflammatory. But at least it seems that one can become involved in a kind of intellectual dabbling, a game of intellectual construction, that has little intrinsic link to the life of faith.
But of course, if one has no model of the Trinity, then one has no model which one can apply to society, whether in the wholehearted and uninhibited manner of some social trinitarians or in the more cautious and selective manner of Volf. And so one seems to have cut off the possibility of a politically relevant theology of the Trinity.
One response to this objection might be simply to grant that not every element in Christian theology need have equally immediate practical relevance. We could perhaps borrow an image from the philosopher Willard van Orman Quine and think of Christian belief on analogy with a spider’s web, where, though everything is interconnected, only some parts come into contact with the realm of the practical, of the ethical, of politics.24 Perhaps we could say, then, that the doctrine of the Trinity plays its role somewhere in the interior of the web. It is necessary to the whole; it is linked to other beliefs in various ways, supporting them and being supported by them. But it is not really close to the edge where the action takes place, and so it cannot be burdened with the expectation of giving rise directly to social, ethical, or political wisdom.
But a problem with this approach is that it would involve imagining the doctrine of the Trinity as a particular fragment of the totality of Christian belief, a localised node, a delimitable bit, and this is not quite right. It is safer to suppose, I think, that the entire pattern of Christian belief is trinitarian than that it contains one particular element that is the Trinity. If we are to use something like Quine’s metaphor, the Trinity is better imagined as something about the structure of the whole web, and the quality of each of its strands, than as a particular point in the web.
Still, the notion that not every element of Christian theology needs to come into direct contact with our thinking about social programs and politics seems to me to have a certain plausibility, and I would think that some likely candidates for this kind of non-frontline role are in fact the technical concepts that have emerged within trinitarian theology — concepts such as persons, relations, processions, and perichoresis. We need these — or similar — concepts. They have a function, helping to hold patterns of belief in place and to articulate in brief form the rejection of heresies. But we shouldn’t put them under pressure to further justify their existence by supplying direct dollops of social or political wisdom. They are, we might say, backroom workers who should be allowed to remain in their back-rooms. This is something that Barth and Rahner implicitly recognized when each, in coming up with a replacement term for “Persons,” gave us what are, from a rhetorical point of view, utterly uninspiring suggestions (“modes of subsistence,” “ways of being”).
So we do not have, on my view, a model of the Trinity that can serve as a model for society, nor should we look to highly specific concepts that have emerged in the tradition to provide us with tidy packets of practical or political insight. But I would like to propose that there are nevertheless two dimensions in which an apophatic trinitarianism has potential political significance. The two dimensions correspond to the two aspects of the approach I have been recommending: a resistance to the project of constructing trinitarian models on the one hand, and an emphasis on our incorporation into the Trinity on the other.
First of all, then, what is the political significance of resistance to the construction of models? If one cultivates an awareness of the ungraspability of God, the impossibility of finding an image or model or integrating vision of the Trinity — if one cultivates the capacity to live with questions to which we have no answers — might this be correlated, not with a particular political commitment to one form of socioeconomic system or another, to one social vision or another, but with a resistance to an absolute confidence in any system and social vision? Economic and political regimes do, after all, tend to take on a sacred aura, to demand unconditional commitment, to imagine themselves as the end and goal of history. If Christians are schooled, by the doctrine of the Trinity as well as in other ways, to know that God is not within our grasp, that we possess no concept or overaching understanding of that which is highest, then we are in a sense schooled into a suspicion of systems that present themselves with a kind of sacred, all-encompassing necessity. Might we not imagine that an important political contribution of Christian thinking about God be, then, not that it provides us with something like a shortcut to formulating a distinct alternative of our own, but that it helps call in question, helps relativize, all such systems we might find ourselves enticed by? Might there not be a correspondence, in other words, between a resistance to idolatry in relation to God, and a resistance to ideology in relation to political systems?25
Let me now turn to the second side of what I take to be the political potential of the approach that I am advocating. The unknowability of the Trinity, I’ve suggested, need not just be conceived as the result of some sort of unfathomable distance between us and God, but also as a result of our involvement in the Trinity, its closeness to us, our incorporation into it. Now, if the whole of the Christian life can be thought of in terms of incorporation into the Trinity, it follows that social and political dimensions of the Christian life also have this quality. That is to say, every dimension of our life in community, with others, in society, in politics, is somehow also connected to our life lived toward the Father, with the Son, in the Spirit.26
That this formula sounds rather general and not informative should come as no surprise. I’ve suggested the Trinity is not best thought of as a localised element within the structure of Christian thought, one little bit from which to get some nice ideas, but as structuring and characterising the whole. So if one talks about its political significance in general terms, one has to expect to say something formal. Furthermore, concepts of “the social” or “the political” are themselves general and can be taken in many ways.
TRINITY AND POLITICS: AN EXAMPLE
To make the discussion a little more concrete, it may be useful to focus on a particular dimension of political existence and a particular context, and try to sketch at least one example of what an incorporative, rather than a mimetic, trinitarian political orientation might look like. As the context, let me take the nonpoor parts of the relatively rich world, a context that includes myself and, it is likely, a considerable portion of my readers. As a particular dimension of “the political,” let me take the question of Christian political engagement considered in the limited sense of the struggle for justice.
I will presume in what follows that the Christian commitment does in fact include a commitment to work, as individuals and communities, for justice and for the alleviation of suffering in the societies in which Christians find themselves. I will presume that this may involve working for structural change to one degree or another. Neither of these views is universally held among Christians, but neither of them can be thought of as representing a particularly eccentric or minority perspective.
Now it might seem that I have already begun to paint myself into a corner. I am using words like “society” and “justice,” suggesting that I need to know what these things are, and I have talked about the possibility of working for structural change, suggesting that I need to understand how society is and ought to be structured; yet earlier I suggested that the doctrine of the Trinity, rather than giving us a social or political vision, causes us to relativise, to call into question, to distance ourselves from all the available possibilities. But in fact I don’t think this is such a problem. It seems to me that even in the absence of a comprehensive sociopolitical ideology, derived from the Trinity or anywhere else, it is perfectly possible to look around and see that there are many things that are not as they ought to be, that there are features of the world around us crying out for change, and that it is possible to do something about them.
My reading of our context, in fact, is that the biggest impediment to proper political engagement is not the lack of a comprehensive analysis of social reality, or the lack of a utopian vision of the ideal society and politics toward which we ought to move; it is rather a lack of a willingness to really look around us and take what we see into account.27 My hypothesis, that is to say, is that many of us in the context on which I am focused, the nonpoor in the rich world, live with a knowledge that we mostly want to suppress, a knowledge that the circles of comfort and stability in which we move do not really reflect to us the true story of the world. To look at the conditions of life and the suffering of those in absolute poverty, unable to feed and educate their children properly, or at the suffering of those who are mentally ill, or of those who are trafficked, or of those caught in the asylum system of a country like Britain, or the criminal justice system of a country like America, is something that in my judgment we who live in comfort often simply do not want to do. This brokenness and monumental injustice and suffering are part of the reality of the world, but it is hard to look at it. What Jon Sobrino calls “honesty with the real” is not easy.28 It is a little too disturbing. We sense that it will unsettle us, call us into question, that to look and to keep looking and act in a way that is in keeping with what we see might destabilize our existence.
Now, it would be silly to suggest that political engagement is a theory-free zone, requiring neither social analysis nor a vision of human flourishing. Clearly it requires elements of both, and the imperfections and limitations in one’s analysis and one’s vision will have practical consequences. But, first of all, the absolutely generalized kinds of vision one might hope to derive from just the right concept of the Trinity are not the intellectual tools most required in this kind of political engagement. Second, while it is true that incomplete or imperfect sociopolitical analysis will hinder efforts to work for justice and alleviate suffering, it seems to me that what most significantly inhibits proper political engagement, the key sticking point, is not a lack of analysis but a lack of this honesty with or fidelity to the real, a lack in our willingness to look at and really take seriously the world around us. Indeed I think that often we do not fail to engage because we lack the right analysis, but we lack the analysis because we are not willing to engage.
This point is worth illustrating. Suppose I hear a piece on the radio about the plight of trafficked women in Britain. I am, perhaps, unsettled and troubled to think of such misery and oppression going on near where I live. What should I do about it? I don’t know. I don’t really understand what global forces of capitalism and crime contribute to trafficking, and I don’t know what role faulty legislation or policing play, or what reform might be necessary, or where if anywhere pressure could be applied to bring it about, or what organisations ought to be supported in working on this problem. So I go about my daily tasks, and I listen to other items on the radio. But whatever I tell myself in this situation, my ignorance is not really what blocks me from engagement — it is much more truly understood as the result of disengagement. I don’t look away and do nothing, then, because of a lack of understanding of what to do — even if that is how it seems — but I lack an understanding of what to do because I have opted to look away and do nothing.
Let’s suppose, anyway, that this is the case. What does it have to do with the Trinity, one might ask? Well, it is not too hard to imagine that it has something to do with Jesus. Whatever temptation we might have to tell ourselves that the way to relate to God is by rising directly above the sufferings and injustices and particularities of this world, putting them out of mind — any such temptation is thwarted by the pattern of Jesus’ life, incarnate and engaged as it is in a particular political moment, responsive to the injustices and sufferings of a distinct time and place. Perhaps not everyone would agree with this reading of the Gospels, but again I don’t think that it is an eccentric or minority reading.
It’s not clear, of course, that we can abstract from the life and teaching of Jesus a tidy political program and then apply it at will in any other time and place, but if Jesus is understood as the Word of God spoken into creation, then this speaking, it seems, takes place in the midst of things, in the midst of the messy, suffering, conflicted reality that is the world — this is how and where we have to listen for God. If Jesus is understood as the fundamental pattern of human response to God, this response, too, takes place in the midst of things, through and not apart from the engagement with the messy, suffering, conflicted reality that is the world.
This focus on the Word Incarnate, considered on its own, however, leaves us with two problems. First, if there is no concrete program to be transferred from his time to ours, how do we know in particular what to do? And there is the deeper problem on which I have already dwelt, the danger that we don’t necessarily want to know, don’t want to be disturbed and destabilized from a comfortable, secure existence. Where can we find the strength, the commitment, to genuinely confront the demands of justice and love, wrapped up as most of us are in our own secure cocoons, caught in a position of both knowing and not wanting to know of the suffering and injustice that stalk our world?
Each of these questions can, in fact, lead to reflection on the role of the Spirit. It is a classic Christian affirmation that the Holy Spirit incorporates us, in our variety and difference, into Christ, and this is significant for the first question. Trinitarian faith legitimates a certain trust, as Christians seek to engage with the social and political demands of their time, drawing on all the resources, theological and nontheological, that they can, that the Spirit may be at work aligning them with and incorporating them into Christ’s own relation to the world. If we have no algorithm for a transition from Christ’s engagement to the one required of the contemporary church and contemporary Christians, there can nevertheless be a kind of confidence that this is a gap that the Spirit can bridge.
As regards the reluctance, the disinclination to really see what is before us, we can again be led to reflection on the Spirit, although by way first of a reflection on sin. For surely this evasion of the real is a dimension of the sin of the rich world. Indeed, what I have tried to suggest is that it is a sphere in which sin has a particularly strong grip, so strong that it can be hard to see how to escape, how as individuals or communities we could be really willing to look at the real when to do so would so discomfort and destabilize us. But it is part of the fundamental grammar of the Christian faith that where we know there is sin, we must also trust in and look for the reality of grace, the movement of the Holy Spirit. For if it is a basic Christian conviction that the Holy Spirit is at work in the world, in the church, and in individuals, freeing and making new things possible, it is a fundamental Christian requirement to attend to, to listen for, the promptings of the Spirit. So in the realm of the political, faith in the Holy Spirit means not needing to remain simply trapped and frozen, caught between a half-suppressed awareness of the injustices and oppression of the world on the one hand and one’s own fear of confronting them on the other; the individual or community is rather in a position, first, to acknowledge the sin of their own situation, and second, to seek out and attend to the movements of the Holy Spirit that, on one level or another, allow a new fidelity to the real.
So I have said something of the Son and the Spirit, but what of the Father? At this point I think it may be useful to consider the almost inevitable frustration of political engagement. NGOs may tell their supporters that they can end hunger, make poverty history, eradicate debt, and so on, but Christians who engage with any of these things must do so in the knowledge that in all likelihood they won’t end hunger or make poverty history or usher in a new age of justice. At best political efforts may contribute to some partial success, and they may utterly fail. What can make ongoing, sustained engagement possible under these conditions? One strategy might be to ignore the complexity and ambiguity of the world and attend only to a limited problem where there is hope of seeing full success — but this would once again be a kind of escapism. But what if the whole of our engagement in the world is itself — and is lived as and understood as — part of an orientation and a movement toward a horizon that transcends the world, toward the Father who is the source and goal of all?
In brief, then, one can conceive of political engagement as the Spirit moving within us, working to overcome our selfish blindness, seeking to unite us with Jesus, whose own engagement with the world and “fidelity to the real” is at the same time always also his pointing beyond the world to the Father. Or at least we can say, that is one example of how one can bring the Trinity and politics together.
I asked above whether an apophatic trinitarianism could in any way match the appeal of the social trinitarians, with their ability to say “the Trinity is our social program,” and whether an apophatic trinitarianism was bound to be apolitical, encouraging the church into passivity, disengagement, and escapism. We are now in a position to give at least a provisional answer to these questions.
To the first question — can an apophatic trinitariansim match the appeal of social trinitarians — the answer may well have to be “no.” There is, it must be acknowledged, something elusive about the incorporative approach to thinking about politics that I have been sketching; it cannot provide a particular difference, a particular policy, a particular political proposal, that could trace its pedigree to the doctrine of the Trinity. And there is a certain intellectual asceticism required. Maybe we would like to have in our grasp special concepts about God that give us a special basis for our political thought, but this is a desire that on my account has to be resisted. So it is undoubtedly difficult to compete with the appeal of social trinitarianism.
But does this mean that the upshot is, on a political level, passivity, disengagement, and escapism? I don’t think so. Disengagement and escapism are certainly powerful temptations for Christians, I’ve been trying to suggest, at least in some contexts. But highly generalised social and political proposals that can be derived from thinking about how we may “copy” the Trinity don’t help to counter these temptations. In fact, one might see such highly generalised proposals as themselves another form of escapism. It’s not difficult to play around with ideas of perfection. It is difficult to really look at and think about long term, massive suffering, particularly if I have to wonder, as anyone in the so-called first world does, about, say, third world poverty, whether I am somehow implicated in and responsible for this suffering. The doctrine of the Trinity doesn’t in my opinion give us a blueprint for remaking society. But in reminding us of our true situation — disciples of Jesus, in whom the grace of the Spirit is constantly at work, in the midst of the world on a journey to the transcendent Father — it can do something to overcome our fear, passivity, and escapism, to make engagement more possible in the first place, and to help sustain this engagement in the face of our imperfection and failure.
1. Miroslav Volf, “ ‘The Trinity Is Our Social Program’: The Doctrine of the Trinity and the Shape of Social Engagement,” MTh 14 (1998): 403 – 23.
2. Ibid, 403.
3. The historical work of Michel René Barnes, Lewis Ayres, and others has been significant here. Stephen Holmes’s recent The Holy Trinity: Understanding God’s Life (Milton Keynes: Paternoster, 2012) serves both as a historical introduction to the doctrine and a decisive critique of claims by social trinitarians to be retrieving the tradition. From a more conceptual angle, Kathryn Tanner’s “Trinity” chapter in Blackwell Companion to Political Theology (ed. Peter Scott and William T. Cavanaugh; Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), 319 – 332, develops a forceful criticism of social trinitarianism, at least insofar as it is put to work for practical purposes.
It might be argued that the kind of social trinitarianism discussed by analytic theologians is largely untouched by these critiques. Historical rootedness — a thick connection to tradition — carries less weight in this school of thought, and the concern for relevance and practical import is less marked.
4. Volf, “ ‘The Trinity Is Our Social Program,’ ” 404 – 5.
5. Ibid., 405.
6. Ibid.
7. Volf does not, in this essay at least, distinguish particularly carefully between temporality and sin, i.e., between being fallen and being historical.
8. “By describing God in whose image human beings are created and redeemed, the doctrine of the Trinity names the reality which human communities ought to image. By describing human beings as distinct from God, the doctrines of creation and of sin inform the way in which human communities can image the Triune God, now in history and then in eternity” (ibid., 405 – 6).
9. Ibid., 406.
10. Ibid.
11. Ibid., 407.
12. Ibid., 412.
13. Ibid., 409.
14. Ibid., 410.
15. Ibid.
16. Ibid.
17. Ibid., 411.
18. Kathryn Tanner succinctly suggests that the danger of a strategy like Volf’s is that “the Trinity fails to do any work” (“Trinity,” 327).
19. Volf, “ ‘The Trinity Is Our Social Program,’ ” 404. It is rather striking that Volf doesn’t seem to notice the particularities of this injunction to copy — he simply substitutes “God” for “Father” in glossing the gospel text, and then weaves the result into his general discussion of modeling ourselves on the Trinity.
20. Also, of course, as against Jewish and Muslim thought. For most social trinitarians, however, Christian self-assertion over against Jewish and Muslim thought is closer to an unintended consequence than a deliberate goal.
21. Tanner, “Trinity,” 319 – 20.
22. These ideas are developed more fully in Karen Kilby, “Is an Apophatic Trinitarianism Possible?” IJST 12 (2010): 65 – 77.
23. My language of incorporation here is not of course distinctive in contemporary theology. Similarities to Kathryn Tanner’s position are discussed in note 25 below. Cf. also Sarah Coakley’s trinitarian writings — most recently God, Sexuality and the Self (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013) — for a sustained reflection on the importance of our incorporation into the Trinity for theology. I am not inclined to give the absolutely decisive place in trinitarian theology to either sexuality or “deep” contemplative prayer that Coakley does, although I think that each of them can and should be given a trinitarian framing, and that one can learn well from Coakley how to do this.
24. This is, it should be said, a fairly free adaptation of Quine’s image. It is not only that the web here becomes an image for the structure of Christian belief rather than scientific thought, but that what is imagined to be at the web’s edge is practice, whereas for Quine it is (empircally construed) experience. See W. V. O. Quine, “Two Dogmas of Empiricism,” The Philosophical Review 60 (1951): 20 – 43.
For a related use of Quine’s web metaphor, cf. Paul Murray, “Discerning the Dynamics of Doctrinal Development: A Post-Foundationalist Perspective,” in Faithful Reading: New Essays in Theology in Honour of Fergus Kerr (ed. Simon Oliver, Karen Kilby, and Tom O’Loughlin; London: Continuum, 2012), 193 – 220.
25. The cautious phrasing here is deliberate. Kathryn Tanner has argued persuasively in The Politics of God (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1992) that a variety of political programs can be correlated with any one way of believing in God, and I think the point also holds in the apophatic case. So I am suggesting a possible political correlate of an apophatic emphasis, but not claiming that it is the only possible one.
26. My position here is very close to the one set out by Tanner in her “Trinity” article in the Blackwell Companion to Political Theology. She suggests that participation in the Trinity, rather than modeling ourselves on it, is the key to thinking about its significance for politics: “Humans do not attain the heights of trinitarian relations by reproducing them, but by being incorporated into them as the very creatures they are” (329). Two differences between what are, structurally, similar positions, are worth mentioning. First, Tanner lays less emphasis on unknowing than I have. Second, she fills out the notion of “incorporation into the Trinity” with a slightly different, and more christocentric, emphasis than I will do below. While I am not inclined to disagree with anything she proposes, I fear that her account is open to being taken as a denial of political significance to the doctrine of the Trinity: everything of political import seems to lie in Christology alone.
27. I sketched a similar reading of our context and a similar reflection on the doctrine of the Trinity in relation to this context in “Trinity, Tradition and Politics,” in Recent Developments in Trinitarian Theology: An International Symposium (ed. Christoph Chalamet and Mark Vial; Minneapolis: Fortress, forthcoming).
28. Sobrino introduces this concept, together with “fidelity to the real,” in his article “Spirituality and the Following Jesus,” in Mysterium Liberationis: Fundamental Concepts of Liberation Theology (ed. Ignacio Ellacuria and Jon Sobrino; Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1993), 677 – 701.