Sunday, November 06, 2011

The Trinity is/is not our Social Program

Christoph Schönborn seems to reconcile Volf's argument and Mark Husbands' retort regarding the Trinity's relation to human interrelation:
The difficulties we inevitably encounter when we attempt to discuss the mystery of the Trinity spring above all from our own limited conceptual framework.  The mystery of God's Trinity goes beyond these limits; we can approach it only gropingly, in darkness enlightened by our Faith.  How are we to combine the thought of God as Father with that of the complete equality of essence?  Should we think of perfect union with an order but no domination?  A union in which total self-surrender is identical to total self-possession?  A union in which each exists totally from the other and for the other, and yet remains absolutely free?  Such a triune God is too incomprehensible as to be conceived according to the ideal desires of everything human yearning longs for in terms of community, oneness, and love, so much so that it seems only reasonable to look on man as created after the image and likeness of precisely this God.
No human interrelation will ever perfectly mirror the Trinity which, paradoxically, is the ground of all imperfect human interrelation.