Christianity is in a political crisis and must change toward God, which is to change toward love.

Our image of God creates our image of ourselves.

Our image of God creates us, even if we don’t believe in God. For theists, a punishing God creates punishing people, just as a merciful God creates merciful people. Sometimes merciful people turn away from a merciless God and call themselves atheists. Their mercifulness suggests that they have faith, but if the concept of God bequeathed them is all judgment and fear and wrath, then atheism becomes the only sensible option.

Bad theology drives good people out of faith. Theology is what we think and say about God. To define what good theology is, we must first define what good faith is. Many people believe that God loathes them for their imperfection, or controls everyone like a puppeteer, or causes their tribulation as punishment, or hates the same people they hate. Such faith arrests development, induces anxiety, and sanctions hatred.

But if we truly believe in a benevolent God, then faith becomes something more life-giving. Faith becomes the enacted conviction that there is more available than the immediately obvious would suggest or even allow. And within this faith, God becomes the ever more— ever more love, ever more joy, ever more peace, meaning, and purpose.

Faith is not the assertion of truth claims that we have never experienced; faith is the discernment of a trustworthy extravagance within and beyond the universe. Faith suspects that there is always more than we can receive. This type of faith experiences the world as luminous and trusts the source of that illumination.

Rather than discounting religious experience as a disturbance of the psyche or accident of evolution, faith celebrates the capacity of these experiences to render the ordinary extraordinary. Early humans expanded geographically by chasing the horizon, repeatedly trusting that new opportunities lay beyond. In much the same way, contemporary humans expand spiritually by chasing the horizon, trusting that new ways of being await us. And like our distant ancestors, we experience this movement as a journey homeward, toward a land that is where we are supposed to be. Rejecting the path of least resistance, faith instead chooses the path of most promise.

Theology must heal, not harm.

Theology is faith at thought. But faith can only express itself in thought humbly. Theology does not try to “get it right” so much as it tries to help. We can’t get our thinking about God right: “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways, my ways,” says YHWH. “As high as the heavens are above the earth, so high are my ways above your ways and my thoughts above your thoughts” (Isaiah 55:8–9). We can’t think comprehensively about God, but we can think beneficially for humans, and we can trust that such beneficial thought fulfills the will of God because God is beneficent, a very present help in times of trouble (Psalm 46:1).

This practical attitude toward theology includes criteria of evaluation. Since we are made in the image of God, we must ask what kind of self this theology makes. Does it make a loving self or a hateful self? Does it make a courageous self or a fearful self? Our struggle to think as beneficially as possible, to receive the abundance that is already present, requires attentiveness. It also requires perseverance, because so much inherited religious thought blocks the love of God instead of transmitting it.

We can ask two questions: What do Christians believe? And what should Christians believe? Far too often, the most astute answers to those questions will diverge. Some Christians have believed and still believe, and some Christian denominations have taught and still teach, that women are subordinate to men, non-Christian religions are demonic, LGBTQ+ identity is unholy, extreme poverty and extreme wealth represent God’s will, God gave us the earth to exploit, God loves our nation-state the best, human suffering is divine punishment, dark skin marks the disfavor of God, and God made the universe about seven thousand years ago in six twenty-four-hour periods. Such bad thinking produces diseased feeling and harmful behavior.

Recognizing this problem, we must unlearn every destructive dogma that we have been taught, then replace that dogma with a life-giving idea. Ideas are brighter, lighter, and more life-giving than dogma. Dogma ends the conversation, but ideas fuel it.

This project, of deconstruction followed by reconstruction, demands that we examine every received cultural inheritance and every authoritative dogma, subject them to scrutiny, then renounce those that harm while keeping those that help. Along the way, we will generate new thoughts, or look for thoughts elsewhere, if the tradition doesn’t offer those we need. The process is laborious, tricky, and unending, but our ongoing experience of increasing Spirit legitimates the effort.

Faith needs better questions, not static answers.

Questions fuel this project of emancipation. Because God is infinite and we are finite, we are invited to grow perpetually toward God. Because God loves justice and our societies are not perfectly just, we are invited to work perpetually toward their improvement. The infinite God invites finite reality to move like a stream. But without questions, we do not move. With unchanging answers, we do not move. Only ceaseless questioning propels us over the horizon. For persons and communities committed to growth, answers are not the answer. Having questions—intense, consequential, burning questions—is the answer.

Eventually, good questions may produce better theology. When I was a young man, I preferred philosophy to theology. Reason and observation themselves would save me, I reckoned, and I didn’t need any old gods or ancient superstitions to cloud the process. But over time, I came to suspect that philosophy itself was either predicated on a hidden abundance (that was the philosophy I liked) or blind to that hidden abundance (that was the philosophy I disliked). Theology always engaged the abundance, even if I did not always find its conclusions attractive. Nevertheless, I saw that theology could ascribe great potential to existence and provide a ground for the experience of all reality as sacred. So, I cast my lot with theology.

In so doing, I cast my lot with God. At the time, I didn’t think of God as Trinitarian, as three persons united through love into one God. I wasn’t sure who Jesus was, and the Holy Spirit seemed like an abstraction. But over the years, I have pondered certain questions: What worldview promotes human thriving? What worldview will allow us to say, on our deathbeds, “Yes, that was a good way to live my life”? What worldview produces abundance in all its forms—spiritual, communal, and material?

The social Trinity invites us to progress toward social justice, which is the Reign of Love.

Over the years, I have come to believe that the social Trinity—the interpersonal Trinity characterized by agapic nondualism, by unifying love—provides the best intellectual ground for thinking through the fullness of life, both individual and social. The social Trinity is an inherently progressive concept of God. The social Trinity models relations of openness, vulnerability, and joy. The recognition that we, who are made in the image of God, fail to express such perfect love invites us to change toward God. But change toward universal, unconditional love necessitates transformation, and entrenched power always resists transformation. That resistance will be worn down by the perseverance of the saints, as water wears down the rock.

Before considering the transformative implications of the social Trinity, we will have to consider one of the great mysteries of Christian history. Jesus of Nazareth was a Jew, a devout practitioner of a monotheistic religion, a religion that insistently worships only one God. In the Gospel of Mark, drawing from his own Scriptures, Jesus repeats the central monotheistic refrain of Judaism, the Shema: “Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one” (Deuteronomy 6:4; Mark 12:29). How did a monotheistic prophet of a monotheistic religion inaugurate a movement that became Trinitarian? Since all of Jesus’s original disciples were Jewish, to the best of our knowledge, how did they end up talking about three persons—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—whenever they spoke of God and salvation? No consideration of the Trinity can proceed without first delving into this historical mystery. In my next blog, we will consider the first appearance of Trinitarian language in the tradition. (adapted from Jon Paul Sydnor, The Great Open Dance: A Progressive Christian Theology, pages 39-42)

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For further reading, please see:

Merton, Thomas. New Seeds of Contemplation. Boston: Shambhala, 2003.

Voss, Michelle. Dualities: A Theology of Difference. Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2010.

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