God of Our Silent Tears is a sustained argument that a Patriarchal God Image makes the problem of evil intractable, leads inexorably toward atheism and cuts us off from the Trinitarian image of God that changes our understanding of God's response to suffering, which can equip us to live better in the face of so much wrong. Why then do we cling to the patriarch and resist, even dismiss, the ancient mystery of early Christianity. This excerpt from Chapter 6 offers a possible explanation. God Of Our Silent Tears is now available for order on line from The Cathedral Bookstore in Los Angeles and from Amazon. http://www.godofoursilenttears.com/#et_page_802
You can
learn a lot while drinking coffee in the student lounge of Harvard Divinity
School. I was reading there one day, when I overheard a conversation at the
next table. Two young women, both on the verge of graduation, were discussing
their futures. The first wanted to be a Congregationalist minister, but she
didn’t think the ministerial board would approve her. They would, she feared,
expect her to believe in the Trinity – and she was not going to say that, no
way, no how.
The other
agreed that it was unjust and oppressive to expect her to affirm something like
the Trinity. The first shook her head at the waste of her theological education
and the cutting short of her ministry over such a thing. The second then said,
“It’s so seductive though, isn’t it?”
“What do you mean ‘seductive’?” the first
asked.
“Well,” the
second said, “the way Prof. Coakley explains it, it’s just so beautiful. It’s
about relationship instead of power as the heart of everything. It’s really
beautiful and so good, so moral.”
The first
student nodded and sighed, “Yes,” she said, and when you read St. Basil and St.
Gregory, and St. Thomas Aquinas, it just makes so much sense. It really seems
true.” There was a pause in the conversation. Then the first student continued.
“It’s hard to sacrifice all I’ve worked for on principle. But there’s no way
I’m going to say I believe in the Trinity.”
“Of course
not,” the second student said. “It would be corrupt and absurd.”
These are exceptionally
bright people in their third year at Harvard Divinity.
They know full well that God is infinitely beyond any
doctrine or description, that all doctrines are ways of using poetic language
to reach into the dark, grazing the face of mystery with our fingertips. Why is
this particular language about God, this particular sacred imagery, such a
taboo that they recoil against it no matter how beautiful, how good, and even
how true it may seem?
There is a
deep resistance to the Trinity. And it does no good to explain the Trinity, as
long as this resistance is in place. So, let us start with the resistance. Most
modern believers and unbelievers have the same definition of God, “the Supreme
Being.” AA members call this being “the Higher Power.” Note what is implicit in
this kind of language. First, God is a being. Second, he is supreme because he
is supremely powerful. The Supreme Being is the cosmic patriarch. Some believe
in this being. Others do not. But they agree on what it is they disagree about.
The God they either believe in or do not believe in is a super-being with
absolute power, who may be persuaded to do what we want if we will do what he
wants.
That
definition of God as a Superman Master of the Universe is so widely and
unquestioningly assumed, that orthodox Christianity does not even make it into
the conversation. I once watched an ECU-film program featuring six contemporary
Christian leaders speaking on the question “What Do We Mean By ‘God’?”Neither
the Trinity nor the Holy Spirit were mentioned – not even once in passing, and
the Son was referred to only as the historical Jesus, not the eternal Word who
St. John and the Nicene Creed identify as God. Six out of six of the supposedly
divergent viewpoints assembled by Ecu-film were stuck in the patriarchal
god-image, even though they were all ostensibly “liberals.” Cambridge
theologian Nicholas Lash says,
Under the dominant influence of
modern theism, the doctrine
of God’s Trinity has . . . largely
ceased to function as our Christian
In my experience, and in the experience of many theologians
and pastors, when most people say “God” they mean the patriarchal dominator.
Even academic theology in the West often misses the Ancient Doctrine of the
Trinity and lapses instead into a heresy which has a distinctly patriarchal
tenor.[ii]
To think of
God as Trinity is to reject “modern theism.” If God is the Trinity, God is not
a powerful individual dominating creation. Rather, God is a web of
relationship, and this web does not dominate anything. It loves creation into
being. This image of God is nothing short of revolutionary. So, in order to get
beyond modern theism, we have to outgrow our childhood picture of God.
There are
no doubt various reasons that people may object to the Trinity on a conscious level. They may never
have heard the doctrine explained beyond simplistic metaphors to elucidate a
metaphor. They likely do not know how Trinitarian doctrine developed. Many people take religious language at the
concrete literal level where the Trinity is simply non-sense. They do not know
that doctrines are metaphors pointing toward infinite mystery, and that all
religious metaphors are at best mixtures of truth and fiction. But beneath
those conscious snags lies a cultural taboo. It is simply impossible to live in
Western Culture without soaking up the mistaken definition of God as “the
Supreme Being.” That definition is a patriarchal culture’s roadblock to
grasping the Trinity.[iii]
Remember
our two Harvard Divinity School seniors who praised Trinitarian doctrine in
every way – it is good, beautiful, and even true – but they refused to believe
it. Why would sophisticated theology students, who have studied these deeper
meanings of the Trinity, who decidedly know better than to think the Trinity is
a silly polytheism, and who acknowledge that this poetic description of God is
true, good, and beautiful, nonetheless resist it? Stop and consider this
statement: “I know it’s a metaphor, not a literal fact. I find this metaphor to
be true, good, and beautiful. But I refuse to believe it.” Something deeper is
going on.
Sigmund
Freud’s great contribution to religion was explaining the primary way we get
this superman image of God stuck in our heads. It comes out of early childhood
experiences of dependency. The God image we get as children is of God the
patriarch, God the monarch, God the supreme boss, the dominator-god. We learn
it psychologically in the family; then children’s church school curricula and
some patronizing clergy teach it as doctrine. It is doctrine – just not
Christian doctrine – not Christian because the God image we get from early
childhood experiences is not the Trinity.
If our
parents were benign, we will feel safer with this dominator God. If our parents
were frightening or neglectful, our attitude may be less positive. But either
way, the universal condition of children is dependent and subservient. So we
all get the image of God the dominator. It is the rare modern Westerner who
does not have the patriarchal image entrenched in their assumptions about the
definition of the word “God” either consciously or unconsciously. If Freud is
right – and I believe he is on a cultural
level – we all have the patriarchal God imprinted on our psyches. Certainly, each individual has his or her own
personal history which shapes his or her own inner image of God, but as for the
cultural norm which defines words, Freud was absolutely on the mark in
describing the psychological foundation of a patriarchal culture’s image of a patriarchal
God.[iv]
In a
patriarchal culture, people will resist an anti-patriarchal God image and then
generate conscious pretexts. Liberating one’s religious imagination from the
culturally imposed patriarchal God trap is long, slow going. Reading this book
will not be sufficient. But I hope it will help.
To be fair,
we must acknowledge another reason for discomfort with the Trinity. We are
deeply attached to thinking of God as an individual because it is easier to
think of an individual as personal. It is easier to imagine an individual as
caring, having opinions. It is easier to be friends with an individual.
When we say
God is not an individual, people are apt to leap to the conclusion that God is
not personal. That is 180 degrees opposite to the point of the Trinity. The
Trinity image of God is the opposite of impersonal. It is more personal than an
individual autocrat dominator-God could ever be. Personhood (feeling, thinking,
hoping) occurs in the context of relationship. The Trinity shows God as essentially
“interpersonal.”[v] One might say the Trinity is at
least three times as personal a God image as God the individual.
Granted, we
cannot pray to a relationship.[vi] But the Trinity itself, the godhead
itself, the innermost being of God itself, is not the object of our prayer. It
is the nameless, imageless God beyond our reach. The three divine persons of
the Trinity are, however, quite accessible in prayer. Jesus taught us to pray
to the Father – not the godhead, not the divine nature. We pray to and through
the Son. And we pray in the power of the Spirit. Trinitarian prayer is
decidedly personal.
Encountering
the Triune God through Communion and Community is the original Christian way of
salvation. “Salvation,” (as the word was actually meant in the New Testament)
does not mean to be pardoned for our sins, but rather to be made whole, to
become fully human, to become a complete person. The first Trinitarians
discovered that “to become fully a person... is to break through the isolating
boundaries of individualism into a life of inclusive communion with persons
valued for their uniqueness and differences . . . . Arriving at full personhood in this way . . .
is what it means to be saved.”[vii]
A
final objection to this way of imagining God is that when we feel weak, we need
someone to be strong. Being beautiful, good, and true may be very nice. But
when we are about to hurt, we want a cosmic Rambo to break down the door and
save us. A cosmic dance of love may not seem strong enough. But the Trinity does
not deny God’s power. It changes the nature of God’s power. It challenges us to
rethink the kind of salvation that works and it might change how we go about
trying to address the suffering in our own lives and the world around us.
When
we contrast “love” with “power,” we mean the power of dominance, the power to
oppress, coerce, and dictate. God’s renunciation of dominating power does not
prevent God from participating powerfully in our lives in ways that are both
consistent with God’s nature and responsive to our need. When we speak of “God’s
power” it is important to remember several things: God’s power is not the same
as any other power we know. It is not the power of dominance, but rather the
power of creative love. God’s power is exercised in relationship, personally,
not oppressively – honestly, not manipulatively. God’s power is restrained by
God’s own nature and by God’s faithful commitment to allow the existence of
that which is not God.
Trinitarian
language for God isn’t perfect. It suffers from regrettable gender bias.[viii] But despite that clear problem,
leading feminists theologians[ix] vigorously defend the Trinity
because it saves us from God as an individual – the big guy (and it is
invariably a guy) in the sky. God as an individual is easy to understand – but
the individual God usually becomes an autocratic power symbol – a king or a
warrior. The Trinity makes God relational rather than domineering,
interpersonal rather than abstract, egalitarian and mutual rather than
oppressive. The Trinity makes God into something like a spiritual force field
in which the force is not dominating power but interpersonal longing.[x] The
Trinity is not an adequate image for God. It needs to be supplemented by all
the other metaphors from ancient tradition and new metaphors arising out of our
culture. The Trinity is not adequate but it is helpful, especially when we
consider the problem of evil.
The Trinity
makes God, not a dominant individual, but a web of loving relationship. The
Trinity means God is not a thing that might or might not exist. Calling God
“Trinity” is describing the innate essence of Being as a personal relationship.
To believe in such a God is not to believe that a particular being exists, but
to say something about the nature of Reality itself – that Being is relational,
generous, abounding and overflowing with procreative love, that it is deep,
mysterious, and paradoxical. To describe God this way is to betray the power
system religion.[xi]
The Trinity
is not a literal taxonomy of God. It is a metaphor pointing toward a mystery.
The metaphor preserves the Jewish insight of the one-ness of the divine nature,
but also insists that God is not a dominating individual. God is more like a
web of relationship. This metaphor plays out paradoxically in the form of our two
models or ways of thinking about the Trinity – Family Trinity and Job
Description Trinity. In the coming chapters we will see how each of these
models will be helpful to us in dealing with suffering. When we address the
realities of evil, suffering, and affliction, both the Family Trinity and
Job-Description Trinity images of God make a world of difference.
Part of our
difficulty in making meaning out of our suffering has always been that
suffering truly is mysterious. But modern people are utterly at a loss in the
face of suffering because our modern concept of God is inadequate to the task.
It is inadequate precisely because the Trinity has been supplanted in our
religious imagination by an individual monarch. When we try to understand suffering in light of God, and God in
light of suffering, it is this Trinitarian Communion of Love we are seeking to
understand, not the mind of a Cosmic Puppet Master.
[i] Nicholas Lash, Easter In Ordinary, p. 277. Jurgen Moltmann argues that Western
theology even at its best it predominantly heretical in terms of the Early
Church statements on the Trinity. He examines Karl Barth as a representative
Protestant theology and Karl Rahner as a representative Roman Catholic
theology, and contends their views of the Trinity both amount to Sabellian
modalism, a declared heresy essentially saying God is one individual performing
three functions – the Job Description Trinity taken to the extreme. If this is
true of our great theologians, it is much more true of pastors in the pulpits
and people in the pews. Western Christianity is out of touch with the richness of
our traditional view of God. It is the feminist and liberation theologians who
are reminding us of it.
[ii]Treating the Father as the real God,
and the Son and Spirit as different ways in which the Father manifests, is
essentially the heresy of Sibellian Modalism. Moltmann rightly charges leading
Western theologians including Schleiermacher, Barth, and even Rahner with being
essentially modalist. Sabellian
Modalism. It treats the Father as God
the Commander, with the Son and Spirit as being either joint First Officer or
more often as the First and Second Officer. They do not understand the Godhead
as a network of relationship and so miss the feminist values of mutuality and
compassion the orthodox Trinity represents.
[iii] Harvard Prof. of Systematic
Theology, Sarah Coakley tells the story of a young woman studying for
ordination in the U. C. C., perhaps the most liberal and least patriarchal
denomination in the Christian tradition. She had grown up only minimally
churched in that liberal tradition and had never heard of the patriarchal image
of God until seminary. She found the notion odd. But as she approached
ordination, her dreams were filled with images of submission to patriarchal
figures. Professor Coakley’s point is
that even those who do not consciously believe in such a picture of God are
still subject to unconscious cultural influences.
[iv] Anna Maria Rizzuto’s research in
the psychology of God images showed that individuals form personal God images
in more complex ways. Rizzuto, Birth of
the Living God. But as a culture when we speak of God we necessarily adopt
the culture’s definition of God. Here I think Freud’s understanding of our
common God image is apt.
[v] “The God who is a person is transcended by the God who
is the Personal itself . . . “ Paul Tillich, Biblical Religion and the Search for Ultimate Reality (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1955) pp. 13, 16, 24-26, 333-34, 59, 74, 82-84
generally explaining his thesis that God is personal without being an
individual.
[vi] Notre Dame philosopher Robert Audi
rightly observes that there is a problem God’s identity as relationship from
the standpoint of religious practice and from the standpoint of Scripture. “One
cannot pray to a relationship.” The response to this problem is in terms of the
two complementary albeit paradoxical models of the Trinity, which we will call
the Family Trinity and the Job Description Trinity. God in Godself is more like
a personal relationship than an individual. But God, being relational, engages
us in the personal manner we can be engaged. That is to say, God engages us in
the form of persons – Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Scripture is not a
theological treatise on the nature of God. It is an account of God’s
interaction with people. So it tells the story in terms of the Divine persons
whom we have met.
[vii] The words quoted are Patricia Fox’s
apt summary of Zizioulas, Being As
Communion, pp. 49-50. Patricia Fox, God
As Communion (Collegeville: The Liturgical Press, 2001) pp. 42-43.
[viii] Feminist theologians such as
Elizabeth Johnson offer restatements of the Trinity in less patriarchal terms.
On the other side, Robert Jensen defends the use of masculine language and argues it neither reflects nor supports
patriarchal culture. Robert W. Jensen, The
Triune Identity (Eugene: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 1982) pp. 13-16.
[ix] For example, Sarah Coakley,
Elizabeth Johnson, and Kathryn Tanner.
[x] The objection to talk about God in
terms like “force field” (remember this is just an analogy) is that we don’t
think of a force field as personal. Actually, a force field may be more
personal than we think. But to the extent that image connotes something
impersonal, that is just the other half
of the analogy. God is like a force
field in size and energy, but unlike
a force field in that God is personal.
[xi] The Trinity is not the only way to
liberate ourselves from the dominator God. Nothing in Islam or Judaism, for
example, preclude them from developing theologies that see God in a better way.
Martin Buber and Abraham Heschel are examples of such a better view within
Judaism. In Islam, the God of Rumi and al-Halaj
is no dominator. But the Trinity is Christianity’s way of saying God is
loving rather than domineering. The point in emphasizing the Trinity in this
book is not to challenge non-Christian religions, which may have other ways of
saying something similar about God. The point is to challenge a Christianity
that, without the Trinity, has no effective way of saying that God is, at the
core, relational rather than domineering. The relational, as opposed to
domineering, nature of God is essential to a Christian understanding of how God
and suffering fit in the same reality.
