[Nota del editor: lo siguiente es un extracto de The Deep Things of God , 2010, de Fred Sanders, publicado por Crossway Books. Usado con permiso.]
La gracia del Señor Jesucristo y el amor de Dios y la comunión del Espíritu Santo sean con todos ustedes.
2 CORINTIOS 13: 14
«Me conoces mejor de lo que crees que lo sabes, y llegarás a conocerme mejor aún».
ASLAN A FRANK THE CABBIE, EL SOBRINO DEL MAGO
La realidad es lo primero, y la comprensión la sigue. Si desea cultivar la capacidad de pensar bien acerca de la Trinidad, el primer paso es darse cuenta de que hay más en el trinitarismo que solo pensar bien. Específicamente, el punto de partida para una teología trinitaria duradera no es principalmente una cuestión de llevar a cabo un proyecto de pensamiento exitoso. Los cristianos nunca están en la posición mendiga de reunir algunos conceptos sobre Dios y luego construir una gran síntesis trinitaria a partir de ellos. Los cristianos tampoco están en posición de reunir algunos pasajes de las Escrituras, aquí un versículo y otro versículo, y juntarlos en una brillante doctrina que mejora el desorden de las Escrituras. En cambio, los cristianos deberían reconocer que cuando comenzamos a pensar en la Trinidad, lo hacemos porque nos encontramos ya profundamente involucrados en la realidad de la vida trina de Dios, ya que él nos lo ha abierto para nuestra salvación y nos ha revelado en la Biblia . Para comenzar a hacer una buena teología trinitaria, solo necesitamos reflexionar sobre esa realidad presente y desempaquetarla. Cuanto más nos demos cuenta de que ya estamos rodeados por la realidad de la Trinidad del Evangelio, más nos importará nuestro trinitarismo. Los evangélicos en particular deberían reconocer que tenemos todo lo que necesitamos para pensar en la Trinidad de una manera que lo cambie todo.
La teología trinitaria de Nick Cruz
Nicky Cruz no es famoso por su teología trinitaria. Es famoso por haber sido el «señor de la guerra» de una violenta pandilla callejera llamada Mau-Maus en
Pero en 1976 Cruz escribió otro libro para describir lo que llamó «el hecho más importante de mi crecimiento cristiano». El libro era Los tres magníficos , y el hecho de que se había convertido en el centro de la vida cristiana de Cruz en ese momento fue el hecho de la Trinidad:
Algo ha surgido en mi caminar con Dios que se ha convertido en el elemento más importante de mi discipulado. Se ha convertido en lo que me sostiene, me alimenta, me mantiene estable cuando estoy tembloroso. He venido a ver a Dios, a conocerlo, a relacionarme con Él como Tres en Uno, Dios como Padre, Salvador y Espíritu Santo. Dios me ha dado a lo largo de los años una visión de Sí mismo como Tres en Uno, y la capacidad de relacionarme con Dios de esa manera es el hecho más importante de mi crecimiento cristiano.
Los tres magníficos es el testimonio personal de Nicky Cruz sobre el poder de la Trinidad en su vida. Nunca se vendió como Run Baby Run , pero es el clásico Nicky Cruz, del capítulo sobre la salvación de un drogadicto llamado
El testimonio de Cruz de su experiencia con la Trinidad es realmente poderoso. Él alaba a las tres personas por turno, comenzando con varios capítulos sobre Jesús como su «magnífico salvador». Enfatiza especialmente la presencia, la realidad y el poder de Cristo para salvar. Cruz ya nos dijo: «Cuando me convertí en cristiano por primera vez, no sabía nada sobre nada. En lo que respecta a las cosas de Dios, era un hombre totalmente ignorante. No sabía nada. Pero Jesús me alcanzó a pesar de mi ignorancia sobre Él». . «5 En estos capítulos, trata de mirar hacia atrás y describir ese extraño conocimiento que obtuvo en su primer encuentro con Jesús, antes de haber aprendido ningún detalle. En prosa que se convierte en oración, Cruz dice:
Recuerdo cuando vi al verdadero Jesús por primera vez. De repente te vi como realmente eras. Vi que eras humano, como yo … Vi que tenías coraje, tenías agallas. Tenías algo que no podía describir, algo que nunca había visto antes, algo increíblemente fuerte y tierno al mismo tiempo. Vi que tenías poder para aplastarme como un insecto, y en cambio derramaste tu sangre para salvarme, amarme, sanar mi corazón dolorido.
Este es el corazón del mensaje de Cruz, y él se mueve sin esfuerzo del lenguaje de la oración al lenguaje de la invitación, dirigiendo a sus lectores a la presencia de Cristo: «Él quiere perdonarte por tu pecado. Él quiere curarte de tu enfermedad Quiere evitar la ansiedad, el miedo y la culpa. Quiere liberarte de todo tipo de esclavitud. Y ahora está allí contigo para hacerlo. ¡Es un Salvador maravilloso y magnífico! «7
Pero este intenso enfoque en Jesús no impide que Cruz celebre « el Padre Magnífico ,» cuya paternidad «no es simplemente una figura retórica». Dios no es nuestro padre simplemente en un sentido «universal e impersonal» de habernos creado, sino «también en un nuevo tipo de paternidad personal y especial que está reservado solo para los cristianos nacidos de nuevo. Él es mi Padre no solo porque Él creó ¡pero ahora también porque me adoptó como su hijo! ¡Soy su criatura, pero más que eso soy su hijo adoptivo! «8 Cruz no es menos elocuente y apasionado por Dios el Padre: su intimidad paterna, su protección, su generosidad y su disciplina, de lo que él se trata de Jesús.
Nicky Cruz no dice mucho acerca de cómo su experiencia de Jesús y su experiencia del Padre están relacionadas entre sí. Pero cuando recurre a la tercera persona, «el Espíritu Santo Magnífico», comienza a unir a los tres en una visión unificada de la salvación. Él logra esto al señalar la necesidad absoluta de la obra del Espíritu para ponernos en contacto con el Padre y el Hijo:
Dios es un padre magnífico. Dios es un magnífico Salvador, Jesucristo. ¡Pero si no fuera por el magnífico Espíritu Santo, aún sería un miserable y odioso pecador! No es suficiente tener un Dios Padre que me ame y me provea. Ni siquiera es suficiente tener un Salvador que murió por mis pecados. Para que cualquiera de esas bendiciones marque la diferencia en nuestras vidas, también debe estar presente en este mundo esa Tercera Persona de Dios, el Espíritu Santo.
¿En qué sentido es necesario el ministerio de la tercera persona? La obra del Espíritu es necesaria porque él es quien realmente nos pone en contacto con el Hijo y el Padre. No le quita al Padre y al Hijo decir que su trabajo depende de la obra del Espíritu. Como Cruz argumenta, aunque Jesús murió por nosotros y el Padre nos perdona, debemos preguntarnos: «¿Pero por qué viniste a Jesús en primer lugar?» y responde: «Porque fuiste atraído por Dios el Espíritu Santo».
Jesús me salvó; El Padre me perdonó. Pero el Espíritu Santo me convenció, me puso de rodillas, me mostró a Dios … Él me mostró a Jesucristo, y Su fuerte y dulce amor me conmovió. Y luego me empujó hacia Dios, y con mucho gusto caí en los brazos de mi amado Padre.
En la obra del Espíritu, los propósitos de Dios se cumplen, y toda la salvación, el perdón y la comunión se realizan. Nicky Cruz es famoso por predicar un mensaje evangélico simple de una manera que es relevante para los jóvenes endurecidos en la calle. No es famoso por su teología trinitaria, e incluso puede parecer incongruente destacarlo al principio de un libro sobre la doctrina de la Trinidad. Hace todo lo posible para asegurarse de que nadie lo confunda con un profesor de teología: «No sé todo lo que hay que saber sobre teología. No soy un erudito griego. Solo soy un
a quien Dios recogió de los barrios bajos en
No hay nada en el libro de Nicky Cruz sobre la Trinidad que no esté implícito en sus libros anteriores. Su comprensión de la salvación y la vida cristiana no cambió entre Run Baby Run y The Magnificent Three . Desde el momento de su dramática conversión, había sabido que Jesús salva y el Padre perdona. En sus primeros días de estudio bíblico, llegó a comprender cómo había sido el «empujón» soberano del Espíritu Santo que había estado trabajando detrás de escena. Nada de esto era información nueva cuando comenzó a describir a la Trinidad como «el elemento más importante» de su discipulado. De hecho, Cruz incluso había afirmado la doctrina de la Trinidad desde el principio. Parece que nada ha cambiado, sin embargo, comenzó a escribir sobre su relación con el Padre, el Hijo y el Espíritu con la emoción de haber hecho un descubrimiento que cambió su vida. Lo llamó «lo que me sostiene, me alimenta, me mantiene estable cuando estoy tembloroso». Aunque Cruz no había obtenido información nueva, escribió como si su nueva comprensión de la Trinidad hubiera cambiado todo sobre su vida cristiana.
La diferencia es que se había metido en el interior de la doctrina. Había pasado de aceptarlo bajo la autoridad de las Escrituras y sus ancianos de confianza a entenderlo desde adentro. «No lo entendí. Creía que era verdad, aunque al principio solo porque tenía una gran confianza en aquellos que me lo enseñaron. Luego creí que era verdad porque lo vi en la Biblia». » Esta fue una transición importante en sí misma, que maduró de una confianza necesariamente inmadura en la autoridad humana, a la dependencia directa de la autoridad divina. Pero todavía era solo autoridad, y solo trabajaba en Cruz desde afuera. «Así que lo creí, pero aún no lo entendí». Lo que Cruz experimentó en su despertar trinitario fue una especie de cambio en la forma en que percibió la misma idea: primero, vio a la Trinidad como una doctrina difícil que tenía que ser aceptada pero difícilmente podría explicarse, luego pasó a verla como una doctrina iluminadora que explicaba lo que leía en la Biblia y lo que experimentaba en su vida cristiana . Mientras que primero encontró la doctrina como un problema, llegó a entenderla como una solución.
Cruz recuerda su exasperación temprana con la doctrina de una manera que probablemente suena a verdad para muchos cristianos que no lo expresarían tan claramente: «¿Por qué tener tres personas, pensé, cuando me confunde tanto? Me pareció totalmente complicación innecesaria. ¿Por qué Dios no podría ser solo Dios? Entonces pude entenderlo. Este negocio de ‘Trinidad’ lo acepté por fe, pero no pude relacionarme con él en absoluto. «13 La transformación en su vida tuvo lugar cuando se dio cuenta que las cosas descritas en la doctrina eran cosas con las que ya estaba en contacto. Conocía a Jesús, el Padre y el Espíritu a través de su trabajo en su vida. La doctrina de la Trinidad fue la clave para entender que esas tres experiencias pertenecían juntas porque el Dios detrás de ellas era el único Dios, haciéndose conocido como Padre, Hijo y Espíritu Santo precisamente porque existe eternamente como Padre, Hijo y Espíritu Santo. . «Entiendo que Dios es mucho más para mí como Tres en Uno de lo que podría ser de otra manera», escribió Cruz. «Ahora sé lo fácil que es para mí relacionarme con Él de esa manera cotidiana porque tiene tres años». 14 Continúa:
No estoy hablando de teología. Lo que estoy describiendo es algo diferente de simplemente creer en la doctrina de la Trinidad. Siempre he creído en la doctrina de la Trinidad, pero nunca había experimentado a Dios personalmente como Tres en Uno. Al principio era simplemente una doctrina en la que creía, pero ahora se ha convertido en una verdad de la vida cotidiana. Dios ha desarrollado en mí un sentido de las relaciones separadas que puedo tener con el Padre, el Salvador y el Espíritu Santo. Me ha mostrado la fuerza que proviene de esas relaciones separadas, el poder para vivir que proviene de las tres caras de Dios. Me ha enseñado a alimentarme de la Trinidad para mi sustento diario, en lugar de tener un vago sentimiento de que la Trinidad es de alguna manera cierta.
Las personas pueden convertirse en cristianas después de aprender una cantidad muy pequeña de doctrina e información. A medida que crecen en el discipulado, leen más de la Biblia y llegan a comprender más de lo que habían entendido antes. Pero lo que destaca el testimonio trinitario de Nicky Cruz es que el factor decisivo no es una transferencia de información. No se introdujeron datos nuevos en su proceso de pensamiento, y no tuvo que cambiar de opinión sobre ninguna de sus creencias. Él ya había estado creyendo en la Trinidad por un tiempo cuando se despertó con la diferencia que la Trinidad hace para cada aspecto de su vida cristiana. Su radical trinitarismo no provino de una lección de teología avanzada; vino del evangelio y luego lo llevó a una clase de teología avanzada. Era como un hombre que encontró un tesoro escondido en un campo que no tenía que comprar, porque ya lo poseía. Escuchó que Dios lo llamaba a cavar en las profundidades, y lo que encontró allí cambió todo para él.
Algo más que palabras
El tipo de trinitarismo que necesitamos no es simplemente la aceptación de una doctrina. La doctrina de la Trinidad no es, en primera instancia, algo que se construya con argumentos de textos. En el mejor de los casos, ese método conducirá al reconocimiento mental de que «la teoría trinitaria» explica mejor la evidencia reunida. El primer paso en el camino hacia el corazón del misterio trinitario es reconocer que, como cristianos, nos encontramos ya profundamente involucrados en la vida trina y solo necesitamos reflexionar correctamente sobre esa realidad presente. La mayoría de los cristianos evangélicos no necesitan ser convencidos de la teoría trinitaria; necesitan que se les muestre que están inmersos en la realidad trinitaria. Necesitamos ver y sentir que estamos rodeados por la Trinidad, rodeados por todos lados por la presencia y la obra del Padre, el Hijo y el Espíritu Santo. Desde ese punto de partida, puede comenzar una enseñanza verdaderamente productiva.
Ciertamente, hay un momento y un lugar para introducir las palabras, conceptos, proposiciones y afirmaciones de verdad de la teología trinitaria. Pero con demasiada frecuencia en la enseñanza contemporánea sobre la Trinidad, esas palabras no solo son lo primero; vienen primero, último y exclusivamente. La Trinidad parece a la mayoría de los evangélicos como una fórmula doctrinal para ser recibida y creída por un acto mental de comprensión. En resumen, es, en el mejor de los casos, un hecho verdadero acerca de Dios que tenemos en nuestras mentes en forma de palabras. Enseñar sobre esto es, entonces, una cuestión de usar palabras para guiar a los alumnos a más palabras. «Palabras, palabras, palabras», fue la respuesta del príncipe Hamlet cuando se le preguntó qué estaba leyendo, pero eso no era una señal de una mente equilibrada o un espíritu generoso. Un cristiano que lee sobre la Trinidad debería poder decir que está leyendo más que «palabras, palabras, palabras». El compromiso evangélico con la Trinidad no debe limitarse al ámbito de los ejercicios verbales; debería sumergirse más profundo y elevarse más alto que el poder de las palabras. Debe comenzar desde la realidad experimentada de la gracia trinitaria de Dios y llevarnos a un encuentro más profundo con el Padre, el Hijo y el Espíritu Santo.
Un enfoque meramente verbal de la Trinidad está condenado a ser superficial, débil y quebradizo, porque no será más fuerte que nuestra propia capacidad de comprender y articular lo que estamos pensando. De hecho, esta es la situación en la que se encuentra gran parte del trinitarismo evangélico en el nivel popular. Como he enseñado en varias iglesias sobre la doctrina de la Trinidad en los últimos doce años, he tratado de responder las tres preguntas principales que los evangélicos traen consigo: ¿es bíblico? ¿Tiene sentido? ¿Y eso importa? Todas estas son buenas preguntas y merecen las respuestas más útiles que un teólogo puede aportar a una congregación.16 Pero he aprendido que si las dos primeras preguntas se responden solo en el nivel de las maniobras verbales, la tercera pregunta tiene una tendencia increíblemente grande. .
La pregunta, ¿es bíblica? puede ser respondido por una serie de versículos de la Biblia que prueban varios elementos de la doctrina. Primero proporcionamos pruebas bíblicas de la deidad del Hijo, luego la deidad del Espíritu, luego la personalidad del Espíritu, luego la distinción entre el Padre y el Hijo, luego la distinción entre el Hijo y el Espíritu, y así sucesivamente, ya sea comenzando o terminando con una prueba bíblica de la unidad de Dios. Es posible vislumbrar la lógica trinitaria más profunda del mensaje total de la Biblia a través de este enfoque, pero cuando el tiempo es corto, la prueba bíblica de la Trinidad se reduce a un asunto verso por verso.
Eso lleva a la segunda pregunta, ¿tiene sentido? Hay algunas distinciones lógicas y satisfactorias que hacer aquí, especialmente al señalar que Dios no es una cosa y también de alguna manera tres de lo mismo (lo que sería una contradicción estricta y lógica), sino una en tres personas (que todavía requiere más explicaciones, pero no es simplemente una contradicción). Pero el siguiente paso aparentemente inevitable en la búsqueda de la pregunta, ¿tiene sentido? es la subpregunta, ¿Cuál es la mejor analogía para la Trinidad? Esta subpregunta suele ser la sentencia de muerte para la relevancia del trinitarismo. Las analogías pueden jugar un papel útil al pensar en Dios, pero cuando surge el anhelo de una analogía aquí, en la frontera entre «Tiene sentido» y «¿Importa?», Generalmente es una señal de que el pensamiento trinitario se ha convertido en un proyecto verbal por sí mismo. Se ha convertido en una cuestión de obtener las palabras correctas, para que puedan llevarnos a más palabras correctas. Los mensajes de texto de prueba en serie dan paso a analogías rotas, que nos confrontan con una pregunta «¿y qué?» Sin respuesta. ¿Cómo caemos tan rápido de tres preguntas perfectamente buenas (¿es bíblica? ¿Tiene sentido? ¿Y es importante?) A una forma de discurso tan hueca como una cámara de eco? ¿Cuál es la diferencia entre una creencia en la Trinidad que simplemente no importa y una que lo cambia todo?
Lo que se necesita es un enfoque de la doctrina de la Trinidad que se apoye en la realidad experimentada de la Trinidad, y solo entonces avance hacia la tarea de la aclaración verbal y conceptual. El principio es, primero la realidad, luego la explicación. Lo que sale mal en tanta discusión popular sobre la Trinidad es que los cristianos abordan la doctrina como si fuera su trabajo construirla a partir de fragmentos de versos, argumentos y analogías. La doctrina misma parece estar al otro lado de un proyecto mental. Si el proyecto tiene éxito, lograrán la doctrina de la Trinidad y podrán responder preguntas como ¿Por qué tener tres personas ? y ¿Cómo es la Trinidad? Pero el método correcto comenzaría con una inmersión en la realidad del Dios trino y solo entonces pasaría a la tarea de explicar. Las palabras y los conceptos encontrarían su lugar apropiado en el contexto de una vida marcada por la presencia reconocida del Padre, el Hijo y el Espíritu Santo. Este tipo de enseñanza sobre la Trinidad no sería un proyecto de construcción de una idea compleja sino de desempaquetar una realidad integral en la que ya nos encontraríamos en medio de cristianos.
¿Qué se puede hacer para que la doctrina de la Trinidad florezca en la teología evangélica como si fuera su propio suelo nativo? ¿Qué se necesitaría para inculturar el trinitarismo en la cultura del evangelicalismo? Estoy argumentando que debemos comenzar con los recursos disponibles, justo donde estamos. Sabemos más de lo que podemos decir sobre la Trinidad, y no debemos dejarnos atrapar por pensar que todo depende de nuestra capacidad para articular el misterio del Dios trino. Pero sí debemos recordar que estamos inmersos en una realidad trinitaria. Es posible ser radicalmente trinitario sin saberlo o tener amnesia sobre el estado real de uno. Podemos ser formados y educados por un movimiento que surgió como la fuerza trinitaria más consistente en la historia del cristianismo , pero podemos vivir de una manera alejada de esas riquezas trinitarias.
Por muy empobrecida que pueda ser su articulación, la realidad trinitaria en sí está presente en la vida de las iglesias evangélicas. El evangélico como movimiento es impensable sin una cierta lógica de experiencia trinitaria subyacente. La robusta teología trinitaria nunca ocurre en el vacío; siempre florece en el contexto de un rico entorno experiencial y cultural que proporciona el trasfondo contra el cual las formulaciones doctrinales se registran como significativas. Robert Louis Wilken ha celebrado la forma en que la teología doctrinal del período formativo del cristianismo razonó «a partir de la historia, del ritual y del texto», de modo que «los conceptos y las abstracciones siempre se pusieron al servicio de una inmersión más profunda en el resto, la cosa misma , el misterio de Cristo y la práctica de la vida cristiana «.17 Es común (como veremos más adelante) argumentar que un entorno consciente de la alta iglesia, bien abastecido con tradición, liturgia y realismo sacramental, es el suelo adecuado en el que el trinitarismo se puede cultivar mejor.
Sin denigrar esos recursos o negar que puedan financiar una vigorosa teología trinitaria (también entre algunos evangélicos de la alta iglesia), quiero argumentar que hay otro terreno en el que la doctrina de la Trinidad puede prosperar. El tipo de evangelicalismo de la baja iglesia que se está extendiendo tan rápidamente en todo el mundo en nuestra era contiene recursos profundos para una teología trinitaria efectiva. El evangelicalismo puede ser el gigante dormido de la renovada teología trinitaria en la vida de la iglesia, si llega a entenderse correctamente. El «si» es importante, y también ocupa un lugar destacado en la reciente evaluación de Mark Noll, que habla no de la teología trinitaria sino de la vida de la mente en general: «Para los evangélicos (como para otros cristianos), la mayor esperanza para aprender en cualquier edad … yace en la fe cristiana misma, que al final significa en Jesucristo. Por lo tanto, si los evangélicos son las personas del evangelio que afirmamos ser, nuestro rescate intelectual está al alcance de la mano «18
La doctrina de la Trinidad florece, no cuando simplemente se establece con precisión, sino cuando se afirma en el contexto de una conciencia de fondo pre-discursiva y no temática de la realidad de la Trinidad. Este trasfondo no cognitivo (o dimensión tácita) es necesario para financiar una reflexión productiva, temática y teológica sobre la doctrina. De hecho, existen recursos evangélicos para el trinitarismo robusto que aún no se han articulado en un idioma evangélico reconocible. Debemos tener cuidado con el peligro de la incomprensión evangélica y destacar los recursos propiamente evangélicos que están en peligro de ser pasados por alto. Los santos evangélicos ya están viviendo el Trinitarismo primario, esta comunión con la Santísima Trinidad. Pero los teóricos del evangelicalismo a menudo no han logrado dar voz a las cosas que su gente está experimentando. Ya está sucediendo algo profundamente trinitario en las iglesias evangélicas, y cuando ese algo comienza a financiar la reflexión teológica, podemos esperar una contribución significativa de estas iglesias. «Si los evangélicos son la gente del evangelio que afirmamos ser», para extender las implicaciones del condicional de Noll, entonces todo lo que se requiere es que los teólogos evangélicos comprendan la forma en que el evangelio y la Trinidad se presuponen mutuamente, para que puedan convertirse manifiestamente lo que son tácitamente: personas de la Trinidad.
Cómo una doctrina dejó de funcionar
Ahora es un lugar común observar cuán pobre fue la doctrina de la Trinidad cuando el mundo se volvió moderno. El régimen de racionalismo y esta mundanalidad que se apoderó de la cultura intelectual en algún momento a fines del siglo XVII no era amable con esta doctrina cristiana central. Esa historia, junto con la historia del supuesto rescate de la doctrina por teólogos como Karl Barth y Karl Rahner, se cuenta con frecuencia en las historias de la doctrina.19 Pero hay una versión distintivamente evangélica de la quietud y la ineficacia que se apoderó del trinitarismo por tanto. largo. En esta comunidad, la doctrina se ha colgado de los cuernos de un dilema: un cuerno es una experiencia religiosa subjetiva y el otro es una reducción a una mera fórmula proposicional. La tediosa oscilación entre el pietismo y el racionalismo, que no es especialmente saludable para ningún aspecto de la vida cristiana, ha sido especialmente dura para la doctrina de la Trinidad. Desde ningún lugar, cabeza o corazón, se puede articular la doctrina como debe ser, con una conexión inherente al evangelio. Una encuesta rápida sobre cómo la tradición evangélica ha manejado la doctrina de la Trinidad mostrará que la teología evangélica trinitaria tiene una tarea inacabada: describir cómo la Trinidad está conectada con el evangelio y evitar los extremos de la experiencia religiosa subjetiva y el simple proposicionalismo.
Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834) se enfrentó seriamente al problema de cómo mostrar una conexión entre el evangelio y la Trinidad. Aunque puede ser perverso iniciar una investigación sobre teología evangélica con una mirada al padre del liberalismo protestante, es necesario. Su forma de manejar la doctrina de la Trinidad es el punto de partida correcto para la historia evangélica, y sus principales decisiones sobre esta doctrina fueron impulsadas por los instintos evangélicos que heredó de su familia. Provenía de una formación evangélica en la teología pietista de
En relatos estándar de cómo la Trinidad se descuidó en el pensamiento moderno, Schleiermacher generalmente recibe gran parte de la culpa. Famoso colocó la doctrina en las últimas páginas de su influyente obra La fe cristiana, convirtiéndola en algo así como un apéndice de la obra principal.20 Uno podría hacer demasiado de la ubicación de una doctrina en un libro, pero en el caso de un pensador tan sistemáticamente sistemático como Schleiermacher, la ubicación significa mucho. Dado que el cristianismo «se distingue esencialmente de otras religiones por el hecho de que en él todo está relacionado con la redención realizada por Jesús de Nazaret «, 21 la teología de Schleiermacher se centra por completo en esa redención, o más bien en el conocimiento de esa redención, el contenido de la autoconciencia de los redimidos. «Agotaremos toda la brújula de la doctrina cristiana si consideramos los hechos de la autoconciencia religiosa, en primer lugar, tal como se presuponen por la antítesis expresada en el concepto de redención, y en segundo lugar, según lo determine esa antítesis». 22
Puede parecer que «agotar toda la brújula de la doctrina cristiana» al analizar la redención corre el riesgo de reducir la teología a un estudio de salvación, pero el método de Schleiermacher es lo suficientemente amplio como para incluir mucho más que la salvación. La conciencia cristiana de la redención presupone conceptos como la santidad de Dios, la justicia, amor y la sabiduría; los estados negativos opuestos del mal y el pecado; y la transición entre ellos por medio de Cristo y la iglesia a través del renacimiento y la santificación. Estos conceptos, además, presuponen otros: creación y preservación, un estado original de perfección humana y los atributos divinos de eternidad, omnipresencia, omnipotencia y omnisciencia. Incluso a los ángeles y demonios se les puede dar un lugar dentro del proyecto centrado en la redención de La fe cristiana , aunque solo un poco tentativamente, ya que sus supuestas operaciones están tan lejos en la periferia de la conciencia cristiana de la redención que la angelología «nunca entra en la esfera de la doctrina cristiana propiamente dicha» 23
La Trinidad, sin embargo, no podía ser admitida en el sistema doctrinal propiamente dicho, porque no podía estar relacionada con el evangelio o, en términos de Schleiermacher, no está directamente implicada en la redención: «No es una declaración inmediata sobre el yo cristiano». -conciencia pero solo una combinación de varias de esas expresiones «. Piecing together doctrines to construct more elaborate doctrines was something Schleiermacher regarded with horror, because it led out from the living center of the faith to the arid regions of theologoumena (words about words!), where dogmaticians do their deadening work. Schleiermacher had long since rejected that approach in his early speeches On Religion: «Among those systematizers there is less than anywhere, a devout watching and listening to discover in their own hearts what they are to describe. They would rather reckon with symbols.»24
The young Romantic may have grown up to write a big book of doctrine, but he continued his «devout watching and listening» and never betrayed his basic insight or became one of «those systematizers» content to «reckon with symbols.» Because the Trinity could not be directly connected to redemption, Schleiermacher placed it well outside the life-giving core of The Christian Faith . In the heading of the section where he finally treated it, Schleiermacher pointed out that the doctrine of the Trinity could not be considered an issue that was «finally settled,» because after all it «did not receive any fresh treatment when the [Protestant] Church was set up; and so there must still be in store for it a transformation which will go back to its very beginnings.»25 Schleiermacher considered it obvious that if the Trinity were implicated in the evangel , the evangelisch (that is, Protestant) awakening of the sixteenth century would have transformed and deepened it as it had everything central to Christian redemption.
The whole point of our book is to insist that gospel and Trinity are internally linked, so we obviously dissent from Schleiermacher’s judgments about Trinitarianism. However, we are tracing the story of what goes wrong that makes this doctrine stop mattering to evangelicals. And Schleiermacher’s assessment that there is nothing Trinitarian to be discerned in the Christian consciousness of redemption has had its forecasts and echoes throughout the evangelical tradition. The characteristic evangelical response, however, has not been to deny the doctrine, or even to move it to an appendix of the systematic theology texts, as Schleiermacher did. The evangelical tradition at large has not usually been as phobic about propositional revelation as Schleiermacher was nor as allergic to the clear doctrinal statements that propositional revelation makes possible. Indeed, connecting discrete propositions found in Scripture, and believing them on the basis of the authority of Scripture as the word of God, has been a crucial method in evangelical theology all along. Our path has been different from Schleiermacher’s, though we started from the same blind spot. When a theologian has to function under the salutary pressure of authoritatively revealed sentences, but in the debilitating absence of a lively sense of the connection between gospel and Trinity, Trinitarian commitments take on a particular pathos. This tension is pervasive in evangelical history, but its workings can be seen instructively in three examples from three centuries: John Bunyan, Isaac Watts, and Amanda Smith.
John Bunyan (1628-1688) devoted only one extended meditation to this doctrine, a piece entitled «Of the Trinity and a Christian,» whose title suggests an interest in something practical and perhaps edifying. The descriptive subtitle specifies that it is about «How a young or shaken Christian should demean himself under the weighty thoughts of the Doctrin of the Trinity.» The problem Bunyan wants to solve for the «young or shaken Christian» is that the Trinity is a difficult doctrine, seeming to contradict reason by proposing that one is three or vice versa. This intellectual conflict could lead the believer to question what is clearly revealed in Scripture, which is tantamount to questioning God himself. But Bunyan warns: «It is great lewdness, and also insufferable arrogancy to come to the Word of God, as conceiting already that whatever thou readest must either by thee be understood, or of it self fall to the ground as a senseless error.» The proper response to this hard doctrine is to submit one’s human judgment to God’s greater wisdom: «But God is wiser than Man, wherefore fear thou him and tremble at his Word, saying still, with godly suspicion of thine own infirmity, what I see not teach thou me, and thou art God only wise; but as for me, I was as a beast before thee.»26
Surely Bunyan strikes the appropriate human posture in the face of God’s wisdom, but we might ask why it is the doctrine of the Trinity in particular that spurs his reflection on humility of mind. Why is it precisely here that we are invited to yield our understanding before the incomprehensibility of God and his secret counsels? The answer, sadly, seems to be that when Bunyan thought about the doctrine of the Trinity, he thought of something remote from the business of salvation, but authoritatively revealed and necessary to be believed. The doctrine seems to have turned from a mystery of salvation to a problem of intellectual coherence.27
Isaac Watts (1674-1748) felt the same tension, but by his era there had been considerable debate about whether this hard doctrine was in fact scriptural.28 The debates took their toll on Watts, and although most of his hymns and sermons are a glorious legacy of Trinitarian worship, he became much less confident about the traditional form of the doctrine later in his life. Watts was as submissive to scriptural revelation as Bunyan but was deeply troubled about what doctrine he was being asked to submit his understanding to: «Dear and blessed God, hadst thou been pleased, in any one plain scripture, to have informed me which of the different opinions about holy Trinity, among the contending parties of christians, had been true, thou knowest with how much real satisfaction and joy, my unbiased heart would have opened itself to receive and embrace the divine discovery.»
If only God had shown «plainly, in any single text, that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, are three real distinct Persons» in one divine nature, Watts says, «I had never suffered myself to be bewildered in so many doubts, nor embarrassed with so many strong fears of assenting to the mere inventions of men, instead of divine doctrine; but I should have humbly and immediately accepted thy words, so far as it was possible for me to understand them, as the only rule of my faith.» Nowhere in his impassioned prayer does Watts give the impression that he is grappling with a mystery of salvation; his angst all stems from the situation of being faced with a doctrine lacking the kind of direct biblical support that would bind it on his conscience as an article of faith, and its sheer intellectual difficulty. «How can such weak creatures ever take in so strange, so difficult, and so abstruse a doctrine as this?»29
The way this tension has come to expression in the devotional life of evangelicals is startlingly expressed by the Holiness evangelist Amanda Smith (1837-1915) in her autobiography The Story of the Lord’s Dealings with Mrs. Amanda Smith , the Colored Evangelist.30 Without explaining what provoked her, Smith records that she «became greatly exercised about the Trinity. . . . I could not seem to understand just how there could exist three distinct persons, and yet one. I thought every day and prayed for light, but didn’t seem to get help. I read the Bible, but no help came.» Smith records the two weeks during which her anxiety mounted and she felt guided toward a definite experience of personal revelation, a kind of intellectual counterpart to the experience of entire sanctification expected by Holiness people in
I turned around and knelt down by an old trunk that stood in the corner of the room, and I told the Lord I wanted to understand the Trinity, and that I was afraid of fanaticism, and I wanted Him to make it clear to me for His own sake. I don’t know how long I prayed, but O, how my soul was filled with the light under the great baptism that came upon me. I came near falling prostrate, but bore-up when God revealed Himself so clearly to me, and I have understood it ever since. I can’t just explain it to others, but God made me understand it so I have had no question since. ¡Alabado sea el Señor! Then he showed me three other things.
Smith undeniably had a powerful spiritual experience centered on the doctrine of the Trinity, but it is equally undeniable that the problem her experience solved for her is the problem of how the doctrine itself can make sense. In a single ineffable moment, a «great baptism,» she leapt the divide between doctrine and life. Perhaps if she had been able to «explain it to others,» her explanation would have laid bare the evangelical substructure of Trinitarian commitment; perhaps this is what God made her understand to her own intellectual satisfaction. As it stands, however, the implicit advice from Smith’s experience seems to be that troubled believers should likewise «pray through» to an ineffable moment of inward clarity and peace over this teaching.
For evangelicals, then, from Bunyan to Smith and down to the present, the doctrine has shrunk to a set of propositions that are to be held in the mind as verbalisms, remote from any possible direct experience or relevance. Because we believe in God’s power to reveal truth, we believe that this is a revealed truth: God is triune. There seems to be no intrinsic reason God could not have revealed some other proposition to us, for instance, that God is quadrune, quintune, or blue. Karl Rahner famously lamented the parallel situation in Roman Catholic theology, in which it seemed as if «this mystery has been revealed for its own sake . . . we make statements about it, but as a reality it has nothing to do with us at all.»32 Although the doctrine may still be dutifully taught and just as dutifully learned, it has long been viewed as an abstract series of propositions, an undigested lump of tradition or of revealed ideas. Like anything that should be living but is dead, it stays in its place and decays.
The Tacit Dimension Of Trinitarianism
As these case studies show, when we lose our ability to see the Trinity as directly connected to the gospel, we tend to reduce it to an issue of authority and mental obedience. No wonder, then, that the doctrine of the Trinity has been treated as something of a burden by many evangelicals. But this dysfunction of the doctrine is only one side of the story of evangelical Trinitarianism. The other side of the story is that the life of every healthy church and every true Christian is a manifestation of the work of the Trinity. Evangelicalism, even when it is handling the doctrine of the Trinity as a foreign artifact difficult to deal with, is nevertheless always already immersed in the rich, Trinitarian reality of the gospel. We are often in the strange position of being Trinitarian without knowing it, or of living in an encounter with the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit that we then give very weak and inadequate explanations of. We have the thing itself but act as if we do not know we have it.
The way forward for evangelical Trinitarianism is to get in touch with the deep, Trinitarian roots of our own history as evangelicals. The main way this will happen is by cultivating a deeper understanding of the gospel of salvation in all its Trinitarian contours. What we need is an advance in our theological understanding that does not take us anywhere new but directs us to the depth and richness right in the gospel resources at the heart of evangelicalism. Evangelicals especially need to learn to see the big picture of biblical Trinitarianism as one coherent whole rather than as a series of isolated parts.
It is worth asking why we should bother going on to clearer understanding of what is Trinitarian about the gospel. If it’s possible to be subliminally Trinitarian as a Christian, what benefit is there to taking the next step of being explicit about it? The advantages are too numerous and comprehensive to list, but all of them flow directly from making that cognitive jump from unawareness to awareness. When we bring an idea this important out from the backs of our minds into the spotlight of our conscious attention, we change everything in our theological understanding. Furthermore, we move out of the preposterous situation of being Trinitarian without knowing we’re Trinitarian.
Anybody who has encountered God in Christ through the Holy Spirit has come to know the Trinity. But not everybody in this position knows that they know the Trinity. When they move to that next level of knowing that they know the Trinity, a bright light shines on everything they knew before. The situation is like a vivid learning experience I had as a child. I was standing on the front lawn of my great-grandmother’s farm watching clouds pass in front of the moon. It was early evening, the sun had just gone down, the moon was already very bright, and the clouds were blowing quickly across the face of the moon. It was very beautiful, and I was standing on the front lawn, just looking at it. My Uncle Dan came out and asked, «What are you looking at?»
I said, «I’m watching the clouds go by the moon.»
He asked, «What does that make you think about?»
I replied, «Well, really I’m waiting to see if any of the clouds will go
behind the moon. So far they’ve all gone in front of it.»
Uncle Dan stood there with me watching clouds, and after a while
he asked, «Where is the moon?»
«It’s in outer space.»
Some more time went by. «And where are clouds?»
«They’re in our upper atmosphere,» I said.
More silence.
«Oh . . . right,» it dawned on me. «I’m going to stand here a long
time before I see a cloud going behind the moon. In fact, it’s not going
to happen.»
What I always come back to when I think about that story is the question, Did I know that clouds are closer than the moon, or did I not know that? I had in my mind all the information I needed to draw the right conclusion, but I had never put it together. It was a situation in which I knew something but didn’t know that I knew it. And that put me in an awkward position, made it very likely that I would say foolish things and even waste my time waiting for something that was never going to happen. If you trust Jesus to be your salvation, you already know the Trinity. But it’s a great benefit to know that you know the Trinity. It’s a great benefit to know that you’re a Christian because you’ve received a Spirit of adoption from the Father, a Spirit that lets you call God «Abba, Father.» The Trinity is lurking in the gospel, just as it is lurking in the life of every believer. This Trinitarian reality is going on in our Christian lives whether we know that we know it or not.
Vital Trinitarianism, the kind that matters and changes everything, does not occur in a vacuum. The doctrine of the Trinity, although it can be stated as a series of propositions embodying truth claims about God («God is one being in three persons»), involves much more than that. Trinitarianism is the encompassing framework within which all Christian thought takes place and within which Christian confession finds its grounding presuppositions. It is the deep grammar of all the central Christian affirmations. Therefore, when the theologians of the patristic age finally stated it explicitly as an article of faith (beginning with the Council of Nicaea in 325, though with obvious precursors), they were not simply adding an item to a list of beliefs but performing an act of intellectual foregrounding, bringing a background element from the periphery to the center of Christian attention. By doing so, they were equipping later theologians to think coherently about the entire structure of our saving knowledge of God in a single act of focused inquiry. In the passage from implicit awareness of God’s triunity and an inarticulate experience of salvation, to explicit confession of faith in the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, Christian theology came of age epistemologically. Having always known the Trinity, Christian thinkers now knew that they knew the Trinity.
Because Michael Polanyi (1891-1976) wrote extensively about epistemological moves of this type, his analysis has been recognized as a help in coming to terms with the doctrine of the Trinity. Polanyi began his scholarly career as a research chemist, but over the course of his long career he turned his interests gradually to the philosophy of science and from there to epistemology. His work is part of a larger mid-century trend toward the demotion of science from its role as absolute arbiter of all truth claims. Polanyi’s work fits, for instance, somewhere between Thomas Kuhn’s «historicist turn» in the philosophy of science,33 and Stephen Toulmin’s critique of the abstraction introduced into theories of knowledge by the Enlightenment.34
Polanyi’s most famous work is 1958’s magisterial Personal Knowledge: Toward a Post-Critical Philosophy , which was primarily devoted to exposing the fiduciary and participatory character of all knowledge, not least scientific knowledge. «I start by rejecting the ideal of scientific detachment,» he begins, but moves on to confess frankly: «I want to establish an alternative ideal of knowledge, quite generally.»35
This research project set him on a trail which resulted in him turning his attention to epistemology proper, and to describe knowing as a skill comparable to focusing one’s eyes on a particular object in a complex field of visual stimuli:
I regard knowing as an active comprehension of things known, an action that requires skill. Skillful knowing and doing is performed by subordinating a set of particulars, as clues or tools, to the shaping of a skilful achievement, whether practical of theoretical. We may then be said to become «subsidiary aware» of these particulars within our «focal awareness» of the coherent entity that we achieve.
This skill cannot be gained by lone practitioners determining for themselves what they should focus their attention on. Knowing what data to ignore and what data should be sought out as meaningful evidence presupposes an established framework within which knowledge is assembled: «We must now recognize belief once more as the source of all knowledge. Tacit assent and intellectual passions, the sharing of an idiom and of a cultural heritage, affiliation to a like minded community: such are the impulses which shape our vision of the nature of things on which we rely for our mastery of things. No intelligence, however critical or original, can operate outside such a fiduciary framework.»Polanyi developed these ideas about knowledge most elaborately in his book The Tacit Dimension (1966).
In reflecting on the process of scientific discovery, Polanyi became aware of the crucial importance of elements normally disregarded as imponderable factors and left unexamined in the background of standard accounts of how scientific knowledge comes about. There is real creativity involved when research scientists engage in their characteristic tasks of following hunches, discerning meaningful patterns, and framing the right experimental situations. Beginning from this insight into the process of theory formation, Polanyi explored gestalt psychology, the mechanics of visual perception, and the experiential training process by which young doctors learn to recognize meaningful patterns of symptoms and pronounce with some confidence a diagnosis on the basis of evidence which to the uninitiated is a mere haze of insignificant, incoherent observations. These skills and insights cannot be accounted for by merely heaping up greater quantities of clear and distinct ideas or by honing propositions to greater precision. They require the knowing agent to acquire a framework of understanding and a practiced skill of forming judgments. These skills are generally inculcated by a community committed to maintaining a convivial relationship centered on values agreed upon and presupposed by all who participate. This enveloping culture forms a precognitive, nonthematic awareness of where to direct one’s attention and what bits of information are worth considering explicitly. Lest this seem like a preparation for sheer subjectivity, it should be noted that Polanyi was a firm believer in the value of objective knowledge, and he repeatedly took pains to show how personal beliefs are to be held honestly, with «universal intent» as beliefs about how things really are.
Polanyi thus drew attention to the all-important, not-yet-cognitive awareness that makes thematic knowledge possible. This tacit dimension is the nonarticulated element in perception and knowledge, an unreflective awareness of things that is quite different from the clear-cut awareness we have when we perform the mental act of focusing our attention directly and thematically on an object. Polanyi’s most famous catchphrase was the expression, «We always know more than we can tell.»
These Polanyian insights into the nature of knowledge have some helpful implications for theology in general but for Trinitarian theology in particular. Scottish theologian Thomas F. Torrance offers the following compressed account of tacit knowledge:
It is on this deep subsidiary awareness that all skills, explicit thought, formal reasoning, and articulate knowing and communication rely. Even the most completely formalized knowledge (e.g. through logic or mathematics) must include informal or tacit coefficients, for it is only by relying on them that formal systems can operate meaningfully. This is evident in the bearing of thought and speech upon some reality of the bearing of some skill upon an intended end; and also in the way our minds spontaneously integrate particulars into significant wholes, as in the recognition of a physiognomy, or integrates clues into a focal target, as in scientific intuition and discovery. Tacit knowing, Polanyi claims, is the fundamental power of the mind which creates explicit knowing and lends meaning to and controls its use. Tacit knowledge and explicit knowledge are opposed to one another but they are not sharply divided. While tacit knowledge can be possessed by itself, explicit knowledge must rely on being tacitly understood and applied. Hence all knowledge is either tacit or rooted in tacit knowledge. A wholly explicit knowledge is unthinkable. This tacit dimension provides the unifying ground of all knowledge, rooting it in the concrete situations of life and society in the world; and as such provides the continuous epistemological field which integrates the sciences and the arts and does away with age-old dualisms which have led to the fragmentation of human culture.
Explicit knowledge, then, depends on a prior unity richer and fuller than the propositions gathered around it. This tacit coefficient of all explicit knowledge is especially important for coming to conscious and disciplined understanding of very large, subtle, or complex subjects that bear within themselves implications for a broad range of subsidiary fields. This brings us back, at last, to Trinitarianism.
The tacit dimension of knowledge is especially relevant in Trinitarian theology. It is what enables the theology teacher to utter that all-important phrase «You know» and expect realistically to make connections with the audience. The Christian teacher taking up the subject of the Trinity should be able to invoke some range of experience or of implicit understanding and familiarity that can then be explicated in propositional teaching on the subject:
«You know, the Trinity, like we sing about in the church»;
«You know, the Trinity, like is all over the Bible «;
or «You know, the Trinity, like every Christian believes in.»
Without this tacit awareness of the Trinity, explicit teaching on the subject will always seem like a foreign body rudely interjected into an otherwise reasonable nexus of beliefs. This is because the doctrine of the Trinity is so large, fundamental, and all-encompassing. Scottish theologian Thomas F. Torrance, whose summary of Polanyi’s categories we just quoted at length, has done more than any other theologian to use Polanyian insights for theology in general and for the Trinity in particular. Here is his masterly account of how vigorous Trinitarianism relies on the tacit dimension:
A child by the age of five has learned, we are told, an astonishing amount of physical world to which he or she has become spontaneously and intuitively adapted- far more than the child could ever understand if he or she turned out to be the most of physicists. Likewise, I believe, we learn far more about God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit, into whose Name we have been baptised, within the family and fellowship and living tradition of the Church than we can ever say: it becomes built into the structures of our souls and minds, and we know much more than we can ever tell. This is what happens evangelically and personally to us within the membership of the Church, the Body of Christ in the world, when through the transforming power of his Word and Spirit our minds became inwardly and intuitively adapted to know the living God. We became spiritually and intellectually implicated in patterns of divine order that are beyond our powers fully to articulate in explicit terms, but we are aware of being apprehended by divine Truth as it is in Jesus which steadily presses for increasing realization in our understanding, articulation and confession of faith. That is how Christian history gains its initial impetus, and is then reinforced through constant reading and study of the Bible within the community of the faithful .
According to Polanyi according to
Liturgy. Tradition. And Sacraments. OH MY!
There is widespread agreement among many theologians that Trinitarian theology is so expansive that only a sophisticated approach via tacit awareness is likely to produce effective and productive understanding of it. We have seen the logic of this position and have seen some of its promise for reinvigorating Trinitarian theology. However, at this point we can begin to reapproach the question of inculturating the doctrine of the Trinity into evangelical culture. In doing so, we will part ways with the answers normally given to the question, Where do we locate the tacit awareness of Trinitarianism that can fund explicit understanding of the doctrine? The question is a good one, but the standard answers are less helpful for our purposes. The standard answer is as follows: the tacit dimension of Trinitarian thought, the nonthematic awareness of Trinitarian reality that makes productive understanding possible, is located in the richness of the Christian liturgy, in the profound experience of continuity with tradition, and in the real presence of Christ himself in the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper. The sources, then, are liturgy, tradition, and sacrament. Let us examine each briefly.
Liturgy in the sense intended here is an order of service and a set of practices attached to regular Christian worship. The best liturgies in use in Christian churches are ancient, well-worn compositions permeated with scriptural language skillfully deployed across a series of pastoral pronouncements, prayers, congregational responses, and songs. These are correlated with a series of symbolic actions arranged with equal artfulness to embody the theological commitments of the church. At crucial junctures, select passages of Scripture are read aloud as the word of the Lord for that day in the church calendar. The synergy of the words and actions constitute a worship experience intended to convey the entirety of the Christian message in symbolic form, and all of this takes place in its own liturgical language, regardless of the content of the actual sermon preached that day. Of course a good liturgical homilist will do his best to preach a message that harmonizes with the particular liturgical setting at hand and thus work with the grain of the overall service rather than against it. However, as Gerald Bray points out, the power of a set liturgy is partly in its independence from any particular sermon:
If the sermon is good and the spirit of the congregation is right, a fixed liturgy may appear to be an irrelevance, even a constraint on the freedom of the Spirit….But when the times of dryness come, when we reach a plateau in our spiritual growth, then the structure of a liturgy that keeps both biblical depth and the biblical balance can provide us with fresh inspiration and keeps us from falling into the many diffrent errors caused by our natural proclivity toward omission and distortion. A person who is well trained in biblical liturgy will have a feel for what is orthodox because it will be embedded in his consciousness. Furthermore, he will have a sense of the right kind of Trinitarian balance, because whatever the sermon may be like, there will be a doctrinal framework to restore his spiritual equalibrium and keep him from going off the deep end.
Bray goes on to make the connection between this benefit of liturgy and the doctrine of the Trinity:
Good theological liturgy…is not (or should not be) a substitute for preaching, or a way of stifling spiritual fervor, but a framework in which to place biblical teaching and an encouragement to explore areas of it that we might otherwise neglect. Once again, words like structure and framework provide the key. Start discipling your faith into a structure, and you will inevitably come to the doctrine of the Trinity, which is the most basic and universal structure of all.
Thus liturgy functions as the tacit dimension that provides the basis for explicit Trinitarian doctrine. Indeed, as Bray suggests, on more than one occasion a healthy liturgy has kept a church from sliding into errors it would otherwise have embraced. A Unitarian theologian once lamented the fact that it was nearly impossible to turn Anglican churches against the doctrine of the Trinity as long as they kept using the Prayer Book. «The Prayer Book used by the Unitarian clergymen . . .familiarized the minds of worshippers with addresses and petitions to the three persons of the Trinity. Whatever the parson said or left unsaid from the pulpit could not sink into the mind as did the prayers from the reading desk and the responses from the pews repeated Sunday by Sunday.»42
Another location of this tacit dimension, according to conventional wisdom, is tradition itself, especially the deep sense of tradition espoused by churches in which the ecclesiology is centered on claims of apostolic succession and institutional continuity. For these churches, tradition is a kind of deposit that we can adhere to and exercise implicit faith in without necessarily specifying the propositional content of that faith, or at least not needing to specify all of it at any given time. «I believe what the church believes» is the guiding principle here. However, there is an even deeper sense of tradition sometimes invoked by high-church theologians. Andrew Louth, in his evocative study Discerning the Mystery: An Essay on the Nature of Theology ,43 advocates an approach to Christianity that lays greater stress on liturgical action than on proclaimed words. Claiming to follow Richard Hooker in laying «emphasis on the deeper power and significance of deeds,» Louth links «the importance of the Incarnation, and, in dependence on that, the importance of the sacraments, and indeed of liturgical worship—which is a matter not just of words but of actions—in general» and argues that this constellation of concerns points to a very special significance for tradition:
For the central truth, or mystery, of the Christian faith is primarily not a matter of words, and therefore ultimately of ideas or concepts, but a matter of fact, or reality. The heart of the Christian mystery is the fact of God made man, God with us, in Christ; words, even his words, are secondary to the reality of what he accomplished. To be a Christian is not simply to believe something, to learn something, but to be something, to experience something. The role of the Church, then, is not simply as the contingent vehicle-in history-of the Christian message, but as the community, through belonging to which we come into touch with the Christian mystery.
In Louth’s view, the prioritizing of life over doctrine finds its clearest expression in the epistemological priority of the church as a history-spanning community that provides the tacit dimension on which explicit theological awareness can develop. In this connection he invokes «Polanyi’s idea of the importance of a community and of a tradition, within which one learns to perceive and know»45 and praises
it as the inescapable background and framework within which faith is possible. «We come back to the fact that Christianity is not a body of doctrine that can be specified in advance, but a way of life and all that this implies. Tradition is, as it were, the tacit dimension of the life of the Christian: what is proclaimed . . . is only a part of it, and not really the most important part.»46
Tradition provides, for theologians like Louth, a sense of fullness and presence, and thus it constitutes, in one of his favorite metaphors,
the fecund silence in which the Word can be spoken and heard:
To hear Jesus, and not just his words, we have to stand within the tradition of the Church; we have to put our trust in those to whom our Lord entrusted his mission, his sending. Part of the stillness that is needed for us to hear the words of Jesus is a sense of presence, and it is this tradition conveys. We become Christians by becomeing members of the Chruch, by trusting our forefathers in the faith. If we cannot trust the Church to have understood Jesus, then we have lost Jesus: and the resources of modern scholarship will not help us to find him.
From this thick account of tradition it is a short step to the third standard answer for where to locate a tacit dimension capable of funding Trinitarian thought. A high view of the sacraments is often invoked in this context. Baptism in the name of the Trinity is not merely a ritual performed as the right formula is spoken (though that is important), but is actually viewed as a mysterious, physical immersion in the life of the triune Godhead via the death and resurrection of Christ, sacramentally mediated to the individual baptized. This experienced reality of the life of the Trinity thus contains in itself the actual content that can later be unpacked or expounded in definite Trinitarian teaching. The sacraments are concrete, while the doctrine is necessarily abstract. This view of the relation between sacrament and doctrine has naturally generated the catechetical practice known as mystagogy, which means teaching that is provided for those who have already been introduced to the mysteries. In a fully sacramental mystagogy, the Christian would receive the thing itself in the sacraments and then learn about it in doctrinal form. Converts make a profession of faith and are admitted to baptism and the Eucharist, which is followed then by teaching and preaching that further explicates in conceptual form the mysteries they have just encountered in experiential form.
Evangelical Resources Already At Hand
What are we to say to these proposals for cultivating the tacit dimension of Trinitarian theology? For some varieties of evangelicals, these relatively high-church resources have been, and continue to be, nourishing sources of Christian life that underwrite the church’s ability to think well about the Trinity. Furthermore, we do not need to enter the interminable debate about the essence of evangelicalism, or its true center, by asserting that evangelicalism by definition must be nonliturgical, nontraditional, and nonsacramental. Millions of evangelicals are, of course, and this includes a wide swath from Southern Baptists to Pentecostals in the global south. Nevertheless, the movement as a whole, or certain ecclesial strands within the movement, could certainly grow in the three areas discussed above without losing compromising evangelical identity. A more formal and elaborate use of liturgy, a firmer grasp of the great tradition, and a higher view of the sacraments are all possibilities within some of the churches that make up the evangelical movement. Insofar as they actually help provide a tacit awareness of the reality of the Trinity, they can even be recommended as strategically valuable directions in which the movement could develop. Gerald Bray’s remarks about liturgy cited above, for example, are clearly that: a recommendation that evangelicalism could become more Trinitarian by becoming more liturgical.
However, if such advice were to be taken programmatically and urged as necessary, it seems to lead to the conclusion that some evangelicals will become more Trinitarian only if they become less evangelical. Minimally, such a program for Trinitarian renewal would require that those segments of the evangelical world which are nonliturgical, nontraditional, and nonsacramental would be involved in Trinitarian renewal only to the extent that they change their practices enough to accommodate the tacit resources of their high-church brethren. But this would be an unhelpful recommendation for many reasons. The primary reason is that these churches have theological convictions in place about this whole range of issues. There may be churches that are nonliturgical, nonsacramental, and nontraditional by accident, ignorance, or default, but most of them adopt these stances because they have biblical reasons for doing so. It’s no good telling members of a credobaptist church that if they became paedobaptist they would feel the Trinity working in their lives more deeply. They have made decisions about infant baptism on other grounds and will hold to those decisions. To approach them as if they simply hadn’t thought about the sacraments yet is by turns naïve and insulting.
The other reason to dissent from the conventional wisdom about the tacit dimension of Trinitarianism is that our task is to present the Trinity so that it will take deeper root in the soil of evangelicalism. That may require tilling the soil quite a bit, but it should not mean selling the farm. Suggesting that a nonliturgical, nonsacramental, nontraditional church should change all these practices is tantamount to declaring that their evangelical culture (and the constellation of doctrinal and practical characteristics connected to that culture) should be altered. What we are undertaking, however, is to inculturate the doctrine of the Trinity into evangelicalism, and we are therefore more interested in finding elements in that culture which are consonant with the tacit framework required for robust Trinitarianism. Evangelicalism certainly would profit from becoming more thoroughly Trinitarian by whatever means necessary. However, rather than pushing evangelicalism to shift its resource base, I am recommending that evangelicals should work harder with the resources already available in plenty.
What are the resources at hand? When teaching evangelical Christians about the doctrine of the Trinity, what are the powerful but unstated realities that the theologian can invoke in order to make connections with experience? What tacit awareness is lying latently
ready in the minds of these believers from which to generate conceptual tools for this theological feat of conscious reflection? Evangelicals who demur from deep tradition, elaborate liturgy, and realist sacramentalism still have plentiful resources for deep Trinitarianism. Everything they do is grounded in Trinitarian commitments, and every evangelical practice repays further reflection: proclamation of the gospel, personal appropriation of salvation, assurance of salvation, submission to biblical authority, knowledge of the Bible, authoritative preaching, affective worship, conversational prayer, world missions, and many of the other standard features of evangelical church life are rich resources for Trinitarian exploration. Dig anywhere and you will hit Trinitarian gold.
The evangelical emphasis on the conscious experience of salvation is an obvious characteristic of the movement. It has come to be associated with the phrase «born again» and is described in more sociological language as «convertive piety.» This experience of conversion is the concrete, experiential reality that the abstract, conceptual terminology of Trinitarian doctrine can appeal to in order to find a connection with existing knowledge. Because God saves us by opening himself to us and making the divine life available for our restoration and rescue, salvation occurs according to a Trinitarian order. The sentence of salvation is coherent and correct because it operates according to an underlying Trinitarian grammar, whether the speaker can codify those grammatical rules or not. All who are born again are born again by the power of the Trinity, as the Father sends the Spirit of his Son into their hearts. When the rules of this grammar of salvation are made explicit, what emerges into understanding is the doctrine of the Trinity. The thing itself is there, making possible rational reflection on it which explicates the rules of its own being.
Evangelicalism is characterized by an awareness of the personal character of knowing God and an experience of the actual presence of another Someone in intimate contact over the course of a shared history. The evangelistic shorthand for this has to do with inviting Jesus to take up residence in your heart as your personal Savior or with the theme of friendship with God. «Person» is a key term in Trinitarian theology, and it is no accident that the personal emphasis of evangelicalism coheres well with this element of Trinitarianism. This pervasive personalism also gives a particular tone to evangelical prayer, one which emphasizes a freedom of speech and a direct, even informal manner of talking to God.
From Wesley’s hymns to contemporary choruses, affective worship experience is a recurring mark of evangelical church life. This emotional depth, while not adequate to support theological reflection on its own, provides a rich and engaging context for Trinitarian theology. Above all, it provides the kind of incentive and communal sanction necessary to encourage anybody to undertake the kind of challenging thinking required to bring Trinitarian theology into sharper focus. This stirring up of the depths of the heart and mind is crucial to the Polanyian strategy: «Since tacit knowing depends on where your attention is focussed, it won’t work without caring. . . . There is no discovery without a desire to know and a belief that there is something to know.»48 Emotionally engaging worship is a communal effusion of that caring without which the attention will not be focused and without which there will be no confidence that there is something worth expending cognitive energy toward investigating. Communal praise of God is itself already a focusing of the mental apparatus of attentiveness in the right direction.
One of the most important resources evangelicalism has for developing the tacit dimension of Trinitarianism is its distinctive posture toward Scripture. Evangelicals are a variety of biblicists (if the term has not grown too pejorative), and they believe that the Scriptures are the medium of God’s personal address to them; the Bible is God’s word. Accordingly, evangelicals have developed a host of spiritual disciplines focused on the Word of God that provide perfect examples of the Polanyian motif of indwelling a subject in order to understand it better.49
I believe that the above resources show enough promise for developing a rich fund of tacit Trinitarianism that it is fair to assert that evangelicalism has within its own particular genius all that it takes to be more robustly Trinitarian. If I am right about resources like these as sources for Trinitarian understanding, then the evangelical malady is
Chart 1.1: Tacit Trinitarianism of Evangelical Practices
The Evangelical Practice ——Its Tacitly Trinitarian Dimension
Getting saved—–Being adopted as sons by encountering the gospel Trinity
Knowing Jesus personally—– The Spirit joining believers to the life of Jesus
Devotional Bible reading- —-Hearing the Father’s word in the Spirit
Conversational prayer—–The logic of mediation; prayer in the name of Jesus
actually more mysterious than ever because we have everything necessary for health and yet we remain ill. It would be good if evangelical theology would lay hold of its tacit resources for Trinitarian theology and fulfill its potential. At this point, even a bit of amicable competitive spirit would be beneficial on all sides: if a nonliturgical, nontraditional, and nonsacramental family of Christians would undertake to prove itself more solidly and productively Trinitarian than its liturgical, traditional, and sacramental cousins, both parties would benefit from the competition, to the benefit of the ecumenical church. Everybody could be a winner in the «more Trinitarian than thou» fight that might break out if evangelicals rise to their potential and develop the genius of their own movement in the direction of reinvigorating Trinitarianism as a force in Christian life and thought.
This chapter has necessarily been more abstract and methodological than the others in this book. I hope it has also been more suggestive of future possibilities in the broad field of evangelical Trinitarianism. In the following chapters we will not be following up every one of those possibilities. Instead, we will focus on the main things: the gospel and its application to individuals, Bible study, prayer, and the church as a community on a mission.
[This excerpt was taken from The Deep Things of God , 2010, by Fred Sanders, published by Crossway Books. Used by permission.]