Just been on a trip to national RTSF exec, in other words me and three (normally four) students getting in a room with Melinda to feed back to her about how RTSF nationally could improve and what’s going good ATM. The following day, Mike Reeves came up to teach and chat. Other than discovering the fact that Piper actually recommends no one reads more than one of his books because they’re all the same (a fact which I suspect significantly mellows my criticism of him, even if I still think Pipers key points that he always repeats again and again are wrong and damaging). We had some great teaching from Mike on the trinity (basically on how the social analogy is better than the mental analogy, which he’s slowly convincing me on, although I still have a few questions and am loving thinking through trinity - I hope I shall soon post a third post in this so-called blog series on trinity). He said a few interesting and profound things, including:
“Calvin fancies Augustine”
He then commented that, were you to go to the pub to discuss trinity with great thinkers on the subject…
“Augustine’s the guy you beat up on the way home”.
All in all, a good weekend (and I had at least those two comments to write in my notes!)
Got what I think is a great definition of the trinity from him (I must have heard it before, but it sounded particularly helpful this time - his talk, even though I’d heard it before, was so much more convincing now that I’ve read around the subject) - “God is Father, Son, and Spirit loving each other.”
While there may be more to the unity than this, this - properly understood in terms of the nature of personhood (ie that persons cannot exist in a vacuum but require relationship to exist or have any kind of identity) and of God (ie that He is even more personal than the rest of us) is actually a very intense and profound unity. I guess because we’re so individualistic and suchlike in our culture, we don’t really understand the unity that exists between human persons in relationship (e.g. in Marriage we become one flesh - which the Bible uses as a key analogy to the trinity, probably in Gen 1:27 but definitely in 1 Cor 11:3; in the church we are called to become one as Jesus is one with the Father, John 17:21) - basically, that unity in someone who has that person-ness even greater than us must be even greater than any unity that we have, even though we degrade our own unity.
So, yeah, Eastern orthodoxy rocks on the trinity. They get a lot of other stuff wrong, mind. It’s just such a shame that evangelicalism has adopted so much the western doctrine of the trinity, although I suppose it was inevitable geographically.
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