Lauren Winner, author of Girl Meets God, Mudhouse Sabbath, and Real Sex, was at North Park Theological Seminary last week and the seminary was kind enough to make the lectures public -- so my two classes gathered in the seminary chapel for her two talks -- one on Trinitarian Spirituality and one on Real Sex: The Naked Truth about Chastity. I'll focus here today on her "theology" lecture:
Lauren is now done with her PhD (from Columbia) and teaching at Duke. She saw three implications of the Trinity for Christian spirituality ... and I'm guessing these are some points from a class lecture or the makings of a new book.
Her big question: How do we inhabit "Trinity" and (1) not just talk about it and (2) avoid our ever-present danger of being Deists or Unitarians? Now, what about your thoughts on Trinitarian spirituality: where does a belief in Trinity, where does our inhabiting Trinity, lead us in terms of spirituality?
1. Prayer is to be seen as participation in the ongoing dialogue of love of the Trinity. If A.C.T.S. is the normal instruction in prayer, it tends to emphasize that we initiate the conversation and enter into a conversation with God. No, she says. That conversation is endlessly ongoing -- a conversation about redemption and grace and love and peace -- and when we pick up the phone (my trope) we simply participate in that conversation.
2. Trinitarian spirituality images a difference without subordination and without violence, so once we inhabit Trinity we enter into the ontology of peace -- and she discussed both politics and gender. Peace, she claimed, is more controversial than war.
3. Trinitarian spirituality models God's hospitality within GodSelf and reveals an essential relationality. Community, therefore, is participation in the Trinity.
Stan Friedman's summary of the lectures.
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I don't know. I'll look into it.
I don't know if community is participation in the Trinity, but it certainly is a reflection of God. Communion is the essential nature of God so I can kind of understand it from that perspective, but I'm not quite sure what participation in the Trinity means. Is *any* community participation in the Trinity?
I'm not sure that the Trinity means there is no subornation...not even voluntary submission? Not My will but Thine be done???
The very first thought and impression I got after reading this post is what I experience every time I listen to a christian musician John Michael Talbot either in person or tape.
I love the man. The very presence of the Holy Spirit fills my room and it is very precious and holy time. I think a life set apart in a consistant and disciplined way invites this type of communion relationally in a tangible way. I am quieted when alone,but the challenge I think is how this is expressed relationally with others.
BTW Lauren spoke at my church and gave a seminar to single women,very good and frank. I teach abstinence education and if there is ever a reason as singles to remain chaste you will find out why by reading her book..( just an aside)
I have trouble seeing authentic connections between detailed theology and lived experience. Buddhists, for example, do fine with peace and love without having to lassoo 'em and then wrastle 'em to the ground to hogtie 'em with a trilogistic conceptual apparatus.
In the interests of full disclosure, I spent a year of my life sleeping six hours a night and holed up in a tiny dorm room overdosing on theology to get my Masters at the U of Chicago divinity school. I read so many people who purported to have it all figured out - and I do mean ALL - that in the end it rendered me skeptical of both the truthfulness and usefulness of explanations rendered in great theological detail.
The worst was Alfred North Whitehead, mathematician turned theologian, who seemed to really think he'd literally explained everything from the smallest subatomic particle to the Mind of God in, I don't know, 700 or so pages. I can't believe anyone was really convinced other than (perhaps) A. N. Whitehead.
Lauren's ideas sound fascinating, relating sex and the Trinity and spirituality. I just left a church that has a high view of subordination within the Trinity and gender roles. While the rhetoric was harsher than the reality, I left because I could not accept a doctrine of God that placed authority/obedience at the heart of the Triune God. The doctrine of the eternal subordination of the Son to the Father is an impoverished view of the Trinity.
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