Dennis Tuuri

# Sermon Transcript

And end with a loving spoonful. So, okay, let’s pray. Father, we thank you for this afternoon. We thank you for this morning and for the wonderful presentations that were given. We thank you, Father, for causing really the entire world of Christendom at least, to be thinking this last hundred years about you and the relationship of you and Trinity. We pray, Father, you’d help us today and this evening to think more about these things to meditate upon them and to have our lives changed by them.

Bless us Lord God as we study you. In Jesus name we pray. Amen.

Okay. So there’s this quote by Augustine that I wanted to read. I first heard this from Jeff Meyers at a ministerial conference in Moscow several years ago. This is from his *On the Trinity*. Okay. So it’s a little longer here, but it’s actually on your handout. So this is the beginning of the handouts. Okay. He says:

“Further let me ask of my reader and we can ask of our hearers today. Whatever alike with myself he is certain there to go on with me. Wherever alike with myself he hesitates there to join with me in inquiring. Wherever he recognizes himself to be an error there to return to me. Wherever he recognizes me to be so there to call me back so that we may enter together upon the path of charity and advance towards him of whom it is said seek his face evermore.

And I would make this pious and safe agreement in the present of our Lord God with all who read my writings as well and in all other cases as above all in the case of these which inquire into the unity of the Trinity of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit because and here’s the payoff: No subject is in no subject is error more dangerous or inquiry more laborious or the discovery of truth more profitable.”

So you know you’ve heard many things today already. You’ll hear things from me and from Jack and these are difficult subjects both to labor over to think about. Error here is very significant and so we try to avoid that. But no doubt we’re going to enter into some error, but it’s significant and it’s bad for us. And but no subject is more profitable than a consideration of the person of God himself.

And he’s speaking particularly here of considerations of the Trinity.

So with that kind of caveat I’ll go on boldly. Now it’s a subject that is very profitable but very dangerous. We read in Psalm 115 a verse couple of verses that are very commonly known. He talks about the making of idols and he says:

“Their idols are silver and gold the work of human hands. They have mouths but do not speak, eyes but do not see. They have ears but do not hear, noses but do not smell. They have hands but do not feel, feet but they do not walk. And they do not make a sound in their throat. Those who make them become like them. So do all who trust in them.” (ESV)

So the idea here is that in the making of idols, people that worship idols become more like them. And communication for instance becomes quite difficult. So a study of God that involves idolatry will make us like that thing.

But on the other hand, I think implicit in this is that as we worship God and as we think about him and as we center our lives in him, we become more like him as well. You become like what you worship, I think, is the point here. And so we’re warned not to engage in idolatry. But we’re also encouraged, I think, to study on God and who he is and realize that this changes who we are because we’re made in his image.

In Genesis 1:27, we read that God created man in his own image. In the image of God, he created him. Male and female, he created them.

So, I think Rushdoony says, that God makes man in his image, which means righteousness, holiness, knowledge, and dominion. And we would add from this verse that God makes man in his image, in community. And so community, as we’ve been talking about today, is essential to who God is, the three in one.

And community is an essential part of who we are. So these verses tell us to study these subjects that we’re dealing with today. There’s profit in them. And we read here that we are to understand ourselves in relationship to God in community because He’s been made in community and so we’re imagebearers not individually but in community as well.

I have a quote here as well from St. Gregory of Nissa from the 4th century and the last sentence in this he says: “Then do not be surprised that we should speak of the godhead as a being at the same time unified and differentiated diversity in unity and unity in diversity.”

So that’s what we’ve been considering today.

I mentioned that I’d be talking about David Chilton a little bit. Our church began 30 years ago and we began well we sort of met before that but we look at our beginning is when we formed up as a covenantal community and had a joint confessional statement. And that confessional statement which was kind of drawn up rather hastily at the time still is ours.

And so I’m not sure that’s a good thing. We want to make improvements to it. There’s various deficiencies in it. But it was interesting as a sign of the times and the importance of this subject today, Trinity, to read our point number three in our confessional statement. We say: “We believe that God is one God yet three persons, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. And we therefore believe in the equal ultimacy of the one and the many.”

So a language that is not common to people. And so we think maybe this doesn’t belong in our confessional statement, but as Doug said earlier in the Q&A time, it was quite significant to us and remains so to this day.

David Chilton had an article in a newsletter put out in Tyler, Texas called the *Biblical Educator*. And the name of the article, I think, was “The Objective Theology of the Covenant.” And he talks in that article about kind of the nature of reality based upon the person of God.

And he says: because God is one and three, then we believe in this equal ultimacy he says in the article of the one and the many. And by the one and the many he references in the article R.G. Rushdoony’s book entitled *The One and the Many*, and he begins then to talk about this as the answer to the philosophical dilemma of the one and the many. There are philosophical schools nominalism and realism that adopt one emphasis or the other. And Chilton makes the case that what we want to do is not fall into that error because God is both unity and diversity. He’s one and he’s many.

And Chilton does a good thing in articulating that. I think that’s page two of your handout maybe.

So Chilton talks about this and he talks about it philosophically and then in relationship to the person of God. And in the article he then goes on to address specific aspects of life based upon this biblical approach which is neither unity emphasized or diversity emphasized. He talks about various things. Talks about baptism. He talks about the Lord’s Supper. He talks about church membership and covenants. And then he talks about excommunication. But I think on your quote I left in there the portion in which he talks about government.

And so what Chilton says is that you know governments are the same way. Either governments stress unity or diversity. They either inherit cultures or governments that stress unity improperly. They become dictatorial or authoritarian. And on the other hand, political systems or governments that stress diversity tend toward anarchism. And so you’ve got this kind of, either both sides, two different sides because the answer is to be found in the context of the middle of that. God is. And my topic is the Trinity as social reality. And so the Trinity has a reality, is defines reality and is social and is both one and many.

So he talks about that in terms of governments and then he goes on to other things.

Well, when I read this article by Chilton, it was really quite astonishing to me. As Doug said, I was the same way where at the time I read it, it was just sort of like, yeah, we’re trinitarian. Check the box. But it didn’t necessarily have implications that I understood or was aware of. And when we read this Chilton’s article and then Rushdoony’s *The One and the Many*, it began to take on a very practical significance in the life of our church and the doctrine of the Trinity.

Rather than just being some abstract theological doctrine became an issue that was quite important to us in how we structure church businesses, cultures, governments, families etc. And so that’s why in our confessional statement then we ended up with this kind of language about the equal ultimacy of the one and the many.

Now it’s interesting if you observe governments by the way in reality of course no government does one or the other. They end up with systems that kind of swerve back and forth or even the same thing at the same time. You know, Van Til says that fallen man is Janus-faced. Janus was the household god, right? And so it’s like two faces looking either way. So you put it on your door of your house and it’s like entrance and exit. But he said that pagan men does that same thing. He’ll sin this way and then he’ll sin back this way.

We have a culture today in America, you know, that what do we have? We have probably the most radical individualism, stress on the many as this country has ever seen. But along with that, what God does is he then also gives us governmental systems that end up more in a sense dictatorial or overreaching in who they are in relationship to this, you know. So, we kind of see the same thing going on here, a failure to embrace the triune God reflected in the sort of structures that we now have going on in our culture which are radically individualistic on the one hand and then make way for tyrannical government on the other hand where the laws of the people can be overturned through administrative order etc and where we have massive seemingly violations of our constitution going on and people don’t much care.

So while we can talk about these things as sort of either end of the spectrum frequently fallen man tends to be both depending on what he wants to do that day and what’s convenient for him.

So this is sort of like the simplistic entrance into some of this stuff. And so 30 years ago, you know, we understood that much. But what we’re talking about today is a further development in the context of this.

So we’ve in several in Ralph’s talk particularly we had this reference, this Leithart quote and he uses the term social trinitarianism. And I’ve got kind of the context for some of that as a quote on I think your second page or third page as well. It says Leithart on social trinitarianism. This is from the book *Athanasius*. So he says this and I’ll read the quote:

“I suggest it’s the failure to reckon with the asymmetry of the relations that has sent certain forms of social trinitarianism down a blind alley. The Trinity is not as social trinitarianism has suggested a modern egalitarian democracy made up of distinct but identical individuals. The persons are indeed equal but not identical.”

And then he says this and I think this is important:

“At its best though, social trinitarianism has been a plea to take the personhood of the persons seriously. It has been a plea for a scriptural exposition of the ontological life of the Trinity in which the persons converse together as they do in the gospel story. But the response to trinity as democracy, social trinitarianism should not be the implicit subordinationism that has infected some traditional trinitarianism. We do not need to resort to a unilateral hierarchical trinity, paternal monarchial monarchianism or paternal causality to avoid the problem of social trinitarianism. An asymmetrical account of the triune life takes the place of social trinitarianism seriously and can get at the dynamism and personal interactivity that social trinitarianism wants without threatening to collapse into tritheism.”

So the point here of this is that so we can take one and many and that kind of simplistic way of looking things good but not developed and what’s happening now in broader Christendom I think is that the inner trinitarian relationships are now being seen and developed and so this is a lot of ongoing theological work in this area.

So now our problem is not necessarily the rejection of one and many but in Christendom particularly it’s those who embrace the triunity of God and yet don’t do it in the sort of balanced way that it should be taken.

And so social trinitarianism is a group of people who take perichoresis for instance very seriously. This doctrine is now permeating lots of theological works and it takes the Trinity very seriously but for whatever reason it ends up stressing the diversity of the persons rather than the unity of the persons. And so it’s almost as if a reaction against a stress on the unity and some of the completely hierarchical systems that produces.

And it’s an overreaction because now it jumps into the other ditch of saying that we have a radical trinitarianism that should be developed and seen in egalitarian ways.

Now, for an entrance into some of this stuff, I found a pretty good article on the internet, which is also, I think, on your page, “How a Social View of the Trinity Can Positively Inform Our Approach to Ecclesiology and Leadership in Today’s North American Church.” This is by a guy named J.R. Woodward who has a book called *Creating a Missional Culture*. So in this article, he tries to look at social trinitarianism as a positive development and then say what can we do in terms of practical application in churches and church structures particularly as a result of this newfound emphasis in the church and in theology on trinitarianism and upon the interpersonal relationships of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

To do this, this writer uses the works of a guy named Leonardo Boff and Miroslav Volf and sort of compares contrasts and uses them to talk about this. So both men would espouse themselves I think as social trinitarians and they both sort of work in and end up at particularly in particular ways that are quite similar.

So this is what he does. Now Leonardo Boff is an older Roman Catholic priest who is associated with liberation theology. He’s from South America, you know when that was a big deal going on in, whenever it was, 30 years ago. And so Boff is that sort of fellow. But he’s influential in certain circles. He sees the election of the new pope as a very hopeful development. For a while I don’t know what Ratzinger did to him but he did something to him to diminish his influence and Boff referred to Ratzinger as a theological terrorist.

So, you know, that’s kind of where Boff is coming from. And what he does, and Woodward points this out in his article, is to say that we really need kind of a radical trinitarianism that essentially is egalitarian.

So, for instance, here’s a quote from Woodward’s article:

“We live in a society where faith lived ecclesially is being replaced by faith lived individualistically.”

So this is the context into which discussions like ours today are held. What’s going on in western culture at least? And we see that people assue the institutional church. They might want a relationship with Jesus. Jesus is just all right with me. But not so the church. And what Boff and other social trinitarians say is the reason for the rejection of these institutions. One of the reasons is the overt power, the manipulation, the kind of extreme or radical structures that are top down.

And so Boff sees these things going on, sees the reaction to them and says, “Well, the problem here is that people, we’ve stressed God as unity and not diversity. And so we’ve ended up with systems that are kind of corrupt and that you know where leadership is coercive, right? As opposed to leadership that develops consent. And so the kind of internal cohesion that any institution needs, he says, doesn’t happen because the leadership, the power is based on this unity of God and doesn’t take into effect the trinitarian relationships that we’ve been talking about today.

So when Boff and Volf talk about this, they say there’s two basic things in an institution including the church. You’ve got power, right? Who’s in control? And then you’ve got social cohesion. Can you really get along together? And so what they say is that social cohesion in the church is broken down. And the reason it’s broken down is because we haven’t embraced social trinitarianism.

We’re too hierarchical. We’re radically hierarchical. And as a result, power is not proper. It’s sinful and cohesion can exist ultimately in that. So that’s their diagnosis of the world that we all would agree: is we live in where Christianity as an organization we might say as a religion is demeaned, looked down upon and spirituality, individual spirituality and an individual walk with Jesus is what it’s all about.

You know, we could put in a plug here for Peter Leithart’s book *Against Christianity*. I think originally the subtitle was *For the Church* and what Peter was saying: some of these same things that what’s happened in America is we have Christianity which means it’s about me and Jesus. So you become a Christian individually. You work as a Christian individual. You might go to church if you find it helpful but you don’t really have any use for the church.

And of course the scriptures place our lives as Christians directly in the context of the body of Christ, the church. And so something’s kind of radically gone wrong here. And the answer to that on the social trinitarian side is to embrace egalitarianism and radical individuality and to you know lower or even eliminate power structures in the context of the church.

So this is what this online article is about.

And so the diagnosis of the condition it’s made to is not really off very much. I think a lot of us would share the same truth. You know, you hear this talk all the time, being trumpeted by whether it’s Tim Keller, who I have great appreciation for, Mark Driscoll, who I have great appreciation for, but you hear all this all the time that, you know, Christianity is what we want, not religion.

Well, you know, everything’s in the definition of those terms. If by religion you mean working your way to salvation, yeah, we don’t like that. But religion, you know, the word actually means to retie something, right? Religion comes from *ligare*, to tie together and so to tie things back together is really what Christ accomplishes in the context of the church and in for instance the liturgy of the church we’re tied together we’re tied back together as communities in relationship to God and with one another so it’s another example of these oversimplistic you know put downs of religion and it’s taken to mean by most people institutional the church at all is seen as a bad thing.

So Boff you know rejects this and he says well God is one and three but because of our particular cultural context we need to stress the three. So it’s kind of funny because you know he embraces trinitarianism but then he jumps into one of the two ditches right he jumps into the ditch of seeing God as three and not one. And so this is what he does and in the context of this article it does a good job of describing this.

And then the article also goes on to talk about one of the sections in the article and I think it’s quoted in what I gave you is called “the Ascent of the Social Trinity.” And what Woodward means by that is that in our day and age the social Trinity is rising in the consciousness of theologians in churches in with Christians etc. And he traces this back to the development of trinitarianism by Barth and Karl Rahner.

And of course Leithart interacts a lot with Karl Rahner in his book and so Barth and Rahner you know were, if I don’t know, but I hear that they were like the beginning of the resurgence of trinitarian theology and development and so in this ascent of social trinitarianism or the social Trinity Woodward makes the same basic point that you have this going on and now as we’ve developed from Rahner and you know Rahner said, as Leithart points out, that God’s ontological nature, he calls it something different, but his ontology is his economy.

So God’s actions in history are the essence of who he is. Now that’s a statement that we might actually kind of start to agree with, right? To divide these categories too distinctly is to fall again into the error of, you know, stressing one or many. But what Boff ends up doing with this is sort of seeing then Rahner’s rule as having this necessary implication that the social Trinity, God’s actions in society, the economical Trinity must be the primary model as opposed to his ontological basis.

Okay. So that’s what Woodward sees, that’s what he sees Boff responding to. Woodward is basically positive toward Boff and then he also deals with Miroslav Volf. Now in Volf’s case it’s interesting because Volf doesn’t completely throw away power distribution in the church. He still wants leadership but again he says stresses this kind of social egalitarianism beginning in the church but then throughout culture as well.

Miroslav Volf spoke here in Portland a year and a half ago. There was a conference called the Justice Conference. This was started by a church in southern Oregon. Grew immensely right away. 2,000 people there last year. Is now going to different cities. I think this year it might have been in Chicago or someplace. 2,000 young Christians, mostly evangelicals, I think came out to this conference and the conference is on justice.

And so, you know, people want there’s a great hunger and thirst for young people in the church today to see justice. That’s good, right? We like that. Jesus said he came to bring justice to victory. The question is, how do you define social justice, right? What’s the goal? And then what’s the method to reach that goal? And here, you know, young people and probably older people, they’re kind of, you know, they don’t have a lot of background education in this.

And they’ve kind of been they’re coming out of churches that have sort of rejected law in favor of grace. So, they don’t really see it in terms of God’s law. They want social justice. They don’t really know what to do to attain it or even necessarily what it looks like. It was people, Christians, I think, who desire greatly social justice that elected our current president. The Christian candidate both of the last two elections won.

I mean, McCain not Christian hardly at all. Obama certainly Christian and he appeals to evangelicals based on this desire for social justice that’s ill-formed and maybe they want to see it happen through the government, but it’s a biblical instinct, right? It’s a biblical instinct to desire justice and then of course the last election it was a Christian and a Mormon. So evangelicals are being pulled into social justice because of this quest for justice which is proper.

So at this Justice Conference 200 mostly young people evangelicals and they hear speakers such as Walter Brueggemann and for those of you who know him you know that he’s not orthodox really. He’s very interesting. He’s like from Jordan, not on acid and liberal, but you know, he’s masterful at doing narrative studies in the scriptures and talking about the scriptural narrative. I mean, he’s really good at it.

But, you know, for Brueggemann, Jesus on the cross is a liberation theological event where he’s seeking the social justice of those that he sees. It’s not really stressing the atonement. This is what he said in his talk. I was there.

Now, the church that put this on is evangelical. The other organizing church was Imago Dei, an emerging church that’s a conservative Baptist roots here in Portland. I mean those guys are all there. It was interesting by the way a little side note when Rick McKinley gave his talk and you know praise God for ago. We’ve got young people that are in the context of our church that are going there and praise God for what they’re trying to do. But it was interesting because McKinley’s talk was about how he said he noticed that in this conference 2,000 people during the breaks, people would put things down in their seats and save their seats.

And McKinley used this as an example of how bad that is because we don’t want to save our seats. We really want other people to take the seats if they want them. And so he kind of went on for a while saying how bad it was that people were saving their seats. It’s not egalitarian, right? It’s not justice. What was interesting about it was that Rick and other elders from his church had reserve seats at the front.

So, you see, this is the sort of thing that develops when you’re, you know, when you’re not embracing orthodox Christianity fully and understanding the implications of God’s oneness and his diversity.

So, in addition to Brueggemann, Miroslav Volf spoke at this Justice Conference. Now, I didn’t hear his talk. I had to not be there. I can’t remember why I didn’t have a driver or something, but he spoke there as well.

So, he’s quite influential. He did a famous conference with Tony Blair on globalization and faith right so I mean he’s world-class theologian well-known. I’m sitting with and Victoria at McMmilan’s drinking beer Friday afternoon and I bring up Miroslav Volf. Well’s eyes light up do I think he’s good or bad? He says I said he’s bad. Oh good. But Volf is influential in the area where uh pastors and because of Volf churches are becoming less orthodox. Evangelical churches, as I understood him at least, are becoming less trinitarian because of Volf.

Well, why would that be? Volf on the one hand like Boff stresses, you know, diversity and church institutions that are rather radically egalitarian rather. But on the other hand, Volf as well is probably most well known the last couple of years for his rapprochement, his desire to have kind of a pluralistic Christianity that embraces Islam.

He came out with a book in 2011 called *Allah: A Christian Response* something like this. And the contention in his book his question that he asks is do Christians and Muslims worship the same God? And his answer is yes. I mean he says it explicitly: Christians and Muslims worship the same God. And of course to get there he has to talk about the differences in the Trinity. And he deals with the five Quranic verses that are seen as shots at the Trinity kind of explains them away and then says that Christians need to understand that God is not numerical identity.

Right? So God isn’t numbers. We can’t number him now. Volf hasn’t given away the Trinity but he’s certainly redefining it. And he’s trying to redefine it in a way that stresses God’s unity. Even though in terms of what he’s doing in churches in American churches, he’s from America being radically egalitarian. What he’s doing is creating a dialogue with Islam. And in a desire for that dialogue, he’s embracing a system stressing the unity of God that essentially leads way to the sort of authoritarian governments, churches, etc. that Islam represents today.

You know, what’s the difference between us and Islam? We have a God, as someone said earlier, who isn’t obsessed with his own glory and loving himself in eternity. We have the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit where love, sacrificial love, embracing the other, love is part of the character of God. Islam has no such God. And so is it any wonder that their system is based upon submission to power?

And is it any wonder then that the sort of activities that fundamentalist, supposedly call them fundamentalist Muslims engage in.

So the point of this is one: to make you aware of social trinitarianism and what Peter is responding to in Ralph’s quote and what I wrote earlier. Two: to understand that there are things afoot in Protestant theology in this country and actually around the world that are not that are part of the ascent of supposed social Trinity but in actuality these men end up not being trinitarian in the way they approach life either being radically egalitarian on one hand or in the case of Boff embracing Islam which is radically you know oneness centered now.

So 2,000 young people from Portland, they want justice and they go to hear speakers and those are the speakers they hear. This is the instruction that they’re receiving and they no longer have the categories in their churches or in their upbringing to properly evaluate and make discernments. Right? Well, and in fact, the very idea of making judgments is now not just suspect, it’s spoken against in the broader culture and unfortunately in too many churches.

So, you know, we face difficult times. Now, they’re wonderful times in one sense because the we do have the ascent of the social Trinity, but that doesn’t mean that everything’s going to be hunky dory. In the short term, we’re going to see heretical positions taken on the social Trinity, and it’ll have strongly deleterious effects. As Volf said, in his city, churches moving away really from orthodox theology. And in my city, you know, young people embracing kind of what used to be a social justice movement. Social gospel is what we used to call it in America 40 50 years ago. And in both cases we’re seeing the development or attempted development of a cooperation with Muslims that say we worship the same God.

Now the answer to all these problems and you know this is what Ralph said this morning is that when these heresies come up the Lord God is maturing his church. But it doesn’t happen magically, right? It happens through times like this where we think through these implications where we discuss them and where we hopefully don’t just have a nice intellectual endeavor here and maybe get vertigo for a while and then recover and say okay well I don’t know what all that was about.

But hopefully we work on this enough and we take away some things that are important to us to bring to our churches to teach the significance and the importance of the triune God that we worship. Right? That’s the point. That’s it’s kind of the point of all this is so that when your young people go to a justice conference, they’ll have their right biblical glasses on and discern things based on the Bible and what the Bible teaches about the triuneness of God.

So, I hope that, you know, it’s probably a little confusing, but hopefully that’ll give you some categories to think of in terms of what’s happening with trinitarian theology today and why conferences like this are, you know, very needed in the church as an antidote to the heresies and the heresies actually will demand that we reexamine our view of the Trinity.

Now, as Leithart says, social trinitarianism is a plea to take seriously the diversity of God, the three persons, right? And to have social systems that reflect that in our church and our families and our culture. And I do think that there’s a proper corrective that it brings to us and that because the church has only in the last century really embraced this explicitly and began to think about the social Trinity because it stressed the unity of God and the threeness was just an orthodox position that nobody really had much practical use of.

I think because of that we do tend to develop systems that are maybe unbalanced in a hierarchical sort of way both in the family and in the church and in some of the culture as well. So I think God is doing something corrective and wonderful through all this, but it requires our attention. It requires some study and it requires the ability to take these truths and kind of be able to put them in a practical way to teach our congregations.

Okay. Volf, by the way, uses uh well, I won’t get into that. It’s more of a distraction, but his argument for this seeing Islam and Christians as worshiping the same God is not well taken.

Okay. So I want to return now to what we’ve been talking about really in a in one way or the other all day and that is this perichoretic relationship among the triune God. And so there’s been discussions of it definitions uh read and I don’t need to go over all that material.

I would like to just mention briefly John 10:38 and Jesus says that you should believe in him. He says: “believe if you do not believe me believe the work that you may know and understand that the father is in me and I am in the father.”

So this is a statement of this perichoretic indwelling between Father and Son. And he doesn’t mean there’s a little bit of me and the Father and a little bit of the Father and me. He means their lives are contained in each other. You know my wife did this thing behind me and it’s got this trinitarian symbol and you see many things like this. The old Irish trinitarian symbol and these Venn diagrams and such and you know they’re fine they’re good art but you know we run the risk of thinking like that when Jesus says this there’s just this portion of intersection of the three persons and that’s what they have in common no the Father is fully known of the Son that’s what it means here and the Son is fully known of the Father and so John’s gospel makes this claim for Jesus in many places. But that’s one of the more explicit places where it’s given.

So this is kind of a uh one of the verses that teach this perichoresis.

Another verse very important verse of course to being a missional church today and has been for a number of years is also found in John’s gospel and that is that you know the way it’s kind of articulated is we have to have unity because if the world sees the unity that we have then it will know that Jesus was sent by the Father. Right?

So essential to the mission of the church to disciple the nations is unity. And this is a common thing. But the verse actually puts it this way. Jesus in John 17 prays:

“that they all may be one as you Father are in me and I in you that they also may be one in us that the world may believe that you sent me.”

Okay, there’s a little chiasm there by the way that you can look for yourself. But the point is that what Jesus is saying is the particular kind of unity that will drive our mission and success in evangelization and in discipling the nations. That particular kind of unity he describes as being like the unity that the Father and the Son have. I and you and you and me. That’s the perichoretic relationship. That’s the social Trinity we can say that we’ve been is talking about all day.

And so when we try to develop oneness in the context of the church in obedience to this command and in anticipation of the victory that it will give us in evangelism and discipleship, that’s what we have to talk about is the sort of unity, right? It’s not the unity of not making any judgments or discernments about things going on in the church. It’s the kind of indwelling of one another in community and in churches to one another, etc. that John says is found in the Godhead itself. That’s the kind of unity that we see in the social Trinity that we want to have and aim for in the context of the church.

Leithart just gave a couple of talks at a university I think in the Ukraine you did Shakespeare and perichoresis.

Yeah. And Boo didn’t post those links. He put the links up from his other talks on the BH list and the CRC list but I think we can encourage him now if he’s still listening to send those links at least to the CRC list.

You know there’s nothing all that new about what Peter says about perichoresis in his talk. But you know what he does is he goes to explain it some like has been done today. And then he talks about the practical implications and the way it works itself out. And you’ve probably heard him talk about this before but it helps us as pastors know what to do with this stuff, right?

And so what he talks about is interruptions. So he’s working on his sermon or a book or whatever it is and his son comes up and tugs him on the sleeve and this and this you know how do we see these kind of interruptions by people in our work? How do we as pastors deal with interruptions to our study to all the stuff that we’re doing and what Peter says is if we’re thinking when we think of the one we think of the three and when we think of the three we think of the one if we’re thinking in terms of the development of this perichoretic relationships in the church, then we’re going to see those interruptions as opportunities for relationship and to deepen relationship and to give of ourselves to the other.

So, he talks about this at some length of these talks. He talks about this in relationship to marriage, right? So, marriage is the same thing. I mean, you don’t get married so you can have a better life as an individual. You get married to indwell one another and over time to do that more and more, right? Right. So marriage, parenting, I would say that the church as well, I don’t think he talks about this much, but in terms of the church, this reality of the social Trinity has to see itself reflected in our churches.

Now, a couple of thoughts I had about this was that you know what we John Frame wrote a book years ago called *Evangelical Reunion*. And what he said is that in most churches, they’re either an eye church or an ear church or a foot church. Eyes like to get together with other eyes. Ears like to get together with other ears because they’re like them, right? So, churches have these individual kinds of people in their church.

And those are the people they’d rather have come to their church than people that are not like them. Every church is like this. I think I think my next sermon here at RCC I may talk about what Mark Horn used to call cook points, an emphasis on particular distinctives of a of a lifestyle that are not necessarily biblical. They may be they would be motivated by a biblical desire. But they’re particular expressions that are not required of all Christians.

But we tend to build churches or communities that are homogeneous in that sense. Right? So when we have weird people come to our church, it’s not so comfortable, right? And if they come to our church as visitors and they’re sort of like us, oh, you know, dozens of invites over to people’s houses. But if they come to our church and they’re not sort of like us and they look quite different than us, not so easy, you know, to develop perichoretic relationships with that person.

But I think a necessary implication of what we’re talking about today is just that we should embrace people in the context of our church, not just in our particular clique. Cliques are okay. You know, it’s not bad to get together with people that have common interests. That’s fine. But if those are the people you spend all your time getting together with, something’s radically wrong.

We think of hospitality in the church as just that, having our friends over. But, you know, hospitality in the New Testament means a lover of strangers. You’re not really you’re entertaining people. That’s good. But it’s not hospitality the way the New Testament calls for us to be hospitable. Hospitality is our families bringing in strange Eastern Europeans who speak weird ways and polls that all they do is talk Z all the time. I mean, you’re different, right? We have a lot of commonality, of course, but it’s an a rare opportunity for our folks here to exercise hospitality, love of strangers when they bring you into their homes.

And that’s the kind of thing I think that Paul is talking about in some cases very directly what he’s talking about because as you know at that time you couldn’t stay in a motel because a girl came at the motel with the room. So the idea was entertaining people other Christians but people you completely just didn’t know except on the basis of someone else’s recommendation.

So one way to make this stuff practical is to preach on hospitality in our church and not just as some abstract virtue, but to say that’s a that’s a result of John 17 telling us that we want to live perichoretically with the extended body of Christ and hospitality means welcoming the other into our church and the problems that they bring into our church, right? And to see that not as an interruption of the stuff we like to do but as an opportunity to live out the social Trinity in the context of our church.

Now, it also means in the context of our church that our relationships with one another should deepen, right? So that the unity that we have even with our friends should grow and develop and be self-sacrificial, of course.

So, Leithart does a good job of talking about some of the practical implications of what we’re talking about today in that talk, and I’d recommend that when we post the link, you listen to it.

Now, I have another quote here, a couple of quotes on perichoresis that I found on Peter’s blog. Let me see how I’m doing on time. 3:05 means I’m late. But I didn’t start till when? 2:15 or something. Okay. So, I’m going to read these things. And again, this is on your handout, so you can follow along in the reading of it. I think this is on your handout.

Is there a page that starts by saying “vests of perichoresis”?

Yeah. Yeah, F.C.N. Hicks. So this guy’s a was a he died in the 40s. He was an Anglican bishop or priest rather. And he says Hicks offers this wonderful summary of human perichoresis, the ordinary man.

So what we’re talking about is social reality, the reality of the triune God that he’s created us to be these very beings who live perichoretically imaging his perichoretic relationship, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. So that’s where this ties in.

So he says this summary of human:

“The ordinary man is apt to say that for him the idea of mutual indwelling is unreal, a thing perhaps for saints or of exceptionally religious people, but without meaning in the ordinary experience of the world. Yet, as so often happens, it is precisely in the common intercourse of life that the highest truths of religion find at once their analogy and their justification.

Because God is personal, our intercourse with him will prove to present analogies to our intercourse with human persons in the affairs of every day. And it’s just in this intercourse that we can see most easily what mutual indwelling can mean.”

And then he goes on to say:

“For the experience of life is that in friendship and still more in friendship that is ripened into love, two living persons grow into each other’s lives or serves or selves rather. Love as we say takes us out of our self and that is another way of saying that it takes us into the self of the person whom we love. Each self remains distinct but each penetrates the other and in this inner penetration a common life is first created then developed which in turn gives a new fullness to the individual selves or lives which contributes to it.

And the closer this union, the more that thoughts, feelings, wills, actions are linked together, the more literally true it is that each lives in the other person. This is mutual indwelling in common human experience. The Trinity is social reality. And what Hicks is saying is this is the way we live whether we understand it or not because we’re made in the image of God. And so the idea is to become a little more intentional about it. Right?

Okay. He goes on to say:

“And its nature, its possibilities, its value are revealed in the common element in experience that the wholly self-contained, self-absorbed, selfish personality is narrowed, cramped, and starved. It is an unself. It is in unselfish expansion into the lives of others. The personality is developed in the inst to the love of family or social, civic, national, worldwide obligations, in friendship, in all the degrees, and most of all in the intimate relationships of life between brother and sister, parent and child, husband and wife.”

And you know, I’ve been married 30, how long? 38 years. Yeah. 38 years. And this is exactly what’s happened. You know, you know, that old people frequently look like their spouse. They start to look alike. Well, they certainly are acting more alike if they have a successful marriage. Their lives are one. They’re distinct people, but their lives is a shared life together as well.

So, I think that’s a that’s an excellent quote and a way to put very practical you know feet on some of the concepts that are you know a little a little difficult to grasp, but this is a way to do it.

But there’s another quote on there about musical perichoresis and I won’t read it to you but I would highly encourage you to read it. Again this is from one of Peter’s blog posts and I think it’s quite good.

Let me move to conclusion. I preached on the book of Hebrews a number of years ago. I think I have this on your handout as well. It says Dennis Tuuri sermon. Yeah, that’s it. Outline from sermon series on the book of Hebrews.

And I think Hebrews has this sevenfold structure sevenfold even heptagonal chiastic structure to the basic way the book is is written it’s a very carefully constructed book and I think that’s true and in the in the third section at this entire section we see Christ as a faithful and compassionate priest and so I think you know the third day is first fruits and this is like the first fruits of humanity and so this is who we’re to be as well and so that third section of Hebrews describes Christ in that way as compassionate and faithful as perichoretic we could say with humanity.

You know perichoresis was I think originally used in the context of the divine personhood of Christ as humanity and his divinity together and it also then was used to talk about God’s relationship to the created order before the modern usage which is more having to do with the trinitarian life and then with social life based upon it.

So I say I say this on my on my outline and I make this point that this is particularly true in the perichoretic community of the culture of the church rather. And then I have several points:

One, interruptions are perichoretic opportunities to minister. Jesus is available, right? You never call in Jesus and he says too busy. Now I know there are things we do and you got to balance off your service to the kingdom, you know, but the point is I think that particularly for myself and I don’t know but maybe for other ministers, you know, it’s very easy for the study to become the whole thing. I try to I’ve been doing this for 10 or 15 years, probably not that well, but I’ve tried to look for opportunities.

So, if I’ve got an opportunity either be myself studying, preparing more for the sermon, whatever I’m doing, or to go see somebody, I go see somebody because my natural inclination is to isolation, my fallen nature, I should say. So, you know, interruptions, opportunities. Jesus is available. We should be available.

Secondly, we are to open ourselves to one another, you know, is a lot easier to give for a lot of us than to receive, right? I mean, I have a real hard time telling people my needs, asking for prayer about things, etc. But that’s part of the perichoretic relationship. It’s not just, you know, serving the other. It’s being open to indwelling by the other person in your life and particularly at difficult times or celebratory times, etc. Right? So, it means opening ourselves to each other as well as serving one another.

Three, this is the road to wholeness, witness, and victory. John 17. And four, this is rooted in our entrance into the trinitarian dance, our heavenly calling.

Now, this stuff that Hicks says, and Leithart quotes him on about a life that mutually dwells together. I’m reading this and I’m playing on Raps City an old album by The Loving Spoonful, which I don’t normally do, but I did. I don’t know why. And this song came on that I had forgotten. This is just one example and it’s not like wow that’s talking about perichoresis you know it’s not like that you but you can listen to a good many songs and really see that what they’re talking about is this sort of perichoretic relationship between people who love each other and you know frequently by the way what we think of as romantic songs are really about children I don’t know if you knew that or not but when songwriters write this stuff a lot of times they’re not talking about their boyfriend or their girlfriend they’re talking about their child not necessarily their wife so It works in those relationships as well.

But, you know, I’ll just I’ll just close with this and maybe it’s it’s ridiculous or stupid. If it is, that’s okay. And I won’t sing it. Which I should do. The song is called “Full Weight,” so the lyric is:

“The full measure of your giving.
You don’t yet understand.
And I don’t think we understand it. The full measure of our giving, what it does for the world, how it’s based in the social reality of the triune God and the way He exists. I don’t think we understand that.

A cup full of living that you hold in your hand.
The full weight of your loving makes me lighter than air.
The text I’m receiving now I know that it never was there.

And then you know this description of the sort of development that Hicks talks about. It started off just sticking around with the other person with that wonderful feeling from you. Now there’s finally someone telling me I can really give too, you know.”

It’s probably a silly lyric, but I thought it was good. Music speaks to me. You can read the perichoresis article on music as to why that probably is. And the lyrics go on, but the point is just listen to love songs and they really are a re-emphasis of the sort of theological truths we’ve been discussing today and that will bring health and well-being to our marriages, to our families, to our churches, and to our cultures.

And I would say first, you know, this is a minister’s conference, right? Primarily geared to help each of us grow in these areas. I mean, I think we I know that here at our church, we’ve got a lot we’ve got a long way to go to having that kind of perichoretic opening to the other, particularly others you know, who are not like us and then the development of relationships that transcend, you know, diets or exercise or football or what whatever it is, right?

Those are great things in their place, but I think in our churches particular, particularly, I would encourage you, you know, as you go back to your congregations to see the significance of this social reality of the triune God and how it affects us.

Let’s pray.

Father, I thank you again for this conference, for Ralph’s inspiration to have us do it and for the topic. I know that I was a little not sure of how this would go a year ago. But I thank you for it. I thank you for the discipline it brought to me to study this issue again and to grow and develop in it. And I pray that all the pastors here particularly but all of us might take back very practical lessons that we can apply ourselves and then lead our congregations into. We know that life is found in reality and the reality is that you exist in relationship. In Jesus name we pray.

Amen. Amen.