2003 - three haiku

the west wall ivy

hides from the sun—

but still turns red without it

all those gold leaves

can barely cover

thin black branches

every lone jet

lost behind the skyline

makes me stop breathing

2024 - everything happens

2007 - ich du zeit

While we trace the whole affair to Tertullian, theological constructs—whether specifically addressing "the doctrine of the trinity" or otherwise—have formed themselves in relationship to it. "Even the detractors recognize the trinity in forming their negations of it," moreover, the nature of theological discourse has repeatedly returned to trinity as its base structure.

   In the most basic forms—e.g. credal affirmations—trinitarian theology founds Christian theology, its major "zone of convergence" or “monumental structure” around which Christian theology accretes. Such gradual accumulation is obvious and not accidental. Pannenberg's conception of public theology serves us well here. Consider that idea: the public discourse on the nature of God. The trinity is public wrestling with the foundations of reality. Of all the doctrines of the church, it is the one most concerned with that which is and that which moves between the pieces of itself and the whole of God. Trinity as a doctrine is within and without, it is meta- scripture. It's built out of many parts, aligned by their end. Think of it as meta-teleology: of our ability to apprehend the final truth of God, a statement about the completion of God emergent in scripture and identifiable by its end in God's revelation.

    Trinitarian doctrine is foremost a public doctrine, worked out in public ways to publicize the reality of God. It therefore points at the reality of reality as well.

   This public quality is the explication of God's self nature by God's own action. This is typified in Karl Rahner's "rule" that the economic trinity is the immanent trinity and the immanent trinity is the economic trinity. This contribution is one of the most unifying gestures of twentieth century theology, as it so thoroughly accords with the biblical witness and addresses questions about the monarchy and fullness of God. When we speak that the economic trinity is the immanent trinity and vice versa, we preserve the proper placement of this doctrine within the unity of God. Rahner's rule presents the doctrine of the trinity such that preempts theology from using the doctrine to enclose or build mystery and absence behind itself. We acknowledge something about the nature of God that relates to the matters of public. It regards the opening of God's nature from hidden to revealed. More directly state, it opens a pathway for accord with contemporary Lutheran proposals that the trinity is God revealed, over against God as deus absconditus. In this rule we have an affirmative statement that the trinity is God's self revelation of the interior heart of the divine life. Trinity is the revelation of God, and not the further cloaking of divinity in a mystery.

      We have this formulation which opens enormous possibilities, so it remains to us to construe our theology accordingly, responsive to the range of these possibilities. Trinitarian theology is coalescing more and more on the subject of relationality in the trinity. So much energy is now spent on opening the frontiers of theology; energy that was once diverted by apologetics that boiled down to "one-ness and three-ness." Otherwise disparate elements of Christian thought find further convergence around the relational character of the trinity, and do so in a shared range of vocabulary that also happens to align with Rahner's principle—though Rahner's "manners of subsisting" differs somewhat from the approach of later interpreters.

    This next evolution of the growing common language describes the triune God through a lens of relationship. Theologians have explored the trinity of God as one inasmuch as God is three in relation; and further, that God is in relationship to God's self only insofar as God relates to the world. Three persons in one, and one in three becomes possible as the persons relate to each other, and the world. More and more theologians have begun to adopt this approach, taking their cues from interaction with Eastern thought. Some of the most expansive approach comes to us from the East, from metropolitan John Zizioulas. When Zizioulas writes of being as communion, we glimpse a realignment of traditional thinking. Zizioulas opens the possibilities that the structure of "the person" is identifiable within the activity of relationship. Moreover that the divine relationship creates grounds not for blurred dis-individuation, but is the font of all otherness. The oneness of the trinity is what makes possible any otherness at all!

   While certain details have differed, relationship language in these senses, along with Rahner's rule in the West, are swiftly growing as the predominant ways to theologically express the triune God. If we ask now "what comprises this trinity?" we hear more and more responses that generally accord with these two impulses.

    God in three persons exhibits personhood inasmuch as God is in relationship with God's self and the world. God is in relationship with God's self inasmuch as God is in relationship with the kosmos.

   It strikes me that so much trinitarian work has been done since the inauguration of the twentieth century with only the barest explicit mention of what must be seen as an elephant in the room. Are not these many relational conversations consonant with Jewish philosopher Martin Buber's work? Do we not have a common ground there? Look where Buber prefigures Rahner and our current notions of immanent and economic: "Inner things, outer things—what are they but things and things! I experience something. If we add 'secret' to 'open' experiences, nothing in the situation is changed." Take this seriously and it also extends a challenge: even the radical, imaginative equation of or interchange between "economic" and "immanent" matters little if we leave them in the world of things.

   Just so, even when we balance this with the arrival of relationship language, we still find Buber on the road, a few steps ahead: "The Thou meets me through grace -- it is not found by seeking. By my speaking of the primary word [thou] to it is an act of my being, is indeed the act of my being. The Thou meets me But I step into direct relation with it. (...) I become through my relation to the Thou; as I become I, I say Thou." This poetically outlines a philosophy of personhood that dovetails finely with the likes of Zizioulas and others, that resonates with the last fifty years of trinitarian relationship talk.

    The nature of God's relationship with the world bears the characteristic of Ich und Du. The triune God steps into relation with the world, plunging it—us! into Buber's "unity of the whole." Trinity is the Christian revelation of the nature of God as being in relationship. Buber can serve as a preeminent guide to what it means for anyone, and particularly God with us, should expect.

     Perhaps we can issue an additional challenge to received teaching on this. Many people read from this the idea that "I" is humanity, "Thou" is God. It also seems clear that this is not the whole of Buber's intent. However, Buber's writing opens a great causeway of understanding relationship that the world might be in I-Thou relationship to the divine as both I and Thou, in a complex of exchanges.

    It doesn't seem far fetched to say that God is not the eternal thou but the eternally present I. This seems possible within Buber's own writing, but also more resonant with those theologians wishing to preserve the primacy of God as mover in these relationships, as the main actor in the drama of grace. We are the Thou, and God approaches the world as a lover determined to embrace us, show us, and involve us wholly in the entirety of God's interior life.

   This doctrine unites the various constructs on the nature of God. Moltmann's work makes a profound expression of the shape and character of God's relationship. In Moltmann's theology the tenor of communion is dramatically dependent on the radical participation of this whole God, of the entirety of the trinity in the person of Jesus and his cross. Moltmann says of a trinitarian theology of the cross that we "no longer interpret the event of the cross in the framework or in the name of a metaphysical or moral concept of God which has already been presupposed (...) but [develop] from this history what is to be undestood by 'God.'" In short, we do not know the cross in the light of what is already known of the triune God, but we know God as triune in the light of the cross!

    When Moltmann addresses the crucifixion of Jesus in terms of the crucifixion of God, he operates on the corpus of Christian thought. The surgery excises the old hierarchies—and honestly addresses in terms somewhat beyond what the Ancient Fathers or Zizioulas does. Moltmann lays claim to an interpretation of the biblical tradition and builds a link between trinitarian theology and concepts of time. He declares "For Paul and Mark, the theological accent is placed entirely on the reversal of the noetic and ontic orders and on the transformation of the historical sense of time into an eschatological sense of time. The risen Christ is the crucified Christ." Moltmann does more than address the question of subordination or relationship between the persons of the trinity. The event of God present and active in the suffering of Christ reworks the whole of history. As the trinity's participation in reality as God crucified inducts history into the interior life of God's self, so the cross inducts eschatological time into historical time, and remakes time in eschatological terms.

   From this we know God's relationship with the world creates, takes place in, and moves through and across time eschatologically. That is, in entering relationship with the world as lover, God moves God's self fully into time for a final purpose. God does not stand outside or beyond time as the transcendental subject, but revealed in economic personhood engages time, exists and works with time to bring the conclusion and purpose of time fully into the present. The maker and lover who is telos and finis of the created, whose intent from the beginning is to conclude with a world drawn into self.

    The limitations of time to the biological hypostasis (i.e., what we might take from Zizioulas' concern for the human person without God) highlight time as manifestation: past, present, future. This is just so, and neatly brings us to another key, namely that manifestation is not incarnation. These manifestations fail to depict the transcendental reality of God in relationship.

    They fall short of explicating God's choice to reveal God's self in the person of Jesus. God in revelation as trinity recreates the world in incarnational time, the reality of God revealed in and across time, in with and under time. The triune identity reveals time in the living present, the incarnate logos proclaimed already and not yet, the transparent church showing the kingdom, the future and past inside the present. As Zizioulas might term it, in the relationship of us with God, these limitations of the biological hypostasis fall away. Manifestation is an appearance of a ghost or spirit, the event that shows or indicates the thing. Incarnation is the embodiment of the spirit as a person, the indwelling of God in personhood. Do we see the difference? Do we see the transformation of time by incarnation?

   God is the eternally existing subject, the transcendental real at the base of the kosmos, the nephesh in the lungs of the universe, the ground and figure of the world. God incarnate is God revealed in triune relationship. Trinity is fundamentally the self-revelation of the transcendental real. Not as a god beneath a sub strata of these untrustworthy senses, but God ad strata in relationship toward the world for the sake of the world. The economic trinity is the immanent trinity, and this is ground of human participation in divine life. Through such complete involvement of God in the world, human participation assumes participation in the creation. It gives rise to another recent theme in contemporary theology, the popular conception of humans as created co-creators. This proposition arises out of the same ground that gave us Rahner's rule and the relational character of God in trinity.

   What if we extend that co-creation concept eschatologically? In this relationship, we participate not just in the co-creation, but the co-terminus of the world! We have already seized a measure of destructive power, in the realms of human action without God. That is we found the suicidal limits of our biological hypostasis in the tools of world-ending war. There must also lie an answer that we might participate in the power to end creation existentially and eschatologically, to announce the kingdom to the limited hypostasis and create a new person. To kill and give life with the proclamation of Jesus and him crucified. Trinity and eschaton open a doorway on human possibility to create, destroy, and make new.

    Moreover such talk of God forms a basis for human relationships that is transformative and liberating. If we participate in the interior life of God in love with the world, we open the possibility of life in love with other persons. The wonderful turn of phrase from Catherine Mowry LaCugna, that we are "living God's life with one another."

    In the vantage point of relationship with the incarnate lover of the kosmos, time is revealed as eternity in the present, and history as container of the memory of the divine who is immanent in the living present. To know God is to know the creator and destroyer of the world. The approach of God to the world is from the moment of creation and the moment of conclusion at once, the instantiation and arising, the telos and finis. 

   That is how this will conclude then. Trinitarian theology opens for us a great vista on anthropology. What does God tell us about ourselves? That God is this way announces we are made to be called into relationship. Let us say that trinitarian theology contributes a third leg to the formulation of human and divine relationships, time. In this understanding, Ich und Du becomes Ich und Du in der Zeit: I and Thou in Time or Ich Du Zeit: I-Thou-Time. I and Thou and time: a triadic consideration of anthropology: 1) as person, 2) in relation, 3) from the end of time inside the living present. Such a structure is visible only in the light of the triune identity of God. The person as a flowering expression of reality, rooted in the creative communion of the triune God. Trinity announces that the foundation of the universe was laid out of love and the desire for God to work all in all. Trinity draws the universe to God impatiently, urgently insisting that we see in God's participation in history the very heart of the interior life of God beyond which there is nothing else, no more passable reality than the unveiling of cosmic purpose now and again now, now, now.

2020 - october 11 stopped crying, started trying

2004 - not a cloud in the sky outside my window

I am not the source of the broken branches, the slants of light across the square.

I hunger for the color of bricks piled just so

and your blue figure moving through shadow and light

(shadow and light and light and light). 

Where did all this traffic come from

and who are these messengers in our midst?

Felt the distant push of youth last night, again,

the whiteless yearning of the crow at midnight,

the harried race of tiny feet

among the high buds of springtime,

the tension of gray wires against the skyline. 

I avoided the request as best I could, hoped eagerly for better sources,

better handoffs from him (yes, him) to me (and thee).

Here in my enclave of buildings I can forget them,

the sodium pools, the phosphoric highways at the fringe of the City.

Here there is a hint of pleasure at every stoplight, and the memory of his words (and hers!) fades into a yellowed memory, recedes into the middle distance. 

I hide here, surrounded by glass and stone, right where I belong. O steel! O hiding place away from the open borderlands. O city— But roads and rivers run cruelly on, run right out of the city (my City, still) and we wind up right back at the wide open plain, back at the flatlands and floodplains, the bitter airports and the deep toll of the planes,

the chorus of all that thrusting.