EmergingChurch.info interviewed Steve Dancause, a recent grad from the Christian Studies program at MHGS. The interview is in response to Steve’s master thesis on the Trinity as symmetrical, integrative and dynamic. From the interview:
The divine community of the Trinity is often held up as the ideal human community. Some would even say that the Trinity is the revelation of perfect communion. This is why egalitarians and subordinationists both look to the Trinity for justification of their social worldviews. I was interested to learn for myself why various scripturally sound Trinitarian models that are used to legitimate human social systems (including church ecclesiologies) were incompatible. This led me to follow the idea that the Church may be looking at the Trinity in an incomplete way.
The question boiled down to the contradiction between the Egalitarian Trinity held to by some in the Emerging and some other forms of church and the Patriarchical/Subordinationist Trinity of the more traditionalist church. The former is a theological necessity in that it is the very definition of Trinity. To deny it is to undermine the entire Christian faith because Christianity relies on the fact that the Son and the Spirit are fully God. The cross has saving power only because the person on it was fully God. The indwelling of the Holy Spirit is only profound because we are indwelled by the person of the Spirit who is fully God. To deny the egalitarian nature of the Trinity is to deny the saving power of the cross and everything that makes Christianity a religion in its own right.
Yet the latter view of the Trinity is scripturally grounded. The Son did indeed submit himself to the Father. The theological problem with the patriarchal Trinity is that the Father is ultimately God above the Son and Spirit – implying that the Trinity is not ultimately God. I see this view as undermining the Trinity at the most basic level. So the project then became one of seeing divine subordination not as a static or eternal state, but seeing it as part of the larger trinitarian life of mutual submission and egalitarianism. Essentially, my interest was to integrate the subordinationist Trinity into the egalitarian Trinity, and in doing so remove the contradiction and see that the Trinity is indeed egalitarian. This was done by imagining the absolute divinity of God not solely as the person of the Father but as all three divine persons of the Trinity. And this required the integration of the economic and immanent trinities within a dynamic system.
You can read the rest of Steve’s interview here and even read an excerpt of Steve’s original thesis.
