Participating in the Life of the Triune God: Towards a Trinitarian Approach to Theology of Work for the Life in the Workplace
Holy, holy, holy! Lord God Almighty!
All thy works shall praise thy name in earth, and sky and sea.
Holy, holy, holy! merciful and mighty!
God in three persons, blessed Trinity!
The above lines are from the classic hymn Holy, Holy, Holy written by Reginald Heber about the trinitarian God in 1826, which continues to ring out in many churches even today. What I will try to argue in this essay is that the very essence and purpose of life, including our work, derives from this trinitarian God who is three in persons- Father, Son, and Holy Spirit yet One. Our life and work are an invitation to participate in the life of the triune God from which we live, move, work, and have our being in the world. Theologian Colin E. Gunton aptly pointed out the fact that the loss of the Trinitarian dimension for our approach to life had ‘gravely impoverished’ the Christian tradition for decades because it was more often presented as a dogma to be believed rather than as a living focus of life and thought.[1] Similarly, referring to his early career as a missionary, Lesslie Newbigin acknowledged a lack of emphasis on the Trinity. He once admits, “I must confess also that in my own theological training the doctrine of the Trinity played a very minor role. Of course, it was not denied or questioned, but it had no central place.”[2] A possible reason for the neglect of the trinitarian doctrine is because of its complexity[3] and the tendency to dismiss the notion, given that it is difficult to access by reason and that there is an element of mystery in it.
Is pursuing the triune God vanity? Or is it God’s desire?
An important question then arises regarding the acceptance of our human fate and the pursuit of knowing the triune God and His nature. Should the creation, with the understanding that the complete comprehension of the creator God is unattainable, choose to refrain from their endeavour? Alternatively, should we actively pursue a deeper understanding of God? What we learn from the Scripture is that the triune God desires man to seek him with all his heart, mind, soul, and strength (Deu. 4:29). If man seeks him, we will find him (Jer. 29:13). Not only in the Old but even in the New Testament we read similarly. Jesus in Matthew 7:7-8, addresses his listeners to ask, seek, knock, in order to find, receive, and doors be opened. As the people of God pursue the triune God, the knowledge of the Trinity is made available to us through the divine disclosure in the process of salvation. By means of God's self-revelation, we can gain some knowledge of His identity, albeit not in its entirety. Yet, it is a continuous knowing which increases without limit. Since man derives his origin and purpose from God, there exists a certain likeness between human beings and God, thus implying that all humans should strive to live and work in a manner consistent with God's nature. Therefore, the character of the Christian life and the nature of the church, including those in the marketplace, are fundamentally determined by the nature of God. The focus of this specific paper is to elucidate the importance of studying the doctrine of the Trinity and comprehending the essence and existence of God for the life of the church, particularly in relation to our perspectives on work within the marketplace. This leads us to explore next the origin of work and mission.
Missional God, Missional People: Origin and God the Worker
Mission starts not with human action but with the sending of God himself. David Bosch says "Mission [is] understood as being derived from the very nature of God."[4] Or, as Hastings has noted, God is missional and is “bidirectional in his missional nature. He both sends and brings.”[5] God is the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, three persons sharing the one divine nature in a perfect communion of love. Bosch says that in Creation, God was already on Mission, with his Word and Spirit as Missionaries.[6] In other words, there is mission in trinity. The relational God is the personal God as well, who draws humans into his life through his people by the Spirit. Hastings asserts that “this is central to mission, not peripheral. To be missional is to be Trinitarian and to be Trinitarian is to be missional.”[7]
Taking that into account, as God already in mission, an action of God which is vibrant and not static, we can now understand that there is work. That should clarify the question of how human works come into being by learning to know that God himself is the worker. In the Genesis account, God is creating, separating, dividing, commanding, naming, breathing life into creation, etc. Although work is not the sum total of God’s purpose for us, Darrel Cosden is right when he writes, “work is the mission (God’s mission) for everyone created to be in God’s image and indeed therefore the whole people of God.”[8]
Images of the Trinity: Perichoresis and participation
It was inevitable that the historical, economic sharing of Jesus in the work of the Father should lead to ontology, to questions about the being of God whose work is done by both the Son and the Spirit. The Arian objection to classical Christology is that it violates the sacred and traditional ontology and divides up the being of God.[9] The question of how God can be called one God if he is the Son as well as the Father is raised here. Arius’s definition of God, with its repeated ‘alone,’ is essentially non-relational. In contrast, Gunton introduced “a note of relationality”[10] into the being of God. Person-in-relation is a preferred description of theologians who stress both the personal and the social nature of the Trinity. This includes Orthodox theologians such as Zizioulas, Moltmann, and Volf. These theologians have often been called “social Trinitarians” to distinguish them from the anthropological and socio-political Trinitarians within the social Trinity label. Other theologians prefer to use the language of “three persons as relations.” This includes theologians like Pope Benedict XI and other classical Trinitarians.[11] I do not intend to enter the debate by supporting either the former or the latter group, which is not my focus here. But the point that I want to make is that, be it classical or social/relational, all the traditions agree that God is a being in relation.
By the end of the fourth century, it was agreed among the church fathers of both East and West that the nature of God- ousia or substantia- should be thought of as a communion of persons.[12] Paul Fiddes explains that the term ‘perichoresis’ expresses the permeation of each person by the other, their coinherence without confusion. [13] Volf refers to the term as “reciprocal interiority” of the trinitarian persons.”[14] The two Latin terms, circuminessio, mean that one person is contained in the other. This stresses a state of being, and was preferred by Thomas Aquinas. Secondly, circuminecessio is a more active word evoking a state of doing, the interpenetrating of one person in another; it captures the sense of a moving in and through the other, and was preferred by Bonaventure among the theologians in the West.[15]
For Zizioulas, in the ordo cognoscendi one moves from the experience of ecclesial communion to the correct understanding of the divine communion.[16] In the ordo essendi, on the other hand, ecclesial communion presupposes the Trinitarian communion, since the church is the imago trinitatis. Zizioulas’s insistence on the monarchy of the Father is problematic because it projects a hierarchical view of persons in the Trinity and does not promote unity for the church by way of the Trinity. For Zizioulas, the trinitarian communion is hypostasized through the ecstatic character of the Father, who is the αιτία of the Son and Spirit, and so also for the Trinitarian communion. Without the Father’s monarchy, the unity of the Trinitarian communion would be lost. The Father never exists alone, but rather only in communion with the Son and Spirit; the other two persons are the presupposition of his identity, indeed of his very existence. On the other hand, the Son and Spirit exist only through the Father, who is the cause and in kind subordinate to the Father.[17] Alan Torrance objects to Zizioulas’ description of the Father as the cause of the Trinity because, “endangers his own identification of being and communion” and fails to interpret the oneness of God in the light of free communion and mutuality of God.[18] Although I am sympathetic with Zizioulas that the Father can be a uniting factor for the Trinitarian relationship, to understand it hierarchically and give recognition of the Father as a monarch would be a mistake. How I would understand is to perceive the Father as the first among the equals in its functional and ontological order.
Volf makes a fair critique of Zizioulas that such understanding arouses a suspicion of not actually grounding the necessity of the one for the unity of the church, rather “projecting the hierarchical grounding of unity into the doctrine of the trinity from the perspective of a particular ecclesiology.”[19] I then turn to Jonathan Wilson and Moltman who then provides a correction to what Zizioulas’ monarchical understanding of the Father as the source for the Son and Spirit’s existence. Wilson aptly understands that there cannot be the Father as well without the Son or the Spirit. He further says, “The life generated by the Father in relationship with the Son also generates relationship with the Spirit…. If there were only Father and Son, life would be an exchange. But with the Father, the Son, and the Spirit, life is an interchange. Life is not merely reciprocal.”[20] For Moltman, the Father exists in the Son, the Son in the Father, and both of them in the Spirit, just as the Spirit exists in both the Son and the Father. It is a process of the most perfect and intense empathy. In the perichoresis, the very thing that divides them becomes that which binds them together. Moltman summarizes succinctly, “the doctrine of perichoresis links together in a brilliant way the threeness and the unity, without reducing the threeness to the unity, or dissolving the unity in threeness. The unity of the triunity lies in the eternal perchoresis of the Trinitarian persons.”[21] Similar can be understood in the Gospel according to John 14:10, where Jesus says, “I am in the Father and the Father is in me.” This can be understood as a portrayal of a perichoretic relationship, which means that each is in the other and is interpenetrated by the other. One completes the other and not dominating the other, and it is in the circulation of the divine life that they fulfil in their relations to one another.
There is the inseparable communion of life within the Trinity. There is no being of God other than the dynamic of persons in relation. The charge against Augustine and many of his Western successors is that because he failed to appropriate the ontological achievement of his Eastern colleagues, he allowed the insidious return of a Hellenism in which being is not communion, but something underlying it.[22] For Gunton, to be in communion has four central concepts; they are, person (irreducible to other), relation (Father, Son and Spirit are particular persons they are by virtue of their relations to each other), otherness (one cannot understand relationship satisfactorily unless we also realize that to be person is to be related as an other), and freedom (free and mutually constitutive relationship with other persons).[23]
Gunton is critical of Augustine’s opera trinitatis ad extra sunt indivisa (the actions of the trinity outwards are undivided). It is because if one cannot distinguish characteristic and distinctive forms of action ascribed to the Father, Son, and Spirit, there appears to be no point in distinguishing them.[24] Similarly, Leonardo Boff, though in a different way, argues that the cycle within the Trinity is reversible, that the Father is breathed out by the Spirit as the Spirit by the Father.[25] Fiddes who on the other hand, argues that there are the irreversible directions of relation derived from the revelation of God in the life of Christ and in his relations with the Father, as the begotten Son and as the receiver as well as the giver of the Spirit.[26] It is because it maintains better the direction of flow to speak of the Spirit as proceeding from the Father through the Son rather than from the Son. I think Gunton is right because, without distinction, what would be left is that there cannot be a ‘perichoretic relationship’ because it is in the light of this particularity that we correspond to the richness of God.
The Christian Gospel is that the Trinity is open for relationship; relationship with God and with fellow humans and creation. Hastings has aptly stated that it was rendered open by the sending of the incarnate Son, and humans enter that openness by the work of the Spirit and are birthed into the life of the church. This is the crucial point that gives hope for mission and every work that we do, participating in God’s mission.[27] Why is there a mission and work is that God himself is the worker, and he has a mission, and the church participates by grace in who he is and what he is already doing in the world.
Let us now then explore an aspect of each functional work of the triune God.
a. Creational Work of the Triune God:
God need not have created the world. There are no inner reasons and no outward compulsions for his actions. God is self-sufficient. But it was his good pleasure to create the world with which he could be well pleased. It is for this reason, as Moltman puts it, that God created “a reality corresponding to Himself.”[28]Creation is a fruit of God’s longing for ‘his Other’ and for that Other’s free response to the divine love. It is for this reason that the idea of the world is inherent in the nature of God himself from eternity.[29] It is also an act of triune God in his unity directed outwards.[30]
One can understand how the triune God expresses in creation, embracing the difference inherent in the divine life. In the sending of the Son and the Spirit, the Creator honours the work of each and recognizes that without each person’s work, God’s self-expression is incomplete. If this is the shape of life given for the world, then it has consequences for our human work as well. The Father is the ultimate Origin. He is the creator, and therefore, creative ideas must emanate from the worker- the intuitive act of the imagination which precedes the fashioning of the actual material.[31] Yet it was never in isolation that the Father creates. The Father only creates the world in his love for the Son then he also creates the world through Him. It is for the fellowship with the Son that He destines men and women. Everything that is made is made to the point in the direction of the free kingdom of the Son. It can therefore be understood that from eternity, the Son has been destined to be the Logos, the mediator of creation.[32]
So it is God in communion that He creates. The involvement of the Son and the Spirit in creation if isolated, would be a theological error. Moltmann has put it aptly:
The eternal Son is closely related to God’s idea of the world. The Logos through whom the Father has created everything, and without whom nothing has been made that was made, is only the other side of the Son. The Son is the Logos in relation to the world. The Logos is the Son in relation to the Father. The Father utters the eternal Word in the Spirit and breathes out the Spirit I eternal utterance of the Word. Through the eternal Son/Logos, the Father creates the world.[33]
The Father yet operates through the Spirit. He creates ‘out of the powers and energies of His own Spirit.’[34] It is the powers and energies of the Holy Spirit that bridge the difference between the Creator and creature, the actor and the act– a difference which otherwise seems to be unbridged by any relation at all.[35] In creation, all activity proceeds from the Father. But because the Son, as Logos, and the Spirit, as energy, are both involved- each in its own way and yet equally- creation must be ascribed to the unity of the triune God. In his creative love, God is united with creation, which is His other giving it space, time, and liberty in his own infinite life.[36] The Father creates and yet in perichoretic relationship with the Son and the Spirit, who are equally involved in it.
b. Redeeming Work of the Triune God
As God through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ redeems our lives, nothing in our lives is discarded, forgotten, or erased. Hastings puts it succinctly that, “it is fair to say that participation in the life of the triune God as revealed in Christ is the greatest key to releasing the church from its besieged and defeated position.”[37] For Hastings, the dynamic of participation in the mission of the Trinity seems to be the only way to account for how the eleven disciples behind locked doors could have transformed the known world.
One common misunderstanding in Christian theology is embracing annihilation of the present world. The idea that God will destroy the present order, erase all within it, and start afresh. However, a correct understanding of the Scripture must help us reject the annihilation concept because in Christ, God is already renewing and re-creating the present order and transforming all things in Christ and for Christ. The starting point of redemption for Oliver Donovan is the resurrection of Jesus Christ. He does not intend to isolate or undermine the other saving events which the Gospel proclaims, but the connection of what preceded the death and ascension of Christ is with the resurrection in a knot of mutual intelligibility that binds up the two.
O’Donovan puts it:
The resurrection carries with it the promise that ‘all shall be made alive’ (1 Cor. 15:22). The raising of Christ is a representative, not in the way that a symbol is representative, expressing a reality which has an independent and prior standing, but in the way that a national leader is representative when he brings about for the whole of his people whatever it is, war or peace, that he effects on their behalf. And so this central proclamation directs us back also to the message of the incarnation, by which we learn how, through a unique presence of God to his creation, the whole created order is taken up into the fate of this particular representative man at this particular moment of history, on whose one fate turns the redemption of all. And it directs us forward to the end of the history when that particular and representative fate is universalized in the resurrection of mankind the dead.[38]
This very act of God by resurrecting from the dead for Donovan is the reaffirmation of creation. In the resurrection of Christ, creation is restored and the kingdom of God dawns. This surely gives us a new perspective on how we see our work as we continue to participate in the continuing work of God’s redeeming work and the hope that our work will also endure and be redeemed fully in the New Heavens and the New Earth.
All the speech of Christ, all the ways he sees the world, all his acts fit exactly into the movement in the Trinity that we recognize as being like a son to a father. Fiddes argues that the human son is the same as the divine sonship and remains so forever, as signified by his bodily resurrection. It is therefore appropriate to call this numerical sameness a unity of being, not just of function.[39] When one recognizes this, one can find similar patterns in all other bodily life. Wherever in the world we give ourselves to others or sacrifice ourselves for our neighbours, these actions will also match the movement in God as our acts share the patterns of love and we can discern the body of Christ. Fiddes has put it succinctly, “Wherever there is the movement of a measure of music, of a stroke of a brush, of a blow of a chisel, of a sequence of thought in arts and sciences, which reflects God’s truth and beauty, this too shares in the dynamic flow of the life of God.”[40]
Dorothy Sayers calls for responsibility as created beings to the creator. Everyone must grapple with evil and transform it into good. This can be understood as a participation in the redeeming work of God. The pattern of the crucifixion and resurrection cannot be avoided by anyone. All must be responsible for their actions, which will never be fully good or totally evil. The past cannot be changed, but it can be redeemed.[41] It is in our participation in the world of God’s continuing work that transforms our mundane work with meaning and purpose. God’s redeeming work becomes our work too as we participate in it. N. T. Wright puts it:
I don’t know what musical instruments we shall have to play Bach in God’s new world, though I am sure Bach’s music will be there. I don’t know how my planting a tree today will relate to the wonderful trees that there will be in God’s recreated world….But I know that God’s new world of justice and joy, of hope for the whole earth, was launched when Jesus came out of the tomb on Easter morning, and I know he calls his followers to live in Him and by the power of his Spirit and so to be a new creation people here and now, bringing signs and symbols of the kingdom to birth on earth as it is in heaven. The resurrection of Jesus and the gift of the Spirit mean that we are called to bring real and effective signs of God’s renewed creation to birth even in the midst of the present age.[42]
The goodness yet incompleteness of creation invite a place for human endeavour to participate in the redeeming life of the triune God in the world. The imagery of heaven and how it will exactly look will remain a mystery, yet what Christ has achieved in His death and resurrection opens doors for His people to participate in what he has done and continues to do so through human agents.
c. Spirit’s Sustaining Work of the Other
The Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father as found in John 15:26. The Father eternally breathes out the Holy Spirit, and the Holy Spirit does not proceed from the Son. The distinction is maintained, but it is only in respect to the Son-God the Father is always the Father of the Son. Here, I find Moltmann helpful to clarify the distinction and yet not disturb the unity within the Trinity. He writes:
If, then, God as Father breathes out the Holy Spirit, then the Spirit proceeds from the Father of the Son. His procession therefore presupposes, firstly, the generation of the Son; secondly, the existence of the Son; and thirdly, the mutual relationship of the Father and Son. The Son is the logical presupposition and the actual condition for the procession of the Spirit from the Father; but he is not the Spirit’s origin, as the Father is. The procession of the Spirit from the Father must therefore be essentially distinguished from the generation of the Son through the Father, and yet it is connected with that generation relationally.[43]
For Moltman, it is the Spirit who proceeds from the Father in the eternal presence of the Son, and therefore the Son is not uninvolved in it. It is the Spirit’s divine power that gives life to the dead (1 Cor.6:14), the Spirit sustains life, and the divine energy of the New Creation. The Son is raised through the Spirit and as the second Adam, the risen one becomes the life-giving Spirit (1 Cor. 15:45). The Son’s sending of the disciples out into the world with the mission of the Father, the risen Son gives them the Holy Spirit (John 20:21).
It is in the Spirit that people already experience what is still to come. Moltman writes, “With the Spirit the End-time begins. The messianic era commences where the forces and energies of the divine Spirit descend on all flesh, making it alive forevermore.”[44] It enables humans to live, to be skilful, intelligent, and discerning, and to follow God’s ways. As the divine power, it also makes the difference between life and death, not just for humans but for all living beings.[45] And T. F Torrance writes that it is “through the creator Spirit that the saving work of Christ is actualized in the church as redemption reaching out to the parousia, demanding and pressing toward the redemption of the body and indeed the whole creation.[46]
Two important aspects for understanding and doing theology of the Spirit, as pointed out by Gunton, are significant. The first is that Spirit relates to other beings and realms that are opposed or separate. The Spirit brings God into relation to the world and, reciprocally, the world into relation with God. The second feature is that the Spirit, far from abolishing, rather maintains and even strengthens particularity.[47] Gunton understands that Spirit is a homogeneous possession of Jesus, like a built-in soul-stuff. The Spirit is the one, the personal other by whom Jesus is related to the Father and to those with whom he had to do.[48] God the Spirit is the source of autonomy, and because of his action, human beings are constituted in their uniqueness and particular networks of relationality. It is by virtue of both these features that crossing the boundaries and preservation of particularity, that Gunton argues that the notion of Spirit is so important for our understanding of ourselves and our world and our work (emphasis added).[49]
It is the Spirit that sustains the life of creation and the world. The Father creates the world out of his love through the Son, for the purpose of finding a response to his love in time, in the power of the Holy Spirit, which binds together what is in itself different.[50] The Spirit maintains and strengthens the particularity.
Why the Trinitarian approach to the theology of work?
Dr Konrad Raiser, in his book “Ecumenism in Transition” speaks of a paradigm shift in the ecumenical movement. He describes the paradigm shaping the movement of WCC at Uppsala in 1968 being the turning point, as “Christocentric universalism” and celebrates its replacement by a Trinitarian paradigm. The Christocentric model is seen as unacceptable because it carries the message of lordship, of control from one centre. Newbigin is dismissive of Raiser’s proposal for a paradigm shift and to commend the Trinitarian paradigm over against a Christological one, and to commend it as corresponding to an egalitarian climate of opinion, would surely be a “disastrous mistake.”[51] I am sympathetic with Newbigin because, it is the work of Christ to bring sinful human beings into communion of the blessed Trinity in such a way that those who have been made members of the body of the Son by the work of the Spirit are enabled to address as ‘Our father.’[52] The grammar of Christological universalism does not necessarily exclude the work and presence of the Father and Spirit as they work in perfect relationship. Newbigin then writes, ‘this koinonia is indeed the very being of the church as a sign, instrument, and foretaste of what God purposes for the whole human family.’[53] To be Trinitarian is therefore to be Christological as well as Pneumatological.
The trinitarian models, however, are not simply projections of ideal social models. The triune God is been distinguished from human beings. Volf remarks that “person” and “communion” in ecclesiology cannot be identical with “person” and “communion” in the doctrine of the Trinity; they can only be understood as analogous to them.[54] Newbigin then aptly writes, “The doctrine of the Trinity was not developed in response to the human need for participatory democracy! It was developed in order to account for the facts that constitute the substance of the gospel. It is the work of Christ in his incarnation, in his atoning work in death and resurrection, and in his bestowing the gift of the Holy Spirit upon the church that made it necessary to undertake a radical re-understanding of the being of God.”[55] It is because through proper understanding of who God is and the nature of His work in relation to the Other that we can bring a correct theological understanding of how we view our work.
For Gunton, “to be human is to be related to the Father through the Son in the Spirit, and it is the character of Christian experience to realize that relationship.”[56] Even though human sins bring about distortion and failure of that relationship with the triune God, it is again through the Son and Spirit that we can re-establish our relationship. The point is that because “we are established in our being in the trinity, we are able to think from, and with careful qualification, about the triune being of God.”[57] So if the Christian initiation is a trinitarian event, the church must speak of the Trinity as its determining reality. Volf asserts that, “because churches, in the power of the Holy Spirit, already form a communion with the triune God, ecclesial correspondence to the Trinity can become an object of hope and thus also a task for human beings. The correspondence between the Trinitarian and ecclesial relationships is not simply formal. Rather, it is ontological because it is soteriologically grounded.”[58] If Volf is true, we cannot refrain but developing a trinitarian approach to the theology of work in light of the nature of our triune God in whom we share our ontological relationship.
A Proposal: Praxis of the people of God from the Trinitarian understanding of the Godhead
As a community of believers responds to God’s creative, redemptive, sustaining, and empowering work, we can draw out a few points from studying the nature of our triune God as we envision our work. I acknowledge that there are other reasons as well, but drawing from what I have highlighted above in this paper, I would like to highlight four significant principles for the life of the church:
Firstly, the Triune God created out of His free will, love, and satisfaction: It is out of our triune God’s own good pleasure and satisfaction that work originated. In the Scripture, we do not see God working out of necessity, of compulsion, or grudgingly creating, but rather it is out of sheer delight and His own pleasure. God is love- a love manifest between the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. So the act of creation is an outpouring of God’s eternal love relationship within the heart of God. Because it is created as an outflow of God’s own nature of love, creation exists as both the recipient and the mirror of God’s eternal love and ought to mirror that same love back to the Creator and to fellow creatures and creation. The sad irony is that many today understand work as a curse and a punishment from God for survival. However, when we see God at work, there is playfulness in the divine work of the triune God. This should give us the same spirit of playfulness in our work. To work joyfully and take delight in our work. G.W. F Hegel emphasized the playfulness of God’s work anchored in the Trinitarian life. As he writes, “a play of love with itself” is God’s love, which is self-communicative and playful, never imposing itself upon another.[59] However, God’s play at work does not mean the divine economy is a stranger to the rupture, tragedy, scorn, and alienation of labor. God’s work of extending delight and play to creation also means that the redeemer faces the cross. It is not an end in itself or an escape from work, but the result of God’s radical work of love for creation.[60]For too many people, work has lost its potential as a means of self-expression as we respond to God’s gift, and it becomes a drudgery and toil. But if love and play are characteristics of divine work, we should be able to respond to the Creator’s delight in us by recovering love and play in our work, though it may not always be easy.
Secondly, a non-hierarchical and a non-dualistic understanding of work: The divine work of the triune God functions in relationship and is non-hierarchical. It would be dangerous to label the Son’s work as more significant than the Spirit’s work or to label Father’s work above the Son and Spirit. Such hierarchical understanding would mislead the church to perceive some work as more significant than others. Unfortunately, such has been the case in some churches[61]. Dorothy Sayers laments concerning the church and the everyday working life:
In nothing has the church so lost her hold on reality as in her failure to understand and respect the secular vocation. She has allowed work and religion to become separate departments and is astonished to find that, as a result, the secular work of the world is turned to purely selfish and destructive ends and that the greater part of the world’s intelligent workers have become irreligious, or at least, uninterested in religion. But is it so astonishing? How can anyone remain interested in a religion which seems to have no concern with nine-tenths of life?[62]
The dualistic view of sacred and secular work had a devastating impact over the decades in history and continues to haunt us even to this day. It is because of such perspective projects that there are some aspects in life that are insignificant, and that there are areas where God is least bothered or uninvolved in them.
The cooperation of divine activity shows us that fullness is achieved not through competition for scarce resources or the elevation of some workers over others, but in recognition that one’s work is incomplete without the work of others. It is through sharing. God shares out of abundance with creation. Sharing is the true pattern of our life and work. Jensen concludes that there is no such thing as work one does alone; good work always owes itself to other workers.[63] As interdependence permeates all forms of work within the Godhead, our attempt to elevate one worker over another is as economically vain as it is theologically misguided. God’s economy displays no hierarchy of work other than between the Creator and creation. And since none of us occupies the space of the Creator, hierarchies of work that view some work as more important[64] would be a theological error.
God’s work of creating, redeeming, sustaining, and empowering cannot be taken in isolation and labeled as one more significant than the other. His resting on the seventh day and contemplating His work cannot be understood as sacred and other times as secular. All his works of action and rest are a divine activity and are in perichoretic outpouring of his nature and love. Therefore, the need is even greater than ever in the past for the church today to emanate such an example as the church in the world experiences alienation and meaninglessness in work.
Thirdly, Relational and Communal aspect of work: The doctrine of trinity, as it comes to us from the Cappadocian theologians, teaches us that the first thing to be said about the being of God is that it consists in personal communion. Communion is for Basil an ontological category.[65]Communal orientation to work finds its source and inspiration in the triune God in whom there are both persons of irreducible identity and communion that is complete. The being of God is a community of energies, of perichoretic interaction.[66] One question that can be raised here is: what is the relation between the ontology of the church and the Trinity? In what is our ecclesiology any more than a theory which is abstractly derived from an equally theoretical concept of God? Gunton succinctly answers such a question by appealing that we ground the being of the church in the source of the being of all things, the eternal energies of the three persons of the Trinity as they are in perichoretic interrelation.[67] By virtue of sharing in communion with the Father, mediated by the Son, and realized by the Spirit, those who are in Christ are in the church: brought into relation to God through him and into community simultaneously. So to be created is to be created in and for community.
If we are utterly isolated from others, we can neither give nor receive anything from them. Like the divine perichoretic relationship, it is impossible for humans to experience and share a relationship that humanely, but in the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, common to everyone, that makes the church into a communion, corresponding to the trinity, a communion in which ‘personhood and sociality are equiprimal.’[68] God constitutes humans through social and natural relations as independent persons, and so likewise, does the Holy Spirit indwelling constitute them through ecclesial relations as an intimate communion of independent persons.
Relationship and priority of persons within the Godhead precede labour. Jensen writes, what endures in the divine economy are not particular tasks, but the relationships that magnify and share God’s life with others. God seeks relation with others, and others are the point of God’s work.[69] Good work has value because it enhances and enlivens relationships.[70] Workers always take priority over the work being done. Good work sticks close to the faces and hands of the workers pursuing that aim. In the divine economy, work has a decidedly personal face.[71]
It is our communion of relationships with one another that our work can serve the community. Stevens aptly writes, “Trinitarian theology of ministry proposes that service is the expression of the relational love life of the triune God through the whole people of God in the empowering presence of the Spirit. Trinitarian ministry expresses God’s grace through the incarnational service of Jesus to create unity through diversity in the gathered life of the church and build Kingdom community on earth. The ultimate end is the full consummation of the Kingdom and renewal of creation in the new heaven and the new earth.”[72] All the talk of the cosmic Christ, of his work in creation and redemption, must be realized in a community whose life takes place in time and space. The church is called to be that midpoint, the realization in time of the universal redemption and the place where the reconciliation of all things is from time to time anticipated.[73] Grenz is right as he states that God himself is triune, and we are in the image of God only as we enjoy the community with others. He puts it succinctly:
As we live in love- that is, we give expression to the true community- we reflect the love which characterizes the Creator himself. And as we reflect God’s character, which is love, we also live and work (emphasis mine) in accordance with our own true nature. Only by being persons-in-community do we find our true identity.[74]
We come to find our true identity only as we participate and work together with others in the community of the body of Christ. In doing so, we bring honour and reflect God’s character by participating in God’s very purpose of being created for community.
Fourthly, the doxological aspect: Why did Christ institute the Church? The church ultimately exists ultimately for the sake of the glory of the triune God. The Westminster Catechism opens up with a question of what the chief purpose of man’s existence on earth is and concludes that, ‘the chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy Him forever.’ Psalm 19:1 suggests that God’s glory is the fundamental purpose of all creation.
Grenz points out that it is in our sin that we fail to praise God as we should. God is thus at work in bringing us to participate with all creation in glorifying Him.[75] To this end, the Father sent the Son and the Lord purchased us from our sin for God’s glory (Ephe. 1:5-6) and poured out his Spirit in our hearts so that we might live for God. Similar could be understood of Newbigin’s comment, “The church learned to worship God as Trinity only because through the atoning work of Christ men and women have been brought to know Jesus as Saviour and Lord and have been enabled by the gift of the Holy Spirit to be incorporated into the eternal offering of love and obedience of the Son to the Father.”[76] Colin Gunton also writes, “if life is the process of self-refinement which occurs in praise, and if the condition for this occurs when the excellent in itself is present, it can be said that the praise of God actually constitutes the way which we live.”[77] This carries a far-reaching significance for our lives as we live and work corporately. It means that the ultimate motivation for all planning, goals, and desires of our work, whatever noble it may be, must centre solely on bringing glory to God.
The concrete means by which the church becomes an echo of the life of the Godhead are all such as to direct the church away from self-glorification to the source of its life in the creative and re-creative presence to the world. Gunton puts it, “the activity of proclamation and celebration of the Gospel sacraments are temporal ways of orienting the community to the being of God. Proclamation turns the community to the Word whose echo it is called to be; baptism and eucharist, the sacraments of incorporation and koinonia, to the love of God the Father towards his world as mediated by the Son and Spirit.”[78] It is in our doxological approach to work, giving all thanks and glory to God, that our mundane work can find its place and meaning in the sight of God. N. T Wright has put it clearly:
Every act of love, gratitude, and kindness; every work of art or music inspired by the love of God and delight in the beauty of His creation; every minute spent teaching a severely handicapped child to read or to walk; every act of care and nurture, of comfort and support, for one’s fellow of human beings and for that matter one’s fellow nonhuman creatures….makes the name of Jesus honoured in the world- all of this will find its way, through the resurrecting power of God, into the new creation that God will one day make.[79]
It is because no matter how humble and pious our intentions and efforts are to build God’s kingdom, it can only be an end in itself and a project of self-deception. It is work done for the glory of God that can only last. The hope that our human work will find its place in the new heavens and the new earth could help us develop a new perspective to view our work with meaning and purpose. Witherington III helps us understand an often misquoted passage of Isaiah 2:2-5, especially verses 4-5,[80] that Isaiah does not envision a massive work stoppage. What he envisions is a massive war stoppage. When Isaiah envisages the final or eschatological state of affairs, his vision of shalom, well-being, peace, is not of a workless paradise, but a world of peace worshipping one true God and working together rather than warring with each other.[81] The vision is that humans can continue to work and give glory to God even in the New Heavens and the New Earth. Stevens captures well for us to understand how our mundane work can be good work as we look forward into the New Heavens and the New Earth if done for the glory of God. He writes, “We Christian ‘stonemasons’ must build our cathedral in a society that, along with the form of this world, is both passing away and moving toward its destiny of a new heaven and a new earth. What we need, then, are city saints who can turn a screw on an assembly line for God’s glory, and homemakers that will wipe noses or scrub walls and salve hurts for the love of Jesus.”[82] With respect to work and vocation, Christians must recognize the dignity and value of work: It brings glory to God, it benefits others, it serves the world, and it is fundamental to our humanity. Daniel I. Block says, “Every talent is a gift on loan from God, given to us to be used for his glory and the benefit of this world.”[83]
Conclusion
In the unity of the trinity, we are invited to find communion with God in God’s work. Human work is a “duty” and “godlike activity.”[84] Our work has meaning because our work is claimed, blessed, redeemed, and transformed by the triune God. As LaCugna points emphatically that Trinitarian life is also our life because followers of Christ are made sharers in the very life of God, partakers of divinity as they are transformed and perfected by the Spirit of God.[85]God is both profoundly relational and profoundly personal. One cannot use the term person properly in Trinitarian grammar without qualification that each of the ‘persons’ is in relation to the other, in fact, each is mutually internal to the other. Each has space for the other, yet each “irreducible identity.”[86] The primary echoes of that being are to be heard in the ways of God to the world in creation and the perfection of that creation in both Jesus and the Spirit.
Trinitarian doctrine, as suggested by Jensen, appeals to every person that regardless of age, ability, or status, each has distinctive work to bring to the world. As God communicates Godself to us, God blesses creation with difference, and summons us to bring ourselves and our work as a response to the blessing.[87] Experience of God is not of three personal realities in isolation from each other but of persons in relation, always interweaving and interpenetrating each other. It is in a perichoretic relationship that God works in perfect unity. We live in the Trinitarian cosmos created by a Trinitarian God, and so the Trinitarian approach to life and work is indispensable as the body of Christ and God’s image bearers. There can be other reflections as to how one can draw out meaning for our living and work by studying the doctrine of the Trinity. However, it is my hope that the four points that have been proposed, to understand work as God’s good pleasure, developing a non-hierarchical and non-dualistic approach, that we are relational beings for community, and our work is for the glory of God, are significant. It is because this can offer a solution of our alienation from work and the negligence of the doctrine, and offer meaning and the eschatological purpose of our daily living and work. This Trinitarian approach is modelled by participating in God’s continuing work in the lives of the church through human agents in the world.
References:
[1] Colin E. Gunton, The Promise of Trinitarian Theology (Edinburgh: Scotland; T & T CLark, 1991), 3.
[2]Kevin Vanhoozer ed., The Trinity in a Pluralistic Age: Theological essays on culture and religion (Grand Rapids: Michigan; William B. Eerdmans Publising, 1997), 2.
[3] The doctrine of Trinity is not explicitly spelled out anywhere in the Bible. This doctrine is the product of a lengthy process of theological reflection that arose from the experience of the early Christians.
[4] David Bosch, Transforming Mission: Paradigm Shifts in Theology of Mission (Maryknoll: 1991),
390
[5] Ross Hastings, Missional God Missional Church: Hope for Re-evangelizing the West (Grand Rapids: Michigan; Intervarsity Presss, 2012), 15.
[6] R. Paul Stevens, Doing God’s Business: Meaning and Motivation for the Marketplace (Grand Rapids: Michigan; William B. Eerdmans Publishing, 2006), 83.
[7] Hastings, Missional God Missional Church, 84.
[8] Darrel Cosden, The Heavenly Good of the Earthly Work (Great Britain: Hendrickson Publishers, 2006), 136.
[9] Gunton, Promise of Trinitarian Theology, 8.
[10] Ibid., 8.
[11] Ross Hastings, Echoes of Coinherence: Trinitarian Theology and Science Together (Eugene: Oregon; Cascade Books, 2017), 124-125.
[12] Paul Fiddes, Participating in God: A Pastoral Doctrine of the Trinity (Louisville: Kentucky; John Knox Press, 2000), 71.
[13] Ibid.,, 71
[14] Miroslav Volf, After Our Likeness: The Church as the Image of the Trinity (Grand Rapids: Michigan; William B. Eerdmans Publishing, 1998), 209.
[15] Fiddes, Participating in God, 71
[16] Volf, After Our Likeness, 74.
[17] Volf, After our Likeness, 78-79
[18] Douglas H. Knight, The Theology of John Zizioulas: Personhood and the Church (Burlington: USA; Ashgate Publishing Company, 2007), 98.
[19] Volf, After our likeness, 79.
[20] Jonathan R. Wilson, God’s Good World: Reclaiming the Doctrine of Creation (Grand Rapids: Michigan; Baker Baker Publishing, 2013), 75.
[21] Jiirgen Moltman, The Trinity and the Kingdom of God (Munich; SCM Press Ltd, 1981), 174-175.
[22] Gunton, Promise of Trinitarian Theology, 10-11.
[23] Ibid., 10.
[24] Ibid., 3.
[25] Leonardo Boff, Trinity and Society (Eugene: Oregon; Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2005), 146-147.
[26] Jason S. Sexton and Stanely N. Gundry eds., Two Views in the Doctrine of Trinity, (Grand Rapids: Zondervan Publishing House, 2014), 175
[27] Hastings, Missional God, Missional Church, 81.
[28] Moltman, The trinity and The Kingdom of God, 105
[29] Ibid., 106.
[30] Ibid., 108.
[31] Christian Schumacher, God in work (Oxford: England; Lion Publishing, 1998), 76.
[32] Moltman, The Trinity and The Kingdomof God, 112.
[33] Ibid., 108.
[34] Ibid., 113
[35] Ibid., 113.
[36] Ibid., 114.
[37] Hastings, Missional God Missional Church, 81.
[38] Oliver Donovan, Resurrection and Moral Order: An outline for evangelical ethics (Grand Rapids: Michigan; William B. Erdmans Publishing Company, 2001), 15.
[39] Sexton and Gundry, Two Views on the Doctrine of Trinity, 178.
[40] Ibid., 178.
[41] Christine M. Fletcher, The Artist and the Trinity: Dorothy L. Sayers’ Theology of Work (Eugene: Oregon; Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2013), 38.
[42] N. T Wright, Surpised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the resurrection, and the Mission of the Church (New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 2008), 209.
[43] Moltman, The Trinity and the Kingdom of God, 184.
[44] Ibid., 124.
[45] Hans Schwarz, The Trinity: The Central Mystery of Christianity (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2017), 191.
[46] T. F Torrance, Royal priesthood: A Theology of Ordained Ministry (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2nd edition, 1995), 23.
[47] Colin E. Gunton, The One, The Three and The Many: God, Creation and the Culture of Modernity (Cambridge: United Kingdom, 1993), 181-182.
[48] Ibid., 182.
[49] Ibid., 184.
[50] Moltman, The Trinity and the Kingdom of God, 114.
[51] Vanhoozer, Trinity as Public Truth, 7.
[52] Ibid., 8.
[53] Ibid., 8.
[54] Volf, After Our Likeness, 199.
[55] Vanhoozer, Trinity in a Pluralistic Society, 7.
[56] Gunton, Promise of Trinitarian Theology, 5.
[57] Ibid., 6.
[58] Volf, After Our Likeness, 195.
[59] David H. Jensen, Responsive Labor: A Theology of Work (Louisville: Kentucky; Westminster John Knox Press, 2006), 61.
[60] Ibid., 61.
[61] At least in some of the North-East Indian churches that I am associated with has this hierarchical view of evangelism and mission work much elevated being in politics and business.
[62] Dorothy Sayers, as quoted in James Thwaites, The Church Beyond the Congregation (Great Britain; Paternoster Press, 1999), 213.
[63] Jensen, Responsive Labor, 56.
[64] Work such as pastoral work, overseas mission, healthcare, charity work viewed as more important than business work, administrative work or politics.
[65] Gunton, Promise of Trinitarian Theology, 72.
[66] Ibid., 73.
[67] Gunton, Promise of Trinitarian Theology, 82.
[68] Volf, After Our Likeness, 212.
[69] Jensen, Responsive Labor, 57.
[70] Ibid., 57.
[71] Ibid., 57.
[72] Paul Stevens, The Other Six Days: Vocation, Work and Ministry in Biblical Perspective (Grand Rapids: Michigan; William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1999), 144-145.
[73] Colin Gunton, The Actuality of Atonement (Grand Rapids: Michigan; William B. Eerdmans Pubishing Company, 1989), 170.
[74] Stanley Grenz, Created for Community: Connecting Christian Belief and Christian Living (Wheaton: Illinois; Bridgepoit Book, 1996), 80.
[75] Grenz, Created for Community, 216.
[76] Vanhoozer, Trinity as Public Truth, 8.
[77] Gunton, The Actuality of Atonement, 201.
[78] Gunton, Promise of Trinitarian Theology, 82.
[79] Wright, Surprised by Hope, 208.
[80] Verse 4 and 5 reads, “They shall beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore. O house of Jacob, come, let us walk in the light of the Lord.”
[81] Ben Witherington III, Work: The Kingdom Perspective on Labor (Grand Rapids: Michigan; William B. Erdmans Publishing, 2011), xiv.
[82] R. Paul Stevens, Liberating the Laity: Equipping All the Saints for Ministry (Grand Rapids: Intervarsity Press, 1983), 91.
[83] Daniel I. Block, For the Glory of God: Recovering a Biblical Theology of Worship (Grand Rapids: Michigan; Baker Academics, 2014), 138.
[84] Other Six Days, 123.
[85] Catherine Mowry LaCugna, God for Us: The Trinity and Christian Life (Chicago: Harper Collins, 1991), 22.
[86] Hastings, Echoes of Coinherence, 128.
[87] Jensen, Responsive Labor, 53.
