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It's my privilege to welcome you and to introduce our Jones lecturer, Reverend Mr. Gordon Mikoski. Before our hymn, we have a few announcements to deal with, naturally, since this is church. There is a survey that our Office of Seminary Relations would very much appreciate you filling out before you leave the campus today.

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You will find this-- David, am I right-- in a box in the entryway of the chapel. Excuse me? On the table. On the table in the entryway.

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And if you will fill out this survey on the midwinter lectures this year, and it can be left in the chapel, in the McCord Atrium, in Macmillan 210, or with David Evans. You have four choices. So please, if you'll give us some feedback on the lectures this year. And secondly, and much to our regret, we have to conserve our president.

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We've been using him too roughly lately. Still thinking that one out? OK. OK.

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But we do have to cancel the 1015 address. Is that right? So we are continuing to work him too hard, it seems like. My apologies.

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These are latest updates. Dr. Johnson will speak at 10:15, and the 11:15, we will see how much of President Wardlaw is still available. He doesn't sound good this morning, but he looks very good.

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So, please bear with us. Our hymn this morning is number 457, I Greet Thee, Whom I Sure Redeemer Art. We welcome again the Reverend Mr. Gordon McCoskey, our Jones lecturer for 2005, pastor, scholar, educator, currently an instructor in Christian education, Princeton Theological Seminary, and dissertationist at Emory University, writing on the topic of Growing in the Doxological Life.

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This may be too interesting a title for a dissertation. In the first Jones lecture, Mr. McCoskey addressed us on baptizing and teaching in the triune name, returning to the challenge of James Smart's, the teaching ministry of the church, which grew out of these Jones lectures in 1953. And indeed, Mr.

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McCoskey brought us up to date of a half century since those lectures by James Smart and his book. Mr. McCoskey, you brought us up on changes in the field of theology and the renewal of Trinitarian reflection throughout the Christian agenda. You brought us up on changes in the church and in the Christian education field.

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In picking up from James Smart, you draw our attention to the centrality of baptism, as you say, bodily practice that is our starting point and orienting center. Indeed, you gave us three reasons for your focus on baptism. Baptism is the core practice that confers identity and defines vocation. Many of us here, raised in the Westminster catechisms, remembered question 167 of the larger catechism on the much neglected duty of improving our baptism.

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I remembered it because of the session of Central Presbyterian Church of Lafayette, Indiana, chose that question to examine me at age 13 off for admission to the Lord's table. But more, I remember the catechism's fierce and specific baptismal piety that integrates our whole life as those, in the words of the answer, who have given over our names for Christ. You went on to remind us that baptism is inescapably trinitarian in character, and finally that baptism is bodily, local, contextual, and ecclesial, that it is a vision of the Christian life.

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You then proceeded to sketch out how, in practice, baptism can and should be the source and guide for Christian education. This morning, we eagerly await, in this second Jones lecture of 2005, your address on the topic Teaching for Identity and Openness. Mr. McCloskey.

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That was such a helpful summary. I can now skip the first paragraph. I've entitled the second lecture triune teaching for identity and openness.

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And here I want to focus on the ethical and the public dimensions of baptizing and teaching in the triune name. In other words, Christian witness in the public sphere. Now more than ever, we need to think carefully and deeply about the outcomes of our efforts in Christian education in reference not only to the life of the church, but also and especially in reference to the contemporary social and political context in which we live.

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My argument in this lecture will be simply that baptizing and teaching in the triune name should aim at producing deeply committed Christians who engage in acts of creative and sometimes subversive citizenship. I'll begin by laying out some of the political hazards and ethical problems associated with emphasizing baptism and the doctrine of the Trinity in Christian education, and then I'll describe some of the essential features of a triune approach to Christian education that may produce people who possess a strong sense of Christian identity and a profound openness in the public. public arena to those who do not share that identity.

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I've always been bothered by the fact that so many people went to church in Nazi Germany, and yet so little was done by so few to oppose the deaf machine. Why didn't the churches produce more people who were able to see the Nazi monstrosity for what it was and actively oppose it? How was it that arguably the most Christian nation on earth at that time could be so drunk with nationalistic zeal and so willfully blind to the extermination of Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, and others? Millions of Christians in Germany in the 1930s went to church every Sunday, had their babies baptized, and had their children participate in Christian education.

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So many of those baptized babies grew up to become obedient stormtroopers and willing instruments of death. How was that possible? The Nazi nightmare caused no less a theologian than Karl Barth to rethink his theology of baptism. In volume four, part four of his monumental Church Dogmatics, he argued that it was a mistake to interpret baptism in sacramental terms.

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as if the triune God were actually at work in baptism. Instead, he proposed to think of baptism as the first and paradigmatic act of human response to grace. He actually writes that he has come to a Zwinglian conclusion and will say it better than Zwingli himself said it. Think about that.

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The crisis posed by German Christianity during the Nazi era was of such magnitude that it pushed the greatest reformed theologian since Calvin himself to embrace Anabaptist sacramental thinking. But lest we allow ourselves to think that the Nazification of Germany and the corruption of the churches there was somehow distinctively A Lutheran problem, I want to also call to mind South Africa during the era of apartheid, a little closer to home Calvinist Christians, our reformed cousins in South Africa, came up with that racist system and provided the biblical and theological rationale for it.

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Untold numbers of human beings were mistreated, beaten, killed, under a system inspired and upheld by Calvinists, maybe not very good ones, but Calvinists nonetheless. Throughout the course of the apartheid era, white, reformed South Africans went to church, had their babies baptized, and sent their kids to church school. How was it possible for so many good church people to go along with and to support such a system? Now, the reasons for Nazi Germany and apartheid South Africa are complex.

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and many, and I won't attempt to provide explanations for those phenomena here. Suffice it to say that religious passivity and banal collaboration with state-sponsored evil do not belong only to one place or time or religious group. Such horrors remain a possibility in every time and place, even our own. Christian education in America today, as in any era, must take seriously its ethical obligations, vis-a-vis the social and political context in which we live.

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Well, today, we live in a world dripping with religion and with intense religious instruction. The world today, in fact, may be a more religious place than ever before. Nearly all of the major conflicts in the world have an unmistakably religious dimension to them. Hinduism, Islam, Judaism, and Christianity all face serious challenges from fundamentalists who are willing to engage in, and even to support from afar, acts of violence against those who are religiously or culturally other.

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Jonathan Sacks, the Chief Rabbi of the United Kingdom, in his recent book, The Dignity of Difference, How to avoid the clash of civilizations writes prophetically, the great faiths provide meaning and purpose for their adherents. The question is, can they make space for those who are not its adherents, who sing a different song, hear a different music, tell a different story? On that question, the fate of the 21st century may turn.

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close quote. Sack's question haunts me as a Christian educator. Can Christianity make space for those who are not its adherents, for those who sing a different song or tell a different story than we do? What kind

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of Christian education would help us to foster deeply committed Christians who make space for others? I think that these are not questions with which James Smart had to wrestle in 1953, but surely we must face them as we think about Christian education in the churches today. Religion and religious education can do tremendous good and also unbelievable harm. Religious educators around the world and the different religions, including Christianity, can teach exclusion, separation, and even implicitly or indirectly violence.

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Or they can teach respect, toleration, cooperation, and non-violence. The words of the oldest text of Christian education, the Didache, ring in my ears when I think of these things it says in its opening lines there are two ways one of life and one of death and there is a great difference between the two ways baptismally based Christian education must take responsibility for the ethical outcomes of our efforts to avoid this question And this responsibility runs the risk of tacitly supporting movements and forces aligned with oppression, injustice, or even, God forbid, death.

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What constitutes the difference between lethal and life-giving Christian education? I think that the difference has to do with the way in which human differences are dealt with. The capacity for openness and care for those who are different marks the shape of the divide between teaching that diminishes life and that which protects life.

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And let me try here to connect the dots a little more carefully between yesterday's lecture on the interplay between baptism, trinity, and education and the issues that I've raised this morning. When I talk about the doctrine of God as trinity and about the sacrament of baptism, I'm talking about two of the most exclusive and Christian-specific elements of Christianity. When it comes to teaching about God, no other religion in the world espouses belief in one God and three co-equal persons in exactly the way that we do as Christians, though there is a form of Hinduism that comes close.

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We Christians are neither polytheists nor undifferentiated monotheists. We are Trinitarian monotheists. We believe that the one God exists as three persons. Quoting Gregory of Nazianzus in the Institutes, Calvin wrote of this distinctively Christian view of God.

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I cannot think of the one without quickly being encircled by the splendor of the three. Nor can I discern the three without being straightway carried back to the one. Calvin goes on to say, let us not then be led to imagine a trinity of persons that keeps our thoughts distracted and does not at once lead them back to that unity. Indeed, the words Father, Son, and Spirit imply a real distinction.

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Let no one think that these titles, whereby God is variously designated from his works, are empty. They are a distinction, but not a division. The doctrine of the Trinity, for all of its richness and beauty, does not make for easy bridge building with our neighbors of other faiths. This is one of the reasons why, in the aftermath of the European wars of religion in the 17th century, many Enlightenment intellectuals talked about God, but not necessarily about the Trinity.

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Baptism, likewise, has to do with Christian particularity. Someone gets baptized into the body of Christ to receive a particular religious identity. In baptism, old ways of life, including religious ones, are left behind and renounced in order that the new way of faith and discipleship in relation to Jesus Christ, and by extension to the triune God, might be established. Baptism involves cutting ties with the forces of evil, injustice, and godlessness, and being bound with cords of faith, hope, and love to the triune God and to our neighbors.

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Stressing baptism and the particular religious identity that comes with it doesn't always make for interfaith dialogue in easy terms. There are those in the churches today who seem quite comfortable with emphasizing the particularities and distinctive features of Christian belief and practice over and against everyone else. I fear that Christian identity assertion of that sort leads all too easily to nasty forms of religious chauvinism and also to calls from withdrawal from society.

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society into enclaves of supposed holiness. Such Christian identity assertion will doubtlessly lead to sophisticated forms of religious tribalism. In today's world, merely asserting religious identity presents a dangerous option. Of course, there are those in the church on the other side of the spectrum who want to erase

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or downplay distinctive marks of Christian identity in the name of establishing good relations with our non-Christian neighbors. Some believe that the way to deal with religious differences calls for downplaying them, putting them under the carpet. This point of view would have a sacrifice Christian identity for the sake of openness. I find that to be an equally problematic option.

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I believe that there are two wrong answers and one right answer to the problem of Christian faith formation in the increasingly pluralistic world in which we live. The 2 wrong answers, in my view, are the ones I just mentioned. Identity assertion to the point of excluding otherness and openness to non-Christian others to the point of losing any meaningful sense of particular Christian identity. I believe a better answer

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involves holding together identity and openness. And the nexus of the doctrine of the Trinity and the sacrament of the baptism can provide us with the necessary orientation for an approach to Christian education that helps us hold together these two seemingly contradictory convictions. In the next section of what I have to say, I want to share with you some initial thoughts about how we might frame a Trinitarian approach to Christian education that will lead to this more excellent way. In my study of the linkage between baptism, the doctrine of the Trinity, and ecclesial pedagogy and the thought of Gregory of Nyssa, I found some very helpful resources to aid in the development of an approach to Christian education that simultaneously promotes

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identity and openness. Gregory of Nyssa emphatically proclaimed that we can never know all that there is to know about the mystery of the triune God. We don't have the capacity to comprehend the inner essence of the Trinity. Full and complete knowledge of God always eludes us.

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The mystery of God is always bigger than the grandest and most elaborate of human conceptions. Gregory of Nyssa stands out among the company of theologians in the history of Christianity for providing one of the earliest and most compelling articulations of the limits of what can be known about God. He wrote, The uncreated nature alone, which we acknowledge in the Father and in the Son and in the Holy Spirit, surpasses all significance of names.

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For this cause, the word, when he spoke of the name in delivering the faith, that is in baptism, a reference to Matthew 28 in the Great Commission, did not add what it is. For how could a name be found for that which is above every name, but gave authority that whatever name our intelligence by pious effort be enabled to discover to indicate the transcendent nature, That name should be applied alike to Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, whether it be the good or the incorruptible, whatever name each may think proper to be employed to indicate the undefiled nature of the Godhead. And by this deliverance, the Word, or the Logos, seems to me to lay down for us this law, that we are to be persuaded that the divine essence is ineffable and incomprehensible.

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For it is plain that the title of Father does not present to us the essence, but only indicates the relation to the Son. The knowledge of the divine Trinitarian essence is beyond our capacity, as we have in the profession of faith and baptism, the doctrine delivered to us that suffices for our salvation. In other words, what has been disclosed to us is that the tri-relational God is one, not the way in which that is the case.

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Even though the way in which the three are one is beyond us, Gregory says that we do have some reliable knowledge about the work of the triune God for our salvation. The knowledge that is necessary for our healing and restoration has been revealed to us and can be known through scripture. And he wrote in another place, we account for God's willingness to admit people to communion with himself by his love towards humankind, but since that

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which is by nature finite cannot rise above its prescribed limits or lay hold of the superior nature of the Most High. On this account, he, bringing his power so full of love for humanity down to the level of human weakness, so far as it was possible for us to receive it, bestowed on us this helpful gift of grace. For as by divine dispensation the sun, that is S-U-N in the sky, tempering the intensity of his full beams with the intervening air, pours down light as well as heat on those who receive his rays, being himself unapproachable by reason of the weakness of our nature.

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So in the same way, the divine power, after the manner of the illustration of the sun I have used, though exalted far above our nature and inaccessible to all approach, like a tender mother, who joins in the inarticulate utterances of her babe, gives to our human nature what it is capable of receiving. And thus in the various manifestations of God to humanity, he both adapts himself to us and speaks in human language and assumes wrath and pity and such like emotions so that through feeling corresponding to our own infantile life might be led as by the hand, and lay hold of the words which his foresight has given.

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God's providence helps our infirmity by using our own idioms of speech, so that such as are inclined to sin may be restrained, and that those who are overtaken by it may not despair of return by the way of repentance when they see God's mercy, while those who are walking uprightly and strictly may yet more adorn their own life with virtue. as knowing that by their own life they rejoice Him whose eyes are over the righteous. That's a passage that Calvin himself could have written about God's accommodation to our capacities. McGregory of Nyssa has a very similar notion.

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As the ultimate teacher and healer, the triune God takes the initiative to come to us in our finitude and in our fallenness. And that which is disclosed to us has a practical purpose, to lead us to restoration. Revelation is not aimed at solving intellectual puzzles.

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It's intended to have salutatory benefits. So with this in mind, Gregory warns that scriptural language and the concepts of theology should not be reified. They should be taken with utmost seriousness as God-given and as trustworthy pointers to the reality of God.

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But we need also to always bear in mind that what we do not know about God. In Gregory of Nyssa's thought, we find an interesting interplay between what we can and cannot know. about the triune God. We see further that which lies beyond our comprehension conditions and qualifies that which we are able to comprehend.

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This means that we are entitled to hold our distinctively Christian convictions about the mystery of God as Trinity and the economy of salvation. But we must hold these convictions with humility and with generosity of spirit. Such an emphasis as Gregory of Nyssa provides on the limits of our knowledge lays the groundwork for the kind of openness to others that creative citizenship in a pluralistic democracy requires. And here I turn again to Rabbi Sacks in his book.

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He writes, the divine word comes from heaven, but it is interpreted on earth. The divine light is infinite. But to be visible to us, it must be refracted through human understanding. Truth in heaven transcends space and time, but human perception is bounded by space and time.

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When two propositions conflict, it is not necessarily because one is true and the other false. It may be, and often is, that each represents different perspectives on reality. God transcends the particularities of culture and the limits of human understanding. He is my God, but also the God of all humanity, even of those whose customs and ways of life are unlike mine.

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That is not to say that God endorses every act done in his name. On the contrary, a God of your side, as well as mine, must be a God of justice, who stands above us both, teaching us to make space for one another. to hear each other's claims and to resolve them equitably. Only such a god would be truly transcendent.

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Sacks, like Gregory Gregory of Nyssa rightly emphasizes the transcendence of God and our inability to fully grasp that mystery. But Sachs, unlike Gregory of Nyssa, helps us to see the profound ethical implications of emphasizing divine transcendence at the heart of the triune mystery. Since none of us can claim to fully and finally comprehend the nature of God, we must make space

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for those whose conceptions of God and ultimate reality differ from our own in the public sphere. In more technical terms, apophatic spirituality can lead us to religious affirmation of humility in the face of pervasive pluralism without giving ourselves over to it. Jeffrey Stout in his recent book, Democracy and Tradition, can help us flesh this out even further.

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Stout criticizes both the Rawlsian liberalism that would inhibit religious identity in public ethical discourse and a Christian sectarianism advocated by thinkers like Alastair MacIntyre and Stanley Hauerwas. Instead, as an alternative to both, Stout calls upon religious individuals and communities to bring the particularities of their religious identity into public deliberations about the common good as a necessary element of the practice of democratic conversation. Stout writes, I'm trying to articulate a form of pluralism that citizens with strong religious commitments can accept and that welcomes their full participation in public life without fudging on its premises.

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Christians should own the particularities of their identity and should be willing to provide rational explanations for the positions they hold on various ethical matters, according to Stout. They should also remain open to hearing others' points of view and the reasons for the positions that they hold. Giving up on the practice of such democratic conversation by religious communities may set up the conditions for a return to wars of religion. the kind of which ravaged Europe immediately prior to and gave rise to the Enlightenment.

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Stout calls people with deep religious convictions to engage in the practice of democratic conversation marked by both identity and openness. Well, it's not only what we don't know about the mystery of God that provides us with clues about how to teach for identity and openness in the churches, It's also what we do know that helps us. On the basis of Barth's theology of Christ as the disclosure of truth, Jeff Stout further calls upon Christians to be open to finding the truth both inside and outside the church.

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He writes, Thus, when Christians are considering the questions of where truths, in the plural, are to be found, They must be prepared to look both inside the church and outside of it. Wherever they look, they must be suspicious and critical, as well as open to the possibility of needing to change their minds. Wherever they find important truths being spoken by other human beings, they must take themselves to have been addressed by Christ himself, the truth, the light, the word.

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Barth refers to true words spoken or true lives lived outside the church as secular parables of the kingdom in 4.3 of the Dogmatics. Stout goes on, as in the case of the New Testament parables, Jesus Christ is their ultimate source as well as their criterion a Christian must use to appraise them. Stout, in that statement affirms a very ancient Christian theological conviction, namely, that all truth, all goodness, all beauty, all justice have their ultimate source in the triune God.

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While we cannot know everything there is to know about the mystery of God, what the triune God has disclosed to us in Jesus Christ is of such profound and universal nature that we can and we must Learn to think outside the parameters of the church in order to participate in the ongoing work of the triune God in the world, including in contemporary American society. Revelation gives us eyes to see the presence of that triune God in the midst of the ordinary things of our everyday lives. We can never allow ourselves the idolatrous luxury of thinking that somehow the churches

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have a corner on God's activities. I've seen too much of the church, I guess, from the inside to believe in a pure church inspired totally by the Holy Spirit. Half the time I can't tell the difference between the church and from the world when I'm standing in the midst of it.

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And I've seen enough signs of God's work bringing healing and hope in the midst of our society and its many cultures to believe that American life is utterly devoid of God's activity. In light of the dual awareness that the church isn't a pure haven of spirituality and light, and that the triune God is also at work in the midst of culture, The crucial question for us in the church and in Christian education becomes one of discernment. How can we teach people how to discern what is of the triune God and what isn't, or merely appears to be so?

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A contemporary trinitarian approach to Christian education should aim at providing young people and adults with the conceptual tools they need for discerning the triune God's activities today in both church and culture. In this way, Christian education for discernment can equip Christians to join up with those people and groups engaged in endeavors of truth and justice and goodness wherever they may be found. We don't necessarily need other people or other groups to hold our Christian beliefs and to be part of our tribe in order for us to work alongside them.

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This reminds me of an incident from my pastoral ministry that has been indelibly imprinted on my thinking about Christian education. While serving as an associate pastor for education at the Grosse Pointe Memorial Church in a suburb of Detroit, I became interested in the work of the Search Institute on asset building and youth. The notion of building assets and youth interested me quite a bit, and I began to talk with the superintendent of the public schools in that community about ways to bring together everyone in the community who had something to do with adolescence and their development.

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She and I and a handful of others began to work on the formation of what we called the Youth Summit. It was to be a coalition of leaders from public and private schools, religious communities, recreation leagues, businesses, hospitals, police, and public safety. We wanted everyone in that community who had something to do with youth to come together once a month for conversation about ways to strengthen the development of the young people in our community. One of my roles in this effort involved making a pitch to my fellow youth ministers to get them on board with the plan.

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And I remember the gathering of eight or 10 church youth leaders in which we enjoyed a meal together and some fellowship and then got down to business. And I laid out the emerging vision for the youth summit. Most of my fellow youth pastors seemed interested and ready to sign on, but one of them, from a neighboring church just across the street, wanted no part of it whatsoever.

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The conversation quickly became a series of interchanges between him and me. He said he wasn't interested in being part of the youth summit because it wasn't primarily or exclusively A Christian project. I tried my best to articulate why I thought Christians ought to work together in the public arena with other people of good will. After long discussion, it became clear that we had two very different theological perspectives on the work of the triune God.

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He believed that the Holy Spirit only worked in and through the Church. And it was the work of the Church, in his view, to bring God's message and presence to an utterly corrupt world. I, for my part, maintain that the Holy Spirit was at work wherever people were engaged in goodness and justice and healthy activities, and that the work of the Triune God was in no way limited to the Church, that it was the task of the Church

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to catch up to and to participate in God's mission in the world. That's already always going on. And it didn't particularly matter to me if the baseball league officials, the public school teachers, or the doctors saw what they were doing in theological terms. I argued that from the point of view of the church and my version of Trinitarian theology, such activities

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could be embraced and supported because we saw the triune God at work at the deepest levels of such ordinary, constructive behavior. In the end, neither one persuaded the other. But it was a defining moment for me in my thinking and in my understanding of Christian education. And I believe more strongly today than ever before that the ultimate source of life and human flourishing is the triune God.

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We don't necessarily need other people to say that or to call it that in order to work with them. Christian education conducted in close proximity to the doctrine of the Trinity and the baptismal rite should not only provide tools for discernment, and this is the next subject, it should also foster what I call both-and thinking. Christian education today should intentionally foster a complex kind of thinking characterized by holding seemingly contradictory things together.

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Paradox and tension mark the central conceptions of the divine in Christianity. God is one and three at the same time. Jesus Christ is one person with two natures, fully human, fully divine. Christian education ought, therefore, to avoid attempts to resolve such tensions as if they were merely logic puzzles.

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The divine antinomies or paradoxes at the center of Christian belief don't, first of all, lend themselves to such resolution. But more than that, they function pedagogically as tensions that stretch and challenge our minds. They keep us conceptually open and help us to avoid locking in on any human conception and turning it into an idol of the mind. The point is not to find perfect analogies that explain the triene mystery.

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The point, as I see it, is rather to live with these paradoxes until they become habits of mind. The famous quote from the poet Rilke helps me in my thinking at this point. He wrote to a young colleague, have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search for answers which could not be given to you now because you would not be able to live them.

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And the point is to live everything. Live the questions. Perhaps then, someday, far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, Live your way into an answer.

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Christian education developed in relation to baptism and the doctrine of the Trinity, I believe, should help learners live the questions for a very long time. It should help learners to avoid calcification of conceptualizations of God and of ourselves and of others. We need to avoid the temptation to provide easy answers and to solve paradoxes because it's living with tensions that makes the habit of mind possible for us to engage with identity and openness in a radically plural democratic society. Living the questions posed by this unusual claim about the unity and plurality of God may well shape

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the habits needed for creative citizenship in a social and political context marked also by the themes of unity and diversity. This same habit of mine, fostered by an approach to Christian education that takes its cues from a baptismally grounded doctrine of the Trinity, can also provide tools for trenchant critique of the social order in church and society. In his work on the doctrine of the Trinity, Jurgen Moltmann explicated the deep interconnections between a Cappadocian-inspired social doctrine of the Trinity and radical critique of power relations in church and society. Moltmann points out that the emphasis on the monarchical unity of God has often been aligned historically with patterns of hierarchy, patriarchy, and domination.

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In contrast, a thoroughly trinitarian doctrine of God carries radical implications for the transformation of social life, both in church and society. He wrote, he writes, We have said that it is not the monarchy of a ruler that corresponds to the triune God. It is the community of women and men without privileges and without subjugation. The three divine persons have everything in common.

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except for their personal characteristics. So the Trinity corresponds to a community in which people are defined through their relations with one another and in their significance for one another, not in opposition to one another in terms of power and possession. Teaching in relation to the doctrine of God as Trinity can equip people with the tools for radical prophetic critique of all forms of injustice and the abuse of power in today's society.

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Further on in his exploration of the implications of the doctrine of the Trinity for public life, Motman argues that there is a profound and inescapable connection between an understanding of God as Trinity and human freedom in the midst of differences. He writes, It is only in love that human freedom arrives at its truth. I am free and feel myself to be truly free when I am respected and recognized by others, and when I, for my part, respect and recognize them. I become truly free when I open my life for other people and share with them, and when other people open their lives for me and share with them.

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them with me. Then the other person is no longer the limitation of my freedom. He or she is an expansion of it. In mutual participation in life, individual people become free beyond the limits of their individuality and discover the common room for living which their freedom offers.

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That is the social side of freedom, the kind of freedom that we see in the Trinity. We call it love and solidarity. In it, we experience the uniting of isolated individuals. In it, we experience the uniting of things that have been forcibly divided.

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close quote. The love and freedom characteristic of the divine community of persons in the Trinity corresponds in Moltmann's theology to a radical alternative for life together in the churches, but also in pluralistic democracy. like that which we find in contemporary America. The vision of a socially egalitarian trinity should plant the seeds of discontent with all forms of hierarchy, patriarchy, and exploitation.

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It's the job of Christian education, I believe, not only to plant such seeds of discontent, but to water them diligently and regularly. Lastly, and in conclusion, A contemporary Trinitarian approach to Christian education would have to stress the practice of love. The writer of 1 John is right that whatever else the mystery of the Trinity might be, it certainly has to do with the greatest love imaginable.

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To be baptized into the name of the triune God and to live the Christian life is to be about the business of love. That means not just adoring an image or an extension of ourselves or our community. For that isn't love, that's narcissism writ large. True love, as disclosed in the mystery of the Trinity, helps us to avoid the dual distortions of too much and too little self.

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It helps us to see that to be created in the image of the triune God means that we need both well-differentiated personhood and profound relationality with others, even those who differ from us. True love has to do with developing and maintaining particular identity but refusing to be imprisoned by it. True love involves reaching out in openness to those who are truly different than ourselves.

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It stretches out a hand to another human being in solidarity and friendship. Considered socially, this kind of love means working for justice, for peace, for the protection of human dignity, and for all forms of social righteousness. The writer of 1 John confronts us with a stark and difficult truth. We cannot say we love the triune God.

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if we do not act in love towards our neighbor. Notice that it doesn't say towards other members of our household or our family, but in love towards our neighbor. The one who is different and other, but in close proximity. The one who sings different songs and who tells a different story than we do.

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The acid test of all our talk about God is our ethical behavior toward those who do not hold our beliefs and do not engage in our practices as Christians. In the end of the day, a Trinitarian approach to Christian education is really about helping people to learn how to do what the Triune God has done for us, in reaching out in openness to make space for the other. Augustine was right.

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If we want to know about and teach something meaningful about the triune God, we must reflect deeply upon and act in love. To teach for identity and openness in the triune name is simply to teach how to be loved and how to love. And there's nothing in our public life that is more creative or more subversive than that. Thank you very much.

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I think we can take one or two questions, right? Yeah. She's bringing the microphone. I, of course, have been retired for a number of years, do not have, am not a

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active pastor. But listening to your very erudite lectures, I wonder if you have thought in terms of writing material that could be distributed in, say, a church with only 35 or 40 members and you've got a very dedicated teacher or two even with elementary age children, and that this teacher could be inspired by illustrations and instructions in Christian education that would enable them to do the kind of job, so to speak, that you have been describing to us needs to be done today in the church through Christian education?

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Well, that's coming down the line. I'm trying to lay out the sort of launching pad, and then the curricular implications come next. But thank you for that. Would you share with us your biblical references for the points of view that you have expounded to us today?

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That would be very helpful. Yeah. Well, there are many, but let me just give a couple, a few. One is the first, the prologue to John's gospel.

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the Logos theology, that the Word, the Logos, is the light of all people, the life of all humanity, and the Word became flesh and dwelt among us. There's an interesting, I think, profound interplay between the universality of God's presence in the heart of every human being, and the particularities of the disclosure of that reality of God in the person of Jesus Christ. I'm helped by Karl Rahner, the Catholic theologian in this.

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He has some wonderful things to say about the nature of revelation, both in the broadest general sense and also working toward the particular manifestation of God in the incarnation. So that's one set of texts. The text we heard last night from Philippians chapter 4, there's a kind of broad vision there that whatever is good and trustworthy, and I don't have it in front of me, but that list of things that Paul calls us to attend to would be another place.

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Then things like the Acts of the Apostles where you see God out in front of the church and the church scrambling to catch up to God and to make sense out of it. Peter goes to Cornelius' house and so on and he preaches and the Holy Spirit comes upon them, these Gentiles, and he baptizes them. When he goes back home, he has trouble. They say, what in the hell were you doing with those Gentiles?

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They said, well, what could I do? God showed up. And I did what I thought I should do. So the texts like that are also helpful.

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But also texts related in the Psalms to the sovereignty of God and the largeness of God. And also texts like in Isaiah where even somebody like a pagan like Cyrus, is the instrument of God's activity. So, I mean, there's a lot there.

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But it's in shorthand, it's what I'm saying in part is that stream of the reformed tradition which emphasizes the providence of God at work in the whole world and the need for us to be engaged meaningfully in society and not to depart from it. I think probably the last one. Yeah. Oh, I'm sorry.

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Actually, you had your hand up, so here and then back there, I guess. I think you probably know a whole lot more about the Trinity than I do, having studied it. But there is that old conflict between the Western Church and the Eastern Church about the nature of the Trinity, and I wondered if you could talk about that a little bit. and talk about whether you see any impact on our theology.

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Where are we in all of that now? Is that an old fight that is gone and dead, or is there some room for discussion there, and what are the implications of it? Gee, you want to fill up that extra lecture? Well, one, there's several aspects of that.

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The one that I think I want to talk about for a minute is the idea that in Western Trinitarian thought, the Western churches, the Latin tradition, there's an emphasis on the unity. And in the Eastern traditions or the Orthodox traditions, there's emphasis on the plurality or the threeness. And for a while, it's been a bit of a sport to bash Augustine and to embrace the Cappadocians. I've gone down that road with

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Colin Gutten and others, and even Multmann to some extent. But having read both Augustine and the Cappadocians, I find that distinction to be problematic. It's a little bit more complicated than that. And so I try to...