The BCMS Paper & The Trinity as an Understanding of God

So, I'm finally going to add some more in response to the BCMS paper. The end of my last post pointed to some next questions including: Should I/we relate more stongly to the concept of the Trinity? Why or why not? Thoughts in that vein follow.

I see the Trinity as a way to think of God, but not the only way to think of God. I'm suspicious of treatments of the Trinity as more or less the be-all end-all, exclusively right & necessary way to conceptualize God. Christians in general, and the BCMS paper, tend too much toward this approach in my opinion. At the same time, a couple things that have come up since I've started thinking about this lead me to believe that the concept of Trinity deserves more credit and attention than I have previously given it. Let me fill in a little on those thoughts as I continue.

All our language for God is metaphor. Each metaphor keys in on some aspect of the truth. But none of the metaphors adequately capture, completely describe or explain God. We come closer to understanding God, and our spiritual lives expand through use of varied and multiple images for God.

Though the authors of the BCMS paper may (or I suppose may not) understand things this way, the language of the BCMS paper doesn't leave me feeling that way. For example, in the section "Mission Begins with the Trinity" the paper states, "The Christian understanding of God is highly relational: God's identity consists in the loving communion...of three distinct yet inseparably united divine persons..." (bold emphases mine). This makes things sound pretty definitive and limited. It sounds like beyond this particular understanding we are no longer in Christian territory. It sounds to me like beyond this we are no longer talking about God as God should be understood. Does it sound that way to you too, or not?

I don't argue against Trinity being a good and important way to understand God. But to make it too exclusive a way to understand God limits our ability to comprehend God in and around us as fully as possible. It also unduly limits our ability to communicate and relate to people in our society. This makes the adequacy and wisdom of orienting our whole sense of mission around such exclusive sounding concepts of God questionable.

That said, what HAS interested me more in the concept of the Trinity lately? See my next post - hopefully coming soon, where I finally get to be more positive, and hopefully add credibility to the idea that I do want to do more than be part of a "culture of 'complaint, critique and criticism.' ”