Little Ah-Has

On the Trinity questions.

I've been reading The God We Never Knew by Marcus Borg. (Watch for an upcoming online book discussion on this.) He indicates the term persons in ancient texts doesn't mean separate individuals as we think of. Instead it refers to different roles. (pp. 97-98) This concept makes a lot more sense to me.

Second, in thinking about the traditional terminology of Father, Son & Holy Spirit and other terminology that is or might be use, I came upon this idea. I was trying out the gender neutral terms Parent, Child....but I didn't like that because child conveys the sense of a person who is not an adult whereas son is inclusive of all ages. This brought me to the term offspring. It may not be the most poetic term, but it triggered something in me.

At first the idea of offspring seemed a bit objectionable. God is God and God having offspring, or that offspring being Offspring with a capital O (that is God), seemed to be a lowering or compromise of the concept of God. Though the same issue exists with the concept of father and son, I hadn't had the same clarity about it until I thought in terms of parent and offspring.

Then I realized that maybe the concept of Offspring is the point. Its not that it lowers the concept of God, rather it elevates the concept of Offspring, broadens the concept of God and fits together with a few things that make sense to me that I hadn't been able to put together before. Offspring God emanates from Parent God, but its still all the same - its all God. I sense possible connections to the relational, communal aspect of the trinity, to panentheism (no, that's not a typo of pantheism, that's a different thing), to what's reflected in the Holy Trinity icon I wrote about before, to the immanence of God, to creation - both past and continuing...

This is exciting.

I'll have to live and work with this a lot more to become more clear on which of these connections hold up and how those that do work out, not to mention to get to a point to be able to talk or write about it more clearly. For now I hope someone reading this has a sense of what I mean.

It's A Blurry Line...

between posts that belong on my other blog and those that fit here. So I'll let you know I recently posted Visiting Another Church on Children in Church.

It has to do with encouragement or discouragement of the perception that one can make choices in the context of religion.