Trinity Refined

A clarification of my last post, about "That Trinity Thing," if you please. First, some clarification of terminology. Specifically, my mention of the "economic Trinity." We are not talking about the flow money, whether into your own checkbook, or on a societal scale. The term comes from the Greek "oikonomia," which derived from the management of a household (which, yes, includes finances). In this case, the term was extended to embrace God's "management" ("plan") of the salvation of creation (as in, for example, Ephesians 1:10: "... as a plan [oikonomian] for the fullness of time, to gather up all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth." The notion occurs elsewhere in the letter as well, "the plan of the mystery hidden for ages in God..." [3:9]). So, relating all this to the Trinity, the phrase "economic Trinity" refers to said plan for the salvation of all Creation, begun in Jesus Christ (God the Son), and spurred by the indwelling of God the Holy Spirit in the community of faith, forging a force of reconciliation that will simultaneously display among themselves God's reconciliation (internal) and struggle for reconciliation between humans in the world (external). This redemptive activity begins with God, comes to us from God, animates us to participate in God's activity of salvation in our world, and promises that what God began, God will wind up in splendid style at the Consummation (rather than the far weaker catastrophic end-of-the-world visions in which a special few escape destruction and don't give a whit about the other poor slobs).

The "immanent Trinity," or internal relationality in God's being, in turn displays God as endlessly relating in creative-love/creating-love, endlessly reaching out to create new relating among us creations, and endlessly drawing-us-in to new relations with God and each other. An obscure bishop and theologian (ca. 394 C.E.) named Amphilochios of Iconium mused that all we can really say -- or even hope to know! -- about God is not God's "whatness," but rather God's "howness"; that is, all we know of God is not the essence of what God is, but only "how" God is experienced by us (the reference to Bishop Amphilochios comes from Richard Kearney, The God Who May Be [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001], p. 115 note 17). Thus, for preachers, it is much more useful to begin any attempt to plumb the depths of the doctrine of the Trinity from the standpoint of the economic Trinity (see clarification above).