Science and Theology paper www

A Trinitarian Paradigm in Theology and Natural Science:

With Special Reference to Ecology and Public Policy

by Allen Johnson

fall, 1995

For by him were all things created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things were created by him and for him.

Colossians 1:16 (NIV)

He has let us know the mystery of his purpose, according to his good pleasure which he determined beforehand in Christ, for him to act upon when the times had run their course: that he would bring everything together under Christ, as head, everything in the heavens and everything on earth.

Ephesians 1:9, 10 (NJB

Praise God from whom all blessings flow;

Praise Him, all creatures here below.

Praise Him above the heavenly host;

Praise Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.

(The Doxology)

"Problems of such magnitude and solutions demanding so broad a perspective must be recognized from the outset as having a religious as well as a scientific dimension ...

Efforts to safeguard and cherish the environment need to be infused with a vision of the sacred."

An Open Letter to the Religious Community, issued by 32 internationally eminent scientists, January, 1990. [1]

Introduction and Overview of Thesis

The past several centuries have witnessed the accelerating triumphalism of humankind over the contingencies and treasure troves of nature. For those elite with the access and technological keys to the Earth's storehouses, "the earth is subdued, dominion established" (Genesis 1:28, paraphrase).

Yet this domination has been won not through partnering relationship with nature but rather through penetrating the secrets of its bosom, dividing it asunder into its components, and reconstituting it in objectified servitude. Yet even this triumph of humankind over against nature is not secured. As the goose that lays the golden egg is being strangled, so the natural realm which endows humankind with sustenance, beauty, and meaning is likewise being snuffed to bequeath only sterility and isolation of human spirit.

Jürgen Moltmann writes, "So when we talk about the ecological crisis of modern civilization, we can only mean a crisis of the whole system with all its part-systems, from the dying of the forests to the spread of neuroses, from the pollution of the seas and rivers to the nihilistic feeling about life which dominates so many people in our mass cities." [2]

Humankind is created by God to reflect His image in creation. Yet the God who creates, sustains, and loves His creation is oppositionally imaged by the humankind which conversely destroys, exploits, and scorns creation. in incessant striving for autonomy apart from God. Such is the Fall, and such is its consequent self-wrought death (Genesis 2:17). This leads to what Leszak Kolakowski terms a delusion that "the utopia of man's perfect autonomy and the hope of unlimited perfection may be the most efficient instruments of suicide ever to have been invented by human culture. To reject the sacred is to reject our own limits. It is also to reject the idea of evil." [3]

After centuries of disdain, antagonism, or practical exclusivity to the other's respective domain, science and religion each are increasingly in dialogue with the other for complementarity and "consonance ... [assuming] that both science and theology share some domains of knowing." [4]

Covenanting specifically toward a common agenda to the preservation of the Earth, 150 religious heads and scientists gathered in May, 1992, issuing a joint appeal that concurred,

"We believe that science and religion, working together, have an essential contribution to make toward any significant mitigation and resolution of the world environmental crisis. What good are the most fervent moral imperatives if we do not understand the dangers and how to avoid them? What good is all the data in the world without a steadfast moral compass?" [5]

Nonetheless it cannot be a fully comforting thought that the scientific and religious communities which for the past several centuries have constituted the predominant paradigm that has presided over the desacralization and plundering of the Earth should now suddenly declare themselves as its saviours. Yet neither science nor religion can step aside; both are firmly entrenched into the psyche of the dominant cultures. Therefore, a key toward the reversal of the imminent destruction of life-sustaining and life-fulfilling ecological communities is paradigmatic change in the dominant scientific and religious communities.

That the seeds of such paradigmatic change is sown is the thesis of this paper. In his classic The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn states that paradigm change is always in response to a crisis unresolvable by the current paradigm yet resolvable by a new paradigm. [6] For several centuries the Baconian-Cartesian-Newtonian mechanistic and objectivistic science coupled with a parallel theology of the strict monotheism of God as sovereign, immutable, impassive, and solitary transcendent absolute subject—has propelled humankind to a point of alienation from itself and the Earth.

"As God's image on earth, human beings had to understand themselves as rulers, as the subjects of knowledge and will, facing the world as the passive object to be subdued. For only through their rule over this earth can they correspond to God, the Lord of the world. As God is the Lord and owner of the whole world, so human beings must be concerned to become lords and owners of the earth, in order to prove themselves as the image of God." (Jürgen Moltmann) [7]

Thus, our present malaise is due to the correlative scientific and Judeo-Christian dualism of subject over against object. But is this the reality of modern theoretical science? Is this the revelation and truth claim of the Christian gospel?

It is increasingly clear that modern physics demonstrates a unitary basis of knowledge. As Thomas C. Torrance illustrates, the epistemological dualisms inherent first in the Ptolemaic cosmology and later in the Newtonian system are being challenged "primarily from natural science which has been forced to reject the traditional dichotomies between the sensible and the intelligible, the phenomenal and the mathematical, or the empirical and the theoretical, and to reconstruct knowledge upon a unitary basis." [8]

This inbreaking scientific paradigm of inter-relatedness has re-awakened theology to rediscover the Trinity. Moltmann states, "The triune God is not a lonely Lord in heaven incapable of feeling, who subjects all things to himself, but a God who is rich in relationships and capable of relationships, a God in community." [9]

If God is triune—the mutual interpenetration and love of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in both full personal and full unitary community—then the bearer of that image on Earth, that is, humankind as representative and mediator for all creation, should correspond not in subjective rule over that creation but rather "through community and mutuality which furthers life....It is not its individual parts, but the community of creation as a whole which reflects God's wisdom and God's beauty." [10]

A home divided cannot stand. Centuries of philosophical, scientific, and theological dualisms have divided and split creation into myriads of shattered, fragmented entities that poise now over a precipice of ecological destruction and psychological nihilism. Yet also poised is a gathering momentum of scientific conclusion and re-awakened theological awareness that life, truth, freedom, and love are an interrelated, interconnected, mutually interpenetrating, unitary whole. This, I contend, reflects the reality of the triune God, and reveals God's plan and purpose for creation in its restoration and fulfillment.

II. Historical Understandings and Socio-ethical Implications

A. Natural Science

1. Pre-Copernican Paradigms

To sentimentalize pre-modern era peoples as congenial with nature is overdrawn. "Primitive" peoples certainly recognized their own interconnectedness with and dependency upon the natural world for their survival. Yet this survival was often as much a competitiveness and war against nature as it was a partnership and harmony with nature. Thus, Adam's sin evokes a curse on the land which will henceforth resist with thorn and thistle his attempt to wrest his survival from it (Genesis 3:18,19). Many prehistoric cave pictographs depict the struggle between humankind and savage beasts, while parallel mythologies in historic eras abound. By the dawn of the Christian era the populations of lion, bear, leopard, and wolf in Palestine were greatly diminished or extinct. To have reintroduced such predators then as is being done with the wolf in Yellowstone would have been inconceivable.

Nonetheless, people living close to the land, in direct dependence upon its sustenance, had a deep sense of partnership and relatedness to it. Indeed, most cultures engaged in some form of pantheistic nature worship in order to induce a favorable partnership with the natural realm. The Hebrew scriptures vehemently denounce nature worship (although even this seems to have had some evolution), yet point strongly toward Shalom as harmony and proximity within human community and the land in its fruitfulness (Amos 9:13-15; Isaiah 30:23-26; Isaiah 32:15-20; Micah 4:1-4).

The Hebrew people were constantly tempted to over-step their relationship to the land, as Walter Brueggemann illustrates. "Wilderness is gifted land, and surprisingly meat and bread and Sabbath do come there. Always Israel is in gifted land yearning for managed land, but characteristically Israel learned that gifted land gives life and managed land does not." [11] Land, its creatures, its bounty, and its struggle were part and parcel of a trust and gift from God. "Land was a part of the covenant community, not to be treated as a commodity to be exchanged at one's convenience." [12]

Early Christian theology was permeated in constructive dialogue with natural science, peaking in the Nicene era in which, as Thomas Torrance shows, "the relation of God to the universe took shape as theologians thought through the bearing of the incarnation of the divine Logos in the spatial and temporal structures of created reality." [13] Such dialogue generated significant scientific advances "in physics of space and time, and of light and motion....[and] was thoroughly anti-dualist in its basic orientation." [14] Unfortunately Greek-influenced dualist philosophies hammered away at Christian faith eventually undermining its unifying synthesis in its doctrine of creation. Under Aristotelian influence God became conceptualized as impassable and immutable, an Unmoved Mover, paving the way for the Newtonian paradigm. Neoplatonic dualism, meanwhile, tended to elevate the soul while demeaning the earthly realm. As God became increasingly conceived as wholly transcendent from the creation, the Incarnation increasingly lost its influence as God immanent with creation.

Nevertheless, technology and education were both in short supply in the West. The majority of people—ignorant, agrarian—lived their lives out in often superstitious yet rhythmic harmony with nature. The shining star of medieval Christian ecology, Francis of Assisi, never received advanced intellectual training and therefore never absorbed the "Christian Neoplatonic attitude toward creation." [15]

2. Mechanistic Paradigms

The desacralization of nature accelerated in the sixteenth century as nature became objectified, reduced into component units and harnessed. The Aristotelian God as detached Unmoved Mover would not object, thus Francis Bacon could boast that through the scientific method "nature could be 'forced out of her natural state and squeezed and molded.'" [16] Bacon viewed the environment as a "harlot" to conquer in all out war. [17] Descartes, meanwhile, reduced nature to mathematical formulae, a dualism of mind and matter. To Descartes even the human body was simply a machine, the animal kingdom unfeeling automata. Only the human mind transcended this cold mechanical-machine world. Descartes increased the chasm between nature and the minds of humankind and their God. [18] And in this chasm the God who so loved the world that he incarnated into the world (John 3:16) was also abandoned. The predictability of mathematics and precision of machines tempted humankind once again to an autonomy over against God.

Not that the idea of having a God was abandoned, at least not at first. A First Cause was ontologically necessary with which honor God might be obliged to hold in blissful and superfluous old-age retirement. Although some like Laplace held to such a completely deterministic cause-and-effect universe that this "hypothesis God" could be discarded, Isaac Newton and other deistic thinkers held to uneasy dualistic constructs of God. Newton himself was clear in "his vehement rejection of the teaching of Athanasius on the incarnation, and his acceptance of the views of Arius, on the ground that God could no more become incarnate in the universe....than a pail could be contained by itself as part of its contents." [19] Thomas Torrance asserts that "Newton's idea of the 'freedom' of God as an inertial absolute, carries with it the concept of a universe that is not free but imprisoned within its own systematic necessities." [20]

The concept of a loving, feeling, and personally involved God as subject in immanent involvement within the world that was replaced with the concept of a cold, remote, and unfeeling God wholly transcendent from nature became reflected in the image of God—humankind. God the mechanical engineer became reflected in humankind the technicians. Nature was objectified, a commodity to be tamed and exploited. Humankind had finally, so it seemed, disposed of God and seized his reins.

3. Twentieth Century Quantum and Relativity Paradigms

The dethronedment of the Newtonian worldview began in physics in the late nineteenth century, argues Torrance, "due to the development of relational thinking about the activity of God in creation and incarnation." [21] Clerk Maxwell's "Christian theological way of understanding dynamic relations" caused him to look beyond mere mechanical explanations of nature to pave his road to discovery of "unification of light, electricity, and magnetism in the dynamic field of radiation." [22] Torrance states that Maxwell devoutly adhered to a trinitarian God, "an active and loving Father revealed through Jesus Christ his incarnate Son....who is creatively and invisibly at work in all the processes of nature." [23]

Physics finally broke free from the Newtonian dualism in the twentieth century, perhaps most notably through the paradigmatic revolutions of Albert Einstein, who "dethroned time and space from their absolute, unvarying, prescriptive role in the Newtonian system and brought them down to empirical reality, where he found them indissolvably integrated with its on-going processes." [24]

Placing time back into unitary relationship with all matter implies then a Creator involved with his creation who enters into the warp and woof of time and space. Such a God entering into time, as the Incarnation attests, is a God who is not impassive, immutable, Unmoved Mover, but who can interact with love and freedom in and with his creation. [25]

Quantum theory has stunningly demonstrated the interconnectedness of all matter. The gravitational effect of one electron at the edge of the universe would render a "Laplace-determined" set of moving billiard balls into unpredictability within a minute. [26] Furthermore, since in quantum theory it is theoretically and mathematically possible within the amplitude of a wave function for any singular particle to be at any point in the universe, "in a very real sense every fundamental particle, or structure constituted of them (which means everything), is interacting to some extent with everything else in the universe." [27]

Finally, it is increasingly recognized by ecologists that organic life is intrically interconnected upon many planes from the macro to the micro levels, through elaborate energy flows and matter exchanges.

In summary, modern science demonstrates an interconnectedness and relatedness of all matter and energy within the cosmos, with exceptional, observable, organizational functioning upon the planet Earth. Unfortunately, a time-lag of Newtonian theological, political, and economic paradigmatic thinking continues to propel humankind on a perilous course counter to the constitution of nature. [28] To a theology of unitary truth and harmony in relatedness and interconnectedness with nature we now turn. It is a recovery of the doctrines of Trinity and Incarnation.

B. The Trinity

"It was by reference to the inner relation of the Son to the Father in the centre of its faith that the Church formulated its understanding of everything else: creation, salvation, the Church, the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come."

Thomas F. Torrance [29]

Consistent Christian doctrine holds that humanity is created in the image of God (Genesis 1:26). However if humankind is to aspire to a true reflection of this image (even though acknowledging the distortion of sin yet also recognizing the transforming restoration of salvation), then the understanding of that God to be "imaged" is central. That is, who is this God that we should be image of?

Doctrinal orthodoxy holds that God is monotheistically one. "Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one" (Deuteronomy 6:4). Yet orthodoxy also hold that God is tripartite Father, Son, Holy Spirit. "Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit" (Matthew 28:19). "The Godhead is one in three, and the three are one.", summarized Gregory Nazianzen. [30] Furthermore, the Son (Jesus) is from eternity fully God in same essence (homoousia) and fully human in incarnation. Soteriologically the significance of Trinity and Incarnation are momentous, as Athanasius succinctly states, "If Jesus Christ the incarnate Son is not true God from true God, then we are not saved, for it is only God who can save; but if Jesus Christ is not truly man, then salvation does not touch our human existence and condition." [31]

The councils of Nicaea in 325 A.D. and Constantinople in 381 A. D. were crucial in establishing clarity of essential Christian doctrine in the face of hellenistic dualisms. "The basic decision taken at Nicaea made it clear that the eternal relation between the Father and the Son in the Godhead was regarded in the church as the supreme truth upon which everything else in the Gospel depends." [32] The Council reconvened, as it were, 56 years later at Constantinople to clarify the person and work of the Holy Spirit, establishing that only as "The Holy Spirit is fully, perfectly divine can participation in Christ have efficacy to unite the believer to Christ." [33]

To a mindset steeped in hellenistic dualisms the doctrine of the Trinity can be difficult to maintain. The two major classifications of error each involve a dualism that harkens back to the pre-Nicaean era. Sabellianism (or Modalism) holds that the Trinity is composed of modes of being of one God, essentially denying the distinct three persons. [34] Arianism, on the other hand, holds that the Son is subordinate to the Father, even to some adherents being a creation. Sometimes known as subordinationism, this view strips Christ of divinity in essence. [35] Although each form of error is in one sense an opposite from the other, in each case the divinity of the person of Christ is dissolved. In similar fashion the person of The Holy Spirit is modalized into the active energy of God or else a subordinate blend into the Spirit of the Father or Son.

One might state that to "fall off the edge," so to speak, from Sabellianism is toward a strict monotheism without the distinctiveness of the three persons of the Godhead, while "off the edge" of Arianism leads to a tritheism that separates the three from the one essence. To hold the three-in-one and the one-in-three in dialectical balance is perhaps key to maintaining a solid trinitarian base. Yet two questions arise: Does it matter whether one begins with the three and works toward the one, or begin with the one and work toward the one? And derivatively, in which of the two beginning points is our dominant theology of today shaped?

According to Jürgen Moltmann, when the sovereignty of God is premised as "God the identical subject of his rule the doctrine of the Trinity can then only be presented as 'Christian monotheism'." [36] To start with the one subject and move to the threeness has been predominant in the West since Thomas Aquinas. [37] Such a monotheistic-structured God portends a modalism of personalities and functions yet is self-sufficient, immutable, impassable, and transcendent Wholly-Other. As Karl Barth writes in his doctrine, "He could have remained satisfied with Himself and with the impassable glory and blessedness of His own inner life....This God has no need of us. This God is self-sufficient. This God knows perfect beatitude in Himself. He is not under any need of constraint." [38]

Yet this emphasis on the single subject creates what Nicolai Berdyaev terms a monism in which the deity is "immovable, beyond history, beyond conflicts and processes, and hence beyond the tragedies of passion too." [39] Such a monism, however, places God in an untenable dualism with the empirical reality of the world and its salvation. "We cannot simultaneously claim that God is immovable and moved, impassable and suffering, beyond history and historical." [40] As Berdyaev states, "It is impossible to assert the tragic destiny of the Son of God and his expiatory death without at the same time admitting movement in the divine life." [41]

To start with a theology of the Oneness as sovereign is to tend toward an ideological orientation of subject over object. This can orient in the family as the male patriarch over his wife and children, or politically as monarch ruler over his subjects, or the fatherland nation over the vassal states. [42] Ecologically the implications lead to an ideology of humankind (or more gender specific—mankind) in subjective and impassive rule over creation. One might further contemplate implications of a monism in regards to racial diversity and cultural plurality.

According to Moltmann, modalism leads anthropologically to a justification for the cult of the individual. Each individual, to be sure, must develop his or her many-faceted personality traits and manifestations, as in modalism. But at root is the image of God reflected in one's many-faceted relationship to oneself? Moltmann is convinced that personality is developed and manifested only as a person in fellowship with other persons. "It is not the completed and fulfilled individual personality that can already be called the image of God on Earth; it is only the completed community of persons....[that] points to the triunity of the Father, the Son, and the Spirit." [43]

To begin with the sovereignty of the threeness and then move toward an understanding of their perichoretic oneness, on the other hand, is to reflect the creaturely condition of human beings and the world they live in. Passion, love, and freedom can mutually reciprocate in the threeness of community. Furthermore, dualisms are dissolved, for the perichoretic Triune community can "enlarge" its embrace into its creation with feeling, reciprocity, and mutuality. The sovereignty of God, therefore, resides in the perichoretic community of the Godhead in the Three Persons mutual, interpenetrating love for the Others.

As one example of many, the marriage relationship of husband and wife much more accurately reflect the image of God through a trinitarian prism—two persons in oneness of community.

Finally, the Incarnation is become more believable and applicable when it is understood as the Father sending the Son into the world, this Son full of love, feeling, compassion, and interconnectedness to the Earth and its inhabitants. Furthermore, The Holy Spirit as subject from whom proceeds the union of God also indwells believers for their unification with one another and as sons and daughters of the Father of their brother Jesus Christ. Thus a high view of Trinity inculcates a high view of family, community, and mutual interrelatedness yet while defining and affirming individual distinctiveness.

But does natural science uphold a view of cosmic reality as relational, mutually interpenetrating, and contingently free? To this question we turn next.

III Wholeness in Unity and Diversity

A. Discoveries in Modern Physics

"In a very real sense every fundamental particle, or structure constituted of them (which means everything), is interacting to some extent with everything else in the universe."

Arthur Peacocke [44]

Toward the close of the nineteenth century startling scientific discoveries began to rock the Newtonian mechanistic paradigm. In his A Dynamical Theory of the Electromagnetic Field, Clerk Maxwell rejected unworkable Newtonian mechanics in favor of a relational model. [45] At the break of the twentieth century new discoveries involving radioactivity, electrons, and X rays were unlike any realm before. Max Planck demonstrated that radioactive atoms vibrate with quantized energy units. [46] Yet most astounding and influential has been the work of the man whose very name is now a synonym for genius. Torrance recounts,

"In 1905 Einstein published several essays of epoch-making significance, bearing on relativity theory and quantum theory, which initiated changes that have been transforming the whole perspective of modern science.... with the implications of these changes for fundamental epistemology, affecting every area of human knowledge." [47]

Einstein proposed "an inherent unity of geometrical and physical forms in nature....within a space-time universe that is ultimately defined with reference to the speed of light." [48] That is , in his relativity theory, Einstein unified matter, energy, space, and time into an interrelational order.

Further discoveries exploded Newtonian mechanistic determinisms. The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle became accepted that at the atomic level pairs of variables relate in a way such that as one quantity is more accurately known the other is less predictably known. Other experimental conclusions involving probability distributions of wave-particles as well as radioactive atomic disintegration demonstrated that the Universe operates in an order of both contingency and determinacy (freedom and law). For example, although the probability of a certain percentage of radioactive atoms can be calculated to disintegrate within a specified time period, the certitude of any one atom disintegrating at a particular point of time would be fundamentally unknowable. [49]

Thus within the Universe are "paired" operative conducive to law and freedom, constancy and change, continuity and novelty. It had been held that properties of mass and velocity were intrinsic to the properties of the constituent particles of the Universe independent of the observer. An important aspect of modern relativity physics is the acknowledgment that the role of the observer is intrically connected to the reality of the observation. Barbour concludes, "Science arises from the interplay between nature and ourselves....no clear separation of subject and object is possible." [50]

Much of modern theoretical physics especially at the sub-atomic and macro-universe levels are non-picturable. Speaking of relativity theory in which mass is composed of atoms which are themselves "empty space and probability waves....a temporary manifestation of nonmaterial energy," Ian Barbour quotes Arthur Smethurst,

If the Christian view is true, surely we should expect to find the evidence of the Holy Spirit in the physical sphere in just such signs of dynamic energy and activity as are indicated by modern physics. If energy is the essential basis of the whole material world, this is to the Christian a clear manifestation of the active, creative Spirit of God in the physical realm. [51]

Therefore modern physics lends itself to metaphysical interpretations due to its non-determinant, interrelated character. Even the deterministic attributes of mathematics demonstrate that universal principles are "mental." James Jeans suggests that "the universe begins to look more like a great thought than a great machine." [52]

Some principles in physics can only be understood in paradox. The notion of complementarity holds that in differing experimental conditions differing interpretive models must be posited. For example, in certain constructs electrons model particle characteristics while in other constructs electrons model wave characteristics. That an entity can seemingly manifest complementary (not contradictory) traits seems reflectively congruent theologically to a "dialectical treatment of the attributes of God" (Barth), such as "Christ fully human and fully divine" (Van der Ziel) and "the paradox of human freedom and divine providence" (Pollard). [53]

Modern physics has moved away from a reductionist view that phenomena are explained in terms of the properties of individual parts, to an wholistic organic construct in which the individual components can only be defined in relationship to the whole. For example, quantum theory holds that electrons in a helium atom have no separate identity but can only be understood within the total pattern. [54] Margenau concludes that "physics had discovered within its own precincts a purely social law....In the Pauli principle is a way of understanding why entities show in their togetherness laws of behavior different from the laws which govern them in isolation." [55]

Finally, in relativity theory tables were turned upside down in that matter became understood as a function of space. This led to a concept of energy as a field not beholden to an emanating subject body. [56] This momentous discovery in Field Theory paves the way for an integrating theological understanding of The Holy Spirit as creative, upholding, infilling, and unifying Subject toward creation. [57]

The Newtonian scientific worldview reflected as image a Deity that was solitary, impassable, immutable, rigidly mechanistic and deterministic—an absolute Lawgiver. Yet a survey of modern physics has remarkable compatibility with the doctrine of the Vestigias Trinitatis. Such a Deity is incarnational, relational, and affected by time and contingency. Such a Deity is dialectical and communitarian in order and interrelationship. Such a Deity has truly connected with the Cosmos.

2. The Ecology

That Time is a dimension of the Universe (or that the Universe is a dimension of Time) is perhaps most observable in the successive evolvement of biological life in its complexity, diversity, and interwoven relationships. Furthermore, in the face of the conventional Newtonian Second Law of Thermodynamics, life drives forth.

The groundbreaking theories of Charles Darwin were set within the scientific construct of Newtonian determinisms and reductionisms which yet today infuse much biological research. Nonetheless, the larger view offered by systemic physiology and macro ecology demonstrates that life is interrelational and only fully definable within open whole systems of coordinating space, energy flow, time, law, and contingency. Darwin's "survival of the fittest" construct is now understood within the mutually interwoven relationships of other species, climate, and geology.

That all life, even to any one individual life, is viable only within a dynamic of interpenetrating relational communities is now scientific dogma. Within a complex single organism, a cell lives only because of the life of the larger organism, yet all the while contributing to the life of that larger organism. One can see the same principle operative in the workings of component organ systems in a giving and receiving with respect to the entire organism and the other respective organ systems. To paraphrase Paul's teaching on the Church, the eye cannot say to the hand that it does not need it (1 Corinthians 12: 12-26).

Ecological communities also have diverse, complex, and mutually-reinforcing populations of organisms in dynamic interplay with the climate, energy flow, and geology. These communities exhibit a dynamic equilibrium of constancy and change. As example involving biodiversity, a particular biome might contain at the macro level several hundred species of plants and animals. The diminishment or extinction of any one species population might be precipitated by pressure from other species; its loss might further affect the diminishment or gain of other species.

Organisms vary in significance to the dynamic equilibrium of a biome. Just as a human body can be affected by the amputation of a hand but destroyed by the irreplaceable amputation of the heart, so some singular "keystone" organisms are vital to the dynamic stability of a biome. In his best-selling The Diversity of Life, Edward O. Wilson describes the extraordinary effect the Sea Otter, a keystone species of the North American Pacific Coast, has upon the overall ecology. When this species was almost extirpated for its fur a century ago, its chief prey, sea urchins, exploded in population to devour the forest-like kelp beds into desert-like depletion. Eventually when strict, intentional conservation efforts repopulated the region with sea otters, the sea urchin population became resultantly reduced, the kelp beds recovered, and the kelp-commensual species of crustaceans, squid, fishes, and even the gray whales recovered. [58]

Organisms can influence weather patterns, geological change, and energy flows. For example, much of today's calamitous global desertification is caused by overgrazing or over harvesting of plant species whose ground cover loss decreases transpiration into the atmosphere as well as decreases soil hydration capacity and warms soil temperatures. The results are decreased and irregular rainfalls along with soils with decreased hydrological retention capacities and increased erosion loss.

Modern paleontological theory holds that the diversity and complexity of biological organisms exploded exponentially during a period of about 10 million years during the early Cambrian period, when "nature appears to have sketched out the blueprints for virtually the whole of the animal kingdom." [59] This biological "Big Bang" seems to have been initiated by exceedingly tumultuous forces of earthquake, volcano, and shifting land masses which disrupted the algal dynamic equilibrium of oxygen production and depletion. A resulting increase of atmospheric oxygen laid the conditions necessary that larger complex metabolisms could evolve. [60]

But is nature by design or simply chance? Theoretical physicist and Anglican priest John Polkinghorne sees in cosmic nature an anthropic principle, "a universe that is fruitful in evolving complexity out of simplicity—to a degree that an almost homogenous ball of energy becomes, after fifteen billion years, a home for self-conscious beings." [61] Only a universe large enough to contain 10²² stars could be old enough to birth then die in Super Nova explosions creating the carbon and other chemical necessary for life to evolve and diversify. "Thus we see that a universe capable of being anthropically fruitful is a very special kind of universe—one in a trillion, one might say." [62]

In summary, modern scientific paradigms continue to demonstrate that the natural realm is interconnected, mutually interpenetrating, relational, and purposeful. And it is a theology that emphasizes the threeness of the Godhead in relational unity, rather than the oneness in sovereign transcendence, that better fits an understanding of the Creator to whom the universe reflects in Vestigias Trinitatis.

B. The Inner Triune God

"To throw open the circulatory movement of the divine light and the divine relationships, and to take men and women, with the whole of creation, into the life-stream of the triune God: that is the meaning of creation, reconciliation and glorification." [63]

In order to maintain an idealized sovereignty of God who is all powerful in knowledge, control, and surety, the Church has often tended to separate the inner triune relationship, or immanent Trinity, from the outward expression of the Trinity in revelation and correspondence to the world, the economic Trinity. This has led to false dualisms that finally touch neither the experience of the world nor bear resemblance to the New Testament witness. [64] How can an impassable God feel the pain of the cross, or yet the pain of human suffering? How can a sovereign God of might, control, and omnicience have truly risked in the cross? (For what is love if risk is not entailed?). It appears to me that to apply the revelation of the economic Trinity (which is the only possible way) to infer the immanent Trinity one must resist all dualisms. Otherwise one ends up with a crucial question posed by Barth, "What are we to make of the validity of an independent natural theology that terminates not upon the triune being of God, i.e. upon God as he really is, but upon some being of God in general?" [65] Therefore the economic Trinity reveals the immanent Trinity, or else one has gone off into fashioning a god of his or her own making.

For Karl Barth this means that the Christ who was slain at Golgotha is the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world. [66] Thus the Father from eternity has prepared to offer the Son for creation, and the Son from eternity has submitted in trust and obedience. As Moltmann notes, "The pain of the cross determines the inner life of the triune God from eternity to eternity [yet also] the joy of responsive love in glorification through the Spirit determines the inner life of the triune God from eternity to eternity." [67]

The mystery and depth of the perichoresis of the Trinity, the mutual interpenetrating unity of the three distinct Persons—Father, Son, Spirit—is nevertheless difficult to fully conceptualize. It is ultimately non-picturable. The idealized marriage state bears some resemblance as two distinct persons in interpenetrating relationship become one. Yet this analogy can also fit a tritheist model. Trinity is not the Three who have found one another and entered into a relationship called "God." And in Quantum Theory, in which individual electrons have no separate identity but are only defined in terms of the whole electron pattern, this analogy tends to take away from the distinctiveness and freedom of the Persons of the Trinity.

It seems then, that any picturability of the immanent Trinity must be within dialectical constructs of several models, as the above examples indeed point to. The critical point, however, is that the Trinity is dialectically to be understood as a :Unity in Threeness and Threeness in Unity. Relationship is key. Moltmann sees "three relations in the Trinity: fatherhood, sonship, the breathing of the Spirit." [68]

And in the self-giving love of the Father for the Son, and the obedient, trusting love of the Son for the Father, The Holy Spirit unites, celebrates, and emanates into creation. "For the community of creation, in which all created things exist with one another, for one another, and in one another, is also the fellowship of The Holy Spirit." [69]

To know God as He has fully revealed Himself is to know God in Trinity—not as a static oneness or an independent threeness but rather as mutual interpenetrating unity and differentiation; not as wooden immutability but rather as a steadfast constancy in movement and newness; not as forceful omnipotence but rather as "a sovereignty of love that is incomparably strong even in weakness....[a wisdom] that includes the foolishness of the cross." [70]

This is the God who has created human beings to reflect His image—an image of the triune God who is in perichoretic relationship of love, unity, and freedom. As this apex of creation, humankind stands in a unique doxological role as representative and mediator between God toward creation and creation toward God. This is the purpose of creation, of which humankind is priest, representative, witness, and participant of creation's celebration of the love of the triune God.

Yet man, woman, have chosen another way, the way of self-love, autonomy, and domination. To this the Fall we now turn, and then to salvation history and the future inbreaking restoration.

IV Fall and Redemption

Philosophers are agreed that evil exists. The classical problem of evil lies in the internal inconsistency of these propositions: "God is all-loving," God is all-powerful," and "Evil exists in a world created by such a God." [71] This construct of course posits a syllogism that negates either God's love, power, or wisdom. And because the popular conception of God is so steeply influenced by Aristotelian dualisms (impassability, immutability, omnicience, omnipotence) and Enlightenment dualisms (ex deus machina), this God indeed becomes candidate for indictment for allowing evil to exist. The only apologetical out within such a construct is to lay all blame for evil upon the victim. In John 9 a man blind from birth is confronted by Jesus and his disciples. To the disciples the question is who sinned, this man or his parents? Yet Jesus says, in effect, that this evil exists "that the works of God should be made manifest in him" (John 9:3 KJV), and then refers to himself as the one who will work those works (John 9:4).

Within a Trinitarian-Incarnation theological construct God does personally and interactively engage evil on the human level to conquer its grip. The Trinitarian God is the crucified God, the God who plunges into the gaping maw of evil, who suffers the full frontal brunt of evil, yet who ultimately conquers it through agape love. Why the existence of evil? Even though the ontology of evil is never fully solved, the Trinitarian construct deals with this mystery more decisively than fundamental monotheistic constructs, for the answer ultimately must lie in a dialectic of Freedom. For example, how can one truly love unless one has both free choice and the other as object of the love?

Is death an evil? An ecological response must answer, "No." Energy flow, space constraints, and dynamic equilibrium balance predicates that life must die in order to make way for new life. Without herbivores, plant life would overrun the planet, and without carnivores the herbivores would over-populate. Arthur Peacocke contends that the evolutionary development of consciousness is precipitated by increased sensitivity to pain and pleasure. A heightened consciousness entails "an increase in sensitivity, hence in vulnerability, and consequently in suffering....in the context of natural selection, pain has an energizing effect and suffering is a goad to action." [72] Perhaps the evil associated with human death involves the alienation connected with it, which in the death and resurrection of Christ has been bridged for those who believe.

If then humans are to have the highest created consciousness, with sensitivity toward pain, suffering and evil in order to know joy, peace, and love, then this should reflect as the image of God. Only a high view of the Trinity and Incarnation supplies such a paradigm—the Father suffering over the pain and humiliation of the crucified Son; and The Holy Spirit's unifying, joyous celebration of the resurrection!

If to image God is to reflect His trinitarian attributes involving relational, agape love in freedom, then it might be suggested that evil is that which is antithesis to these attributes—individualism, isolation, self-centeredness, domination, alienation. Theologically, evil is not ontological with creation, but is ontological with human sin, which is "the living of life without regard to God....a rejection of a trustful confidence in God the creator and the redeemer." [73]

In a trinitarian sense, then, sin is the rejection of the communitarian being of the Triune God and the created order that has been called into being to reflect and celebrate in witness. Sin is to refuse gift and grace from God, in order to seize for oneself (individually and/or corporately) the reins for ones existence.

Humankind in its autonomy no longer can live in a nurturing, giving-and-receiving harmony with nature and the created order, but rather seeks to control the natural world to bolster and secure its autonomy and power over-against the giftedness and community of God's order. Such despoliation and perversion of nature rebounds back toward humankind as evil. Even as humankind has revolted against God and therefore revolted against its assigned privileged role as priest for all creation, so the natural order derivatively goes into revolt, taking on various demonic manifestations and forms. Karl Barth terms these the "lordless powers" which are broken away from the disordered headship of humankind. For even as humankind now exploits the natural powers, those [chthonic] powers "serve in and of themselves to bind the man who has broken free from God, to put him under obligation, to tyrannize him....to rob him of his freedom under the pretext and appearance of granting every kind of freedom." [74] The Incarnation of God into this fallen, rebellious world was initially to reclaim order. In his life, death, and resurrection both God's sovereign authority and humankind's priestly authority were re-established. And in the living Church this authority is appropriated by faith, for which "the groaning, travailing creation eagerly awaits for the manifestation of the children of God" (Romans 8:22, 19.).

V. Eschatology

A. Teleologies in Nature, Anthropology, Culture, and History

Within a trinitarian paradigm what is the purpose of nature and the meaning of history? If we consider the immanent Trinity in light of the revealed economic Trinity, then it appears that the purpose of the created cosmos ultimately lays in an eschatological light. "It is the kingdom that determines creation, and creation is the real promise of the kingdom." [75] For Barth, the covenant is the inner ground of creation. The cosmos is created out of the overflowing love of the Father to the Son and the Son in receiving trust to the Father, in the unity and celebration of The Spirit. Certainly the creation is not of the essence of God (having been sovereignly created by God). Creation is however chosen by God to be His dwelling place, with humankind as conscious representative and priestly mediator of creation to witness, celebrate, and partake in the perichoretic fellowship of the Trinity. History is the anthropologically-conditioned bringing forth of this creation within a response in freedom to reciprocate this love of the Triune God. Inasmuch as only human beings can consciously choose toward God, history is the space, patience, and ultimately the entering in of God (The Incarnation) to seal this covenantal love in anticipation of its consummation. "Let us be glad and rejoice and give honour to him: for the marriage of the Lamb is come, and his wife hath made herself ready" (Revelation 19:7 KJV). "Look, here God lives among human beings. He will make his home among them; they will be his people, and he will be their God, God -with-them" (Revelation 21:3 NJB).

It is important to distinguish panentheism from both pantheism and the radical transcendence of the Newtonian paradigm. Pantheism holds that the created cosmos is of the same essence of God. Thus there is essentially no distinction between God and the created order, and without distinction a reciprocating love relationship between Creator and created order cannot exist. On the other hand, a radical transcendence between a remote, inaccessible God and the created order also precludes relationship. However, panentheism, "God choosing to indwell creation," has differentiation. Therefore, the Transcendent God can move toward and into the created order even to a binding together in covenant, which is the work of the Incarnated Son and the unifying Holy Spirit. [76]

The creation is endowed by God with at attributes that will move creation toward this divine fulfillment and consummation. Because the creation must have order, it has law (or necessity). This law, which physics and other science seeks so diligently to explicate, conditions the universe in like manner to the constancy of the Covenant. But such constancy would be sterile, mechanical, without contingency and freedom. Twentieth-century scientific discoveries (such as the Heisenberg Indeterminacy Principle) demonstrate that the cosmos also has freedom. This dialectical interworking is described by Polkinghorne. "The creative interplay of chance (happenstance—the occurrences that are the seeds of novelty) and necessity (lawful regularity that sifts and preserves the novelties thrown up by happenstance) lies at the root of all the fruitful history of the universe." [77]

What then is the purpose of culture? Rene Girard proposes a paradigmatic "unified field theory for the humanities." [78] At the core of his theory is that all higher primates have a powerful capacity for emulation and desire, which Girard terms as mimesis. This mimetic capacity has facilitated human evolvement into highly intelligent creatures. However, this high mimetic excitability also has induced fierce passions between one another such that violence has inevitably occurred, threatening the species with annihilation. According to Girard, culture is born as religion, when a mimetically-inflamed social violence (such as a mob) is cathartically redirected toward a scapegoat; the result is new-born social solidarity.

As Gil Baillie, a popularizer of Girard's thought puts it, "Human culture as such begins with the community of victimizers looking at the corpse of its victim in solemn astonishment at the miracle of camaraderie that has just taken place." [79] Such event becomes mythologized with religion as the celebrant and reenactment of that cultural birth. Such religion then serves to hold violent mimetic passions in check, so that a social order not collapse.

Interestingly, Girard is insistent that Christ has thrown this delicate cultural order into instability, for in being the quintessential and representative Scapegoat Victim, Jesus has exploded the power of religiously justified violence for maintaining social order. The yeast from this Crucified One continues increasingly its destabilizing ferment into societies. [80]

The very drives that impel humankind to consciousness, self-awareness, knowledge, and creativity, also propel humankind to self-will, violence, and ultimate destruction. In the community of the crucified Christ, the snares are broken. Mimetic passion is refocused to an imitation of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus from which new community is formed.

The Purpose of the Church

The Church is those called-forth to acknowledge, celebrate and participate as representatives of all creation in the perichoretic Community of the Father, Son, Spirit. The Church is the bearer of God's Word into creation, a Word that is eschatologically-loaded inasmuch as it witnesses into the present age the promise of the future. As Jacques Ellul asserts, "Every Christian who has received the Holy Spirit is now a prophet of the return of Christ.... and for him all facts acquire their value in the light of the coming kingdom of God, in the light of the Judgment, and the victory of God." [81]

That witness of the Church most concretely expresses Her glorification of the Triune God in Her own perichoretic oneness, that is, in the agape fellowship of Christian brothers and sisters in the presence of the infilling, indwelling Holy Spirit. God is present where "two or three are gathered together in the name of Christ" (Matthew 18:20), gathered together in the fellowship of his suffering, death, and resurrection. This is symbolized in the Eucharist, but must be existentially genuine in heart if the Shekinah, the Spirit of God, is to indwell. It is therefore critical for the Church that her members seek purity and harmony with one another, for otherwise the trinitarian construct is lost, and with it the infilling Spirit who only indwells in communal harmony.

VI. Toward a Paradigm of Relationship

Preface

"Only an approach which affirms the ontological continuity between Creator and creation can overcome....the devastating effects of a transcendentalist theology on the environment."

Norman Young (quoting from John Mcquarrie) [82]

I have argued on the preceding pages several key points: (1) God reveals Himself as Father, Son, Spirit, that is in triunity. (2) The creation is reflective in its order of the Triune God. As conscious and responsive representative of the creation, humankind is created as image of the Triune God. (3) The Fall is precipitated by human choice to break with communion with God resulting derivatively in disharmony in all creation relationships (most particularly in the human sphere). (4) The Incarnation decisively demonstrates that God has bound Himself in covenant with creation. (5) There is relational communion between God and creation, now in hope and future in consummation.

From this point I will argue for ways to better reflect the Trinitarian God, by building constructs for the nuclear family, church, larger society, and the local and global ecosystems. Basically this involves relational, participatory, and mutually-reinforcing models.

A. The Church Family as Revolutionary Catalyst

"The Church of His Holy Spirit, as the Body of Christ, is the only place on earth where the unity of God is revealed in Christ, that is, in the Holy Spirit. The nature of God is shown so clearly and unitedly here that His one will is done on earth. His Kingdom comes to men as the Unity of the Church. Here the way of Jesus is followed to the end—death on the cross in the name of love. Here men receive the Holy Spirit as community with God in Christ."

Eberhard Arnold [83]

The Church is the eschatological community of creation in conscious communion with God. Although the Church is eschatological in that She is eternal, the Church is also the present incarnation of God into the created world, as the Body of Christ indwelled by The Holy Spirit. The Church is indeed a communion of human beings in "yes" response to the initiative and grace of God. Furthermore, the Church as conscious human beings also represent as priests all nature before God.

The Church is held in low view by most of the institutional church and its adherents. Although several reasons could be given, two of these involve false dualisms. First, the Constantinianism of the church in the early Fourth Century fractured the Church's understanding of power. As example, the cross and the sword are polar opposites, yet they merged. Christian community increasingly fell aside to hierarchically-managed institutional systems. Second, the Enlightenment philosophies and sciences have "liberated" the individual. The socially-binding, communal church was cast aside as other entities more flavored for dominant power and autonomy arose—the modern state, economics, technology. Christian life became relegated to individual pietism. And the light became hidden under the basket, and the salt lost its savor (Matthew 5: 13-16).

Of utmost centrality is the need for the Church to recover its relational identity as community, indeed, as the family of God. At the heart of the gospel, the good news, is that God is bringing into being community with Himself (Father, Son, Spirit), with one another as believers, and proleptically all creation. The message of saving individual souls in dichotomous distinction from bodies, other persons, and the created order is counter to the purpose of God who is creating a Community-kingdom. More than any entity in the created order, the Church is to reflect the Divine Trinity. Like the Trinity, the Church is individuated, differentiated persons each complete and fully embodying the essence of the Church. Yet in the interrelationship and mutual subordination in love and freedom in the unifying Holy Spirit, is the fullness of the Church.

This paradigm of a relational, trinitarian-modeled church has several components: First, it intentions itself to be "perichoretic," that is, as members to serve one another in mutual circular upbuilding. Hierarchy of position for dominant power is unacceptable.

The Mennonite theologian John Howard Yoder suggests that the New Testament consistently presents an "apostolic community" in which the people (laos) were in effect the sum total of all ministry. "There is no concept of "laity" in the negatively defined sense, as 'those with no ministry'....the bishop is a member of the laity just like everyone else." [84] Yoder certainly sees distinctiveness in the various spheres of servant-authority as operative in the offices and giftings in the Church. As Paul clearly states in I Corinthians 12, each member of the Body has real, essential gifts that are to be operative in mutual subordination to the whole. Paul uses as metaphor the organ system of the human body. Yoder concludes, "The 'fullness of Christ' in Ephesians 4:13, or the 'whole body working properly' of 4:16, is precisely the correct interrelation of the ministries of 4:11, 12 in line with the divine unity of 4:3-6." [85] Such a church reflects the relational Trinitarian God. In contrast, the typical congregation reflects a monarchical monotheistic paradigm with the clergyman and other hierarchical elites essentially ruling over a functionally lesser class. Such dualism is not reflective of the Community-kingdom of the Trinitarian God.

Almost without exception (perhaps the "people-centered Vatican II?) church renewal historically has sparked from the grassroots at a participatory community level. (The Latin American base communities, and the modern pentecostal and charismatic renewal are examples). Stagnation has occurred within institutional dualisms, such as that between "professional religionists" (Yoder), and laity.

A trinitarian-relational church will seek as a key ministry focus to build deep interdependent relationships among all the people in the unifying power and purifying presence of The Holy Spirit. Such relationships will be multi-layered, centering on small familial groups of perhaps a dozen, while interconnecting with other groups analogous as an organ within an organism. Paul Yonggi Cho has apostolically built a church of perhaps a half million in Seoul, Korea, yet his institutional focus has been on establishing home cell groups in which each member ministers and is ministered to. [86] Communitarian groups also spring forth with powerful witness, such as the Bruderhof (1920's), Koinoneia (1940's), Reba Place Fellowship, and New Jerusalem (1970's). Yet in Western culture so saturated with the cult of individualism it appears that intentional communities may remain a fringe phenomena.

Because Western culture has increasingly fragmented and isolated the nuclear family (Enlightenment reductionism), it in effect operates as a corporate individual with all the neuroses and alienations common to the individual person. The nuclear family in and of itself can reflect the trinity within its inner relations to a partial degree, but in so doing must be open to larger relational communities. According to Richard Rohr, OFM, a founder of New Jerusalem Community, the church community as spiritual family is central for the maturing and fruitfulness of the nuclear family. [87] The Church is the fundamental building block for all other social relationships.

B. The Church as Priestly Mediator Between God and Nature

In the Incarnation the union between the Transcendent Creator and the created universe is completed. In the person of The Son, in an act of free will, the fullness of the Divine God has bound Himself to the created order in covenant of salvation communion. As fully divine, Jesus represents God to creation, while simultaneously as fully human, Jesus represents creation before God. Jesus is high priest, mediator between God and humanity (humanity representing creation), bound by freely chosen covenant sealed in His Blood.

The Church as the Body of Christ, that is, the incarnated visible presence of God in the created order through the indwelling Holy Spirit, assumes under Christ's headship this priestly role of mediation of the covenant of salvation-communion between God and creation. This calling is both temporal and eschatological. The Church's calling now as well as in eternity is to represent creation to God and God to creation. Every intention, thought, or action of the Church must press into this calling.

The Church, as the communion of people sealed in baptismal covenant with Christ, have a headship of order over creation. This order has privileges and responsibilities. "And God said, Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree....to you it shall be for meat" (Genesis 1:29 KJV). "And the lord God took the man, and put him into the garden of Eden to dress it and to keep it" (Genesis 2:15 KJV). Human beings are commanded to "dress" or serve (’abad) creation, and to "keep" it or take care of it (shamar). [88] Within a trinitarian relational model, as the Church serves creation to the proper building up of its proper order, the Church is nourished and served in turn by the rest of created order. This is then the circularity of the "trinitarian" created order.

Finally, the Church as the consciousness and responsible agent of creation, represents creation in doxological communion with God. Moltmann sees this as the Sabbath: The feast of creation. [89] Richard Cartwright Austin views this role as a bringing forth the fullest potential and glory of creation to God. "God has given us the responsibility of dominion to maintain and to enhance the quality of life. The test of our dominion will be whether creatures, from their contact with us, gain experience of the loving character of God." [90]

Technological Implications

Technique is the totality of methods rationally arrived at and having absolute efficiency (for a given stage of development) in every field of human activity."

Jacques Ellul [91]

The objectification of the natural world during the Baconian-Cartesian-Newtonian scientific revolution has led to unprecedented alienation of humankind. Bacon boasted that an era had dawned to "conquer and enslave the forces of nature." [92] Nature "could be forced out of her natural state and squeezed and molded" through rigorous application of the scientific method. [93] Descartes objectified and reduced nature to mathematical quantifications, harnessed to human control. Locke saw all of nature strictly in utilitarian values. [94] Such a mechanistic, quantified, commodified, utilitarian worldview has had far-reaching negative impact upon human beings, communities, and the environment. Efficiency predicates competition, which jeopardizes community. Even the church does not escape, as S. D. Gaede points out. "This burning desire for efficiency is problematic for the religious community, however, because most of the relationships in a traditional community are either irrelevant to or contradict the value of efficiency." [95]

The manic churning for technological efficiency in all realms to secure life, procure power, and induce happiness comes at the expense of relational life. The fruits of the Spirit—love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance (Galatians 5:22, 23)—are in discontinuity with technique. In the sense that it places efficiency over relationship, technique is anti-trinitarian. Frederick Ferre describes this monism induced by technique. "Unrestrained technique has led to the technologies of large-scale economic centralization." [96]

Yet technique will not disappear nor does it need to. Human beings are endowed with the ability and desire to manipulate the natural world. Jesus was a carpenter. A paradigmatic revolution to reinstate relational values above dominative power could adjust technology once again to its role as servant. Pioneering Christian people can first of all place technology into its subservient role by an existential recovery of the centrality of the Sabbath—a turning away from striving, quantification, and control, to gift, celebration, community.

Within the sphere of each individual, family, church, community, business, political order or other such entity, the Christian witness and response in a trinitarian paradigm will be to seek the wholeness and integrity of relationships, the shalom of community. Technology will be utilized or repudiated in light of that prism.

D. Ecological Implications

"The sensible world is the image, the icon of the celestial world, and enshrines the spiritual reality of which it is the image: the two interpenetrate. Everything organic hangs together, coheres, is symbiotic, and each element of a true synthesis is made whole and perfect to the degree to which it integrates itself with the whole, with the world of spiritual essences or archetypes in whose image it is created. Nothing less than this mutual inherence and coherence—than this interpenetration—is adequate to explain the real self of each created thing, for this is the true setting of each created thing. To abstract something from its setting, and to treat it as though it existed independently of its setting, is to murder it at its roots, in thought if not in deed."

Philip Sherrard [97]

The Incarnation that is the life, death, and resurrection of the Son decisively imputes the creation a sacredness. The juedeo-christian teachings stood resolutely against any intrinsic sacredness of nature, and indeed this desacralization of nature opened it up for scientific inquiry. However, the Incarnation has reconstituted a sacralization of nature. The Son has entered into its realm, to be of its matter, its energy flow, its laws and contingencies, its dynamic processes—and to spill His Blood into its thirsty soil, to cry His agony into its hushed air, to die its Death.

A trinitarian-relational paradigm views the ecosystem as an order reflecting the Triune God for which humankind has an assigned priestly headship. The ecosystem is viewed from within, that is, humankind lives within a dynamic organic equilibrium within the natural environment. The health of the entire ecosystem is predicated upon the health of the constituent member units. Furthermore, humankind can be valued and needed members of the ecosystem. Austin writes concerning the valued created role of humankind toward the ecosystem. "Within this context of nourishment, delight, freedom, responsibility and limits, the human was challenged to work and live creatively—to beautify the garden." [98]

A trinitarian-relational paradigm understands the interconnectedness of all creation and the intrinsic value of all things in their created order. To preserve species because to lose them diminishes humanity is a specious anthropocentric argument. However, a theocentric position holds and honors that God created and values each species. [99]

A trinitarian-relational paradigm is covenant-centered. This includes a respect for the "wildness" of nature. Although humankind is free to "subdue the earth," that is, to creatively use its fruits for meaningful existence, a Sabbath-oriented relational understanding will leave room for wilderness. Covenant further respects and advocates for the integrity of the purity of the environment. Pollution, despoilation, resource depletion to the disruption of healthy dynamic equilibrium, are of course violations of the purity of the natural environment, but so also is any objectification of nature to its degradation. Nature is not "pornography" to shamelessly exploit for seedy tourist thrills.

Furthermore, covenant understands the interconnectedness of righteousness, justice, peace, and environmental quality. False dualisms are rejected that pit jobs against environment, social justice against environmental justice, human needs against the earth's creatures (Hosea 4:1-3).

Finally, a trinitarian-relational paradigm upholds the covenant with future generations to come. The fruitfulness of the earth is sacrificially nurtured even beyond sustainability to a glorious abundance. For even as The Son has definitively given His life for the healing and life of the world, so the Church in representative witness to The Son lays its own life down for the world. This circularity of sacrificial love—the giftedness and openness of grace—is deep in the heart of a trinitarian paradigm.

VII Impacting Public Policy: Ecological Considerations

"To fail to relate creation to the Incarnation, and to fail to relate both to the Trinity, is to mutilate its mystery at its heart, and this is the same as saying that it is to mutilate the mystery of our own lives at its heart."

Philip Sherrard [100]

The triune God is intercessory. The Spirit makes intercessions for us with groanings (Romans 8:26) and the risen Christ makes intercessions to God for us (Romans 8:34). Therefore, the Church as the Body of Christ indwelled by The Holy Spirit will be advocates and intercessors for creation. Intercession and advocacy are priestly functions of the church. Toward God this takes the form of prayer and obedience. Toward creation this takes the form of cruciform witness in word and deed. Advocacy in the public square is an extension of integrity and openness in lived-out trinitarian-relational paradigm.

To my mind the paramount ecological problem facing the public arena is that the resources and sustainability of the Earth are threatened with major irreversible damage. The Baconian-Cartesian-Newtonian paradigm continues to hold sway in crucial fields of politics, economics, and education, even though clearly demonstrated as false through the sciences of modern physics and ecology. Advocacy must be toward relational, sustainable, community-enhancing policies.

(1) The use of non-renewable fossil fuels by the elite industrialized world must be vigorously challenged as injustice to Third World nations (who are forced into competitive disadvantage) and for future generations (whose supplies will be depleted). Public policies can be developed for substantial "carbon" taxes, distributive fuel quotas, priortizing of uses toward community-building values, alternative sustainable energy development, and increased efficiency and frugality. [101]

(2) Economic factors must become "true cost" oriented. John Cobb, jr. feels his "most important proposal....[is] to include all social and environmental costs in the price of goods....[which] must include foreseeable costs to our children and grandchildren." [102]

(3) Economic policy should encourage decentralization and regional self-sufficency for most goods and services. Wendell Berry suggests regional uban-rural symbiotic economic networks. "As you shorten the distance between consumer and producer, you increase the consumer's power to know and influence the quality of food." [103] The globalization of the economy should be resisted as a centralized monism alienated from personalized and diversified local communities. As a farmer writing virulently against GATT, Wendell Berry charges that "the intended effect would be to centralize control of all prices and standards....in the hands of the corporations that are best able to profit from it." [104] Centralization is contrary to a trinitarian-incarnational-relational paradigm. Only those who are intimately connected with a local community, and the land, can have proper motivation to cherish, care for, and nurture it. [105] Therefore outside investors, whose motivation is almost always monitary profit, must be vigorously discouraged. In a trinitarian-relational model, investors connect their being as well as their wealth into the service and enhancement of the community. They know and share their own lives with their employees. Their fortunes are covenantally bound with those in their business, the local community, and the environment.

(4) Policies favoring local and international justice, peace, and empowerment for the marginalized are advocated as an eschatological sign and presence of the Community-kingdom of the triune God. Sexism, racism, militarism are reflections of the diablos, the Divider. The Trinitarian God is uniting the nations, races, and sexes into a rich harmony of diversity in unity.

(5) Policies will be advocated to resist indebting future generations for present profligate consumptive living. Policies will discourage indebting Third World nations into servitude. World Bank member and economist Herman Daley and theologian John Cobb, jr. in their book, For the Common Good, conclude "that for the most part the Third World would have been better off without international investment and aid. This investment and aid have destroyed the self-sufficiency of nations and rendered masses of their formerly self-reliant people unable to care for themselves." [106]

(6) Policies will be advocated to encourage intermediate technologies that facilitate and enhance human "good work." Policies will be advocated to encourage creativity and appreciation in the arts and humanities at all levels. Policies will favor a climate of volunteerism, philanthropy, altruism, and community participation. Diversity will be respected.

(7) Policies will be advocated to increasingly decentralize most government powers and money to the local and participatory level, including education; care of the elderly, indigent, and disabled; security; and beautification, the arts, humanities. However, macro level problems such as global warming or the oceanic fisheries will need even increasing international governmental cooperation. Furthermore, the fact that certain multi-international corporations have greater financial strength than the gross national products of most nations necessitates that large governmental regulatory powers build independent strength. Of critical importance, violence must be restrained. Jacques Attali, president of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, feels that power will increasingly be wielded by economic orders. "The coming new order will be based on its ability to manage violence. Unlike previous orders, however, which first ruled by religion, and then by military force, the new order will manage violence largely by economic power." [107] Technological-leveraged power will be wielded toward consolidation and centralization of power. It is critical that a trinitarian-relational paradigm counter monoculture. Only local, intentional, covenanted, relational communities will be able to resist this darkness.

(8) Policies will be advocated to encourage preservation of agricultural lands, wild spaces, and overall environmental quality. A suggestion might be to advocate incentives toward a 10% "tithe" of rural properties as "wild areas." Incentives for resting the land (Sabbaths) and for organic and intermediate- technology farming will be advocated.

In summation, the advocacy of public policy should be a work of the "openness" of trinitarian faith. Yet this advocacy needs to be reflective in congruent means and ends to the nature of the trinitarian relationship. Therefore, technology, the economy, education, science, the arts, government, and so forth should all be at the service of community upbuilding at all levels of interrelationships present and future. Art Gish sums up nicely this point. "The purpose of economic activity in God's kingdom is not to acquire wealth and power, but to praise God and serve our neighbor. Time is not money but an opportunity to live, love and share. The goal is not profit but supplying people's needs, supporting a fulfilling lifestyle, teaching kingdom ways of relating to each other." [108]

VIII Conclusion

"For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God."

Romans 8:19 NRSV

The created cosmos is an interrelational unity. This is a conclusion in all the natural sciences, including modern physics, astronomy, biology, and ecology. This is also a theological conclusion in historic, orthodox Christian doctrine. The linchpin that holds together science and theology is the doctrine of the Trinity. There is one knowledge, one truth.

The malaise of the human fallen condition, including perhaps particularly our time of pseudo-autonomy, is to separate ourselves from our true created identity and purpose. Just as there are not two truths, one of science and the other of spirit, so there is not two discontinuous human enterprises, one dualism concerned with earthy matters and the other with the heavenly. We must again recover the sense of who we are: Jesus Christ, the Incarnated One, the Son of the Father, the Son of Man, is the one who gives us our identity. In Christ we are a holy priesthood standing with all creation as its representation in doxological communion with God the Father, Son, Spirit. And in Christ we are a holy priesthood representing God the Father, Son, Spirit in cruciform love to the creation.

"Once we repossess a sense of our own holiness, we will recover the sense of the holiness of the world about us as well, and we will then act towards the sense of the world about us as well, and we will then act towards the world about us with the awe and humility that we should possess when we enter a sacred shrine, a temple of love and beauty in which we worship and adore. Only in this way will we once again become aware that our destiny and the destiny of nature are one and the same." Philip Sherrard [109]