By Mark Tooley (follow on twitter @markdtooley)
IRD emeritus board member George Weigel in a recent commencement address has an excellent insight about true pluralism in God’s order of creation versus the incoherent, post-modern, discordant pluralism that plagues secular society and much of the liberal church.
Truth is symphonic. Fragmentation and disintegration are among the chief characteristics of our intellectual life today: Everything is in bits and pieces; nothing fits together; there is no “frame” in which the parts can be composed into a whole. Little wonder that cynicism, skepticism, and irony are prominent features in our 21st-century Western culture. In the face of all that, the Catholic intellectual tradition insists that, amidst real plurality, there is also pluralism: a symphony of truth in which the various instruments by which we apprehend what is true and good and beautiful play together melodiously, not in a cacophony of dissonance. And that which forms plurality into pluralism, individuals into community, fragments of intellectual stone into a cosmatesque mosaic of symphonic truth, is love: the love which is the basis of the unity of the Church; the ecclesial love, itself an expression of Trinitarian love, in which the world may glimpse the unity for which it yearns, but which it never finds on its own.
In contrast to this harmonious symphony of truth that Weigel identifies, the liberal church often celebrates a “cacophony of dissonance,” in which each individual or interest group demands affirmation of his/its own self understanding, politically, theologically, sexually, socially, etc. The only instrument banned from the discordant symphony of liberal post modernism is the one that heralds a universal truth that unifies the whole. That truth, from the church’s orthodox, apostolic perspective, also redeems the whole, and is modeled, as Weigel notes, by the symphonic pluralism of The Trinity, whose Three Persons are distinct, separate and vocationally unique, yet in complete accord within the Godhead.
Maybe it’s no accident that the liberal church often defaults toward an unconscious Unitarianism. Liberal church pluralists too frequently cannot conceive of a divine harmony embodied in the authentic pluralism of The Trinity. Maybe orthodox believers need to cite Weigel’s description of this Trinitarian vision and expression of love. And maybe we should even exploit his wonderful citation of a “cosmatesque mosaic of symphonic truth.”
Comment by Kay Glines on May 11, 2013 at 4:05 pm
Weigel makes some great points, as he always does, but I think the “fragmentation” may be illusory, for the post-modern types are pretty united in their ethical stance, the gratification of the individual is all that matters, and the real enemy is the family unit and any non-governmental group that calls the individual out of himself. There’s the individual, and there’s Big Nanny Government, and anything else is suspicious.
Comment by Samuel Stuart Maynes on May 6, 2014 at 12:26 pm
If you are interested in some new ideas on religious pluralism and the Trinity, please check out my website at http://www.religiouspluralism.ca, and give me your thoughts on improving content and presentation.
My thesis is that an abstract version of the Trinity could be Christianity’s answer to the world need for a framework of pluralistic theology.
In a constructive worldview: east, west, and far-east religions present a threefold understanding of One God manifest primarily in Muslim and Hebrew intuition of the Deity Absolute, Christian and Krishnan Hindu conception of the Universe Absolute Supreme Being; and Shaivite Hindu, Buddhist, Taoist apprehension of the Destroyer (meaning also Consummator), Unconditioned Absolute, or Spirit of All That Is and is not. Together with their variations and combinations in other major religions, these religious ideas reflect and express our collective understanding of God, in an expanded concept of the Holy Trinity.
The Trinity Absolute is portrayed in the logic of world religions, as follows:
1. Muslims and Jews may be said to worship only the first person of the Trinity, i.e. the existential Deity Absolute Creator, known as Allah or Yhwh, Abba or Father (as Jesus called him), Brahma, and other names; represented by Gabriel (Executive Archangel), Muhammad and Moses (mighty messenger prophets), and others.
2. Christians and Krishnan Hindus may be said to worship the first person through a second person, i.e. the experiential Universe or “Universal” Absolute Supreme Being (Allsoul or Supersoul), called Son/Christ or Vishnu/Krishna; represented by Michael (Supreme Archangel), Jesus (teacher and savior of souls), and others. The Allsoul is that gestalt of personal human consciousness, which we expect will be the “body of Christ” (Mahdi, Messiah, Kalki or Maitreya) in the second coming – personified in history by Muhammad, Jesus Christ, Buddha (9th incarnation of Vishnu), and others.
3. Shaivite Hindus, Buddhists, and Confucian-Taoists seem to venerate the synthesis of the first and second persons in a third person or appearance, ie. the Destiny Consummator of ultimate reality – unqualified Nirvana consciousness – associative Tao of All That Is – the absonite* Unconditioned Absolute Spirit “Synthesis of Source and Synthesis,”** who/which is logically expected to be Allah/Abba/Brahma glorified in and by union with the Supreme Being – represented in religions by Gabriel, Michael, and other Archangels, Mahadevas, Spiritpersons, etc., who may be included within the mysterious Holy Ghost.
Other strains of religion seem to be psychological variations on the third person, or possibly combinations and permutations of the members of the Trinity – all just different personality perspectives on the Same God. Taken together, the world’s major religions give us at least two insights into the first person of this thrice-personal One God, two perceptions of the second person, and at least three glimpses of the third.
* The ever-mysterious Holy Ghost or Unconditioned Spirit is neither absolutely infinite, nor absolutely finite, but absonite; meaning neither existential nor experiential, but their ultimate consummation; neither fully ideal nor totally real, but a middle path and grand synthesis of the superconscious and the conscious, in consciousness of the unconscious.
** This conception is so strong because somewhat as the Absonite Spirit is a synthesis of the spirit of the Absolute and the spirit of the Supreme, so it would seem that the evolving Supreme Being may himself also be a synthesis or “gestalt” of humanity with itself, in an Almighty Universe Allperson or Supersoul. Thus ultimately, the Absonite is their Unconditioned Absolute Coordinate Identity – the Spirit Synthesis of Source and Synthesis – the metaphysical Destiny Consummator of All That Is.
After the Hindu and Buddhist conceptions, perhaps the most subtle expression and comprehensive symbol of the 3rd person of the Trinity is the Tao; involving the harmonization of “yin and yang” (great opposing ideas indentified in positive and negative, or otherwise contrasting terms). In the Taoist icon of yin and yang, the s-shaped line separating the black and white spaces may be interpreted as the Unconditioned “Middle Path” between condition and conditioned opposites, while the circle that encompasses them both suggests their synthesis in the Spirit of the “Great Way” or Tao of All That Is.
If the small black and white circles or “eyes” are taken to represent a nucleus of truth in both yin and yang, then the metaphysics of this symbolism fits nicely with the paradoxical mystery of the Christian Holy Ghost; who is neither the spirit of the one nor the spirit of the other, but the Glorified Spirit proceeding from both, taken altogether – as one entity – personally distinct from his co-equal, co-eternal and fully coordinate co-sponsors, who differentiate from him, as well as mingle and meld in him.
For more details, please see: http://www.religiouspluralism.ca
Samuel Stuart Maynes