John Franke and Social Trinitarianism

John Franke, professor of theology at Biblical Theological Seminary, preached at our church on Sunday. His sermon was on God's mission and our mission. It was essentially a simplified lecture on trinitarian theology and the imago Dei. His sermon progressed through the following theses:

1. God is love. Love is God's primary or essential attribute, since it is true of God in pre-temporal eternity, whereas attributes of judgment and wrath are only in relation to the creation and are not part of God's inner life from all eternity.
   
2. God is triune. God is not solitary but social.
   
3. God has a mission to reconcile the world to Godself. In the eschaton, God will bring that which is not-God into participation with God's own life, so that creation will share in the giving and receiving of love that has always been true of God.
4. God made humankind in God's image. This means that humanity is intended to live with others in a community of giving, sharing, and receiving love.
5. The church is the paradigmatic community that images the Trinity in the world by participating in God's mission to reconcile the world to Godself. The church is thus the embodiment of the divine mission of reconciliation which will only be complete when "God will be all in all" (1 Cor. 15:28).
   

I should be clear up front that I do not disagree with these theses at face value. However, the issues which Franke brings up in this sermon are ones that cannot be done justice in such a simple form. I will thus go through each thesis and explain where I think Franke needs to be more careful and critical in his theology:

1. God is love. I surely agree with Franke that God's primary attribute is love. As Barth says, God is the "one who loves in freedom." This statement by Barth emphasizes that God is both over us (Deus a se) and for us (Deus pro nobis). However, Franke gave the impression that God's love is something separate and opposite from God's wrath. Barth is much better on this subject in that Barth recognizes that God's love is wrathful against sin but always also gracious and merciful. In other words, God's love is a "consuming fire" that is not the opposite of judgment but rather accomplishes God's purposes of love in the judgment of sin and in the gracious pardoning of humankind in the person of Jesus Christ. Judgment and grace, wrath and forgiveness, are both parts of God's holy love.
2. God is triune. Franke follows a lot of contemporary theology in stressing God's "sociality." To be sure, there is much to agree with, insofar as these theologians stress the triunity of God as a "community of mutual otherness" (Jüngel). However, these theologians, Franke included, end up leaning toward the extreme of tritheism. They criticize people like Augustine (wrongly, for the most part) and Thomas Aquinas for beginning with the one God and then moving to God's triunity. Contemporary theology primarily begins with the three persons and then speaks about how they are one. Franke made this very move, trying to argue that God's being-in-love was what brought the three persons into such intimate unity that they are truly one being. Franke has made some serious errors in that he has followed Jürgen Moltmann by (1) trying to explain how the three becomes one, and (2) connecting God's sociality to human sociality. The latter is the reason for the former, because these theologians think that improper doctrines of God result in improper human social models (e.g., singular God leads to dictatorship, hierarchical God leads to female subjugation). Consequently, these theologians emphasize God's sociality in order to protect against abuses in human relations. The only problem is that oneness and hierarchical relations are part of the biblical witness. Furthermore, the protection against such theological abuses is the one move which all theologians need to make: to deny any natural relation between God's being and our being. God's oneness and triunity are not mirrored in any way in our human individualism or relationality. God's internal equality and submission among the triune persons is not connected in any way to egalitarianism or hierarchicalism. What theology must do is unabashedly proclaim God's triunity as a unity-in-difference and a difference-in-unity, as a perichoretic "community of mutual otherness" which is a mystery of the faith that has no ontological relation to human relations. God's sociality is not analogous to human sociality. We can never derive egalitarianism or hierarchicalism from the Trinity; an argument for human equality has many other resources for support. We can emphasize God's triunity only as a unity, and God's unity only as triunity. Speaking of a "social" Trinity is misleading insofar as it seems to predicate sociality to God as we do to humans, or vice versa. We must rather speak of God's being out of God's being-in-act in the economy of salvation, and we must speak of our being out of the revelation of what it means to be human in Jesus Christ. (On this point, see my discussion of thesis 4.)
   
3. God has a mission to reconcile the world to Godself. I am more comfortable with this thesis, as long as we are careful not to uncritically accept language of divinization, which seems potentially implicit in such a statement. The thesis on its own is incomplete in that it is eschatological but not Christological. Indeed, God will one day become "all in all," but reconciliation is not a future event but a past one. God has a mission to perfect and transform creation by making all things new. Reconciliation, however, does not await some future event of God. Reconciliation has already occurred in Jesus Christ. In Christ, God already reconciled the world to Godself. As Paul says in 2 Cor. 5:19, "in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting the message of reconciliation to us." Reconciliation, in an ontological sense, was actualized in the person of Jesus; but reconciliation, in an eschatological sense, continues to await God's perfection and recreation of the cosmos. The message of reconciliation, entrusted to us as the agents of reconciliation, proclaims both the reconciliation accomplished in Jesus Christ and the consummation of this reconciliation in the eschaton.
4. God made humankind in God's image. I think this is where Franke primarily goes astray. I have already discussed the imago Dei at length elsewhere, but for now I wish to return to how this doctrine relates to the dangers of social trinitarianism. A social trinitarian, like a hierarchicalist, assumes that our being reflects God's being. The social egalitarian uses her doctrine of the Trinity to argue against the hierarchicalist, who uses her doctrine of the Trinity to argue against egalitarianism. The problem with these two positions is that both have Scriptural warrant. (I am referring to their doctrines of the Trinity; I do not believe Scripture gives warrant to hierarchicalism for other reasons.) Both sides believe that the doctrine of the "image of God" from Genesis 1 secures their argument. The problem is (1) that neither side takes the radical consequences of the fall into consideration (Franke mentioned the Fall but did not state any serious consequences as a result), and (2) that our being in the image of God is only available in and through the person of Jesus Christ, who is the image of God (2 Cor. 4:4, Col. 1:15). Now to be fair to Franke, he said that it is the purpose of God for all human creatures to be in the image of God, by which he may mean, that we are designed to become the people of God who are conformed into the likeness of Jesus Christ. With this I agree, except for one caveat: We do not image the Trinity but rather the person of Christ. Our being in the imago Dei must be seen in light of the incarnation of the Son of God. This does not, in any way, diminish the relationality of the imago Dei; it only stresses the ontological divide between God and humanity in concert with the incarnation of God in Christ who alone brings humanity into ontological correspondence to God. A doctrine of the imago Dei must accomplish the following things: (1) take the fall into full account; (2) read the doctrine christologically in light of the person of Christ; (3) refuse to allow the doctrine to make anthropological arguments that derive their material from the doctrine of the Trinity; and (4), in light of the fall, insist that the imago Dei is a soteriological category, not a creational one that is natural to all human creatures.
   
5. The church is the paradigmatic community that images the Trinity in the world by participating in God's mission to reconcile the world to Godself. The language of participation is acceptable when used rightly, and Franke often played fast and loose with the word. While I agree that the church is the paradigmatic community and that we participate, in some form, in the mission of God to reconcile the world to God, I also must insist that we refuse to derive our ecclesiology from the doctrine of God just as we must not derive our anthropology from the doctrine of God. Both of them find their orientation in Christology and soteriology. The church is the community of the saints, those who have been conformed to Christ, and as this community, the church functions as the witness to God's infinite love by proclaiming the message of reconciliation. The church is not God-on-earth, as some theologians try to argue, usually via a warped interpretation of the term "body of Christ." The church becomes the "body of Christ" when the Holy Spirit empowers and sanctifies the concrete community of the Word to be the suffering community of the cross. The communal love that Franke declared to be ideally characteristic of the church is not simply derived from a doctrine of God applied to the human community; rather, communal love is necessary because in the life of Jesus Christ—in his table-fellowship with humanity—we understand that only a community of love can truly bear witness to the triune God "who loves in freedom." The church community participates in God's life 'here and now' by the actualizing power of the Holy Spirit only because it first participates in the person of Christ 'there and then.' Participation is thus a Christological category, though it also includes the existential reality in which the present-day community becomes the communio sanctorum by the sanctifying power of the Spirit. The church is the fellowship of the covenant—those who are brought into the covenant of grace—and as this fellowship, the church witnesses to the reality of God as agents of reconciliation in the world. In this way, the church participates in God's mission of reconciliation. The church does not reflect God's being, nor does the church replace Christ, but rather the church bears witness to who God is and what God has done (and is still doing). The church is indeed the paradigmatic human community, but it is a human community sanctified and guided by the Spirit. In the same way that Holy Scripture is not divinized in its actualization as the Word of God, so too the church is not divinized but remains the creaturely witness to God's being and mission. The church finds its being-in-becoming only in and through the person of Jesus Christ and is carried forward toward the future only by the Holy Spirit who, by the will of God, makes this particular community the sanctified witness to the being of God.

In all of what I have said, I am merely thinking critically through John Franke's sermon so that we do not fall into simplistic theology and, thus, potentially misguided theology. Franke rightly made it clear that humankind is created for the ecclesial community of love, which implies that the fall makes this a goal only realized in light of Christ's reconciling work. The problem with Franke's sermon, however, is that he rarely spoke of Jesus Christ, and instead fell into the trap of speaking almost exclusively about God's triune being, as if he could move from the immanent Trinity to the church only by way of the imago Dei. Franke thus unintentionally minimized the effect of sin and the reconciliation accomplished in Christ. Consequently, he moved too simplistically from the Trinity to human community, which then led him to speak too simplistically of the church's participation in God's triune life.

I heartily commend him for affirming the church's mission as one that takes place in light of and as part of God's overarching mission to reconcile the world to Godself. However, God's mission was realized in Jesus, and our mission only exists as a participation in Christ's being. In other words, I think Franke would benefit greatly from setting aside his interest on "postmodernity" and contemporary theologians and focusing on dogmatic topics of creation, sin, reconciliation, and (primarily) Christology, out of which will then flow more robust doctrines of the Trinity, the imago Dei, and theological anthropology.