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PotOnWheel
Registered Member

Date Joined Jul 2001
Total Posts : 9890

Posted 10/3/2009 9:52 AM (GMT -6)

Tom, let me ask you a question.

Listening to a Bethel U chapel on Trinity I came across, again, the expressed notion that perichoresis involves suffering.

I neither hold that nor really understand what it means. I tend to think of that notion as an anthropomorphic tag-along under the influence of the social-trinity tradition. (also why I like "co-inherence" instead of perichoresis.)

1. Where do you think the notion that God has to internally suffer from God's interniality come from?

2. What do you think of that view?

3. What would Zizzy and others (A? and L?) think of it?

(o)

Tom
Registered Member

Date Joined Jul 2001
Total Posts : 10353

Posted 10/3/2009 11:03 AM (GMT -6)

I don't think perichoretic suffering is a necessary feature of God's triune life. That is unimaginable to me.

As you know, perichoresis was first used to express the inter-relatedness of the triune PERSONS, how each PERSON constitutes and is constituted by the others. It later got used to describe the co-indwelling of the human and the divine NATURES. And now it's use to describe the inter-relatedness of our relation to God.

I think the term is being overtaxed. It can't MEAN the same thing in all these contexts.

But I can see how the union of natures in Christ is a means by which the Son suffers as human. So THERE perichoresis (whatever it is) involves suffering. But it can't involve suffering (in my opinion) when we're talking about the three relations that constitute the being of God as God. But there are a lot of folks out there who have taken the idea that God can suffer (and I think there's a carefully qualified way to attribute suffering to God) too far and want to make suffering an essential, necessary feature of God's triune life.

I think they do it because they want to bring God as near and close to us as possible. I suppose they reason that if suffering isn't an essential feature of the triune relations from all eternity, then how can God move from that to incorporate us and our suffering at all? I think that's bad reasoning.

Tom

"Man is a person not by nature but by spirit. By nature he is only an individual." Nicolas Berdyaev

PotOnWheel
Registered Member

Date Joined Jul 2001
Total Posts : 9890

Posted 10/3/2009 5:45 PM (GMT -6)

Dear Tom,

Thank you, thank you, thank you.

You do a wonderful job.

Thankfully yours,

Bruce

(o)

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