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1 The Doctrine of the Church— Focus and Challenges The church is best understood within the context of the doctrine of the Trinity. That doctrine places the church within the work of God's Spirit in this world, to embody the meanings and rationale that God wishes to actualize for creation. Since those meanings are focused in the Logos, incarnate in Jesus Christ, the church is thoroughly christocentric in its nature. THE TRINITARIAN CONTEXT FOR THE DOCTRINE OF THE CHURCH To set the proper doctrinal context for our consideration of the church, it is helpful to remind ourselves of the basic structure of the trinitarian vision of God and state the way we mean to employ it. The trinitarian dogma is at once the normative Christian understanding of God and the basic vision of the world and its relation to God. The dogma speaks directly of God, while by implication it sets forth what Christians hold the world to be as a conse­ quence of their vision of God. The first person of the Trinity symbolizes the numinous mystery of God, what Rudolf Otto spoke of as the mysterium tremendum et fascinosum, the God of such power that no one can look on this God and live.1 In the religious traditions of humankind, including those of Judaism and Christianity, it is not clear whether this powerful Mystery is beneficent or hostile. It is not clear what God's purposes arc, nor indeed whether God is purposeful at all. The second person, known as the Logos, is precisely the revelation and ar­ ticulation of the purpose and meaning (the ratio) of this God. Thus it can be said that this Logos is the principle of intelligibility (ordo intelligendi) of God and hence of all reality.2 The stoic philosophers spoke of the Logos embedded in the world's process, the World Mind, which accounted for the order of the world and for the correlation between the order and the human 187 9 / THE CHURCH mind. Christian philosophers and theologians made a monumental contribu­ tion to and modification of classical philosophy by asserting that this Logos isJesus Christ. As God's activity of articulating the divine rationale, the Logos can be said to be homoousios, of the same substance, with God. Indeed, this Logos is best understood as God. The third person is the ordering principle of the realm of nature and history. This realm is referred to in classical philosophy as the ordo vivendi (order of life). The rationale of this ordo vivendi is one and the same as that which was revealed and articulated in the Logos. The third person is the embodi­ ment, the actualization of God's meaning within the realm of natural and historical processes. Christians have identified this actualizing power with the Holy Spirit. As such they can affirm that this power too is truly God, as God is intrinsically involved in actualizing God's purposes. They also point to the sense in which the Spirit unifies the Godhead, bringing God's primordial being and purpose together in natural and historical actualization. These af­ firmations are central to the Christian faith, even though the faithful are fully aware that nature and history are shot through with evil. Each of the "persons" in the trinitarian view of God is ultimate reality, what classically was known as arche, "first principle." That is to say, it is not the case that one of the persons is primary while the others are subordinate to that one, nor that one or two are elaborations or explications of a primary arche. Rather, all three are primary, foundational, and as such they constitute the basic structure and dynamic of all of reality. This has several important implications. First, there is a certain finality or necessity in this threefold process, because it represents the process of God's being God. The three persons, or the three ways of God's being God, are the unfolding of God's own nature or being.3 Intrinsic to the primordial being of the mysterium-God (First Person) is the articulation of the rationale of the Godhead (Second Person), and the actualization of God's own purposes in concreteness (Third Person). Second, the unfolding of God's being in the trinitarian framework thus belongs both to the fundamental character of reality and to the historical development of that reality. In classical terms, we say that this triune character of God is both ontological and revelational or "economic...

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