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19 chapter 1 The Trinity From Immanent to Economic Lauds Coming in at three a.m. Sleep deprived, but adrenaline alert to say prayers at the morgue. After four months almost a full body is found only missing everything from both knees down, lying on his left side. O the intimacy of this position, as if he were curled up tenderly against his lover and the beseeching aspect of this man’s body: The white parietal bone of the skull innocently visible against the black bag and the black of charring naked, vulnerable, seeking to be held just one more time.1 The Pastoral Ethic of Love Much pastoral theology focuses on pastoral care as an expression of the divine rule to “love one another as we have been loved,” or, alternatively, ministration to the other in whom we see Christ, catching God’s image in others, loving God through loving the other. Much of it is grounded in the theology of the incarnation, the Trauma and Transformation at Ground Zero 20 movement of God to and for us in the person of Jesus, and in an understanding of humanity as imago Dei, the image of God, who is love. Here, pastoral care as a “ministry of presence” becomes less about one’s own presence, and more about the presence of the divine. A chaplain describes this well: . . . I don’t know if this is the essence of [the T. Mort. chaplaincy], but I think it was “the presence. . . .” I think it was first when people were talking about “the ministry of presence,” when that became kind of a term that was being used, I was like, “A ministry of what?” Because I always associated it with clergy who just were there and never really did anything. I didn’t understand what that was, but of course after this experience, I not only understood it, but used it. I would say the essence of it was being God’s presence. Who is this God who is present? Christian theology posits the trinitarian nature of the One God of Judaism due to belief in the incarnation—that Jesus of Nazareth was God incarnate. Gospel accounts describe Jesus’ experience and teachings of God the Father and he promises them the gift of the Spirit. In John’s Gospel he makes such claims as “I and the Father are one,” “If you have seen me you have seen the Father,” and he says that wherever two or three are gathered together he is there. Through Jesus’ life, death, resurrection, and the experience of the early church, Christians came to believe in a God that is not only a unity of being but also a “unity in community”: God as three in one—Trinity—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Hence, for Christians, the Trinity is a way of describing the being of God in both God’s unity and multiplicity. Through the incarnation God takes on what is not God, crossing the “gap” between Creator and created in the person of Jesus. In this unique person, existentially , humanity takes into itself the being of God, where God in Jesus is fully human and divine, “truly God and truly man,” with all the bio-psycho-social manifestations of such, “like us in all respects apart from sin.”2 Thus, we are encouraged in incarnational theology not simply to see the hypostatic union of divine and human in the Son, as a one-to-one correlation, but to see the Trinity, the threein -one, in the divinity. Incarnation takes us to Trinity, and perhaps back again.3 In the incarnation and resurrection, God takes ontologically into Godself the being of humanity in the second person of the Trinity—the Son, Jesus. God is not only psychologically relevant because of the person of Jesus, a man with a psyche, but God is relevant to us from what we know of God in Godself, not simply in the tri-unity of being but the unity of the three persons of the Trinity as love, a state of being that we as humans experience in a way not shared by the animal kingdom. Here the Trinity lends itself to a pastoral model for reasons arising from the nature of Trinity itself. These reasons relate to what is called in theological language the immanent and the economic Trinity. The immanent Trinity speaks of who God is—theologia, the relation of God as Trinity as God is to Godself. The economic...

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