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6. Obedience and Mission
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6 Obedience and Mission The preceding chapters unfolded von Speyr’s vision of the original image (Urbild) of the immanent Trinity as one of love. In this chapter, I will discuss obedience (Gehorsam) and mission (Sendung) as the economic articulation of the triune immanent love. In the two chapters following this one, I will specifically focus on interpreting von Speyr’s theology of the missions of the Son and the Holy Spirit. Whereas the previous chapters were about the Trinitarian relations before creation, these next three chapters are about the Trinitarian relations after creation. The move from the previous chapters to this next set of chapters is fundamental to von Speyr, because love leads to obedience. For her, the triune God creates the world out of God’s love. Since God is love itself, everything God does is love. Since the world is created out of God’s love, the world should respond out of loving obedience to God.1 In Genesis, God’s creative words of love, “Let there be . . .,” are obediently followed by “and so it was” (Genesis 1). The creation obeys by letting itself be created. God creates God’s world out of love so that the world can participate in God’s love. The created world participates in God’s love by obeying, and this obedience is a valid expression of love.2 To love God is to obey God. With the fall, however, creation does not love God back and thus loses participation in this love. For creation to regain this participation in love, the Father will send his Son and his Holy Spirit on a mission to his creation and to bring creation back home into his love.3 The Son and Holy Spirit will accomplish this mission by being obedient for creation. It is the reinsertion of creation into triune love, which is itself perfect loving obedience of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Re-participation in triune love comes through the gift of triune obedience. Love and obedience are inseparably 1. Von Speyr, G, 112. 2. Ibid., 113. 3. Ibid., 112. 127 connected. Put as strongly as possible, obedience is the fulfillment of love.4 To love God is to obey God. Since creation has fallen away from this love, the Father has sent his Son and Holy Spirit to be the obedient fulfillment of creation’s love for the Father. The Son and Holy Spirit make creation obedient.5 Creation will participate in triune love through the mission of obedience of the Trinitarian Persons of the Son and the Holy Spirit. In the immanent Trinity, the original image is love. The triune Urbild of love is also characterized by an Ur-Gehorsam, an original obedience.6 Even in God, love and obedience are intimately connected. The Son and Holy Spirit are sent to creation to reveal that God himself is always the original image of obedience, which is the fruit of their love.7 Von Speyr integrates original image and obedience, meaning that the Son’s and Holy Spirit’s missions of obedience are the economic expression of the triune immanent relations of love. In this chapter and the next, I will be developing the second point of the book’s central thesis, namely that heaven is opened by the Father sending the Son on a mission (Sendung) to be the incarnate Word of obedience (Gehorsam). In chapter 8, I will focus on the Holy Spirit’s mission of obedience. We are now in the section of the book developing an economic Trinitarian theology that presents von Speyr’s Christology and Pneumatology. For her Christology, we must master her understanding of obedience and mission as centered in Christ; then we will be able to better see the unfolding of the Trinitarian economic mission of the Son as a theology of obedience. As T. S. Eliot writes, But to apprehend The point of intersection of the timeless With time, is an occupation for the saint.8 The overcoming of human finitude, which has come from humans’ disobedience, will be conquered by the insertion of the timeless into human time. The mystery of the sending of the Son and the Holy Spirit—of the mission of the timeless into time—is best contemplated by the saint. The one who can best apprehend this mystery is the saint who has been inserted most deeply 4. Ibid., 54. 5. Ibid., 115. 6. Von Speyr, SM, 154. Von Speyr dictates that this point comes from Ignatius...