Trinity and the Personal

"Trinity understands God as three-personed: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, God in community, each 'person' in active communion with the others.  We are given an understanding of God that is most emphatically personal and interpersonal.  God is nothing if not personal.  If God is revealed as personal, the only way that God can be known is in personal response.  We need to know this.  It is the easiest thing in the world to use words as a kind of abstract truth or principle, to deal with the gospel as information.  Trinity prevents us from doing this.  We can never get away with depersonalizing the gospel or the truth to make it easier, simpler, more convenient.  Knowing God through impersonal abstractions is ruled out, knowing God through programmatic projects is abandoned, knowing God in solitary isolation is forbidden.  Trinity insists that God is not an idea or a force or a private experience but personal and known only in personal response and engagement."

Eugene Peterson in Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places, pages 45-46.

Comments

[Todd]

Beautiful quote by Peterson.

http://baptistpress.com/bpnews.asp?ID=20420
A Baptist Press article on McLaren. A lot of Mohler's blog rehashed, but some new info as well.

[JACK]

Steve:

Interesting quote. Although I'm not sure if I fully understand the way "personal" is being used in connection with the "personal" response. When I read that, it naturally suggests to me a very individualistic viewpoint from our everyday use of the word as akin to "private", but the rest of the quote suggests that was not the intent. For the Trinity does reveal to us a communio and that should speak to us about the nature of God, God's relationship with man, and the nature of the Church.

I get to the same place as he does about not knowing God through "abstractions" or "principles" from the method by which Jesus became known to us. He encountered people, calling some to Him, and they responded. Others He didn't expressly call, but they responded to Him nonetheless. To me this fact helps reinforce that no one sat down to invent the Christian religion. Our doctrines developed out of trying to explain the facts of this encounter with Jesus and the new people he called together.

Okay, I'm rambling. My apologies, but your post started me thinking.