Social Trinitarianism and Leonoardo Boff

As you may have counterintuited, Leonardo Boff's Trinity and Society (Euegene:  Wipf and Stock, 2005) is a fairly orthodox synthesis of Trinitarian theology.  My principal quibble is that it reads, at times, more like a stream of consciousness than a dogmatic handbook, which has rendered an otherwise good book something of a hasty profiling of ideas.  Yet if I were to teach an advanced course in Triadology with a section called "What are they saying about the Trinity," this book would be at the top of the list.

Like his later Holy Trinity, Perfect Community, the (former) Franciscan friar suggests that the Trinitarian communion ought to model for us a just and ethical society, even an egalitarian one.  His starting point--as is all of Social Trinitarianism's starting-point--is the analogy used by St Gregory of Nyssa's To Ablabius:  On Not Three Gods which I briefly explained in an earlier post.  In drawing a 'social analogy' to explain the Holy Trinity, Gregory wrote:

Peter, James, and John, being in one human nature, are called three men: and there is no absurdity in describing those who are united in nature, if they are more than one, by the plural number of the name derived from their nature. If, then, in the above case, custom admits this, and no one forbids us to speak of those who are two as two, or those who are more than two as three, how is it that in the case of our statements of the mysteries of the Faith, though confessing the Three Persons, and acknowledging no difference of nature between them, we are in some sense at variance with our confession, when we say that the Godhead of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost is one and yet forbid men to say "there are three Gods"?

The difficulty that Gregory sets out to resolve is this:  Given the analogy of three men--Peter, James, and Andrew--all sharing one human nature, manhood to describe three Persons all sharing one Godhead, why, then, do we still call "them" one God?  Briefly put:  Because they each share in the same operation, whether it is in creating, redeeming, judging, or the like.  Gregory engages in a bit of etymology when he thinks that the Greek word for "Godhead"--θεότης (theotes)--is derived from θέα (thea), meaning "beholding," something that each the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit does, but as a single operation, thus demonstrating the oneness of the Divine Essence.

Curiously, this is where "social Trinitarianism" ends, because it does one of two things, depending upon the proponent.  On one hand, it looks at the analogy of human society, but leaves aside Gregory's explanation of the unity of Godhead that preempts the Holy Trinity from being called "three gods."  On the other hand, the analogy "bounces back," as it were, as a model of the ideal human society.

For Leonardo Boff, the "rubric" of a society based upon the Trinitarian communion is perichoresis, an element of Triadology to describe how each Person "dances around" each other.  The Latin patrimony uses the equivalent Latin term, circumincessio (or circuminsessio), a reference to "going around."  It is this interrelationship within the Trinity that Boff hopes will model an equitable human communion.  He discusses this at length towards the end of Chapter Seven of his Trinity and Society.

He is right, I think, but he cops out at the full implications of what he is suggesting.

Rather obviously, Boff winces and briskly moves on when he speaks of the "taxonomy" or ordering within the Trintiarian communion:  Father, then Son, then Holy Spirit.  Though the three hypostaseis are co-equal in glory, majesty, and divinity, this does not erase the fact that of the Father's "monarchy"--that he is the principle from whom the Son is begotten and the Holy Spirit proceeds.  What role does this have to play in Boff's (dare I say it?) utopia?  He skirts the issue altogether, which is unfortunate because he is "on to something," as they say, like a kid who builds a magnificent sandcastle, only to demolish it. 

Yet the bigger problem is the one that Boff does not even consider, because it doesn't fit within the paradigm of "Christian Marxism," namely, the role of grace in the building of a just society.  Granted, the "Kingdom of God" looms large in liberation theologies, but it undercuts itself by a de facto Pelagianism:  "We'll build the City of God on earth for the poor with our own gumpton and gall."

If the theology of grace tells us anything, it's that gumpton and gall falls woefully short in terms of energy to carry out God's project for humanity:  Transformation.  After all, Capitol Hill Organised Protest (CHOP) or the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone (CHAZ) in Seattle may have been born of a grandiose idea of a peaceful society, but the persona non grata of God's grace rendered it a dismal failure. 

More to the point, how can anyone model the Trinitarian perichoresis in their own lives when they have not been inserted into the life of the Trinity in baptism and confirmation?  It follows, then, that a just and equitable society envisioned by Boff must necessarily be a spin-off of the Church, the community of those in grace.  It means, ultimately, mission.  But when "social action" replaces "evangelisation" but retains the appellation of "mission," it is really a simulacrum of the City of God because it's following the playbook of the City of Man.

This is why I call Boff's conception of God's project an "utopia"--the term was coined by St Thomas More meaning, quite literally, "nowhere"--because pursuing God's project gracelessly will land us, indeed, nowhere.

My other critique lies in how he "truncates" the Mystery of the Incarnation to something almost entirely pre-Paschal and, worse, without considering the role of the Ascension and therefore the Lordship of Jesus over the cosmos.  But, to be fair, he hasn't read my dissertation, and to be indulgent, I haven't finished the chapter on Jesus' kingly anointing!