OCTOBER 2006

ISSUE 8 - ISSN 1448 - 6326

CLASSIC AND CONTEMPORARY - AN HERMENEUTICAL EXPLORATION OF TRINITY

MARY VELING

Abstract

How are contemporary Christians to understand the classical doctrine of the Trinity in a meaningful way? Hermeneutical theory—discussed here under the rubrics of ‘belonging’, ‘interpretation’, ‘risk’ and ‘standing under the text’—provides the key for appropriating classical texts. Reviewing the root metaphors for God in Hebrew and Christian history, as well as early Trinitarian developments, a constructive approach to the Trinity as metaphor is then proposed. [Editor]

Introduction

The doctrine of the Trinity, although deeply rooted in the Christian tradition and expressed liturgically in creeds and doxologies, remains for many people today a baffling contradiction.  On the one hand, many people find the doctrine too complex to understand and too removed from experience, and thus opt to image God in a removed “monolithic, mono-personal way.” [1]  Others, if asked their understanding of the triune God are likely to reply something like this: “the Trinity is sort of God – three persons in one – I’m not exactly sure. God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit.” This tendency leans heavily toward tritheism – as if God were three persons in the modern understanding of the word. The doctrine of the Trinity as a particular tenant of Christian faith and piety appears to be for many people just too elusive and unintelligible. Indeed, theologian Karl Rahner wonders how accessible the doctrine actually is for people today. He writes:

With all due respect to the church’s official and classical formulation of the Christian doctrine of the Trinity… we still have to admit that the assertions about the Trinity in their catechetical formulations are almost unintelligible to people today, and that they almost inevitably occasion misunderstandings.[2]

In this article, I will first turn to hermeneutical theory which provides great insight into the way we creatively appropriate the classics of our tradition.  I will then examine the history of the doctrine of the Trinity, its scriptural and theological roots, and also explore the relevance of the doctrine for the world today, to canvass the possibilities and difficulties of expressing this classical theological idea in contemporary terms. Regardless of its apparent elusiveness, the belief in a triune God has been defined and redefined over the centuries and has earned great eminence within the Christian tradition. Rather than “hand ourselves and our tradition over to the dustbin of history”[3] we must enter into dialogue with the tradition to discover new possibilities.

1.      The Importance of Hermeneutics for Systematic Theology and its Appropriation of Classic Texts

In this section, I will review the key dynamics of hermeneutical theory under four sub-headings: Belonging, Interpretation, Risk, Standing Under the Text.

(i) Belonging

We do not exist out-side of history but rather we belong to and shape history. The past is not simply a textbook rendering facts but rather history as we interpret it through our particular lenses. Therefore to view ourselves as autonomous beings that are not affected by tradition, where we can ‘take it or leave it’, so to speak is naive and even egotistical. This view both dims our appreciation of the present and limits the liberating possibilities of hope for the future. “Tradition”, says Hans-Georg Gadamer, “is not simply a permanent precondition; rather, we produce it ourselves in so much as we understand, participate in the evolution of tradition, and hence further determine it ourselves.” [4]

It was Nietzsche who first said there is no such thing as an uninterpreted fact. Whenever we occasion to question, understand, interpret our tradition we are doing so through the lenses of our situatedness our belonging. Western society today is highly pluralistic, multi-cultural and secularised. Materialism, economic rationalism, environmental issues, complex family structures and rapidly changing technologies all have an impact on society in the third millenium. These enormous social and cultural shifts that have taken place over the past few decades have a significant impact on how we understand ourselves and our tradition. Our history, our language, our culture, our gender, and our social location together shape our understanding. All interpretation is mediation, conversation between past and present, a “translation carried on within the effective history of a tradition to retrieve its sometimes strange, sometimes familiar meanings.” [5]

And as enticing as it may be to claim an authoritative, normative, external status to the various theologies within our Christian tradition, they too are bound to this hermenuetical principle. There is no theological statement we can make that is a pure ‘uninterpreted fact’. Indeed, there is much at risk when theology attempts to authorize norms to stand outside of history as ‘external truths’. As David Tracy comments:

It is interesting to note that when the notion “authority” shifts from a truth disclosed to mind and heart to an external norm for the obedient will, the theologian, in effect, can only repeat the shop-worn conclusions of the tradition…Eventually, the central, classical symbols and doctrines of the tradition become mere “fundamentals” to be externally accepted and endlessly repeated.[6]

If this be the case, then in the end the human task has little to do with understanding and hope, but rather with certitude, an existence where all that is encountered remains locked in initial meanings with no possibility for radical otherness.

In the Jewish tradition, the Talmudic text is seen as infinite, universal and eternal. It is, after all God’s text. Similarly, in the Christian tradition, the doctrine of the Trinity is understood as naming a truth about the relationship between God, creation and humanity. However, that does not mean it somehow floats above history. Rather its eternity is that it can time and time again illuminate varying historical contexts. “Turn it and turn it,” the Talmud says, “over and over again; everything can be found there.”[7] To be timeless is thus an infinite capacity to enter history. We cannot simply ignore the Trinity. As a central part of our Christian tradition it demands our attention.

(ii) Interpretation

The possibilities for understanding the tradition from a contemporary perspective are endless, especially when we view tradition as something that not only shapes us but also enables us to shape the future. However, to interpret tradition, is not simply a task of ‘uncovering’ the past. Interpretation does not merely decipher the past “via some new method or technique…the mind of the author, the social circumstances, the life-world of the text, or the reception of the text by its original addressees.”[8] Interpretation is not seeking explanation and answer, but is rather seeking the question that stands behind the tradition. Gadamer notes that although every text of tradition appears as an assertion, it is in reality “the response to a prior question.”[9] The interpreter’s task, therefore, is to enter the world of the question, to ask, What question provoked this text, this tradition? “We can understand a text,” Gadamer says, “only when we have understood the question to which it is an answer.”  Tracy explains as follows:

The movement in conversation is questioning itself. Neither my present opinions on the question nor the text’s original response to the question, but the question itself, must control every conversation . . . We learn to play the game of conversation when we allow the questioning to take over.[10]

Moreover, when we interpret our tradition, when we enter into conversation with the questions (to which the symbols and texts of tradition are a response to) we must realize that these questions are open-ended and not closed. The responses of tradition, therefore, are far from definitive. Rather, they lend themselves to further questions that are placed in dialogue with our own questions. Two horizons are at play, the horizon of tradition and the horizon of the interpreting community. That which emerges as a result of the conversation belongs to neither but is rather, a new event of understanding.

(iii) Risk

Interpretation is a task that is not without risk. Whenever we enter into true conversation with tradition we become aware that although familiar to us, it is also strangely unfamiliar.  When we allow the ‘question’ to assume primacy, we place ourselves at risk of  being provoked beyond that which ‘know’; our secure world of belonging, into a world that might require a new, unfamiliar, different, way of belonging. When we enter into authentic conversation, where the questions themselves lead us, we arrive at an  interpretation that recognizes that if it understands at all, it understands differently.[11]  Thus whenever we attempt to express a classical doctrine such as the Triune God into a contemporary setting we are at once risking our assumptive world, entering the strange and unknown, and at the same time making possible a different, new understanding. As Terry Veling explains:

From a radical belonging to a tradition, through a venturing out into the open and unknown spaces of the question, we return to rewrite ourselves anew, as if to another self, another tradition. We realize we have not left the book to which we belong – the book, however, different to itself for having been reshaped through its own reading.[12]

(iv) Standing Under the Text

Why is it, Augustine asks, that in our desire for the joy in truth, some do not rejoice in it. His answer is that while we love the truth that enlightens us, we hate the truth that accuses us. The truth that accuses us is the truth that strikes back at us: a truth that holds us responsible in bearing witness to it.[13]

To be responsible for bearing witness, as Augustine says, is to put the truth to the test, to see if it is really true – not just in the past – but here now, today, in these times. We have a responsibility to answer for our time. The moment of application in the present is the only way that history and tradition can endure in time and generate new futures – new readings, new applications, new testimonies that make the truth a living truth, and the word of God a living word. However, there is another sense of “bearing witness” that must also be highlighted. The eternity of the sacred/classic text does not only mean finding its meaning for the present, but also standing under the text as that which bears witness as an accuser or judge of our times. Indeed, to “stand under” is the best way to understand.[14] The texts of tradition are teachings  by which current outlooks can be evaluated, and they often resist our efforts to make them correspond to our cherished “modern” ideas.

One of the most puzzling hermeneutic “keys” in the Jewish tradition is the phrase, “We will do and we will hear.”[15] This seems to reverse our usual notion that action comes after hearing, that we hear and understand first, and then we act. However, as Gadamer suggests, the moment of application is not an afterthought, but integral to the event of understanding or of “hearing.”[16] Tradition is not an historical object, rather, it is a gift, a donation. In a similar way, in the Jewish tradition, there is a prior conviction that, even before one knows what a text amounts to, one nevertheless accepts that a teaching exists in the text to be interpreted, that the “truth” is somehow concealed there. The interpreter surrenders or gives oneself over to the text, just as the tradition is first given to the interpreter as a gift to be welcomed and received.

What we learn from the Jewish tradition is that the sacred text is higher than us and commands authority, with a power to teach and to judge. The interpreter does not place oneself under the text after the fact of reading but before the fact of reading. Moreover, this willingness to be judged by these deep sources is what maintains a people and a tradition in time and history.  Interpretive understanding lies out in front of both our tradition and our contemporary situation as the two are in conversation, continuously evoking new horizons of meaning.

2. The Development of the Doctrine of the Trinity

“The logic of hermeneutical theory”, suggests Roger Haight, “can be appreciated in two fundamental movements. The first is a certain release of meaning from its particularity in the past; the second is a retrieving of this meaning in a new particular situation.”[17] In this next section I will give a brief overview of the development of the doctrine of the Trinity, in order to honor and release its classical expression.

(i) Root Metaphors for God in Hebrew and Christian History

The Christian tradition speaks of God as Trinitarian, three manifestations of God’s self-communication - the experience of God as manifold expression is rooted in both the Hebrew and Christian scriptures.  This experience gave rise to the different ways of speaking about God, the different metaphors for describing God – “God is like…”  These expressions of God are descriptive and rhetorical, not literal. “Metaphor”, notes Paul Riccour, “is where resemblance serves as the reason for substituting a figurative word for a missing or an absent literal word.”[18]

The story of  Israel from the beginning suggests a people who recognised God as active in history, present to creation. For the Hebrew people, two main metaphors for God were expressed: Ruach, God’s Spirit, God’s breath, is the deepest part of God as communicated to the deepest part of the human soul. Dabhar, God’s Word, is present in God’s ‘action’ or ‘deed’, the concrete expression of God’s reality manifest in history.

Later, in the centuries before the time of Jesus, a new metaphor emerged and gained prominence, Wisdom, or Sophia. Wisdom combined the two different agencies of Ruach and Dabhar into a single metaphor, although leaning more heavily toward the Spirit. The use of Father as a metaphor to describe God’s relationship with humanity,in early Hebrew Scriptures, is almost non-existent. According to Bernard Lee,“ Israel ’s understanding of God as creator differs so fundamentally from the reproductive notion of parent that the Hebrew people assiduously avoided ‘father’ terminology.”[19] However, later when the Israelite self-understanding shifts into a new covenant relationship with God, as the Chosen People - the First Born, an appreciation of fatherhood emerges. God ‘adopts’ a people as his children. (Ex 6:6)[20]

In the Christian scriptures, we note several layers of God-meanings, “each of which is used to express Christological faith in Jesus.”[21] We note the use of Ruach, Dabhar and Sophia in the Gospel accounts of both Matthew and Luke as well as in the letters of Paul. Later the Hellenistic influence in Christian scriptures is evident in the Johannine use of Logos/Word. However, “what is attributed to Logos in the Johannine Prologue is also attributed to Sophia in the early chapters of Proverbs, and in many parts of the Book of Wisdom.”[22]  So too, the notion of the Fatherhood of God, was apparent and ritualised in the assumptive world of Jesus – Jesus himself prayed to and referred to God as Father.

In the Christian story as it unfolded, followers of Jesus began to recognise through him the Ruachand the Dahbar of God – a “God bent on humanity.” God desires to be at one with humanity, to share the pain of humanity, to redeem the suffering of humanity. Those who addressed God as Father did so with the one who is named Son, the anointed one, in and through the power of God’s Spirit, active anew in the community. A pattern of salvation history  began to emerge: God redeems humanity through Jesus in the power of the Holy Spirit.

(ii) Early Trinitarian Developments

Whilst the categories of Father, Son and Spirit are certainly biblical, a formulation of Trinitarian theology did not take hold in the Christian imagination until the third century. However, as a second level reflection on a particular Christian experience of God, it was from the onset plagued with problems and controversies.[23]  The early Christian theologians were primarily focused on oikonomia, the economy or salvific experience of the Son and of the Spirit as the reality of the Divine self-communication to humanity. Problems arose when theologians began to speculate and debate about the divinity of Jesus and the internal relationship of God, manifest in the Trinity.  Eventually these debates gathered momentum and instilled divisiveness within the Christian community, leading to numerous controversies, most notably the Arian controversy.  These questions of Jesus’ divinity prompted the early the Church councils to outline a clear response. The bishops at Council of Nicaea (325) employed the non-biblical term homoousios(of the same substance) to explain that Jesus Christ was not created but “begotten of the same substance of the Father”. However, uneasiness and debate continued, in part because the term homoousioshad no origins in scripture, and in part because of its previous usage that denoted it to mean ‘single identity’, thereby denying any real distinction between Father and Son. Thus, although the Council alleviated somewhat the Arian debates, it left unaddressed the question of the unity of God.

Not until the Council of Constantinople (381) were these questions and controversies laid to rest. Through the aid of the philosophic genius of the Cappadocians, the Trinity was finally ‘explained’. God was described as a single essence (ousia) which would forever remain incomprehensible to us, and three expressions (hypostases) which made him known. Rather than begin an understanding of God through his unknown ousia, the Cappadocians  mantained that we can only know God through the three manifestations of God, revealed as Father, Son and Spirit.

Less than a century later, Augustine of Hippo began a series of reflections on the Trinity which laid the foundation for what today is understood as the beginning of the classical Latin understanding of the Trinity. This tradition, that for Augustine was deeply rooted in the experiential realm, focused primarily on the unity of the godhead and explored a number of triadic relationships that he suggested were analogous to the human understanding of being, knowledge and love. Today this understanding of the Trinity is known as the “psychological approach”. Nearly a thousand years after Augustine, Thomas Aquinas expounded his reflections into Aristotelian philosophic concepts. Hence a systematic and abstract theory of trinity was explicated, where the locus of meaning is first to be found in the relationships of the divine ‘persons’, ad intra, that to this day has been the main source of teaching about this doctrine.

3.  Constructive Theology

By the mid- twentieth century, serious questions surfaced concerning the doctrine of the Trinity and its significance for the modern world. As I mentioned in the introduction to this paper, many Catholics today find the triune symbol a notion that is unintelligible, esoteric, and religiously irrelevant – detached as it were from their religious world. In this next section, I will examine some of the reasons why Trinitarian theology has become neglected, and for so many people, distant and abstract. I will highlight ways in which some theologians today are generating new ways of appropriating the doctrine of the Trinity that it might yield meaning in contemporary contexts. 

According to contemporary Trinitarian theology, there are three significant points that hinder Christians from fully engaging in the doctrine of the Trinity.  I will explore these further under the following sub-headings: TheologiaVS Oikonomia; “Economic” and “Immanent” Trinity; Trinity as Metaphor.

(i)     Theologia VS Oikonomia

The attempt to understand the mystery of God (theologia) that has been revealed in the economy of salvation (oikonomia), is the underlying mystery of the doctrine of the Trinity. Thus, writes Lacugna, “Theology (the doctrine of God) is inseparable from soteriology (the doctrine of salvation).”[24] However, as the centuries progressed, “Christian theology became sidetracked by the question what God is in and of Godself”.[25] Theologiaand oikonomiabecame separated as theologians went beyond “the salvation historical or narrative categories of the economy to the metaphysical ground of economy in ‘theology.”[26]

The direction that history chose to take concerning the doctrine of the Trinity is, according to LuCugna, “a one-sided approach…that has kept it on the fringe, quite unrelated to other theological doctrines, much less to the Christian life.”[27] She is referring to the highly abstract approach of the classical Latin understanding, which focused too heavily on “the esoteric exposition of God’s ‘inner’ life, that is, the self-relatedness of Father, Son and Spirit.” [28]  Thus the triune symbol, according to many theologians today, has become divorced from its originating birth in human understanding. “The psychological theory of the Trinity”, writes Rahner, “does not really give enough weight to a starting point in the history of revelation and dogma which is within the historical and salvific experience of the Son and of the Spirit as the reality of the divine self-communication to us.” [29] 

(ii) Economic and Immanent Trinity

The separation of oikonomiaand theologialed theologians into a bog-mire of complex philosophic treatments on the notion of God in se.  Theories on the immanent Trinity, God’s inner life, and the economic Trinity, how God is revealed in the world, began to emerge and take shape. The obvious danger in deliberating too heavily along these lines is that it risks leading to thinking not of one God but two, one who encounters us in the world, and another who is totally absent from human experience. Rahner, in an attempt to correct this line of thought, suggested that because God is by nature self-communicating, the “immanent” Trinity is the ‘intradivine’ communication between Father, Son, and Spirit, and the “economic” Trinity, is the manifestation of that communication in the history of salvation. The economic Trinity is the immanent Trinity, and vice versa. [30] 

Thinkers in contemporary theology vary in their responses to the notion of an economic and an immanent Trinity. “Strong objection”, notes Elizabeth Johnson, “is offered by some contemporary theologians who hold that it simply is not given to human beings to talk about the inner life of God. Such language is a bold over-reach of human capabilities.”[31]  LaCugna too notes the dangers of focusing on ‘intra’ divine relations; she suggests that instead of “thinking of persons or relations ‘in’ God we should think of God existing as persons in communion with other persons.”[32]  When focus is placed on the distinctions of the ‘inner’ life of God, the “economy is left behind”[33] and the doctrine of the Trinity has no bearing on the experience of life and faith.

As LaCugna says, the mystery of God and the mystery of salvation are inseparable.  We cannot speak of God in se without speaking of God pro nobis.  God’s name is fundamentally God-for-us.  It is the name of goodness, love, grace and compassion, of which God says, “My name shall be there” (1 Kings 8:29).  To speak of the triune God is not to speak of a faceless God, a God of impersonal Being, a God of the swirling cosmos.  Rather, it is to speak of the relational oikonomia, the life of each other in relation to each other, bound and responsible one-for-the-other.

(iii) Trinity as Metaphor

Metaphor is generally used as a literary tool. Metaphor adds flavour and colour to our conversation; it ‘embellishes’ in order to highlight the things we feel are important, that we cannot say enough about. However, according to Lee metaphor also “mediates experience in the very moment of the origination of experience.” In this instant, “metaphor, midwifes experience.”[34] This understanding of metaphor is not interpretation ‘after the fact’, nor simply ‘mere’ metaphor, rather it is “an enabler of the fact in the first place and even a constitutive feature of fact”.[35]  Metaphor in this sense, gives birth to or names experience, it suggests an overwhelming ‘I know’! However, Lee reminds us, in every sense or claim of ‘knowing’, there remains the unknown – the not yet revealed.

Many theologians today, when exploring the doctrine of the Trinity, explain the language about God or concepts of God in terms of models. This language, they argue, is symbolic, analogous, metaphorical. However, too often this language has been seen as descriptive and literal.  Models of Trinity have become something to “replicate in a precise way rather than to image in an iconic manner.”[36] Contemporary theologians are wary of such literal interpretations in light of the understanding that language both reveals and conceals truth. They would argue that models of God are not a direct beholding of God, thus models of Trinity, are not the Trinitarian God.  Models of God reflect our knowing of God and at the same time “reflect our unknowing of God; model is reflective vision, not direct beholding.”[37]  No concept is exact; no model is complete. This is the mystery and beauty of metaphor; it claims with conviction the ‘is like’, and acknowledges at the same time the ‘is not like’. Metaphorical understanding is what contemporary theologians are eliciting in their attempts to retrieve the centrality of the doctrine of the Trinity in the world today.

Theologians such as Karl Rahner, LaCugna, and Johnson all evoke the fundamental metaphor of the Trinity as pro nobis to help us reclaim the mystery of God’s gracious and self-giving love toward and for humankind and all creation.  This metaphor, in turn, serves to inspire the Christian community to be for each other in the way that God is for us.   Love is originary.  The Good is primary.  Life is on the side of love, on the side of goodness.  It is not being-in-itself, it is not sheer being, indifferent being – it is “being-for.”

The metaphorical naming of God as Trinitarian love is like arguing on the side of “amazing grace,” or arguing for a strange, impossible “ kingdom of God” where a different logic of love is operative, where a different “rule” applies. Trinitarian faith asks us to adopt an enormous faith that life spins in an orbit of loving gratuitousness that compels a gravitational love.  Especially when the world in which we live seems to be spinning around an axis of egocentrism and disregard of the other, Trinitarian theology asks us to believe that it is spinning otherwise, that it is tied to a gravitational “being for” of mutuality and loving, inclusive relationships.   It is this “capacity” – this great “size” – this generous being-for-the-other, this Trinitarian name of God, that we need to hallow in life.  It is this hope of salvation that must call forth our response, our “yes,” our “amen.”  

Conclusion

The doctrine of the Trinity has, throughout history, run into numerous problems. Its ‘divorce’ from the original multi-faceted, life-giving experience of the early Christian communities and its movement toward arcane treatise on the nature of God in God-self, as well as the forgetfulness in history of the nature of theological language which is metaphorical and analogous, has resulted in a doctrine that for many people is unintelligible and religiously irrelevant. 

Contemporary thought is attempting to place correctives to these misleading understandings of the doctrine of the Trinity. Theologians today are attempting to move the mystery of the Trinity from the background to the foreground of our thinking, where once again we can understand the eternal mystery of God as that who is revealed in the economy of redemption. The economy of salvation is the basis, the context, and the final criterion for every statement about God.  Recent theology has both retrieved and refashioned this ancient understanding of God that it might lead the world into new realms of relationality.  “In the end”, suggests Johnson, “the Trinity provides a symbolic picture of shared life at the heart of the universe…as pure relationality, epitomising the connectedness of all that exists in the universe.[38]

Footnotes

[1] For the above theme see Elizabeth A. Johnson, She Who Is: The Mystery of God in Feminist Theological Discourse (New York: Crossroad, 1992),193.

[2] Karl Rahner, Foundations of Christian Faith : An Introduction to the Idea of Christianity (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1978),134.

[3] David Tracy, The Analogical Imagination: Christian Theology and the Culture of Plualism (New York: Crossroad, 1989),103.

[4] Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (New York: Crossroad, 1990), 293.

[5] Tracy, The Analogical Imagination, 99

[6] Tracy, The Analogical Imagination, 99.

[7] This reference is from the Mishnah of the Talmud, Pirkei Avos 5:26..

[8] Tracy, The Analogical Imagination,105.

[9]  Gadamer, Truth and Method, 370.

[10] David Tracy, Plurality and Ambiguity (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1997), p. 18.

[11] Gadamer, Truth and Method, see 297.

[12] Terry Veling, Living in the Margins: Intentional Communities and the Art of Interpretation (New York: Crossroad, 1996), 60.

[13] See Augustine’s Confessions, Book 10.

[14] See Gerard Hall, Raimon Panikkar’s Hermeneutics of Religious Pluralism (Michigan: UMI Dissertation Services, 1994), 214.

[15] Tractate Sabbath, 88b.

[16] Gadamer, Truth and Method, 307-311.

[17] Roger Haight, Jesus Symbol of God (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1999), 42.

[18] Paul Riccour, Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning (Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1976), 48.

[19] Bernard Lee, Jesus and the Metaphors of God: The Christs of the New Testament (New York: Paulist Press, 1993), 50.

[20] For the above themes, see Ibid, 50 – 53.

[21] Bernard Lee, “The ‘Other’ Trinity”, in Continuum: Trinity in Progress (1997): 198.

[22] Ibid.

[23] For the following developments see: Catherine Mowry LaCugna, God For Us: The Trinity and Christian Life (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1991),chs. 1-4; Johnson, She Who Is, ch.10; Haight, Jesus Symbol of God, ch. 16.

[24] LaCugna, God For Us , 2.

[25] Ibid., 395.

[26] Ibid., 23.

[27] Ibid., 2

[28] Ibid.

[29] Rahner, Foundations, 135

[30] Karl Rahner, The Trinity (New York: Herder & Herder, 1970), 21-24, 82-86.

[31] Johnson She Who Is, 200.

[32] LaCugna, God, 225

[33] Ibid., 227.

[34] Lee Jesus and the Metaphors of God, 14&15

[35] Lee, The ‘Other’ Trinity, 192

[36] Haight, Jesus Symbol of God, 472.

[37] Ibid.

[38] Johnson, She Who Is, 222

Author

Mary Veling has recently completed her Masters Degree in Theology at Australian Catholic University. She is currently Dean of Mission at St Joseph’s College, Nudgee.

Email: MVeling@nudgee.com

© Copyright is retained by the author

This article has been peer reviewed, and is deemed to meet the criteria for original research as set out by the Australian Government Department of Education, Science and Training.