Making the Trinity practical seems like a very tall order. Few areas of Christian doctrine are more filled with technical mine fields, terms and concepts that must be used in very specific ways to avoid heresy. We have to talk about a God who is one God and yet somehow three. How He is three isn\u2019t entirely clear, and the explanations don\u2019t seem to clarify things very much. We have to talk about substance or essence. We have to make sure that we don\u2019t confuse substance or essence, whatever that may be, with \u201cperson.\u201d If we do, we might end up talking about \u201cthree gods,\u201d which isn\u2019t what we should say. We have to talk about God as He reveals Himself and God as He actually is. We have to deal with strange statements of Jesus, like \u201cI am in the Father, and the Father is in Me.\u201d<\/p>\n
<\/span>How can we make this practical? We might follow the example of Immanuel Kant. He didn\u2019t think the Trinity made any practical difference, so he suggested that it needed to be translated into practical concerns. We don\u2019t worship Father, Son, and Spirit. We don\u2019t pray to them. But we can translate the doctrine of the Trinity into practical terms. What it really means is that God is Love. We revere God as the loving one, the Father; we revere humanity, which is His Son; and we revere the Spirit because the approval of the Son depends on our agreement with one another, which is love based on wisdom, which is the Spirit. Kant doesn\u2019t believe that the doctrine of the Trinity describes what God is actually like. We can\u2019t know. But we can allegorize the doctrine for practical uses.<\/p>\n Kant\u2019s way isn\u2019t the way forward. The way to see the enormous practical import of the Trinity is not to abandon the dogma. We need to believe the dogma, and believe it intelligently, if we want to see how it transforms the way we experience and see the world day-by-day. We can take a page from science to see how the theoretical and practical work together. A scientist who said he wasn\u2019t interested in theory but only practice would be laughed out of the lab. Not all great discoveries come theoretically, but many do. We have nuclear bombs and nuclear energy because scientists followed out the implications of Einstein\u2019s theories.<\/p>\n Our daily lives display a similar relation of theory and practice. To have a flourishing family life, we need at least an implicit \u201ctheory\u201d of family life. Theory is from theoria<\/em>, which is not originally a scientific but a philosophical term, almost a mystical one. It meant \u201ccontemplation\u201d or \u201cspeculation\u201d in the sense of \u201clook at.\u201d It refers to a \u201cvision\u201d of things. It describes the way we look at things, and the way we look at things affects how we at toward them or in response to them. <\/p>\n A theory of family life would seek answers to questions like: Who are my children? To whom do they belong? What is a good life? How do I help them to lead a good life? What is the goal of my work? What are the means that I can use \u2013 is it right for me to use corporeal discipline or verbal? How should I love them? Without a theory, we don\u2019t know what our parenting practices are aiming to achieve. Without a theory, we have difficulty dealing with the unexpected and unprecedented challenges of family life. Without theory, we can\u2019t resolve the inevitable differences that emerge between parents. Without a theoretical vision of family, with only practices, we don\u2019t know what the practices are for, what they\u2019re aiming at. Without theory, our practices become impractical.<\/p>\n Christian doctrine is \u201ctheory\u201d that guides Christian practice. Without doctrine as \u201ctheory,\u201d we have only a list of commands and guidelines and regulations. Doctrine states what is true and so shapes our imagination of God, the world, ourselves; and imagination in turn shapes the way we live before God. Without a \u201ctheory\u201d of the Trinity, which is a theory of everything, we can\u2019t get practical. <\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Making the Trinity practical seems like a very tall order. Few areas of Christian doctrine are more filled with technical mine fields, terms and concepts that must be used in very specific ways to avoid heresy. We have to talk about a God who is one God and yet somehow three. How He is three […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3021,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1524,1525,139],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17971","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-doctrine","category-practice","category-trinity"],"yoast_head":"\n