THE HOLY TRINITY AND BEING AND REFLECTED IN THE CHURCH by Carl Olsen on the Theology of Jean Danielou, and John Behr on JOhn Zizioulas

The actions of God are differentiated but not divided: it is the one God, the Father, who calls the Church into being as the body of Christ indwelt by the Holy Spirit; and, in return, the Church is conceived in terms of communion, but communion with God, as the body of his Son, anointed with his Spirit, and so calling upon God as Abba, Father.
The relationship between Trinitarian theology and ecclesiology has been much discussed in recent decades. It is an intriguing subject, and perhaps an odd juxtaposition. It has often been noted that although a confession of faith in “one Church” is included in most ancient creeds along with “one baptism,” the Church herself is seldom directly reflected upon; the person of Jesus Christ, his relation to the Father and the Spirit, was endlessly discussed, and the subject of a great many conciliar statements, but not the Church or ecclesiology more generally.

The question of ecclesiology, it is often said, is our modern problem, one (at least for the Orthodox) provoked by the ecumenical encounter of the twentieth century. One fruit of this encounter is the realization of the Trinitarian dimensions of the Church herself, so providing continuity with the theological reflection of earlier ages and grounding the Church in the Trinity.

Following in the wake of the Second Vatican Council, ecumenical dialogue in recent decades has emphasized the connection between the Trinity and the Church largely through the exploration of what is commonly referred to as “communion ecclesiology.”Koinonia, “communion,” was the theme of the Canberra Assembly of the WCC in 1991, and also at the Fifth World Conference on Faith and Order in Santiago de Compostela in 1993. In this approach, the koinonia of the three Persons of the Holy Trinity, the very being of God, is taken as the paradigm of the koinonia that constitutes the being of the ecclesial body, the Church.

As Metropolitan John (Zizioulas) put it in his address to the meeting at Santiago de Compostela: “The Church as a communion reflects God’s being as communion in the way this communion will be revealed fully in the Kingdom.” [Metropolitan John (Zizioulas) of Pergamon, "The Church as Communion," SVTQ 38.1 (1994): 3-16, at p.8] Such communion ecclesiology readily dovetails with the “Eucharistic” ecclesiology espoused by many Orthodox during the twentieth century: it is in the sacrament of the Eucharist, the event of communion par excellence, that the Church realizes her true being, manifesting already, here and now, the Kingdom which is yet to come. Although, as Metropolitan John continues, “Koinonia is an eschatological gift,” the fullness of this eschatological gift is nevertheless already given, received, or tasted, in the celebration of the Eucharist.

Painted in these admittedly rather broad strokes, the oddity of juxtaposing the Trinity and the Church can be seen. What is said of the Church is certainly based upon what is said of the Trinity, but the effect of speaking in this manner, paradoxically, is that the Church is separated from God, as a distinct entity reflecting the divine being. Another way of putting this, using terms which are themselves problematic, would be to say that communion ecclesiology sees the Church as parallel to the “immanent Trinity”: it is the three Persons in communion, the one God as a relational being, that the Church is said to “reflect.” This results in a horizontal notion of communion, or perhaps better parallel “communions,” without being clear about how the two intersect.

Metropolitan John is very careful to specify that the koinonia in question “derives not from sociological experience, nor from ethics, but from faith.[ "The Church as Communion," p.5] We do not, that is, start from our notions of what “communion” might mean in our human experience of relating to others, and then project this upon the Trinity. Rather, we must begin from faith, for “we believe in a God who is in his very being koinonia … God is Trinitarian; he is a relational being by definition; a non-Trinitarian God is not koinonia in his very being. Ecclesiology must be based on Trinitarian theology if it is to be an ecclesiology of communion.” .["The Church as Communion," p.6]

However, only after stating the principles of Trinitarian koinonia does Metropolitan John affirm, as a second point, that “koinonia is decisive also in our understanding of the person of Christ. Here the right synthesis between Christology and Pneumatology becomes extremely important.”  He rightly emphasizes (correcting V. Lossky) that the `economy of the Son” cannot be separated from “the economy of the Spirit,” that is, both that the work of (or the “relation to”) the Spirit is constitutive for the person of Christ and that there is no work of the Spirit distinct from that of Christ. [Cf. J. Zizioulas, Ijeingas Communion (Cresrwood, NY: SVS Press, 1985), 124-25. A point already noted by Lossky, who observes that "In speaking of three hypostases we are already making an improper abstraction: if we wanted to generalize and make a concept of the ‘divine hypostasis,' we would have to say that the only common definition possible would be the impossibility of any common definition of the three hypostases." (In the Image and Likeness of God [Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1975], 113);]

Nevertheless, besides the very serious question concerning the appropriateness of characterizing the Trinity as a communion of three Persons, this approach does not adequately take into account the “economic” reality in which all Trinitarian theology is grounded and in terms of which the Scriptures describe the Church. Christology and Pneumatology may have been synthesized, but Trinitarian theology is still considered as a realm apart. Although Metropolitan John emphasizes that “the Church is not a sort of Platonic `image’ of the Trinity; she is communion in the sense of being the people of God, Israel, and the `Body of Christ,” this is followed, in the next sentence but one, with the affirmation that “the Church as communion reflects God’s being as communion.” [Metropolitan John, "Church as Communion," p8, my emphasis]

Despite the tantalizing mention of the Church as the “Body of Christ,” we are left with a communion of three divine Persons and the image of this in the communion that is the Church, whose structure, authority, mission, tradition and sacraments (especially, of course, the Eucharist, [Cf. Metropolitan John, "Church as Communion. p15: "Baptism, Chrismation or Confirmation, and the rest of the sacramental life, are all given in view of the Eucharist. Communion in these sacraments may be described as 'partial' or anticipatory communion, calling for its fulfillment in the Eucharist."] a point to which I will return) are correspondingly “relational.”

We have the Trinity and the Church, the three primary scriptural images for the Church — that is, the Church as the people of God, the body of Christ and the temple of the Holy Spirit – offer us, as suggested by Bruce Marshall, a way of looking at the Trinitarian being of the Church in a way that integrates the Church directly and intimately to the relationship between the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. [Bruce D. Marshall, "The Holy Trinity and the Mystery of the Church: Toward a Lutheran/Orthodox Common Statement," paper presented to the North American Lutheran-Orthodox Dialogue, May 2002.]

Moreover, each of these images links the Church in a particular way to one member of the Holy Trinity without undermining the basic Cappadocian point, that the actions of God are differentiated but not divided: it is the one God, the Father, who calls the Church into being as the body of Christ indwelt by the Holy Spirit; and, in return, the Church is conceived in terms of communion, but communion with God, as the body of his Son, anointed with his Spirit, and so calling upon God as Abba, Father.

I would like to begin with the basic content of these images, and then continue by suggesting how Trinitarian theology, as expounded in the fourth century and beyond, directs us to combine these various images, as different aspects of the single mystery that is the Church.

Following this I will offer some further considerations regarding the calling of the Church and her eschatological perfection, and concerning baptism (with which the Church is invariably connected in creedal formulations) as the foundational sacrament of the Church, and the implications this has for the question of the boundaries of the Church, and lastly how, as the place where the human being is born again through baptism, the Church can also be considered as our mother, in which each Christian puts on the identity of Christ.