A correspondent informs me that somewhere out there on the web, one of our local critics is chastising us for a bunch of stuff. All to be expected, and part of the cost of doing business. This is not worthy of comment, but one point Nick Gier made in this criticism was too good to pass up. Quoth he:
“Before I close, I would like to focus on one issue: because of their sloppy theological thinking, the leaders of Christ Church have actually instructed their congregants in Tritheism, the most heretical formulation of the Trinity. In a column in the Moscow-Pullman Daily News (8-7-07), Wilson’s Tritheism is readily evident when he states the ‘Father is the Lover, the Son is the Beloved, and the Holy Spirit is the love of each for the other.’ The church fathers would turn over in their graves at such a theological hatchet job. St. Augustine set the grounds for the orthodox Trinity by saying that it has but one will, but here we have two wills, because Wilson demotes the Holy Spirit from a ‘person’ to simply the love that passes between two deities.”
But of course, this formulation of the Holy Spirit as the love between the Father and the Son is . . . drum roll, please . . . Augustine’s. And this does not reduce the Spirit to an impersonal force because the idea is that the spirit of the love of two infinite Persons one for another would be Himself infinite and personal.
And I am not quite sure what Nick is referring to in that business about the wills, but it sounds like he might be confounding the debates over the relationship of the human and divine in the Incarnation, in the person of Jesus, with the debates over the Trinity.
Just keeping you updated.
