Triune Fire
Katherine Sonderegger on the Levitical Trinity
I devoted a couple of pages of Creator to a critique of the first volume of Katherine Sonderegger’s Systematic Theology, where she argues that theology must start with the unity of God and critiques the Trinitarian theologies of the past century. Her second volume is on the Trinity and, surprisingly enough, includes a chapter on Leviticus as theology proper. Here are a few highlights.
1. Sonderegger doesn’t write like a dispassionate academic. More like an impassioned mystic, with stirring flights of rhetoric. A couple of examples:
The language of marriage, never far from prophet or sage or psalm, gives us more than a metaphor or symbol for the peculiar status of Israel and its history. Rather the singularity of Israel is metaphysical. It is the creaturely site of the Lord’s holiness; more: Its outworking. The Life that is the Fiery Glory of God fashions of out Its own Molten Love a partner out of the dust of the earth, stands it up on its feet, blesses and calls it, compacts with it, hallows it. . . . the Aseity of God’s Processional Life is extended, in creaturely mode, to covenant Israel; It generates Israel, ad extra (375).
The Mystery of Trinity begins with the remarkable admission that the Lord is a Living God. The fiery Glory of this God is His Life, His Dynamic Vitality, His Consuming Flame. It roars out of its Hiding Place, it moves, it is Eternally Fertile. . . . the Holy Fire of God and Its Glory are the Old Testament expressions of the Trinitarian Processions. This teaching etches a firm demarcation between the Holy God of Scripture and all purely ideal notions of Deity. The Lord God of Israel is not inert. . . . the Life of God, the fertile, generative, and moral Processions of God, are necessary to Him, essential to His Deity. The Nature of God is Descending, Holy Fire: there is no Deity or Essence that lies behind the Processions. . . . The Processions do not belong only to the economy of salvation; rather, they structure and define Deity Itself, God’s inner Life. The Lord God just is Holy Fire (412-3).
The points here are standard claims of orthodox Trinitarian theology. But the electric energy of Sonderegger’s prose jolts the jaded to surprised astonishment.
2. Leviticus draws attention to the holiness of God. Drawing cautiously on Rudolf Otto, Sonderegger says holiness is a dangerous, overwhelming presence: “the Holy God is Fiery, a living Explosion” (357). She assaults theologies that would domesticate the “dread of the Holy” (357). We draw near to God only through sacrifice, which is inescapably costly. Much as we emphasize festivity in the presence of God, we mustn’t forget He’s “cauterizing fire” (408), and His presence is “something like lye or radium: it cleans and purifies; it contains fathomless energy; and it burns, cauterizes, and scars” (358). The altar fire at the center of Israel’s life is a manifestation of divine life, costly and deadly because of Israel’s sin and defilement (380).