IFED Conference 2003

Doug Jones

 I. Introduction & Review

 Yesterday I closed by citing the wonderful command from Deuteronomy 30:19,20 “choose life, that both you and your descendants may live; that you may love the LORD your God, that you may obey His voice, and that you may cling to Him, for He is your life and the length of your days” (Dt. 30:19,20).

            The phrase “He is your life” should keep us from cutting up life like moderns, saying this part of life is business, this part family, this part religious. Life permeates every day of the week, and every place we are. The passage doesn’t allow us to say “my life is in one place, and God is over there in the corner,” and not even that “here is my life, and God is the foundation holding it up, giving it meaning.” The relationship is much more radical than that. God is life itself, and God is the life of His people, as Christ said, “as You, Father, are in Me, and I in You; that they also may be one in Us” (Jn. 17:21). His life permeates all of life.

            Yesterday, in working up to this claim, I began with Nietzsche’s accusation that the Christian God is an enemy of life, and I showed that the objection was radically misdirected, though too often justified by Christian communities. I sketched the argument that life is the fundamental category of Christian reality and then connected the biblical notion of life to joy, then to earthy joy, and earthy joy to play, and play to the Trinity. This exuberant joy, this playful life at the center of the Trinity is the key to glorifying God at the center of life.

            Today, in part, I want to fill out a few sections of yesterday’s discussion with more detail, namely, the Trinity and then the faith of “secularism” or the “Modern spirit” or the “Enlightenment project” or Modernity, as I will call it today. I would like us to be able to see that if the Trinity is life, then Modernity is an obstacle to life. Modernity is a religion of death, a hatred and distortion of the Trinity. We need to understand the subtleties of Modernity as it chokes off life in the culture around us, as well as recognizing it in ourselves, as we try to purge Modernity from our day-to-day lives. After that, I would like to show how only with the Trinity at the center of life will all the most interesting aspects of human experience hang together, namely, playfulness, beauty, nobility, creativity, wonder, humor, sexuality, freedom, equality, and so on.

 II. The Life of the Trinity

 But what is the Trinity? Attempting to talk about the Trinity is like standing too near a giant waterfall – fascinating but terrifying, clear but deep, life and death uncontained. The Christian Church through millennia has recognized the revelation of the Trinity as the Waterfall of Life, Life personalized by Beauty, Loyalty, Nobility, Gift, Love, and even Wildness (the topic of my sermon tomorrow). The Christian God is not some set of rigid ideas or an impersonal force or a sentimental old man wanting to banish all pain. The Trinity is who we would all naturally long to be connected to, an intriguing, brilliant, playful, noble, intoxicating God.

            The Trinity is the name that the Christian God gives Himself in history. This one God’s name is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit – three unique persons. Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are the source of the personal and personality, a One but also a community. Ultimate reality is not mere matter or physical force but a relationship between persons, a mysterious oneness of loyal friends, of family.

            The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit reveal themselves in the Bible as absolutely free and equal, though serving one another in loyalty for the common goal of gifting life to each other and creation, especially humans. Though one, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit take on different emphases in history, sometimes described as depth, incarnation, and indwelling, other times as Fountain, Word, and Comforter. With the goal of drawing humans into the richness and play of Trinitarian life, the Trinity created the world, and with the rebellion of humans as a keystone to the story, the Father sent the Son to give us life from the death of rebellion, a life to be beautified by the Holy Spirit.

            The Christian Church, then, is not dedicated to a simple monotheism, as found in Islam, Judaism, and common Deism. At the same time, Christians are not polytheists or tri-theists. God is both One and Three, identical and different. The early church father, Gregory of Nazianzus famously observed, “No sooner do I conceive of the One than I am illumined by the splendor of the Three; no sooner do I distinguish Them than I am carried back to the One.” This is the greatest mystery, the most exhilarating mystery. It rebukes any boast of the human mind and unimaginative Reason. As C.S. Lewis observed, “If Christianity was something we were making up, of course we could make it easier. But it is not. We cannot compete, in simplicity, with people who are inventing religions.”

            The Triune God is a mysterious, unified One of three persons giving and living the best life, the sort of God who has the breathtaking humor and creativity to sculpt giraffes, ostriches, elephants, lions, pigs, beetles, jellyfish, horses, and eagles.

 III. Modernity as Anti-Life

 But what of the main opponent to Trinitarian life in our day? Modernity. When I speak of Modernity, I’m speaking of the dominant ideology in the West in the past three to four hundred years. The values of Modernity include within it all its subordinate expressions over the centuries: scientism, romanticism, Marxism, feminism, postmodernism, etc. (regardless of how much some of these pretend to protest Modernity). Modernity is the collection of values that drives contemporary life, whether academic, political, or among common folk. It has permeated everything, even the Christian church. I will return to examine the four specific values of Modernity in a moment. But I have to say something first about the unnaturalness of Modernity.

            They say that giraffes have never become terribly endangered because people are afraid of them. It’s not the fear of attack that we gain from lions or alligators but the fear of otherworldliness, of, say, encountering a tree as a living person – slow, silent, sublime, alien, comic. Giraffes in documentaries and zoos had always seemed to me to be manufactured for those media, simple special effects. But when, as a boy, I saw giraffes in the wild, standing on a southern African plain, rivers of heat reaching to the horizon, with all fences and narrators absent, I lost all sense of balance. It seemed as if I had shifted planets and had nowhere to place my feet. Six foot necks, tapering. Bodies patterned in white nets. Eyes two rooms above ground. Clownish knees. Antennaed heads. And each giraffe still succeeded in giving a noble stare.  I was ruined somehow, in a way I didn’t realize at the time. The terrain explained that these giants were normal; they really belonged here, and I was the alien. I did not live where I thought I lived. What kind of world could be home to such sublime, elegant monsters?

            I was ruined because secularism became so drab and boring from then on. Secular norms have to compress and hide that sort of experience. As a modern culture, huffing, puffing, and trying as we might to find secularism convincing, I’m afraid we’re all too spoiled by the Trinity, even secularists. If Rene Descartes (one of the chief founding fathers of Modernity) had just stood beneath a giraffe for a while, the Enlightenment could never have started. A giraffe is so real it makes you doubt yourself.

            Even after hearing decades of constant, secular preaching via advertising and education, I continue to be surprised by the awkward posture of Modernity. It seems so contrived, so unnatural, something like insisting on painting turquoise over fall leaves or saying you absolutely adore opera but only when middle C is sung; Dostoevsky is marvelous, too, a master of hyphenation; and rainbows, you’d like them if only they were square.

            Though certainly no Trinitarian, Italo Calvino unintentionally provided something of the feel I get from Modernity in his fable “Without Colors” which describes the introduction of color to earth. Before atmosphere surrounded earth and filtered the sun’s stark light, the earth was all a single gray like the moon. Calvino’s humanish protagonist explains that world as,

a bit monotonous . . . but restful, all the same. . . . [A]ll I could see was gray upon gray. No sharp contrasts: the only really white white, if there was any, lay in the center of the Sun. . . . The absence of colors was the least of our problems; even if we had known they existed, we would have considered them an unsuitable luxury. The only drawback was the strain on your eyes when you had to hunt for something or someone, because with everything equally colorless no form could be clearly distinguished from what was behind it or around it.

            Unrelenting grayness – that’s a hint of how the world of Modernity feels to those who have been in communion with the Trinity.

 IV. The Four Pillars of Modernity

 But what is Modernity more specifically? The problem in describing Modernity is the problem of explaining air to a child. It is so pervasive and common that it’s invisible. Modernity is the most powerful, violent, and parasitically successful vision in the history of the world, and yet its adherents think it is just neutral, common sense.

            It is first important to realize what Modernity is not. When I speak of Modernity, I am not referring to modernization or technological progress. Gratitude for technological progress is rooted in the dominion mandate of Genesis and was encouraged in Christian culture before the Modern era. Christian medievals were fascinated by technology. In other words, one can be grateful for technology and modernization and still be an opponent of Modernity. The two are not inherently connected. 

            Modernity has a birthplace and history. Commentators place its birth in Europe, usually in the early 1600s. It was a conscious rebellion against the Christian faith, and though there is plenty of debate on which values make up Modernity, I’ll venture to suggest four main pillars, four key values of Modernity that characterize this secular mindset from its birth to the present day.

            Those four pillars are: rationalism, individualism, egalitarianism, and sentimentalism. I’ll spend the more time on rationalism, and I’ll explain the others briefly in turn, noting how each of the four pillars precludes the Christian God from being the center of life.

             Pillar One – Rationalism: The chief feature of Modernity is the claim of personal autonomy. This is the claim that the individual human mind is the ultimate standard of truth and falsity, possibility and impossibility. This is the commonest form of rationalism that pervades Modernity from Descartes to Derrida (despite the denials of the latter). It shows up in arcane philosophy but most commonly in the voice of the person on the street who says that he or she “can’t believe in a God who would allow evil” or that “the Trinity violates reason.”

            For Modernists, autonomous reason functions in just the same way that Scripture does for Christians: autonomous reason is the supreme, universal, infallible (in-itself) criterion of knowledge, not church tradition, revelation, or the mind of God.

            In his book The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, Ernst Cassirrer writes, “‘Reason’ becomes the unifying and central point of this century, expressing all that it longs and strives for, and all that it achieves. . . . [The Enlightenment] is imbued with a belief in the unity and immutability of reason. Reason is the same for all thinking subjects, all nations, all epochs, and all cultures.”

            In his famous essay, “What is Enlightenment,” the famous philosopher of Modernity, Immanuel Kant explained it this way in 1784:

Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-imposed immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one’s understanding without guidance from another. This immaturity is self-imposed when its cause lies not in lack of understanding, but in lack of resolve and courage to use it without guidance from another. Sapere Aude! [dare to know] “Have courage to use your own understanding!”--that is the motto of enlightenment.

       Laziness and cowardice are the reasons why so great a portion of mankind, after nature has long since discharged them from external direction, nevertheless remains under lifelong tutelage, and why it is so easy for others to set themselves up as their guardians. It is so easy not to be of age. If I have a book which understands for me, a pastor who has a conscience for me, a physician who decides my diet, and so forth, I need not trouble myself. I need not think, if I can only pay — others will easily undertake the irksome work for me.

Reason or Logic was originally introduced in the ancient world to provide an automatic, mechanical system for truth. It functions as a substitute for divine revelation and was supposed to be a short-cut to wisdom. When this sort of Reason is embraced as the supreme standard of knowledge, the following features become prominent in a person or culture: the intellectual, abstract, general, legal, universal, mechanistic, formulaic, literal, timeless, instant, perfectionistic. Though there is some truth in each of these, when these features become the highest values, the dominating values of life, then we know rationalism is firmly implanted.

            Over the centuries, this sort of rationalism has inspired a broad array of ideological grandchildren. Some of these are: Rationalism (the specific school of thought in the 1600s), Empiricism, Materialism, Scientism, Mathematicism, Naturalism, Pragmatism, Literalism, Bureaucratism, and more. Each of these is a vision aiming to capture reality within the limited constraints of Reason.

            When Modernists finally claim to get tired of rationalism in the more rigorous senses, they usually rebel against it with various forms of Romanticism, Mysticism, and Irrationalism. Nonetheless, in each of these, the autonomous mind still reigns as the highest court of appeal. From a Christian perspective, these shifts are not true revolutions.

            And, of course, if the human mind is the supreme standard of knowledge, then God must seek permission to exist. He can at most be a secondary counselor. Thus He is automatically outside the center of life because the human mind is on the throne.

             Pillar Two – Individualism: At base, individualism is the claim that difference is the most important reality. It usually gets expressed as saying that the most important realities are individual things, atomistic things, not groups or kinds. On this view, nothing is more important than the individual thing, especially individual persons. Everything is morally subordinate to the individual. Many times this claim goes so far as to claim that groups and kinds and universal traits do not exist.

            When individualism is embraced as the supreme standard of knowledge, the following features become prominent in a person or culture. For example, we often see these appeals in advertising: autonomy, freedom, choice, diversity, nonconformity, uniqueness, atomism, isolated, disconnected, egocentric, subjective, present-tense. These sorts of appeals are the aroma of individualism. As always there are truths in each, but when these become most prominent, we know that individualism at work. If the individual is most valuable, then the Triune community must be mistaken because the members of the Trinity are not seeking their own private interests. Individualism, then, also has to remove God from the center of life.

            Individualism has motivated much of modern life. Historically, it has motivated classical liberalism (Mill), libertarianism, the rugged pioneer spirit, and most prominently, consumerism, where paradoxically, advertisers try to sell us things that promise to make us unique by buying things that millions of others are also buying.

            Many times, when people tire of individualism, they swing away from it to idolizing groups, with such visions as Fascism, collectivism, nationalism, racism, and egalitarianism. The last of these, egalitarianism, is most prominent because it serves as the other end of the pendulum swing in Modernity. It is pillar three.

             Pillar Three – Egalitarianism: In egalitarianism, we find a worship of equality. In contrast to individualism’s love of difference, egalitarianism glorifies nondifference or sameness. Now it may seem odd to include both individualism and egalitarianism as pillars of Modernity, but it is important to do so not just because the history of Modernity regularly swings between these values. Both are important because together they provide Modernity with a false trinity, as secularized leftover once the Christian Trinity has been ruled out. Reality forces us to recognize both difference and identity, individuals and groups. They are culturally inescapable. But because they reject the Trinity, in which oneness and difference harmonize, they substitute the unhappy tension between Individualism and Egalitarianism. As we’ll see later, both are important aspects of the Trinity, but in Modernity they become tense but necessary rivals, each trying to subjugate the other.

            When individualism starts to wane, we see Modernity swinging back to an egalitarianism obsession with sameness, and we start seeing the following features praised in a culture: collectivity, unity, oneness, sameness, conformity, indivisibility, leveling, anti-hierarchy, general will, present tense.

            In turn, egalitarianism has motivated the following sorts of visions: socialism, Marxism, progressivism, feminism, environmentalism, multiculturalism, and postmodernism.

            When Modernists grow tired of egalitarianism, they, in turn, go back to preferring individualism, atomism, consumerism, and other forms of difference.

            Egalitarianism in the context of Modernity makes a unified, undifferentiated humanity the main focus of life. Humanity is the only thing allowed at the center, and so God, especially a God involving difference and hierarchy can have no place at the center of life.

             Pillar Four – Sentimentalism: The first three pillars of Modernity are rationalism, individualism, and egalitarianism. The last pillar is more uniquely ethical in nature, and it is perhaps the strongest motivation in Modernity.

            When we speak of “sentimentalism” we often mean merely an excess of soft emotion, perhaps we think of a weepy teenage girl. But I want to go against that trend. Great warriors and sports coaches often show an excess of emotion, but we don’t label them as “sentimental.” No, the sort of sentimentalism I’m speaking about is more deeply pernicious. It stems from the early advocate of Modernity, Jean Jacques Rousseau and has been noted by writers such as Flannery O’Connor.

            Sentimentalism of this sort flows from a perfectionistic view of the world (an implication of rationalism). Sentimentalism is the insistence that we are still in a state of innocence, some Eden, and that all evil is to be hated and banished. Sentimentalism is fundamentally a resentment of evil tied to the assumption of innocence.

            In other words, Sentimentalism is first and foremost a complaint. It is a complaint against any pain, any evil. It is a desire for a world without scrapes, scars, or labor, a desire for a world without sin. Sentimentalism refuses to see that God has imposed the curse of sin on us for our health. He put trials, pain, and evil in our way so that we will grow up. In this sense, evil is healthy for us. But to the sentimentalist, evil is always an intrusion. To them, everything is supposed to be complete and perfect as it is, and evil messes up this pristine garden we are in.

            Sentimental people, then, end up pretending that evil isn't really part of the world, and sentimental Christians are closet pagans, pretending that we still deserve to be in the garden of Eden.

            Sentimental stories and movies have characters that resign before evil and submit to the pain as victims, but they don't master the evil and gain health from it. Political sentimentalism resents oppression, but it doesn't use it to bring repentance or grow from chastisement. It must be resented.

            Sentimentalism is not only a denial that pain and evil have positive life-enhancing roles to play. The additional ingredient I noted that gets us to sentimentalism is a positive assumption about good: sentimentalism loves the nursery; it loves primitivism; it loves immaturity. It loves Eden and Heaven, but it wants no Cross in between. Sentimentalists view the nursery world as the place yet uncorrupted by civilization and adults, the roots of all evil. The nursery is the place where no one gets hurt, adults lisp, everything is cute and pastel, and knowledge is kept small. That is the sentimentalist’s paradise. Sometimes this nursery is youth itself, sometimes it’s “love,” and sometimes it is a primitive tribe. But it's always a demand for immaturity.

            When sentimentalism reigns the following sorts of values stand out as emphasized: innocence, immaturity, victimization, suffering, youth, primitivity, earth, animals, painlessness, effortlessness, utopianism, perfectionism.

            The vision motivated by a sentimental resentment of evil include Romanticism, Socialism, Primitivism, Multiculturalism, Pietism, and more.

            When other Modernists grow weary of sentimentalism, we see them turning primarily to cynicism, the opposite of sentimentalism. Where sentimentalism sees life as essentially good and innocent, cynicism views all of life as essentially evil, with no innocence in anything. Private or political cynicism often expresses itself in violence because nothing is sacred. In addition, secular opponents of sentimentalism swing toward a disgust not only against goodness but also against beauty. Cynics take ugliness to be fundamental, and so they wish to express it in clothing and art and base lifestyles.

            As with all the other pillars of Modernity, this one excludes God from the center of life. If evil is an intrusion, then God must be weak to allow it, and, therefore not relevant. If He imposes evil on us, then He must be wicked and must be fought. In either case, He has no place at the center.

 V. Modernity as a Monotheism

 Overall, Modernity does two things, both negative. First, it underhandedly forces the Christian God (and any other competitors) out of the center of life, all while promising to be neutral. It says that God cannot be at the center of life because each human is the ultimate standard of truth; the human mind dictates the standard for what is reasonable, logical, believable, convincing, provable, and possible. God can at most be a subordinate counselor. Only the autonomous mind sits at the center.

            Second, Modernity not only precludes God, its vision fractures the most interesting parts of life and enthrones power as the supreme value. The best way to understand this criticism of Modernity is to see the radical difference between a simple monotheism and Christian Trinitarianism.

            We have to understand that Modernity is truly a type of monotheism. In pure monotheism, for example, in Islam, Judaism, and Deism, we have a single, supreme person who has no equals in his rule over creation. It is the essence of this God to stand alone, to be self-sufficient. This God’s knowledge, too, is determined alone, not in relation to any equals or superiors. Ultimate reality is a lone person, not a relationship or a society of persons. And, very importantly, this one God can relate to his created order only as a superior to an inferior, a master to slave. In other words, the most basic relationship in the universe is not loyalty or love, but brute power. Pure monotheisms are ultimately religions of power, with other virtues flowing out only secondarily. As the theologian Ralph Smith explains,

Although an absolute monad, like the god of Islam or Judaism, is the most exalted non-Christian idea of deity, a monad is a being who is eternally alone – with no other to love, no other with whom to communicate, and no other  with whom to fellowship. In the case of such a solitary god, love, fellowship, and communication cannot be essential to his being. But without these qualities, it is difficult to imagine that the deity so understood is, in any meaningful sense, personal.

            When I say that Modernity is a kind of monotheism, of course, there are differences. Modernity does not share monotheism’s view of a supernatural, omniscient person. But that is not the most important aspect of monotheism. What the two views do share is the view that the ultimate standard of knowledge is a singular person, a monad, a One that stands by itself, a person that is essentially self-sufficient. Like monotheism, Modernity posits a single and lonely supreme judge, the autonomous human mind, as the ultimate determiner of truth, goodness, and beauty. Modernity assumes this autonomous mind is completely self-sufficient in terms of knowledge. It can stand on its own, all by itself. As Kant said, the motto of the Enlightenment is, “Have courage to use your own understanding! . . . Immaturity is the inability to use one’s understanding without guidance from another.” The individual mind is complete. It needs no one else.

            Following the same path as simple monotheism, then, Modernity has to offer the same fundamental relationship that monotheism does: power. Just as a monotheistic God fundamentally relates to everything else by a relationship of power, always a superior to inferior, so, too, does Modernity’s self-sufficient, supreme, individual persons relate to every other being as an inferior. An autonomous mind cannot relate as an equal to other minds; they are all competing gods who have no rule over any other.

            At the center of life in both simple monotheism and Modernity, then, we have oneness and power. This is why these views fracture life. Their highest value is Oneness, and their means of achieving conformity to this goal is power. That is how the world works for them. Islam and the Deism of the French Revolution show their devotion to power through state action and coercion. Modernity, too, reveals its love of power through the bloodbaths of the twentieth century. Violence is natural to these views.

 VI. The Trinity at the Center of Life

            In contrast to having conformity and power at the center of life, the Trinity is not only a One but personal equals in communion. A relationship is ultimate reality. In the Trinity, we have God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, who are eternally in communion. Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are love – sacrificing and upholding one another in grace. Love, fellowship, and communication are natural to the Trinity, and the communion of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is the very expression of the personal and personality. As truly different, yet wholly equal persons, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are not related to one another by power, but as equals in loyal devotion to one another. And even in relation to the creation and human life, the Trinity is first a personal bond of love and then a creator who rules as an expression of love, not as “the gentiles lord it” (Matt. 20:25). The Christian God is not even fundamentally law or duty or obedience. Father, Son, and Holy Spirit do not relate to each other in terms of legal demand or labor contract, but in terms of gracious, self-sacrifice for one another.

            Instead of fracturing life, the Trinitarian bond of loyalty is what holds life together. The Trinity is the center of life because the best parts of life have value only because ultimate reality is a personal relationship.

            Playfulness: I’ve already sketched the playfulness at the heart of the Trinity, and the most interesting playfulness in our lives involves a community of equals in genuine difference. Modernity’s love of power and conformity condemns it to a soul-killing seriousness. It can’t love play the way Trinitarians can.

            Beauty: In Modernity, beauty is at most an accident of power. It derives from survival by power or mutation, and it is an unnatural presence in Modernity’s cosmos, because it doesn’t reflect the conformity and power at the center of that world. But beauty is not efficient; it is superfluous, unnecessary, an overflow, a natural expression of the Trinity’s life. Beauty doesn’t operate by force or power or necessity but by holy seduction, like the Trinity.

            Nobility: Nobility of the sort masterfully displayed in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings epic can’t easily show up in Modern cultures because it involves a humble hierarchy, a sacrificial lordship. Those notions can’t harmonize in Modernity. But a nobility where equals can submit and sacrifice for one another is a natural expression of Trinitarian life.

            Creativity: Creativity in Modernity is usually explained in terms of lack of constraint in design, unfettered spontaeneity, but never in terms of the fundamental values of Modernity’s universe – conformity and power. Creativity in a Trinitarian universe is an imitation of the identity-in-difference expressive of personal grace. We’re creative when we imitate the play, freedom, and insight in creation.

            Freedom and Equality: Modernity often turns freedom into the lack of order and equality into bland leveling. In the Trinity, freedom is a gift from each to the others, a sacrificial gift enabling each to fulfill His calling. Equality stems not from conformity but by the persons of the Godhead, letting “nothing be done through selfish ambition or conceit, but in lowliness of mind” letting each esteem the other “better than himself” (Phil. 2:3). The freedom and equality that should show up in a healthy Christian culture won’t be abstractions in tension but both issuing from love.

            Sexuality: Sexuality delights in the joys of otherness. But in Modernity’s egalitarian moments, sexuality becomes a love of sameness, a move toward androgyny. In Modernity’s individualist phases, sexuality becomes a power struggle between competing gods, a theology of rape. The Trinity, especially in the Son’s taking of a bride,  provides the ground for valuing the mysteries of difference, the overflow of pleasure that delights in oneness, the sort that moves the Song of Solomon to sing, “Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth; for your love is better than wine” (Song 1:2).

            Irony and Humor: Modernity is the death of humor. Irony and humor live on real difference. Power and conformity don’t naturally motivate humor. And rationalism and egalitarian conspire together to turn every genuine difference into a mere appearance, a mere social construct, not real differences. Every joke you hear is hiddenly declaring “no that’s wrong; it doesn’t go that way.” I’ll let you think of your favorite jokes, instead of trying to impose American humor on you. The Trinity is genuine difference, and creation reflects the Creator with deep differences in reality. Humor and irony result when we play with these differences faithfully.

            Wonder: Modernity’s rationalism makes everything explainable in principle and with enough laboratories. It has no place for mystery or awe. Everything is an accident waiting to be explained. No secularist really lives without awe, though. Hypocrisy is the norm. The Trinity, though, is forever a mystery, and the Trinity’s work in creation can leave us speechless at its art.

            Celebration: Celebration in feasting and holiday is an expression of gratitude, but gratitude assumes a person to thank. Modernity only offers us impersonal power to thank. Celebration often focuses on concrete bits of creation to give us a picture of all of life. As William Blake said, “To see a world in a grain of sand and a heaven in a wild flower.” But that can’t happen in just any universe, certainly not in Modernity’s. Disconnected atoms can’t accomplish this. To be able to see the world in something particular assumes Trinitarian interconnections, in which the One lives in the Three, and the Three through the One.   

VII. Conclusion

 In the end, Modernity strips life of life, but the Tri-personal God of Christianity is life and the community in Whom all life holds together – personality, playfulness, beauty, nobility, creativity, freedom, equality, sexuality, irony, humor, wonder, celebration, and much more.

            Let’s return to the Italo Calvino story I referred to at the beginning at this talk. Calvino’s story of the colorless world meets its crisis when atmosphere and oceans begin to form around the earth, and “the world poured out colors, constantly new, pink clouds gathered in violet cumuli which unleashed gilded lightning; after the storms long rainbows announced hues that still hadn’t been seen. And chlorophyll was already beginning its progress. . . . I ran all over the Earth, I saw again things I had once known gray, and I was still amazed at discovering fire was red, ice white, the sky pale blue, the earth brown, that rubies were ruby-colored and topazes the color of topax.”

            The protagonist tries to find the woman Ayl, his Eve, but she cowers from the new explosion of colors. He finds her friends, “leaping over the lawn, tossing the iridescent ball: but how changed they were! . . . Her friends’ lips were red, their teeth white, and their tongues and gums were pink. Pink, too, were the tips of their breasts. Their eyes were aquamarine blue, cherry-black, hazel, and maroon.”

            He finds his Ayl hiding in a chasm. “Ayl! Come outside with me. If you only knew.” She responds, “Sssh. I’m here. Why are you shouting so much? . . . I don’t like it outside.” He finally lies to her to entice her out into the world of color. But just as he sees the new colors on Ayl’s face, she screams and draws back into the darkness, and an earthquake forces a gray wall between them, a wall that grows into a mountain range. She is secluded forever from color. And the protagonist realizes that “her place could never have been out here,” and “that Ayl’s perfect world was lost forever, so lost I couldn’t even imagine it any more, and nothing was left that could remind me of it.”

            That’s the sort of weariness that plagues Modernity’s imagination. It beckons us to give up all the colors, to give up life. We have been gloriously spoiled by the Trinity. I don’t think the narrowest secularist can truly imagine Modernity’s colorless world – a world without play, beauty, and humor. Can any of us really do it? Can we really hide from the Trinitarian colors? “I don’t like it outside,” says Ayl, but that is where life is, and the Trinity is at the center of life.

            In these two talks, I have tried to make a case that before we can understand how God is at the center of life, we must adore the life at the center of God, that life characterized by earthy, playful joy that turns the world upside down, receiving the cultural blessings of God and producing godly offspring excited about life. The chief and subtlest opponent of this life for both Christians and non-Christians is the gray world of Modernity, that vision summarized by four pillars – rationalism, individualism, egalitarianism, sentimentalism – that reveal Modernity to be just another simple monotheism grounded essentially in power, rather than a personal society. Where Modernity fractures life, the Trinity shows itself to be life and the center of life, the center of play, beauty, humor, celebration, and so much more. We are called to embrace Trinitarian life, to enter the most intimate fellowship of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, the “Living God.” As Jesus said, “I have come that they may have life, and that they may have it more abundantly” (John 10:10) – “Io son venuto perche abbian la vita e l’abbiano ad esuberanza.”