"When I Hear the Word 'Perichoresis,' I Reach for My Revolver."

Father Anonymous loves to preach; it is one of the few pleasures in life which he finds both legal and unalloyed. Each year, however, the church's calendar provides him three opportunities to reconsider this position: Transfiguration, Ascension, and Trinity.

They are observances of fundamental importance, but they are also -- let's face it -- homiletical challenges. To modern ears, one sounds purposeless, one sounds cheaply theatrical, and one is by its nature a combination of two words largely hostile to the modern churchgoer: "medieval" and "doctrine."*

Those readers who are preaching come Sunday, as the Church celebrates the Trinity, have a number of strategic choices before them. One is to exegete the texts with no purposeful reference to the feast. A bit cowardly, though, isn't it? Another is to delve deeply into the (ahem) substance of the ancient controversies -- offer a learned rebuttal to the Eutychians and Monothelites. Or failing that, to tell a sweet, largely invented story about some anonymous French monk composing the creed which was later named for Athanasius. In fraternal frankness, we humbly suggest that the moment of opportunity for this approach has passed. There is just one old lady in your congregation who really cares, and you shouldn't indulge her.

Another approach, particularly popular among those who have finished seminary in the last half-century, may be to talk about "perichoresis." It is, after all, a good old-fashioned patristic word. On top of that, it means "dancing," which always makes the feminists and liberals-in-general happy. And it does provide the opportunity to lay out a model of the Trinity which can, at the very least, give the average churchgoer something to carry home to lunch.

But a word of caution. In an essay some years ago, quoted at the excellent Faith & Theology blog, Reformed theologian (and noted classroom Lutheran-basher) Bruce McCormack warned about the tendency to expand perichoresis beyond its historic use, so that it no longer describes the action of the persons of the Trinity alone, but also of human beings, or the whole creation:

Perichoresis … is rightly employed in trinitarian discourse for describing that which is dissimilar in the analogy between intra-trinitarian relations … on the one hand and human-to-human relations on the other. Nowadays, we are suffering from ‘creeping perichoresis,’ that is, the overly expansive use of terms – which have their home in purely spiritual relations – to describe relations between human beings who do not participate in a common ‘substance’ and who, therefore, remain distinct individuals even in the most intimate of their relations.”

—Bruce L. McCormack, “What’s at Stake in Current Debates over Justification? The Crisis of Protestantism in the West,” in Justification: What’s at Stake in the Current Debates, ed. Mark Husbands and Daniel J. Treier (Downers Grove: IVP, 2004), p. 111.

The blog post is well worth reading, for a brief string of thoughtful comments both pro and con. We take no particular position on this, except to sympathize with our fellow preachers as they are given ten or twelve minutes to say something worth hearing about the deepest mysteries of God.

____________________________________________________

*(Yes, we hear your howls, however pedantic, and respond with pedantry of our own. The doctrine is patristic, but the feast is medieval. Prior to the 14th century, there were local celebrations of the Trinity, but no universal observance -- indeed, one was specifically rejected by Alexander II on the quite reasonable grounds that the Church's worship always celebrates the Trinity.)