Just a short post today, since Nancy and I are trying to get things in order to go to Colorado on Tuesday, but I've been musing about applying Tournier's person/persona model to God. Please note that, at least at this stage, I'm trying to stay within a classically Christian, trinitarian framework. Perhaps I'll apply this outside that framework, but, honestly, any talk of the divinity being "person" and its extension into persona seems irreducibly Christian.
First question: when we say God is three persons, are we actually saying God is three personas? To stay within a Chalcedonian trinitarian formulation (God is one in essence but three in persons) seems to prohibit dividing God's essence into three persons, so I tend to think of the persons as personas: God had three distinct personas in God's interaction with Israel first and then the rest of humanity. The persona of God the Creator, then, gets recorded differently in scripture: in Genesis, the personal creator; in Exodus, the avenging fire and monarch; etc.
God the Son becomes more complicated, since in good Christian confession God became fleshly person just like you and me. However, even in that situation Jesus would still have a persona, so that one could view the gospels as narratives about Jesus' different personas, i.e. how people engage and interact with Christ. So the incarnation is not a barrier to the whole person/persona thing.
God the Spirit is the least complicated of all, it seems to me, since the scriptures and our own confessions/traditions concern most of all humanity's interactions with the Spirit, i.e. humanity has experienced and will continue to experience the Spirit way more often than the other two personas (the Creator is away, the Son is with the Creator wherever that is, the Spirit, when it wills, blows here and there). So sometimes the Spirit has the persona of teacher, sometimes that of comforter, etc.
Following this model seems to imply two fundamental results. First, the essence of God is unknowable by us, only the personas are knowable (whether historically/scripturally/persently). That means our knowledge/experience of God is always mediated through our own personas, which are developed and interact relationally with God's own personas. Going the other way, God's own personas are developed historically and relationally, too, and undoubtedly will vary based on those with whom God is interacting. This raises all kinds of questions, from the immediacy of revelation in an individual to the question of whether God changes at all. This is actually another way of saying that God's personas and ours are mediated not just individually, but corporately through ethoi: in fact, given that even two personas will be bounded by at least one ethos, God's personas are mostly developed in relationship with group ethoi rather than individual personas. Which is yet another way of saying that God's personas are essentially social. Are there ways of speaking together and constructing narratives (which may not involve conversation as such) that testify truly to God's presence? How do we identify them?
Second, I'm not talking metaphysics here, but narrative. Though I'm certainly willing and hoping to leave open the possibility that God will reveal Godself unmediated by personas to an individual or group, all we have to work with are narratives enmeshed (or enfleshed) in personas and ethoi. In fact, narrative, it seems to me right now, seems exclusively located in persona, perhaps, but most probably in ethos/oi. Again, being Calvinist I'm certainly not attempting to limit God's sovereignty, but arguing that, extending Plaskow's argument in Standing Again at Sinai, the only thing we have to go on are narratives, even instantaneous ones, about God's interaction with us and our relationship with God.
Regarding the question of how to determine whether God's Spirit is present, I guess I'm moving more toward analysis of narratives advocating for the Spirit's presence, even in the case where I'm one of those experiencing something (or someone) that may in fact be the Spirit. The "still, small voice" may indeed speak within a person, but that speaking, it seems to me, must be communicated (whether verbally or actionally), and that takes us immediately to narratives. But also in terms of group experience: persons collectively (as on our recent pilgrimage) experience something that they suspect is divine, so they must talk about it, engaging all the messiness of personas and ethos. How in constructing our narrative can we be assured that what we're experiencing is actually Spirit rather than spirit?
A final note of caution: post-modernism loves narratives and their analysis. We've been post-modern for a century now (in scientific terms, following Luckman), so perhaps we've accepted post-modern tenets uncritically. Yet Kipling, writing during the changeover from modern to post-modern (1895), offered a critique that may still need answers: narratives may be dead wrong according to a non-narrative referent. The Bandar-log in The Jungle Book were fond of saying, "We all say so, and so it must be true," when, at least according to the omniscience of Kipling's narrative, what they said was entirely false. Sadly, in constructing our own narratives we are not so lucky to have such a referent, according to post-modernism (which many reject, by the way). Thank you for reading.
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