Perichoresis, or, I am the Lord of the Dance

[Solly]

Peri - around
Chorea - dance, cf Choreography
Perichorea - To dance around...

Perichoresis is the Divine Dance. The Divine Dance of the persons of the Trinity.

In the beginning was the Dance, and the Dance was in God, and the Dance was God...

An eternal Dance; the three persons of the Godhead dancing eternally, in an embrace of love, mutually giving and receiving. Always dancing.

In the beginning God created a Dancing partner...

The world was created in its own dance, and invited to join the Dance. But the lead dancers said No! and started their own dance. The hands of God are extended to restore the Dance, and inviting us to Dance: The Son, and the Spirit, the two hands of God.
The Dance for us has a beginning, and an end, and they are not the same. The beginning starts with anticipation, expectation, and desire; the end concludes with satisfaction, completion, and rest - until the next Dance.

We look upon the Dance of God, as he ever circles about us. We try to understand. We so often fail. The Dance goes on, and the part we have in the Dance goes on, though we are not Dancing, only dancing, yet that dancing seems to be incorprated despite our best efforts. We look, and the Dance seems to change, to reverse, to go back on itself - it repented the Lord that... - and then the Dance goes on, seeking it's goal, never seeking return to the starting point - I the Lord change not. This is the nature of Dance: round and round you go, sometimes to and sometimes fro, but the Dance goes on.

And us? Some of us sit as wallflowers. We won't dance under any circumstances. Some of us are dancing around our handbags in our own dance, while the Dance wheels about us. We dance on our own. But dances are communal, not individual, everyone knows that. Dances are free, though structured: God's Line Dancing.

Will you join the Dance? God's two hands, The Son and Spirit, await you, pull you, invite you, to take you into the Dance, to wheel you about, make you dizzy at times, exhilerated at times, exhausted at times, fearful at times. But it is The Dance.

I am the Lord of the Dance said he...

A few thoughts on reading Colin Gunton's The Promise of Trinitarian Theology.

[brother vinny]

Perry-core-Reese's?

[Solly]

*sigh* sometimes you post things and nothing happens...

[brother vinny]

*sigh* sometimes you post things and nothing happens...

No need to get down, ol' chap. I'm intrigued; I just want to know if the approximation of pronunciation is on target.

[brother vinny]

I would join this Dance, but I have two left feet.

[Solly]

OK. Perry-Kor-Ree-Sis

[brother vinny]

Is this the dance you speak of?

And now notice what is happening. If I had rejected the authoritative and scriptural image of glory and stuck obstinately to the vague desire which was, at the outset, my only pointer to heaven, I could have seen no connexion at all between that desire and the Christian promise. But now, having followed up what seemed puzzling and repellent in the sacred books, I find, to my great surprise, looking back, that the connexion is perfectly clear. Glory, as Christianity teaches me to hope for it, turns out to satisfy my original desire and indeed to reveal an element in that desire which I had not noticed. By ceasing for a moment to consider my own wants I have begun to learn better what I really wanted. When I attempted, a few minutes ago, to describe our spiritual longings, I was omitting one of their most curious characteristics. We usually notice it just as the moment of vision dies away, as the music ends or as the landscape loses the celestial light. What we feel then has been well described by Keats as “the journey homeward to habitual self.” You know what I mean. For a few minutes we have had the illusion of belonging to that world. Now we wake to find that it is no such thing. We have been mere spectators. Beauty has smiled, but not to welcome us; her face was turned in our direction, but not to see us. We have not been accepted, welcomed, or taken into the dance. We may go when we please, we may stay if we can: “Nobody marks us.” A scientist may reply that since most of the things we call beautiful are inanimate, it is not very surprising that they take no notice of us. That, of course, is true. It is not the physical objects that I am speaking of, but that indescribable something of which they become for a moment the messengers. And part of the bitterness which mixes with the sweetness of that message is due to the fact that it so seldom seems to be a message intended for us but rather something we have overheard. By bitterness I mean pain, not resentment. We should hardly dare to ask that any notice be taken of ourselves. But we pine. The sense that in this universe we are treated as strangers, the longing to be acknowledged, to meet with some response, to bridge some chasm that yawns between us and reality, is part of our inconsolable secret. And surely, from this point of view, the promise of glory, in the sense described, becomes highly relevant to our deep desire. For glory meant good report with God, acceptance by God, response, acknowledgment, and welcome into the heart of things. The door on which we have been knocking all our lives will open at last.

I read the full sermon last night, and was in tears by the end. This is the only time the word "dance" was used in the whole thing, but it seems to me that the whole sermon centers on the topic.

[Solly]

Yes, i think that is a flavour of it. Lewis was not scriptural in his thoughts a lot of the time, but he had read in the Church Fathers, and worked it through his own renewed understanding. That sense of being drawn into something. not static, not a coliseum, or - oh dread - a mausoleum, but something alive, active, something big that has been going on for eternity, and which in one sense does pass us by, but only because we don't really want to engage with it, but when we do, we are swept into it, caught up in it.

And they shall have life, and that more abundantly...

[brother vinny]

Is true perichoresis even available to us in this life? Or is what we experience of it here merely a shadow of what's to come?

One would think that the true Dance would be so overhwhelming that this dying flesh we find ourselves housed in couldn't withstand the Dancing-- that it would either have to be shuffled off, or otherwise transformed.

[Solly]

While we live in a fallen world with our fallen natures, a full perichoresis is not possible. Right now we only get a glimpse of the divine reality. Someday however, there will be no more creeds and confessions to set ourselves apart by. No more distinctives to live by. No more traditions to mark ourselves out by. There will only one denomination. The denomination of Jesus Christ. A. Raj Rao

My siggy. Not offensive I hope.

What I am finding intriguing is the Gunton does not follow Process Theology, mentions not at all Open Theism, but rather draws on Irenaeus. Yet while there might be modifications to make to Reformed theology in the light of his theological explorations, yet I believe perichoresis can be incorporated with it.

Can we have full perichoresis now? No, anymore than we have anything in the fullness now, only the measure of the Spirit. Have you read Dant'es Divine Comedy? In paradise the saints are dancing. He knew. And I think Lewis grasped it and expressed it when Aslan was resurrected in LWW, remember that scene, how they danced and flew, all creation?

What I think OV might be trying to capture, but overdoing, and which Calvinsim has perhaps slightly missed in giving expression to an iron determinism at times, is that the contingencies of this life are not necessarily failures or reversals, but part of the dance, and God, as the lead parnter, is taking the dance on, and we are called into it. And that requires trust - not simple belief or sandemanianism, light feet - in the world, not of it, a sensitivity to his leading - and that requires perhaps a new reformed charismatic pneumatology, unquestioning response even when we don't understand - a theology of providence, and above, joy!

All things work to the good for those that love God...

[brother vinny]

Oh, you have a sig?

[Solly]

ego te absolvo.

Anyway, I might not be around for a while, so get Gunton if you can, and we'll talk.

[John Reece]

While we live in a fallen world with our fallen natures, a full perichoresis is not possible. Right now we only get a glimpse of the divine reality. Someday however, there will be no more creeds and confessions to set ourselves apart by. No more distinctives to live by. No more traditions to mark ourselves out by. There will only one denomination. The denomination of Jesus Christ. A. Raj Rao

My siggy. Not offensive I hope.

What I am finding intriguing is the Gunton does not follow Process Theology, mentions not at all Open Theism, but rather draws on Irenaeus. Yet while there might be modifications to make to Reformed theology in the light of his theological explorations, yet I believe perichoresis can be incorporated with it.

Can we have full perichoresis now? No, anymore than we have anything in the fullness now, only the measure of the Spirit. Have you read Dant'es Divine Comedy? In paradise the saints are dancing. He knew. And I think Lewis grasped it and expressed it when Aslan was resurrected in LWW, remember that scene, how they danced and flew, all creation?

What I think OV might be trying to capture, but overdoing, and which Calvinsim has perhaps slightly missed in giving expression to an iron determinism at times, is that the contingencies of this life are not necessarily failures or reversals, but part of the dance, and God, as the lead parnter, is taking the dance on, and we are called into it. And that requires trust - not simple belief or sandemanianism, light feet - in the world, not of it, a sensitivity to his leading - and that requires perhaps a new reformed charismatic pneumatology, unquestioning response even when we don't understand - a theology of providence, and above, joy!

All things work to the good for those that love God...

[studyhound]

:boogie:

[Solly]

What I think OV might be trying to capture, but overdoing, and which Calvinsim has perhaps slightly missed in giving expression to an iron determinism at times, is that the contingencies of this life are not necessarily failures or reversals, but part of the dance, and God, as the lead parnter, is taking the dance on, and we are called into it.

This part should read: What I think OV might be trying to capture, but overdoing, and which Calvinsim has perhaps slightly missed in giving expression to an iron determinism at times, is that the contingencies of this life are not necessarily failures or reversals to God's plans, taking him by surprise or circumventing his providential ordering of the world, but part of the dance, and God, as the lead partner, is taking the dance on, and we are called into it. Calvinism focusses on the Will of God: that the dance will reach it's end, and so must fit in the "reversals", and so gives the impression of puppetry. OV AFAI see it, focusses on the will of man, and seeks to do justice to the "reversals" that occur through human sovereignty at the expense of providential control. Both are limited povs.