Relational. That word keeps cropping up. In the Mission and Ministry module of Rochester Diocese's Bishop's Certificate, they used it to describe God, humans, the Church, God’s Kingdom, mission and ministry. But they never defined what they meant by it.
Now, it has popped up in the Worship and Spirituality module too. Here, it is one of the hallmarks of missional leadership; it is one of the characteristics of Christian spirituality; it is an attribute of God. Again, it is never defined.
So what do we mean by “relational”?
If missional
leadership is relational, to whom is it relating and how? The Mission and
Ministry module emphasised social relationships almost to the exclusion of
everything else: my neurodivergent daughter commented that the Evangelism
Styles questionnaire was “all about neurotypical friendships”. Is this all that
“relational” means in mission and ministry? And if so, where does it leave autistic
people who find neurotypical relationships difficult and are drained and
exhausted by social interaction? Can we ever be called to missional leadership?
Indeed, can we participate in mission and ministry at all? Or must we simply be recipients of other
people’s mission and ministry? Are we doomed to be forever guests in our own
churches, “welcomed” but never belonging?
If Christian
spirituality is relational – “knowing God, rather than just knowing facts about
Him” – how does this work in practice? How
well can we really know a transcendent God? What does a “personal and social”
relationship with a risen and ascended Jesus mean in reality?
If “relational” is
an attribute of God, then how do we imagine the relationships in the Godhead?
Do we imagine them in human terms? Indeed, is there any other way we can
conceive of them? Our understanding of God is limited by our human imagination.
God is not like us,
and the relationships in the Godhead are not like ours: “For my thoughts are
not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, says the Lord. As the heavens
are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my
thoughts than your thoughts.” (Isaiah 55:8-9)
Jesus is human, but
this doesn’t mean we should imagine his relationship with the rest of the
Trinity in human terms. When I was a Catholic, the Holy Family of Jesus, Mary,
and Joseph was held up as the ideal for human relationships, to which all of us
should aspire (which is difficult, since Scripture doesn’t tell us much about
the Holy Family's everyday life!). But I don’t remember anyone saying that it
was a model of the Triune God – fortunately, because it certainly isn’t.
Jesus’s relationship with his real Father, though evidently close and intimate,
is not like our relationships with our fathers; and though we use female
pronouns for the Holy Spirit, Jesus’s relationship with her is profoundly
different from his relationship with his mother, Mary.
Since God made us in
his image, we might expect our relationships to bear some resemblance to God’s relationships,
both with His creation and within the Godhead itself. Scripture gives us clues about
the nature and extent of that resemblance. But we disagree about the
interpretation of Scripture, and since most of us can’t read Hebrew or Greek, meaning
is also lost in translation. And any resemblance is necessarily smaller and
meaner than the reality. God is bigger and more complex than we can possibly
imagine.
Why does all this
matter? Because when we imagine God in terms of human relationships – or worse,
specifically neurotypical human relationships - we are making an idol.
Karen Kilby, in her
essay “Perichoresis and Projection”[i],
described what she called “reverse projection”, in which theologians project on
to God their own experience and understanding of relationships and then use
that as the basis for a political and social theology:
“In short, then, I
am suggesting we have here something like a three stage process. First, a
concept, perichoresis, is used to name what is not understood, to name whatever
it is that makes the three Persons one. Secondly, the concept is filled out
rather suggestively with notions borrowed from our own experience of
relationships and relatedness. And then, finally, it is presented as an
exciting resource Christian theology has to offer the wider world in its
reflections upon relationships and relatedness.”
As she points out,
theologians are free to imagine God in any way they like. And metaphors drawn
from human experience can help shed light on the nature of God. The problem arises
when theologians use these human metaphors as doctrine. And this is what
appears to be happening here.
Every tutor in this
course has used the word “relational” to describe both God and humans without
ever defining it. It is simply stated as dogma.
“Relational” is a
great buzzword, but without a definition, it is no more informative than other
buzzwords Christians have used to describe God over the centuries. And it
unfortunately encourages humans to imagine God as a group of neurotypical
friends who always understand each other perfectly and never have disagreements
or rows. Only one tutor warned against imagining the relationships
within the Trinity in this way.
From my perspective
as an autistic person, describing God, humans, church, Kingdom, mission, and
ministry as “relational” without ever defining what “relational” means for any
of these things is typical of the unspoken assumptions that make neurotypical
discourse all but incomprehensible. And if “relational” is imagined as
neurotypical styles of personal and social relationships – as it seems to be in
this course - it excludes people who relate differently. I don’t do
relationships the way most people do, and this can cause friction, for which I,
as the minority, am inevitably blamed. But my style of relationship is no less
“of God” than that of neurotypical people. “My Father’s house has many rooms:
if it were not so, would I have told you that I am going there to prepare a
place for you?” (John 14:2).
Rather than making
assumptions about the “right” way of relating, and telling me (implicitly, and
on one occasion even explicitly) that I need to be less autistic, this course
should acknowledge the limitations of human-derived images of God and teach
that there is room in God for everyone.
Image: A tale from the Decameron, by John William Waterhouse - https://johnwilliamwaterhousehome.files.wordpress.com/2020/11/1916-a-tale-from-the-decameron-.jpg, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=142384668
[i]
Perichoresis and Projection: Problems with Social Doctrines of the Trinity”,
Kilby, New Blackfriars October 2000.
Kilby’s views on the significance of the doctrine of Trinity are not universally shared: Gregory S Gorsuch, for example, argues that perichoresis, which he equates with “love”, is “the very ground of our mutuality with God” (Perichoresis and Projection: a response to Kilby’s Trinitarian minimalism, Gorsuch, Sciendo 2023).
However, it is not necessary to agree with Kilby's view of
the Trinity for her critique of “social Trinitarianism” to stand. In his
heartfelt doctrinal thesis, David Dixon Kinser uses his own experience as
father of an autistic child to illustrate how the existence of autistic people
profoundly challenges the “social Trinitarianism” that has become dogma, and
finds in Scripture evidence that autistic styles of relating are as God-like as
neurotypical styles. (Reimagining Relationships: What Autism Reveals About What
it Means to Relate to God, Kinser, 2021)
