A Trinity Catena

1. The story of redemption is the perfect and absolute love of the persons for each other being separated (for our creaturely sake) like light through a prism on the wall of history. The Godhead does as it is. [Explain]

2. The shalom of the persons is the eschatological shalom of the people of God, which we are called to and long for, which we await with all creation, and to which we summon our neighbors. [Explain]

2a. Love requires a lover and a beloved and the love itself. When we, following scripture, assert "God is love," we confess that God is a plurality in unity; God is love.

2b. The life of the church--in all its varied practices--tells and participates in the Father's sending of the Son and the Spirit for the sake of the world. The church community is the imago Dei and its spirituality is no exercise in individualism since God is a fellowship, not a monad.

2c. To state in another way: the Great Commission is a repetition of the sending of the Son, which is itself a reflection of the eternal begetting of the Son in history. But this time, the church is invited.

3. The people of God whose head is Jesus of Nazareth are invited to participate by grace in the loving oneness of the persons. By grace, not by nature. The flesh of Jesus is forever scarred. This is the doctrine of theosis, the foundation of Christian anthropology. In the words of the early church fathers: He became like us so that we can become like him.

4. Christian spirituality is inside out: an always moving current into God and into the community. There is a holy and joyful eros to it as we, through the Son and by the Spirit, are caught up into the perichoretic dance to the Father.

4a. Christian spirituality is triune from the foundations.

5. The Doctrine of the Trinity, revealed just in the light of awareness as we became no longer servants but friends, is a summing up of the whole. And, together with the two-natures of the Son, tells the whole thing in a glance.

6. Afterthought: Do not get overcome by how are there three in one. Sometimes you emphasize the oneness; sometimes the threeness. Heresy cannot be avoided. So, sin boldly!

Beauty is a form of Hope

"When we make beauty, it is a form of hope." Anne Hathaway.

Human beings are priests; our value is worship

LLMs are causing all sorts of angst and discussion these days, most noteably in the recent encyclical Magnifica Humanitas which I have yet to read. There is a duality of doom on one side and evangelical fervor on the other. For now, these thoughts from from author L. M. Sacasas in his Substack "The Convivial Society" point me forward in a laudable way:

We’ve made machines that can fly faster and farther than the swallow-tailed kite, but in no way does it follow that the kite should cease from its flight or that it is somehow diminished because of the advent of flying machines. That there is something else in the world that flies tells us nothing about whether the kite ought to fly.

It seems to me that we would be better off if we were less preoccupied with the question of human uniqueness, if we took for granted that we are creatures of certain sort making their way in the world with a distinct set of capabilities and potentialities and that we ought to exercise these capabilities and develop these potentialities not because they make us special but because they make us happy.

I will set aside for a moment the question of whether machines, LLMs specifically, can think or reason or use language in a manner that corresponds to the human use of language, etc. But let us grant for arguments sake that they can. They can certainly generated passable simulations of such things. But why should this mean that I ought not to think for myself and with others? Why should I cease from inhabiting the playground of language because a machine can pretend to play in it as well? Why should I abandon the exercise of judgment or the pursuit of knowledge? We must pursue these things not because the dignity of our humanity is on the line, but because our joy is.

This is a good turn, but it is not turn enough. Human beings were not made for what we do. Certainly what we do is marvelous. But we were made to be priests. Priests receive their value from the calling they receive from their god and from the personal and corporate worship they do and produce for their god. This river of value flows from the Source of value and go back again to that Source.

So let's get our anthropology set and calm down about these new tools we've invented. The ability of the greatest LLM or robot may meet or surpass that of human beings, but we do not receive value from those abilities. The joy of the Lord is our strength. I rejoiced when I heard them say, 'Let us go to the house of the Lord.'

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[1] An adjacent though unrelated idea. "AI is not a unitary actor." wrote Joanna Bryson. "It is not unitary, and it does not act. . . It is a set of software engineering techniques and digital services. Thus it is meaningless to discuss what AI will do, or to look for singular solutions about how to govern it."

[2] Microsoft's post "Towards Humanist Superintelligence" written in November 2025 should not be forgotten. "Technology’s purpose is to help advance human civilization. It should help everyone live happier, healthier lives. It should help us invent a future where humanity and our environment truly prosper. . . . Any technology that doesn’t achieve this is a failure. And we should reject it."