The act and being of church?

My doctrine essay is (finally) done. Huzzah! It was on how our understanding of God as triune shapes our understanding of church. Big topic, very interesting.

If you’re interested, here’s a potted summary of what I wrote, entitled ‘The Act and Being of Church? The Limitations of Trinitarian Analogy.’

Our understanding of God as triune has direct implications for our understanding of church. Firstly, we recognise that the church is instantiated by the Trinity, as the Father calls his people to himself by his Son, in the Spirit. The united actions of the persons of the Trinity institute and constitute the church. Secondly, the worship of the church is focussed on the Trinity, as we hear and proclaim the doctrine of God. In recent times analogies have been drawn from the triune relations to an ecclesiology, from Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, and Free Church positions. Consistently applying models of how the divine persons relate to finite human persons, however, is fraught with difficulty. Models of ‘person’ developed from divine persons are not sufficient to fully capture human personhood, which seriously damages ecclesial models based on such notions. Finally, a proper trinitarian understanding of christology allows us to take church models or metaphors centred on Christ as acceptable, without needing to appeal to flawed or strained ‘full trinitarian’ analogies. We conclude that there is no logical reason for making explicit trinitarian formulations constitutive of ecclesiology, rather an appropriate balance of scriptural and theological categories must be applied, when necessary, to appropriately limit the analogy.