Just a snippet of the sabbatical reading (and coffee-drinking) thus far....
TRINITY AS GROWTH & MATURITY WITHIN GOD
"As we make [this] journey towards maturity, with all the twists and potholes in the road which that entails, it may be useful to consider that this is a journey that God has also made. The idea that God - the same yesterday, today and forever - has changed over history is a contentious one......It is in this light that we now see why the incarnation was so important: it was actually necessary for God to give birth to a son for God to complete Godself. This violent, moody, changeable God needed to grow up and become a Father before he could be counted as mature. As Zizek has argued, 'Christ had to emerge to reveal God not only to humanity, but to God himself.'
God could not be all that God could be without becoming a parent. The doctrine of the Trinity is not simply about community with God; it is about maturity and growth within God too. The boyish, adolescent, tempestuous God of the Old Testament, of plagues and floods and animal blood, grows into adulthood and parenthood and, in one of those strange twists that Trinitarian thinking forces, allows the knives and anger of his youth to be turned on himself - not to affirm them, but to critique them and end them." Brewin, 106
JESUS AS DIVINE STRANGER
"The fact of Jesus' status as fully human and fully divine has traditionally been interpreted as a bridge between divinity and humanity: Jesus' divine side holds onto God, and human side holds on to us. But the idea of Jesus as the divine stranger suggests that the empathetic relationship may be equally powerful the other way round. The important thing for God was that Jesus was fully human - and thus gave God a strange mirror in which God could be revealed to Godself; the important thing for us was that Jesus was fully divine - for in this stranger, trying to adapt to the ways of our world, we see a truer picture of what we have become." Brewin, 107
There's something of this sense of Godward benefit to the incarnation in
DELIGHT, DESIRE & MAKING SPACE FOR THE OTHER
CHURCH AS STRANGE PLACE
"Our journey into Christianity, into the way of Christ, has to be a journey into the way of identifying with the stranger. It is not a journey into refuge from the world, a journey into comfort. It is a tightrope walk between separation and binding.
Too often our churches are created as places of protection, exoskeletal shells where we can take refuge from the traumas of the world and sing nice songs with like-minded, gentle people. This is not the church of Christ. Between ourselves and 'others', church should be a strange third place, a place where the other and the self can meet and exchange gifts. It is the role of the priest, of the leader, to facilitate, not dictate, these transformative spaces. It is our duty to learn to inhabit them for the simple reason that we are trying to follow a God who, through the incarnation, did the very same thing." Brewin, 110
Other: Loving Self, God and Neighbour in a World of Fractures Kester Brewin, Hodder & Stoughton 2010