Community...
“Community is important because God does not want faith to be expressed only in an interior way within the hearts of individual disciples. Human experience itself is social, and faith needs to assume corporate form…The Spirit has a vested interest in the church, where men and women confess Jesus Christ and are open to participation in the divine life…Community is also central to the purposes of God because it allows the relationality of triune life to be reflected in the created order. This mirroring back gives delight to God and at the same time supplies fulfillment to our own lives as semi transcendent and relational beings. Made in God’s image, as differentiated creatures, as male and female, we too delight in community. Stanley Grenz writes, ‘God intends to bring to pass a reconciled creation in which humans reflect in their relationship to each other and the universe around us the reality of the triune God. God’s actions are aimed at establishing the reconciled community of love as the human reflection of the social trinity-the divine nature-which is love’ [(Stanley J. Grenz, Theology for the Community of God (Nashville: Broadman & Holman, 1994), p.636.]
The Spirit is central for ecclesiology because he is the source of fellowship among humans in history and the bond of love between Father and Son in eternity. Fellowship on earth corresponds in a measure to fellowship in heaven. The Trinity is an open, inviting fellowship, and the Spirit wants the church to be the same, responsive in the same sort of way. God wants to hear from us an echo of the dynamic relations within his own life, anticipating the coming of the kingdom. The church is meant to resemble the triune life by being itself a place of reciprocity and self-giving. The fellowship that we have with one another is related ultimately to our fellowship with Father and Son (1 Jn 1:3). Fellowship refers both to divine life and to community life, because the community is meant to reflect the communion of the Trinity, which is the ontological basis of the church” (Pinnock, Flame of Love- A Theology of the Holy Spirit, pg 116-117).
The Spirit is central for ecclesiology because he is the source of fellowship among humans in history and the bond of love between Father and Son in eternity. Fellowship on earth corresponds in a measure to fellowship in heaven. The Trinity is an open, inviting fellowship, and the Spirit wants the church to be the same, responsive in the same sort of way. God wants to hear from us an echo of the dynamic relations within his own life, anticipating the coming of the kingdom. The church is meant to resemble the triune life by being itself a place of reciprocity and self-giving. The fellowship that we have with one another is related ultimately to our fellowship with Father and Son (1 Jn 1:3). Fellowship refers both to divine life and to community life, because the community is meant to reflect the communion of the Trinity, which is the ontological basis of the church” (Pinnock, Flame of Love- A Theology of the Holy Spirit, pg 116-117).
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