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truth and justice. Any of you might decide or choose to express the essence of
the three Persons di?erently (and I say quite readily that my clusters are not
exclusive) but I hope that they give us some sense of how, using our imagina-
tion, we can ?esh out Trinitarian aspects of each person of the Trinity for a life
of responsible discipleship in response to God’s incarnational gift of God to us
and to the whole world.

I want to do no more than to open up the ground for a divine, as well as
a theological, understanding of unity and friendship. In many ways it is no
more than an application of the doctrine of co-inherence (perichoresis/
circumincessio) of the Cappadocian Fathers to speci?c attributes of the Three
Persons of the One God and how they relate to us in living a Godly life. Any of
the characteristics which I have clustered, in threes, around the essence of
each Person of the Trinity can be seen as operating in the lives of the other two
Persons also. My concern is to connect divine being with human personhood
and community life. It was, after all, a Patristic truism which has not utterly
lost its validity that God became human in order that human beings might be-
come divine and it was taken up with gusto and creativity by the Caroline Di-
vines of the Anglican tradition in the seventeenth century.

‘Disappearing boundaries’

I was listening one evening recently to a programme about a close harmony
group called Chanticleer. What was particularly interesting was the way in
which, as with Schonberg but di?erently, in their music the classical form be-
came more and more elastic and creative as it was subjected to more and more
strain through revision and reapplication in an idiom and a direction which I
will call contemporary, for want of a better word. The interviewer asked the
interviewee, who was Chanticleer’s conductor: ‘Where will all of this go next?’
The interviewee replied, from within his encyclopaedic knowledge of the tradi-
tion both in terms of form and of content: ‘I really don’t know. We live in a
world of disappearing boundaries.’ I thought it an exciting statement from a
traditionalist, in the best sense of that word, and I found it asking me deep and
searching questions about the church as a vehicle of inherited tradition, and in
particular of the laissez faire liberalism which passes for theological thinking in
parts of my own church and of the boomerang response of constricting literal-
ism which equally passes for theological thinking in other parts. The future is
already happening as we speak; since it is God’s future, we cannot know where
it is going. This is the disciplined freedom of being children of the Kingdom of
God. Both parts of the tradition seem to me to be confused and frightened

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