To be inclusive, one must have something or someone to include people into. And for that inclusion to be “good” we must include people into something that brings abundant life and full human flourishing. It is not enough to include people into communities or families. Street gangs, prisons, cartels, and Nazis all form strong communities. We must ask what greater good— what God— is served by those communities, and if that God is worthy of worship. That God could be racial identity, profit making, power acquisition, or even some version of “God” itself. But how do you define the God you include people into?
For Christians, we have developed unique linguistic safeguards on the conception of God to try and keep our conception of God from drifting into the demonic and destructive. Those safeguards include, at the very Core, the idea of the Trinity and the Incarnation. The Trinity posits a God that is fundamentally relational and characterized by inter-relations of self-giving, inexhaustible Love. The Trinity says that the fundamental Ground of Reality is Love, and it is from the Love shared by Father, Son, and Spirit that all worlds emerge. The Incarnation further states that God so loved the world that God enters into it uniquely and concretely to join the world to Godself in Love, so the world may be saved and healed and made whole. Furthermore, this incarnation and revelation of Triune Love happen in a real human life— a life like yours and mine— and not in some mythic never time. In other words, the Trinity and Incarnation are not just metaphorically or mythically true, but actually and historically true as well.
The Trinity and Incarnation are the Christian way of saying “We include everyone in this Divine Reality of Love that is our Source, our Life, and our Destiny, and which we see most clearly embodied in the Person of Jesus”. Without proclaiming this, we fear we will include people in something less than Love, something that draws us into anger and fear and selfishness, something that eventually destroys us. Although I deeply value the inclusion of women, and men, and LGBT persons, and all ethnicities, and all ages, into every dimension of the Church’s life and ministry, I value the Trinity and Incarnation EVEN more. Because without the Trinity and Incarnation I have no compass to tell me if what we are including people into will really give them life. Maybe God has ways of giving life outside of communities that explicitly affirm the Trinity and Incarnation. I certainly hope so, and have written about this hope. But I have only been given two safeguards, two road signs, that clearly point me in the direction of abundant life. And those road signs are the Trinity and Incarnation.
The Trinity declares that God is, in essence, a loving community of three distinct Persons, in which they eternally receive each other's "otherness" in full inclusion, with full inter-sharing of all they are with one another. What could be a more full-bodied basis upon which to build a radical theology of full inclusion of human otherness? What could be a better foundation for insisting on distributive justice, in which all of God's children, made in the image of the Triune God, are provided with all they need for health and life, as we share God's creation with each other?
Likewise, in the Incarnation God took upon himself not only the consequences of human sin, but the fullness of human nature as well. God included all of human life in Godself when God became human in Jesus. And God completed this union when Jesus took human nature into the Divine life of the Trinity in his ascension. It was this God incarnate who preached such radical messages as what we read in the Sermon on the Mount. It was this God incarnate who lived out the inclusion and justice he embodied by actually sharing fellowship with saints and sinners, wives and whores, sick and healthy, poor and rich, outcasts and insiders. It was this God incarnate who proclaimed that whenever we receive and help the last, lost, and least among us, we are in fact receiving and helping him (cf. Mat 25.31-46). Thus Jesus provides the historic, temporal basis for radical inclusion and social justice, just as the Trinity provides the trans-historic, eternal basis for the same positions.
That is why, if I am forced to choose between an inclusive Church that rejects the Trinity and Incarnation, and a less inclusive Church that affirms the Trinity and Incarnation, I will have to choose the latter. Because I know in the latter case where they are going eventually, even if they are in the wrong place right now. And I know that the particularity and peculiarity of the Trinity and Incarnation will help safeguard them from the idolatrous seductions of the Market and the Nation. In the former case, even though they have chosen well now, I fear they are eventually headed toward disaster, because they have chosen due to current feelings and fashions, not due to a deep moral grounding. A bloodless “Moral Therapeutic Deism” is easy pickings for becoming dominated by Market values that commodify everything, turn religion and sexuality and community into marketable products, and sacrifice persons as disposable means to profit.
If we want a community that will hold our lives sacred, and resist the sacrifice of our particular selves as mere means to profit or power or pleasure, then we must chose a community that affirms the sacredness and particularity of the God of Love who makes us sacred. And the only route for me to affirm God as sacred and particular is through the Trinity and Incarnation. For me and for most of Christianity-- as symbolized in the Great Ecumenical Creeds-- the Trinity and Incarnation are the minimal basic starting point for Christian talk about God. God may be an infinite number of things in addition to the Triune Reality fully embodied in the Incarnation, but God can never be LESS than that, or OTHER than that.
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