The desire to belong, to be part of something greater than oneself, a chain of solidarity, and a community of origin and destiny can be a powerful and exhilarating force.Footnote 1 Recent studies have shown that belonging is a basic human need already present at birth, and lack of belonging has severe consequences for one’s social, emotional, and cognitive development and physical health.Footnote 2 Yet, belonging ‘is not an unmitigated good and can be paradoxical in many ways’.Footnote 3 As Thomas Kühne has argued, in Nazi Germany ‘the desire for community, the experience of belonging, and the ethos of collectivity became the basis of mass murder’.Footnote 4
There is much around belonging: the fear to ‘get it wrong’, that is, the fear of exclusion;Footnote 5 but also the fear of the sacrifices one may have to make to ‘get it right’, that is, the price of inclusion.Footnote 6 Moreover, if belonging can be the place of, and even arguably is the condition for, human flourishing, and if authentic Christian discipleship typically requires some form of (ecclesial) belonging, belonging can also be a place of vulnerability, where one may experience profound spiritual, psychological and sometimes physical alienation. In After Whiteness, Willie James Jennings writes that ‘belonging must become the hermeneutic starting point from which we think of the social, the political, the individual, the ecclesial, and […] the educational’.Footnote 7
Whilst offering a comprehensive systematic theology of belonging might seem like the overly ambitious and abstract venture of a by-gone era, to reflect systematically on belonging is to ask about the potentially transformative impact of the faith Christians communally profess on their realities, that is, in their daily lives in all their textures. This article invites readers onto an experimental journey, seeking to reconfigure creatively, constructively and generously several significant voices in contemporary systematics in the service of a grammar of theocentric belonging.
In seeking to provide the foundations for how our God-talk can inform the way we think about belonging, this essay will resort to three key Christian doctrines: the Trinity, creatio ex nihilo and the incarnation. It will will begin with some brief observations about the issues Karen Kilby and Kathryn Tanner have raised regarding social trinitarianism. It will then explore the concept of participation as understood by Tanner. From this, the idea of an expansive theocentric theology of belonging will emerge, understood as participation in the divine life through creation and the incarnation. This will be explored further through the concepts of ‘kinship’ and ‘deep incarnation’.
From mirroring the Trinity to belonging in the Trinity:
The doctrine of the Trinity, specifically social trinitarianism, may initially seem to offer tantalising prospects for a bold theology of belonging that articulates diversity in unity. However, Karen Kilby and Kathryn Tanner’s noted critiques of social trinitarianism have questioned this intuition. Michael Brain has recently described Kilby’s critique of social trinitarianism as ‘thus far one of the twenty-first century’s most important pieces of trinitarian theology’.Footnote 8 Brain adds, ‘she has changed the landscape of contemporary trinitarian thought, such that uncritical appeals to social analogies are now impossible’.Footnote 9 Kilby’s and Tanner’s contributions to disputes in contemporary trinitarian theology offer constructive and distinctive alternatives to social trinitarianism, which provides an opportunity to rethink the task of constructing a grammarof theocentric belonging.
At the centre of Kilby’s concern is the worry that social trinitarianism is redefining the doctrine of the Trinity, such that its purpose may no longer be solely to articulate certain fundamentals of the Christian faith,Footnote 10 but rather to make normative claims about human living. Tanner points out that in doing so, social trinitarianism runs the risk of falling into idolatry by canonising particular theological agendas and reshaping God accordingly, and in such a way as to give shape to our so-called better selves, even if this entails ‘systematically modify[ing] as many of the socially and politically problematic aspects of trinitarian theology as they [social trinitarians] can’.Footnote 11 Such strategies, therefore, risk neglecting God’s unknowability (one of Kilby’s chief concerns), as well as polluting the doctrine of the Trinity by introducing historically conditioned and highly questionable concepts into the doctrine of God to earn greater clarity about God and ourselves. If projection and epistemological arrogance are Kilby’s main concerns about social trinitarianism, Tanner dedicates an entire chapter of Christ the Key to the political use and application of the doctrine of the Trinity, especially in the work of social trinitarians. Aside from all the risks that seeking socio-political guidance from the Trinity entails,Footnote 12 the most important and concrete obstacle remains what Tanner describes as ‘the lack of ontological continuum’ between God and humans:Footnote 13
No matter how close the similarities between humans and divine persons, and between human society and the unity of the trinity, differences always remain – God is not us – and this sets up the major problem for theologies that want to use conclusions about human relationships on the Trinity.Footnote 14
For Tanner, ‘figuring out the socio-political lessons of the trinity is a fraught task’.Footnote 15 Instead, the significance of the Trinity for human relations is to be found in the incarnation.Footnote 16 Through the incarnation, humankind is incorporated into and invited to participate in the life of the Trinity ‘as members of Christ’.Footnote 17 Whilst the relations between the members of the Trinity, as well as the way we are called to relate to the Father and the Spirit, do not offer clear guidance as to what intra-human belonging might look like,Footnote 18 Christ’s life provides us with an example as well as a hermeneutics for intra-human relationships and, therefore, for belonging. Therefore, it is important to stress that Tanner’s move does not constitute a radical rejection of imitation, but rather a salutary reorientation of the kind of imitation appropriate for Christians.
For Kilby, ‘the unknowability of the Trinity needs not just be conceived as the result of some sort of unfathomable distance between us and God, but also as a result of our involvement in the Trinity, its closeness to us, our incorporation into it’.Footnote 19 As a result, ‘we are caught up in the Trinity. The Christian life is a life of being brought into the Trinity – not a contemplation from a distance, nor a mimicry at a distance, but a genuine incorporation, a being taken up by the Spirit into the movement of the Son from and to the Father’.Footnote 20 Kilby’s distinction between contemplation of and in the Trinity, therefore, results from our location in relation to the Trinity. Indeed, contemplation of an object requires stepping aside and standing at the appropriate distance from the object gazed upon. However, the difference between God’s nature and ours renders such inquiry impossible, for God is not another, even superior, external object directly available to contemplate. Thus, God, the Creator of everything, is simultaneously infinitely distant and close to us. From this, we can begin to understand that this lack of ontological continuity or radical distinction between God and humans, which might initially have appeared as an obstacle to theocentric belonging, is the very condition for this mode of belonging that is slowly emerging, carved as it is the space or movement between God’s infinite presence and God’s infinite distance.
Tanner distinguishes between two modes of participation in the divine life. Together these two modes will form the two pillars of the grammar of theocentric belonging. This article contends that what Tanner says about participation can be said of belonging, too. Indeed, all forms of belonging are forms of participation, and exclusion is precisely the denial of participation. This in turn enables us to say that belonging is at the root of what it means to be created beings.
Participation as the shape of theocentric belonging
The first of the two kinds of participation is what Tanner calls ‘weak’ participation and finds its root in the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo. To the extent that creaturely existence is derivative from God’s esse who alone is, ‘to be a creature means […] to lead a continually borrowed life’.Footnote 21 This is why creaturely existence can be described as contingent and as participation in God. Tanner calls this ‘weak participation’ since ‘the difference between God and creatures requires this first sort of imaging through participation to be quite weak’.Footnote 22 Such a mode of participation, which for this article might more helpfully be described as primordial, is a requirement of the lack of ontological continuum between Creator and creation. Creation out of nothing allows us to discover God ‘pervasively present as self-communicating Love throughout the cosmos from the beginning of time to the end’.Footnote 23 Thus, it is possible to say that through creation, all are born into being by Being, love by Love, and belonging by Belonging. Here, the use of a capital letter is not accidental and deserves some explanation.
Although Kilby and Tanner may be right to insist that perichoresis cannot provide a map for human belonging, I would contend that it it is nonetheless possible, and even necessary, to say something about this highly technical term. Whilst its function is to help us articulate the mysterious relationality between the persons of the Trinity as characterised by procession, constitutive relationality and indivisibility, it also gives us a glimpse of what I propose to call Divine Belonging. The claim is not that belonging as we encounter it and experience it in its partial, vulnerable, often exclusionary and sacralised form is divine but that belonging is at the core of the mystery that characterises the life of the immanent Trinitarian. Informed by the doctrine of divine simplicity, which compels us to say that ‘God’s attributes (what God has) and God’s existence (what God is) are one and the same’,Footnote 24 we can affirm that, just as God is Truth, God is Love, or God is Good, we can say that God is Belonging. Our language about Divine Belonging and theocentric belonging can, therefore, work in the same way that our language about God’s goodness and human goodness does, analogically and in terms of participation.
Finally, being able to name these ‘divine perfections’ does not mean that ‘we have a firm grasp of [them]’.Footnote 25 Thus, whilst we can say that theocentric belonging flows from, participates in, and heads towards its completion in Divine Belonging, we are not left with a clearer or more robust understanding of what Divine Belonging looks like. Although the suggestion that perichoresis can tell us something about belonging might initially seem open to Kilby’s critique of epistemological arrogance, it avoids the pitfalls of saying or finding too much in the doctrine of the Trinity. Instead, the key to understanding properly the relationship between Divine Belonging and theocentric belonging is not imitation or knowledge but participation.
Such a mode of participation is inalienable, for it is rooted in God’s creative act rather than in any actions or decisions on our part. Therefore, this mode of belonging attests to the radical dependence of all creatures upon their Creator, in whom they find their fundamental orientation. As a result, it is theocentric, expansive, inclusive and catholic, rather than anthropocentric. Whilst primordial belonging affirms the radical dependence of creation upon the Creator, it also stresses the kinship of all creatures, for all belong to the same Creator and depend on each other as part of the same creation and ecological community – ‘with evolutionary genetics, we have come to see ourselves as belonging to an ecological community beyond the skin and skulls of our bodies, embedded as we are in ecological networks, ceaselessly active as niche-constructors, and with a deep history behind us and in us, shared with our forebears’.Footnote 26 This is an important reminder that primordial belonging is not merely vertical but also horizontal.Footnote 27
Whilst primordial participation relies on the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo, the second mode of participation relies on another fundamental Christian doctrine: the incarnation. Tanner describes it as participation through ‘attachment’ rather than ‘likeness’.Footnote 28 Although both modes of participation proceed from God, it is important to notice that whilst primordial participation is within the realm of the natural existence of creatures, participation as incorporation is not. Indeed, it is ‘the gift to [creatures] of what remains alien to them, the very perfection of the divine image that they are not, now having become their own’.Footnote 29 This mode of participation, which Tanner calls ‘strong’ is realised in Christ: ‘as a result of th[e] hypostatic union or incarnation, perfect human imaging of God is achieved by way of perfect unity with what is perfectly and properly the image of God, the second person of the trinity’.Footnote 30 Here again, if one understands participation and belonging as coterminous, this means, first, that in Christ perfect belonging to God is realised; second, that it is only through Christ that this participation is realised; and, third, that it is realised only imperfectly and partially for the time being.Footnote 31 Through ‘strong’ participation, we belong to God in a new, fuller, extravagant, ‘over the top’ way that respects our creatureliness as articulated in the doctrine of the hypostatic union. In that sense, it can be called eschatological participation into the divine life.
Like primordial (or ‘weak’) participation, eschatological (or ‘strong’) participation is not the fruit of our own activity. However, unlike the former, eschatological participation is not derived from nature but is the fruit of God’s extravagant and super-abundant Love in the gratuitous self-giving of God-self: ‘By way of the Incarnation, humanity is united to, bound up with the Word. The Incarnation is for the purpose of humanity’s entrance into trinitarian relations. (…) Room is carved out for us within it [the Trinity] by him [Christ]; we are taken along with him into the space that has opened up for us within it by his side’.Footnote 32 This confirms that participation can rightly be understood as belonging and vice versa, but it also suggests that the primary function of the incarnation is not sacrificial atonement for the redemption of the sin of humankind but this over-the-top and eccentrically broad and generous belonging.
In this emphasis on Jesus’ restoring and bringing human belonging into the very life of God, the purpose of the incarnation can be described as divinisation – though in making this claim, this article simultaneously follows and departs from the mainstream western Christian tradition. Both Anselm and Aquinas largely contributed to shaping the mainstream Christian understanding of the incarnation in christologically infralapsarian terms, that is, as God’s loving response to human sin and, therefore, a direct consequence of the fall. In contrast, the supralapsarian position chiefly associated with Duns Scotus identifies the incarnation’s primary purpose elsewhere and speculate that the incarnation would have happened regardless of the fall.Footnote 33 If the incarnation and its salvific significance are understood primarily in terms of atonement for the sins of humankind (that is, according to the infralapsarian narrative), then God’s greatest gift to creation is prompted by human mischief and cosmic disorder, not God’s loving primordial intent to glorify or deify God’s creation. In the words of Marilyn McCord Adams, ‘how metaphysically preposterous to suppose that [creatures] acquire their most dignifying capacity for union with God as a consequence of Adam’s fall’.Footnote 34
Whilst it is true that the incarnation, and more specifically the cross, achieves the redemption of humankind, it is important to insist that the incarnation is the mean of participation of all creatures into the divine life through Christ.Footnote 35 This suggests the possibility of expanding beyond an impoverished and narrowly anthropocentric theology of the incarnation and belonging – which, although theocentric in intent, remains primarily concerned with the fate of humankind independently of, and with little reference to the rest of creation – towards a properly theocentric and cosmic one. Particularly as the environmental crisis presents us with the urgent challenge of rethinking our ‘disjointed sense of connectivity to creation’,Footnote 36 a theology of theocentric belonging ought to consider, challenge and offer an alternative to this disjunction from within the Christian tradition if the latter is to rise to the challenges of our times.
Expanding theocentric belonging through ‘kinship’ and ‘deep incarnation’
The idea of the whole creation finding its completion in Christ is not new.Footnote 37 Yet, in the last two decades, the idea of the cosmic frame of the incarnation and concern for creation has generated renewed attention through the concepts of kinship and deep incarnation to which we shall now turn. Together, they lead us to an understanding of belonging as kinship, and what I will call ‘deep belonging’.
In his fascinating book Plants as Persons, botanist Matthew Hall challenges our conception of personhood and its boundaries, pointing out that ‘a detailed study of the nature of Christianity’s attitude to, and relationship with, the plant kingdom is conspicuously absent from discussions of the wider attitude to nature’.Footnote 38 This omission, or ‘plant blindness’, uncovers zoocentrism as another form of bias to add to Lynn White famous accusation that Christianity is the ‘most anthropocentric religion the world has seen’ and, as a result, the ‘root cause’ of the present ecological crisis.Footnote 39 By enlarging the sphere of their concern and care for animal life, dignity and rights whilst still largely neglecting the plant realm, humans continue to place themselves at the centre, as the point of reference and value maker. Interestingly, Hall describes ‘the rendering of plants as passive and radically different’ as ‘a deliberate process of exclusion’.Footnote 40
It is not insignificant that he uses the word exclusion here, as it confirms that the heart of the matter is one of (misconstrued) belonging. Indeed, not only is exclusion the negative side of belonging, but belonging requires the sort of agency, sameness and worth that most of the Christian tradition has failed to see in non-human creation and which contemporary post-Christian society currently grants to (some) animals. This leads Hall to distinguish between what he calls ‘philosophies of inclusion’ and ‘philosophies of exclusion’.Footnote 41 Although he identifies the Christian tradition with the latter, Hall acknowledges the emergence of eco-theologies and a model of stewardship to replace the model of dominion presumably at the origin of a distorted Christian understanding of nature.Footnote 42
Stewardship is a positive step forward from dominion, as it acknowledges creation’s value and vulnerability and bestows upon humans a duty of care for the creation. However, recent theological developments have uncovered some of stewardship’s deficiencies, and posing kinship as an alternative.Footnote 43 For Horan, ‘the stewardship model, while an improvement to the previous approach, continues to bear the disjointed sense of connectivity to creation that places humanity over and against the rests of creation […] albeit in a more subtle fashion than is found in the dominion model’.Footnote 44 Accordingly, the bond that unites humans to creation is a contractual one, between God and humans, with creation remaining the passive object of the duty of care entrusted by God to humankind. This neglects the fact that ‘our interconnectedness is biological as it is theological’, for all were made by the same God and from the same ‘stuff’.Footnote 45 This leads Horan to argue that ‘humanity’s relationship with creation is best described as familial rather than viewed as contractual’Footnote 46 – that is, through kinship, ‘for everyone, utterly everyone, is kin in the radiant tapestry of being’.Footnote 47 Therefore, it is not incidental that the metaphor to describe the relationship between humankind and creation is kinship or belonging. Horan also speaks of ‘the theological significance of adopting a grammar of kinship in place of stewardship’.Footnote 48 This grammar creates a way forward to reimagine our ways of inhabiting the world and relating to each other, with the other here expanding far beyond humans and our animal next of kin, for all are kin in God, and in Christ, all are kin to God. This last claim of cosmic kinship to God deserves further unpacking. To this end, we shall now turn to the concept of ‘deep incarnation’, which will, in turn, enable us to speak of ‘deep’ belonging.Footnote 49
For Niels Gregersen, who coined the phrase, ‘deep incarnation means that the “divine logos” […] has assumed not merely humanity, but the whole malleable matrix of materiality’.Footnote 50 Celia Deane-Drummond writes that ‘while the idea of deep incarnation is predicated on Christology and follows from its most expansive interpretation, the idea of divine immanence is predicated on the belief in God as Creator’.Footnote 51 Deep incarnation ‘suggests that God does not only tolerate material existence but accepts it and incorporates it in a divine embrace’.Footnote 52 This radical deepening of the requirements of love and care beyond humankind, or even certain animal species, to the whole creation has profound ethical consequences for the Christian tradition, which ‘for centuries, [has] emphasised Christ’s significance for the human race as Savior from sin and death’.Footnote 53 Thus, Elizabeth Johnson asks: ‘without losing its meaning for human salvation, is Christology capacious enough to allow for an intrinsic connection between Christ and the natural world? If so, what would be the result of ecological ethics?’Footnote 54 Gregersen distinguishes between ‘the focus of salvation’, which he associates with ‘the reconciliation of humanity with God’, and the ‘more comprehensive scope of salvation’, which he identifies as the peace and union between God and creation’.Footnote 55 This expansive and cosmic union, which is the result of both primordial belonging and incorporation in Christ, I propose to call ‘deep belonging’.
This expansive reframing of the incarnation, salvation and belonging does not come at the price of the distinctiveness of the Word dwelling amongst us as human and its distinctive impact on humankind, but instead resituates it into a wider eschatological horizon for all: ‘a new line of vision’.Footnote 56 To use Gregersen’s language, it does not change the ‘focus’ of salvation but explores and affirms its expansive ‘scope’. In distancing himself and deep incarnation from a pantheistic understanding of God and creation, Gregersen also helps us further clarify an ecclesiological conundrum. Gregersen’s concern is primarily ethical, as a ‘bio-historical pantheism […] would identify the kingdom of God with just any other forceful reign of nature or history’,Footnote 57 thus seeing God as fully manifested and revealed in all things, including evil forces or structures. This would leave us powerless and speechless to name, address and resist evil. To avoid this, Gregersen articulates two ‘subtle but theologically crucial distinction[s]’ between God’s ‘omnipresen[ce]’ and God’s manifestation as God’s ‘self-revelation, self-identification, or self-characterisation’ in the person of Jesus Christ and between three ‘modes of incarnation’.Footnote 58 Through these distinctions, Gregersen resolves an important ethical concern but also offers an answer to another significant challenge that the idea of deep incarnation brings to Christian theology. If deep incarnation challenges the narrowness of an ecclesial narrative that focuses exclusively on The incarnation’s soteriological significance for humans, it by no means disregards that mode. (Re)affirming the place and even the destiny of creation within God’s plan does not come at the expense of God’s distinctive work for and in the midst of a lapsed humankind or of the role of the church as the primary instrument of God’s salvific work for humankind.Footnote 59
Conclusion
This article sought to outline what I have called theocentric belonging. Whilst participation and incorporation do not give us extra knowledge about the inner life of the Triune God, they provide us with vital information about who God is not (viz., another creature), as well as who God is (viz., the source and sustainer of all things in whom all find their completion and are joined in Christ through the Spirit). As a result, these concepts also tell us who we are in relation to God, that is, the kind of identity and belonging that such a God bestows upon us. The ontological distinction between the Creator and creatures is also important because it is the condition for a non-competitive understanding of belonging fully realised in Christ, in whom divine nature and human nature are perfectly united without confusion. Thus, just as God is not an obstacle to our freedom but its condition, theocentric belonging doesn’t preclude but is on the contrary the condition for any other kind of belonging, including deep belonging.Footnote 6
Therefore, theocentric belonging is not merely another form of belonging or a political strategy of escapism from the world, but, on the contrary, the condition for and mode of evaluation of any other forms of belonging and engagement with the world. If theocentric belonging is understood as a covenant between the Creator and creation, one in which the latter is radically dependent on the former, then this redefines the intersubjectivity of belonging in two ways. First, despite their diversity of appearance, cognitive functions and social capacities, and despite the uniqueness of humankind, all creatures have more in common than not in relation to God, for all participate in God as creatures (that is, in the same way).Footnote 61 Second, to belong to God in a non-competitive way might also help us to learn to belong to each other and creation as we become more aware of the radical dependence of all creatures upon God, as well as of the interdependence, connectivity, mutuality and solidarity of all things, and Christ with all things.Footnote 62 Furthermore, whilst creaturely belonging cannot be entirely non-competitive in the way that theocentric belonging is,Footnote 63 for the ontological discontinuity which characterises the relationship between Creator and creatures does not characterise relations between finite creatures within a finite world, it can nonetheless teach us, at the very least, that belonging is a gift to be received and shared rather than a token to be seized, or a possession to be jealously guarded.
Another significant potential of theocentric belonging is that in contexts where belonging has weakened, or at least become more transient, and challenged by increased chosen or imposed mobility, the collapse or marginalisation of traditional providers of belonging, but also new challenges to belonging, theocentric belonging can offer a foundational and unshakable mode and sense of belonging.Footnote 64 This foundational sense of belonging and the security that it grants can in turn provide the basis for engaging and critiquing particular forms of (exclusive) belonging and promoting political change, whilst offering consolation and hope to those facing rejection and exclusion, that is, those to whom belonging is denied, for in God, all belong.
