The attractor and the energy of love trinity in evolutionary and ecological context

In the Greek-speaking world in which the gospel was first preached and the doctrine of the Trinity emerged, permanence and stability were highly prized. Amidst the turmoil of personal and political life, the world itself seemed relatively stable. Our 21st-century worldview is radically different. After Einstein and Hubble, we know that we are part of an observable universe made up of more than a hundred billion galaxies, all of them in motion, a dynamic universe that has been expanding and evolving from a tiny, dense, and hot state over the last 13.7 billion years. And after Darwin, we know that all life on earth has evolved by means of natural selection from the first forms of microbial life that appeared on our planet about 3.7 billion years ago. At the same time we face a looming crisis of life on our planet because of human actions.

Stability no longer characterizes our worldview. We belong to a universe of constant motion and emergent processes. We are confronted by the reality that we are contributing to global climate change and to an increasing loss of earth's biodiversity. How is the Christian community to speak of its God in this new context? What difference does it make to our classical understanding of the Trinity to think about such a God in relation to an evolutionary worldview? How might this theology of God inform our ecological action? I will begin to explore these questions by briefly outlining a theology of the Trinity that I find meaningful in this context: that of Athanasius. Then I will explore three theological developments of the classical tradition for an evolutionary and ecological context: a) The Word as attractor and the Spirit as the energy of love in evolutionary emergence; b) the costs of evolution and the divine passion of love; and c) the defencelessness of the humble God in creation.

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