Father and Son

Tom Smail’s Like Father, Like Son: The Trinity Imaged in Our Humanity (Eerdmans 2005) has a lot going for it. Written for a general Christian readership, it reflects a thorough familiarity with both tradition and contemporary work on the Trinity, and applies Trinitarian patterns to human life in interesting ways. His chapter on “Gendered Image” shows an unfortunate skittishness about feminism, endorses ordination of women, and doesn’t deal with all the relevant biblical texts; but even that chapter has its virtues, as he explains that men are created to initiate and to work while women are created to cultivate relationships. Each is modified and matured by contact with the other, but each retains his and her own calling:

“The man is to be responsive as he remains faithful to his distinctive calling to image the initiating love of the Father; the woman is to be proactive as she remains faithful to her distinctive calling to image the responsive love of the Son.” Appealing to perichoretic categories, he writes that “in their inter-relating with women, men, in their distinctive calling to initiating work in the world, are inducted into the realm of empathetic attentiveness to the other which male humanity needs for its completion but which is the distinctive calling and gift of women. In their inter-relating with men, women, in their distinctive calling to that responsive relationality, are inducted into the realm of initiation and authority which female humanity needs for its completion but which is the distinctive gift and calling of men.” This comes to fullest expression in marriage, but also in relations of sons to mothers, daughters to fathers, brothers to sisters, and so on.

He describes human identity in terms of “obligated responsiveness,” a description that avoids both isolated, dominating autonomy and social determinism. More fully, “What constitutes our human identity is an obligated responsiveness from which, on the one hand, we receive the affirmations that give us our identity and which, on the other hand, make demands upon us that enable us to find ourselves in response to them.” Smail does not limit this to I-Thou relations, but finds the same kind of obligated responsiveness in our relations with creation: “If I am a gardener, my engagement with soil and plants intrigues, enriches and satisfies me and imposes upon me an obligation to tend and protect what has been put into my care, so that if I neglect it I ahve failed in my obligation of responsiveness to it.”

He also deftly disposes of various modern and postmodern mistakes about the self. In spite of modernity’s pretense to autonomy, relationality is inescapable; in spite of various theories that imply we are socially determined, we retain genuine freedom, which even the deterministic theories implicitly acknowledge. Most deftly, he points out that if selves were really as completely fragmented as some postmodern theories suggest, we could never know it – because we’d have no member of yesterday’s (or the last second’s) self. We wouldn’t be in anguish; we’d be blissfully ignorant of the past.

Smail appeals to Pannenberg to make the point that “the process of our personal formation depends on our exocentric relationship to our environment that begins at birth and is completed only at the eschaton. Personhood is as much ultimate destiny as present reality. but all the way, it depends on other persons and imposes obligations toward them.”

There’s much more in this book, all very readable. With some caveats, especially on gender questions, I’d recommend this as an introduction to Trinitarian anthropology.