Harmony in God

The Triune God is a God of peace.  Father, Son, and Spirit live in eternal and undisruptible harmony with one another.

But harmony is not the same as the sheer “peace” of stasis.  We ought not, I think, figure the harmony of the Persons by analogy with the harmony of figures and colors on a canvas.  It is rather a harmony precisely of Persons, the harmony of perfect conversation, harmony like the harmony of music, movement ever eternally already resolved.  But if that’s not going to collapse back into the peace of stasis, the eternal sounding of a single resolving chord, then we’ve got to think of the harmony of the Persons as involving actual movement, life, boundless life.  Now, can we make sense of that without making room for “dischord” in any sense?  Is it possible to have harmony, harmony as coordinated movement, without having tension that moves toward resolution?  It would seem not: Coordinated movement without any room for dissonance in any sense seems to be indistinguishable from non-movement, from stasis.

So it seems that harmony in God must include some moment from dissonance to closure.  Or, to put it in the paradoxical form that is probably inevitable: The Triune God is always moving toward the resolution that He has always already reached.  As Robert Jenson has put it, there does seem to be room for the notion that the Spirit resolves and reconciles Father and Son, so that the Speaker and His Word are harmonized in His breadth.