Mutual Coinherence

John Webster (in an essay in Volf and Welker, God’s Life in Trinity ) prefers the term “fellowship” to “communion” in describing the way creatures participate in the perfect life of God: “God communicates his absolute life. This communication does not mean that creatures participate in the life that is proper to the Holy Trinity, for then God would be not only giver of life to creatures but the receiver of life from creatures; and so his life would no longer be absolute . . . . Fellowship is a key term in explicating the divine missions because unlike the much more fluid term communion, which rather easily becomes mutual coinherence, fellowship indicates both the intimacy of God with creatures and the unbridgeable gulf between them that is the essential condition of their relations in time. Fellowship indicates the mutuality of grace, not of shared being.”

I agree with Webster that we should affirm both God’s intimacy with us and the Creator-creature distinction, but his avoidance of the language of “mutual coinherence” is an avoidance of direct biblical language: “that they may be in Us,” Jesus prays, “I in them, and Thou in Me.”