The Place of the Spirit

An imaginative exploration of how the concepts of 'place' and 'location' can be meaningfully applied to our understanding of the Trinity.

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Is there any way to talk theologically about the Trinity and place? What might the 'placedness' of creation have to do with God's triunity? In The Place of the Spirit, Sarah Morice-Brubaker considers how anxieties about place have influenced Trinitarian theology - both what it is asked to do and the language in which it is expressed. When one is nervous about collapsing God into created horizons, she suggests, one is apt to come up with a model of Trinity that refuses place. Distance becomes a primary way of situating the divine persons in relations to each other. Conversely, theologians who wish to avoid a too-remote God likewise recruit Trinitarian language to suit that purpose. They, too, use language that encourages the importance of place, expressing triunity in terms of coinherence and mutual indwelling. And yet, suggests Morice- Brubaker, the question has received full-on attention in other areas of ethics, philosophy, and systematic theology. The Place of the Spirit calls for Trinitarian thought to avail itself of those insights and offers some ways in which it may do so.