The Divine Dance – By Richard Rohr with Mike Morrell

I've been enjoying various things about this book. One is that the theology is interesting and put over in an unpretentious and potentially helpfully expressed way. I'm guessing that for some readers some of the theology might be new, but the authors have done a good job of making it accessible and interesting. And I enjoyed the attempt to pick up some imagery that has contemporory resonance and to work with it to try to make something of the way Christians reflect on God accessible in a way that helps us in discipleship and spirituality. I would like to think about the idea of 'flow' a bit more -but perhaps a bit more cautiously than here in this book.

There were a couple of things that had me frowning a bit. One was the translation of perchoresis as 'dance' Even if this is warrented, it falls into the etymological fallacy that the 'origin' of a word (and in this case that actually means its origin in the records we have which is itself a moment frozen in time by writing) gives us its true meaning. I think we should pay attention to the fact that "perichoresis" is usually translated something like 'co-inherance' because its use-value in those texts is more like that. I was also surprised by the idea that the original Icon 'Hospitality at Mamre' by Andre Rublev had a mirror in it. I think this might be factually incorrect but based on the thought that the portrayal in the icon of a relicary shown in the middle front of the table round which the figures sit might be seen as representing a bringing of created bings into the relating of the 'angels' representing the persons of the Trinity. Certainly, I would be prepared from time to time to try the mirror idea out to help make that point in a learning or worship context. But I think that it is unlikely that the icon was originally so made.

Another of the things I was less convinced about was can be found in some of the criticisms in this article. It seems to me that while 'flow' can be a helpful image for us to undestand something about the relatedness and community of God, it could also seriously mislead us if it becomes the unity of God in some way: then the problem mentioned about the western tendency to overemphasise the Unity gets simply transferred to this 'new' image of Flow. And that image itself then becomes a controlling metaphor which hasn't been subjected to the wider conversation of the church, so a little more wariness about using it is warranted I think than the authors give it. So while I think that it is useful to think about the dynamism of God's action in the world by the Spirit which can be related to notions of the Kingdom and also to ideas of us being caught up into God's life, love and work, I am also a little worried about too much of a collapse into a pantheistic way of describing things. I am comfortable that the idea of theopoesis needs to be grounded in the doctrine, probably somewhere around here. But care is needed. I suspect the reviewer in the article just referenced may not be comfortable with the biblically derived notion of theopoesis and so the more vehement push back against the book.
And I guess the thing I'm alert for is whether using the notion of flow begins to cut out the person-ness of God, which might actually be one of the main points of a trinitarian theology. In that way, 'flow' might displace and important insight and downgrade personality and the notion that God is Love. I can see that the authors do not want to do this, but I wonder how they might defend against it.
That said, I'm wondering whether the language of 'blessing' might be used to supplement or replace the use of 'flow'. It might well help to give it a biblical basis and keep it clear that it is not some kind of reification.

The Divine Dance – By Richard Rohr with Mike Morrell

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Review: Richard Rohr and Mike Morrell's The Divine Dance

- Mark Longhurst, OrdinaryMystic.net 

Disclosure of Material Connection: I received this book free from the author and/or publisher through the Speakeasy blogging book review network. I was not required to write a positive review. The opinions I have expressed are my own. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR,Part 255.

Please note there was some updating of this a couple of days following its original publication.