The Modern Problem is understanding gender.
The Ancient Tradition is vestigia Trinitatis.
That Latin term, meaning “traces of the Trinity,” looks through the doctrine of the Trinity to see how that truth about God illumines the way the world is. The simple reasoning is, if this is the way God is, it would likely show up in how He made things. The ancient tradition of seeking and seeing this has fell on hard times of late, as theology has become unmoored from adherence to the orthodox Biblical faith. Faithful theologians are usually complaining today of how the Trinity can be used to prove anything, and so they lock it up and hide the key. Matthew Barrett, for example, after a visit to a book shop, catalogs all the different, often contradictory points and topics the Trinity is used to demonstrate.
But, thankfully, the tradition has not all but died out. Because, despite abuses, the created heavens still declare the Lord’s glory (Psalm 19:1), And the Bible still encourages us in this direction, espying indications of that tri-une glory in His created works, especially the work of Their image, mankind in male and female. And that Biblical thrust is why vestigia Trinitatis goes back to the Church Fathers, recurring occasionally among good theologians.
Three recent, fascinating offerings one could mention are Colin E. Gunton’s, The One, The Three and the Many: God, Creation and the Culture of Modernity (1993), JD Lyonhart’s MonoThreeism: An Absurdly Arrogant Attempt to Answer All the Problems of the Last 2000 Years in One Night at a Pub (2022), and Vern S. Poythress’ Making Sense of the World: How the Trinity Helps to Explain Reality, (2024). Even though these are profoundly different works, they partake of the vestigia tradition and are not trying to re-invent or update the doctrine (maybe the second one sort of is).
One author taking up the orthodox tradition decided to just go for it. The rugged individualist writer, Peter Leithart, named his 2015 book, Traces of the Trinity, which title is an exact translation of the Latin term. Dr. Leithart’s focus is the strange but necessary doctrine of the Divine Persons’ perichoresis. Drawn largely from the gospel of John, this teaching is how the persons of the Trinity exhaustively and mutually indwell one Another, which makes them one God and not three Gods, even they though they are three Persons. The First Person is fully in the Second, and vice-versa, etc.
Dr. Leithart writes an entire book on the principle of divine perichoresis visible in the world, inside us and all around us: in living bodies, music, ethics, society. The result is some profound thinking that at times leaves one in awe of God and His world. I can tell you, I will never think about time the same way again after reading this book’s treatment of our past-present-future reality.
But Dr. Leithart finds one of the most striking demonstrations of mutual indwelling in human marriage (ch. 3) which, of course, accounts for my interest in the book. The one-ness shared by husband and wife, especially physically, has always struck me as the most obvious analogy of divine perichoresis that creation, limited and insufficient as it is, offers us. And so Dr. Leithart includes it in his inventory also, speaking of a kiss as mutual consumption and physical intimacy as mutual envelopment and indwelling. He also understands the deeper intimacy intimated by the sexual act, noting correctly that it takes a lifetime for one life to fully indwell another. Even so, our’s will never be just like the Trinitarian indwelling. But it traces it.
We so need works like this recognizing the analogy we are. First, we can understand our God so much more through it. Second, it is only in understanding how deep our intergendered relationships go that will rescue us from the gender problem, that is, the gender disintegration with which we are now afflicted.
The first reason, in my opinion, is why God is allowing the second.