John 16:12–15
The reading for Trinity Sunday from the Gospel of John offers my favorite description of the Trinity: “All that the Father has is [the Son’s]…[the Spirit] will take what is [the Son’s] and declare it to you.” The fullness of the Father dwells in the Son and also dwells in the Spirit, in the form of revelation or declaration, made visible to us. The Spirit, within the Trinity, shows us God as God is also already present in the Son. The Spirit is the fullness of God the Father, fully present in the Son, made visible (“declared”) to us. This is not to lean on a functionalist modalism where the Spirit is only the “revealing mode” of God — but it is to emphasize that when we look to God, we see God-the-Spirit in the revelation and declaration of that which is the Father’s and fully present in the Son. Theologian Sarah Coakley suggests that our trinitarian theology always arises first from our experience of the Spirit: the Spirit is our entry point into the fullness of the Trinity.
What do these technicalities of the Trinity have to do with abolition? Kathryn Tanner, in her discussion of the sacrament of confirmation, associates “manifestation” with confirmation and the gift of the Spirit. The Holy Spirit manifests to us “all that the Father has [which] is [the Son’s].” The Holy Spirit isn’t identical with this manifestation, but the Spirit’s presence in the Trinity reminds us that the manifestation of God in the world is an essential element of God’s being.
What does the manifestation of God look like? It looks like liberation, reconciliation, and healing: setting the captives free and declaring good news to the poor. Abolition — the work of building healing, loving structures and tearing down powers of death and captivity — is the manifestation of God’s liberating presence. Abolition is a project of the Spirit. John 20:22–23 shows Jesus giving the Spirit to the disciple in order to “forgive and retain” sins: put another way, the Spirit empowers the disciples to engage in the hard work of community accountability. The Spirit “declares” to us all the things that are of God; the Spirit enables us to make the fullness of God’s liberating being present in our material realities. Abolition is the manifestation of God.
But the presence of the Triune God goes deeper. Jesus declares his very presence — the presence of the Son — with those who are hungry, naked, unsheltered, sick, and in prison (Matthew 25:31–45). The Father, fully present in the Son, is fully present in those who are oppressed and incarcerated. The Father and Son, fully present in the Spirit, are fully present to us in the manifestation of liberation that is resistance to that which oppresses.
This reality in the world expresses a perspective on the Trinity rooted in the cross-event. Jürgen Moltmann writes of the Trinity arising from the cross-event, in The Crucified God: “In the cross, Father and Son are most deeply separated in forsakenness and at the same time are most inwardly one in their surrender. What proceeds from this event between Father and Son is the Spirit which justifies the godless, fills the forsaken with love and even brings the dead alive, since even the fact that they are dead cannot exclude them from this event of the cross; the death in God also includes them.” The mystery of the Trinity is this: God the Father is fully present in God the Son, yet God the Son is fully present in those who are forsaken, what Ignacio Ellacuría called “the crucified peoples of the world.” The Spirit arises from the Son’s forsakenness — the Son’s solidarity with those who are oppressed, incarcerated, forsaken by societal structures — making God fully present in the resistance found in places under the power of death. The Triune God is present in all the death-dealing systems of incarceration in a manifestation of resistance to them. Abolition makes manifest the Crucified Son in solidarity with those subjected to death-dealing systems and the Spirit of accountability and reconciliation in the real, material resistance to such systems. All that the Father has is in the Son who is one with those who are incarcerated, and the Spirit declares this liberating, life-giving, death-and-punishment-abolishing fullness of the Father to us.
Hannah Bowman is the founder and director of Christians for Abolition.