04/16/2025 – Interview with Jon Paul Sydnor
Today we're having a conversation with the religion scholar and theologian John Paul Sydnor. Check this out, this is TenOnReligion.
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John Paul Sydnor is a theologian and scholar of religion at Emmanuel College in Boston. His most recent book is The Great Open Dance: A Progressive Christian Theology. He has also edited a book titled Nondualism: An Interreligious Exploration, and written a book comparing an Indian and Christian figure titled Ramanuja and Schleiermacher: Toward a Constructive Comparative Theology. We talked about the Trinity, Nondualism, interreligious understanding, and many other things. We had a great talk and here's our conversation.
Dr. B: Hello we are here with John Paul Sydnor, professor at Emmanuel College in Boston. How are you doing today sir?
Jon: Very well, thank you for having me on the show. I'm looking forward to the conversation.
Dr. B: Yeah, it's going to be good. Now, as we will see, John Paul Sydnor is a scholar in many types of subject areas, so we're going to get into some of these. But before we do, I just want to ask you briefly what is your background and how did that sort of filter into you pursuing the academic field of religion?
Jon: My background is, I was raised by a Presbyterian pastor, so I did have a religious upbringing, a bit of a left-of-center religious upbringing actually. I don't have a lot of the trauma that some people are sadly recovering from. I was young and practical and wanted to make my way in the world. I was going to be a lawyer, took the LSAT, and then I joined the Peace Corps. Joining the Peace Corps will mess everything up. While I was in the Peace Corps, I was in Poland, but I was on a trip to England. I went to a book store. I was in need to stock up on books. I went to the history section, philosophy, literature, all these different sections. I went to the religion section and I realized I wanted to read every book in that section. I was just super super thirsty for knowledge. That's when I realized I can't be a lawyer. I've got to get a PhD in religion and be a college professor. That's a long haul, but that's what I ended up doing.
Dr. B: I think a lot of us have been there. I went to a local library once and then saw all the religion books. Over the next six months, I think I read every one on the shelf.
Jon: It's endlessly fascinating. It's such a huge area to study and so many different permutations and ideas, different architecture, different stories. You can never master it.
Dr. B: We're going to go not chronologically here with your career, but we're going to start with your most recent book, which is titled The Great Open Dance. In this piece, you talk about an unconditional love and you describe it as a love that Abba extends Jesus reveals and Sophia inspires. Tell us a little bit more about what that means.
Jon: I'm one of those people who never quite understood the Trinity and was always perplexed by the Trinity I felt there was something rich there that was untapped, but I wasn't quite sure how to tap it. And basically what happened was after many years of theological study and just encountering different concepts of the Trinity, I discovered the tri-personal Trinity, usually called the social Trinity. I prefer the term tri-personal. I just found that if God is love, and if we are made in the image of God to be love, then we must be made in the image of the Trinity. I conceptualize the Trinity as three actual unique persons, so three subjective centers of consciousness, who are in such perfect relationship with one anotso that they form one God. That's a very tri-personal Trinitarianism. Each person has a certain role to play in salvation. Each person has a different memory of the history of salvation. They're truly, there's actually difference within God. I think it's very important in this world that we live in, in a period where some people really seem to be thirsting for more homogeneous culture, for more sameness. I really think it's important that our concept of the divine actually offer us difference and celebrate difference.
Dr. B: The Abba part, the Jesus part, and the Sophia part, do they represent specific things?
Jon: Oh, they're a very specific person. So Abba is the creator, and in the Hebrew Scriptures and also in the New Testament, the creator is male and female or non-binary, etc. We tend to call God God, or God the creator, we just tend to call God. Jesus called God Abba, and I think we should call God Abba as Father, which is a very warm endearing term for Father. So Abba is the creator and sustainer God. Jesus is the Christ, the one who participates in creation at great risk, as we see in the crucifixion. And Sophia is the inspirer, the one who lures creation to completion, to fullness continually everywhere I mean, Jesus was localized in space and time. Sophia is the person within the Trinity who acts everywhere throughout space and time.
Dr. B: Yeah, that's interesting. Now you have, I mean, just looking historically, you have sort of an ancient Hebrew part or component. You have a Christian part or component. I mean, to Christ is, I guess you could say a Messiah Christ concept is also Hebrew that Christianity sort of co-opted as well. And then Sophia is maybe more of a Greek concept, you know, historically. So you have sort of these different cultures sort of all coming together in this idea.
Jon: Yeah, very much so. You can also find precursors to them in Hebrew. I mean, obviously, Abba the sustainer, that's a Hebrew concept. Expectation of the Messiah was a Hebrew concept. And then also the role that wisdom plays in Proverbs and whatnot is also a Hebrew concept. But sure, the end result, the end concept of the Trinity that we end up with is going to come from various cultures, from Greek culture, from Hebrew culture. And then I'm actually bringing in some Hindu and Buddhist concepts as well to interpret the Trinity because I just found that they were fruitful and helpful in that interpretation.
Dr. B: So in what, I mean, with this view of the Trinity, like you say, of course, there's many ways to formulate a Trinity concept in Christianity. And of course, a Trinity, a three-part component can be used in other religions as well to describe. But in the Christian formulation, there's more classical formulations. How do you feel that yours differs or is any way in tension with more classical formulations?
Jon: I think it's in tension somewhat with the Western tradition, which tends to be dominated by Augustinian Trinitarianism. And Augustine tended to be more of a mono-personal Trinitarian. So when he used analogies for the Trinity, they tended to be analogies that arose from one person, such as memory, will, and intellect being three aspects of one person. Now in the early church, the early church fathers, they, I'm arguing that some of them were more open to a tri-personal Trinitarian interpretation. So Gregory of zus, for example, he refers to the Trinity as three suns emitting one light. So that's more like three unique beings offering one salvation or one light, if you will. And in Eastern Orthodoxy, they have been much more open to conceptualizing the three persons of the Trinity as three actual unique individuals who are one God. So now the Trinitarianism that I'm offering is really, gets really picked up in the 20th century when certain feminists and liberationists started arguing for the relations between the persons of the Trinity as an ideal for human relations. And I'm talking about people like Moltmann and Catherine Maury LaCugna, John Zizioulas, and Leonardo Boff. They're my main inspiration. So I'm kind of continuing their work. And I found their work to be, I'm an ordained minister, in addition to being a theologian. I'm married to a full-time pastor. So I'm deeply involved in the church. What I found was that their concept of God, which is a tri-personal Trinitarian God, was super helpful in church life. It kind of gives you an ideal to live up to. It's also helpful in social criticism. If you now analyze your society, you can see where people are separating themselves from one another. And that is unholy, I would argue, whether it's the rich separating themselves from the poor, or one race that are separating themselves from another race, or one religion separating themselves from another religion, this type of separation is anti-Trinitarian. So it denies the image of God within us. So it will inevitably harm us.
Dr. B: Now, in more classical formulations, there have been Islamic scholars, for example, in the past that have critiqued it as being not monotheistic. Do you see this view of the Trinity as being monotheistic, or is it still guilty of this critique that Islamic scholars have? How would you answer that?
Jon: I'm not too concerned about it. I had this wonderful exchange with a Sufi Muslim theologian about the Trinity, my concept of the Trinity, and then his concept of tawhid, or the pure unity of God. We disagreed. He believes in a completely relational universe, that tawhid, the pure God, sustains a perfectly relational universe. I believe that God, the Trinitarian God, sustains a perfectly relational universe. So we agreed about the nature of the universe, we disagreed about the nature of God. And then once we realized that we disagreed and would not come to agreement, we agreed to disagree. We thanked each other for the conversation, and we went on our merry way, and he's a wonderful human being. So, whether it's monotheism, the critique of the kind of Trinitarianism that I propose is that it's tritheistic. So you have three gods instead of one god. It's not monotheistic. Well, I would consider a strict monotheism and a strict tritheism to neither. Neither of those are Trinitarian. So what I would argue is that my Trinitarian proposal is actually Trinitarian. Whether it's monotheistic or tritheistic, it's not tritheistic. It's certainly not monotheistic in the sense that the Muslims would propose in the doctrine of tawhid. So it's Trinitarian. Christianity is supposed to be Trinitarian, and I'm very comfortable with that.
Dr. B: Alright, so it's just trying to understand what the categories are and how we define them?
Jon: Oh, no. The categories are super complicated. For people who accuse social Trinitarians or tri-personal Trinitarians like myself, people accuse us of tritheism. I say, well, if you want to see an example of tritheism, look at the Greek gods. Look at Zeus, Poseidon, and Hades. They are three gods. They are definitely not one god. They're in tension with one another. They don't get along. They try to...they compete with each other. Basically, if Poseidon or Hades could, they would overthrow Zeus, but they can't because Zeus is just more powerful than they are. So you're looking at a relationship between three persons in which the order is preserved by their power, not their love. So it's not agapic, so it's not Trinitarian. That is tritheism, not Trinitarianism.
Dr. B: That's a good example because I don't think people talk about tritheism or something that's not monotheism. They don't really think about other cultures in the past or in the present. For example, like you say, Greek philosophy or whatnot or Greek religion. Obviously, it's not monotheistic. You've done a lot of work and study of non-dualism. For those of us that don't know what that is, can you give us a quick elevator speech of what is non-dualism and why it's important?
Jon: Sure. I'll explain because I'm trying to bring non-dualism into Christianity and specifically into Trinitarian Christianity. The concept of God and the trinity is that God is characterized by agapic non-dualism. So agape being the unconditional universal love of God for all of creation and then non-dualism being the fundamental unity of all of creation. Everything within creation is actually inseparable from everything else. Non-dualism is a concept. It comes from Hinduism and Buddhism. It comes from Advaita, which means not two. And basically, what it is saying is that when we see something that we think are two separate things, two separate persons, they're actually not two. They're actually unified. It doesn't mean that they're one. They're not identical, but they derive their existence from one another. The Buddhists would say that they co-originate. Some contemporary Christians would say they co-create one another. By proposing this concept of non-dualism, what I'm proposing is that our loving God sustains a universe in which difference is harmonized by love. What that means is that our challenge as a society of human beings is to harmonize our differences through love. So we don't need to get rid of difference to have a loving society. We need to instead celebrate difference and love difference in order to have a flourishing society.
Dr. B: You mentioned that non-dualism really informs your understanding of Christianity. Do you find that that's something that a lot of Christians struggle with understanding or with accepting because it's not inherently, historically, a Christian concept?
Jon: Oh, sure. I think it's a novel concept. I think I try to explain it as well as I possibly can in my book. My impression is that when people wrestle with the concept and come to see what it means and come to see how it can be informed and enriched by the concept of agape, or God's universal unconditional love, they start to see its relevance and helpfulness to the tradition. It can kind of be an eye-opening concept based on some of the feedback I've gotten from some of the people who have read my book closely, for which I'm deeply thankful. It is initially difficult. When you write a book with a new concept in it, it's always kind of a bit risky. I'm hoping people will persevere. I personally, in my own life, have found this concept to be immensely informative. I use it in my own relationships. My wife and I use it in our church. We use it when we talk about America and society and what American society is doing right now. It's a very powerful concept. It's very fruitful.
Dr. B: So in your book where you compared Ramanuja and Schleiermacher, Ramanuja being an Indian scholar, known for qualified non-dualism, and Schleiermacher with sort of this beginning, many consider him to be sort of the father of modern hermeneutics, and then also had this interior view of Christianity, this "whence" of your existence. Did you find that they were more easily to compare more things in common with them, or did you find that there were more things that there was sort of tension between those two figures?
Jon: Well, you're looking for a balance, right? You want them to have enough in common so that they can converse with one another, but you want them to be different enough so that they ask each other questions that other people haven't asked them before. So that's kind of the goal of what I do, which is called comparative theology, putting different religions into conversation with Christianity. Because then, you know, you have all these conversations going on within Christianity, and they've been going on for years. It's kind of hard to have a new conversation with a purely kind of intra-Christian debate. But if you bring other thinkers into Christianity and you start comparing and contrasting them, you find that they start to ask the religion of Christianity questions that it's never been asked before. And then when you answer those questions, you're generating really new, interesting, and I would say promising theology, theology that can actually kind of help us make the world a better place. So that's comparative theology, and I just, I find it, if I were only involved in intra-Christian debates, I would feel claustrophobic. But because I'm involved in questions and conversations across religions, I just kind of feel like I'm in this divine expanse in which I'm continually learning and growing, and I'd like to share some of those insights with my readers.
Dr. B: So I want to talk about interreligious understanding for a minute, because that's something certainly both of us have in common. I recently started to pursue the framework for a book on some major figures in 20th century religious pluralism and things like that. And I learned that interreligious understanding takes many forms. Some figures focus on history, some more on philosophy, some on theology, so on and so forth. So what are some of the avenues towards interreligious understanding that you find the most helpful?
Jon: Well, to me, I mean, the most helpful has been, because, you know, there's all kinds of things you do. The interfaith movement kind of works more on religions doing things together. You can do theology of religions, where you're kind of like, "Well, I'm a Christian. What does that mean that there are Jews and Buddhists and Hindus and Muslims in the world?" You can do theology of religion, which is like, "Why is there religion in the world?" For example, my approach, and I've just been sticking with this, my approach has been comparative theology. So I do Christian theology in conversation with other religions, and I find it to be a very fruitful endeavor. Now, you have to draw some inferences from that, right? So if I'm learning from other religions, that would suggest to me that Sophia, the Holy Spirit, has been active in those religions and has imbued them or sown into them agape. And I really believe that God is agape. God is love. And so we find God in other religions and actually in our own religion to the extent that we find love in that religion. So, and to the extent that a religion deviates from love, that it advocates violence or anger or fear or hatred, to that extent, they are not practicing. they're not serving God, if you will.
Dr. B: That's interesting. My last interview and video that is already out now was with the Keeping It 101 podcast hosts, Ilyse Morgenstein Fuerst and Megan Goodwin. And their recent book, they talked a lot about politics as it relates to religion, that they're so intertwined, in some cases it's hard to separate the two. Very intertwined. Yeah, that's what I was going to ask you. How does all of this with the Trinity and non-dualism, is there a political aspect of this as well?
Jon: Oh, absolutely. I mean, if we are made in the image of God, and if God is Trinity, and if the Trinity contains difference, and yet that difference is so perfectly united that it forms one God, then our call within our society is to unite our society as lovingly as possible, to unite difference within our society as lovingly as possible. So what that means is that when leaders come along, demagogues, who use fear and anger to divide the electorate, and to divide people against one another, whether it's dividing people by race, or dividing people by religion, any type of kind of use of fear and anger to divide people is contrary to the will of God. So very much this concept of the Trinity that I'm proposing and advocating, it very much advocates for a multicultural, plural society, and it advocates for us benefiting, that we will actually benefit from the difference we find with our own society, that we will be, if we can harmonize our differences, we will be more creative, more vital, we will flourish more universally. And so this, the Trinity, and this line comes from Christian theologian named Miroslav Volf, but very much the Trinity is our social program. So it's the Trinity is something that we do. It's never something we'll perfectly achieve, but it's something that we can always be doing. And the more we do it, the more sacred, the more at home we will feel within the universe.
Dr. B: So what are you working on right now? What's next for you?
Jon: So I completed my book, The Great Open Dance, A Progressive Christian Theology, and I'm kind of working on getting that out there. At the same time, I mean, I got that book up to a certain length and I kind of, I just couldn't make it longer. So there were some chapters in the book I left out, and I'm kind of trying to write shorter books based on those chapters that I left out. The next book I want to write is entitled God is Love, Love is Something You Do, and that would be a Christian ethics based on agapic non-dualism. And then the other chapter I left out was a chapter on, it sounds a little bit technical and philosophical, but it's epistemology. So it's our ways of knowing how do we come to know things and how we think we know things is extremely important in faith because, you know, if we think we have absolute certainty, we can become very rigid. That's very dangerous. But if you have, if you're just don't, if you have no confidence in beliefs whatsoever, you can become extremely relativistic and lose your prophetic voice. So what I'd like to propose is some type of epistemology that allows for growth, allows for open-mindedness, broad-mindedness, continual learning, but at the same time, advocates for the common good and for a better society and for universal human flourishing.
Dr. B: Wow, that sounds interesting. So how, and the one thing I want to sort of finish up with is I always ask a lot of people that are, that I interview that teach religion, what are some methods you find when you teach religion that work really well? Because, and to sort of simplify it again, for those that don't teach, teaching is sort of like, you know, deciding the content that you want to give and then what kind of delivery method that you're going to use for that content. And there's also the assessment piece as well. But, and so, so when you do this, I mean, do you prefer, you know, a balance of things? Do you emphasize one method over another?
Jon: I mean, you have to use a balance, right? Life is always balanced. Well, I like to get my students talking and so I do a lot of small group discussion in class. I find that if my students have done a small group discussion, you know, with five other students or something, and then we talk about it as a class, they're much more engaged and much more willing to speak. And my teaching approach is really primarily existential. What I mean by that is that my students, you know, you get them in college, they're more or less immediately post-adolescent. They've kind of figured out who they are and now they're trying to figure out how they want to live their life. What is their values? What do they want to pursue money? Do they want to pursue meaning? Are they going to be generous? Should they be altruistic? Should they be egoistic? They're having all these conversations. Does God exist or not? So, and if you can talk about those subjects with them, give them the opportunity to have existential conversations without giving them answers. They don't want the answers. They want to have the conversations. So if you give them the opportunity to have those conversations, they will really appreciate it and they'll really come alive in the classroom. If you try to give them answers, which I've never done, but you know, that's not going to go well, just lecturing to them about the various options, that doesn't go well. But getting them to talk about them and engage with each other, I find the classroom can really come alive when that happens.
Dr. B: Yeah, yeah, that's interesting. So you want to sort of help them find their own or give them the tools to help them find their own way.
Jon: Correct, correct. Because that's, I mean, that's just like any student. That's what they're going to be doing for the rest of their lives. And then you can't really teach a student to find their own way by, you know, having them sit in class passively. You want them to participate in class actively because they're going to participate in life actively. So that's the only way you prepare them for life.
Dr. B: Wow, that sounds great. That sounds great. So well, we appreciate you taking out time to talk with us today. Thanks so much for being here.
Jon: Oh, thanks for having me. It's a great conversation. I enjoyed it.
Dr. B: All right. Thank you.
Jon: Good speaking with you.
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