The difference between an image and a model does not lie in how exhaustively it is

employed in different contexts as a basic metaphor. An image does symbolic and

metaphorical work, poetically and aesthetically. A model, though, is based on a root
metaphor, which serves as an heuristic device, metaphysically, employed systematically,
ordinarily, in terms of classical Aristotelian causes --- material, efcient, formal and nal,
setting forth putative relationships to bridge emergent phenomena such as natural
theologies, quantum interpretations, cosmogonies, biopoietics, philosophies of mind
and symbolic language origins. While exhaustively applied, Rohr's images aren't doing
the work of models, metaphysically or onto-theologically, only the work of metaphors,
theo-poetically, aesthetically. Rohr's images already presuppose a classical Scotistic
metaphysical frame of distinctions, a model of divine essence, hypostatic persons and
divine energies, panentheistically interpreted.
There is another method in play here, theopoetically, at the intersection between theology
and spirituality.
Once we dene the applicable methodological contours of the development of doctrine
from historical exegetical and polemical environments, through what additional methods
might we authenticate their spiritually transformative efcacies?
Theopoetics.
We abide with the paradox, tolerate the ambiguity, nurture the creative tensions, seek out
the antinomies, resist rushes to closure and admonish the voices of certitude but move
forward, anyway, in humility, with hospitality, doing what we've discerned we must and
saying what we believe we should, dialogically, boldly and imaginatively!
As Scott Holland suggests: Good theology is a kind of transgression, a kind of excess, a
kind of gift. It is not a smooth systematics, a dogmatics, or a metaphysics; as a
theopoetics it is a kind of writing. It is a kind of writing that invites more writing. Its
narratives lead to other narratives, its metaphors encourages new metaphors, its
confessions more confessions . . .
If all too certain theological understandings get undermined and theopolitical modes of
historical discourse challenged, theo-poetics will have a chance to successful advance
the spiritual efcacies of otherwise sterile abstract doctrines, bringing them alive in the
concrete lives of the faithful through fruitful ortho-relational, orthocommunal, orthopathic
and orthopraxic realizations.
As Roland Faber puts it: One moves into an undened land in which one experiences
differently, begins to think differently, and is encouraged nor just to adopt to, but to
create new theological language. Today, I think that not only can we not control this eld
or region in fact, but that it is of the essence of process theology to be an uncontrollable
undertaking in the innite adventure of God-talk, and consciously so, in modes that I
came to name theopoetics.
Rohr is merely the latest in a long pedigree of people who want to run with the Trinity (or
dance, as it were) to --- not draw conclusions, but --- to create new theological language,
encourage new metaphors, and to help us experience differently those historical
realities that were developed with our traditions out of what we might call the

formations contexts of the Trinity within the pro-Nicene polemical and exegetical
environment.
See:
http://theopoetics.net/what-is-theopoetics/denitions/
theopoetic, trinity, richard rohr, mike morrell, scott holland, roland faber,