In his letter to the Ephesians St Paul says that we must walk as children of light (5:8). We have here an important biblical image: walking, walking as children of light. Probably you have observed how in the Bible people are all the time walking. Walking or eating ... all the time. These two human actions are the expression of life. And it is life 1 am preaching about.

The gospel of John is a very long text but a very rich one. And, as miracle stories go, the story in it of the healing of the man born blind (9:1—41) is very long but very rich.

Both in it and in the excerpt from Ephesians which is read with it (5:8—14) Jesus is the Light. That is an idea that comes up again and again in the gospel of John. And light in John is always related to life; light and life are linked. From the very beginning of the gospel, from the first chapter, Jesus is the Light, is Life, and all the miracles of Jesus in the gospel of John are done to give life. Jesus does not do miracles to surprise people, but to give life. And this is, of course, evident above all in the story of the healing of the man born blind.

It sometimes seems as though everyone loves a Christian, and everyone wants more of them. From a dangerous, persecuted sect of the first century, whose strange practices of consuming their god and indulging in a communal agape produced the sort of ignorant criticism in the Roman Empire that Moslems and Hindus receive in much of the West today, Christianity has become most popular religion, chief determinant of public morals and compulsory faith of any budding British monarch. It is now commonplace to challenge the progress of the Christian faith from a subversive branch of Judaism to a world religion. The highpoint of that progress, the success of Christianity in becoming official faith of the Roman Empire, looks very different today. Did Constantine convert to Christianity, or did Christianity convert to Constantine? The degree of self-criticism implied in that question represents a profound challenge to the churches.

I would like to suggest that there are two Christianities. The first is the faith that this government, in the form of the Bishop of London, the Prime Minister and Baroness Cox, is anxious to put onto every school curriculum. This Christianity encourages what seems to have become a vogue phrase in politics today, ‘good citizenship’. It supports pride in one’s national identity, respect for the institutions of state, and a type of concern for others harnessed to the sort of individual conscientiousness that volunteers for school governorships and neighbourhood watch schemes.

Two of the most striking and memorable features of Meister Eckhart’s treatment of the Trinity are these. First, in several passages in the Latin works he uses the metaphor of bullitio—literally ‘boiling’ or ‘bubbling’—to explain the inner trinitarian life of the Deity; that is, to explain how and why there is procession within God. Secondly, in several passages in his German sermons he distinguishes between the personal, trinitarian God and a distinctionless, nameless ground or Godhead that transcends this. The latter distinction, apparently, is considered to exist within God: prima facie, at least, the distinction is not merely economic or between ‘God within’ and ‘God without’. My intention in this study is to examine each of these aspects in turn, to suggest how they are related, and to consider what all this can tell us about the general character of Eckhart’s trinitarianism.

Our task presents us with a problem which must always arise in the study of Eckhart: that of bringing together the Latin Eckhart with the German Eckhart and attempting to take a unified view, and this while conserving the peculiarities of each. Bullitio is a Latin word and, as far as I know, the notion is applied to the Trinity only in the Latin works. It may be noted, however, that there is a related family of German words such as ûzbruch and ursprunc which Eckhart uses to denote the idea of the supreme fountain-head or source, or the original outpouring, outspringing or outbreak of being. One of the things I wish to suggest in this study is that the distinction between God as Trinity and as Godhead is not made in the Latin works.

The Jew is never more uneasy than when faced with a text from the New Testament. Aware of the scriptural authority that such a text holds for the Christian, the uneasiness is compounded when what, basically, the Jew is offering is an opportunity for Christians to listen in, as it were, on a Jewish interpretation of one of the most important texts in the New Testament.

There are, of course, historical considerations that determine how a Jew understands the New Testament. For much of the past, if Jews read or studied the gospels, it was only for polemical purposes. One of the first figures to abandon such an attitude was Claude Montefiore, an English Jew, founder of the Liberal Jewish movement in Britain. In 1909 Montefiore published The Synoptic Gospels, consisting of an introduction, translation and commentary on the first three gospels. The aim of such a book was two-fold: to dissipate the patronising and negative attitude which Jews held towards Christianity and to reveal the true spirit of the Jewish religion to Christians.

Montefiore’s attitudes roused dissent and suspicion among the Jewish community. For him, Jesus linked on to the prophets and sometimes seemed to go beyond them. But as Montefiore revealed, for the Jew it was not the personality or life of Jesus that was important but the teaching:

In his 1976 book New Testament Interpretation in an Historical Age, Denis Nineham advanced the thesis of cultural relativism in theology this way:

Broadly speaking this is the theory that the relation between facts on the one hand and language and interpretation on the other is perpetually shifting. Facts that will demand one kind of description in one cultural context will require a quite different kind in another and conversely a given term or description will mean different things in different contexts.