If you’ve benefited from the spiritual teaching in Rohr’s earlier books, take a moment to consider afresh whether you ought to place yourself under the teaching of such a person. My advice is that you should not. Thank God that you were stimulated to something good by his work, but acknowledge that he teaches another gospel with another God. Anything true he says can surely be found elsewhere, from a writer who doesn’t juggle the Trinity away into the Divine Flow. If you can’t trust a teacher with the Christian doctrine of God, you can’t trust him, period.

Father Richard Rohr believes in the flow. Sometimes it’s Flow with a capital F, sometimes it’s “the Divine Flow.” Sometimes it’s “the flow who flows through everything, without exception, and who has done so since the beginning.” But with more than 150 occurrences of the word “flow” in his new book, The Divine Dance: The Trinity and Your Transformation (Whitaker House, 2016), it’s always the flow that Rohr is pushing, praising, and preaching.

The flow is a self-giving exchange of love and life. If you were to ask Rohr whether the flow is primarily something about God, the world, or the human person, he would no doubt answer with an enthusiastic “Yes!” and his twinkling Franciscan eyes would twinkle Franciscanly. The flow overflows the distinction between the Creator and the creature. It flows from God as God empties Godself; it circulates among creatures and binds them together with each other and the absolute; it flows back to God, enriching and delighting that Holy Source who loves to see finite spirits awaken to their true, divine selves. The flow sounds like a noun, but it’s really a verb. Flow verbs all nouns as they flow with its flowing. And everybody is flowing, if they would just realize it; the book is dedicated “to all the unsuspecting folks who do not know they are already within the Divine Flow.” The flow is divine and cosmic and human all at once, always together. For Rohr, that’s the point.

What does any of this have to do with the Trinity? Well you may ask.

Rohr is a bestselling author who enjoys great popularity on the spirituality scene. He has Oprah cred, a Bono blurb, and an alternative school in Albuquerque. He’s written a lot of other books (he refers helpfully to several of them in the footnotes of this one), and I have to admit I haven’t yet read any of them. I picked up The Divine Dance because it says it’s about the Trinity, and also because it seems likely to be influential in coming months. The book is endorsed by Shane Claiborne, Jim Wallis, Nadia Bolz-Weber, and Rob Bell. Weeks before it was even published, The Divine Dance was already the bestselling new release on the Trinity—indeed, the top seller in Amazon’s listing of newly released theology books, period.

Father Richard Rohr, in other words, has a thing going on. He has a signature style, a devoted fan base, and a certain something people expect him to bring to whatever topic he takes up. In The Divine Dance he takes up the Trinity.

Except he doesn’t. This book, The Divine Dance, is not about the Trinity.

What it’s about is the flow (see first paragraph above). What Rohr does in this book is teach about the Divine Flow, and he gets his message across by pressing into service some bits and pieces of Christian theological terminology. If that sounds perniciously subversive to you, there’s a reason. It’s perniciously subversive. In The Divine Dance, Rohr aggressively misappropriates Trinitarian language in order to commend his own eclectic spiritual teaching.

Whatever Is Going On in God 

When I say Rohr’s book is not about the Trinity, I’m not trying to reveal a secret about it. I’m not saying he tried to write a book about the Trinity but failed. I’m reporting, as directly as possible, what he says he’s up to in the pages of The Divine Dance. As he writes about Trinity (usually “Trinity” without the definite article), he consistently directs our attention away from the ordinary claims and categories of the Christian doctrine, and toward a dynamic movement. “Whatever is going on in God is a flow,” he says, expanding the idea with these words: “a radical relatedness, a perfect communion between Three—a circle dance of love.” But even a dance is too concrete, because it suggests somebody or somebodies doing the dancing. So Rohr redirects:

God is not just a dancer; God is the dance itself. Now hold on to this. This is not some new, trendy theology from America. This is about as traditional as you get.

As evidence that what he teaches is deeply traditional, Rohr claims that “the early Fathers of the church dared to call [the Trinity] a divine circle dance,” using the Greek word “perichoresis, the origin of our word choreography.” There are two or three factual errors here, but never mind that for now.¹ The important question, for Rohr and his readers, isn’t whether he speaks responsibly when he’s making historical claims (I would say no), or even whether he’s right that his doctrine is old-fashioned rather than newfangled (also no). The important thing is he gets himself into a position to teach his metaphysic of flow, under the banner of teaching a Christian doctrine.

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