It is not only the structure of the church which is Trinitarian. Its activity and even its doctrine, as Trinitarian, are dialogic and dynamic rather than fixed and static. This led the theologian Bernard Lonergan to describe the dramatic shift produced by the council as the transition from a classicist worldview to one of historical mindedness. The classicist view sees human nature as pre-defined and essentially static, and culture as fixed and normative. In the historicist view, on the other hand, experience is meaningful, life and society are developmental and knowledge is empirical.
Modern organizations emphasize individual initiative, subsidiarity and creativity.
These interrelated doctrines form a unified and multifaceted whole, so comprehensive in scope that it has to be called a paradigm shift. The older complexus is shattered beyond repair utterly incapable any longer of producing cohesive meaning. Vatican II saw the church as immersed in and part of the world, thereby diverging sharply from the over against the world position of the classicist position. The church s presence in the world is as the sacrament of salvation. Its objective is not to turn the world into a vast ecclesiastical organization.