Tomorrow is Trinity Sunday. Like each year, poor preachers from different churches will strive to make sense from something that, let us be honest, often seems not very sensible even to themselves.
We too published this and that about the Trinity on our blog:
- Trinitarian Reality
- Sunday of the Most Holy Trinity (Pradusz’s sermon)
- God as Trinity (chapter from Kallistos’ Ware book)
When I reflect on the topic of this Sunday, the first thing that comes to my mind are the words of the Swiss Reformed theologian
Emil Brunner
from his book
Our Faith
, which
I read and reread as a teenager (so often that it simply fell apart; only last winter did I manage to buy a new copy
in the Methodist Church in Scinawka Srednia
, Lower Silesia):
No man can know who God is. The cleverest scholar knows nothing more concerning God than the simplest man. There dwells of course within every human heart a feeling of something higher than itself, a dim apprehension of a Power ruling all that is, and giving His Law to all that lives. But how dark and confused this pre- sentiment is, is shown by the history of mankind and by everyday life. What variety of ideas men have of “God” and “the divine” — and how many have no conception of the matter whatsoever. Who dare to say, “I know who God is. I know His plans and purposes?” This much we know of God; He is the great mystery.
Faith is continuous interaction with the Mystery, is living the Mystery. This awareness should accompany us from the beginning. And nothing we hear (also tomorrow from the pulpit) or what we say should ever be seen as its “explanation”. For in this consists the difference between a mystery and a riddle: the latter can sometimes be solved, the first always remains what it is. One of my favorite philosophers, J.D. Bierens de Haan , wrote:
When divine ideas cease to amaze one, they are deprived of their splendor. To conclude our philosophizing like one concludes a trade contract means a fall comparable to Lucifer’s.
Pondering ‘divine ideas’ cannot be concluded, cannot be closed like a balance: with a gain or a loss. They continue to occupy and to challenge us: spiritually, morally and intellectually. This is why the trinitarian dogma not only does not diminish our conviction that God is a mystery, but is a brilliant confirmation of it. For St. Augustin was indeed right when he wrote that the thought that we would once exhaust the topic of the Holy Trinity is much more pathetic than the belief that one can pour the ocean into a whole in the sand. But the conviction that faith means an encounter with a mystery can also be abused. In my opinion we do it when we say that if it is a mystery, it simply has to be accepted (without reflection) or (likewise without reflection) rejected, but one should by no meas devote too much attention to it, for what’s the point of it – ‘WE WON’T MAKE ANY SENSE OF IT ANYWAY, WILL WE?!’ For those who reject the trinitarian dogma it is a rather good news, but these words of Bierens de Haan should at the very least encourage those who accept it kneeling humbly ‘with their mouths shut’ and their hands devoutly put together to think:
The dogma is a creation of man; it lives by the grace of our royal FREEDOM and sounds clearly only as long as a free hand rings the bell of our spirit.
In a less solemn style this means simply that it depends on us whether a dogma will have a sense and meaning. And not in the least on whether we “accept it with humility”, but on whether we will be able to make sense of it in freedom. Otherwise it will lose its ‘sound’.
‘How did early Christians begin to make sense of the Trinity?’, asks Mark McIntosh , Episcopal priest and associate professor of systematic theology and spirituality, in his book Mysteries of Faith :
They saw that this new encounter with God was not the same as meeting God in three different roles or activities, just as I can be the celebrant at the eucharist, the coffee hour host, and an exasperated parent all on the same Sunday morning. For them the Trinity was not a divine game of peek-a-boo in which a playful deity peeps out at them from behind different masks (now the ancient fellow with the beard, now the infant, now the bird, and so on) until God tires of the whole charade. No, when these Christians met God they were swept up into God’s own inner life of mutual relationships. The Word who becomes incarnate and the Spirit who moves over the chaos of human hearts are not temporary patch-up efforts on the part of a bumbling deity who had not quite counted on human recalcitrance. Instead, Word and Spirit are eternally enacting the communion who is God, and into this communion Christians are drawn. For the Father is never just Father, but eternally delights to pour himself out, give himself away in the “othering,” the speaking, of the Word. The delight that draws the Father beyond simple oneness toward Another is the same love, the same Spirit, who likewise draws forth from the Word an eternal response of loving self-surrender to the Father.
God is love. In that powerful statement, Christians have come to understand that God is God through relationship: the communion of Lover, Beloved, and Enrapturer. Just as Christians grow into the fullness of who they truly are through their lives together, the relationality of God is precisely who God is. In other words, it is through the eternal loving and self-giving of one to another that the Persons of God are Persons. The Father pours out the divine life to the Son, the Son speaks and embodies this life, and the Spirit brings both together in passionate delight and love.
But does it mean that the early Christians ‘believed in the Trinity’? I grab another book. Its author played an immense role in my life. I got hold of it at the end of my studies at the
University of the Reformed Churches in Kampen
, the Netherlands, and it gave me so much inspiration that I decided to move to Leiden and meet the writer in person. I spent the first night in the new city in his home, and a few years later he ordained me as a minister in the
Remonstrant Brotherhood
. Eginhard P. Meijering was then lecturer of dogma at the University of Leiden. In the book
Inspiratie uit de traditie. Gegrond geloof
he writes:
The term ‘the Living God’ belongs to faith, while the term “triune God” is a theological formula, which as such is not an object of faith, but a product of reflection on faith. The Trinity does not belong to the revelation, but is a theological conclusion from the revelation, and one which was drawn relatively late. The antitrinitarians are right to say that in the first three centuries of Christianity the orthodox teaching of the Trinity was not known in the form we know it, but they are not right to conclude from this that this teaching is thus redundant.
And a bit further on:
… Everything we have to say about God is human speech and often a product of all too human practices. The point is whether we believe that God can bestow this our talk about him with sense.
Let us interrupt for a moment Meijering’s discourse and pay attention to the way he supplements what both Bierens de Haan and McIntosh wrote. Philosopher Bierens de Haan put emphasis on the fact that it is men that give sense to the dogma. Theologian McIntosh too begins with the question ‘How did early Christians begin to make sense of the Trinity?’ Meijering states that God is the one who will do it. One vision does not exclude the other. What is more: one presupposes the other. I think it is now worthwhile to refer to the threefold source of authority in the Church (the famous ‘three legged stool’, which we associate with one of the most important authors of distinctive Anglican theology, Richard Hooker ): the Bible, Tradition and (human) Reason. We trust that in the unity of these three elements we will find a sense that is not only ‘our sense’, but which also reveals God’s will to give sense to our talk. Let us return to Meijering’s words:
This dogma rightly limits our talk about God. It states that God is not a stagnant unity, but a living God whose revelation in time reflects the richness of his eternal essence. The Father without the Son is indeed, as St. Athanasius put it, like a tree without fruits or a source without water. Through the Son the Father becomes the living God. The opposition to the trinitarian dogma which ensued in the 16th century makes us aware that we have to do with a purely human attempt to systematically express God’s revelation in Christ with words. This is why neither the attempt as such is an object of faith, nor can consent to it be the measure of the purity of faith. It is worthwhile, however, to continue such attempts to systematically express with words what we believe in, in accordance with the classical dogma.
Of course, not everyone is convinced that it is “worthwhile”. The opposition to the teaching of the Trinity is still alive – not only among declared Unitarians, but also among members of churches that officially confirm their attachment to the dogmas of the ancient church. And it seems that one thing is in any case certain: in our times nothing can be achieved only by referring to the fact that “there is a dogma” and we have to “swallow it or choke on it”. The whole matter consists in whether we will manage to fill it with some sense and make it “sound” in our own ears and the ears of those who listen to us with the hope that we will hear something of “the divine music” in it. Jay Emerson Johnson writes in his book Dancing with God , whose fragment we already posted on the blog:
E.P. Meijering
As Christians today experiment with various ways to speak of the Holy Trinity, the goal in such experimentation has remained the same since the earliest Christian communities first composed a gospel: To hear the divine music as clearly as we can. Anglican Christians insist on hearing this music in a wide range of locations and not just in our church buildings or from our pipe organs. What we do and say and what we hear in church expresses in a particular way the divine melodies running throughout human life. We can hear it in the arts and culture, in scientific inquiry and investigation, in loving relationships and the creation of families, and in the astonishing beauty of the created world around us. Anglicans have likewise recognized the importance of listening for this music together, of learning the rhythms of the divine dance in the company of other dancers, both historical and contemporary. Without question, each us can hear the divine music, but to hear it clearly and to dance well, we need help. This is one of the fundamental insights of a Trinitarian faith: Encountering Divine Reality creates a community, because Divine Reality is not only personal, but also essentially social.
Perhaps the most important thing we can say at (or hear from) the pulpit tomorrow is contained in the famous words of the Russian philosopher Nikolai Fyedorov , which were taken up and elaborated on in an extremely interesting article by the theologian Miroslav Volf : “The Holy Trinity is our social program”. Volf wrote in 1998:
More than just the Good News of what God has done, the Gospel is a social project humanity needs to accomplish. Because the resurrection of Christ is immanent to all human beings, the participation in the triune life of God is not just an eschatological promise, but a present reality and therefore also a historical program.
And perhaps the most important question we should ask ourselves on the Trinity Sunday is what this program actually contains and how to realize it…
