St Mary's Church Almondsbury
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THEOLOGY 3: How can God be three persons? A summary of the talk given by Rev John Hadley; the third in our series entitled “Theology for the Layman / Laywoman”.			X-plore Programme
Some preliminary axioms: (1) “Orthodoxy” is not, as is commonly supposed, the idea that the dominant faction happens to approve of (“heresy” being any idea that happened not to dominate). “Heresy” means “choosing”: choosing one truth at the expense of another, apparently contradictory, truth – e.g. Jesus was divine but not human, or vice versa. Whereas “orthodoxy” means holding on to both truths, holding the two in tension and seeing what fizzes up from them. It means choosing both/and rather than either/or: refusing to turn away from what is there, however uncomfortable. (2) The doctrine of the Trinity was hammered out in this way over the early centuries, refusing to let go of either the unity of God or the divinity of Christ and the Spirit. But it was recognised as an uncomfortable formula, put into words “non ut diceretur, sed ne taceretur” (“not in order to say it, but in order not to keep silent” – in the face of truth being sold short by heretics). (3) Why is it uncomfortable? because it attempts to describe objectively something which is not an observable object. You can no more formulate the Trinity than you can formulate love. The Trinity is not out there, in heaven or anywhere else, to be analysed and quantified. Like all Christian pictures of God, it can only make sense if it is experienced and prayed and lived and enjoyed. Particularly in the West, we have made the great mistake of separating theology from spirituality, so that the former has become coterminous with dry high-flown academic language (not for ordinary people), and the latter constantly risks descending into individualistic gobbledegook. Whereas theology and spirituality are actually allotropes of the same thing. (4) And, in fact, all doctrines, all verbal formulations of theology, are ultimately only provisional. Only the experience of God, the vision of God, is the real thing. The doctrine of the Trinity came into being, as I have said, because of the need to hold on both to the unity of the Godhead and the divinity of Christ. But it is by no means simply an uncomfortable formula, rather a somewhat inelegant expression of something absolutely fundamental to Christianity. The New Testament, especially - but not exclusively - the writings of John and Paul, is drenched in Trinitarian imagery and experience. And the same goes for those other classic expressions of the Church’s faith, liturgy and hymns. If we tried to expunge the Trinity from scripture and tradition, there would be very little left that was recognisably Christian at all. Why? because the doctrine of the Trinity is not merely a description of God, it is a description of the faith itself. One of the classic pictures of the Trinity in the Orthodox tradition is that shown in icons of Jesus’ baptism, or “theophany” as they call it. The hand of the Father is seen sending down the Spirit, in the form of a dove, upon the Son as he descends into the waters. (This is incidentally another reminder of why Jesus is divine – he is acclaimed as the Father’s beloved Son at the moment of his descent into water, that powerful symbol of death: he is God because he gives himself away). But, as with all icons, this is not the complete picture: often we see in the water fishes and other creatures, and one, or two, human beings. Christ has descended to be one with creation and to share the human condition all the way to death: yes, but at the same time he is offering divinity to the human race and the whole created order. The picture of the Trinity includes us: even if there are no creatures to be seen in the water, it is the nature of icons to draw us in and make us a part of the picture. The doctrine of the Trinity, therefore, shows us a God who desires to say to all of us, as he says to Jesus, “You are my beloved children, in whom I am well pleased”, and to give us all the Holy Spirit who cries and sings at the depth of our soul for union with the Father. And it is precisely for this reason that spirituality is integral to Christian theology: to say “theology and spirituality are one” is another way of saying “the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are one.” The Creator sends the Spirit to restore divinity to his children, Jesus Christ himself being the exemplar and the first-fruits of this new creation. In the Nicene Creed we describe Christ as “the only Son of God, eternally begotten of the Father, God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, of one being with the Father.” This seems to make an indelible distinction between Christ and ourselves: he is begotten, everything else is made. But might it be actually that there is a lost begottenness in all of us? we carry on as if we were independent beings, made, and therefore separate from God. Whereas actually we have been begotten as God’s children, and the Christian endeavour seeks to restore to us our original begottenness. This is why, in baptism, the image of death and rebirth is so strong: as Jesus says to Nicodemus in John 3, we have to be born from above, born afresh. And, if baptism itself is an image of birth, the blessing of the waters at Easter, when the Paschal Candle is lowered into the water, is the strongest possible image of begetting. In the biblical account of creation, the Spirit is described as “moving over the face of the deep” as God’s creation takes shape. And this creative Spirit is not then withdrawn, but continues to work in creation, flowing through and between the depths of all things. And so human creativeness also takes shape, as we work with the Spirit of God. And that is why we feel such outrage when this creativeness is abused, whether in the making of ugly buildings or of weapons of mass destruction. The God who is Trinity is utterly beyond: beyond the creation, beyond comprehension, beyond our grasp; but also absolutely present, in the depths of our being, in our creativity, in our connectedness with all things, in our recreation as God’s children. The God whose incomprehensibility makes him non-existent for many, is also “closer than the air we breathe”, a God to be encountered, experienced, loved, feared, enjoyed and above all worshipped. Only in worship can we begin to have the faintest idea what the Trinity means. I will finish with a few implications of Trinitarian faith: (1) A faith rooted in the Trinity is generous. The God who pours himself out in love for us, who pours out his Spirit to recreate us in his image, will necessarily engender a similar generosity in his children. There is no room for meanness in the Christian dispensation; and there has to be a welcome for all who share our delight in him. (2) Trinitarian faith is also catholic. You could relate to a distant God with the mind alone, with the thin channel of mere words, or by following the rules: but the God who surrounds and permeates us cannot be encompassed with the mind alone. God touches all our senses, our mind, our body, our spirit, our emotions: true Trinitarian worship will involve all of these. (3) Finally, Trinitarian faith is likely to be sacramental. In other sorts of worship, God may be sensed and felt, or he may not: but in the sacraments, above all in the Eucharist, Christ is visible and tangible and materially present, and we are united with God through the Spirit, and given a foretaste of divinity. It is there, and not in any books or talks, that we might begin to understand what it means to say that God is Trinity.
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