 | The New England Church PulpitNew England Congregational Church UCC |
The Trinity | May 26, 2002 |
The Trinity is somewhat male dominated. God is Father and his child is a son. The other member of the gang of three is a spirit, sometimes represented as a dove. Male human beings and even a feathered creature get a look in, but not women.
Furthermore, the Trinity is mathematically implausible. Throughout school I failed most math tests that were put before me, but I feel reasonably confident in maintaining that three into one doesn’t go. Or, to put it another way, to say that affirming God as Father, God as Son and God as Spirit makes Christians believers in one God rather than in many gods seems stretching it a bit.
So maybe we should throw in the towel and update our beliefs. It could make inter-religious dialogue a little easier, at least with Muslims and Jews. It could also get us out of patriarchal stereotypes. It might even improve our arithmetic. In fact, it might have a number of improving and beneficial effects.
So why do I hesitate to do so? Why do I have this feeling in my guts and in my brain that we Christians are onto something important when we worship the Triune God? Maybe it’s the conservatism of my increasing years, or residual affection for doctrine I learned long ago, that stops me from going where some brave and sincere and holy Christians have gone: Unitarian Universalists and some Quakers among them. Maybe. But let me share with you a few misgivings I have about making such a radical renegotiation of Christian doctrine for the third millennium.
Last month in Canterbury Cathedral, England, I attended evensong and recited the Apostles’ Creed, in a form that dates back to the sixth century. I was happy to do so, though I observed to myself (not least in the bit which says ‘Jesus descended into hell’) that if we were to attempt a meaningful translation of its sense for 21st century people, it could be an exercise to make any decent theologian sweat. All fundamental beliefs of all religions, not just the Christian belief in the Trinity, are rooted in a time and space that are far away from us; they need interpreting in order to light up the dark recesses of our various human settings. Despite what Muslims might say, if the Prophet Muhammad had turned up in seventeenth century Massachusetts rather than sixth century Arabia, the form of the beliefs that grew up around him would be quite different than they have turned out to be.
What’s important isn’t the beliefs themselves but what they point to. Does what they intend and imply tell us mortal creatures crucial things about the immortal God? So, for us Christians: with all its difficulties, and for all the sense that it comes from another age whose people thought deep thoughts quite differently from us, does the doctrine of the Trinity help mediate God to us?
I suggest two ways in which it does. It marvelously affirms God’s love and the central importance of Jesus to Christian faith. These are but two of many things that we could begin to explore on Trinity Sunday.
First, to quote a wonderful old hymn: the doctrine of the Trinity points to ‘love divine, all loves excelling’. I offer my mother as an example of this, though not quite in the way that you might first imagine. Now that she lives almost 4,000 miles away from me, I feel confident in talking about her behind her back. As a child, I had this instinctive feeling that, although she displayed all the noise, bossiness and sharp, caustic humor of many Lancashire women, she was entirely dependent upon my father for her stability and a sense of her own worth. I was nineteen when he suffered the first of a number of heart attacks. I expected my mother to panic and be of no use at all. On the contrary, she calmly put him to bed, called the doctor, took careful note of the medical advice and made my dad obey it. He gave up smoking, and did a number of things he was told to do. Alas, it was too late to do any long-term good, but not for want of my mother giving it her best shot. She showed a real authority, tenderness and sensitivity that I would not have put her down as possessing. My mother amazed me: it was as if I had discovered Joan Rivers moonlighting as Florence Nightingale.
All of us human beings are extraordinarily complicated people. Psychologists like Freud and Jung have helped us see the truth of our own divided selves, though it is self-evident to experience and the practiced eye. When we look at our own life-journey and all that we’ve had to handle on the way, we surprise ourselves by all the resources that, for good or ill, have shaped who we are and who we are becoming.
There’s a tendency in all of us to tame and domesticate the high and holy God who inhabits eternity. We want to know where we stand, and we think we can cope better with as few of his demands as possible. But he (and I would add: she, it, maybe sometimes we have to say even ‘they’) reveals himself in a mystic’s meditation, the work of a scholar of religious law, the feeble prayers of you and me, the unexpectedly kind acts of many people. God defies our expectations. He is more elusive, more wonderful, more diverse than many of us give him credit for. He speaks to many people in hundreds of different ways. We want her to like us and a few others: she does what she wills in her world. The God who rebuked and silenced Job out of the whirlwind for thinking he knew more than God did about divine ways, always is greater than we can know, not just in mighty power but in tender affection. His multi-hued compassion shows up the grayness of our own deeds; his hopes for us can transform the safe goals we have for our lives into myriad, marvelous expectations for our, and others’, transformations.
So, I would say that the doctrine of the Trinity safeguards the crucial notion of God’s sheer diversity: the wonder and unexpectedness of his many-sided affection for his human family. You try to pin it down and you never succeed. God is more than you ever thought she was. Unlike us, his diversity and many-sidedness does not contain a dark side: no Darth Vader he, even though Darth Vader lurks inside most if not all of us.
God’s infinite, bountiful and overflowing love for all of us, his joy when we live good and holy lives, his meeting us in many and varied ways in forms that each of us can appreciate and respond to: this lies, I think, at the heart of the meaning of Christian Trinitarian theology.
Which brings me to Jesus. The hymn from which I fancifully drew my first point: ‘love divine all loves excelling’ goes on to affirm ‘joy of heaven, to earth come down’. The reference of course is to Jesus, come down to earth as one of us, to bring to us the life of heaven. That hymn-writer Charles Wesley’s greatest works were, I think, about God becoming a human being for our sakes. He saw a wonderful paradox in the eternal God become flesh, captured in these few lines from his little-known Christmas hymn:
Emptied of his majesty,
Of his dazzling glories shorn,
Being’s source begins to be
And God Himself is born!
For many of us, these sentiments are puzzling or irrational, absurd or just outdated. We can accept Jesus as a holy and good man but not with all the mythological baggage that comes with it. If we’ve done a little reading in other faiths, we know that miraculous stories have attached themselves not only to Jesus, but also to the Buddha, Krishna, Muhammad and many other human mediators of the divine. Having got that far, we explain to ourselves that, in less austerely rational and mechanistic societies than ours, it’s natural to play up the status of holy men. So, we might say, let’s strip Jesus of the myth and symbol and make him Christianity’s exemplary person.
I want to sound a caution against doing so. It’s not as easy as it seems. Jesus isn’t a model figure as we usually define them. He had a terrible temper; his disciples were often scared of him. In trying to make sense of him, his earliest followers didn’t summon up images of his niceness and kindness to those who obeyed him. They didn’t tame him, making him into their best buddy or someone who justified their most vicious prejudices, as do so many muddle-headed contemporary Protestant Christians. The disciples and gospel writers saw in him a remarkable religious power and courage, and a quite extraordinary sense of closeness to God. The question that haunts me is the one that people in his hometown, Nazareth, asked each other when Jesus taught there: ‘Where did this man get all this from?’
That kind of questioning led people early on to reflect in ways that led to the Apostles’ Creed and other statements of faith in Jesus as the human face of God, the earthly incarnation of the eternal, transcendent creator. If Jesus had appeared in seventeenth century Massachusetts, we would now spell out what he means in rather different ways than are recorded in the creeds and much traditional theology. But I expect we would still be driven to ask: By what authority did he teach, and heal and inspire? What manner of person is he? Where did he get this from?
So let’s not abandon the doctrine of the Trinity too quickly. To be sure, it needs careful handling and explanation. Maybe some evening study sessions could ponder how we would reinterpret it for our faithful living in today’s setting, freeing it (as it can be freed) from obsessively patriarchal and mathematical interpretations. In today’s diverse world, it seems to me not an embarrassment but a gift to affirm God, whose love is without limit, unconstrained by our petty prejudices and tribal preferences, so great that it enters the world as we are, so that we can be like God. At any rate, come every Christmas, I hope to sing the carol ‘See amid the winter’s snow’, especially for the words: ‘Lo, within a manger lies, he who built the starry skies’. I do not perfectly understand them, but my heart and soul quicken to what they tell of a good and gracious God.
-Dr. Martin Forward
| Copyright © 2002 by Dr. Martin Forward. All rights reserved. |