A Sermon for The Trinity, 18th May 2008
Professor Graham Holderness
A character in Graham Greene’s Monsignor Quixote asks a priest to explain the Trinity, as he could never understand it. ‘It always seemed like higher mathematics to me’. The Trinity has often provoked similar reactions: too complicated for the layperson to understand - abstract, rarefied, disconnected from practical reality. Yet the Trinity lies at the heart of Christian doctrine.
The Catholic Faith is this:
That we worship one God in Trinity, and Trinity in Unity, neither confounding the Persons, nor dividing the Substance.
That is of course the Athanasian Creed. God is three persons, all equal, co-eternal, omnipotent.
The Father eternal, the Son eternal, and the Holy Ghost eternal.
The Father uncreate, the Son uncreate, and the Holy Ghost uncreate.
The Athanasian Creed is full of fine distinctions. Although the Son was ‘begotten’, this does not mean He was made by the Father. ‘Not made, not created, but begotten’. And although we talk of the Holy Spirit as ‘Proceeding from the Father and the Son’ (or if we were Greek or Russian Orthodox, we’d say ‘from the father’ alone), this doesn’t mean the Spirit was created. ‘Not made, nor created, nor begotten, but proceeding’. Most people have stopped listening by now. Clearly all these qualifications belong to a period of great theological controversy and doctrinal dispute. The Athanasian
Creed is almost more concerned with what Christians should not think, than with what they should. Because at the time so many people were thinking other things, and the Church wanted to put them straight. And this is the period in which the doctrine of the Trinity was formed; there is very little about it in the scriptures.
Much as I love raking over 4th century theological controversies, we have to ask what the Trinity really means to Christian believers today. Many modern theologians have suggested that it’s not a lot. Karl Rahner in his book on the Trinity said that most Christians are in practice almost monotheists. They believe in God, and they believe that God became man; but they don’t really believe in a Trinity. (Rahner, p. 10) ‘In practice’ says Jurgen Moltmann in The Crucified God, ‘the religious conceptions of many Christians prove to be a weakly Christianized monotheism’. (p. 244)
To illustrate this consider a well-known Trinitarian hymn, ‘Holy holy holy’. Though it praises the ‘blessed Trinity’ there is nothing in it of the Son or of the Holy Ghost. It celebrates the Father, the Creator, the Son of Man from Revelation, the figure of majesty and power seen in the visions of Ezekiel and Isaiah. There’s nothing in it that couldn’t be shared by a Jew or a Muslim - except the word Trinity.
Now the pressure on Christian belief, from secularism and from other powerful world faiths, is to back off from the Trinity towards the monotheism that represents a kind of neutral common ground among all faiths and none. Muslims worship the one true and indivisible God. They acknowledge Jesus as a true prophet, but not as the Son of God. When in Asia Minor they turned churches into mosques, they put up signs saying ‘God is not begotten, and does not beget’. Jews share the same paternal deity, God the Father. They see Jesus as a charismatic preacher, but not as the Son of God.
Agnostics don’t mind God, but pour scorn on the idea that God could have a Son, that a human being could be divine, and that there is something around like oxygen called the Holy Spirit.
If as a Christian you insist that God has three persons, you’re made to feel part of a kind of awkward squad, standing in the way of universal reconciliation.
Now if we could just ditch the Holy Ghost, and downgrade our claims about Jesus from divine to divinely-inspired, then all these people would agree with us, and the world would be a much better place. Absurd as this may sound there’s actually something in it. The Incarnation and the Trinity are what separates Christian belief from Islam and Judaism, and it does make us more vulnerable to attacks from atheists and agnostics. So we need to be sure that the Trinity is worth having if we want to keep it: that it’s a true doctrine that really does tell us about the nature of God.
In the reading from St John’s Gospel prescribed for Trinity Sunday (16.4-16) Jesus speaks of the Trinity (indeed this passage is an important source for the doctrine). He, the Son, is returning to the Father, and in his absence he will send a third person, a ‘Spirit of Truth’ who will speak what he himself does not have time to say. Father, Son and Spirit are unified in mind: they speak the same thing, they are the same thing. The Spirit is not an independent power: he speaks for God. The Son is not separate from the father: he possesses all the Father’s power. The Spirit will glorify both the Father and the Son.
Here then the Trinity is very tightly knit. This is consistent with those doctrinal formulae that speak of One God in three persons, equal, co-eternal, omniscient and all-powerful. And yet reading such a passage is not at all the same as reading the Athanasian Creed, though they seem to be saying the same things. Why should that be so?
To start with, the terms that are used as metaphors for these concepts – Father, Son, Spirit – are terms that carry their own associations. We understand what Jesus is saying because we know about fathers and sons. But these terms suggest difference as much as they suggest kinship. A father and a son will have things in common: they are to some degree of the same substance, they may look alike. But they are also quite different people. The Holy Spirit is invoked here by the Greek word ‘paraclete’, translated in many different ways – helper, counsellor, advocate, comforter – in itself suggesting some doubt about its meaning.
But a spirit is normally understood in terms of its difference from something else – body as distinct from spirit, the material versus the spiritual. Father and Son, the body of Jesus and the spirit of truth, seem in this imagery to be discrete and even incongruous ‘persons’. In addition the three persons of the Trinity are here performing different functions, and seem to be separate in space and time. Jesus will return to the Father, suggesting that the Father is somewhere else. The Holy Spirit will come when He is gone, so they don’t occupy the same space. Everything in the narrative and symbolism suggests the difference, rather than the identity, of the three persons.
Lastly, the Gospels convey theological ideas through dramatic dialogue. The reader listens to the voices of Jesus and those of his disciples. We naturally position ourselves as readers alongside the disciples rather than with Jesus, except in the rare occasions where he is represented as alone (e.g. Gethsemane). So our subjective experience of the Trinity is that although we are assured the three persons are aspects of one God, we get them separately like a three course meal. In the narrative we hear about the Father from the Son whom we know; and we are promised the coming of the Spirit.
Theologians have projected this separation into a historical timescale: the time of the Father, before the Incarnation; the time of Christ himself; and the post-Resurrection time of the Holy Spirit. But why are these different times, if God is indivisibly One?
It looks as if the Trinity may actually break down our monotheism into separate forces, related but almost independent of one another. But let’s focus on what Jesus says there about the promise of the Holy Spirit. He must go away, and that grieves his followers. But it is to their advantage that he goes, since then the Holy Spirit can replace Him. But remember that Jesus is not just catching a bus back, or beaming up to his home planet. The return to the Father is through the suffering and death
of the Crucifixion.
The Gospel begins with the Baptism in the Jordan, where the Trinity interacts as a united family. ‘And when Jesus was baptized, just as he came up from the water, suddenly the heavens were opened to him and he saw the spirit of God descending like a dove and alighting on him. And a voice from heaven said, "This is my Son, the beloved, with whom I am well pleased."’ (NRSV, Matt. 3.17-18) It ends however with the Son crying out in agony from the Cross in bitter reproach against the Father who has forsaken Him. ‘”Eli, eli, lema sabachthani” that is, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”’ (Matt. 27.47) And for those terrible hours the Holy Spirit seems utterly
absent from the world.
It is only through the Trinity that we can fully understand what is happening here, something that no other religion can comprehend. God is killing God. The Father abandons the Son to suffering and death. But both are God, so God is abandoning God. Father and Son do not experience the death of the Cross in the same way.
Moltmann puts it like this: The Son suffers in his love being forsaken by the father as he dies. The Father suffers in his love the grief of the death of the Son. In that case, whatever proceeds from the event between the Father and the Son must be understood as the spirit of the surrender of the father and the Son, as the spirit which creates love for forsaken men, as the spirit which brings the dead alive. It is the unconditional and therefore boundless love which proceeds from the grief of the Father and the dying of the son and reaches forsaken men in order to create in them the possibility and the force of a new life. (p. 253)
This view is quite different from the Athanasian Creed. If the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit all existed from eternity, then nothing much was changed by the Passion. But everything was changed, and changed because (1 John 4.9) ‘God is love’. It is because ‘God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish’. (John 3.16) What Moltmann calls the ‘event of the cross’ is Trinitarian, ‘an event concerned with a relationship between persons’
who ‘constitute themselves in a relationship with each other’. (p. 256)
The event of the cross brings all this into being and alters everything. God suffers, God allows himself to be crucified and is crucified, and in this consummates his unconditional love that is so full of hope. But that means that in the cross he becomes himself the condition of his love. The loving Father has a parallel in the loving Son and in the Spirit creates similar patterns of love in man. (Moltmann, p. 257)
So let’s keep the Trinity, whatever anyone else says. Because the Trinity is the event of the Cross. ‘The Father who abandons him and delivers him up suffers the death of the Son in the infinite grief of love’. (Moltmann p. 251) The Holy Spirit is love, and hope. The Son is love, and hope. God is love. God is hope. God in three persons. Blessed Trinity.
Works Cited
Moltmann, Jurgen. The Crucified God: the Cross of Christ as the Foundation and Criticism of Christian Theology. Translated R.A. Wilson and John Bowden. London: SCM Press, 1974.
Rahner, Karl. The Trinity, Translated Joseph Donceel. London: Burns and Oates, 1970.