‘An Incomprehensible Attempt.’ The Trinity!
Hildegard of Bingen, the 11th century theologian and mystic, imaged it in grand metaphorical style: A brightness, a flashing forth, and a fire. And the three are one.
John Robinson, the English 1960s radical bishop of Honest to God fame, said it had become a formula as arid and as unintelligible as E=MC2 that Einstein said was the clue to the physical universe.
While in one of his weekly eMail newsletters, Bishop Jack Spong said: “No one can ultimately define God, not even as the Holy Trinity. The height of human arrogance is to suggest otherwise. All any of us can do is define not God, but our experience with God. There is a vast difference between those two things. The Trinity is a definition of our experience, nothing more. Those that make this definition of our experience the definition of God, and call it the ‘bedrock belief of Christianity’ are not well informed.” (Spong Newsletter, 2008)
I suggested that the Doctrine of The Trinity’ might be a literary device, seeking to frame an understanding of God based on the Christian Myth of a special divine Son who through abandonment and thus sacrifice became the salvation of humankind. The doctrine seeks to deconstruct the divine character so as to answer reasons questions. I also posited a question. That of “What if ‘Sacredness’ in everything, is a better doctrine?’
The reality of the challenges of the above reflection and suggestion is that here are those who argue that any person, but especially feminist theologians, who want alternative names for Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, should be declared enemies of the church, or heretics.
What the elephant in the room is, is that the traditional doctrine of the Trinity. A doctrine for which many have always harboured a (healthy) discontent. And while this rather serious debate continues, seriously, other stories about the doctrine also abound. Especially in the context of those culturally bound arguments called creeds. And as Rex Hunt puts is ‘during BBQs!’ One of his Catholic colleagues from theological student days, said he remembered the first time he became aware of just how difficult and obscure the doctrine of the Trinity can be.
“I remember as a teenager being in church and reciting the Athanasian Creed. We got to the bit which reads, The Father incomprehensible, the Son incomprehensible, and the Holy Ghost incomprehensible. The man sitting next to me muttered, too loudly for comfort: The whole damn thing incomprehensible!” It seems that the ‘Trinity’ is incomprehensible indeed! At best irrelevant, and perhaps at worst, nonsensical.
We might pause here to acknowledge that Marcus Borg’s in his book ‘The God We Never Knew,’ and in Val Webb’s ‘Like Catching Water in a Net’. They suggest that the Latin and Greek words translated as ‘person’ do not mean what ‘person’ most commonly means in English. For us, ‘person’ means separate human being. But ‘person’ in the ancient texts refers to the mask worn by actors in Greek and Roman theatres. And Rex highlight Borg’s words:
“To speak of one God and three persons is to say that God in known to us wearing three different ‘masks’… in three different roles.” (Borg 1997:98)
The image here is of a multifaceted sacredness, creating, indwelling, sustaining, resisting, recreating, challenging, guiding, liberating, completing. Not a reductionist simplifying example of a reasoned outcome. And cumulatively speaking, Borg suggests that when we step away from a literalist understanding, but a poor attempt at proving that God is not a distant being but is sacredness-ing near at hand. God is not primarily the lawgiver and judge but the compassionate one and the religious life is not about requirements, but about relationship.
Like Rex I am of the opinion that if more sermons were shaped by progressive theological thinking about the Trinity, then: most lay people would welcome such honesty from their ministers, most lay people would be enriched by such theological honesty and freedom, and the literalness which often binds this doctrine, into a limited kind of definition of God, could be answered in a creative and imaginative way, and the original experience to which the doctrine points could be given new life, freed from the interventionist prison it suffers within and the dead outer shell of the doctrine be discarded to the rubbish tip.
What this would affirm is that the way we imagine or understand what the word God tries to do and what Sacredness in everything might unveil could be valued. In the words of Irish priest and theologian, Diarmuid O’Murchur: “How precisely the relatedness of Jesus differs from that of the Father and Spirit may well be one of the most meaningless questions ever asked.” (O’Murchur 2005:52)
Rex suggests that having a holiday weekend with Trinity Sunday in the middle, would allow for an emphasis of certain aspects of the nature of sacredness we are likely to ignore when we take our creed-driven neo-orthodox theologies so seriously! He says that having a holiday at this time of the year could remind us that simply getting together as a family for BBQs and picnics and taking delight in each other and in the world around us, would echo and reflect something of the spirit of Sacredness in which we ‘live and move and have our being’.
His reasoning is that there is wisdom to be found in merely being playful as we would be expressing something of the nature of Sacredness not least the mystery of the livingness of God in a wondrous community… a creative energy beyond reason, a compassionate cosmic traveler with, an empowering friendship within, connecting ‘all creation’ together.
Maybe… just maybe, this is really what the storyteller Matthew is on about. That the essence of God is to be in mutual relation with everything… A mystery of dynamic communion of connectedness beyond that of things. A dancing and celebrating BBQ Emmanuel.
Sounds easier than the literal and liturgical interests of the ‘church fathers’ who set this lectionary story for this Sunday after Pentecost with its tenuous links to the so-called doctrine of the Trinity. Amen.
Bibliography:
Borg, M. J. The God We Never Knew. Beyond Dogmatic Religion to a More Authentic Contemporary Faith. New York. HarperCollins, 1997.
O’Murchu, D. Catching Up With Jesus. A Gospel Story for our Time. New York. Crossroad Publishing, 2005.
Webb, V. Like Catching Water in a Net. Human Attempts to Define the Divine. New York. Continuum Press, 2007.