Language as the Personal Field for Knowing God as Trinity

Trinity Sunday A   June 7,2020   
Gen. 1:1-2:3       Ps.33
2 Cor. 13:5-10,11-14  Matt. 28:16-20      

Lectionary Link

Today on Trinity Sunday, we might stop to ponder why we as Christians have come to confess God as One God in Trinity of Persons.

First the only way in which we can know anything at all is to know it as it is mediated in the field of language.  To have language, to use words in speaking and in writing and in body language deeds is the manifestation of the very medium of personality.  To have language means we are by basic nature personal because language implies being in relationship and relationship is how personality comes to be known and manifested.

As language users, we assign value within human experience.   We come to assign some values as being values which are literally out of our reach, beyond our "pay grade" because we know that individually and collectively we cannot comprehend the vastness of the existence which confronts us.  And so we posit some experiencing being who has the capacity to comprehend the vastness of all, and we conceive of a greatest one who came long before us and will be long after we are gone.

But does the conception of such a great One who experiences all, imply a personality?  Albert Einstein once wrote that an important question in life is whether the universe is a friendly place.

Should you and I take all of the events of freedom in this vast cosmos personally?  We cannot help but do other since we are prisoners of human personhood and having language is the essence of personhood.  To use language in all forms is to be a person.  When we interact with non-human life, we do so as persons.  The attributing of human like characteristics to non-human life is called anthropomorphic projection.  Such is unavoidable.  An astronomer in the study of the stars might want to forget his or her humanity in being some impartial, non-human observer of the stars, but there is no way to escape being human being seeing human versions of the non-human worlds.  So, we cannot help but project our human personality because we are using language in our observation and interactions.

Do you assume that pets and plants have human-like mutually responsive features?  People talk to their plants as though they can understand and interact in human-like ways.  And even if you think this is silly, do you think that regarding such projection is a valid human poetry celebrating our intimate connection with important non-human being?  The Psalmist wrote the heavens declare the glory of God.  The Psalmist was projecting a deliberate vocation of the stars with regard to God.  Also ancient astrologers, projected upon the stars a personal relationship between the constellation of the stars and the life situation of people.  Astrology is the ancient poetic projection of the universe having all kinds of personality which was accessible to the chief persons, human beings.

If we can understand our pets as being "like" people enough for significant mutual beneficial behaviors, it is not a great leap for us to understand the poetry of the great One from whom all derive as embracing the personality of God as heavenly parent and Father of the Plenitude and us.  In confessing God to be a Trinity of Persons, we do not confess God as Father and Holy Spirit to be the exact kind of embodied persons as we are.  We would say they are "hyper-Persons, super-Persons," in fact so super that to attain clarity on how we might address them as distinct persons, we would need One who had bi-lingual experience between the divine and the human.  And in the Person of Jesus Christ, the revelation of God as Trinity becomes manifest.  We found Jesus of Nazareth to be so perfectly human, literally, out of our league so that we confess him to be God's unique Child.

Let's be honest; we confess God as Trinity of Persons, because we first came to confess Jesus as God's unique Son who shows us how we in human terms could understand the personal dynamic of the divine.

The standard of believing in the Trinity comes from accepting the presentation of the witness of Jesus Christ and his relationship with divinity.

For Christians, the main access to the Trinity is through Jesus because he is the One who is known to be bi-lingual with God and humanity so that the divine could be translated to human terms.  And Jesus translated the divine in the familial terms of the persons of Father, Son and Holy Spirit.  It is highly intuitive poetry to say the very least and so it resonates with us.

Frankly, our acceptance of Jesus as the the truly God-human bi-lingual being is the honest acceptance of the validity of human experience as the only way in which human beings can come into the highest values of living.

In Jesus, we have come to accept the Trinity as intuitively sound, because we have in him the acceptance of the validity of our lives as a way of "knowing" God.

And in accepting the understanding of the Trinity today as best presented by Jesus Christ, we know the deep Gospel love of God accepting us, as human beings, mere human beings, but truly loved.  Amen.