We might say that the Holy Trinity is an insight arrived at in the history of the church which might be an insight of the eternal return of the same.
To quote from T.S. Eliot's famous quartet
“We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploringWill be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time...."
Even if the Council of Nicaea resulted in the gathering of bishops voting to define how Christians should articulate their understanding of God, and even if serious disagreement about the same resulted in the excommunication of perhaps more than half of the Christians of the Christian world, those whom we now to refer to as Arians, the Trinitarian insight became explicit. Even the Arians had a Trinitarian insight even if it was different from those who sided with Athanasius. The Trinitarian insight arose as people dared to speak about the insight of the Personhood of God as Plenitude.
In time, the last turned out to be first, that is, privileged in having insights about what has always been. St. Athanasius came to claim that presence of the Trinity was implicit in the creation event. God the Father was creating speaker, commanding creation in those words, "let there be." And the word which God the creating Father spoke was Christ, the Eternal Word. And in articulation of the those words from the "mouth" of the Father, there came the Breath, the Holy Wind of the Spirit of God who moved over the deep to bring into becoming specific differentiated lives, with humanity becoming the Word bearing creatures who in turn had words to articulate and name God. Certainly a very circular type of action, but true to how God co-inheres with the reality of Word in knowing and having consciousness of life.
We do not yet know the Trinity, just as we don't know anything, or ourselves in any conclusive way. What we can say is that we know the Trinity, others things, and ourselves in adequate ways to live out the values which we regard to be highest in our lives.
Time means that there is always a future, and having future means that there is always what we do not yet know. The future creates the continual probability of mystery about what we do not yet know. We do not yet know the precise details of the Trinity, because the Trinity still has a future. Therefore, we should have the humility not to presume to know in such a way as becoming final judges about the inferiority of knowledge possessed by other people.
As we give ourselves opportunity to be convinced more about God as Trinity, we give other people opportunity to come to the persuasive love of God as God has become adequately known through the Creator, the Redeemer, and the sanctifying Sustainer of life itself.
Why do we as Christians accept the Trinity as a adequate and insightful understanding of God? Do we do it to force God to be limited to human language definitions? Do we say that God as Father means that God can only be referred to using human masculine pronouns? Do we say that God as Son means that divine children can only be males? Do we limit the pronouns for the Holy Spirit being masculine pronouns, or do we feminize the Holy Spirit as Sophia, the feminine aspect of God? All language "play" regarding God is but the partial in the referral role to pointing to that which is still becoming in being everlasting. We need the humility to admit that the formative literature for speaking about God took place in cultures which were patriarchal with the masculine most often being used as defining full personhood.
In contrasting how God is named and regarded in the Hebrew Scripture with the occurrence of the understanding of God as Trinity of Persons one might make several observations.
The God of the Hebrew Scriptures has names and attributes and actions. There is one name of God consisting of the four consonants which are so holy as not to even be pronounced, of the great self-existent God. In effect, this is the God so separate and different from us that nothing can be said about that God. This might be understood as the negative or apophatic notion of God. God is not anything specific that we can name or conceive. But human life involves language and conceiving, even about things which seem beyond the human sphere. That which is beyond is known by the emanations and energies which have proceeded from this self-existent great Being. In Orthodox theology, it is said that God is not known in the Divine Essence but in the Divine emanations or energies that flow from that Essence. Hence, we have positive or cataphatic theology of naming those energies or essences which flow from the "unknowable Divine Essence."
In Hebrew Scripture God is revealed in the contexts of other gods, a the "most high God," (El Elyon). Timeless or everlasting God. (Olam). Almighty in Nurturing. (El Shaddai). God as birthing God, God as living God, God as seeing God, God as creator God, God as knowing God, God as mighty God, God as providing God, God as healing God, God as sanctifying God, God as the presider over a Host (Sabbaoth), God as Rock, God as justice and righteousness, God as Shepherd, God as Ancient of Days, God as owner and master of all, God as having a holy spirit, and God as Father.
What are we to make of the contrast of names, attributes, and metaphors and analogies about God with the Christian understanding of the Trinity? Do we regard the understanding of the Trinity to negate the apophatic or the negative aspect of the divinity being so great as being beyond human ability to say to speak about?
The Christian answer to how we move from the apophatic mystery of God into the cataphatic or positive acknowledgement of God begins with what might be called the most telling energy or emanation from the mystery of the divine. What is the telling emanation from the divine which for human perception has an equality with the divine? Christ the eternal Word. Word as the deeply organized or structuration of human life is our touching point with the divine. Within the field of Word, all traditional ways of speaking about God have arisen.
Word might be said to be the great invisible intercommunication or connection between all things. This Word comes to humans with spoken, written, and body language manifestations of communication. Word implies relationship, and relationship gives birth to personality. Personalities are formed within relational contexts. We can therefore say that because we live in a worded universe, that Word is the essence of Personhood.
From this we can understand the wisdom of Jesus speaking in familial relationship terms with his heavenly parent. Worded relationships are conducted in time and space and the "betweenness" of mutual experience is confessed by Jesus to be another person, the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit for Jesus was the assurance that God-presence would be with us in an always already way. Father, Son, and Holy Spirit can be known in a general theoretical way, but also become perceptually evident in space and time in intermittent and serendipitous ways for people within their life situations.
The Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit represent within our field of language, the Personhood of reality itself which underlies everything as the great Before Creator of everything that has and is and will become. Jesus is the historical event of revealing God with us and affirming that with words and language it is valid to speak in metaphorical, analogical, and anthropocentric ways about God and about everything. We can only know, speak, and understand in human ways; Jesus is affirmation that even though human experience can seem to be a limiting prison, it is also a valid way to speak about what lies outside of human experience, even the personal great God. This practice too is seen in personalizing of our relationships with animals, the plants and our environmental homes. Lastly, we know that we live in a great field of mutual perception giving us the ability to know that we are not alone. This great field of mutual perception is the omnipresence of the Holy Spirit, with whom we can know intermittment and serendipitous events of connection with our togetherness.
Today, let us not use the gift of how the Holy Trinity has come to us as a way to condemn or criticize persons who cannot see such as a gift. Let us rejoice in knowing how the unavoidable realities of the Trinity pervade our lives. How so?
Knowing that we have been parented by a great Plenitude. We came from more than our earthly parents; we were born in and from a great Plenitudinous Container.
We have come to know ourselves within the field of having language, and having language totally code our existence. We have our being in Word. God confessed as the Eternal Word became specific or particular worded being in Jesus of Nazareth to affirm our very particular locations as paths or journeys of valid ways of knowing our divine parentage.
And since we live in a worded field which has attached meaning and relationship to all our sensorial events, and to our inward geography, we confess that we are not alone within the Divine Milieu of the Holy Spirit who conducts our mutual awareness of each other and our world.
Let us accept the gift of understanding God as Trinity, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, as a relational journey in the exploration of our personhood, because we have received the gift of knowing that we are truly God-connected. And may we be made to feel so natural as to seem "to arrive at the place we started." Amen.
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