Trinity Sunday May 22, 2016
Today is Trinity Sunday and so I am obligated to explain to everyone how God can be three persons and yet still be just one God. I probably cannot do this adequate to anyone's satisfaction. What I can do is to hazard a try to provide some insights about why the Trinity has come to have true, valuable and functional meanings for people who have embraced this Christian notion of God. This is to say that the way in which people have understood God has a human history. As human beings we often believe that latest discoveries to be the best discoveries but then we further proclaim that our latest discoveries about God were always that way from the beginning.
Belief in God or gods is called Theism, and there are many kinds of theisms. And there are different varieties of theisms even within the kinds of theism. Some of the variations of theisms came about because of historical developments within cultures and societies. The majority of the religious people of the world would call themselves monotheists or people who believe in one God. The people of the Abrahamic faith traditions, Jews, Muslims and Christians are monotheists. But within this classification there are variations; Most Christians are Trinitarian monotheists, Jehovah Witnesses are not Trinitarian monotheists. Judaism and Islam might be called radical monotheistic faith communities and some observant members of Judaism and Islam do not understand how the Christian belief in the Trinity can avoid being called the kind of theism known as polytheism, or the belief in many gods. It also might be noted that during the development of Judaism, the ancient Hebrew people might be called henotheists. Henotheists believe in many gods, but there is a one, supreme or superior God among the other gods. There are references in the Hebrew Scriptures of the One God El, or Yahweh who was the supreme God of a heavenly council of other gods. Ancient Greek and Roman societies were polytheists as well as the pre-Christian European peoples. Ancient Greek has also henotheistic tendencies as the god Zeus battled and became the supreme god of the Greek pantheon.
Sometimes in classifying theism, we run in the problem of who gets to classify theism. Since much modern scholarship has been done in the modern western context, scholars have tended to classify all world beliefs in terms of how people of the Abrahamic faiths have used the terms gods and God. So when modern scholars have encountered life practices in Asia or Africa they have used the Western models as the norm for analysis. To characterize Eastern religion the term pantheism has been used. This means that everything is some way a part of God. This has been used to define Hindu beliefs, even though there is no exact correspondence between the various systems of Eastern and Western belief. Hinduism may have many gods but they also have a supreme Deity and they also believe in Unity.
There is a theism known as Deism. Deism was the belief of some of the founders of our country and of liberal political philosophers in Europe after the Enlightenment. What kind of God can we believe in after the reason of Enlightenment has come to prevail? In Deism, one believes in a creator God who after creation left creation to run independent of divine intervention by the rules of reason. And in this system, we discover God through the discovery and practice of the good reason which guides the universe. Certainly Thomas Jefferson was a Deist.
So why are we Christian Trinitarian monotheists? Is it because we recite the Nicene Creed which derived from a church convention of bishops in the 4th century when our official belief in God was voted on and then gradually enforced throughout the Christian world? Yes, that is partially why we Christians believe and confess God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit. The theologians of the Council of Nicaea used the Greek philosophical concepts of their time to try to explain how God could be One God and three equal Persons. Even though the belief in the Trinity came to very explicit expression and doctrine at the Council of Nicaea, it would not have happened if the internal relationship within the Divine Life had not been presented in the witness of Jesus Christ in the Gospel.
The Trinity derives from the Gospel presentation of Jesus Christ who is presented as one who prayed to his Father and who claimed equality with His Father. He also indicated that he would send the Spirit from the Father to be with his disciples. The Spirit would represent and be the equal Divine Presence of God with his followers.
Today you and I can understand the Trinity as the official teaching of the church. We can accept it as the standards of belief of the church. And this is important for cementing our community relationship in our participation within our church. After all, we want to live in agreement with each other as we embrace a common mission to let our world know about the Gospel of Jesus Christ.
But more than being our official doctrine, it behooves each of us to walk back to the precedence for this doctrine in the life and ministry of Jesus. When we do that we realize that the Trinity is not so much a doctrine as it is a relationship dynamic. The record of the life of Jesus shows us a dynamic relationship between Jesus, God the Father and the Holy Spirit as Persons in the One Divine Being. When we speak about personal relationship, speaking takes place in sequential time, even though relationship dynamics happen with synchronicity. I am a father, son, brother, husband. It has taken me speaking a sequence of titled roles to tell you my personal identity. But I am father, son, brother, husband and lots of other things all at once. So we can understand the synchronicity of the One God even while we can also understand that under the conditions of time, God is presented in the sequences of the Persons of Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Time and Language helps us understand the relationship between singularity of Being in Equality with Persons of Becoming known in Time.
I am a rather severe skeptic and doubter. Things have to make sense to me. I just don't want to be told to believe blindly some special revelation if I can't articulate it as something which is very anthropological sound and functional within human experience. I often believe that the church has been comfortable to just state the Trinity as an unexplainable mystery of belief rather than showing how the Trinity accounts for what is unavoidable in our human experience. As a doubter, I want to know that the Trinity has unavoidable true meanings for my human existence.
I begin human existence as it can be known with language. We know nothing about ourselves or God without first having language. In the beginning was the Word, the Word was with God, the Word was God. Because we have and use language, we define our existence as human beings. And since we can only be human beings we use language to speak about the existence of non-human beings. We speak about animals and plants and angels and we speak about the divine life. But when we do so, we do so as human beings. So we use human categories to make understandable to us the life of animals, angels and God. We use language to define our human consciousness which includes the ability to have wisdom, reason, emotions, and choice in the classification of human experience and our interaction with all that is in our environments. With reason we have come to know we are not alone and that we are in relationships with many other beings. With reason we know we did not self generate; we know that we came from a great pre-existing Plenitude. When others die and depart, we also know that the Plenitude will still exist after we have died. So we can easily acknowledge a very great pre-existing Creator and future Sustainer of life. And so we speak of an eternal divine parent who was called Father by Jesus. And since Jesus called the Divine parent His Father, that by definition made him the Son.
But there is some more anthropologically honest about our confession of God as the Son. God as the Son is Emmanuel or God with us. This is a very true meaning about God. The only reason we speak about God at all is because we inherently accept God as being with us. This means we believe that God accepts human language and human experience as valid and meaningful ways to know about the Divine. If we deny this then we cannot assume any valid understanding or relationship with God. So God as the Divine Son is perhaps the supreme validation of human language and experience as ways to be in adequate, beneficial and saving relationship with God.
There is something else which I can also believe in; I can easily believe in mutual experience and the conduit which makes such mutual experience possible. In electricity a copper wire connects point a with point b and when the power is turned on the light comes on. Copper wire conducts electricity as it travels between two points. What is it that conducts mutual experience between human beings and other phenomena? If I am holding your hand then I have direct contact with you. When I am not in direct contact with you what it is it which allows me to see, hear, smell that you are here? Is the space between you and me a dead space which blocks us from having mutual experience of each other? No, there is a dynamic conductor between us which allows us to mutually experience each other. We can give endless scientific and physiological explanation about how and why I can experience you, but that still does not explain the mystery of their being a dynamic conductor which allows mutual experience. And this conductor is not limited to an impersonal electrical current; this conductor allows Personality to be conducted and so it is easy for me to confess the Holy Spirit as the supreme personal Conductor of all mutual experiences within this universe.
Today, we confess the Trinity for good reason. But we should not be too proud of our Trinitarian knowledge or confession of God. Why? Because we do not believe the experience and the knowledge of the Trinity is yet finished. As long as there is time, the Trinity will still have a future.
Today, you and I can embrace the Trinity with good reason, but not being too proud of our reason, because in humility we need to be open to the further and greater unfolding of Trinitarian knowledge in the future. The knowledge of the Trinity is not yet done, because the last person has not yet inhabited the earth. The Trinity is best known in the experience of a personal relationship with God.
And so in thanksgiving today, I make my humble and limited confession of the great Trinity; In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Proverbs 8:1-4, 22-31 Psalm 8/Canticle 13
Romans 5:1-5 John 16:12-15
Lectionary LinkToday is Trinity Sunday and so I am obligated to explain to everyone how God can be three persons and yet still be just one God. I probably cannot do this adequate to anyone's satisfaction. What I can do is to hazard a try to provide some insights about why the Trinity has come to have true, valuable and functional meanings for people who have embraced this Christian notion of God. This is to say that the way in which people have understood God has a human history. As human beings we often believe that latest discoveries to be the best discoveries but then we further proclaim that our latest discoveries about God were always that way from the beginning.
Belief in God or gods is called Theism, and there are many kinds of theisms. And there are different varieties of theisms even within the kinds of theism. Some of the variations of theisms came about because of historical developments within cultures and societies. The majority of the religious people of the world would call themselves monotheists or people who believe in one God. The people of the Abrahamic faith traditions, Jews, Muslims and Christians are monotheists. But within this classification there are variations; Most Christians are Trinitarian monotheists, Jehovah Witnesses are not Trinitarian monotheists. Judaism and Islam might be called radical monotheistic faith communities and some observant members of Judaism and Islam do not understand how the Christian belief in the Trinity can avoid being called the kind of theism known as polytheism, or the belief in many gods. It also might be noted that during the development of Judaism, the ancient Hebrew people might be called henotheists. Henotheists believe in many gods, but there is a one, supreme or superior God among the other gods. There are references in the Hebrew Scriptures of the One God El, or Yahweh who was the supreme God of a heavenly council of other gods. Ancient Greek and Roman societies were polytheists as well as the pre-Christian European peoples. Ancient Greek has also henotheistic tendencies as the god Zeus battled and became the supreme god of the Greek pantheon.
Sometimes in classifying theism, we run in the problem of who gets to classify theism. Since much modern scholarship has been done in the modern western context, scholars have tended to classify all world beliefs in terms of how people of the Abrahamic faiths have used the terms gods and God. So when modern scholars have encountered life practices in Asia or Africa they have used the Western models as the norm for analysis. To characterize Eastern religion the term pantheism has been used. This means that everything is some way a part of God. This has been used to define Hindu beliefs, even though there is no exact correspondence between the various systems of Eastern and Western belief. Hinduism may have many gods but they also have a supreme Deity and they also believe in Unity.
There is a theism known as Deism. Deism was the belief of some of the founders of our country and of liberal political philosophers in Europe after the Enlightenment. What kind of God can we believe in after the reason of Enlightenment has come to prevail? In Deism, one believes in a creator God who after creation left creation to run independent of divine intervention by the rules of reason. And in this system, we discover God through the discovery and practice of the good reason which guides the universe. Certainly Thomas Jefferson was a Deist.
So why are we Christian Trinitarian monotheists? Is it because we recite the Nicene Creed which derived from a church convention of bishops in the 4th century when our official belief in God was voted on and then gradually enforced throughout the Christian world? Yes, that is partially why we Christians believe and confess God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit. The theologians of the Council of Nicaea used the Greek philosophical concepts of their time to try to explain how God could be One God and three equal Persons. Even though the belief in the Trinity came to very explicit expression and doctrine at the Council of Nicaea, it would not have happened if the internal relationship within the Divine Life had not been presented in the witness of Jesus Christ in the Gospel.
The Trinity derives from the Gospel presentation of Jesus Christ who is presented as one who prayed to his Father and who claimed equality with His Father. He also indicated that he would send the Spirit from the Father to be with his disciples. The Spirit would represent and be the equal Divine Presence of God with his followers.
Today you and I can understand the Trinity as the official teaching of the church. We can accept it as the standards of belief of the church. And this is important for cementing our community relationship in our participation within our church. After all, we want to live in agreement with each other as we embrace a common mission to let our world know about the Gospel of Jesus Christ.
But more than being our official doctrine, it behooves each of us to walk back to the precedence for this doctrine in the life and ministry of Jesus. When we do that we realize that the Trinity is not so much a doctrine as it is a relationship dynamic. The record of the life of Jesus shows us a dynamic relationship between Jesus, God the Father and the Holy Spirit as Persons in the One Divine Being. When we speak about personal relationship, speaking takes place in sequential time, even though relationship dynamics happen with synchronicity. I am a father, son, brother, husband. It has taken me speaking a sequence of titled roles to tell you my personal identity. But I am father, son, brother, husband and lots of other things all at once. So we can understand the synchronicity of the One God even while we can also understand that under the conditions of time, God is presented in the sequences of the Persons of Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Time and Language helps us understand the relationship between singularity of Being in Equality with Persons of Becoming known in Time.
I am a rather severe skeptic and doubter. Things have to make sense to me. I just don't want to be told to believe blindly some special revelation if I can't articulate it as something which is very anthropological sound and functional within human experience. I often believe that the church has been comfortable to just state the Trinity as an unexplainable mystery of belief rather than showing how the Trinity accounts for what is unavoidable in our human experience. As a doubter, I want to know that the Trinity has unavoidable true meanings for my human existence.
I begin human existence as it can be known with language. We know nothing about ourselves or God without first having language. In the beginning was the Word, the Word was with God, the Word was God. Because we have and use language, we define our existence as human beings. And since we can only be human beings we use language to speak about the existence of non-human beings. We speak about animals and plants and angels and we speak about the divine life. But when we do so, we do so as human beings. So we use human categories to make understandable to us the life of animals, angels and God. We use language to define our human consciousness which includes the ability to have wisdom, reason, emotions, and choice in the classification of human experience and our interaction with all that is in our environments. With reason we have come to know we are not alone and that we are in relationships with many other beings. With reason we know we did not self generate; we know that we came from a great pre-existing Plenitude. When others die and depart, we also know that the Plenitude will still exist after we have died. So we can easily acknowledge a very great pre-existing Creator and future Sustainer of life. And so we speak of an eternal divine parent who was called Father by Jesus. And since Jesus called the Divine parent His Father, that by definition made him the Son.
But there is some more anthropologically honest about our confession of God as the Son. God as the Son is Emmanuel or God with us. This is a very true meaning about God. The only reason we speak about God at all is because we inherently accept God as being with us. This means we believe that God accepts human language and human experience as valid and meaningful ways to know about the Divine. If we deny this then we cannot assume any valid understanding or relationship with God. So God as the Divine Son is perhaps the supreme validation of human language and experience as ways to be in adequate, beneficial and saving relationship with God.
There is something else which I can also believe in; I can easily believe in mutual experience and the conduit which makes such mutual experience possible. In electricity a copper wire connects point a with point b and when the power is turned on the light comes on. Copper wire conducts electricity as it travels between two points. What is it that conducts mutual experience between human beings and other phenomena? If I am holding your hand then I have direct contact with you. When I am not in direct contact with you what it is it which allows me to see, hear, smell that you are here? Is the space between you and me a dead space which blocks us from having mutual experience of each other? No, there is a dynamic conductor between us which allows us to mutually experience each other. We can give endless scientific and physiological explanation about how and why I can experience you, but that still does not explain the mystery of their being a dynamic conductor which allows mutual experience. And this conductor is not limited to an impersonal electrical current; this conductor allows Personality to be conducted and so it is easy for me to confess the Holy Spirit as the supreme personal Conductor of all mutual experiences within this universe.
Today, we confess the Trinity for good reason. But we should not be too proud of our Trinitarian knowledge or confession of God. Why? Because we do not believe the experience and the knowledge of the Trinity is yet finished. As long as there is time, the Trinity will still have a future.
Today, you and I can embrace the Trinity with good reason, but not being too proud of our reason, because in humility we need to be open to the further and greater unfolding of Trinitarian knowledge in the future. The knowledge of the Trinity is not yet done, because the last person has not yet inhabited the earth. The Trinity is best known in the experience of a personal relationship with God.
And so in thanksgiving today, I make my humble and limited confession of the great Trinity; In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.
