Trinity: A Doctrine That Shapes Who We Are
Karen Mains is a prolific author and radio personality. Daily she co-hosts with her husband a national radio program—The Chapel of the Air. In one of her writings, Karen, at age fifty, reflects upon the meaning of Trinity Sunday. Her approach to the subject, however, has an unanticipated port of entry. She dredges from her distant memory the thoughts of her first love.
The boy’s name was Allen. They were preschool friends, age four. On the week after Pentecost, as she contemplated the meaning of Trinity Sunday, she was flooded with the consealed memory of her first real friend. The recovery of this memory seemed to have an intuitive import. Allen had come to symbolize to her the primary ritual of innocence, her original relationship of trust, her very first love. Karen observes that “before this child paradise disappeared, before sexual awareness slithered come-hither into my consciousness, I had a soul-friend.”1 In the activity of remembering little Allen, her childhood friend, Karen began probing new depths of soul-friendship in her adult life.
What does all this have to do with the theology of trinity—a doctrine that is being celebrated around the world today?
Karen Mains explains that scripture presents to us the concept of a benevolent One-God-in-Three. In the stories of creation, Adam is not some solitary bachelor created to inhabit the garden alone. According to this etiological story (a story that seeks to explain why certain things are), Adam was both man and woman. Adam was undivided. After Adam was divided, according to the Genesis myth and Hebrew theology, there was Ish (Hebrew for male) and Ishshah (female). An ancient Jewish Midrash explains that man was first created as two halves—male and female. Through covenant with God and sanctification of sexual union within this covenant, the two become one flesh again. Through sexual and emotional intimacy, which is sanctified by covenant with Yahweh, man and woman become united. They become whole. They become one, psychologically and spiritually.
This unity and harmony is expressive of the will of God for humanity. It discloses the personality of God. God is at peace with Adam. In the paradise of God’s intended garden, woman and man are co-regents. There is no hierarchy of dominion in God’s creation until after the covenant is broken. It is not the ultimate will of God that the male has dominion over the woman.
The biblical message moves toward the proclamation of Christ as the New Adam—the undivided One. In Christ, Ish and Ishshah (male and female) are at peace. Moreover, humanity is at peace with the created order. The apostle Paul always viewed the redemption of Christ to be the salvation of both humanity and nature. He wrote, “For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God; for the creation was subjected to futility, not of its own will but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and will obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God.”2
If we are to model the triune God, we shall experience a truce between the sexes, reconciliation between enemies, a healing of humanity’s brokenness, and the redemption of the natural world.
Karen Mains reflected upon this astounding biblical challenge as she remembered Allen, her four-year-old preschool friend. “He was safe; he was just…. We were completed in each other…. With me he belonged, he was an insider, he had a place.”3
Karen explains that Trinity Sunday celebrates the original first love. The first love of God for humanity. The first love of God for God’s creation. From the beginning, God has had a plan for his creation. God has created all of us for relationships of love, trust, faithfulness, and sacred covenant. Thus, Karen writes, “Marriage is a sacrament that mediates Trinity, but holy friendship between men and women is also an eschatological sign of what God intends creation to be on that day when profound restoration finally comes.”4
No special day was set aside for celebration of the doctrine of trinity until after the Arian heresy of the Fourth Century. A man named Arius, using the language of John’s gospel, taught that the eternal Logos of God became flesh in Christ. But Arius then insisted that Christ did not possess a human soul. Thus, Arius separated the Son of God from the creator God, insisting that there was a time in which the Son (Christ) did not exist.
For at least a decade, the whole eastern church became a metaphysical battleground. The climax of this controversy was the Council of Nicea. This council prescribed the creedal phrase that we recited earlier in the service. We said that we believe that Christ is “of one being (substance) with the Father.” The creedal formula, which articulates a Trinitarian concept of God, became at Nicea the orthodox teaching of the church. The Sunday following Pentecost, consequently, has been designated as a time for teaching and proclaiming the glory of this mystery.
So what? Why is this teaching important in the Twenty-first Century? What are the practical implications of this doctrine for our lives? Why would I dare speak of this ancient doctrine to a group of graduating high school seniors?
First of all, our concept of God will define our ethics and all aspects of our behavior. Our belief in the trinity, therefore, makes it perfectly clear that our understanding of God is rooted in the historical being, Jesus.
Earlier this year, I participated in a group that met on Thursday evenings in dialogue with Muslims living in Charlotte. We demonstrated mutual hospitality. We certainly discovered a commonality in some important matters of faith. After all, three great religions indeed have their origins in the Abrahamic covenant. But hospitality is phony if differences are not articulated. We Christians define the nature and being of God through the personage of Jesus Christ. If you want to know the identity of the Creator of this mysterious and expansive universe, you must check out Jesus. If you want to discover the way God desires us most clearly to conduct our daily lives, we must commune with Jesus.
Muslims will often insist that we Christians are promoting the notion of three separate gods through our Trinitarian teachings. Nothing could be further from the truth. The mystery of the trinity is as our opening hymn, “God in three persons, blessed Trinity.” The Latin word persona was widely used in classical Greek and Roman drama. One actor came upon the stage to play several parts. With each change in roles, the same actor wore the persona—the mask. One actor, several roles. The term persona was used by the theologians at Nicea to express the diverse forms of God’s activity within history without destroying the concept of God’s unity.
A second practical implication of Trinitarian theology is this: our faith in God is not some subjective generalization. Not just any sort of God will do!
When I was a teen, I gained great respect for the Cherokee tribe with its origins in the Appalachian land I love. I joined my cousin in looking for arrowheads. He had a collection of hundreds from the soil of Rutherford County. Once I was with a church group visiting the restored ancient village on the reservation. One ill-informed youth asked as we entered a teepee, “Do you reckon they will scalp us inside here?” Our Native American guide was justifiably indignant. She stated that scalping was the horrendous method of torture used by Europeans to terrorize the Indians. Native Americans merely learned the art of terror with greater precision.
Then she shared this insight from her oral history. When the Christians missionaries came to the Cherokee tribes in the late Seventeenth Century and told the story of Jesus, the tribesmen were quickly converted. Their chief announced, “Our ancestors have always taught that God is just, merciful, and forgiving. God has compassion for us in our sorrow. We did not know that this God has entered our experience. We did not know the suffering God. But now you have supplied us with the name and personality of the God for whom we have longed—Jesus the Christ.”
In the United Methodist Church we teach that the Bible is our authority in matters of faith and doctrine. The biblical narrative is the progressive revelation of God’s being. Christ is the key that unlocks the meaning of God’s covenant with Abraham and all humanity. When we neglect this narrative, we are tempted to provide our own subjective concept of God. We may drape Jesus in the American flag. He becomes a card-carrying Democrat or Republican. We make him a gun-toting leader of the National Riffle Association. We make god into the image of our own preference so that this god always blesses our personal agenda.
Trinitarian theology will not allow such apostasy. We must look at God’s activity in the fullness of salvation history. God is not through with the story. But God has erected a cross in the middle of history, dividing time itself. THE STORY interprets our individual stories, not the other way around.
A third practical implication of our Trinitarian theology is this: the Holy Spirit is the power of God released into God’s new community. This Holy Spirit is constantly forming the new community in the image of the suffering, redeeming servant, Jesus Christ.
Our recently formulated vision statement is very Trinitarian. We envision ourselves as the Body of Christ, glorifying God and serving others. When we are filled with the Holy Spirit, we begin to take the form of a church that washes another’s feet, that wipes tears from another’s eyes, and that places food into the mouths of those who are hungry. The Holy Spirit is not just a feel-good phenomenon in the life of ecstatic worshipers. When the Holy Spirit engulfs the church, that congregation may feel remorse. The authentic spirit convicts, converts, and transforms. The euphoria of grace is preceded by the anguish of contrition. The Holy Spirit in worship will make us feel happy, but it will also make us feel responsible. A church filled with the Holy Spirit will indeed feel the pain and anguish of a world immersed in hatred, poised for war, and apathetic toward the plight of the poor. We shall know when the Spirit comes to Providence Church, for the Spirit is indeed Jesus at work in a continuation of his ministry through us!
Jurgen Moltmann, in his classic The Trinity and the Kingdom of God, makes this profound observation: “We can only talk about God’s suffering in Trinitarian terms.” Aristotelian philosophy does not tolerate the notion of a suffering God. Islam and most of the major religions of the world do not tolerate the concept of a suffering God.
Perhaps this is why I felt the presence of the Holy Spirit so vividly on a cold July day in 1994. Our mission team had departed very early on a Sunday morning in order to reach the remote mountain village of Contani in the high Andean hills. The elevation was over 12,000 feet. Bolivians had walked from miles away over tough terrain to gather at a Methodist Church. Our sanctuary had dirt floor. There were no pews or chairs. But on this day of thanksgiving the worshipers arrived with food for a fellowship meal. They sang with exuberance hymns of faith. Scripture was read. In small groups, we discussed the day’s lectionary texts with the aide of the bilinguals from Greensboro. I joined with Pastor Gustavo Loza in placing our hands upon the head of a young child with abdominal pain as we prayed for his recovery. The morning offering was for the purpose of paying for his medical care down the mountain in Cochabamba. Upon our departure one man wept in my arms. The personage of Jesus Christ formed this loving and compassionate community of faith.
Only a Trinitarian God enters human suffering by suffering with us and for us. Thus, the Irish placed upon the breastplate of Patrick words attributed to the patron saint of their anguished island:
“I bind unto myself the name,
The strong name of the Trinity;
By invocation of the same
The Three in One and One in Three,
O whom all nature hath creation;
Eternal Father, Spirit, Word;
Praise to the Lord of my salvation,
Salvation is of Christ the Lord.”5
Footnotes:
1. Karen Burton Mains, “Trinity Sunday,” Stories for the Christian Year, edited by Eugene H. Peterson, representing The Chrysostom Society (Singapore: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1992), p. 166.
2. Romans 8: 19-21 NRSV
3. Op. cit., p. 168.
4. Ibid., p. 170.
5. From the breastplate of Saint Patrick.