Trinity Sunday, May 30, 2010

I would speak to you today about the Trinity seeking to address three questions: What do we mean when we speak of the Trinity as doctrine? How did we get the Trinity? and Why do we need the Trinity?

The Trinity is the central doctrine of the church, but it is only one of many. It is important to understand that doctrines come from the Bible. They are not made up out of whole cloth but people in ivory towers with too much time on their hands.  Doctrines come from devout people reading the Bible and trying to “think it through,” applying  human reasoning to the stories they read there trying to answer the questions that naturally arise.  The doctrines are often grouped around the members of the trinity--there are doctrines of God, of Christ, of Humanity. For example, Creation and Revelation are doctrines that come from thinking about God.  The incarnation and atonement and the divinity of Christ are doctrines that come from thinking about the stories of Jesus. The trinity is a doctrine we get when we think carefully about the relationship among God, Jesus, and the Spirit. The doctrines of the Evil, Sin, Free Will are what we get when we think about Humanity as it shows up in the Bible. Other doctrines have to do with the sacraments and with what we call last things--the end of time, the second coming and immortal life--all with a basis in what the Bible says. 

We get doctrine from the Bible in two ways. First of all, we are all theologians. No one can think seriously (or even un-seriously) about the Bible without asking questions, and as we ask questions, we are doing theology, whether we want to admit it or not. When we read about God, questions naturally come up: Why did God create the universe? How does God make Himself known? Second,  when great minds have think through the stories in the Bible they find language  that work itself down into the layers of our minds so deeply that we are not even conscious of it .  I am hoping to show you that Trinity can be a fascinating thing to think about, but even if I fail, I hope and that you will realize that you are a theologian whether you  want to be or not and you will remain respectful of the great minds who have worked out the fundamental doctrines of the church

The next thing is to explain the trinity, not in abstract terms, and not with some simple image such as the shamrock that St. Patrick s supposed to have used to explain it to the Irish. Rather I want to explain it to you historically. How did we GET the trinity? I want to suggest we get it from two places. First of all there is a natural tendency in the human mind to think in terms of the One and the Many. It is a problem that has occupied all the great philosophers, as it occupies us. We all think about how our children or our spouses can be many different things and yet one thing.  We all think about how all dogs can be different and yet all participate in the Oneness we call Dog. 

But more immediately, we find the concept of the Trinity everywhere in the Bible, even though we do not find the word itself there, and in fact we do not find it in commentary before 180 A.D. There is no doubt that Judaism is deeply monotheistic. But there are hints of multiplicity even in in the first chapter of Genesis, where we find God himself saying, “Let US create man in OUR own image, in OUR likeness.”  The three men who visit Abraham in Genesis 18 have been seen as an adumbration of the Trinity. Even one of the names of God in the OT--Elohim--is used only in the Plural. In the NT, the clearest statements of the trinity are in the baptismal commission in MT 28 and in 2 Cor 13:14,but there are many other passages with a Trinitarian cast to them. And more importantly, there is the many many passages where Jesus talks about his relationship to his Father and where he talks about the Holy Spirt, the comforter, the advocate. It is the constant talk about the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, sometimes separately, sometimes in twos that led the early church deeper and deeper into the ideas we finally began to call the Trinity. The graphic I put on the front of the bulletin gives us a crude schematic that can help us understand. 

The names of the people who did this are a roll call of what we call The Fathers, with names like Tertullian, and Origen, and Irenaeus of Lyon, and Basil of Casearia, and Augustine of Hippo,  In our own time, the best Protestant theologian,Karl Barth, and the best Catholic theologian, Karl Rahner,  have spent some of their best energy writing books about the trinity.We cannot begin to trace their thoughts in any detail but we can generalize and say that they have noticed that God expresses himself in the world in different ways. As we focus on these different  ways, we find it easy to group them into three: Creation, Redemption, and Sanctification. In other words, God reveals himself first in the fact that He created the world and in the kind of universe he created. God revealed himself in a Jewish carpenter who claimed to be the son of God and who taught and healed and who gave his life, as he said, as a ransom for many and then rose from the dead to show he was who he said he was.   Finally God  revealed himself in releasing a powerful force that continually reveals God’s mercy and power and will and who even guides our prayer. 

As we notice that God is One expressing himself in three different ways, there are two errors it is easy to fall into, and people have fallen into both of them: The first is Modalism (Sabellianism), the Second is subordinationism (also called Monarchism).  Modalism is the belief that God acted sequentially in time, first as the creator, then as the redeemer, then as the sanctifier Monarchism is the belief that God is the big Numero Uno and other two footnotes or afterthoughts or just aspects of God.  But when we avoid these errors, it is possible to see the three persons of the trinity in a kind of dance. For this, we have used a big and beautiful Greek word, Perichorisis. (Use children to illustrate.) No one part of the Trinity acts alone. 

It is this dance that I would leave you with. We need the trinity, not only to distinguish ourselves from Hindus and Buddhists, and even from groups that call themselves Christians but which do not honor theTrinity, such as Jehovahs Witness and Mormons. We need the trinity in order to experience the comprehensiveness of God. We need the Trinity in order to understand how God ministers to EVERY aspect of our lives.  God is not just one thing, he is many things. He did not just act once, he acts continuously. He is active right now.