'On Banning Trinity Sunday': Trinity Sunday
We can only really think of God in terms of who and what we already know or have experienced. I certainly wouldn’t go so far as Freud, and advocate the reduction of God to a human projection. But when it comes to the greatest mystery, the divine presence herself, or himself, all we have to work with are our limited human terms and human metaphors; even our pronouns fail us, or trip us up at least. God is the Creator, the Father; God is the Redeemer, our Lord Jesus; God is the Giver of Life, God’s breath, Holy Spirit. Julian of Norwich, one of the great English theologians, wrote that God is our Mother; she is our comforter, our friend, our lover.
The scriptures and our tradition point us towards a personal God, they encourage us into relationship with a God we can know and trust. While there is truth in these teachings and these perceptions of God, they do not contain the whole picture. Our scriptures, and the life of faith, point at the same time towards a profoundly unknowable, mysterious, hidden, and different God. If I am beginning to think that I have God neatly wrapped up in a box, I need to think again. A medieval mystic, drawing on a sixth-century tradition, described this Triune God as “The Cloud of Unknowing.”
The doctrine of the Trinity is simply a human attempt to point towards the indescribable. It began with the New Testament writings, but then took some three hundred years and numerous church councils before the doctrine we recognise today was formed. Even then, it became a doctrine that is reshaped and reinterpretted in every age. The doctrine holds in tension a personalised God - Father, Son and Holy Spirit – alongside the prayerful, unknowable mystery of God, the otherness of God, the strangeness of God.
As with all doctrine, it is scriptural, but equally it is not possible to construct Trinitarian solely from our scriptures. The word Trinity is not a Biblical word. To impose doctrinal strictures on our scriptures would be to domesticate them; to whittle away at the truth they preserve. The point is rather to prayerfully allow the scriptures to speak to us, to shape us. And the doctrine of the Trinity is like that too; it is exegesis rather than eisegesis, divine revelation rather than an imposed human philosophy or ideology. We might describe it as following in the slip-stream of Creator; or standing in the lightning storm of the Christ-life; or inhaling the “ruach” the breath of the Spirit.
Australian theologian, Ben Meyers, published in 2017 a very clever series that you may have seen. He entitled it: “Tweeting the Doctrine of the Trinity.” It is quite literally that, a series of tweets in which he attempts to summarise this foundational Christian doctrine. It is worth a read. Dr Meyers starts with eight handy tips to combat Trinitarian heresy:
#1. Start by abolishing Trinity Sunday, that fateful day on which preachers think they have to explain the Trinity
#2. Teach children to make the sign of the cross when they say the words “Father, Son and Holy Spirit”
#3. When someone offers to tell you the practical implications of the doctrine, just smile and move along
#4. Have you come up with a really helpful analogy of the trinity? Well done! Now please don’t tell anyone about it, ever
#5. The doctrine is not a mystery. It is simple & precise. The reality it points to is the mystery
#6. Don’t try to get rid of the biblical words. Don’t try to stick to them exclusively either
#7. In this doctrine every word is used in a very limited way. Even the numbers 1 and 3 can’t be taken literally
#8. Don’t partake in meaningless debates about whether “oneness” or “threeness” is more important (see #7)
For all the books and the scholarship and the study; the best way to understand the doctrine of the Trinity is to pray it, to breath it, to imbibe it, to live it, and yes, even to tweet it! And this is something that takes time. It is an approach that the great thinkers and saints have taken for centuries, and we have much to learn from them. It may not be comfortable, but it is real. Indeed, to coin Evelyn Underhill’s term, it is Reality with a capital “R”.
John Donne, the seventeenth-century English poet and cleric, puts it poignantly in his poem: “Batter my heart, three-person’d God.”
Batter my heart, three-person’d God, for you
As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;
That I may rise and stand, o’erthrow me, and bend
Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.
I, like an usurp’d town to another due,
Labor to admit you, but oh, to no end;
Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,
But is captiv’d, and proves weak or untrue.
Yet dearly I love you, and would be lov’d fain,
But am betroth’d unto your enemy;
Divorce me, untie or break that knot again,
Take me to you, imprison me, for I,
Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.