A Difficult Light (Trinity Series)

Last week, we traced some of the history of the doctrine of the Trinity, emphasis on the word “some.”  The full history is tortuous and twisty, and we didn’t even talk about things from the Latin side . . . And I claimed that how we envision the divine is critical to our self-understanding—just precisely in what way are we created in God’s image?—and how we treat others, including how we live in community, Christian or otherwise.

We also saw that the doctrine was by-and-large set in stone by the end of the fifth century, and that as time marched on, it became increasingly marginalized, especially in the pews, where we tend to recite it by rote in worship (if we mention it at all) but don’t pay it no never mind anytime else.  It certainly doesn’t carry much weight in the minds of believers, at least not enough to be fundamental to our faith as a growing number of scholars believe it to be.

Why do you supposed that is?  Why have we shuffled it off to Buffalo and buried it beneath platitudes for so many centuries?  Why have we given such an important doctrine lip service for so long?  Could it be its just too tough a proposal to get our minds around, so hard to understand that we dismiss it as gobbledygook or declare it the province of pointy-headed theologians like Biblical scholars have tended to do?

To answer that question, we have to take a detour back into the mists of time—well, only about 800 years before Christ—to the beginning of what theologians call the “Axial Age.”  During this time, Western Philosophy was born, reaching its stride some 400 years later in Plato and Aristotle.  In particular, philosophical argument is based on three so-called “Laws of Thought” that can be traced back to Plato.  These laws are (1) the law of identity, or “whatever is, is”; (2) the law of non-contradiction, or “nothing can both be and not be” and (3) the law of the excluded middle, or “everything must either be or not be.”  And the Laws of Thought begat dialectical reasoning or argument, which Lo! has been the basis of rational thought ever since.  All our scientific advances, all our technology, our cold medicines and iPhones, our beliefs about what is possible and what is not, are based on dialectical thought and reasoning.

And fundamental to all this is the notion that a thing is either true or not true, either one thing or the other, but not both.  This is often called dualistic thinking, and we grew up bathed in it, trained in it, and so we all—almost subconsciously—think that way.  And so, right off the bat, something that violates these rules—as the Trinity surely does—is going to make us uncomfortable.

Can you see the kind of cognitive dissonance this sets up, especially among those who were raised in the church?  We’ve been told something is true, that it is part of our Christian faith, yet it violates our very way of thinking.  We can maybe accept that there is a great, all-powerful being somewhere else, but that’s separate, up-above, in a different place or sphere.  And that only violates some esoteric laws of physics and causality that nobody cares about, anyway . . but the notion that something can be two things at once?  Now you’re meddlin’ . . . that violates the way we see the world.  Where would we be if our cat was also our dog?  If a car was a polar bear?  If a man was a woman?  You can see what happens there in the story of Caitlin Jenner . . . We have to be able to count on things being one thing or another, or we couldn’t function . . Could we?

And there’s another, more fundamental notion that this violates . . . our sense of self, of identity, of personhood.  Very early on we learnt that we are not those around us, and that they were not us.  First, we separated our own identity from that of our mother—we learn we’re not-the-mama—then next, from everyone else.  In other words, we forge our own identity, we learn that I am not you and, by extension, that Jim is not Bob and Bob is not Carol.  That’s the way the world works: you’re either one thing or another, one person or another, and never the twain shall meet.

But in the Trinity, all of that goes by the wayside.  The Father is the Son.  The Son is the Father.  And they’re both the Holy Spirit.  Oy vey!  What’s a thoroughly modern Western thinker to do?

Well.  Back to the end of the second century . . . You remember that around that time, Christian theologians began to couch Christian theology in terms of Neoplatonic philosophy?  No?  Well they did . . . and in doing so, they used not only the form of reasoning of the Neoplatonists but their vocabulary as well, and a major problem was that if you asked three philosophers what a certain Greek word meant, you’d get four answers, the fourth coming after one of them thought about it overnight.  Thus, some of them — including Origen, the big guy of Greek theology — used the Greek word hypostasis in its older sense of “a single concrete being,” while his successors — whippersnappers that they were — understood it to mean more like “state” or “underlying substance.” Take another Greek word, ousia, which, depending on who you talked to, meant “being” as such (as opposed to a single being like my cat Chili) or “essence,” i.e., cat-ness, or what makes a cat a cat and not a dog.

Well again.  I didn’t pick those two particular words out of thin air, or because I like the way they sound—ousia . . . hypostasis—but because the fundamental definition of the Trinity, the one that came out of the Councils of Nicea and Constantinople, the one that has survived over the centuries to this very day—is that the Godhead is “three hypostases in one ousia” or “three beings in one essence” or “three states in one being” or . . . Well, you get the point.

To complicate matters further, Latin was becoming the lingua Franca of the Western Church, centered at Rome, the chief theological biggie of which was one Augustine of Hippo.  And the favored translation of hypostasis was persona (i.e., person) and the favored translation of ousia was “substance.”  Giving the overall definition as “Three persons in one substance.”  Of course, this is where we get the line in everybody’s favorite Trinitarian hymn:  “God in three Persons, blessed Trinity.”

Are we confused enough?  I know I am . . . So, let’s cut to the chase and I’ll give you my favorite rendition, and it's the earliest version: God is “three beings in one essence,” with essence meaning God’s basic God-hood, what makes God God, and being meaning “concrete being” or “example of a being.”   I don’t use “person” because today we think about it as an individual human being and that’s not what is meant by it.  Notice that this is nicely Platonic, or rather Neoplatonic, where the essential God-ness is a Neoplatonic ideal and the Father, Son and Holy Spirit are actual examples of that ideal.

Of course, that wasn’t the end, because they had to describe how The Son and the Holy Spirit came about.  The first one was easy, the Son was begotten from the Father.  Not made, you understand, but begotten . . . remember that thing with Mary?  The Holy Spirit, however, wasn’t so easy, and it took another Century and a half after the Nicene Council to come to an agreement:  the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father (and the Son, in the West).  That “proceeds” is a participle, as in “proceeding,” indicating that the Spirit is a dynamic thing, always proceeding down into the world from the Father (and, in the West, the Son).

If you look at the first page of your handout, you’ll see a Medieval representation of the Trinity that captures many of the features of the doctrine.  It's called the “Shield of the Trinity,” and back in the day, variations were used in coats of arms and to embellish actual shields.  The lines between the entities represent their relationships: the Father is-not the Son, the Son is-not the Holy Spirit and so on.   They are all God, by dint of their ousia, their essence, which is represented by lines labeled “is.”  The Father is on the left, the Son on the right—at the same level—with the Holy Spirit below them, indicating, perhaps, that it processes from them.  In the West, that is.

But wait a minute: if the Son is begotten of the Father, and the Holy Ghost is proceeding from the Father, what about the Father, who is technically just another being who is God like the Son and Spirit?  Where did the Father come from?  Nowhere: the divine Father was neither begotten or made, said the fathers of the Church. and didn’t proceed from anywhere.  The Father, alone out of the three hypostases, the three persons, had always been there.  Thus, in a triad of supposed equals, the person of the Father was more equal, and his positioning at the top of the Trinitarian triangle in many representations—like the one on the second page of your handout—reinforced that feeling.

In fact, no matter how you slice it, in the doctrine of the Trinity, the Father looks superior to the other members, even though this is a big no-no . . . So big that it has a name, Subordinationism, and is considered a heresy.  In theory, the members of the Trinity are co-equal.  In practical terms, however, you can’t hardly get there from here.

And that has helped spark re-evaluation of the doctrine, among feminist scholars as well as others, exploring the relationships among the members . . . What does it mean to say that the Father “begets” the Son? What kind of relationship does that imply?  Can we abstract it to a “parental” relationship, or is there something uniquely “father-like” about it?  What does it mean that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son?  Surely that is a dynamic, ongoing thing, as implied by the participle . . . is the “begetting” dynamic and ongoing as well?  We’ll explore some of these notions next week, as we look at some of the leading edges of Trinitarian thought.

But for now, let’s notice that stepping back, one might say that God, or perhaps more accurately the “God-head,” is relationship.  And as Franciscan priest Richard Rohr puts it, that relationship is love.   After all, First John assures us that what God is, is love, so how could it be any different?  And we are made in God’s image, are we not, and if that is true, are we not love, at our very core, do we not share in the dynamic, life-giving nature and relationships—one in three, three in one, all in love— of the God-head?  And not only we as individuals, but we as community are founded on love . . . The relationships within us—body, spirit, mind—and between us are bound by, bathed in, comprised of nothing less than love.  Amen.