Trinity

Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts.
The whole earth is full of his glory.
Isaiah 6:3

Today's feast, Trinity Sunday, can be seen as the pivot of the entire church year, for it looks both backward and forward. On the one hand Trinity Sunday forms the capstone of all that has gone before: the season of Advent, the season of Christmas and Epiphany, the season of Lent, and the seaon of Easter, including Christ's resurrection, his ascension, and his sending the spirit on Whitsunday. But Trinity Sunday also looks forward: it introduces the Sundays in ordinary time, which the Prayer Book numbers as "Sundays after Trinity."

The doctrine of three persons in one God is not found explicitly anywhere in sacred scripture. And yet it can be seen as summing up not only the church year but also the whole history of salvation. "The Father," whom we adore, is the God of Israel, whom Jesus called "Abba" (Mark 14:36) and taught us to call "Our Father" (Matthew 6:9). "The Son" is Jesus himself, who was anointed at his baptism with the solemn words from heaven, "Thou art my beloved Son" (Mark 1:11). "The Spirit" is the spirit of Jesus, whom he sent to remind us of everything that he had taught us (John 14:26) and to guide us into all truth (John 16:13).

In the history of this doctrine of the Trinity, attention has focused on showing the other monotheistic faiths of Judaism and Islam that faith in the Trinity does not mean that Christians are polytheistic. The Creed of St. Athanasius affirms, with innumerable variations, "There are not three gods, but one God." To make this point, the philosophical concepts of "person" and "nature" have been finely honed, and, in the West, the elegant solution was arrived at by which each divine person was declared to be a "subsistent relation," so that the Son has everything that the Father has, except the name of Father, and similarly for the holy Spirit.

But as we move into the 21st century, the polemic against polytheism, which so dominated Israelite thinking and has so influenced speculation about the Trinity, has lost much of its relevance. With the discovery of other world religions, we can appreciate that monotheism is not the only paradigm for experiencing the divine.

Paul's statement that "there are many gods and many lords" (1 Corinthians 8:5) takes on new significance when we encounter, for example, the Hindu pantheon. Even within the Christian tradition we have innumberable Madonna cults: Our Lady of Czestechova, of Guadalupe, of Einsiedeln, of Walsingham, of Lourdes, and many, many others. These cults are the focus for a religious devotion which sometimes risks eclipsing the adoration of the most holy Trinity.

Human beings seem to be polytheistic by nature. The awesome oneness of the godhead may be experienced by mystics such as Meister Eckhart, but the religious experience of humankind is infinitely diverse and cannot be brought under any common denominator.

In this situation, Christian affirmation of the three: the God of Israel, our Lord Jesus Christ, and the spirit which dwells in our hearts (2 Corinthians 1:22) is no longer a problem to be solved but an expression of the variety of religious experience right in our own tradition.

June 15, 2003