Trinity column

  I was sorely tempted to write on President Trump, but need to consider the Comey testimony properly, as it seems we are reliving Watergate. Since this is Trinity Sunday, I thought it better to consider a crucial dogma as a pastor, instead of my former role as a teacher of American government. Of course it is daunting to speak of Trinity. After all, we are trying to come to grips with God.

Most Christians are Trinitarians. The reason is obvious. If we hold to the great claim: hear O Israel, the Lord our God is one, we run into a logical issue when we speak of Jesus as divine. Critics of the doctrine are correct that it is not spelled out in Scripture, but Scripture certainly provides the raw material for it. This Sunday we will read Paul’s blessing, for instance 2 Cor. 13:11-13). Celtic Christianity will call God the One, or the Three. God provides a template for us to grasp both unity and diversity.

Kalistos Ware- “ God is openness, exchange, solidarity, self-giving. The same is true of the human person when living in a Trinitarian mode according to the divine image.”

One major difficulty in our frail grasp is in the hymn, Holy, Holy, Holy and its phrase, God in three persons, blessed Trinity.  Thomas Jefferson saw this as utterly fanciful, as he found it ludicrous to say one is three and three one. It stems from a translation difficulty; Person comes from an ancient word, a mask, a role, in theater. So, one actor can have a variety of parts in a production. Some see Scripture as giving us three basic aspects of the divine, not three utterly distinct, separate entities, but a communion of three shared scenes, three connected modalities, in the divine drama.

Paul Fiddes-“When the early Church Fathers developed the doctrine of the Trinity, they were not painting by numbers; they were finding concepts to express an experience.”

The Old Testament readings this week center on God and creation. We have more understanding of the history of creation than any human beings ever. We now take it as a given that our instruments will reveal more wonders in the farthest reaches of space. John 1:14 sees God’s own logic and order (logos) inherent in Jesus Christ. We would never be able to discover patterns in nature, if it were chaotic. It is a tragedy, or better, a sin, that we have permitted the faith to try to drive a wedge between science and faith, by claiming precedence for a particular, poor reading of Scripture. The truth about the god of the heavens cannot be threatened by the truth of the handiwork of God.

Trinitarian doctrine says that in spite of the vast reaches of the universe, God knows us and redeems us, by name. On the cosmic scale, what are we, as Ps. 8:4 would ask. In Jesus, we have an answer. God sees us as infinitely valuable, so much as to become not only with us, but one of us.

The late William Placher puts it this way: A kind of space lies within the triune God - a space potentially inclusive of the space of sinners and doubters - and yet this space is no desert but a spiritual garden of mutual love and glorification. In the incarnation, the three show that there is always within God a space large enough for the whole world, and even all its sin: The Word's distance from the one he calls Father is so great that no one falls outside it, and the Spirit fills all that space with love.” In other words, God’s love needs plenty of room.