October 17, 2011

• The Trinity

  

  What a hiatus! The latter half of September and October so far has been full; goodness I can hardly believe it’s been over a month since my last update. I have been meaning to update for the last couple of weeks but, alas, the mission always comes first and I wasn’t missioned to blog as my full-time apostolate!

  So my hope for this particular entry is not to slam-dunk the case for the Trinity but rather to offer some thoughts and ideas for understanding and talking about the Trinity (prepare yourself for a whole handful of nutshells!). To the dismay of some the Christian doctrine of the Trinity is not explicitly Biblical (as in the word “trinity” does not appear in the Scriptures, nor is the doctrine outlined or defined). The history of the doctrine’s development out of Apostolic Tradition (in other words what Christ taught His Apostles and they taught the first Christians, who taught the second generation, and so on until today) and Scripture is fascinating and, frankly, far to great in its scope for something like this blog! Nevertheless it is an absolutely crucial doctrine in Christianity; after all, Jesus’ commission to “go and baptize all nations in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit” hardly makes sense if we yet claim to be monotheists! Yet we are. However some say, “Well you sound polytheist to me!” But we aren’t. We believe in one God in three Persons and vice-versa.

  

  Three in One? One in Three? Does…not…compute…

  Trinity? What It That, er, Who Is That? Er…Who Is?

  “Trinity” is a word that basically means “threeness,” which refers to God’s nature; the Trinity is the mystery of who God is. Hence, it ought to be extremely impossible to understand fully! But the fact that we even have a slight grasp that He is Three-in-One is an amazing grace and revelation. So, just as “unity” and “duality” mean “oneness” and “twoness,” “trinity” means “threeness;” three-as-one. You might also look at the word “trinity” the same way we look at the word “humanity” or “divinity;” the word “trinity” is speaking not merely of God’s numerical properties but of His very nature, His “threeness” just like “humanity” is speaking of our “human-ness.” Humanity is enough of a mystery to try and comprehend, yet here we are talking about Trinity. Are we not the most blessed people in the world?!?

  Some Scripture

  Besides the Great Commission at the end of Matthew’s Gospel, there are some other Scripture sources that at least begin pointing in the direction of a doctrine like the Trinity. My absolute favorite is Genesis 1:26 not only because it is beautiful but an important little word is so often glossed over:

  “Then God said: Let us make- human beings in our image, after our likeness. Let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, the birds of the air, the tame animals, all the wild animals, and all the creatures that crawl on the earth.”

  Literally in the beginning we see God speaking in the plural; I can’t even think of another time in which He does this.

  John 10:30 is probably about the most frank line of Scripture regarding at least a duality in God (since the Holy Spirit isn’t directly mentioned here:

  “The Father and I are one.” (Note the PERIOD at the end of that sentence!)

  John 17 is referred to in some Bibles as “The Prayer of Jesus.” In it He says things like, “Now glorify me, Father, with you, with the glory that I had with you before the world began” (17:5),

  “…everything of mine is yours and everything of yours is mine…” (17:10),

  “Holy Father, keep them in your name that you have given me, so that they may be one just as we are” (17:11b), 

  “I pray not only for them, but also for those who will believe in me through their word, so that they may all be one, as you, Father, are in me and I in you, that they also may be in us, that the world may believe that you sent me. And I have given them the glory you gave me, so that they may be one, as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may be brought to perfection as one, that the world may know that you sent me, and that you loved them even as you loved me” (17:20-23).

  If by these we can at least agree that, Scripturally, Christ and God are one (a duality) then we might be able to connect that with a verse like John 20:21-22 when Jesus says, ““Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you.” And when he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, “Receive the holy Spirit…” Just as the Father sent Jesus, Jesus sends the Apostles. When He says this, He breathes on them, telling them that they have just received the Holy Spirit in that very breath…

  We start to see, then, that while we pick up hints toward a three-ality in Scripture, especially in the Gospels, defining the Trinity (not inventing mind you!) took more than merely what was written; after all, not everything Jesus said and did was written down (John 20:30)! Yet we see in the writings and artwork of the first few centuries of Christianity that the Trinity was something crucial to their beliefs; the oldest existing work in which the word “trinity” is used with the meaning we are all discussing here comes from the 2nd-century, even though the doctrine wasn’t defined in its present form until sometime in or around the 4th century. If Christians were already believing that God was a Trinity of Persons all along, why did the Church feel the need to define it, to use its Christ-given authority to clear things up and declare what Christians believe?

  Heretics of course! But I won’t go into all that mess; there are plenty of books that do a better job than I could. Let’s just say that, in the end, the Church was guided by the Holy Spirit to yet again chart that almost impossible course, threading the needle not around but straight between two heresies: Arianism/Subordinationism (that there is one Person, the Father, and Jesus is a creatureor that there is a hierarchy of superiority in the Trinity, with the Father being the greatest) and Sabellianism/Modalism (that there is one Person who appears to us in three modes or, as one professor of mine put it, wears three masks according to his purpose). Granted, many of you theologians out there will roll your eyes at these very loose definitions, but I’m not here to write a treatise! Yet in our orthodox doctrine we have three distinct Persons just like Arianism but without any subordination, and we have the oneness and unity of Sabellianism without achieving it by saying there is just One Person. In a true Catholic fashion the Church had revealed to it the both/and rather than the either/or and, given what we find in the Apostolic Tradition as well as Scripture, our Doctrine on the Trinity fits whereas Arianism, Sabellianism and various other heretical -isms fail. So how do we even talk about something like this?

  It’s All About Love

  Richard of St. Victor, who lived and died in the 12th century, wrote among many things De Trinitatae and in it I believe he explains in beautiful, simple terms a few ways of talking about the Trinity. Being unable to find an online version of the text, I’ll try and summarize what I read back in the spring.

  One of the ways Richard demonstrates a Trinity in God is on the basis of what we know about love. Being that God is perfect, this means God is lacking in nothing; He has everything of everything. This would include love; He is love after all (1 John 4:8)! Were God a single Person, there would be no one for Him to love. Some people out there believe that’s why God created us; not quite! Because, you see, in order to love perfectly, God would have to be able to love someone like Himself, someone else capable of returning an equal love. While He does indeed love us (unto mind-blowing proportions) we can only return that love on a human level, not on the same level that God has given it. To use a crude analogy, we are certainly capable of loving a dog a great deal, but that dog can never, ever love us back in the same way that, say, our spouse or child could. To love perfectly a human being must love and be loved by someone like themselves: a fellow human being. If God is to be perfect, then, He must be able to love not merely another God, but someone identical and equally perfect to Himself. Hence, if God is truly Love and loving, there must be at least two identical persons in God; the Lover and the Beloved. Yet, Richard goes on to say, love is only truly perfected when it is shared with a third person. We see this mirrored in human love, too; when two people are engaged to marry, wouldn’t it be an absolute impossibility for them to keep that to themselves for very long? We see it most mirrored (incarnated, you might say!) in a marriage: we see a man and a woman who love each other, and that love leads to a third person–the child–and then we see the human family take form. In this fallen world, in our fallen nature, we also see the anguish of those couples who are unable to conceive; were the love between the two of them complete in and of itself, where does this anguish come from? (Note: PRAY for couples who have difficulty conceiving!)

  By this understanding of love (again, my meager attempt at summarizing what I read months ago) we can at least demonstrate that a Trinitarian God, rather than a Unitarian or Dual(itarian?) God is reasonable; seeing Two persons is fairly straightforward and seeing a Third is not that far off. It is in a community that love finds its perfection. Some might say, “Well, why stop at three?” I would say because of God’s perfection; three Persons is what is necessary and any beyond that suggest something still lacking in the previous Three. Remember, He’s perfect!

   

  St. Thomas Aquinas also had a way of talking about the Trinity, again relying upon the belief that God is perfect. He suggests that God the Father, in knowing Himself perfectly, “begets” the Son. Take a moment and imagine yourself. Picture yourself in your mind, as accurately as you can. You cannot do it perfectly; if you could do it perfectly–in that your knowledge of yourself would not be lacking in anything whatsoever–that very thought would come into real existence. God, however, is capable of knowing Himself perfectly! The Son is the personified, perfect knowledge of God’s self; this is also why the Son is referred to as the only-begotten as opposed to being created, since the Son is not created by God (like we are) but rather is of God, as we are of our parents and not created by them. Goodness, what a mess that would be! The Holy Spirit, then, is the love God the Father has for Himself as He knows Himself; the Holy Spirit is the love between the Father and the Son. Again, imagine yourself and, hopefully, you love that self that you know. Imagine if you could love yourself perfectly, as God can love Himself perfectly. God can love Himself perfectly, so perfectly that this love becomes a Person. In a nutshell (as though this wasn’t a nutshell already!) the Trinity is the Knower, the Known and the Knowing, or the Lover, the Beloved and the Love/Loving. St. Thomas also uses the language of the inner Word of God that is spoken on the breath of the Spirit; God’s thought of the Word and His speaking forth is all one, eternal action that never had a beginning and never had an end. All the members of the Trinity are co-eternal; there was never a time when they weren’t all three existing. After all, how could the Father be the Father without the Son and vice-versa, and would they not love each other?

  With both Richard and St. Thomas we see a Trinity of three identical persons; the only thing that makes them distinct from each other is their relationship. Everything else about them is completely identical; there is nothing present in one that is not present in the other. Isn’t it amazing, then, to realize that the only reason that the Son obeys the Father is not because the Father is any different, but because out of perfect love for the other Person the Son chooses to lower Himself? By the same the Father, out of love for the other, though He knows Himself not to be any different from Him, accepts the humility and self-lowering of a Person identical in every way to Himself? Can you even begin to imagine such a love?!?!?

   

  Finally I might add my own little thing here about why there is a Trinity as opposed to three Gods as some heretics preached, as some Muslims accuse Christians of believing and some Christians, unfortunately, believe.

  God is perfect, so if there are three God’s then you have three perfect Gods. If they are truly perfect–lacking in nothing whatsoever–then they are identical in every. single. way.

  Here’s a problem: if there are three separate persons–separate mind you–then they must occupy different “places” (yes, I know the difficulty of talking about “place” when we are also talking about immaterial beings!). 

  For example say there were three of me (I’ve chosen different pics of myself just to illustrate that even at different points in time, I was as much me as a toddler and a time-traveler as I am me as a Jesuit seminarian with my baby niece) :

  

  Even three identical clones of myself would still differ in their relation to one another, to their place. If they were perfect clones they would have everything in common; thus three perfect clones would occupy the same space at the same time. Three perfect immaterial beings would thus only differ in relation to one another, thus you couldn’t have anything less than a Trinity anyways. The only way to have three Gods is if at least two of them are somehow lesser or imperfect but, then, it hardly makes sense to have one perfect God and two imperfect ones, does it? And if only one is perfect, then we run into Richard’s whole thing about love…oh let’s just all be Christians, shall we?

  Now, why a post on the Trinity? Whoopee, so what; God is one-in-three; why is this relevant to me, Mr. Joe Christian? My goodness, it is the very heart of the matter! You see we are made in the image and likeness of this Trinitarian God; we are meant to be a part of this mystery. But how do we become a part of it? That’s the whole purpose of Christianity; that is why God spoke to Noah and all our fathers in the faith, that is why the Son became Man and lived, suffered and died for us, that is why during His ministry He instituted Seven Sacraments, this is why He sent us the Holy Spirit, this is why He left us teachers in His Apostles, this is why He founded His Church and entrusted it to those same men. He has done all of this so that we could be immersed in the waters of the Trinity, to live in the very love of the absolute heart of God.

  I hope to do my next post (or posts, as it may or may not happen) on the Sacrament of Baptism so, for those who bravely and very, very charitably read this whole post (and even those who just skipped to the baby pictures and saw this last sentence!), what questions do you have regarding the Sacrament of Baptism? Even if I cannot answer all of them it would at least give me an indication of what things I ought to try and address.

  God bless you all!

  • 8:44 pm
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