The Symbol of the Trinity

I recently added a post to this blog that has the title The Symbol of the Incarnation.  You'll find it immediately below this one.  I was prompted to write that piece (and an earlier blog post that also deals with the Incarnation) because as a member of the Pacific Northwest Conference, UCC, Committee on Ministry I regularly read ordination papers by recent seminary graduates that express a humanistic or unitarian Christology.  They see Jesus Christ as a great man, but only as a great man, not more.  The ordination candidates, and anyone else for that matter, who have a humanistic Christology that rejects the Incarnation also usually reject the other foundational symbol of the Christian faith, the Trinity.  That a denial of these two central Christian doctrines, Incarnation and Trinity, go together is not surprising.  They are closely related both historically and theologically, and they present us both with some of the same obstacles to faith and some of the same spiritual virtues.  My discussion of the need to retain and reclaim the Incarnation through a symbolic understanding of it will be incomplete unless it is complimented by a discussion of the Trinity and of the symbolic nature of Trinitarian language.  The purpose of this post is to provide that discussion.

The traditional Christian doctrine of the Trinity states that God has a triune nature.  The doctrine says that God is Three in One, that God is at the same time three “persons” and one God.  The traditional names of the three persons are, of course, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  Each of them is fully God and doesn’t need the others to be completely God, and God is not complete without all three of them.  There is one God, and God is three.  The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are the same, and they are different.  All three are uncreated; and the Son is begotten by the Father, and the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father (or from the Father and the Son if, like most western Christians and unlike any eastern Orthodox Christians, you accept the insertion of the word “filioque” into the creed that occurred in western Europe in the late first millennium CE).

One thing to keep in mind during any discussion of the Trinity is that it is almost impossible to say anything about the Trinity that the Christian tradition has not at some point declared to be a heresy.  The Persons of the Trinity are not three separate Gods, nor are they one undifferentiated God.  They are not three modes of God’s being.  They are not three ways in which a unified God relates to creation.  The Father is not superior to the Son or to the Holy Spirit.  That is, the Father is not a sort of supreme God over two lesser Gods.  The Holy Spirit is not a sort of lesser deity, even though a lot of Christians seem to think of the Holy Spirit that way.  God is not sometimes one of the Persons, at other times a second Person, and at other times a third Person.  I don’t think I’ve ever heard a member of my church say anything about the Trinity that wasn’t some sort of heresy or other.  I always assure them that that’s OK.  Heretics tend to be more interesting than people who strictly toe the orthodox line.  Still, it is truly almost impossible to say anything about the Trinity that isn’t a heresy.  And yet, with that truth in mind, I will now say more about the Trinity.

The classical Christian doctrine of the Trinity says that two totally incompatible things are both true at the same time.  God is One, and God is Three, which in ordinary worldly terms makes no sense.  So why would Christianity develop such an apparently nonsensical doctrine and make it a cornerstone of the Christian faith?  The answer, both historically and theologically, lies in the doctrine of the Incarnation.  For Christianity the experience of Jesus Christ as a human being who represented the presence of God in a unique way is foundational.  It came, and comes, first.  It led to the doctrine of the Incarnation.  For more on that development see my post “The Symbol of the Incarnation.” 

The doctrine of the Incarnation creates a problem for our understanding of God.  It says that God was fully present in Jesus Christ.  It says that, while Jesus was also fully human, he was fully God.  During the lifetime of the human being Jesus of Nazareth God was present on earth in him, which raises some significant questions.  If, during Jesus’ lifetime, God was on earth in him, does that mean that God wasn’t anywhere else during those thirty plus years at the beginning of the Christian era?  Jesus died of course.  Does that mean that God died?  (Yes, although I won’t spend much time on that particular question in this post.  For my thinking on the subject see Chapter 9 of Liberating Christianity.)  Jesus left the earth after his resurrection.  Does that mean that God has left the earth?  There was a lot of human history before Jesus was born.  Does that mean that God wasn’t present on earth in any way before Jesus was born?  The Trinity is Christianity’s way of dealing with these questions.

It deals with those questions quite brilliantly.  It says:  God was fully present on earth in Jesus Christ and was not fully present on earth in Jesus Christ at the same time.  It says that God left the earth with Jesus Christ and did not leave the earth in Jesus Christ at the same time.  It says God was present on earth in Jesus Christ, but also present on earth in other ways at other times.  As Trinity God can be completely in one place and in other places at the same time.  The Son, the Second Person of the Trinity, can be incarnate in Jesus, which means that God is fully incarnate in Jesus.  Yet the Father and the Holy Spirit, the First and Third Persons of the Trinity, can not be incarnate in Jesus while the Son is, even though they are one God.  The Incarnation drove Christianity to develop the Trinitarian understanding of God.  The Incarnation is impossible without it.

The Incarnation explains why Trinity, but the Trinitarian understanding of God turns out to have a great many more virtues than merely making the Incarnation possible.  One of the Trinity’s great virtues is that it makes God dynamic and relational.  A central concept in Trinitarian theology is perichoresis.  Perichoresis is a combination of two Greek roots.  Peri means around.  Choresis means to dance.  It is the root of our word choreography.  Perichoresis is, then, dancing around.  The persons of the Trinity engage in a perpetual, cosmic dance.  They move around, in, out, and through each other.  Perichoresis is a constant movement of the Persons of the Trinity.  They never stop.  They are never still.  They are dynamic, always moving.  They are never alone.  They move in constant relationship with one another.  Trinitarian theology says that it is in God’s very nature to be in movement and to be in relationship.  God relates to Godself in the Trinity.  God’s relational nature pours out of the Godhead and into relationship with creation.  To Christians immersed in Trinitarian thinking, which of course most Christians really aren’t, the monistic God of Judaism and the even more statically unified God of Islam seem inert, unmoving, un-relational.  That is not to deny that there is truth in those two great religious traditions.  I never deny that there is truth in other religions.  It is only to say that for Christians Trinity is important in part because it is not static.  The Trinitarian God of Christianity is dynamic and relational, characteristics that make God more accessible, more approachable, more intimate.

The other great virtue of the doctrine of the Trinity is precisely that it is incomprehensible.  How can incomprehensibility be a virtue?  It is a virtue because the one thing that we know about God with relative certainty is that God is and always will remain a profound, divine mystery to us humans.  Anyone who thinks that she knows what or who God is in God’s essence is wrong.  God is immanent in creation to be sure, but God also transcends creation absolutely.  God is totally other (totaliter aliter, the theologians say) from creation.  Humans are part of creation.  Humans therefore never can and never will know the true essence of God.  Any statement we make about God must immediately be followed by the negation of that statement.  God is love, for example, must be followed by God is not love in any way we humans can understand love.  The negation is necessary to preserve the mystery of God.

The orthodox Christian doctrine of the Trinity meets this standard for statements about God because it contains its own negation of anything it says about God.  God is one, it says; and God is not one.  God is three, it says; and God is not three.  God is the Father, the First Person of the Trinity, and God is not the Father, the First Person of the Trinity.  God is the Son, the Second Person of the Trinity, and God is not the Son, the Second Person of the Trinity.  God is the Holy Spirit, the Third Person of the Trinity, and God is not the Holy Spirit, the Third Person of the Trinity.  (By the way, we number the Persons of the Trinity only because we humans can’t say three things at once.  We have to put them in some kind of order.  God of course can say three things at once, so there is no hierarchy within the Trinity even though our human language makes it sound like there is.)  Any understanding of the Trinity that forgets the inherent self-contradiction in any statement about the Trinity is heresy.  It is heresy because it takes away the paradoxical nature of the Trinitarian understanding of God.

The notion that incomprehensibility can be a virtue is foreign to most of us in the western cultural tradition.  We want clarity.  We want firm answers.  As I mention in Liberating Christianity, I once heard the great historian/philosopher Isaiah Berlin say that the western mind is characterized by three fundamental beliefs:  There is an answer to every question, there is only one correct answer to every question, and it is possible to know that answer.  Science, our culture’s primary epistemology, our primary way of knowing and discovering truth, is extremely uncomfortable with unanswerable questions.  The scientist keep searching for answers.  Classic examples today are the search for a unified theory that would explain all aspects of physical reality the way Einstein’s famous E=mc² and his general theory of relativity explain some aspects of physical reality, and the search to understand what happened during the tiny fraction of a second after the Big Bang that our current theories cannot explain.  We don’t like unanswered questions.  We don’t like even to concede that there are unanswerable questions.  The essence of God is, however, an unanswerable question.  The Trinity preserves that unanswerability precisely because it doesn’t make any sense.

I have found it helpful to think of the Trinity as a Zen koan.  A Zen koan is an unanswerable question used in meditation to take the mind off of ordinary things.  The most famous is “what is the sound of one hand clapping?”  Another I heard recently is “what is the speed of dark?”   The Trinity asks:  What is One when it is Three?  What are Three when they are One?  You can’t answer those questions.  You can only meditate on them and see their incomprehensibility as pointing to and preserving the mystery of God.

It should be obvious by now that Trinitarian language is symbolic not factual.  That truth seems so obvious to me that I’m finding it difficult to come up with anything else to say about it.  Trinitarian language can’t be factual.  It simply makes no sense to try to understand the Trinity rationally, to try to understand it as fact.  It has those virtues I talked about above only when we are willing to understand it as symbol.  Like the Incarnation with which it is so closely related, the symbol of the Trinity powerfully connects us with God, but only if we can get over trying to understand it literally. 

As in the case of the Incarnation, I believe that the reason so many people today, including graduates from our mainline seminaries, have trouble accepting the Trinity is because, being creatures of their culture as we all are, they hear the doctrine literally, factually; and they can’t make sense out of it.  So they reject it, which really is a pity.  When we reject the Trinitarian understanding of God we reject something that is at the very heart of traditional Christianity.  We lose all of the virtues of the Trinitarian way of thinking about God.  Thinking of the Trinity as symbol rather than fact preserves it and all of its virtues.  As symbol, like any true religious symbol, we find our connection to God in it.  God reaches out to us through it.  The Trinity is definitely worth saving.  Symbol is the way to save it.