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Trinity Sunday 2010 William Allberry 30thMay 2010 |
| I believe in one God, the Father almighty, Maker of heaven and earth. |
| Even in the godless world we live in today, most people believe there is a God. In this country surveys show that possibly as few as 40% have faith, though in the US it’s more like 80%. But belief in God is universal, and part of our nature. Perhaps that’s what it means to say we are made in God’s image: we have an innate sense of identity with our Maker. |
| But when we say, as we do in the Creed in our services, that we believe in God, what God do we believe in? The Muslims think that we believe in three Gods – they just don’t get the doctrine of the Trinity. But actually, who can blame them? We Christians are not exactly crystal clear about the doctrine of the Trinity, and how many of us are good at explaining what we mean? |
| I went to a meeting of the Council of Christians and Jews recently, and one of the ladies in the synagogue said, ‘You Christians have three Gods, don’t you?’ Well, this we’ve heard before, but she went on to say, ‘You have three Gods – God, Jesus and Mary!’ We don’t seem to get our message across very clearly, somehow. |
| Since the earliest days of the Church, when Christians were grappling with the problem of precisely who Jesus was, and why his expected second coming didn’t actually come about, Church leaders have tied themselves in knots in trying to explain the essential unity of God, Jesus and the Spirit. Successive Councils of the Church put together formulas which tried to make the understanding clear, but which in fact served only to muddy the waters. Three in One, and One in Three, the Holy Spirit proceeding from the Father and the Son – or as the Eastern churches have it, from the Father alone – tying themselves in knots with words and phrases which took them farther and further from the essential truth that there is one God, and one alone. |
| I think that the trouble begins, really, when we think of the Holy Spirit as somehow different from God. It isn’t that hard to understand that Jesus is God in human form. The idea of an avatar isn’t exclusive to Christianity; in Hinduism avatar means the descent of a deity from heaven to earth, and we would usually translate this as incarnation, or perhaps appearance, or manifestation. The word incarnation simply means ‘made flesh’. Pagan gods appear earth in human form, and return to heaven. That much isn’t hard to understand; and in Christian terms we can see God as transcendent, outside and beyond creation, and then becoming immanent, stepping into the world as a human being. |
| So far, so good. But it’s when we start to think of the Holy Spirit as a separate entity that we get into deep water. Instead of the idea of one God taking human form we’ve now got to extend the idea into a third entity, a third person. Jesus said, I will send the Holy Spirit, and he gave him certain attributes – the Comforter, the Advocate – and the trouble with attributes is that they tend to distinguish one person of God from the others. And I’ll come back to persons later, because I think that may be where the trouble lies. |
| Who, or what, is this Holy Spirit? In the Creed, we say: We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life, who proceeds from the Father and the Son, who with the Father and the Son is worshipped and glorified, who has spoken through the prophets. And in the baptism service we are asked, Do you believe and trust in God the Holy Spirit, who gives life to the people of God and makes Christ known in the world? As we read the Bible it’s made clear that the Holy Spirit was present in the creation of the world; the Spirit was given to some people, in more or less measure; the Spirit rested on great national leaders, great prophets and great kings: the gift of the Spirit was often a definite event that made a real difference in their lives. But the prophets looked forward to a time when God would pour out his Spirit on all people – that’s the lovely verse in Joel chapter 2, which says, I will pour out my spirit on all flesh; your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, and your young men shall see visions … |
| Then into the New Testament, the Spirit came on Mary as the angel told her she would have a child; the Spirit descended on Jesus at his baptism; and Jesus gave extensive teaching about the Spirit, and about how God would give the Spirit to those who ask him. He described the Spirit as the Advocate sent by the Father who would be with them for ever; the Spirit of truth, who would teach them everything and remind them of Jesus’s teaching; after the Resurrection he breathed on the disciples gathered in the upper room, and said, Receive the Holy Spirit. He promised that the Spirit would be poured out on all his followers after the Resurrection, and this is what happened on the Day of Pentecost, when the lives of the disciples were completely transformed. And then in that chronicle of the early Church, the Acts of the Apostles, we see the Spirit given to all Christians, either at their baptism or some time after. |
| In the first couple of centuries after Jesus’s appearance on earth, there were various sects who developed the heresies that so troubled the Church leaders. On the one hand there were those who said that Jesus was a good man, a great teacher and latter day prophet, but that he wasn’t truly God (which is of course what many people believe today); and on the other hand there were those who accepted what Jesus said: that he and the Father were one; and so believed that he was truly God, but they couldn’t accept that he was truly human (so perhaps in this sense they saw him as the Hindus or the Ancient Greeks saw their gods coming to earth, visitors from another dimension, but not really identifying with humanity). The Church leaders were concerned, and quite rightly, to put both these heresies down, and to assert that Jesus was both God and a human being: that in taking human form as Jesus, God set aside his divinity and made himself subject to human limitation; and then in returning after the Ascension he reassumed his complete Divinity, or God-ness. It’s not an impossible concept to grasp, but it was when they tried to put it into words, that the difficulties began: … the only Son of God, eternally begotten of the Father, God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten not made, of one Being with the Father … and so on. The words were trying to define something, but the more words there were, the more the idea they were trying to define seemed to recede into the incomprehensible. |
| And then when the early Church Fathers in their ecumenical Councils went on to describe and define the Holy Spirit, then they really got themselves tied up. If you really want to see the knots they tied themselves up in, read the version of the Creed known as the Quicunque vult – ‘Whosoever would be saved’ in the Book of Common Prayer, which the rubric says should be substituted for the shorter creed we’re familiar with on certain festivals, including Christmas Day, Easter, Ascension Day, Whitsunday and Trinity Sunday (today) as well as various saints’ days. Fortunately we’re no longer obliged to inflict this tortuous piece of reasoning on innocent worshippers in our churches! |
| The trouble for us lies, I think, in the word persons – one God in three persons. The word person actually comes from the Latin persona, used for the characters in a play: a persona is the role or character you are playing, and the word actually means a mask through which you speak – per sona. The trouble with the word person, though, is that we use it in the sense of an individual – a person is the singular form of the word people. And a constant and recurring mistake we human beings make is to anthropomorphise – to see God in human terms, to make him like a human being – that is, to make him in our image. So when Jesus speaks – as he does constantly – of the Father and the Son, we immediately think of a human father and his son: two distinct beings, two individuals; whereas Jesus used the terms father and son to emphasise the intimate relationship between him and God: the Father and I are one. And then we have the Spirit as a third persona, and we think of him as another individual, and then we get into difficulty in sorting out the relationship between the three. It’s just not enough to try explain away the difficulty by saying, as preachers have done over the centuries, that the three persons of God are like the three parts of the shamrock leaf, or by saying that as an individual I am both a father and a son as well; or by saying that water has three characteristics, as ice, water and steam. These metaphors or similes don’t actually help us understand God at all. |
| Can we have a moratorium, I ask the universal Church – one small voice trying to reverse the flood of speaking and thinking about God for the past 20 centuries! – can we have a moratorium on the idea of Trinity and the word persons, and speak instead of aspects of God? |
| If we could only go back to thinking of God as one God: one God who created the universe and who is therefore both surrounding it and permeating it (transcendent and immanent); one God who at a certain point in time stepped into that universe, and indeed into our world, as Jesus of Nazareth; who then after doing the work that he intended – dying and rising again – and no longer being in human form but instead continued to permeate the universe through his Spirit – and again, let’s have a moratorium on the expression ‘Holy Spirit’ and just speak of the Spirit as the Spirit, or the Spirit of God: if only we could do these things, we might be able to convince the Muslims and my Jewish friend that we do indeed believe in one God ... and we might actually understand better ourselves, and grasp the essential simplicity of the whole salvation project. |
| I believe in God; I believe in Jesus of Nazareth; and I believe in God’s Spirit which gives us our spiritual lives. Let’s keep it simple! And let’s not fall into the devilish trap of getting caught up in words. As St Francis of Assisi is quoted as saying, "Preach the Gospel at all times. Use words if necessary"? And only if necessary! Amen. |
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