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| The Council of Nicea debating the Holy Trinity |
Address given in St Mary's Nenagh on Trinity Sunday 4th June 2023
Jews and Muslims, our fellow monotheist ‘peoples of the book’, vehemently reject the idea of God as Trinity – they allege that Christians do not really believe in one God, but in three Gods. Even some Christians find it puzzling. How can one God possibly be divided into three persons? Surely 1 + 1 + 1 = 3?
Over the centuries Christian apologists have answered this question in different ways. We all know how St Patrick illustrated the Trinity with the trefoil-leaf of a shamrock – three leaflets within the one leaf. John Wesley said: ‘Tell me how it is that in this room there are three candles and but one light, and I will explain to you the mode of divine existence’. And it is true in mathematics that if you add three infinities the result is still infinity. But I personally don’t find such arguments helpful. The Catechism of the RC Church says that ‘God’s inmost being as Holy Trinity is a mystery that is inaccessible to reason alone’. But to call it a ‘mystery inaccessible to reason’ seems like a fudge to me.
So today let me reflect on how we as Christians might seek to understand the Trinity.
We must start, I think, with how the early
Christian community came to understand God.
First, the community had its roots in the Hebrew scriptures, our Old Testament. There they learned that God created all that was and is and is to come, as reflected in today’s reading from Genesis (1:1-2:4a). And God had created them in his own image. More than that, God had an intimate relationship with them, as a parent, as a father or a mother. Hence the OT stories where their God hears the cries of the people, brings them out of bondage, cares for them as a hen cares for her chicks. The first Christians did not see God as remote, but as a loving and gracious God, like a parent, like the best possible Father. They followed Jesus’s lead by praying to their Father in heaven.
Second, the early Christian community also understood God through the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. From the apostles and disciples, they heard the story of Jesus - how in Jesus God lived and acted in new and profound ways among people. Through them they encountered the risen Christ, and heard him promise, ‘Remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age’, as we heard in today’s Gospel reading (Matthew 28:16-20). They learned that God was made manifest in Jesus, that God was not just out there somewhere, but had also lived as one of them, as their brother, through his Son, Jesus, who had ascended to his Father and would come again. The stories were written down in the Gospels to show that God was not only their Creator, but also Jesus Christ their Lord and Saviour, through whom they received eternal life.
Third, the Christian community came to understand God as the Holy Spirit. As promised by Jesus, the gift of the Spirit came at Pentecost. It came to the whole community and not just to a select few. It made them fearless. Responding to Jesus’s call, ‘Go therefore and make disciples of all nations’, recorded in today’s Gospel reading, they proclaimed their faith to all who would listen. And the same Spirit came to the gathered groups of new Christians, just as it had to the apostles and first disciples. The Acts of the Apostles reads like an adventure story as the Spirit spreads like a wildfire through the Roman Empire. And the Epistles reveal for us how the Spirit formed the self-understanding of the gathered groups that we can now call churches.
It is clear that very early on Christians came to believe that the one God they worshipped was manifest in three different ways, as Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Today’s Gospel reading shows this when Matthew records Jesus’s command to baptise ‘in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit’. And the Epistle reading (2 Corinthians 13:11-13) shows it too, when Paul blesses the Corinthian church in the words we know as the Grace, ‘The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with all of you’.
By the 4th century the Church had captured the imperial Roman state. Dogmatic theologians argued over what the Trinity really meant, amid power struggles in the church. These disputes were eventually settled at a Council of Bishops, convened in Constantinople by the Emperor Theodosius in 381AD, which settled the doctrine of the Trinity in the words of a creed, a statement of belief. We know it as the Nicene Creed, and use it still in the Holy Communion service.
Most Christians today, including Roman Catholics, Orthodox, and our own Anglican Communion, maintain that this is still the best way to think about God. But we should not forget that the words of the creed were forged in bitter, political in-fighting between Christians. And even today Christians remain divided over the meaning of the words.
It is not hard to understand the historical
reasons why Christians came to believe in God as Trinity.
But I do not think that our Trinitarian belief should rest only on the words of scripture and partisan arguments at Church Councils more than 1600 years ago. I believe that divine revelation did not cease when the last full stop was written in the last book of scripture – God’s creation all around us is a continuing revelation, and in the world around me I see signs of our Trinitarian God everywhere.
I see the Loving Father in the beauty of the universe he created. He has precisely tuned it to support the miraculous, evolving web of life on our planet. He has made it to be a place where you and I and all creatures can flourish and be fed, if we would only tend and care for it, and for our neighbours, as we ought.
I see the Saving Son in the widespread altruism that exists in the natural world. And I see him in communities, communities of people, but also of other organisms and ecosystems. I see him in the worker bee’s dedication to raising a sister’s brood. I see him in the three-cornered dance of pollinating insects, fruit trees and seed dispersing animals. I see him in the cycles of death and resurrection that drive evolution. And I see him in our human capacity to love our neighbours as ourselves – even if we often fail to do so.
I see the Holy Spirit in the continual innovation of living creatures and ecosystems. I see him at work creatively exploring new expressions of what is possible in the arts and the sciences. And I see him in the way that human beings in all our variety, with all our different gifts, come together to build communities with meaning and purpose. The Church, the ‘body of Christ’ as St Paul called it, is one such community.
We should not, I think, see the doctrine of the Trinity as very difficult or a great mystery. Rather we should see it as something very natural. It is very simple really – but also very profound.
Let us finish in prayer with the Collect of the
Word set for today:
before the foundation of the universe
and the beginning of time
you are the triune God:
Author of creation,
eternal Word of salvation,
life-giving Spirit of wisdom.
Guide us to all truth by your Spirit,
that we may proclaim all that Christ has revealed
and rejoice in the glory he shares with us.
Glory and praise to you,
Father, Son and Holy Spirit,
now and for ever. Amen
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