I
am not that impressed when people say they believe in God.
I
don’t even know if their belief is a good thing
until I know who this God is that they
believe in.
Archbishop
of Canterbury, William Temple, said:
“If you have a false idea of God,
the more religious you are
the worse
it is for you
– it were better for you to be an atheist.”
So
we need to clarify what mean by “God.”
We
must use the word carefully – dare I say reverently.
In
Christianity, God means the Holy Trinity.
The
Trinity is a way of imagining God
that the Eastern Orthodox
understand, enjoy, and delight in.
But
most Western Christians either distort it or ignore it.
I was reading in the student
lounge of Harvard Divinity School
when I
overheard a conversation at the next table.
Two young women on the verge of
graduation
were
discussing their futures.
The first wanted to be a
Congregationalist minister,
but she
didn’t think the ministerial board would approve her.
They would, she feared, expect
her to believe in the Trinity
– and she
was not going to say that, no way, no how.
The other agreed that it was
unjust and oppressive to expect her
to affirm
something like the Trinity.
The first shook her head at the
waste of her theological education
and the cutting
short of her ministry.
The second then mused, “It’s so
seductive though, isn’t it?”
“What do you mean ‘seductive’?” the first
asked.
“Well,” the second said, “the way
Prof. Coakley explains the Trinity,
it’s just
so beautiful.
It’s about relationship as the
heart of everything instead of power.
It’s
really beautiful and so good, so moral.”
The first student nodded and
sighed,
“Yes,” she said, “it is, and when
you read St. Basil and St. Gregory,
and St.
Thomas Aquinas, it just makes so much sense.
It really
seems true.”
There was a pause in the
conversation.
Then the first student continued.
“It’s
hard to sacrifice all I’ve worked for on principle.
But
there’s no way I’m going to say I believe in the Trinity.”
“Of course not,” the second
student said.
“It would be corrupt and absurd.”
These are bright people in their
third year at Harvard Divinity.
They know full well that God is
infinitely beyond any doctrine,
that all
doctrines are just metaphors reaching out into the dark,
grazing
the face of mystery
with our
fingertips of language.
So why is this particular
language about God such a taboo
that they
recoil against it no matter
how
beautiful, how good, and even how true it seems?
The reason we resist the Trinity
is all there in dear old Sigmund Freud.
He explained how we get a
primitive image of God stuck in our heads.
It comes out of early childhood
experiences of dependency.
The God image we get in the crib is
of God the patriarch,
God the
monarch, the supreme boss, the dominator-god.
We all have that God stuck in our
heads.
But it is not the Christian God because
it is not the Trinity.
If our parents were benign,
we will
feel safer with this dominator God.
If our parents were frightening
or neglectful,
our attitude
may be less positive.
But either way,
the
universal condition of children is dependent and subservient.
So we all get the image of God
the dominator.
To think of God as Trinity is to
reject that primitive image.
The Trinity does not represent
God as an individual lording it over creation.
The Divine Nature is too complex,
too relational, to loving
to be
represented by a big guy in the sky.
So our image of God is an
interpersonal relationship.
This is out of our ordinary box.
So let me clarify.
The Trinity is not 3 Gods.
The Trinity is not one God with 3
jobs.
The Godness of God, the Divine
Nature,
is
a relationship among three persons.
Their relationship is what makes
them Divine.
The network is the essence of
God.
If God is the Trinity,
then God
is not a powerful individual dominating creation.
Rather, God is a web of
relationship,
and this
web does not dominate anything.
It loves creation into being.
It does not decree. It begets and
gives birth.
I am not making this up.
It is ancient as the faith
itself.
Let me offer two descriptions of
the Trinity from the Early Church.
St. Gregory of Nazianzen and St.
John of Damascus
called
the Trinity a perichoresis.
Peri means “around” as in perimeter or perambulate.
Choresis means “a dance” as in choreograph.
The Trinity means God is
like a Native American or Middle Eastern circle dance.
T. S. Eliot wrote in his poem, Burnt Norton:
At
the still point of the turning world . . .
at
the still point, there the dance is. . .
Except
for the point, the still point,
There
would be no dance,
And
there is only the dance.
Hindus describe the
divine nature as a cosmic dance;
and here it is in the Trinity.
Reality is, at
its heart, a dance -- a community, a striving for relationship.
Feminist
theologians say this cosmic circle dance
signifies the ultimate value of relationship among equals.
It is the
foundation of everything beautiful in creation.
The second image of the Trinity
is from St. Augustine.
He said the Trinity is a symbol of
love.
The first person of the Trinity is the Lover.
In order for the Lover to be the
Lover, there must be an object of his love.
The second person of the Trinity
is therefore the Beloved.
The Lover makes the Beloved
“Beloved” through actively loving.
The Beloved makes the Lover
“Lover” through being loved.
The spontaneous response to such
love is to return it.
The Beloved becomes the Lover;
and the
Lover becomes the Beloved.
Between them flows the love,
and that
love is the third person of the Trinity.
Now you may ask what difference
this makes?
And I answer: everything depends
on it.
Our image of God determines what
we value, what we do,
and
ultimately who we become.
The word “God” contains our most deeply held
value.
God represents what we believe to
be the highest good,
the
truest truth, the most beautiful beauty.
God is the North Star that
orients all our values,
and
indeed our whole life.
We become like God as we define
God.
If we worship the dominator God
of primitive theism,
we
will worship power
and
spend our lives either cringing before it
or
trying to become dominators ourselves.
But if we worship the Trinity,
which
is the cosmic circle dance of love,
then
we will strive to become dancers and lovers.
We will practice friendship as a
spiritual discipline.
And how will we go about being
the Church?
If God is the ultimate dominator,
then
the Church should be a top down hierarchy.
But if God is Trinity,
we
are equals in relationship – not competitors.
Neither hierarchy nor anarchy looks
like God.
An orderly, disciplined practice
of compassion
and
mutual submission,
patience,kindness,
and even humility --
these
things look like God.
Being what Wes Frensdorff called
“a ministering community”
a
family of servants,
this is
how the Church shows God to the world.
I will close with a bit about the
Bible.
We have mostly cobbled together
our Trinitarian image of God
from
a bit of Scripture here and a bit there.
The only clear reference to the
Trinity as a unified picture of God
in
the whole Bible is today’s Gospel lesson.
It is where Jesus gives us the
words of Baptism.
We baptize in the name of the
Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.
We are not baptized to make us docile
before
oppressive powers either human or divine.
We are not baptized to be
dominators of our brothers and sisters,
or
to be free range maverick rebels doing it “our way.”
We are baptized into the dance,
baptized
into the sacred pattern of mutual delight,
baptized into the joy of serving
each other in love.
