I announced my intention yesterday to write some contructive pieces on various theological topics, in an effort to show that I can do more than just pick on people who disagree with me. I doubt these will attract nearly the amount of attention as some other pieces, but what the heck.
It is confusing. Its basic definition is unintelligible, not just to we moderns, but to most people. It is contradictory. It is unbiblical in the strictest sense. It adds little to faith, or ethics, or contemplation. It is unnecessary. All of these have been said, at one time or another, by Christian theologians, about the most baffling, yest inescapable, teaching - that the God we worship, while one God, is manifest in three Distinc Divine Persons, to which we apply the names Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The doctrine itself took hundreds of years to develp, work through, and give an intial definition to. It then took another century and a half to work out the kinks. Different understandings led to a split between the eastern and western churches in 1054. Even most of those who mouth the words could not give an adequate summation of what the Trinity means, for them, other than something that we Christians say about God.
For me, the teaching of the Trinity is most certainly a baffling one. It is also, alas for die-hard rationalists both within and without, inescapable. Even should we wish to dispense with it, we still have to wrestle with it. I for one believe that while its Biblical roots are debatable, its original metaphysical form untenable, and its very confusing nature more of a hindrance to faith for most people than a help, the teaching of the Trinity is a good way of summing up the way the Christian community describes its encounter with God, revealed in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, and granted to us through faith which is the gift of the Holy Spirit.
I believe that we do ourselves much more harm than good if we get too caught up in discussions of the distinction between what has been called the "economic" versus the "immanent" Trinity; the depth and extent of the Divine perichoresis and the consequent question of patripassianism; distinctions between modalistic heresies and the like. When we start down the road of metaphysical understandings, we end up in a place that loses the vitality of the teaching of the Trinity - the diversity of the human experience of God. A monistic (as opposed to a Unitarian) God is much too rigid, too limited. To contemplate the experience of God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit - to experience the necessity of relationship for God, a necessity explicit in the first Johannine letter, which says that "God is love" - is to understand that the static nature of metaphysics denies what the Christian community confesses by invoking the Trinitarian formula - God is not Being; God is Being With. Most assuredly being with us as those called by this God to work in and for the world.
The dynamism implicit in the Trinitarian confession is the dynamism of a God not seated on a throne, as in Isaiah, or the dynamism of a God who orders Moses to shield his eyes and only glimpse the Divine Person from the back. The dynamism of the Trinity is the victory of life over death, love over hatred, of grace over sin (not law!). The Trinitarian confession is the confession that God is not just with us, Emmanuel. The Trinitarian confession is the confession that God is for us. God with us explicitly means that God is for us - and not just those who confess this faith, but all of humanity.
I must confess that I didn't "get it" for a long time, and refused to confess the Trinity. In church, when the formula was stated, I just remained silent. WHen I surrendered my own adherence to nonsensical metaphysical gibberish, however, and opened myself to the dynamism of the Christian history of faith - both in its best and worst aspects - and looked around me at the ways faithful of all kinds were struggling with what it means to be a Christian, I understood in a new and to me much more helpful way what it means to speak of God as One in Three Persons. It is, in a way, equivalent to God's refusal to give a proper name to Moses. Rather, what the LORD gives, the sacred tetragrammaton, is a verb. This is no simple creature raised through some dynamic process to the status of deity. This is the God who calls, calls forth, creates out of nothing not just the world, but a people who were no people and are now the people of this God and LORD. The Trinity is a way of insisting that God cannot be reduced to a formula, but is a living presence in the lives of the communities of faith. Like Jacob, we always struggle with this God. Like Jacob, should we be flush with our own strength, we learn that this God cheats, hamstringing us. Like Jacob, we come away blessed because of the struggle.
I confess loudly, and I must say proudly, my faith in the Trinity as the unique experience of Christian communities as they try to understand the dynamic, loving experience of God, revealed in Jesus Christ, and professed through the mystery of the Holy Spirit. I see no reason to get caught up in questions of "persons" or "substance" because they were only temporary, contingent ways of defining the ever-changing, never-flagging presence of God With and For Us. When we confess God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, we are not speaking of the Divine Entelechy (to get all high-falutin' on y'all). We are speaking of our own experience as Christians living in community and continuity with Christian communities across both time and space of that wonderful, loving mystery that the Divine Presence not only has come to us, but calls us by name, each and every day.
