Experience First
Trinity
Romans 5.1-5; John 16.12-15
‘And the Catholick Faith is this: That we worship one God in Trinity, and Trinity in Unity; Neither confounding the persons: nor dividing the Substance. For here is one Person of the Father, another of the Son; and another of the Holy Ghost. But the Godhead of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, is all one; the Glory equal, the Majesty co-eternal. Such as the Father is, such is the Son; and such is the Holy Ghost. The father uncreate, the Son uncreate: and the Holy Ghost uncreate. The Father incomprehensible, the Son incomprehensible: and the Holy
Ghost incomprehensible.’
Indeed the whole lot ‘incomprehensible!’
This is Trinity Sunday and what I’ve just read is part of the Athanasian Creed that the Book of Common Prayer says must be used in Morning
Prayer today – although Saint Athanasius didn’t write it, the version we have contains inaccurate translations, and the compilers of the Book of Common Prayer unknowingly used a corrupted text in the prayer book they produced – nevertheless we are instructed to use it (and on twelve other feast days too). It tries to be very precise in defining the Trinity and presumably its recitation was meant to make sure this precision was lodged in the minds and hearts of worshippers. Indeed the Athanasian Creed says such learning has eternal consequences for it says,
‘Which Faith except every one do keep whole and undefiled: without doubt he shall perish everlastingly.’
and again,
‘This is the Catholick Faith: which except a man believe faithfully, he cannot be saved.’
Take these words seriously for on your reception of them depends your eternal destiny. But immediately the question comes to my mine of how understanding these precise words and appropriating them as my own can be the determination of whether I’m destined for hell or not. It’s all just too pat; too cerebral; and too formulaic – the heart of Christian faith reduced to kind of abracadabra of language. Of course language is vital and necessary; and of course words are important; but a living faith has to be more than assent to formulas produced in a bygone age that uses a philosophical mindset with which most people are now unfamiliar.
You won’t find such language in the New Testament, nor in the creeds we more commonly use. The Apostles’ Creed uses the word ‘God’ only of the Father, and while the Nicene Creed strongly asserts the godhead of the Son it ascribes the godhead to the Holy Spirit only by implication. The only fulsome statement of the doctrine of the Trinity in a creed is in this one called the Athanasian – this creed that now goes largely unsaid. That can’t be a coincidence. It’s as if we naturally recoil from having something so distinctive and important to our faith boiled down to an arid formula. It appears to put
doctrine before experience; cognitive categories before reality; and intellectual assent before feelings. It just doesn’t fit with the way we usually express things, and that makes for real disease when what is being expressed is
so significant to our belief and action.
Surely the doctrine of the Trinity was originally created to describe and safeguard an experience? If we strive too hard to constrain exactly what that experience means the life drains out of it and we are left with a cold formula. A shell of dogma empty of the snail of a living faith.
A bishop was once asked, ‘How would you teach a child the doctrine of the Trinity?’ Writing about it years later he said it was a very easy question to answer because his answer was simply, ‘I wouldn’t.’ And in making that answer he wasn’t in any sense denigrating the importance of God as Trinity. In fact, just the opposite was his purpose. He meant that to start with the empty shell, the doctrine, and to try to fill it again with the snail, with the new life of faith, is to start from the wrong end. It’s like having the answer before you work out the sum that leads to the answer. What any child needs, indeed what any believer needs, it to start from the lived experience of the Trinity of God, and to work out from that language and categories that can communicate what’s going on in that experience.
Getting it the right way around is vital to our witness as people of faith for our critics are always saying that we supply
prefabricated answers to questions only we ourselves put. No wonder our witness is so often greeted with suspicion and our answers appear contrived or irrelevant. This Christian faith is genuinely and wholeheartedly concerned with
truth so anything that puts that commitment in question does untold harm. The way we handle the idea of God as Trinity is particularly significant. If we start from the doctrine, in the contemporary mindset of our unbelieving neighbours, there then seems no pathway back to ordinary human experience. No point at which the truth of the Trinity could conceivably be tested by reference to everyday relationships.
So let’s begin again from the other end – begin with our everyday experience, for it’s there, as they say, that rubber really hits the road. We worship God in Trinity because that’s how the wheels of experience move across the road of understanding. As St Paul puts it, ‘We have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ,’ we share the very ‘glory of God,’ the gracious Creator, and we are able to live a godly way because divine love is ours ‘through the Holy Spirit.’
The relationships that we are part of, the things that surround us, and the wider world we engage with, are the arenas in which we encounter this Trinitarian God. Most of the time we look on life in a superficial way, but the Trinity prompts us to ask what is most deeply true about this existence. We believe that beyond all the contradictions and tragedies of life there are certain realities from which we cannot get away. And that if we are open to them, we will find these realities as the depth and ground of our relationships. We will find them in amongst the people and places that are the ordinary things of living.
First, we will be moved by the conviction of a personal and utterly reliable relationship beyond the power of anything to destroy or separate. For Jesus this was the ground of his whole life, and we affirm that
this is God, and the love of God active in human experience.
Second, we believe that Jesus doesn’t simply point away from himself to wards that reality of love in an abstract and conceptual way, but that he actually embodies it. In Jesus we don’t just see a man living close to God, we actually see God exposed to our gaze. This Jesus captivates people, even those who utterly reject organised Christianity. God is made known in flesh and blood; we are visibly shown what love has done and can do.
And it doesn’t end there, for thirdly, the Christian isn’t an onlooker to all this but actually takes part in and shares this
reality. We are caught up in a reality that goes beyond anything that one human being can offer another – striking the depth of reality that can only be indicated by the word ‘God.’
It is these relationships that the doctrine of the Trinity was designed to safeguard and affirm – but whether we can express this doctrinally or not, we can all know within ourselves the truth of a God we can utterly trust; the captivating example of the man Jesus; and the love sharing and involving Spirit that is always with us. In this the Spirit ‘will guide us
into all truth.’
Saint Bernard (1090-1153) summed it up like this; ‘How can plurality consist with unity, or unity with plurality? To examine the fact closely is rashness, to believe it is piety, to know it is life, and life eternal.'
Share the life; share the experience– and that will give shape and substance to the doctrine for we will know for ourselves the love of God, the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit.
Ghost incomprehensible.’
Indeed the whole lot ‘incomprehensible!’
This is Trinity Sunday and what I’ve just read is part of the Athanasian Creed that the Book of Common Prayer says must be used in Morning
Prayer today – although Saint Athanasius didn’t write it, the version we have contains inaccurate translations, and the compilers of the Book of Common Prayer unknowingly used a corrupted text in the prayer book they produced – nevertheless we are instructed to use it (and on twelve other feast days too). It tries to be very precise in defining the Trinity and presumably its recitation was meant to make sure this precision was lodged in the minds and hearts of worshippers. Indeed the Athanasian Creed says such learning has eternal consequences for it says,
‘Which Faith except every one do keep whole and undefiled: without doubt he shall perish everlastingly.’
and again,
‘This is the Catholick Faith: which except a man believe faithfully, he cannot be saved.’
Take these words seriously for on your reception of them depends your eternal destiny. But immediately the question comes to my mine of how understanding these precise words and appropriating them as my own can be the determination of whether I’m destined for hell or not. It’s all just too pat; too cerebral; and too formulaic – the heart of Christian faith reduced to kind of abracadabra of language. Of course language is vital and necessary; and of course words are important; but a living faith has to be more than assent to formulas produced in a bygone age that uses a philosophical mindset with which most people are now unfamiliar.
You won’t find such language in the New Testament, nor in the creeds we more commonly use. The Apostles’ Creed uses the word ‘God’ only of the Father, and while the Nicene Creed strongly asserts the godhead of the Son it ascribes the godhead to the Holy Spirit only by implication. The only fulsome statement of the doctrine of the Trinity in a creed is in this one called the Athanasian – this creed that now goes largely unsaid. That can’t be a coincidence. It’s as if we naturally recoil from having something so distinctive and important to our faith boiled down to an arid formula. It appears to put
doctrine before experience; cognitive categories before reality; and intellectual assent before feelings. It just doesn’t fit with the way we usually express things, and that makes for real disease when what is being expressed is
so significant to our belief and action.
Surely the doctrine of the Trinity was originally created to describe and safeguard an experience? If we strive too hard to constrain exactly what that experience means the life drains out of it and we are left with a cold formula. A shell of dogma empty of the snail of a living faith.
A bishop was once asked, ‘How would you teach a child the doctrine of the Trinity?’ Writing about it years later he said it was a very easy question to answer because his answer was simply, ‘I wouldn’t.’ And in making that answer he wasn’t in any sense denigrating the importance of God as Trinity. In fact, just the opposite was his purpose. He meant that to start with the empty shell, the doctrine, and to try to fill it again with the snail, with the new life of faith, is to start from the wrong end. It’s like having the answer before you work out the sum that leads to the answer. What any child needs, indeed what any believer needs, it to start from the lived experience of the Trinity of God, and to work out from that language and categories that can communicate what’s going on in that experience.
Getting it the right way around is vital to our witness as people of faith for our critics are always saying that we supply
prefabricated answers to questions only we ourselves put. No wonder our witness is so often greeted with suspicion and our answers appear contrived or irrelevant. This Christian faith is genuinely and wholeheartedly concerned with
truth so anything that puts that commitment in question does untold harm. The way we handle the idea of God as Trinity is particularly significant. If we start from the doctrine, in the contemporary mindset of our unbelieving neighbours, there then seems no pathway back to ordinary human experience. No point at which the truth of the Trinity could conceivably be tested by reference to everyday relationships.
So let’s begin again from the other end – begin with our everyday experience, for it’s there, as they say, that rubber really hits the road. We worship God in Trinity because that’s how the wheels of experience move across the road of understanding. As St Paul puts it, ‘We have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ,’ we share the very ‘glory of God,’ the gracious Creator, and we are able to live a godly way because divine love is ours ‘through the Holy Spirit.’
The relationships that we are part of, the things that surround us, and the wider world we engage with, are the arenas in which we encounter this Trinitarian God. Most of the time we look on life in a superficial way, but the Trinity prompts us to ask what is most deeply true about this existence. We believe that beyond all the contradictions and tragedies of life there are certain realities from which we cannot get away. And that if we are open to them, we will find these realities as the depth and ground of our relationships. We will find them in amongst the people and places that are the ordinary things of living.
First, we will be moved by the conviction of a personal and utterly reliable relationship beyond the power of anything to destroy or separate. For Jesus this was the ground of his whole life, and we affirm that
this is God, and the love of God active in human experience.
Second, we believe that Jesus doesn’t simply point away from himself to wards that reality of love in an abstract and conceptual way, but that he actually embodies it. In Jesus we don’t just see a man living close to God, we actually see God exposed to our gaze. This Jesus captivates people, even those who utterly reject organised Christianity. God is made known in flesh and blood; we are visibly shown what love has done and can do.
And it doesn’t end there, for thirdly, the Christian isn’t an onlooker to all this but actually takes part in and shares this
reality. We are caught up in a reality that goes beyond anything that one human being can offer another – striking the depth of reality that can only be indicated by the word ‘God.’
It is these relationships that the doctrine of the Trinity was designed to safeguard and affirm – but whether we can express this doctrinally or not, we can all know within ourselves the truth of a God we can utterly trust; the captivating example of the man Jesus; and the love sharing and involving Spirit that is always with us. In this the Spirit ‘will guide us
into all truth.’
Saint Bernard (1090-1153) summed it up like this; ‘How can plurality consist with unity, or unity with plurality? To examine the fact closely is rashness, to believe it is piety, to know it is life, and life eternal.'
Share the life; share the experience– and that will give shape and substance to the doctrine for we will know for ourselves the love of God, the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit.