The Rules of Love: Why Understanding (and not understanding) the Trinity is Important

“For God to be truth, God had to be one; for God to be love, God had to be two; and for God to be joy, God had to be three! ~ Richard of St. Victor, d. 1173

⁵ And hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit, who has been given to us.⁶ You see, at just the right time, when we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly. ~ Romans 5:5-6

Alice and George were getting ready to celebrate their sixtieth wedding anniversary. They wanted to show the photos of grandchildren born since the celebration of their fiftieth. Alice asked George to produce the photos and he began to fumble through his pockets, saying occasionally, “Right. Here they are,” only to produce a receipt, a pipe, a hanky, glasses that had been missing for a month – everything but the photos in question. Then George suddenly remarked, “Oh dear, I think I put them in my other coat just before we left and then grabbed the wrong one on the way out.” After the appropriate apologies and disapproving looks from his wife, George excused himself to the restroom. When he was gone, Alice sighed, “I know him like the back of my hand but I’ll never understand him.”

I’d like to think that that’s a good story to begin with on Trinity Sunday. Despite firm convictions, the church has always taught that our unknowing about God goes deeper than our knowing goes. The famous ancient theologian Augustine – himself no dummy, called this reality, “learned ignorance.” Simply put, he meant that we can and must make every effort to speak rightly about God because God is too important for anything less than our best intellectual effort. And yet, Augustine would remind us, we must also know God without thinking that our thoughts and words actually grasp God. Like Alice’s remark– the church has always tried to navigate two realities - that we seek to know God like the back of our hand without ever thinking we’ve got God figured out. And nothing comes closer to this vision of knowing and unknowing than the doctrine of the Trinity.

Now, if you would permit me one more analogy. I believe that trying to prove the doctrine of the Trinity is a lot like trying to prove that I love my wife. All of us would agree that such an idea is very important but that no single proof exists that can’t be questioned. In fact, to try to prove my love would cheapen it or seem like I was hiding something. So this morning my aim is not to prove to you a concept of the Trinity. The Church has taught throughout the ages that the idea is everywhere assumed in the Scriptures. But it has also refused to remove the mystery of God and God’s activity which is also everywhere assumed in the Scriptures (Psalm 45:15). So the Church over time has developed rules or guidelines for how to think trinitarily without assuming it has God all figured out. And that’s what I would like to talk about this morning. So this is a bit different of a sermon – more thematic and overarching and not bound to one text. And my prayer is that it will help you not be smarter but better able to worship and trust this mysterious God. So today I would like to teach you two rules the church has devised for thinking about our God, the triune God, who created each of us and knows us by name.

1.     The first rule of Trinitarian thinking is clearly emphasized by Paul in his letter to the church at Rome, 5:5-6 – which speaks of God saving us from our sins. It’s called the Rule of Appropriation and can be stated this way: According to Scripture, all the works of the Trinity are indivisible. There is only One God who is Creator, Redeemer and Sustainer. To put it another way, all of God is involved in everything God does.

For example, the work of reconciliation and redemption, Paul reminds us, is not only the work of the Son but the work of the Father and the Spirit as well. “In Christ God was reconciling the world to himself” (2 Cor. 5:19). It is through the Spirit that we have “access . . . to the Father” (Eph. 2:18).

However this is true of other works of God as well, the work of creation is not only the work of the Father, it is also the work of the Son: “All things came into being through him” (John 1:3). “All things have been created through him and for him” (Col. 1:16). And according to Gen. 1:2, creation is also the work of the Spirit of God moving across the waters.

Even the Spirit’s work of sanctification and sustaining the community for fellowship with God is also attributed to the Father (1 Thess. 5:23) and to the Son (Eph. 5:26).

The importance of this rule becomes clear when we encounter a number of heresies which separated the works of God within the Godhead.

Heresy One: This heresy went something like this: “The Old Testament God is an angry and vengeful God who needs to punish us because we have disobeyed his law. But Jesus is a God of love and mercy. Jesus saves us from the righteousness of a God who demands good works and blood, which is why we don’t need to read the Old Testament.” How many of you have heard this heresy in the church? 

In response, the doctrine of the Trinity points out that the will and action of Jesus on our behalf are not opposed to the will and action of God the Father – what Jesus does and says ARE the Father’s words and actions. Christ does not change the mind of God toward us sinful human beings or force God reluctantly to be for us instead of against us; rather, the Biblical witness is that Christ is the deepest expression of God’s desire to be with and for us (Col. 2:9). In fact, we will shall see in our sermon series beginning next Sunday, Jesus will gain his vision of mercy and grace and self-understanding of the cross by reading and praying the Old Testament. So the doctrine of the Trinity means that we cannot separate the power and righteousness of God the Father from the suffering love of the Son for they are one and the same God. I would like to think that this principle of unity would help us discern the “will of God” in how we should deal with sin and sinners, or, how we read the Scriptures.

Heresy Two: This heresy went something like this: “The Holy Spirit makes us into our true, spiritual selves – unencumbered by worldly things and only concerned about things like prayer, worship, our souls. The Spirit has nothing to do with the fallen physical world like our bodies - sexual desires and physical pleasures (like eating, etc.), the way we make and spend money, and we don’t need not to care about the environment or issues of justice. It’s all just flesh and wood and ash – it can’t contain Spirit and won’t it all burn?” How many of you have heard of something like this being said in church?

In response, the doctrine of the Trinity teaches us that the HS is the Spirit of the God who is Creator and ruler of heaven and earth, our bodies, individual persons and social-political communities. The Spirit is the Spirit of the Son who became a flesh and blood human being who went to parties with not always the holiest of folk, healed the sick, fed the hungry and came to bring God’s compassion and peace to all. The Spirit of God who is the Creator of this world doesn’t help us escape it or simply save souls but enables us to engage the world for the redemption of all of human life: physical, material, social, political, economic, etc. What would it mean for us to understand the spiritual life as a Trinitarian life in which there simply is no place that God does not go, no separation of the material and spiritual?

I think it means that there can’t simply be private spirituality only, on the one hand, nor mere socio-political change devoid of a relationship with God, on the other, for God is both a personal God who takes up residence within and the creator of all that is so that nothing is beyond his care. Trinitarian theology aims to heal us of a fractured spirituality.

To sum up: The works of Father, Son and HS are indivisible. Every person of the Trinity is involved in every outward action of the Godhead. We may distinguish between the three persons of the Trinity (it is still okay to think of creation as the work of the Father, despite the fact all three persons of the Trinity are implicated in creation) but we must always understand that they remain in concert, in agreement, all parts participating at all times.

          2.     The second rule of Trinitarian thinking moves us from an emphasis on what the triune God does to a discussion of who the triune God is – a divine community who lives with and for and in one another in mutual openness, and freedom, both giving AND receiving love. 

     

     Here we are aided by the thinking and emphasis of Christians in the East who offer a counterbalance to an overemphasis on God’s oneness. We can call this the Rule of Community  – perichoresis (to sit or go around) or a community of mutual love. Historically, Christians in the East have generally been unhappy about what they believe is a one-sided Western emphasis on the unity, or oneness, of Father, Son, and HS to the neglect of their real threeness. They point, for example, to Jesus’ own prayer in John 17:21, “that they may all be one. As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me.”  In our time, these Eastern Christians have been joined by other theologians (social trinitarianism) who argue that an emphasis on the oneness of God can have disastrous consequences for our understanding of who God is and who we are as human beings and how we should treat one another.

On this point I am indebted to the theologian Rowan Williams about why such a view might be important in order to understand what it means that God is love and how that means that God can be trusted. I often meet people who struggle with experiencing the love of God and I think all of us can acknowledge that our techno-capitalist world is a very cynical place using concepts like “love” and “trust” in manipulative ways – “Love” is everywhere but we always wonder what are they selling? Hiding? Spinning? From politicians, to Walmart, to the television news. In this world, most simply cannot believe that love can exist with no strings attached, without some hidden agenda. I even find this logic in the church where people define God’s love in ways which make it seem as if God’s happiness or joy is somehow connected to our actions or that God created us, for example, because God needed us. For many of us this can sound cold. Wait? God doesn’t need us?  ILLUS. the character of God in the musical Children of Eden by Stephen Schwartz in which God prowls around like a spurned and abusive parent who punishes Adam and Eve because they are ungrateful children. But God as a community of love reminds us that within God is all that God needs for God’s own happiness. This means that the love that God shows in making the world, saving the world, relating to the world, has no shadow or selfish purpose but is utterly for our sake. It is the love that God invites us into - utterly for ourselves. God is, simply happy to be God and thus can be trusted because God has no private agenda, has no need within or outside himself. If God is perichoretic, then we need not ask, “Wait, what’s in this for you?” Nor do need to be worried that God seeks to manipulate us (or that God can somehow be manipulated) in the ways in which all of us felt manipulated by those who claim to love us. God is supremely happy within God’s self and invites us to participate in that. If God is Trinity, in other words, then God creates us because God thought we would enjoy it.

To sum up: The rule of Perichoresis is that God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit reflect a divine community who live with and for and in one another in mutual openness, freedom and self-giving love. And this divine community is the model for all genuine human community. This notion has important implications for Christian political thought. How might the  mutual relationships among three co-equal persons within the Godhead provide a model both for human relationships within marriage and church communities and for Christian political and social theorizing?  

Niels Bohr, the Danish physicist who was a major contributor to quantum physics, said the universe is "not only stranger than we think, but stranger than we can think." Look at any of the Hubble telescope pictures you get a taste for this strangeness. We now know that 68% of the universe is "dark energy"--even though scientists can't define it--and that there are 200 billion other impossibly immense galaxies! Stars and planets now seem uncountable.

The doctrine of the Trinity is saying the same thing: God is not only stranger than we think, but stranger than we can think. Perhaps some of the weakness of the doctrine of the Trinity is that we've often tried to understand it with silly analogies or mathematical-like proofs instead of through worship and prayer. In the end, I believe that only lovers seem to know what is going on inside of God and even when they do, say, “I know him like the back of my hand but I’ll never understand him.”