Home
Meet Father KempTrinity Sunday – 30 May 2010
For the last two and a half weeks, our oldest children have been visiting the Ada and Nana. Our house has been quiet, our meals (for the most part) peaceful and our lives more boring or maybe I should say less active. Our children have called every evening to say good night and last night, their last night at Ada and Nana’s, Edith abruptly said, “I don’t want to go home tomorrow. I want to stay here.” For the last week, Edith had been talking about how excited she was to come home, so this statement came as a surprise. Emily asked her why and Edith’s response was, “Because I do not want to go on the long car ride.” The doctrine of the Trinity is like a long car ride to a four year old: it is intense, it seems to have no conclusive end, and, especially if you are driving on 101, there are few places to stop, pull over and take a mental break. The Athanasian creed, called the Quincunque says, “Now this is the Catholic faith, that we worship one God in Trinity and Trinity in unity.” Thus, according to this ancient statement of faith the doctrine of the Trinity, though difficult to understand and full of nauseating mental twists and turns is a necessary Christian doctrine.
The doctrine of the Trinity is not an idea that floats around the grey cells of our brain divorced from reality. The doctrine of the Trinity is not an idea that can be tossed around like a hot potato and then left to rot on the floor of our lives. The doctrine of the Trinity is truth and truth is personal. Truth is something we enter into a courtship with, it is specific, it is concrete, it is applicable to life. Truth, above all, molds and shapes us to conform to itself. If truth is personal, we can love it, just as we love our parents, and just as we can place ourselves under our parents authority and discipline, so we must do with truth. If truth is personal, we can see it, just as we can see our spouse, but just as we cannot see our spouse with omniscient vision, so we cannot see truth wit omniscient vision. If truth is personal, we can know it, just as we can know our children, but just as we cannot know our children in their entirety, so we cannot know truth in its entirety. This is why in a sermon on the trinity, St. Augustine said: What then, Brethren are we to say of God? For if you have grasped what you wish to say, it is not God. If you had been able to comprehend it, you would have comprehended something else in the place of God. If you had been almost able to comprehend it, your mind has deceived you. That then is not He, if you have understood It. But if it is He, you have not understood It. What therefore would you say of that which you could not understand?[1]
Nevertheless, even though we cannot comprehend God as Triune, even though we cannot own this knowledge, it is imperative that we enter into a relationship with this truth, that in all humility we speak, teach and live this mysterious doctrine. Thus, keeping St. Augustine’s charge in mind, my goal this morning is two-fold. First, I want to review what the Trinity is not, theologians call this the via negativia, or the way of the negative and we will follow this path using two ancient Trinitarian heresies. Second, I want to explain some of the analogies that have been used to explain the Trinity.
There were two main Trinitarian errors made in the early church. The first is called Sabellianism after Sabellius the main proponent of this error. Sabellius taught that God was one and that the Father, Son and Holy Spirit were different operations of self-revealing, or like different names or masks for the One God. Thus Sabellianism, also called Monarchianism, destroyed the diversity of the Trinity because of the unity or oneness of the Trinity. The second error was Arianism. Arians taught the diversity, or manyness of God and they divided God into three different substances that were somehow joined together to form a god. However, if God is divided into three different substances, then god is not one, but three so the Arian god was tri-theistic being three gods united together. Thus, at the expense of the unity and oneness of God, the Arians heretically emphasized God’s diversity. Concerning all these errors, St. Gregory of Nazianzen, said, “But [the Trinity] is yet more single than what is completely divided, and yet richer than what is wholly undivided.”[2]
One of the clearest revelations of the Triune God occurred at Jesus’ Baptism when the Father spoke from Heaven, the Son was Baptized and the Spirit descended. Concerning this event, St. Augustine said: Here then we have the Trinity, brought before us as it were separately: the Father in the Voice, the Son in the Man, the Holy Ghost in the form of a Dove….Here then we have the Trinity distinguished One from the Other. …and although we do not see it with our eyes, not yet with the heart, while being purified by faith, yet by this very faith we most truly and most strongly hold that the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit are an inseparable Trinity: One god, not three Gods. They are One God, yet so that the Son is not the Father, that the Father is not the Son, that the Holy Spirit is neither the Father nor the Son, but the Spirit of the Father and of the Son.[3] To summarize St. Augustine, when we confess our belief in the Triune God, we confess our belief in One God who is ineffable and inseparable, who exists as three separate and distinct persons who cannot be confused but who nevertheless are all equally God sharing the same substance.
If God exists as three persons whose substance is the same, who are all equally God, how are the three Trinitarian persons different from each other? Hilary suggests they are different because of their different relationships to the Father. Hilary said: For the basis of their relationship is in the name Father. But He is the sole Father; He has not as among men derived from yet another source that He is a father: for He is Un-begotten, Eternal, possessing ever within himself the source of His own Being; known only to the Son…The Son is the Offspring of the Un-begotten, One of the One, the True of the True, …the image of the invisible God, the form of the Un-begotten Father. Nor can we separate the Holy Spirit from our confession of the Father and Son. …In the fruits of His gifts is the pledge of our hope. He is the light of our minds; the Brightness of our souls.[4] Gregory of Nazianzen agreed saying, “all the Father has belongs to the Son, save being Un-begotten, and all the Son has belong to the Holy Ghost, save Sonship.”[5] To summarize the thoughts of Hilary and Gregory, the Father is the Un-begotten, the Son is the Begotten and the Spirit proceeds from the Father. Just as the Son and Spirit have different relations with the Father, so they each have a play a different role in bring us into relation with the Father. Gregory of Nazianzen said, “In the Spirit we shall see the Son.”[6] In John 14:6, Jesus says, “No one comes to the Father except through me.” Thus, in the Spirit we see the Son and through the Son we know the Father.
I began by telling you that the doctrine of the trinity is not an ethereal doctrine floating around divorced from the reality of our life and one specific, concrete and particular application of this doctrine concerns the Triune God’s love. The Eternal Triune God -Father, Son and Spirit – had no need to create. It was not necessary for the Father, Son and Holy Spirit to create the universe, to create our solar system, to create the sun and this earth. It was not necessary for the Father to speak, for the Son to be the Word and for the Spirit to hover over the waters of this earth. There was no need for the Trinity to create cottonwood trees, tomato plants, lilies, dolphins, pigeons, duck-billed platypuses, man and woman. The Father, Son and Spirit had no need for these things, they were whole, complete and perfect, theologians use the word ase, in themselves. Nevertheless, they chose to create and they chose to create human beings, us, in their image and if that were not enough they offered to us their eternal, triune love. It is a love that will not let you go, it is a love that began in eternity past and will continue through eternity future. Therefore, as St. Augustine said: May the power of His mercy strengthen our heart in His truth. May it confirm and calm our souls. May his grace abound in us, may He have pity on us, and remove obstacles from before us, and from before the Church, and from before all those who are dear to us, and may He by His power, and in the abundance of His mercy, enable us to please Him for ever, through Jesus Christ his Son our Lord, Who with Him and the with the Holy Ghost lives and reigns world without end. Amen.[7]
[1] St. Augustine, The Trinity in the Baptism of Christ, The Sunday Sermons of the Great Fathers, ed. by M.F. Toal, Preservation Press, Swedensboro: New Jersey, 1996, pg 76.
[2] Ibid, pg 67.
[3] Ibid, pg 70.
[4] Ibid, pg 61.
[5] Ibid, pg 67.
[6] Ibid, pg 68.
[7] Ibid. 81.
