I thought it worth sharing again this post about the experience of God as trinity:
Tomorrow is Trinity Sunday—a time to reflect on this dimension of the life of faith as we engage with this especially challenging and enriching theological mystery.
A generation ago, a leading British scholar wrote in a book on preaching that Trinity Sunday was the one day in the Church Year when a preacher might hope to be suddenly taken ill on Saturday night. I think that is entirely wrong. Perhaps that is how the entire subject of ‘Trinity’ was considered then. But since that time there has been a wonderful renewal in the theology and (more importantly I think) the spirituality of Trinity.
It has been my challenge and privilege this last semester to teach a class on this subject, at Pilgrim Theological College. The unit is called ‘Trinity, Society and Dialogue’. (That was several years ago now.)
At the outset the class engaged with a book developed by the British Council of Churches, in the latter part of the last century, called The Forgotten Trinity. This book celebrates the renewal in trinitarian faith in the twentieth century. That renewal is in many places attributed to the work of various theologians—especially the two great Karls, Barth and Rahner. But this is only partly correct. Not that I disagree with the estimation of these wonderful scholars and teachers.
Rather, I think the most significant element in the recovery of Trinitarian faith is the emergence in the twentieth century of the pentecostal movement. (Not for nothing does Trinity Sunday follow Pentecost.) In the first decades of the twentieth century, ‘revivals’ took place in places as disparate as Los Angeles, Wales and Mizoram (North East India.) Great numbers of people experienced what they called outpourings of the Holy Spirit. One crucial dimension of these early expressions was that the focus was not so much on ‘speaking in tongues’ but simply the renewal of faith, and particularly for people who were not well educated or did not have strong language skills. There was a very strong social justice emphasis here and (at least at this time) an overcoming of racial and economic divisions.Harvey Cox details many of these significant features in his book Fire from Heaven. With time, a more moderate and yet stronger, more comprehensive sense of the reality of God as Holy Spirit has spread through almost all Christian communities (often despite much official resistance) and it is this that has led to a renewal of the understanding of God as Trinity.
My point here is that the worship life of the church precedes theological formulation. This is how it was in the ancient church too. ‘Lex orandi, lex credendi’: literally, the law or way of praying is the law or way of believing. As people worship, they also believe. Faith and theology arise and are shaped by worship. This I believe is vital for how we engage with the theology of Trinity, which is exceptionally difficult if we start with the metaphysical ideas of the third and fourth centuries, or the mathematics (how can three be one, or one three?) and so on.
Part of what I think about this dimension of the mystery of God is this:
The idea of God as Trinity is a theological can of worms: believe me I know it is a difficult thing to grasp.
But I think the reason for that is that we try to understand something as a theory or a doctrine, which is in fact meant to describe our experience, of if you like our story of God.
The church did not first of all develop a doctrine or a theory of God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit: these ideas grew out of worship experiences, out of the life of faith lived and shared and talked about and prayed.
And that is what the Apostle Paul offers us in this wonderful chapter Romans 8.
May I encourage you to go and read it all later today. We do a lot of damage to the bible by dividing it up into little segments and trying to understand it in teaspoonsful.
Today we have been thinking about the sense of being invited into a family home, a household. In the ancient world, a household always had a Father figure, who was thought of as the creator or source of this life.
God is like that, not a human male father, but a richly creative, generative, always giving and providing parent God.
So too, the Bible presents this God as one who teaches us, a source of wisdom and understanding.
God is a teacher and guide, and this aspect of God is seen in the prophets and the wisdom writing, but especially in the person of Jesus, who said that he came to fulfil or to make known in living experience what those prophets and that wisdom books are about, and the way of God they called the Law: —making it known, not with ideas in your head, but passion in your heart and courage in your actions and life style.
He came to bring this wisdom to life and to bring us to this wisdom.
He came to bring humanity to know, with all the creation, that we live as God’s children, in the household of God.
And out of all that, Paul the Apostle says we find that this same God, this Spirit in us and with us, joins with our spirits, our lives, and allows us to hope.
Trinity Sunday is a truly wonderful occasion to engage with the story of our faith, the living experience of being at home with God in the world. You wouldn’t want to miss that.