Trinity Sunday

The doctrine of the Trinity is central to our Catholic Faith.  It has no such relationship to protestant traditions, as it is not biblical.  When I was a child the minister of my parents' fundamentalist church preached quite a sermon upholding the doctrine of the Trinity. Then a few months later a revivalist preacher in the same pulpit denounced the doctrine, calling it Catholic and unscriptural.  And he was right!  When we talk Trinity, we are talking Catholic.  One God in three persons, as we read in detail in the Athanasian Creed, printed in the documents sections of our Prayer Book, on page 864.  That ancient faith statement is long and tedious, and we no longer employ it in our American branch of worldwide Anglicanism.

Clergy tend to use cute analogies in an attempt to explain the Trinity.  Trinity is like a three-leaved clover; or a cartwheel in motion; or water in three states as steam, water and liquid; or like the sun with rock, heat and light; or a man who is at once son, brother and father.  The problem with all such analogies is that they promote one or the other of three principal heresies condemned by the Church.  These are:  modalism which imagines one person in God who changes names and hats from creator to redeemer to sanctifier; tritheism, in which there are three equal deities in a confederation, and the doctrine of subordinationalism, which holds the Father as the Supreme Deity, the Son as subordinate to the Father, and the Spirit as being subordinate to both.

Analogies get us in trouble when we try to explain what the human mind cannot comprehend.  In the time that Saint Augustine was writing his great volume on the Trinity, De Trinitate, he told the story of a vision in which an angel was disguised as a little boy is on a beach.  The boy had a dug a hole and was engaged in getting a bucketful of water at a time from the ocean and pouring it into the hole.  Seeing this, the bishop asked him what he was doing.  The boy explained he was trying to empty all of the ocean into the hole.  Augustine tells him that is impossible, and the boy replies that it is equally futile trying to cram the reality of God into the human mind.

Our root problem, says philosopher Gabriel Marcel, is confusing a Mystery with a problem.  That term Mystery is a theological term, musterion in Greek; in fact, it is the word used to translate the word  Sacrament in the Eastern Church. When we have a problem, we are missing bits of data and when we find all the pieces of the puzzle, then we can solve for X or figure out the murderer is, or whatever.  A Mystery is a spiritual reality which we cannot objectively know.  We mortals cannot comprehend it, only appropriate it.

So where does all this leave us, folks?  First , we can accept that the doctrine of the Trinity is a true articulation of the nature of God, revealed in Christ's Catholic Church, which is always being led into truth by the Holy Spirit.  (viz. John 16:12 et seq.)   Second, we can find the triune God in relationship.  After all, the biblical witness speaks of the perfection of complete goodness of the Father, and how the Father is perfectly reflected in the Son, and how through the Holy Spirit, we are being -- however slowly and imperfectly -- formed into the likeness of Christ.

Saint Augustine in his tome tells us that one who loves another knows more of God than one has attempted to explain the Deity.    When we befriend another, serve another, heal another, raise up another, liberate another, in the name of Christ's love, we experience the life of the triune God.