The Trinity is the most important concept in the church. It is important in the way that things are important. It has this essential character, it is the source of great conflict, and it has some brilliance to it.

And yet the doctrine of the Trinity is about as confusing, ill-defined, and poorly executed of any central doctrines in any faith system. There is little unity over what it is: our fights have brought only relative unity over what it isn’t.

This makes the Trinity, as central to our faith, a most strangely chaotic concept. And its uncertainty a surprising counter to the real rigidity of the faith.

'Christian theology is a paradox.' Share on X

I loved Systematic Theology in seminary. I think there can be no true systematic theology, only personal operational theologies, but the classes and the conversations and the readings were totally fascinating to me.

Systematic Theology as a discipline is a pursuit like the unified theory: it is an attempt to make a consistent theology out of our Christian faith. This seems like a worthy and natural pursuit on the surface. But given how many theories of central concepts there are in Christianity, the pursuit seems monumental.

Making matters worse, we have a faith filled with contradictions and confusions: core beliefs are consistently at odds with one another.

A practical example of this involves baptism, which is not practiced consistently throughout the church by any stretch. But it is founded on two competing principles: the need to include the outsider and the need to educate. If we decide to hold to the letter of the need for baptism to be our marker of inclusion, we will find that our education of the catechumens to be weakened and less thorough. If we adhere to the education, then it means we may have a church with many regular attending outsiders and only a few members.

Many churches think they have a pretty settled view of baptism. But let us not confuse the making of a choice, preferring one half of the sacrament for a consistent systematic theology.

What is the Trinity?

The fact that our theology is a little hard to pin down should not dissuade one from exploring it or believing it is important. Yes, Christian theology is complex. But not because it is naturally hard. Christian theology is a paradox. It isn’t a web of intricacy so much as an attempt to say two (or more) conflicting things at once. And hold them both as true.

This is what makes a systematic theology so difficult. Because it tries to make choices out of paradoxes or firm decisions about the fuzzy indeterminate parts of our faith. It is an attempt to bring systemic structure to an ordered collection of paradoxes.

These paradoxes certainly bring a kind of complexity. Perhaps no greater example of that complexity is the Trinity.

All of the great fights in the church in the first thousand years were about the Trinity. Or more specifically those recurring questions about “Who is GOD?” or “Who is Jesus in relationship to GOD?”

So the concept of the Trinity was born as a means of describing this ultimate paradox: God is one and God is three.

The classic formulation of this is to say that GOD is one god. And GOD takes on three personas or is found in three persons: GOD the Father, GOD the Son, and GOD the Holy Spirit. Even when GOD is with us, GOD is still everywhere. Even when GOD is Jesus, GOD is also not Jesus. GOD doesn’t shapeshift. GOD doesn’t take time off from being GOD. And yet GOD takes on the full humanity of Jesus. And GOD is present in our worship and in the water and in the air and in the fire.

The complexity of the Trinity is only seen in the demand that GOD be consistently one, even as we name the different personas and the different ways in which GOD is made known, the doctrine of the Trinity demands that, in this way, GOD doesn’t change. Other theologies suggest that GOD is able to change in other ways, but that’s a whole other thing.

What does it matter?

Certainly good and devoted people have spent countless hours trying to crack this riddle. But there is nothing to crack. It is not really to be explained in a way that makes literal sense. Our tradition is built on the Trinity being a paradox, not on it being definitive.

That doesn’t mean we haven’t seen this whole thing get out of whack.

For the most part, the church has given much more interest to the divinity of Jesus than his humanity, for instance. And that relationship between the Holy Spirit and GOD the Father and Jesus split the church in half a thousand years ago.

However, this has mattered as a tool of defining the parameters of the faith. It was used to see, not merely where we stand as individuals, but what the church can tolerate and allow for differentiation.

We fought wars over these differences. We excommunicated whole churches and peoples because of theologies much less different from some denominational groups today. And the toll of these disputes was not the ordering of the faith in an honest and productive way, it was the brutal defeat and rejection of historic Christian communities dating back to the Apostles. It was murder and rejection of thousands of innocent people who, like you and me, just go to church each week and read about the church on the internet. OK, well, not the internet, and they weren’t literate, but you get the idea.

And the reason we did this as the church was mostly power and fear.

It was first about control. Control over the narrative and the conditions of the Jesus story. For us, this plays out with televangelists and interviews with Jerry Falwell and Rick Warren on CNN. For the people 1,500 years ago, it was in the streets and behind the closed doors of councils.

The second, and the less public reason is fear. They were afraid of theologies that explored the boundaries and contours of our faith. They were afraid of a guy saying (essentially) What if Jesus was just a dude? The fear was the fear we’d call the slippery slope. They didn’t want to explore that idea because of where it would lead. So it is better to destroy the thought before it can spread, like an idea virus.

This, of course, made it the most dangerous idea, and an idea that has never left the church. We still preach about it.

They hoped, in the end, that the doctrine of the Trinity would bring balance to the faith. That we could all live with the paradox better than we could live with the competing narratives as separate theories. Our ancestors seemed to have gambled on the idea that paradox was the better and more politically safe conclusion than allowing these battles to rage within the church.

They were probably right. Sort of.

The positive description of the Trinity

I have a less doctrinaire view of the great councils in the first millennium than many of my peers. Their work, which established the boundaries and the normative expectations for the church were not as consistent, GOD-led, or inspired events as we wish they were. Some of them were nasty and literally murderous. Here, the work of Philip Jenkins is invaluable.

They also had the unfortunate consequence of producing winners and losers. And rather than treat the losers as faithful Christians or to build ways for all to share at the table together, we saw great division and separation, which have had disastrous consequences and sowed the seeds for the current Middle Eastern conflicts.

I have great sympathy for those on the outside; those marginalized by orthodoxy. So I don’t endorse this approach.

I also see our approach to the Trinity and its related theologies as historically being written by what it is not, rather than what it is. In the same way, the sense of orthodoxy was built around finding the limits of belief, but in enforcement, it has had the effect of separating and dividing, rather than uniting the many.

We’ve taken a great big beach, full of people already, and in the name of unity, set down stones in a great big oval, which covers 64% of the beach. Then we said that all of those in the oval are good. Look at all that beach you can play in! And we said to the remaining third, you better bring your stuff inside this oval, or else!

This must be how our self-described Traditionalists see the church today.

But I think a different approach is in order. One that embraces the differences and the explorations. That sees our bonds of affection as tethers, not nooses. For we already are multiple churches with very different understandings of our tradition.

I’d like to see us name, not the confines of the faith, but the positive descriptors of our faith. In this way, the Orthodox understanding of the Trinity as a dance of mutuality between the three: a radical equality of movement and intimacy to be intoxicating. It is a description of doctrine that is faithful and defensible.

More importantly, it is positive, inclusive, and makes the paradox of our Trinitarian god seem much less like a philosophical compromise and much more like a passionate description of GOD, the church, and creation itself.

Ask Yourself

How does the Trinity inform your faith? Is it ever-present, or something you only think about on Trinity Sunday?

How do you relate to the three persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit? How comfortable are you with them? How comfortable are you with the paradox of 3 and 1? Do you need sharper divisions, or desire a more “mystical” approach?

Aside from using the Trinitarian formulation of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in prayers and blessings, how does the doctrine of the Trinity live in our worship? How does it come out? Do we feel these persona? Or do we (like the Creed) give a ton of real estate to Jesus and then doff our cap in the direction of the Father and Spirit?

What would liturgy look like that more fully embraced the character of the Trinity? Would we have more integrated creation, teaching, and blessing? What if we let the doctrine shape our liturgy, letting us get our hands dirty and experience more in worship?

 

[This is Day 21 of How to start deconstructing church. The next in the series is “Cross or Crucifix”. To start from the beginning, read the introduction here.]