The doctrine of the Trinity is a paradox. We totally hate paradoxes. The real question is why we expect someone else to understand it better than we do.
Why we struggle to explain this weird doctrine
Trinity Sunday C | John 16:12-15
We were at work, setting up the Barnes & Noble for its grand opening at the Lansing Mall. I was about a year from thinking about seminary.
Boxes everywhere and we’re putting thousands upon thousands of books on the shelves and alphabetizing as we go.
And in this room of mostly young Xers and Millennials, I was one of only a couple of practicing Christians.
One of my coworkers, a couple years younger, barely 20 but already engaged; she was that kind of awkward nerd chic we saw in late 2000, before it became normal. She asked the question that bedeviled her about Christianity.
“What I don’t get is the Trinity. OK, so if God is three, then how can God also be one?”
Ooh.
Here’s where all the people in this room look at me to tell you an answer.
It’s a legitimate question. Fundamental.
But at the time, I wasn’t a priest. I had only been going to church regularly again for about 6 months after taking most of undergrad off. And to be honest, I don’t remember at all what I said. Just that she didn’t really buy it.
But here’s the awful truth you probably don’t want to hear. While that is a legitimate question, it is one everyone in this room should be able to respond to already. Not because you’ve memorized a “right” answer. Or taken the right classes.
But because we’re human, curious, and interested. And this question about the Trinity is for all us to wrestle with. Not just the experts.
Yes, it’s complicated
Several years later, when I left for seminary, I was excited to learn. One reason was that I felt completely inadequate. I didn’t know much about the Bible and my theology was piecemeal. This was going to be great because I would get all the official lines so I didn’t have to worry about any of this.
Especially when people came up to me asking about the Trinity.
What I discovered was that our tradition is a bit more complicated than that. And probably the most important thing I learned in my first year was how more alive an active faith is than the static one I was seeking.
It took study and wrestling through systematic theology to see that a simple answer to a seemingly simple question is either too shallow or too vague to be satisfying. Not when our view of the cosmos is so literal.
So here’s why.
There’s no Trinity in the Bible. It’s a doctrine created much later. Our ancestors hoped to answer certain questions AND at the same time AVOID certain conclusions. So the history of all our doctrine is a little like driving while texting.
Where does it come from?
Like most of our faith, it isn’t a single person’s brilliant answer for all time. It’s a quilt we add to over the course of 2,000 years.
But the genesis of the Trinity and all Christian theology is not simply a game of discovering what we are supposed to believe. Nor is it only about claiming what each of us individually believes.
It’s also the question of how we eat at a table with people who believe something different. Because people of faith have always come to different conclusions.
So, from the beginning, the church struggled to positively affirm what it does believe and still get together. It was far easier to come up with what the majority could agree is NOT true. You know, democracy and the process of elimination.
So for centuries, Christians got together to define what official Christian doctrine would be by declaring ideas it DIDN’T like. In reality, this was mostly majority rule and then kicking faithful people out, or worse. Armies were a regular part of the great councils in the 5th and 6th Centuries. Some groups hoped to intimidate their brothers. Or kill them. Either way.
Most of this fighting involved the nature and relationship of Jesus to God or the relationship of the Holy Spirit to Jesus.
What’s the problem?
What we’ve inherited: an idea that God is three persons and one God at the same time, unchanging and separate but never actually separate, three individuals and yet one entity and all somehow true is a compromise.
No, it doesn’t make any literal or physical sense. It also doesn’t make any logical or metaphysical sense. But what it is is the thing we have when we eliminate all the other possibilities as worse.
So I couldn’t give my coworker a satisfying answer because the Trinity isn’t a satisfying idea. Not in that sense. Not in the Catholic or Protestant place holder sense. Literal-minded people are never satisfied by a Great Mystery, a paradox which defies both logic and comprehension. Especially one we’ve arrived at by eliminating all other possibilities.
Words Fail Us
I noticed a while ago that my praying, and the church’s praying does a poor job of dealing with the Trinity.
Our prayers so often separate the three persons into individual identities. And we address them directly. But if they are one, then our practice rarely reflects that singularity.
Our prayers separate the Trinity as our certainty and conviction separates us. So we come to reflect a Trinity that is never truly one; a Trinity of persons which are embodied by our individualism, our selfishness, and our petty need to police the boundaries.
The Trinity of our language paints a picture of disunity.
No wonder my coworker couldn’t understand the Trinity. The literal impossibility of the Trinity is reflected in our liturgical and spiritual impossibility in reflecting it.
Community
We still want a doctrine that answers a really hard question but we refuse to do the wrestling in community to find it. Because that need to be right, to protect our precious egos, keeps us alive.
It also wants us to win. At all costs.
But for us to see how three individuals can actually be one, we have to be able to think about a we that isn’t just three of me.
Or as Steve Daugherty writes, we need to learn how to be just a bit more about others than about ourselves. Just 51% others.
It doesn’t mean totally abandoning the self. Nor does it mean magically finding community through selfishness alone. But it means relaxing the ego and embracing our common life.
God helps us all see that we are a we. And that “weness” is a positive affirmation and reflection of the Trinity.
The Trinity is love made real
The problem with doctrine is that it serves like a mandate that hates diversity. But diversity is the very nature of the Trinity.
So we uphold these archaic and weird affirmations of faith which are wholly inadequate for the job because we’re afraid to follow the Spirit without boundaries. And yet, we can watch them come alive when we get together to eat or serve or learn or talk.
Few of us feel the Trinity when we’re memorizing doctrine. But when we argue with someone? Or we hear stories of God moments? Or we watch the tears well up in the eyes of someone who has just gotten the best gift in the whole world? You know that’s holy!
The static doctrine of the Trinity is a pale facsimile of God. It doesn’t do them justice. Because it can’t. And it doesn’t even really try.
Because the Trinity is community and singularity, binding and delegating; it’s shared authority and singular identity. The Trinity is love made real. Tangible and practical. God personified in us.
God is not an I, but a we. The persons of the Trinity are never alone. And neither are we.
The Trinity is dancing and feasting and sharing; it’s sacrificing self and limiting selfishness. It’s not just saying “I’m hungry,” but “I’m hungry and I bet you are too. Here, have a donut.”
Every one of us has a story, a Trinity moment in which love got real.
I dare us to say that. When someone asks about the Trinity. We can say “Here’s what I know about the Trinity:” and then tell a story of when love got real. And that we can see it now. We only thought we were individuals. But we were always and will always be we.