It's A Mystery: Reflections on the Trinity

Trinity Sunday has been an important day in the Anglican Church since the time right after the martyrdom of Thomas Becket in the 12th century. Becket was consecrated bishop on Trinity Sunday, only a few days after his ordination as deacon and priest, and after his death the English church focused on Trinity as a special day in his honor. Even Henry VIII, who was threatened by the strong devotion to the independent-minded Becket, could not shake this connection to Trinity Sunday. Thus, until the changes in the 1979 Book of Common Prayer, we observed the Sundays after Trinity Sunday, whereas we now observe the Sundays after Pentecost in step with the rest of western Christendom.

The doctrine of the Trinity rests on solid scriptural foundations. The first reference is in the 18th chapter of Genesis where the three angels visit Abraham and he offers them hospitality. In this beautiful story the angels are sometimes referred to in the plural and sometimes in the singular as "Lord." And it goes back and forth - singular and plural. This confused readers for centuries until Christians developed an understanding of the Trinity and saw this passage as a foreshadowing of one God in three personas.

In John 16:12-15 we hear Jesus speaking of himself, the Father, and the Spirit. In this morning's Gospel from Matthew we hear Jesus commanding his disciples to baptize "in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit." And Paul, in the 5th and 8th chapters of Romans also speaks of the Trinity. And there are many others.

But the reality of the Trinity is not found in specific texts, but in the patterns of the entire Bible, especially the New Testament, in descriptions of creation, revelation, redemption, enlightenment, and transformation that all come from God. We see in the general sweep of the Gospels and the epistles the interconnected workings of God as creator, as redeemer, and as our sustainer and advocate.

But, as wise teachers have warned me, to speak of the Trinity in intellectual terms, to try to explain the Trinity, is to risk losing your mind. And my teachers are right about this. Because this is not an intellectual exercise, it is a spiritual exercise. It is not about gaining a scientific understanding so that we can believe. Rather, it is, as St. Anselm tells us, the other way around.

Anselm's spirituality is best summarized in the phrase, fides quaerens intellectum - "faith seeking understanding." He writes,

I have heard of the Trinity compared to an apple. You can eat it just as it is. You can bake it. You can slice it and dry the pieces. Three persons in one God - three deserts in one apple. But the analogy breaks down very quickly under close examination because once you've baked your apple, you can't slice it and dry the pieces. It is either in one form or another, but not both or three at the same time. But God is all of God in all God's properties even when we are most aware of just one of the personas of God.

There is a story about a priest who visited the second grade Sunday school and asked the kids if they knew what the Trinity was. Bobby, who had just lost his two front teeth, shot his hand up and the priest called on him to explain the Trinity. He answered rapidly and excitedly, with his toothless lisp, "It'th three perthons in one God." The priest, confused by the lisp and the speed of the reply, said "I don't understand." To which Bobby shot back "You're not thupothed too; it'th a mythtery!"

It is, indeed, a mystery and we cannot rely on biblical texts and our reasoning alone to arrive at a grasp of the Trinity. This is so because a complete intellectual understanding of God is just not possible, or God would not be God. Anselm tells us that God is "that than which nothing greater can be imagined."

So, how do we understand the Trinity. How do we come to know about God in the Trinity?

We are not, of course, the first people to ask this question. Great minds have grappled with this for centuries and they all have arrived at the same answer: through prayer.

The anonymous 14th century author of the Cloud of Unknowing counsels his student to empty himself of all thought, to enter the way of negation in which all positive statements about God are rejected, leaving only a cloud of darkness and of utter emptiness. And out of that cloud of darkness and unknowing there gradually comes an appreciation of God and all God's attributes. In the Cloud of Unknowing we eventually arrive at a sense of God's habitual presence and God's immediate availability to us.

George Herbert, in his poem "Ungratefulness" also acknowledges that God and the Trinity are unknowable to us. Listen to these two versus in which the poet addresses God:

Herbert knows what we all know, namely that this world is not our home. We will not know God fully until we arrive at our true home. And there is no direct road home. We only get there by a lifelong pilgrimage of prayer and meditation, of believing and then understanding. St. Anselm, the author of the Cloud of Unknowing, and George Herbert all know that through a life of prayer we will eventually come to know our loving God within God's own mysterious being as creator, redeemer, and sanctifier.

There are a few positive statements we can make about the Trinity other than Bobby's assertion that, "It'th a mythtery!" The first is that within God's own mysterious being God is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. These designations are just ways in which God is God. Within the Godhead there are three "persons" who are neither three Gods nor three parts of God, but coequally and coeternally God. To speak this way about God is to acknowledge that "God talk" is a kind of foreign language, God's grammar, so to speak, and as such it is only partially accessible to us who are not native "God talk" speakers.

The second is that when we hear formulas that attempt to create categories or classifications of God's functions, such as "Creator, Redeemer, Sanctifier, we run the risk of stating a false doctrine that each person of the Trinity "owns" an attribute that the other two do not possess. We do this most often to deal with the problem of the inadequacies of language that impute gender to God as when we call God "Father" or "Son." But to solve this problem by assigning specific characteristics to persons of the Trinity is inadvertently to negate the doctrine itself. The inadequacies of this formula are shown in the analogy of the apple I gave earlier.

Finally, we can say with a great deal of certainty that the way in which the persons of God in the Trinity are coequally and coeternally God reflect a truth about humanity. That is to say, our humanity is dependent upon the personal and the interpersonal, upon units and unions, upon the interactions that are a product of a perfect love. I need you in order to be myself. God needs all of God's characteristics, fully and equally interacting, to be God. Said in another way, the Trinity is about a profound union of personas in one God that comes from the profoundest manifestation of love.

That's really a mouthful - and a headful! And only by praying and meditating, and then thinking, can we begin to understand the profound reality of the Trinity.

Let us pray.