Sermon for the 6.30pm Service, 18th May 2008, Trinity Sunday

The Holy Trinity: our Understanding of God

Today is Trinity Sunday. This is the day when we think about God in three persons, the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. I suppose that a lot of us would think that the whole enterprise of trying to contemplate God at all is a pretty tall order. People either think that God is completely beyond our understanding and therefore impossible to describe or to say anything significant about, or alternatively they side with people like Richard Dawkins who called God the ‘Blind Watchmaker’.

This was a reaction against a theologian writing in 1802 called William Paley in his book Natural Theology, where the so-called ‘argument for intelligent design’ first crops up. Paley was very impressed by watches. Presumably in 1802 watches were the summit of technological sophistication. In a long passage in his book he describes a watch in loving detail and he says that because of the complexity and sophistication of it, it’s inconceivable that it was created by accident: that there must have been a creator of the watch, who carefully contrived it, designed it and made sure that it functioned properly. He inferred from that to suggest that the world was sophisticated and complex in much the same way as the watch was, and that therefore there must be a watchmaker just like there was a watchmaker for the actual watch – that this was a cosmic watchmaker, who was in fact God.

Dawkins, as you know, published a book called ‘The Blind Watchmaker’ which is a nod to this concept, and he simply says that there is no watchmaker but that simply the processes of evolution are sufficient to produce the sophisticated creation which we now live in. The watchmaker was nothing other than the ‘blind and purposeless process of natural selection’.

This sermon is not going to be a taster for the new 6 o’clock service ‘Alive @ 6’ which we’re going to start trialling soon. Although I would be very thrilled if I saw lots of new faces in the congregation tonight I have to be realistic and say that I’ve been expecting to see a number of old friends and stalwarts from the congregation who’ve been coming to St Andrew’s pretty regularly for many years, so I can make some assumptions about what’s in your minds as you approach this whole topic of the divine and in particular the Christian concept of the Trinity, Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

It isn’t going to be strange vocabulary to you and indeed after the sermon we’ll be going on to rehearse those words in the words of the Nicene Creed.

However, just suppose that we were doing this in the context of ‘Alive @ 6’ when we’re trying to grow a new congregation and we’re trying either to attract people back to church who have stopped coming or possibly attract people who haven’t been to church before but who are enquiring about their spirituality and trying to see whether in fact Christianity is the thing which is missing in their life – in other words, are they in fact being called by Jesus, if only they knew about Him properly?

Now I suspect that for people like that the whole idea of the Holy Trinity will be quite a radical step and it will need quite a lot of explanation. You know, it might not be taking things too far to say that even for a congregation of brothers and sisters in Christ such we have here tonight it’s probably true to say that detailed analysis of the idea of the Holy Trinity is not something which comes very high up our list of theological tasks.

What do we mean by it? If we start off by looking at the Nicene Creed – and if you want to keep an eye on it in your service booklet, it’s reproduced on page 6 – ‘We believe in one God, the Father, the Almighty, maker of heaven and earth … We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the only son of God, eternally begotten of the Father, begotten not made, of one Being with the Father. Through Him all things were made.’ And ‘We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life, who proceeds from the Father and the Son. With the Father and the Son he is worshipped and glorified.’

Now if you stop and think, there are an awful lot of quite puzzling words there, which need a bit of deeper consideration. Some of the explanation for the highly-technical verbiage, using words like ‘begotten’ and ‘of one Being’ and ‘proceeds’ from the Father, and so on and so forth, one explanation for all that is that the whole context of the coming into being of the creeds is that they represented, if you like, almost communiqués or agreed minutes of conferences in the early church, which were there to settle bitter disputes which had arisen and continued over a number of years concerning the true nature of the Trinity.

So for example the early church was split into various factions concerning whether the Son and the Spirit were in some way subordinate to the Father, or whether a better way of understanding things was to regard the Father, Son and Holy Spirit as each one being a different mode or personality of an underlying ultimate reality, and in both those instances there were difficulties in trying to reconcile the idea of the Trinity either as subordinate beings or personalities of an ultimate reality with the accepted view that there was one God; just as the Jews had always held, so also the Christians made a very big impression in the Roman world with their very clear assertion that they worshipped ‘One God’. The suggestion might be that there are in fact three gods, or possibly one big one with three little sub-gods, and either of those views obviously contradicts quite completely the traditional Jewish idea of One God.

Indeed it’s pretty difficult to understand how such a multiple god concept could be coherent against the background of the idea that God was among other things the ultimate creator of the world, of everything that is.

Now all this got settled in the Congress of Nicaea in 325 AD, so you might think that we’re not talking about anything which has any great contemporary significance; although I think simply setting out the argument in very general terms as I have done, you will see straightway that there is a genuine puzzle there.

It’s quite noteworthy that Archbishop Rowan Williams has written a well-known and respected book on the debate in the early church concerning whether Jesus was subordinate to the Father, and the Spirit was also subordinate to the Father, and whether they came after Him in time; ideas which might look pretty reasonable on their face until you start working out the implications of them. These are views which were put about by a theologian called Arius.

As I say, Archbishop Rowan has published a book about Arius and it’s probably the last word on the whole controversy, but it might amuse you to know that even the new Lord Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, clearly thinks of Arius from time to time in among all his other concerns. When he was elected, or some time near that time, he said that there was an ‘Arian’ distinction between the old Boris and the new Boris, and in fact quite a lot of people thought that this was just an example of Boris Johnson showing just how right-wing he really was, starting to use some kind of Nazi imagery, whereas in fact he wasn’t talking about ‘Aryan’ in the spelling A-R-Y-A-N, the sort of Nazi context, but A-R-I-A-N, one letter different, which was a reference to this controversy in the 4th century AD among the early church.

Another way in which the Arian controversy was presented was whether Jesus was ‘of the same substance’ as God, or whether He was a ‘similar’ substance; in Greek, the ‘same’ is ‘?????????, and ‘similar’ is ‘??????????. There’s a one-letter difference, just as in the Boris Johnson example.

Well in 325 the Council of Nikaia, Nicaea, adopted a definitive reading which appears in the Nicene Creed, and you’ll see in the second section – about Jesus – that we believe in one Lord Jesus Christ, begotten not made, of one Being, ‘??????????with the Father. Well probably by this stage if our mythical worship explorer had stumbled into ‘Alive @ 6’ and listened to all that I’ve been saying, he or she would be very confused indeed – and I’m slightly concerned that you may be not too far behind.

I think that it’s appropriate that we should, when we are contemplating these enormous topics, be pretty humble. I found a very good story to illustrate this in the massive text-book on Christian theology by the great Ulster and Oxford theologian Alister McGrath which is our text-book for this term’s course at GDMC, called ‘Christian Theology’, and I’ll quote the passage. He says, ‘I was told the famous story about Augustine of Hippo who lived from 354 to 430, who was particularly noted for his massive treatise De Trinitate, dealing with the mysteries of the Trinity. Augustine found himself pacing the Mediterranean shoreline of his native North Africa not far from the great city of Carthage. … While wandering across the sand he noticed a small boy scooping seawater into his hands and pouring as much as his small hands could hold into a hole he had earlier hollowed in the sand. Puzzled, Augustine watched as the lad repeated his action again and again. Eventually his curiosity got the better of him. What, he asked the boy, did he think he was doing? …. The youth was in the process of emptying the ocean into the small cavity he had scooped in the hot sand. Augustine was dismissive. How could such a vast body of water be contained in such a small hole? The boy was equally dismissive in return. How could Augustine expect to contain the vast mystery of God in the mere words of a book?’

So should we give up on the Trinity? Is it something that’s really not worth bothering with? I don’t think this is the right answer either. There are several passages in the Bible which show that the Bible certainly supports the idea of a Trinity of Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

The most famous ones, I suppose, are Matthew 28:19, where Jesus gives his great commission to the disciples, ‘Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptising them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit’; and indeed 2 Corinthians 13, the Grace, ‘The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all’ – which we’ll use at the end of this service.

There’s also the passage in Romans 8, ‘For all who are led by the spirit of God are children of God. You have received a spirit of adoption. When we cry ‘Abba, Father’ it is that very spirit bearing witness with our spirit’.

And John 17, where Jesus says a prayer for his disciples, when he is about to suffer and die, he says, ‘Now Father glorify me in your own presence with the glory that I had in your presence before the world existed.’

I think if Arius had taken proper account of that sentence alone he would have found it difficult to maintain his belief that Jesus was in some way subordinate to God, but that’s by the bye. It’s clear that the idea of a Trinity of Father, Son and Holy Spirit is very biblical and it would be a big mistake for us to ignore it.

The great German theologian Jürgen Moltmann, in his book ‘The Trinity and the Kingdom of God’, suggests that another very important way of looking at the Trinity is through doxology. Doxology is that part of our worship where we say ‘Glory’, ???? in Greek is ‘glory’, so ‘doxology’ is ‘glory words’, glory liturgy. In our worship, the Doxology is ‘Glory be to – the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit’.

What Moltmann says is, ‘Real theology, which means the knowledge of God, finds expression in thanks, praise and adoration, and it is what finds expression in doxology that is the real theology. There is no experience of salvation without the expression of that experience in thanks, praise and joy. Only doxology releases the experience of salvation for a full experience of that salvation.

In grateful wondering and adoring perception the triune God’ – the God in three persons – ‘is not made man’s object, he is not appropriated and taken possession of, it is rather that the perceiving person participates in what he perceives, being transformed into the thing perceived through his wondering perception. Here we know only insofar as we love’.

In the name of God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, amen.

©Hugh Bryant May 2008

Posted: 20/05/2008