Faced with cultural and religious pluralism the
post-modern church in the west appears extraordinarily anxious or
extraordinarily accommodating, depending on one's point of view. The
church regards its pluralistic setting as novel and is either tempted to
panic and endeavour to preserve itself through a multi-faceted
isolationism, or is tempted in its bold engagement with the world to
squander the "deposit" (2 Timothy 1:12) which it has been
charged to guard. Those prone to worry are more likely to insist on
retaining a doctrine of the Trinity, if only to preserve continuity with
their forebears in faith, not realizing that "if only" reduces
the doctrine to an artifact in the museum of intellectual history. On
the other hand, those eager to meet challenges are more likely to
jettison any doctrine of the Trinity as an encumbrance which inhibits
the church in its witness to the gospel and its exemplification of it in
the common life of the world.
One issue facing the church, then, is this: is the
doctrine of the Trinity baggage which is not only unnecessary but is
actually a threat to the seaworthiness of the ship (church) as it
appears to founder in the storms of modernity? or is it ballast in the
ship's keel apart from which the ship will capsize in even moderate
winds?
I submit that apart from the doctrine of the Trinity
"gospel" is rendered indistinguishable from religious
aspiration or projection, while "Spirit" is reduced to a
magnification of anything that the Fall-darkened heart and mind of
humankind may conceive, and "church" becomes nothing more than
one more social group (albeit in religious guise) which seeks to promote
the agenda of its constituents. In short, without the doctrine of the
Trinity the arch counter-miracle will occur: wine will be turned into
water as the gospel is denatured.
In maintaining the doctrine of the Trinity to belong
to the being of the faith rather than merely to its
wellbeing I am not holding up as etched in stone the expression of any
one thinker's understanding; neither Augustine's nor Aquinas's nor
Calvin's nor Barth's. Nonetheless, I am convinced that just as these
thinkers were impelled to speak on behalf of the Triune God in order to
forestall the acculturation of the gospel in their day, we must do as
much in ours, all the while endeavouring to obey the fifth commandment;
namely, to honour our parents (including our theological foreparents) in
order that the days of the church may be long in the land which God
gives us.
II: -- I agree with those
who maintain that a fully-articulated doctrine of the Trinity is not
found in scripture. Nonetheless, the building blocks of the doctrine
incontrovertibly are. Consider the following:
Go therefore and make disciples of all nations,
baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the
Son and of the Holy Spirit. (Matthew 28:19)
This Jesus God raised up.... Being therefore exalted
at the right hand of God, and having received from
the Father the promise of the Holy Spirit, he has
poured out this which you see and hear. (Acts
2:32f)
The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God,
and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you
all. (2 Corinthians 13:14)
For through [Jesus Christ] we both have access in one
Spirit to the Father. (Ephesians 2:18)
There is one body and one Spirit, just as you were
called in one hope that belongs to your call, one
Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father
of us all.... But grace was given to each of us
according to the measure of Christ's gift. (Ephesians
4:4-6)
...God chose you from the beginning to be saved,
through sanctification by the Spirit and belief in
the truth. To this he called you through our
gospel, so that you may obtain the glory of our
Lord Jesus Christ. (2 Thessalonians 2:13)
Chosen and destined by God the Father and sanctified
by the Spirit for obedience to Jesus Christ and
for sprinkling with his blood. (1 Peter 1:2)
As scripture attests the incursion of the Word
scripture impels us to an understanding that God is eternally Triune. A
doctrine of the Trinity makes explicit what is everywhere implicit in
the "the faith once delivered to the saints" and for which
faith, the apostle tells us, we must ever "contend". (Jude 3)
III: -- Christian faith is
rooted in the oneness of being between Jesus Christ and God the Father.
In the gospel God has revealed himself to us as Father, Son and Holy
Spirit. (Without the divine activity of the Holy Spirit we should not know
of the deity of Father and Son.) In this self-unveiling God has revealed
himself in such a way as to disclose that what God is in himself God is
toward us, and what God is toward us God is in himself, throughout his
saving acts in history. In other words, what God is eternally in
himself, that is, in his internal relations as Father, Son and Holy
Spirit, God is in his activity toward us through the Son and in the
Spirit.
If the oneness in being between Jesus Christ and God
the Father is cut, then the substance and heart of the gospel is lost.
For if what Christ does is not what God does, then before God
humankind's predicament is unrelieved. Again, if God himself has not
come among us in the Incarnation, then God's love for us (despite God's
good intentions!) stops short of God's full identification with
us sinners; in truth it is not finally love (or at least is woefully
deficient and defective love) and the redemptive activity of God is
finally ineffectual.
Faith in this God is generated by God's self-witness
and self-interpretation (Holy Spirit) in God's Word (Jesus Christ). In
short, knowledge of God is the work of God himself. Since there is no
intrinsic ontological similarity between the eternal being of God and
the contingent being of us creatures, the fact of faith (that is, the
presence of women and men who believe) attests the utter priority of God
over all thought concerning him. We can think correctly about God
at all only because God includes us in his self-knowing.
In conjoining "Spirit" and "Holy"
scripture insists that God is the only fit witness to himself; only God
can disclose God. And since God has given himself to us in the person of
the Son or Word, then Spirit and Son (Word) are inextricably linked. Or
in the idiom of the written gospels, Jesus Christ is the unique bearer
and bestower of the Holy Spirit. This is but to say that one cannot
pronounce "Spirit" except in reference to Jesus Christ. (In
this way the apostles insist that while Christless spirits do indeed
abound, they can only be less than holy!) This point is reinforced by
scripture's depiction of the Spirit as being sent from the Father in the
name of the Son, never in the Spirit's own name; the Spirit speaks only
of the Father and of the Son, never of himself. Put simply, the Spirit
is like floodlighting. Floodlights are positioned in such a way that one
does not see the floodlight itself, only that which it lights up and to
which it therefore directs attention. (Recall our Lord's words, "He
(i.e., the Spirit) shall glorify me". John 16:14) The Spirit
imports no new substance into faith's knowing, but rather facilitates
faith's knowledge of the Son, who is the "substance" of the
Father.
IV: -- While the foregoing
is formally espoused throughout the church catholic it is materially
contradicted frequently in various "unitarianisms", such as
those outlined below.
(i) A UNITARIANISM OF THE FATHER
This popular "unitarianism" certainly preserves the truth that
God is exalted, "high and lifted up"; that God's thoughts are
not our thoughts nor our ways God's ways. (Isaiah 6:1; 55:8) God is the
sole, sovereign, eternal one. God is not an aspect of his
creation-at-large (the cosmos) nor an aspect of his creation-at-small
(humankind). God is irreducibly GOD, never one with whom we may
trifle.
However, the God who is only "high and
lifted up", without differentiation, tends to be so exalted as
never to humble himself, so far beyond us as not to render himself
accessible, sovereign with more than a suggestion of severe, unknowable
in the sense of arbitrary, a creator who is also (or may be) capricious.
Eighteenth century deism portrayed God as the creator
who fashioned the universe and then effectively absented himself from
it. Seventeenth century Protestant scholasticism portrayed God as
capricious in its notion of double predestination. God, it said, has
foreordained elect and reprobate as such even before they are
born, and therefore before they have even had opportunity to sin. When
confronted with the irrationality of this its proponents stated that
there is a reason underlying the only-apparent irrationality of
the decrees, but this "reason" is hidden inscrutably in the
innermost recesses of God. Therefore it is not our place to enquire,
only our place to adore. The more the hidden justice of this scheme was
advanced, however, the more apparent the manifest injustice was to many.
In view of the unqualified remoteness of God, or the arbitariness of
God, or the injustice of God which a unitarianism of the Father seems to
imply, this particular unitarianism, paradoxically, ends in the denial
that God is parent in any sense.
(ii) A UNITARIANISM OF THE SON
Undifferentiated transcendence is overcome as Jesus Christ is
God-with-us. So far from disdaining the complexity of the human
situation God has identified with it in its totality. Jesus Christ is
bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh, is tempted at all points as we
are (Hebrews 4:15), even becoming one with sinners, as his baptism
attests, by "being made sin" for us.(2 Corinthians 5:21)
At the same time, to collapse God into God the Son
distorts even the truth of the Incarnation. For then God-with-us is
demeaned as pal. The saccharine Jesus finds no paradigm in scripture. No
one who met Jesus Christ in the flesh ever spoke of him in this manner.
The written gospels, rather, customarily depict him as one whom people
do not understand and cannot domesticate. Even disciples, newly made
aware in his presence of their systemic sinnership, can only plead with
him to leave them alone. The apostles never confuse proximity with
presumption. So far from being aider and abettor of human schemes, Jesus
is the one who does not supply answers to questions, for he will
not confirm the standpoint or the perception or the purpose of the
questioner. Instead he poses his own question, therein showing the
speaker to dwell in spiritual unreality; i.e., suffer from spiritual
psychosis.
(iii) A UNITARIANISM OF THE SPIRIT
It is the Spirit who imparts vitality and vibrancy in believer and
congregation alike. It is the Spirit who supplies zeal, warmth,
boldness, effectiveness. It is the Spirit whose gifts equip the
congregation for ministry and whose fruits adorn the gospel, in all of
this exhibiting the truth of God as the power of God and not mere
ideation.
One New Testament word for the Spirit, ARRABON --
"down payment" or "pledge", (in modern Greek it
means a woman's engagement ring) -- plainly means that there is more to
come. While the Spirit satisfies the restless human heart the
satisfaction it yields never satiates; believers, contented as never
before and nowhere else, are nonetheless "hungrier" than ever
even as they know that one day they will be fed so as to leave them
hungering no more. The entire experiential aspect of primitive
Christianity (e.g., "Did you receive the Spirit by works of the law
or by hearing with faith?" (Galatians 3:2) plainly directs the
attention of readers of the epistle to identifiable experience) is much
undervalued in most expressions of the church today.
Notwithstanding, when the Spirit is magnified
disproportionately and experience put forward unnormed, then
"Spirit" ceases to be the power in which Jesus Christ acts
himself and which he pours forth on his people. "Spirit"
instead lends itself to frenzy, the suspension of the intellect, and the
identification of God with powers which may be nothing more than the
intrapsychic proclivities and pressures of the devotees themselves.
It appears that whenever the Trinity is denied through
the aforementioned unitarianisms redemption is denied as well. In the
first instance God's transcendence is upheld in such a manner as to
render God remote, distant, inaccessible, with the result that the
creation is left unaffected. In the second instance God is so identified
with the creation as not to transcend it so as to be free for it. In the
third instance God is so identified with human intra-psychic processes
as to leave them deified. It is the Triune God who alone saves, for it
is the Triune God who alone can.
V: -- In many areas of the
church catholic today the doctrine of the Trinity is denied not merely
materially but formally as well. Such a denial occurs whenever, for
instance, the deity of the Son is impugned. "Son of", in
scripture, has the force of "of the same nature as"; to modify
"same nature" is to deny what the church has always confessed
in terms of the Incarnation.
Formal denial need not be blatant; in fact it is no
less a formal denial for being subtle. Whenever the question, "Is
Jesus the Son of God?", is answered, whether waggishly or
sincerely, "Of course he is; all of us are sons and daughters of
God", Incarnation is denied and therefore Trinity as well. And
since the being of God is intrinsically related to the knowledge of God,
any departure from acknowledging the Tri-unity of God imperils the
knowledge of God. The current preoccupation with "Creation
Spirituality" is such a subtle yet formal denial.
The question, "Who is God?", is a question
which scripture answers only indirectly. It answers this question by
first asking and answering two others: "What does God do
(outside of us, yet for our sake)?", and "What does God effect
(in us)?" We can know who God is only as we first learn what God
has done on our behalf, for our sake, in the Son, and only as we
become beneficiaries of this work on our behalf through the power of the
Spirit. In sum, we know God as we are included in God's work for us and
as we are illumined concerning this work. To become acquainted with the
living God is to learn that the creation is not God. It is too
frequently overlooked that the non-divine status of the creation has to
be revealed -- or else why should the creation not be assumed to
be divine, as in fact it often is? As it is only by grace (i.e., by the
action of God himself) that we learn that the Triune one is God, so it
is only by grace that we learn that the creation is not God but
rather is creaturely. "Creation Spirituality", on the other
hand, is predicated on the postulate that the creation either is God or
mediates God, both of which prophet and apostle reject. Since God is God
and we are but creatures of God, the order or logic of revelation
generates the order or logic of our knowledge of God. And since the
creation does not reveal the Triune God, the creation (itself fallen and
in bondage to death) is not the vehicle of that life which the Spirit
(who is God) alone effects.
Any diminution of the Son as one with the being of the
Father is an explicit denial of the Trinity. Such diminution of the Son
invariably fosters an idolization of the creation.
VI: -- Any sundering of
Spirit from Son is a similar denial with similar consequences. Sundering
the Spirit from the Son means that the "Spirit" ceases to be
holy, ceases to be intrinsically related to the Word (as the reformers,
following the apostles, were careful to note), and becomes instead the
religious legitimation of human fancy or fantasy. Since, as was seen
above, it is only through the truth that truth is known and non-truth
recognized, only by reality that illusion is discerned, then only
through revelation can we gain proper perspective on and understand
assorted claims to truth, reality, godliness and goodness.
(i) RELIGION Despite
its apparently ascendant secularism our era is startlingly religious. It
is assumed that religion is good and that Christianity is religious.
Christianity may indeed be, but is faith "religious"?
Prophet and apostle attest that the gospel exposes religion as
non-gospel, non-faith; i.e., unbelief. Elijah on Mount Carmel does not
suggest to the Baal spokespersons that they are religious, he is
religious, and therefore they should all pool their religiosity, seeking
out a common denominator, maximizing convergence and minimizing
divergence. On the contrary Elijah maintains that shortly Yahweh will
act in such a way as to expose Baalism for what it is. This is not to
say that Israel's faith remained free of religion; the prophets
continually deplore the religious invasion of Israel and continually
recall Israel to the God who displayed his outstretched arm in
delivering them from slavery and formed them his people at Sinai, and
now nurtured them like a mother with her child at her breast.
It seems that the church today thinks itself to be
meeting religious pluralism for the first time, when in fact the faith
of Israel and of Israel's greater Son came to birth and had to survive
in the context of competing religious claimants. To be sure, this
pluralism always encroached upon the faith of God's people and
threatened to dissolve them. Significantly, while Paul begins his sermon
on Mars Hill (Acts 17) by acknowledging the phenomenon of religions (the
Greek word he uses -- DEISDAIMON -- also means "superstition",
it should be noted), he quickly moves to an unambiguous declaration of
Jesus Christ, his resurrection, and the coming judgement. Nowhere do the
apostles counsel seeking commonalities with contiguous religious
manifestations.
Unless the church recovers its discernment of how
revelation discloses itself as distinct from religion, how will the
church recognize -- and repudiate -- the religious accretions to the
gospel, and even the most subtle (yet no less deleterious)
psycho-religiosities which attach themselves to our own believing? How
will it distinguish between the truth that God, for the sake of his
glory and our salvation, has freely justified us of his own free grace,
and religion as the insidious attempt at justifying ourselves before a
god whose mercy and pardon we plainly doubt?
(ii) CULTURE Again, as soon
as Spirit is sundered from Word (Jesus Christ is the one Word of
God we are to hear and heed in life and in death, according to the
Barmen Declaration), the "Spirit" is co-opted as the
legitimization and even the divinization of culture. Aesthetic enjoyment
is then spoken of as "spiritual experience". All experiences
of the creaturely order in its own mysterious depths are denoted
"spiritual" and are confused with the work of the Holy Spirit
of God. The obvious conclusion from this confusion is that cultured
people are spiritually superior and that culture saves.
The Germans, as usual, have a polysyllabic word for
it: Kulturprotestantismus. The culture-religion which had
permeated the German church left people unable to distinguish between
God himself and the awesome depths of God's creation, between having
"God's love poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit which
has been given to us"(Romans 5:5) and being moved by natural beauty
or artistic talent. When Kulturprotestantismus went beyond
viewing aesthetics as the vestibule to the kingdom and affirmed culture
and kingdom to be synonymous, the nazification of the land of Goethe,
Schiller, Beethoven -- not to mention the world's leading medical
research -- demonstrated that culture can readily cloak the conflict
between Holy One and evil one. It demonstrates too that Kulturprotestantismus
supplies neither the ability nor the urge to remove the cloak.
(iii) SELF-INTEREST The
spectacle of most television religious programming, replete with
references to "God", "Holy Spirit" and
"faith" raises the issue of narcissism. Narcissism is
preoccupation with oneself, preoccupation with one's own comfort,
advantage, recognition, advancement and reward. The televised
"gospel" offers this more often than not. It is only as the
Spirit is known to be always and only the Spirit of him who had nowhere
to lay his head, of him who summons followers to leave all and shoulder
a cross if they are to be his followers, that the spiritual counterfeit
of narcissism can be identified.
(iv) PATHOLOGY In the same
way once the Spirit is divorced from the one who is the guarantor of the
kingdom (i.e., the creation healed), once pneumatology is separated from
Christology, people are theologically/spiritually defenceless against
psycho-religious pathology. Jonestown need not be recalled; suffice it
to recollect those whose "faith" has rendered them ill, or
rendered them more ill.
VII: -- When Jesus Christ is
confessed as the unique bearer and bestower of the Spirit; when the
Spirit is known as the power in which Jesus Christ acts, to the glory of
God the Father, then distortions which bedevil the church are avoided
and Trinitarian doctrine preserves proper balances.
Reference has already been made to the question Paul
put to the Christians in Galatia, "Did you receive the Spirit by
works of the law or by hearing with faith?". The question directs
his readers to recall and reflect upon an aspect of their life in Christ
which they cannot deny, an event (however protracted), moreover, which
is so common as to provide an indisputable beginning-point for his
subsequent reasoning with them.
As the church today recovers experience of God
(for experience of God is the only experience the Spirit of Jesus Christ
facilitates) the theological content of the gospel will never be arid intellectualism.
It is the Spirit who prevents the gospel (so-called) from becoming the
preserve of the intellectually gifted, from degenerating into a western
philosophy which happens to employ a religious vocabulary. The gospel
must not become one more abstraction to be assessed along with other
"world-views", when in truth the gospel, ultimately, is the
presence and power of the living Lord Jesus Christ in his person.
When the Spirit is honoured as the power of God which
renders Jesus Christ forever contemporaneous then living faith will
always triumph over traditionalism. "I'm a Lutheran",
when uttered in the apparent absence of throbbing faith in the living
Word, usually means that the Lutheran Church is the one someone stays
away from! The same phenomenon is seen in those whose Protestantism
consists in their anti-Catholicism.
When "Spirit" and "Word" are
acknowledged to imply each other then institutionalism will not
supplant adventurous discipleship. No longer subserving itself or an
un-gospel agenda, the institution will subserve the community which
lives for the praise of God's glory. The institution will resist calling
for that obedience which is owed God alone. In trusting the promise that
the powers of death shall not prevail against Christ's people who, like
John the Baptist, point to him, it will soberly remember that
institutional remains litter the landscape of history.
Where the Spirit is recalled as the Spirit of him who
insists that harlots and tax-collectors enter the kingdom of God ahead
of the "righteous" the placebo of moralism will be
detected and dropped. The Christian life will not be impoverished until
it becomes precisely what the world misunderstands it to be: conformity
to a code, success at which enterprise breeds self-righteousness while
failure precipitates despair. Evident instead will be glad obedience to
the living person of Jesus Christ, out of gratitude for the deliverance
he has effected.
Where the Spirit is trusted to lend effectiveness to
proclamation in Christ's name evangelism will not give way to assorted
techniques for proselytizing or garnering adherents. To
evangelize is to set forth the gospel of the Son in reliance upon the
God whose Spirit is sufficient to empower the saints' testimony. In
other words, the outcome of our evangelism can be left in God's hands.
A church which does not trust the Spirit to honour
witness borne to the Son is a church which confuses evangelism with
conversion; which is to say, a church which cannot distinguish between
its work and God's work. Moreover, a church which thinks that conversion
(rather than witness) is its responsibility is a church which coerces;
the harassment can be physical, social or psychological, but it remains
coercion. Paradoxically, the church which thinks that it has to
generate the fruit of its diligent "God-talk" announces to the
world that it does not believe in God, since it cannot trust God to
vivify God's own Word! To trust that the Spirit is the Spirit of the Son
or Word is to be freed from anxiety concerning the results of mission
and therein spared the fear of failure and the concomitant temptation to
coerce.
VIII: -- A recovery of the
doctrine of the Trinity would do eversomuch to assist The United Church
of Canada concerning the catholicity of its mission. Despite our
denomination's protestations that it sides with the victimized, the
marginalized, the oppressed, and those disadvantaged in any way, it
remains virtually exclusively an occurrence of the ascendant middle
class. That segment of the socio-economic spectrum from which the UCC
draws its people is becoming smaller as it also becomes more affluent:
we are attracting fewer and fewer people, virtually all of whom are more
and more wealthy. We attract no poor people, even remarkably few who are
not socially ascendant.
In times of economic turbulence the rich are cushioned
against material misfortune and remain rich; the poor are not cushioned,
but neither do they have anything to protect, with the result that they
remain poor. The rising middle class, however, is unrelievedly
vulnerable. In times of economic dislocation it is precipitated downwards.
It collapses into that segment of the socio-economic spectrum with which
our denomination has no credibility at all. In other words, simply as a
result of uncontrollable economic convulsions the UCC would be deprived
of its constituency. A recovery of Trinitarian faith, especially with
respect to the appointment of God himself in the person of the Son,
would commission us to re-examine our socio-economic exclusiveness. The
Word of God is baptized in dirty water at the hands of someone who will
be forever out of place among the socially slick. The pronouncement
heard at this baptism -- "Thou art my beloved Son; with Thee I am
well pleased" -- is a conflation of Psalm 2 and Isaiah 42. Psalm 2
is God's appointment of the royal ruler, the one possessed of genuine
authority. Isaiah 42 speaks of God's approval of the "Servant of
the Lord", commonly known as "the suffering servant", the
one who "was despised and rejected by humankind...and we esteemed
him not". The mission of God himself in the Son will ever be
effective (God is sovereign), but its effectiveness will
materialize through a servanthood which entails hardship and sacrifice
and social rejection. Then to be Christ's follower is to be commissioned
to a ministry of service, not domination; of self-forgetfulness, not
personal advantage; even of social rejection rather than public
congratulation. Would not a new appreciation of the Son's mission, when
the Son is one with the Father himself, be the recovery of our
identification with the Son who cherished the very people to whom we
cannot relate? In that Son who is of the same substance and nature as
the Father God effectively loved the world -- not merely one
aspect of the world, i.e., social aspirants whose psycho-social needs
church-affiliation appears to serve.
The recovery of the doctrine of the Trinity will
foster the recovery of Trinitarian faith; this in turn will mean a
return to the catholicity of the gospel. And such a return will spell
recovery of mission and service on behalf of the all the
"far off" who have been "brought near in the blood of
Christ".(Ephesians 2:13) For "through him we both [i.e., Jew
and Gentile, which is to say all human beings equally despite apparently
insurmountable barriers] have access in one Spirit to the Father."
(Ephesians 3:18)
The tetragrammaton, , contains no vowels. Lacking
vowels, it is unpronounceable. Because it is unpronounceable it is
untranslatable; for this reason there can be no substitute for it. There
can be no substitute for the name of the God who has named himself
Father, Son and Holy Spirit. To know God, honour and obey and adore God,
is to find that the doctrine of the Trinity is neither the museum-like
security-blanket of the nervous nor the jettisonable baggage of the
naive. The doctrine of the Trinity, rather, will ever orient us to the
living God whose love for a dying world commissions us to love it no
less.
Victor Shepherd
