FINDINGS II
Trinity
- C - May 30, 2010
Proverbs 8: 1-4, 22-31; Romans 5: 1-5;
John 16: (1-11), 12-15
 By Harry T. Cook
5/24/10
RUBRIC
During most of the time I served as a parish priest --
especially when I was in charge -- I cravenly arranged to be out of town when
Trinity Sunday rolled around each year, often, due to the vagaries of the
liturgical calendar, near the first major warm-weather American holiday known
as Memorial Day. Let the record show that most Americans use the memorial
observance as the last day of a long weekend to do anything but dwell on the
original purpose of the day, which was to honor war dead. In Michigan where all
my years as a working clergy person were spent, people who could get away went,
as we say in this state, "up North." I generally found going "up North"
preferable to the mental root canal of preparing and delivering an
intellectually honest sermon on the doctrine of the trinity. The only such
sermons I ever gave on the subject made me liable to charges of heresy.
This is not to say that there have not been whole universes
of words written about the doctrine. Just for example, here are some of them:
* "The Trinity is one God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit." (An Outline of Faith Commonly Called The Catechism,
Book of Common Prayer 1979, p. 152)
* ". . . unless the being of God in Christ is assumed, the
idea of redemption could not be thus concentrated in His Person. And
unless there were such a union
also in the common Spirit of the Church, the Church could not thus be the
Bearer and Perpetuator of the redemption through Christ. Now these exactly are
the essential elements in the doctrine of the Trinity, which, it is clear, only
established itself in defence of the position that in Christ there was present
nothing less than the Divine Essence, which also indwells the Christian Church
as its common Spirit . . . In virtue of this connexion, we rightly regard the
doctrine of the Trinity, in so far as it is a deposit of these elements, as the
coping-stone of Christian doctrine . . ." (The
Christian Faith, Friedrich Schleiermacher, Harper Torchbook edition, 1963, Harper & Row, Vol. II., pp. 738-739)
* "The Christian profession of faith in God, including God's
triune nature, does not consist of meditation upon theological 'truths;" it
originates rather with the church's experience of God. Trinitarian thought is a
commentary on this experience, or else it is sheer speculation." (Professing The Faith: Christian Theology in a North
American Context, Douglas John Hall, 1993, Augsburg Fortress, p. 165)
* ". . . Trinitarian language . . . is not an objective
language, describing a fact laid out for our dispassionate inspection, whether
with or without a high-powered telescope . . . the doctrine of the Trinity
tries to elucidate the picture of God as he appears in the biblical narrative
and in the history of the Christian community. He is a God who embraces
diversity in unity . . . [referring here to Ian Ramsey's Religious Language: An Empirical Placing of
Theological Phrases, 1957, SCM Press] the Christian could not get along
with the single word 'God' as his key word. A richer and fuller experience of
the deity demanded a more complex symbol for its expression. The Christian
could not go along with a stark monotheism in which God is utterly transcendent
and sovereign, and still less with a pantheism in which God is entirely and
universally immanent . . ." (Principles of
Christian Theology by John Macquarrie, 1966, Charles Scribner's Sons, pp.
175-176)
* "The Christian doctrine of the Trinity is a corroboration
of the christological dogma . . . God is Spirit, and any trinitarian statement
must be derived from this basic assertion. (Paul
Tillich, Systematic Theology, 1951, University of Chicago Press. Vol. 1, p.
250)
* "Trinitarian symbols become empty if they are separated
from their two experiential roots -- the experience of the living God and the
experience of the New Being in the Christ. Both Augustine and Luther had a feel
for this situation. Augustine found that the distinction among the three
personae (not persons) in the Trinity is without any content and is used, 'not
in order to say something, but in order not to remain silent' . . . Luther
found that a word like 'Trinity' is strange and almost ridiculous but that
here, as in other instances, there was no better one." (ibid. 1957, Vol. II, pp.
142-143)
* "One can distinguish at least three factors which have led
to trinitarian thinking in the history of religious experience: first, the
tension between the absolute and the concrete element in our ultimate concern;
second, the symbolic application of the concept of life to the divine ground of
being; and third, the threefold manifestation of God as creative power, as
saving love, and as ecstatic transformation. It is the last of these three
which suggests the symbolic names, Father, Son, and Spirit; but without the two
preceding reasons for trinitarian thinking the last group would lead only into
a crude mythology." (ibid. 1963, Vol III, p.
283)
Therewith, some of the best of it. Let the reader make of it
what he or she can. Some of it is profound in its composition, but its common
and weakest link is the bandied-about word "God" upon which all of it rests.
And thus to all but the conventional believer, it amounts to nonsense -- quite
lovely nonsense, but nonsense withal. Nevertheless it is offered as a
collection of examples of how some of our greatest theological minds have
wrestled with the proposition -- a proposition that such intellectuals as Ralph
Waldo Emerson came to see as an impediment to being a Christian.
WORKSHOP
It is not untrue to say that the seeds of what Tillich
called "Trinitarian thinking" are strewn here and there through early Christian
documents. It is a wonder that such a crop was the result of such random
sowing. The gospel for this coming Sunday (John 16: 12-15) has in its text such
seeds.
For the homilist facing the thankless task of preaching the
doctrine of the Trinity, he or she has for assistance such terms as "advocate"
and "Spirit of truth" so that distinctions can be seen among the concepts of a
transcendent deity (or what Tillich called "the Ground and Source of Being),"
the human face of that ground/source and the immanent presence of the elan of
the ground/source. (Sorry: I think I caught a virus from Schleiermacher and
Tillich.)
The ecclesiological need for teaching about divine immanence
became necessary as the communities of late first century C.E. Jesus Judaism surely
questioned their own legitimacy. The one to whom they had been persuaded to
give allegiance -- not in place of the God of Abraham, of course -- was in no
way accessible to the senses. Neither cloud by day nor pillar of fire by night.
The early communities were "remembering" him in the common meal and were
regaled with such stories as Paul mentions in I Corinthians 15: 5-8. Thomas as
depicted in John 20:24ff probably represents a type and disposition that were
very much a part of early proto-Christian communities, viz. ones who wondered
if there was much basis in reality for what they were being urged to believe.
So it is in John 16:1 that evangelist depicts Jesus telling his disciples (as
John and other leaders must have told those in their time whose courage was
waning): "I have said all this to you to keep you from falling away. They will
put you out of the synagogues . . ." Those primitive communities were beset by
ostracism without as well as by doubt within as they gamely tried to believe
things about which they still had serious misgivings.
John needed to convince his communities that it was good for
Jesus to have gone away (i.e. died). For without his physical absence his
non-corporeal and permanent replacement could not be realized (16:7). The
vocation of the Advocate (16:8) is to show that 1) that the "kosmos" (in part,
"the Jews"?) had been wrong about Jesus ("convict the world of its mistake"
16:8), 2) that its sense of justice was flawed and 3) that its judgment of
Jesus had been way off. The "sin" of v. 8 is that those of the "kosmos" refused
to believe in Jesus; the justice of v. 8 is the all-important jurisprudential
"diakaiosune," which means "the state of having been made right"). The "kosmos"
doesn't understand how things are made right or by what or whom. The "judgment"
of v. 8 is "krisis" in its condemnatory sense as in the ruler of this world is
condemned for his misplaced allegiance. John's is a very judgmental gospel, and
whether or not the text says so explicitly, it is "the Jews" who in John's eyes
stand condemned.
What are the unbearable things of v. 12 that Jesus would
refrain from saying? If the text is understood as coming from the time of the
pre-passion Jesus with his disciples, then perhaps it will take the community's
post-passion experiences to make the passion itself become bearable. If we take
v. 12 as a description of the late first century community's fragile nature,
the unbearable or unspeakable things may be the increasing rigors of
persecution by synagogue Jewry and the Romans. Again, it is "the Spirit of
truth" who/that will eventually disclose what Jesus will not now, out of mercy,
say. The full realization of who Jesus is will dawn slowly upon the community
as it follows "the way, the truth and the life" of 14:5 -- a way that is
self-disclosing of the truth of life. As to what may be "the things that are to
come" of v. 13, Raymond Brown astutely observed that "the best Christian
preparation for what is coming to pass is not an exact foreknowledge of the
future but a deep understanding of what Jesus means for one's own time."*
* The Gospel According to
John XIII-XXI, The Anchor Bible Vol. 29A, p.716
HOMILETIC COMMENTARY
John 16: 14-15 contain some of the material out of which
systematic theologians with perhaps too much time on their hands have
fabricated the doctrine of the Trinity. What they generally mean in doing so is
that Jesus, "the Son," is and possesses what was the Father's in the first
place. In turn, the "Spirit of truth" will receive from "the Son" what the
former will reiterate subsequently to the community of disciples. In this
scheme, the Father, the Son and the Advocate possess common properties and thus
are, as the contemporary translation of the Nicene statement says, "of one
Being."
For further homiletic commentary, I cede the next paragraph
of this essay to a faithful reader of this series, the Rev. Fred Fenton of
Concord, CA, who in a sermon for Trinity Sunday last year said:
"What we say we believe is not as important as what we do
with our lives. It is deeds, not creeds, which make the difference. Matthew,
chapter 7, verse 16: 'You will know them by their fruits.' In a commencement
address at Arizona State University on May 13, 2009, President Obama said to
the graduates, 'Be somebody who cares, somebody who makes a difference in
[people's] lives.'"
Father Fenton could not have chosen a better Sunday in all the
liturgical year for his forthright commentary. Such doctrines as the one
treating of the Trinity are catnip to those who wish to think of religion as theological
disputation instead of what the author of the Epistle of James suggested: "Religion
is . . . to care for the orphans and the widows in their distress and to keep
oneself unstained by the world" (James 1:27).
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