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.
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 CE Jesus Judaism surely questioned their own legitimacy. The one to whom they had been persuaded to give allegiance 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 the 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 nascent Christian 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.
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."*
John 16: 14-15 contains 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."
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) the κοσμος had been wrong about Jesus, 2) its sense of justice was flawed and 3) its judgment of Jesus had been way off. The "sin" of v. 8 is that those of the world refused to believe in Jesus; the justice of v. 8 is the all-important jurisprudential δικαιοσυνη, which means "the state of having been made right"). The world doesn't understand how things are made right or by what or whom. The "judgment" (κρισις) of vv. 8-10 is of the ruler of this world, 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. This may be one of the evil roots of the anti-Semitism that has marked Christian states and institutions on and off for two millennia.
That said, I hope this analysis will be helpful to those who must present homiletically on this coming Sunday. Personally, I will be glad to get back to Luke, the principal source for Sunday lections in this year.
* The Gospel According to John XIII-XXI, The Anchor Bible Vol. 29A, p.716
