Approaching the Christian Doctrine of the Trinity
Approaching the Christian Doctrine of the Trinity
A number of readers will approach this chapter with some hesitations, many of which may reflect anxieties about the subject's apparent irrationality. How did the Christian church come to regard such a counterintuitive notion as the Trinity as fundamental to its vision of God? We may begin by considering some expressions of anxiety about the doctrine and then move on to consider how these can be met.
The Apparent Illogicality of the Doctrine
Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826), the third president of the United States, was one of the leading critics of orthodox Christian theology in the early nineteenth century. He reserved his most ferocious criticisms for the doctrine of the Trinity. These “metaphysical insanities,” he declared, hindered the religious growth of humanity, in that they represented “relapses into polytheism, differing from paganism only by being more unintelligible.” So why has Christianity persistently upheld such a doctrine?
The fundamental issue here is the inability of human language to do justice to the transcendent. Human language finds itself pressed to its limits when trying to depict and describe the divine. Words and images are borrowed from everyday life and put to new uses in an attempt to capture and preserve precious insights into the nature of God. The Christian understanding of both the divine and human natures is such that – if it is right – we are unable to grasp the full reality of God. Can the human mind ever hope to comprehend something which must ultimately lie beyond its ability to enfold?
When I began to study theology at Oxford back in the mid-1970s, I was taught early medieval theology by Edward J. Yarnold (1926–2002), a Jesuit scholar at Campion Hall. As we walked to his room together, we passed a large painting depicting an old man in conversation with a young boy by the seashore. What was it, I asked? And so I was told the famous story about Augustine of Hippo (354–430), who is particularly noted for his massive treatise On the Trinity, dealing with the mystery of God. Perhaps in the midst of composing this treatise, I was told, 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 he could hold into a hole in the sand. Puzzled, Augustine watched as this action was repeated again and again.
Eventually, his curiosity got the better of him. What, he asked the boy, did he think he was doing? The reply probably perplexed Augustine still further. The youth told him that he was busy emptying the ocean into the small cavity he had scooped out 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?
The story illuminates one of the central themes of Christian theology and spirituality alike – that there are limits placed upon the human ability to grasp the things of God. Our knowledge of God is accommodated to our capacity. As writers from Augustine to Calvin have argued, God knows the limitations placed upon human nature – which, after all, is itself a divine creation. God therefore both discloses divine truths and enters into our world, in forms that are tempered and adapted to our limited abilities and competencies.
For Augustine, the point was simple: Si comprehendis non est Deus (a loose translation is “If you can get your mind around it, it's not God”). He didn't mean that belief in God was contrary to reason; rather, reason was too limited to grasp the fullness of the majesty and glory of God. Our thoughts about God are bound to seem illogical and muddled, precisely because what they refer to lies beyond our full knowledge and understanding. For Augustine, any attempt to reduce God to the intellectually manageable distorts God. We need to open up our minds to the greatness of God, rather than reduce God to something that we can cope with.
The Swiss Protestant theologian Emil Brunner (1889–1966) took a similar view, arguing that the Trinity was really a “protective doctrine” (German: Schutzlehre) designed to safeguard the rich Christian understanding of God from well-meaning attempts to reduce or simplify it. The Trinity was not itself revealed in the Bible but was the result of serious reflection on what was implied by the biblical proclamation (Greek: kerygma).
The doctrine of the Trinity is the product of reflection, and is not the kerygma. The kerygma is God revealed in Christ – Christ, the genuine revelation of God. The doctrine of the Trinity, however, is not itself biblical [...] but is the result of theological reflection upon the problem that is necessarily raised by the Christian kerygma.
Traditionally, Christian theology has been well aware of its limits and has sought to avoid excessively confident affirmations in the face of mystery. Yet, at the same time, Christian theology has never seen itself as totally reduced to silence in the face of divine mysteries. Nor has it prohibited intellectual wrestling with “mysteries” that might be destructive or detrimental to faith. As the nineteenth-century Anglican theologian Charles Gore (1853–1932) insisted:
Human language never can express adequately divine realities. A constant tendency to apologize for human speech, a great element of agnosticism, an awful sense of unfathomed depths beyond the little that is made known, is always present to the mind of theologians who know what they are about, in conceiving or expressing God. “We see,” says St. Paul, “in a mirror, in terms of a riddle”; “we know in part.” “We are compelled,” complains St. Hilary, “to attempt what is unattainable, to climb where we cannot reach, to speak what we cannot utter; instead of the mere adoration of faith, we are compelled to entrust the deep things of religion to the perils of human expression.”
A perfectly good definition of Christian theology is “taking rational trouble over a mystery,” recognizing that there may be limits to what can be achieved but believing that this intellectual grappling is both worthwhile and necessary. Theology is confronted with something so great that we cannot fully comprehend it, and so must do the best that we can with the analytical and descriptive tools at our disposal.
The Trinity as a Statement About Jesus Christ
The distinctively Christian doctrine of God took shape in response to a question about the identity of Jesus Christ. The development of the doctrine of the Trinity is best seen as organically related to the evolution of Christology (see pp. 15–18, 214–24). As we noted earlier, a patristic consensus emerged that Jesus was “of the same substance” (homoousios) as God, rather than just being “of similar substance” (homoiousios). But, if Jesus was God, in any meaningful sense of the word, what did this imply about existing notions of God? If Jesus was God, were there now two Gods? Or was a radical reconsideration of the nature of God appropriate? Historically, it is possible to argue that the doctrine of the Trinity is closely linked with the development of the doctrine of the divinity of Christ. The more emphatic the church became that Christ was God, the more it came under pressure to clarify how Christ related to God. “If the Word had not been made flesh, there would have been no stumbling block for Jewish monotheism” (A. W. Wainwright).
The Trinity as a Statement About the Christian God
It is generally agreed that the doctrine of the Trinity emerged from the distinctively Christian understanding of the identity of Jesus Christ. The incarnation – a concept we considered in some detail in Chapter 10 – does not simply concern the identity of Jesus of Nazareth. It also concerns the distinctive nature and character of the God who became incarnate in Jesus of Nazareth. The doctrine of the Trinity can thus be seen as an attempt to describe faithfully a God who, while remaining transcendent, also became incarnate in Christ – and, more than that, who now dwells within believers in the Holy Spirit.
Islamic Critiques of the Doctrine of the Trinity
The three great monotheistic faiths of the world – Christianity, Islam, and Judaism – share a belief that there is only one supreme being, the Lord and creator of the universe. This is summarized in an Old Testament verse, known as the Shema: “Hear, O Israel, the Lord your God is one Lord” (Deuteronomy 6: 4).
Some interpreters of Islam believe that Christians worship three distinct gods, an idea which is clearly inconsistent with the Islamic emphasis on the absolute unity of God (Arabic: tawhid). Although there are reasons for suspecting that early Islam may have encountered heterodox forms of Christian belief in Arabia, including unorthodox statements of the Trinity, it seems more likely that the orthodox doctrine has been misunderstood as implying either that Christians worship three gods or that they worship a single God with three component parts. The early Christian emphasis on the undivided authority of God (Greek: monarchia) is important in this respect, paralleling in some ways the idea of tawhid. Christians do not see the doctrine of the Trinity as compromising or contradicting the unity or sovereignty of God, but as ensuring that the richness and depth of the Christian understanding of God is fully grasped and expressed.
In view of the importance of this aspect of the doctrine of the Trinity, we shall move on immediately to consider its foundations in the Bible, before exploring its development within the long tradition of Christian reflection on the biblical witness to the identity and actions of God.