The Trinity: An unexplainable, intellectual headache

Sermon delivered Sunday, May 31, 2015 (Trinity Sunday, Year B) at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Franklin, TN (Isaiah 6:1-8, Psalm 29, Romans 8:12-17, John 3:1-17).

Today is Trinity Sunday, one of the seven major feast days of the church year. It is the only major feast day dedicated to a doctrine or an idea or concept rather than an event in the life of Jesus or the church, and as such, I have to warn you that today’s sermon, by nature, is bound to be a bit abstract.

I also have to warn you that it may make your brain hurt. This is a hazard of any serious theological exploration, since theology is an attempt to explain and understand God, which is by definition an impossible task, since God is always beyond human understanding. I don’t know about you, but as I bump up against the limits of my capacity to conceptualize abstract and unseen realities, my brain always starts to hurt a bit. It’s too bad none of the drug companies have yet developed a pill for alleviating intellectual headaches!

The Trinity is notoriously difficult to understand and explain. It always comes up in interfaith dialogue, since one of the things that non-Christians are most puzzled about when looking at Christianity from the outside is how the largest faith in the world manages to not be able to do simple math. Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are all God, but there is only one God? 1 + 1 + 1 = 1? It appears that the church as a whole never made it out of first grade! When Jews or Muslims or Sikhs ask Christians to explain the Trinity, they’re likely to get an uncomfortable smile and a laugh from their Christian conversation partner. Some Christians get touchy when asked this question by a non-Christian, since they believe the non-Christian may be asking them this question order to trip them up and make them look stupid, to “debunk” their faith, so to speak. In our desire to make our faith appear intellectually respectable, we’re afraid to let out the secret that none of us really understands the Trinity.

But this confusion and consternation about the Trinity goes back to the earliest days of the church. In the first few centuries after Jesus’s death, his followers argued, debated, and even fought violently over how to reconcile a belief that Jesus was divine with the traditional monotheism, that is, belief in one God, that was foundational to the Jewish faith out of which Christianity arose. The testimony of the texts that the community was beginning to regard as authoritative and sacred and would come to be defined as Christian scripture (the texts now in our New Testament) supported identifying both the person of Jesus and the Holy Spirit that descended upon his followers at Pentecost as Lord and God. But how could Jesus and the Spirit both be God, and what was their relationship to the God of Israel, as Jews had understood him before the coming of Jesus? In defining the doctrine of the Trinity, the church attempted to make sense of these mind-boggling questions.

The understanding the church came to affirm in the Nicene Creed in the year 325 AD, clarified later in the Council of Chalcedon and the Athanasian Creed, in the 5th and 6th centuries, respectively, is that there is one God, but that one God consists of three “persons” that are co-eternal and co-equal. They all have the same attributes and qualities and are equally worthy of devotion and worship – and all three are “fully God” in and of themselves – but yet these three “persons” are still separate and distinguishable from one other. Thus, the Father is God, the Son is God and the Holy Spirit is God, but the Father is not the Son and the Son is not the Spirit. All three persons of the Trinity are God, but none of the persons is the same as any of the others, and they are still one God, not three.

I told you this was going to make your brain hurt.

In an attempt to alleviate this intellectual headache, well-meaning people throughout the ages have crafted various analogies to try to explain the Trinity. Unfortunately, none of them actually illustrate the “orthodox” doctrine of the Trinity – the “official” view the church eventually upheld as true doctrine – but one of the heresies – a way of understanding the Trinity that the church ultimately came to reject. You’ve probably heard some of these analogies; in fact, you may even use one of them to make sense of the Trinity in your own mind. If so, I apologize, but I’m about to burst your bubble.

Let’s take this one: the Trinity is like water – just as the molecular formula H20 can be in a solid, liquid, or gaseous state (as ice, water, or steam), but still be H20 no matter which state it is in, so God is still God no matter whether in the form of Father, Son, or Holy Spirit.

Or what about this one: the Trinity is like the way we have multiple identities in our relationship with the world. So, I am a daughter and a wife and a friend – but I am still Tracy, no matter which relationship someone primarily knows me in. In the same way, God is always God, whether he is in relationship with us as Father, Son, or Holy Spirit.

Those sound great, don’t they? And they make sense. But the problem is that they’re heresies. They illustrate not an orthodox view of the Trinity, but modalism, an ancient heresy condemned at the Council of Constantinople in 381 AD. Modalism holds that there is one God who has different “modes of being” – that God can appear or relate to us as Father, as Son, and as Holy Spirit, but ultimately it is the same God, just appearing in different forms. This makes a lot of logical sense and clearly affirms the oneness of God. In fact, you’ll hear many modern Hindus talk this way about how they understand their many gods being various manifestations of the one universal God, simply appearing in different forms. But the church rejected this understanding of God. Instead, it upheld a belief in something much more illogical. It said that while the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are all God, the Father is NOT the Son and the Son is NOT the Spirit – they are each distinct entities separate from one another, not God manifesting himself to us in different ways.

Ok, so what about this one? The Trinity is like a stream of light. There are three components – the light’s source, the beam of light, and the spot produced when the beam hits an object. The Father is the source, Jesus is the beam of light that connects God to the object (us), and the spot is the Holy Spirit that lives in us when the light hits us.

Ah, much more deep and complex than the first two analogies, huh? But sorry – another heresy! This time we’re dealing with Arianism, a heresy condemned at the Council of Nicaea and named after Arius, one of its major proponents. This view holds that Jesus and the Holy Spirit are creations of the Father – that there was a point in time where there was only God the Father, and later God created the Son and the Holy Spirit. Again, this makes a lot of logical sense and affirms the oneness of God – that there was an original creator God in pure oneness, and these other divine beings “emanated” from that one creator God. But the church rejected this understanding of God, too, and instead affirmed something much more illogical – that the Son and the Spirit were both “co-eternal” with the Father – that is, that they both have always existed, since before time began. This is why the Nicene Creed makes such a big deal out of Jesus being “God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, of one Being with the Father” – although I’m still not entirely clear on how being “begotten” is different from being “made,” but clearly they were trying to make a distinction there to show that Jesus was not created – he always existed and was involved in the very creation of the world – and thus the Creed emphasizes, “through him all things were made.”

Ok, one more, just for fun. How about this one? The Trinity is like 3-in-1 shampoo. (I’m not making this stuff up, people. This is actually an analogy that has been used to try to explain the Trinity!) The 3-in-1 shampoo comes out of the bottle onto your hand as one liquid, but it is simultaneously shampoo, conditioner, and body wash. In a similar way, the Trinity is one God (like the liquid) but it is simultaneously Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

There! That’s a better explanation, right? Because we’re affirming that God is all three things at once, not merely taking on different forms or modes of being. But nope – heresy again! This time, it’s the heresy of tritheism – the belief in three gods. If you really think it through, the 3-in-1 shampoo is not actually one substance, it is three substances combined in one bottle. Each of the substances are unique and separate – shampoo, conditioner, and body wash – they are three separate things, not the same in substance or essence or being – the Greek word here is “ousia” – and the Council of Nicaea affirmed that the Son and the Spirit are “homoousia” – of the same essence – made of the same “stuff” – as the Father.

So – what are we left with? A whole lot of dense theological language that seems to make no sense, with no real helpful analogies to explain it. And perhaps that’s as it should be. I think it’s no accident that the church consistently chose the explanation that made the least logical sense as they were trying to name and define God. It is as if they intentionally built into their definition of God a limit on human pride. For when we think we understand God, when we are sure we know exactly how God works and exactly what God’s nature is, we have essentially put God in a box. We have limited God, which by definition makes God no longer God.

To me, the fact that there are no good analogies for the Trinity is an affirmation of the fact that God is ultimately beyond our understanding, and we can’t neatly define God by way of a cute little metaphor like 3-in-1 shampoo. The Trinity is a mind puzzle, a theological conundrum that will keep us thinking and wondering for years to come. If theologians haven’t nailed it down in over 2,000 years, I’m pretty confident in saying you and I won’t be successful in making any real sense of it either. And for me, every time I bump up against the limits of my human capacity to understand, and my brain begins to hurt, it reminds me that God is so much more than I can ever begin to imagine. It stirs in me a sense of awe and wonder that drives me to my knees in worship.

So perhaps we have discovered an antidote for the intellectual headache after all – we can stop our brains from hurting so much by embracing mystery in worship and adoration. In that spirit, I’d like to invite you into a time of worship and contemplation during the period of silence that always follows our sermons. Let go of the hard work of trying to understand the Trinity and simply be still and rest in the presence of God.