A Unitarian Take on the Trinity

            Perhaps no doctrine has so confused me as the Doctrine of the Trinity.

A stained-glass portrayal of the Trinity from Notre Dame.

Don’t get me wrong. I like reading about it. I like adding up the arguments for and against. I know the history of the doctrine—both its highpoints and its very sad low points. But in the end I don’t know. And I wish we could just let the coercion go and have a good discussion. Theology, at least when it comes to debateable matters (and Trinitarian doctrine has always been debated) ought to be a playground. What follows is a sermon on my take on the Trinity. I offer it as a “maybe.” It is trying to follow Jesus that seems much more important. Though wondering about the Trinity is fun.

Words Are Slippery

I usually stay home on Thursdays and Fridays in order to write a sermon. It’s quiet at home. Irene tip-toes around me a little bit, to make sure I don’t start complaining about how noisy she is. There are few interruptions. I can usually concentrate.

But this past Thursday it didn’t work out that way for me. You see, James Comey was testifying before the Senate Intelligence Committee about Trump’s contacts with the Russians.

This might seem very boring. But I’m a dual US-American citizen, and so Trump is my president too, so I’m interested. You understand. Anyway, as I wrote my sermon, a small browser window kept beckoning me to pay attention to Comey’s testimony, instead.

What struck me about the hearing was how slippery words are. Comey, for example, used the word “liar” of Trump, several times. Trump’s son immediately tweeted back that his dad wasn’t a liar. Trump himself tweeted that Comey’s testimony absolutely exonerated him. Commentators argued about what would count as a lie and what wouldn’t.

The word “hope,” came up too. At some point in a private dinner with Comey, speaking of the FBI’s investigation into General Flynn, Trump said to Comey, “I hope you can let that go.” Some Senators said that Trump’s statement was merely a polite suggestion. Others, including Comey, took Trump’s statement as an order. This would mean that Trump could be charged with judicial interference, an impeachable offense. So, what does “I hope,” mean? Words are slippery, difficult, troublesome things.

Homoousios – One Substance

Which is true of the key word in today’s sermon too. You see, few words are as slippery, difficult, and troublesome in the history of Christianity as the word “Trinity”—and one other word, a Greek word which, in our ancient creeds, describes how the Trinity works, homoousios.

This is the brief background. The Israelites believed that there was only one God, Yahweh. Saying so was revolutionary in a world where nearly everyone else believed there were many gods, one behind every bush and under every stone. Monotheism was a great Jewish insight.

Christians wanted to hold onto that insight. But they also had very high—divine, some would say—opinions of Jesus and the Holy Spirit. This was a problem. Christians, in fact, wanted it both ways. They wanted to say that there was one God, but one God who was three persons—the Trinity. Listen to the creed. "Such as the Father is, such is the Son, and such is the Holy Spirit. The Father uncreate, the Son uncreate, the Holy Spirit uncreate. The Father incomprehensible, the Son incomprehensible, the Holy Spirit incomprehensible." And, Jesus is “of one substance (homousios) with the Father as regards his Godhead, and at the same time of one substance with us as regards his humanity.”

Well, remember how I said the meaning of words is slippery and difficult? So, the more the church fathers—they were all men—tried to insist on particular, narrow definitions of one God who was three unique persons, the more they fought with each other. They fought each other about the Greek word, homoousios, which we translate, “one substance.” Jesus and God and the Spirit share on substance, but were three persons.

Homoiousios – Similar Substances

Some theologians, however, preferred the word “homoiousios” in the creed. Just one letter different. Homoousios: one substance; homoiousios: similar substances. The orthodox homoousios party feared that by suggesting that God was three persons of similar substance, you ended up with three Gods. That would be the end of monotheism.

We can, today, hardly imagine how intense these disagreements were. The fights about whether Jesus was God or not, and whether there was one God or three or some other alternative, rocked the Roman Empire to its core. Over hundreds of years, between the writing of the Nicene and Athanasian Creeds, people sometimes rioted in the streets. Emperors fired and hired bishops who fled for their lives from one end of the Empire to the other. Each side wrote popular songs in favor of their view, and singing the wrong song in the wrong crowd could get you killed. Bishops and theologians were beaten and burned to death in places like Alexandria.

And even after the debate was settled, through the whole history of the church, Christians who wanted to explore other than orthodox one-substance homoousios opinions on this matter—Michael Servetus during the Reformation, Donatists, Socinians, and Unitarians—were regularly burned at the stake, sent to prison, exiled, beaten, or shunned. Often. It did no credit to church or to the political regimes that used the church.

Why fight about one word? Well, originally it mostly had to do with Constantine’s desire to unify his empire by unifying the church. He did so by insisting on “homoousios” at the Nicene Synod in 325 AD. The church, which had lived with multiple opinions before that, was forced into a straight-jacket by the Empire—and an emperor who was recently converted and only dimly really understood the Biblical and theological issues.

Scripture Never Attempts to Define the Trinity

What do we make of this history? Well, two things, briefly.

First, although you can see how the Bible’s many contradictory texts make the whole matter of the Trinity a potential landmine, the Trinity itself is not an issue in scripture. No one argues for or against it. For the first three hundred years of the church’s history, most people who were not theologians shrugged when it came to trying to understand who God was to God.

Jesus’ Prayer for Church Unity

The most meaningful commentary on the issue, from my perspective, is the last prayer Jesus prayed with his disciples, according to John 17. Jesus prayed, “"May they”—Jesus meant the disciples and the church—“be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you. May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me. I have given them the glory that you gave me, that they may be one as we are one: I in them and you in me" (John 17:21).

It seems that for Jesus, his mysterious relationship to God was a metaphor for how all Christians should relate to each other. Jesus hoped that just as he was one and in the father, so Christians would be one and into God and each other.

This key Trinitarian text, in other words, is hardly exact doctrine. There is no homoousios or homoiousios in it. There is no attempt to explain how the Trinity—a word that does not even appear in the Bible—works. There is just the hope that we folks here at our church  could be as “into” each other, as loving to each other, as Jesus was into God and us both.

What Does the Trinitarian Struggle Mean for Us?

One final thing.

It took 350 years for the doctrine of the Trinity to find its way into the ancient creeds. And since then, it has remained controversial. People have struggled to make sense of the creeds, to explain the creeds in ways that don’t seem silly. Very few theologians and philosophers, after all, even believe that there even is such a thing as “divine substance” that God is made of. That notion is a holdover from Greek philosophy that today’s philosophers and scientists don’t hold to anymore. So, the language of the creeds is itself very dated—like the notion that the world was created in six days. Some people—we usually call them Unitarians—have struggled to explain who Jesus was without resorting to the creeds and parsing every potential Biblical text to fit the creedal template. Me for example.

I think this long struggle of arguing for and against the Trinity, or some other description of who God is, mirrors the personal struggle we all have to figure out who God is. If the church has struggled why shouldn’t we, too?

And if the church’s struggle teaches us anything, it is that the use of sanctions and violence, political pressure and slippery words to pin something down that can’t be pinned down is very counter-productive. It flies in the face of Jesus’ prayer for love and unity. Why should the church split and fight and kill over words not even found in scripture, over concepts that no writer of scripture thought important enough or pressing enough to even give us a fulsome and satisfactory explanation of? The very paucity of commentary on the Trinity, in scripture, is our best guide for how seriously to take the Trinity today, at least as an article of faith.

No, individual Christians should be allowed wide latitude here, and the church should avoid conflict. The whole notion of a Trinity is interesting. It, or something like it, is a wonderful metaphor, as in Jesus’ prayer. But the healthy church does not have to try to pin it down beyond that. When it comes to the Trinity, the healthy church is a curious, big-tent church rather than a coercive church. We should focus on loving each other rather than on insisting everyone agree on a single systematic explanation.

We Adore the Mysteries of the Godhead

Words, whether political or theological, are slippery things. And, at least when it comes to Trinitarian theology, rather than try to pin them down, better to follow the advice of Philip Melanchthon, an early and esteemed Protestant reformer, who said: "We adore the mysteries of the Godhead. That is better than to investigate them."

A Unitarian with Trinitarian Tendencies

           I’m getting used to being a pastor in the United Church of Canada. This denomination is clearly much more liberal than the Christian Reformed Church I spent most of my life in. My particular congregation, Lawrence Park Community Church, sort of puts an exclamation mark behind the “more liberal,” by describing itself on its webpage as “united, unlimited, and unorthodox.”

            Being “un-,” has had a bit of traction for a while now—at least since 7 Up branded itself as the Uncola, I suppose. I’m reading a book, now, entitled, “Unmarketing: Stop Marketing, Start Engaging,” by Scott Stratton. Still, before I joined the United Church, it was a stretch for me to think of myself as unorthodox.

            Then, a few weeks ago, someone asked me about the Trinity. What did I think of the Trinity? How would I explain it? And—a bit to my surprise—I answered her, “Well, I’m not sure anymore. I guess I’m a Unitarian with Trinitarian tendencies!”

            I’m not sure where that came from. The person who asked me wasn’t having heart-to-heart conversation. We were playing at theology. But there it was. Very unorthodox. Maybe my church’s billboard fits!

            I don’t mean to be flippant in my comments about the Trinity, even though I do think that theology ought to have something of a playground feel to it. But usually, people take getting it right when it comes to theology much too seriously. Or they want to get it right for questionable motives. Take, for example, Constantine, the Emperor of Rome, on both counts. He convened one of the earliest worldwide councils to settle the question of the Trinity. Christians had been talking about the concept for three hundred years, and had not come to a consensus. The discussion got a bit heated and threatened to split the church into competing camps. Constantine, who became a Christian in large measure in order to unify his empire around religion, didn’t want to see a schism lay his plans waste. So, to keep the peace in his empire, he insisted on a single definition. Constantine then used his political power to force the answer he liked best and got the political result he wanted. Most of the church has held that answer sacrosanct ever since, even though the Empire for which the answer was crafted declined and fell sixteen hundred years ago!

            Anyway, as I was driving home after my friendly discussion about the Trinity, another related question occurred to me. Why, exactly, is it so critical that we get this concept right? The church got by just talking about it, rather than insisting on an answer, for more than 300 years. And what could it matter to God—especially a loving God, if we didn’t get it exactly right? To use an analogy (talk about God is mostly analogical, after all), if someone mistakes me for the father of a young man who is actually my nephew; or if I mistake someone I’ve just met at my Rotary club for another person altogether when I meet her on the street, what real harm is done? None. In both cases, having made a mistake about someone’s identity, we act like adults. We smile, correct each other, make small talk, and go our separate ways.

            What is more, we’re talking about God, here. Mistakes are expected. I learned early in seminary that even if the word isn’t very familiar to us, God is, in important respects “ineffable,” or unknowable. Considering that humans are a single species of life among as many as eight million other species on earth; given that the earth is a tiny speck of a planet on the edge of an unimaginably large cosmos; given that that cosmos is some ten or twelve billion years old and God has presumably been here and there the whole time; given that by most accounts God set all this in motion, and is eternal and omnipotent and omnipresent and on and on, how are we ever going to “get” God "right" anyway?

            So we speak about God using analogies we find in scripture or make up ourselves. He is like a rock, or a mother, or a shepherd, or a burning bush. Or we know something of God on account of the things that scripture tells us God has done.

            But let’s face it. Scripture doesn’t take a keen interest in helping us understand who God is in and of himself. We don’t get much by way of divine ontology. In philosophy, ontology is the study of “being.” It is a big deal. Ironically, most philosophers can’t agree with each other on human ontology. Makes trying to understand divine ontology seem like aiming high.

            Nevertheless, we insist that God is three persons, but only one God. Like a church is many persons but one church. That, at least, is the “social trinity” explanation. There are many others, most judged heretical: monarchianism, adoptionism, Arianism. Even a brief description of these views would involve saying much more about them than the Bible says about the Trinity in any one place (or altogether).

            The Bible, however, doesn’t spend much time on any of this. When it comes to whom he or she (both are anthropomorphic analogies, of course) is, God says, enigmatically, “I am who I am.” Or something like that—the Hebrew is hard to translate.

            So perhaps we ought to take a hint from the Bible on this. It isn’t that important that we get it right. If it was, God would have given us more than sporadic clues—God might have actually given us a book or two or at least several chapters that nailed the matter. But God didn’t.

            So, I’ve given up trying to convince people that the Trinity is exactly this or that. I’ve not given up on the Spirit or on Jesus or on God. But when I talk on how they are related to each other I’m going to give the dearth of scripture and its ambiguity on this topic a lot of respect; I’m going to take a hint from scripture’s lack of interest in the matter. And I’m going to go easy on strong assertions; I’m going to enjoy my conversations rather than pick a fight. I’m going to reread Boethius and Augustine for the fun of it. I’m going to smile at assertions, based on otherwise outmoded classical philosophy, that God consists of substance or essence. I’m going to wonder aloud rather than define terms.

            And when people ask me about it, I’ll say I’m playing at being an unorthodox Unitarian—that is, a Unitarian with Trinitarian tendencies.