7th June

Welcome here

Today is Trinity Sunday:

Time to consider the Church’s dogma on the Trinity.  This follows Pentecost simply because having  been through Lent Easter Ascension and Pentecost the church feels it important to  make a statement about the nature of the Faith , the construction of God it is  promoting as true.

The early church councils sought to produce an agreed formulation on the relationship between the Spirit the man Jesus and the Christ and the Creative force while simultaneously holding the position of Sarah and Abraham that there is one living God, a singularity.

Centuries of argument produced the final creedal statements. The need the church has always felt to show internal consistency on these matters drove the need for formulation over encouraging enlightened experience of the living God and began down a path that lead to schism and argument and from there pronouncements of heresies, persecutions, wars and horrific murders.  Sometimes these were about the issues of Trinitarian thinking more often outflows of the need to control the hearts, minds and religious experience of the people.

Power bases were being built and the church no longer wanted reconciliation with Judaism.

The desire early on was to produce a single monolithic religion where all churches agreed some basic creedal statements. At best these were intended to be helpful to the laity at worst they were to offer political control and to promote need to be “right” and to identify the other as wrong – which have plagued the church ever since. Internal disagreement is found in all the great world religions as religious ideals defend to operations of power.

We know that the Bible clearly refers to the Spirit of God, the Creator, the Christ and the person Jesus while also staying monotheistic. The need to clarify what is inherently confusing or mysterious   transmuted into a need to codify (God!). What flowed directly from that were questions:

1. The pecking order inside the Trinity.

Codifying this produced the great schism between the Easter orthodox church (Constantinople the Middle East Africa) and the Churches in the West (Rome and the rest of Europe with their own emerging power). The West have the filioque clause in their creed which says the Holy spirit “proceeds from the Father and the Son” the Eastern churches say the Spirit proceeds only from the Father where the Unity resides in its partial expression of the Father. The West argued for the unity actually in the Trinity per se.

2. The nature of the Christ and the development of Christology around the incarnation, the life teaching death and resurrection of Jesus.

• it also began to limit the language around the stuff of God. This meant feminine images of the Godhead were ignored or supressed and cultural biases began to be laid over the raw teachings of Jesus. His teaching began to be represented in constricted ways.

3. Probably the worst effect of these formulations was that the decisions were presented to the laity, not as helpful tools for thinking about the nature of God, but rather correct positions to adopt. The irony of this process seems to have been completely lost as followers of Jesus were brutally murdered because of perceived threats to religious orthodoxies developed and promoted and policed which promoted religious in and out , right and wrong positions.

4. The most subtle and the most sad effect has been dogmatic teaching which has supressed the natural experience of Christians or  left them concerned that they will fall out of relationship with God for getting it wrong as opposed to falling out with God because of greed violence, love of power, exploitation oppression, laziness and cruelty – demanding instead  conformity to the somewhat ambiguous teaching of the church, and that the church will tell people the nature of God rather than foster the inherent natural relationship between all people, all creation and the transcendent.

The Trinity is a difficult teaching though if you interested it does produce very interesting profound and even liberating catholic (across all people)  views of God. The Best of this is LaCugna

( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catherine_LaCugna ). “God for Us“. This is the best book on the Trinity you will ever read.

The church’s often undignified, misguided and oppressive shoring up of temporal power has never the less been a bit of an ark – carrying the precious teachings of Jesus through the centuries. In the right hands Trinitarianism has the possibility for expansive and great thinking. In the wrong hands it can be an instrument to undermine and to limit the understanding of God to church authority rather than the people of God and to Jesus the Christ. It can lead to an idea that the church owns God.

The Mysterious character of God is a constant source of joy and wonder and fear not, you are probably closer to an understanding of the Trinity if you find it baffling or irrelevant than if you believe you  feel certain that you have God pegged.