Made in the image of the Trinity

Psalm 8

1 O Lord, our Sovereign,    how majestic is your name in all the earth!

You have set your glory above the heavens.

2  Out of the mouths of babes and infantsyou have founded a bulwark because of your foes, to silence the enemy and the avenger.

3 When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers,  the moon and the stars that you have established;

4 what are humans that you are mindful of them,    mortals that you care for them?

5 Yet you have made them a little lower than God and crowned them with glory and honor.

6 You have given them dominion over the works of your hands;    you have put all things under their feet,

7 all sheep and oxen,    and also the beasts of the field,

8 the birds of the air, and the fish of the sea,  whatever passes along the paths of the seas.

9 O Lord, our Sovereign,  how majestic is your name in all the earth!

Romans 5:1-5

1 Therefore, since we are justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, 2 through whom we have obtained access to this grace in which we stand, and we boast in our hope of sharing the glory of God. 3 And not only that, but we also boast in our afflictions, knowing that affliction produces endurance, 4 and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, 5 and hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.

John 16:12-15

12 “I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. 13 When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth, for he will not speak on his own but will speak whatever he hears, and he will declare to you the things that are to come. 14 He will glorify me because he will take what is mine and declare it to you. 15 All that the Father has is mine. For this reason I said that he will take what is mine and declare it to you.

I’ve spent much of this week thinking about how I might say something interesting and/or helpful about the Trinity, and I far from sure that I’m going to succeed.   And really, how many of us know hot to talk about the Trinity or to articulate its significance?

For most Christians the Trinity, the doctrine that God exists eternally as a unity of three persons, Father, Son, and Holy Spirt, just sort of sits there on the shelf only to be consulted occasionally when necessary.  It’s something we know we’re supposed believe even as we’re not really sure what it means to believe it.  This is just one of the many ways Christianity can seem - for insiders as much as for outsiders - to be about believing stuff is true that doesn’t make sense.  The line between Holy Mystery and irrational incoherence can get fuzzy.  How can we claim that God is one but also three?  - that there are three distinct persons which are nevertheless essentially the same?  And there’s always the haunting question of whether, even when we know we’re supposed to believe something, if we actually do?  Our fundamental task here is to orient ourselves to God, and the doctrine of the Trinity says something fundamental about who God is.  

As you probably know, the doctrine of the Trinity does not explicitly appear in the pages of Scripture, and indeed even when we read Scripture now we are unlikely to read through the lens of the Trinity.  We just heard the two NT passages prescribed by the lectionary for Trinity Sunday, and I think it’s safe to presume that in neither did you hear the Trinity calling out to you.  How did we end up with this doctrine anyway?  

The short answer is that it is the result of trying to take Scripture seriously.  In the Bible it’s pretty obvious that the Father is considered God, and indeed when we hear “God” we probably think of something like the Father.  At the same time, Scripture also speaks about Jesus as God - not as emphatically as we might expect, but still quite clearly.  And then the Scriptures also speak of the Holy Spirit in ways that sure suggest the Spirit is God as well.  If all three are equated with God - if language is applied to each which is reserved for God alone - then there’s a tension to resolve.  

It’s obvious that there are clear distinctions drawn between the three - it’s clear that, for instance, while the Son reveals the Father, the Son is not the Father.  To claim they are one in the same violates the language and logic of Scripture, but then delineating them from one another runs the risk of establishing multiple Gods (which means you have no God at all).  The early Christians inherited the unshakable conviction that “Hear O Israel: The Lord our God is One” - but how do you that square that with the three?  One approach - which we now label as the heresy of “modalism" - is to claim that the three person are different “modes” of God’s self expression, in the same way that water might be a solid, a liquid, and vapor - but crucially not all at the same time - but if God were to have various modes this creates serious philosophical problems while, again, not taking seriously the way Scripture depicts the Father and Son interacting.  

This is how the problem was framed in the early centuries, and it’s still the problem we face today when we try to think about this, for while we know that answer has been decided - the doctrine of the Trinity - we don’t understand that answer, and, in fact, we are not the sort of people easily capable of understanding that answer even if we want to.  The doctrine arose in a cultural milieu shaped by ancient Greek metaphysics with its language of substances and essences and the like.   These arena’t just foreign concepts to us, they find their home in an entirely foreign way of conceptualizing reality itself.  In many respects Christianity has shown remarkable adaptability to the cultures and eras in which it found itself, but there are many other respects - not least this one - where to really understand our inheritance almost necessarily means trying to place yourself in a forgotten world, to see as they saw, to imagine as the imagined.  This is not only very difficult, but we are people prejudiced against the past, assuming that in every way these people were less enlightened.  But to be Christian is, inescapably, to attempt taking on a pre-modern way of seeing the world.  And rather than this being a deficiency, something we need to apologize for, in our world where so many (including possibly ourselves) experience disillusion and disenchantment, the potential to inhabit a different reality is perhaps one of the most beneficial things we can offer.  

So, in the time remaining I’m not going to try to explain the Trinity, not only because I can’t do a very good job, but because understanding - while important - can be overrated.  The whole point of doctrine is not to enshrine the solutions to certain mysteries but rather to name the truth to which we cling even when we don’t understand, that which in light of we live and move and have our being.  First and foremost doctrine tells us how and how to not to talk about God.  As my theology professor said: “When I say God, I mean Father, Son, and Holy Spirit”.  We are to talk about each as God while also insisting on their distinction.  This is what we do, even when we don’t know why.  

But even beyond all that, to me the most compelling aspect of the doctrine of the Trinity is what it tells us about who God is.  Trinity defines God as one whose very essence is relationship, that God is relationality as such, that God comprises a community of distinct persons in absolute unity with one another.  

And this must necessarily inform how we think about what it is to be made in God’s image.  Psalm 8 asks the rhetorical question, “What are humans that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them?”, but then in the same breath responds (but does not answer, exactly) “Yet you have made them a little lower than God and crowned them with glory and honor.”  This one verse expresses both the distance between ourselves and God, our apparent insignificance in the cosmos, and at the same time the wonder that we are, in fact, near to God, made in the very image of God.  In light of the doctrine of the Trinity we see that to be made in God’s image is to be , in our very essence, relational creatures, that we are made for community, that we literally cannot exist in isolation from one anther.  And what God desires most for us is to participate in the very life of God that God enjoys in God’s self, that we would not only be justified before God, but that we would become partakers of this divine life, that we would be united with God and with one another.  

This might help shed some light on the passages we read the previous two Sundays.  First, we saw in John 17 that Jesus prayed for the unity of believers, that it would reflect the very unity of the Father and the Son.  It’s important to see that this is not just, for Jesus, a helpful analogy, but a way of stating the whole point of existence.  Our unity with God and our unity with one another are one and the same.  This is why we were made.  

And last week, on Pentecost, we heard the story of when the Holy Spirit descended on the church and gave each the ability to speak another languages, the whole point of which was to overcome our disunity, tearing down the walls that divide us, and establishing a new community that lives in light of who God has been revealed to be.  

This might all sound a bit too abstract - interesting, perhaps, but not so “applicable” - but the fundamental task, if we are going to get anything else right, is to come as close as we can to comprehending God’s essence, God’s nature, God’s character, because this is the very ground of being itself.  We only really know who we are, what existence means, the goal of creation - anything at all, really - if we first have a clue about who God is.  And the mystery of our faith is that we know God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.