Sermon for Trinity Sunday

admin | 12 June 2022

“Behold, a door was opened in heaven”

It is really a dance, the dance of the understanding. It is wonderfully and powerfully expressed in the Athanasian Creed. It is nothing less than the dance of kataphatic and apophatic theology. These are the theological terms for positive and negative theology, the forms of thinking the mystery of God revealed in the witness of the Scriptures to Christ. God is and God is not like anything else. God is, in short, no thing.

Positive theology affirms something of the idea and nature of God by analogy to created things; negative theology recognizes that God is utterly beyond and other, even not other, non aliud. This is the strongest possible counter to the problem of reducing God to any of the forms of human reason, which would make God a construct of our thinking. The dance of the understanding is the circling around the mystery of God as revealed yet revealed for thought. “He therefore that would be saved, let him thus think of the Trinity”; think of the Trinity in this way of affirmation and negation. This is Thou and this is not Thou. Such is the dance of the understanding.

The Trinity is the central doctrine and teaching of the Christian Faith, but is equally the teaching which provides for and requires a respectful engagement with other philosophical religions. Hegel in the 19th century notes that the doctrine of the Trinity is in some sense adumbrated or shadowed forth in all religions. It is not by accident that the first article of the Thirty-nine Articles of Religion is “Of Faith in the Holy Trinity”. The first hymn in our Hymn Book, too, is a hymn to God as Trinity; the tune is called Nicaea after the Creed and Councils that determined the terms of our thinking the Trinity. Our thinking the mystery is our life. We cannot not think the Trinity. But how? Only by entering into what is revealed for our thinking and in the ways in which we have been given to think it.

“A door was opened in heaven,” John in Revelation tells us; a door not a window. One of the so-called “I am” sayings of Jesus is “I am the door” (Jn. 10.7). We go through the door and into the mystery of God revealed in Christ, at once the Son of man “that came down from heaven” and “who is in heaven.” To think this is to be born again, literally born upward into the things of God as signaled in the Gospel story of Nicodemus coming to Jesus by night.

Throughout the course of the Church year from Advent through to Trinity Sunday we have followed a kind of linear logic about the doctrinal moments in the life of Christ. After Trinity Sunday, the logic shifts to the inner appropriation of those moments in our lives. The first is about justification – what Christ has done for us; the second is about sanctification – about Christ in us. The hinge is Trinity Sunday, at once complete in itself and yet the ground for both movements. The two cycles of justification and sanctification have their unity in God as Trinity. Today is the dance of kataphatic and apophatic theology, a kind of circling around and into the mystery of God revealed for our thinking.

What does it mean? At the very least, it challenges an all too common pragmatic or practical kind of thinking which essentially collapses God into ourselves; in short, a kind of atheism. Instead of being born again, born upward, we seek to drag God, to the extent that God has any meaning in our lives, down to our level. In other words, we get it wrong. It is all about being raised up to a larger understanding which is found in worship, which is the point of the Lesson from Revelation. Our liturgy, especially on this day is an intellectual and spiritual work-out, and well it should be. It is the dance of the understanding about what can be affirmed of God and in what way and about the utter transcendence of God. The point is about God not for his sake but for our sake. The wonder lies in what has been opened out to us. Revelation in this sense is not counter to reason but its presupposition: the idea of an intelligible and spiritual principle without which our thinking and being is purely arbitrary and meaningless.

Both the First Article of Religion and the Athanasian Creed require our attention to certain terms that belong to our thinking, terms which have been developed in order to think more fully the mystery of God without making God subject to some sort of system of human devising. In the mystery of the Trinity, God is three in one. Three what? Three “Persons” who are “co-eternal together, and co-equal”. One critical term is person.

It looks back to ancient Greek tragedy where prosopon (προσωπα) or person refers to the masks of actors through which they spoke, literally per sona, if you will. But in the early Christian world, the term was used to speak about the relations of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, in terms of their essential divinity. From that language about the self-differentiation and unity of God in himself and about the relation between the divine and human in Christ – both ideas are present in the Athanasian Creed – the term has been extended in its application to us as persons. The classical definition by Boethius of person as “the individual substance of a rational nature” (Boethius, Contra Eutychen, IV) has migrated to us, to the various ways of thinking about the nature of our lives as individuals, as persons in different senses ranging from the spiritual to the political and social. This shows, however, that we really cannot think properly about ourselves as persons apart from the Trinity: three persons in one God, “neither confusing the Persons, nor dividing the Substance.”

All of this counters any notion of the Trinity as a kind of mathematical puzzle or some sort of mystical Rubik’s cube that is there to be solved. That is to miss the point: God as Trinity is by definition beyond finite comprehension and yet in its infinite self-relation is the ground for all our thinking and being. That requires us to be opened to the mystery itself. “Behold a door was opened in heaven” and we behold the wonder of God and of his creation in worship. We are being called to think upward and into the mystery of God.

This is the wonder of the Trinity. But this is equally our good, the good of our being opened to what is by definition beyond and yet present. One of the features of the early modern world is the phenomenon known as wunderkammer – cabinets of curiosity, or better cabinets of wonders or wonder-rooms. It was mostly about the wonders of things collected from the new worlds by Europeans in the break-out from Europe.

But the 17th-century poet and divine, George Herbert, in his poem Ungratefulnesse takes the idea of the wunderkammer of worldly things and applies it to the mysteries or the wonders of faith. God, he says, “hast but two rare cabinets full of treasure.” What are they? “The Trinitie, and the Incarnation”, highlighting already the inseparable nature of these theological realities. God, he says, “hast unlockt them both, /and made them jewels to betroth/ the work of thy creation/undo thy self in everlasting pleasure,” an allusion to the passage from Revelation – “For thou hast created all things, and for thy pleasure they are, and were created.” Far from reducing God to our finite thinking we are lifted up into the infinite life of God. Such is the wonder and meaning of Trinity Sunday, the wonder and the mystery of our liturgy. It is about our thinking upon the Trinity, our engagement with God’s engagement with us.