“The only-begotten Son who is in the bosom of the Father; he has made him known”
The historian and philosopher John Lukacs in ‘At the End of An Age’ (2002), quotes Feuerbach’s statement that “the old world made spirit parent of matter. The new makes matter parent of spirit,” noting that it is “as good a summation of the historical philosophy of materialism as any” (p. 130). It is a view (early 19th cent.) that predates both Darwin and Marx and remains the dominant assumption for “the overwhelming majority of scientists as well as computer designers” who see the world and its future in this materialistic way. But, as Lukacs says, “they are wrong” (p. 131). Materialist philosophies, ancient and modern, are but one chapter in the history of Science. The assumption that “the universe is written in the language of mathematics is entirely outdated” (p. 112). At the very least it makes the epistemological error of conflating what belongs to the mental and intellectual world of mathematics with the physical and empirical world of nature.
The over-mathematization of the natural sciences, especially Physics ends up “explaining matter away” leaving us with “a complex but essentially empty scaffolding of abstract mathematical entities” yet recognizing more and more “the intrusion of mind into matter” (p. 131). The counter to this false sense of Objectivity – the idea of reality as completely mind-independent, the world which most of us have assumed and grown up in, has been shattered from within the world of Physics and not just by those who in the post-modern philosophies of reaction default to its opposite, namely, reality as completely mind-dependent, an over-exaggeration of Subjectivism which simply asserts the opposite – all mind and no matter.
The point is that these approaches conflict and contradict each other in failing to recognize the “confluences of mind and matter, indeed, of mind preceding matter” (p. 131). It is the reciprocity between human thinking and the world that is there for thought that is the essential concern. Now all of this is but prelude to the matter, pun intended, of the Trinity, the essential mystery of the Christian faith, a mystery which we can only enter into but not control or possess; it is the mystery of God himself who by definition is incomprehensible in terms of finite human thinking and yet makes himself known to us through the images of nature and word, especially the words of Scripture and in our liturgy that are set before us today. This is captured in my text from John’s Gospel, “the only-begotten Son who is in the bosom of the Father; he has made him known.” It complements both the Gospel reading about being born again, or anew or upward with the lesson from Revelation about a door being opened in heaven.”
It is only through the images of Scripture and our thinking upon them that we can enter into an understanding of the mystery of God, our world and ourselves.
All our beginnings and all our endings have their place of meeting in the Trinity. It is the one thing essential. No Trinity, no Christianity. “No one can say ‘Jesus is Lord’, except by the Holy Ghost.” To say “Jesus is Lord” is to make a Trinitarian statement.
Essential Christianity is Trinitarian. What do I mean? That the doctrine of the Trinity is essential to Christian identity, corporately and individually. You are baptized in the Name of the Trinity, God the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost. At Holy Communion, we participate in nothing less than the Son’s Thanksgiving to the Father in the Spirit. Our liturgy is full of the Trinity.
The Trinity is the central teaching of the Christian Faith. The result of the most intense reflection upon the Scriptures and human experience imaginable, it is at the heart of the consensus fidelium, the consensus of the faithful, which is based upon what we receive, the sensus fides, the understanding of the faith. It is not ours to re-invent, re-image or re-define. It is the mystery into which we can only enter and discover the rich fullness of its power and truth.
Trinity Sunday sets this before us in our Scripture lessons with the outstanding vision of heaven in the Revelation of St. John the Divine, a vision of humanity’s worship and praise of the Triune God, which complements the story of learned Nicodemus coming to Jesus and being told he must be born again. His question, “How can these things be?” captures the sense of wonder and awe about the mystery of God which we cannot exhaust and cannot reduce to our own immediate concerns and finite minds. Nor is it a matter of blind faith. To believe it is to think it. We cannot not think it, which is not to say that we ever understand it fully. It remains the mystery revealed, not concealed.
For centuries, Anglican liturgical practice meant the recitation of the Athanasian Creed, one of the three great Creeds of the Catholic Faith, thirteen times a year, once a month and on Trinity Sunday. The Athanasian Creed is most explicit about the Trinity and the Incarnation. It provides a way of thinking the Trinity on the basis of the dance of apophatic and kataphatic theology – negative and positive theology; in other words. what can and what cannot be predicated of God and in what ways?
Trinity Sunday signals an ending and a beginning. There is an ending of all that we have gone through from Advent to this day, an ending that is a kind of gathering, a threefold gathering. What kind of gathering? First, there is the gathering of the whole history of salvation into this fullness of revelation. Secondly, there is the gathering of all religion into this fullness of meaning. Thirdly, there is the gathering of all the substantial moments in the life of Christ into this fullness of understanding. We have run through the Creed, as it were, and reached the summit of its understanding. In other words, the doctrine of the Trinity is the Christian teaching, par excellence, through which we engage respectfully with the worlds’ religions and philosophies.
Trinity Sunday marks a beginning, too. There is our entry by grace, year by year, into the fullness of revelation, the fullness of meaning and the fullness of understanding which have been opened to view. “Behold a door was opened in heaven.” We are given to behold and enter into what we behold. What we behold are the highest things of the Spirit; in short, the spiritual reality of the living God.
To behold the highest things of heaven is to make a new beginning: “ye must be born again.” What does that mean? To be born anew is to be born from above. We enter by grace into what Jesus wants us to know so that the divine life opened to view might take shape in us for our good and to his glory. It is our constant challenge and struggle. It is also our highest freedom and greatest dignity.
It means a new perspective, a deeper understanding and a beholding of things from above. There is a constant need for the resurrection of our understanding. There are two things which Jesus wants us to know; things into which everything he says and does are gathered and find their place.
He comes with a twofold purpose: to reveal God to us and to redeem us to God. What he wants to know concerns his divine identity and his identity with us. There is in fact an exegesis of God, a making known of God. But Jesus himself is the exegesis, the interpretive exposition. “He who has seen me has seen the Father.”
John makes this point explicitly clear: “No one has ever seen God; the only-begotten Son who is in the bosom of the Father, he has made him known”. It is the only place in the Scriptures where exegesis, a making known, is used, not about a text or about an event, but about God himself. Jesus is the exegesis of God. He makes God known to us even as he is the mediator between God and Man who brings us into fellowship with God. That fellowship is the fellowship of the Trinity, the fellowship of God with God in God. “Behold, a door was opened in heaven.” We behold what we enjoy, the fellowship of the Trinity.
George Herbert echoes Revelation and points us to the meaning of its intimacy with us.
Thou hast but two rare cabinets full of treasure,
the Trinitie, and Incarnation;
Thou hast unlockt them both
And made them jewels to betroth
the work of thy creation
Unto thy self in everlasting pleasure. (Ungratefulnesse, George Hebert)
As Austin Farrer puts it: “Belief in the Trinity is not a distant speculation; the Trinity is that blessed family into which we are adopted. God has asked us into his house, he has spread his table before us, he has set out bread and wine. We are made one body with the Son of God, and in him converse with the Eternal Father, through the indwelling of the Holy Ghost.”
We have fellowship with him whom we behold, for “the only-begotten Son who is in the bosom of the Father; he has made him known”
Fr. David Curry
Trinity Sunday 2025