Trinity Sunday
Today on Trinity Sunday, we celebrate God as Trinity. This is often seen as a “difficult” doctrine. Clergy often avoid preaching about it and many congregations prefer that. This is unfortunate as the Trinity isn’t simply a difficult, abstract concept.The perfect “relatedness” within the Trinity is a model for God’s relationship to us and our relationship with each other.
However, as we try to unravel the meaning of the Trinity, we should take note of an important insight from the early theologian Origen. He wrote that God accommodates the way he reveals himself to take account of our human limitations. God is “like a schoolmaster talking a ‘little language’ to his children.” The Reformation theologian Calvin called this process accommodation.
The earliest theological debates were about how Jesus Christ could be both a human being and also God. The status of the Holy Spirit, and, so, the relationship of the Trinity of Father, Son and Holy Spirit, became an issue later.
The theological problem was how to retain a belief that there is one God but also Three Persons.To non-Christians, especially Muslims, it can look as though Christians believe in three Gods, i.e. that they are tritheists. Or, it can seem that Christians are only talking about the “appearance” of Three Persons. A workable Trinitarian theology has to avoid apparently believing in Three Gods or believing that God only appears to be Three Persons.
Two distinct approaches developed in Western and Eastern Christianity. Eastern theologians emphasized the distinctness of the three Persons but safeguarded their unity by stressing that they both came (derived) from the Father. The Western approach, exemplified by St. Augustine, begins from an assumption of unity, especially in the work of revelation and redemption, and describes the relations of the three persons in terms of mutual fellowship, almost treating the Holy Spirit as a kind of glue of “love” linking the three.
The basic Eastern approach can make the three Persons seem too distinct. To compensate for this, two additional concepts arose: perichoresis and appropriation.
Perichoresis (dancing around each other) describes the way in which each Person, although distinct, shares in the activity of the other. Therefore, the Son was at the Creation, (see John’s Prologue to understand this better: “In the beginning was the Word..”), as was the Holy Spirit (as ‘the breath of God” breathing life into Creation). Similarly, the Father was present on the Cross. This insight is reflected in representations of the Trinity in art, like that on the front of this month’s parish magazine, which has Christ on the Cross seated on the lap of God the Father with the Holy Spirit descending upon them both.
Appropriation means that, when referring to parts of the story of salvation, it may be more appropriate” to speak first of one Person before the others: therefore, Creation is “appropriate” to the Father; the work of salvation to the Son; and the sustaining of the Church to the Holy Spirit.
Later theologians have repeated and developed these concepts. An important recent insight comes from Karl Rahner. Reflecting the idea of accommodation, he argues that what God has allowed us to experience as human beings points towards the inner reality of God.