“Unsermon”

June 19th, 2011

Martin Luther famously said that Trinity Sunday was the one Sunday a year when the preacher should remain silent, for there is nothing that can really be said about the mystery of the Trinity. But before you get too excited, you should also know that the late Reverend Peter Gomes said that anything worth preaching about was worth at least forty minutes. So let’s say we split the difference?

I am a great fan of Friedrich Schleiermacher, the 19th century German theologian, and especially of his central work Der christliche Glaube nach den Grundsätzen der evangelischen Kirche, translated in an oversimplification into English as The Christian Faith. And since we are discussing something as profound and dare I say mysterious as the nature of God in trinity, I thought we might use Schleiermacher to clarify. Here he writes about the unity of God:

As to the unity of God- strictly taken it can never be an attribute of a thing that it only exists in a definite number. It is not an attribute of the hand to be dual; but it is of a human to have two hands, and of a monkey to have four. In the same way it could be an attribute of the world to be ruled by One God only, but not of God to be One only. And so if a divine attribute is here in question, we must turn away from mere number; and in that case what we have first to insist upon is the general expression that God has no equal, which, of course, our language can more distinctly express by ‘uniqueness.’ And inasmuch as many similars are always of the same kind of species, the individual beings representing the existence of the species and the species the essence of the individuals, it might be said that the unity or uniqueness of God is that attribute in virtue of which there is no distinction of essence and existence.

Whew! I’m glad we got that cleared up! Seriously, there are countless approaches to the concept of Trinity and they are all just about that clear. In fact, at Harvard I took a class on Trinitarianism from the famed feminist Anglican priest-theologian Sarah Coakley who used as a framing question for the course “Why three?” When it was over I wanted to ask “Why one?” The course had done a great job of showing that God was God, that Jesus was God in some way, that the Spirit was God in some way, though in what way the Spirit… trust me, you don’t want to know… it has to do with whether the Spirit proceeds from the Creator or from the Creator and Redeemer, the technical term filioque… it’s a train wreck! At the end of the class it looked more like three gods than one. It doesn’t help that the ancient Greek words used in these debates don’t translate well into English, or that in the bloody battles for orthodoxy, the one with the sword could declare something with certainty even if it was uncertain!

So lest there be any question about what I believe about the Trinity, let me put it out there. I do not believe God is a Trinity. I believe the nature of God is unknowable, that Trinity is one way for us to understand God’s nature, but when we start making definitive claims we run into trouble. In fact, as if you aren’t already bored, I will share with you the term for this dilemma. It is the problem of predication. If you crawled into a way-back machine and went back to middle school English class, you might recall that predicates are the descriptive parts of a phrase. In a simple sentence you have a subject then a predicate. It asserts or affirms something about the subject. For example, if I say “The ball is red,” “is red” is the predicate.

The problem with the predication of God is that anything after the phrase “God is” is, by definition, smaller than God. God is infinite and beyond all of our definitions so God can’t possibly fit into our definitions, except, I just used definitions and predicates to define God! You can see how this gets circular really fast. Even statements we hold dearly make no sense seen through this lens. Take the phrase “God is love.” We certainly can’t all agree what love even means. Romantic love? Self-sacrificing love? Except how can the infinite and omnipotent God actually sacrifice? Is it that scary kind of love that goes with the words “I’m doing this for your own good?” ‘God is love” fails the predication test!

We need to be able to say something about God, we need a God that we can at least name, but in humility we must admit that God is beyond us. The more certain we claim to be, the more we are worshiping an idol of our own creation, or at least of our own description, which turns out to be much the same thing.

Take for example the notion of God’s omniscience. Humans decided that God must know everything… sort of makes sense, though it is based on a false Platonic idea… but let’s run with it. So if God knows everything, then God must know what is going to happen in the future. And if God knows what is going to happen in the future, then we must be predestined to fulfill the future God knows about. So there must be some people preselected for redemption, the elect. So God must create some humans already intending them to sin and suffer eternal torment. Who, I ask you, wants to worship that god? Predication starts a logic chain that turns God into a monster.

Or maybe we can try on the impassibility of God. In this case the “pass” part of the term comes from the same root as passion. Impassibility means that God cannot feel passions. Never mind that the Hebrew Scripture portrays God as passionate, the Platonic ambush of early Christian belief turns God into form without feelings. But if Jesus is God in our un-understanding of Trinity and Jesus suffers then God must suffer but God can’t suffer… the notion that God can suffer being the heresy of patripassionism…

We need to make claims, but we have to do it with humility. We can’t ask if God is Trinity. We can ask why it is helpful for us to understand God as Trinity. What can we learn about God, about this creation, about ourselves. God as Trinity is in relationship. That certainly doesn’t fit into the cold logic of predication, will never fit well into a Thomist catachism. God is relational, relates internally in God’s self and relates with creation including us. There goes impassibility right out the window! Relationship means ability to change… maybe to be a “living God,” another of our favorite predicates, then God has to change. Maybe God is growing in love… maybe God is learning!

Here is where we’ve landed… most of what we say about God is the best we can do, but the more certain we are, the further we are from God, and the more likely we are to run into dead-ends and traps. Now, we’re okay with that. In the United Church of Christ we acknowledge our limitations, we accept that God is still speaking and we are still learning. But outside of those doors are plenty of people who are certain they know God, can describe God, are agents of God. In their certainty they have traded in the God that created them for a god they created. And we leave them in their sin! We never name it, we follow a live and let live policy, but they don’t… and because they are loud and certain, they get to define who God is for popular culture, they have come to define Christianity… and they are wrong! And we just sit back and politely mention to one another that they are misguided, but we never challenge them.

Let me be very clear. Those who have abandoned God in favor of an idol need to be corrected. If we love them, we will name their sins and correct them. We will call them to humility. You’re not too polite to stop a person from stepping in front of an approaching car. Should you be too polite to save their soul?

For all my theological training, I can’t tell you much about God with certainty. I experience God in my every day. I do, seriously. I have a very real experience of the presence of God. Not some explanation of how the Spirit proceeds from the Father, sorry… that’s the language in question, or how the Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son. But I experience God in creation, I experience God in community, I recognize God in Jesus, I feel God in covenant community. And I weep for those who are in grave error, who have made God small enough that they can understand, that have impoverished their own faith… I weep for them and pray for the courage to correct them, to bring them back to the open and amazing faith that I feel…

Do you?