So today Catholics are called upon to think about the Holy Trinity. We’re supposed to think who God is, as well as who we are as beings made in his image. And it’s the day when priests kind of apologize in their sermons about understanding the Trinity being above their pay grade.
The old Irish priest visiting our parish today (a throwback to the time when most of the priests in Georgia were Irish surplus) suggested that we develop the habit of making the Sign of the Cross frequently during the day to come to grasp the mystery of the Trinity. That learning method, I fear, doesn’t correspond to my learning style.
But here’s one thing: The Trinity is a way of describing the one God as both personal and relational, a God who knows and cares about persons. The Trinity is also the foundation of our understanding that the creative logos that governs all of being, including each particular human creature, is personal and relational. The logos is found in and meant to be shared by free, relational, and rational persons.
Although there is certainly evidence for the Trinitarian understanding of God in the New Testament, the articulation of who the Trinitarian God is depends on the early Church fathers deploying philosophy to distinguish the God of the Bible from the God of Aristotle. The latter is neither personal nor relational and doesn’t know or care about persons. If we’re made in God’s image, the thought was, then Aristotle’s God as thought thinking itself is unrealistic.
Yet the most fundamentalist and low-church Protestants, who think of themselves as following the plain words of the Bible alone and as neither theological nor philosophical, accept the Trinity as the true description of who God is. That might mean that revelation can show us what reason can affirm as true, although what reason itself could not discover. And that philosophical inquiry can illuminate what a believer believes, even when it adds to what can be discovered simply by reading the Bible as a believer or potential believer.
If you think about it, the main division among religious Americans is between Trinitarians and non-Trinitarians, between those who really believe that God is living — and giving and caring about each of us in particular – and those who do not. The compromise that was the revised theology of the final version of the Declaration of Independence was between Trinitarians and non-Trinitarians.
That division is between those who believe that reality is personal and relational all the way down, and those who do not.
What about the Jews? The Muslims? The Mormons? Good questions! Divide up into small groups and discuss.
My takeaway: Thinking about the Trinity — even if in a quite negative way — is an indispensable part of liberal education. It might be that many people who believe in the Trinity have never really thought about it. And that people who think it’s part of a superstitious age that’s finally about faded away haven’t thought about it either.
In my opinion: People who think in terms of philosophy (or science) versus revelation as reason versus will could stand to think a bit about the Trinity and the possibility that logos is personal.