A defence of doctrine - Trinity Sunday 2018

Queens’ College, Cambridge

Trinity Sunday 2018

Firstly, thank you to Fr Tim for the opportunity to preach this evening. That said, Trinity Sunday is not exactly a preacher’s dream. Often hailed by clergy as a yearly opportunity to play a round of ‘heresy bingo’, there is a distinct chance that anyone wanting to say anything about the nature of God will, instead, simply prepare the prosecution’s case for their own excommunication. I will almost certainly commit such heresy tonight – but, I would argue, that to push the boundaries and learn by thinking is not only sensible, but also very Anglican. Doctrine needs to be lived and learnt and tested – it’s not a museum piece, and if it becomes one, then it needs a good clearing out.

A lot of people have a problem with the concept of doctrine. To many outside the church, it is often seen to embody the more bewildering and off-putting nature of the church – the elements that stop people from even going through the church door. Even for those within the church, doctrine can prove a stumbling block. In the course of this Evensong, of course, we have recited the Apostles Creed – one of the foundational documents of the Christian faith – yet I would venture a guess that at least some of us here have never really thought about the words we are reciting. Resurrection of the body? Communion of saints? Descended into Hell?

Now whilst I’d be very glad to engage in why I think those things, and all that is found within the creed, are true, it feels to me that the laity, the person in the pew, are often taken for granted and expected to reel off a bunch of beliefs without much engagement with the history and formation of those beliefs, and hence their relationship to real life. We tell people - this is what the church believes – and you either say it and mean it, or at least say it, and then you can come to the coffee morning or help at the food bank. It’s all a bit childish, and it doesn’t help us in the propagation of the Gospel.

Now our predecessor generations of Christians have hardly helped us in this. In many churches today, Trinity Sunday, the Athanasian Creed will have been read, or at least acknowledged – a creed attributed to St Athanasius in his fights against the Arian Heresy and firmly establishing the doctrine of the Holy and Undivided Trinity. For brevity’s sake, the Arian Heresy refuted the idea of God being a Trinity, and instead placed Jesus as secondary to God the Father – effectively suggesting that God the Father existed before God the Son, and at some point God the Son came into being. More on that, anon.

But back to this Athanasian creed - it doesn’t pull it’s punches:

“Whosoever will be saved, before all things it is necessary that he hold the catholic faith. Which faith except every one do keep whole and undefiled; without doubt he shall perish everlastingly.”

That is, if you don’t believe in the Trinity, it’s off to Hell with you, with hellfire, gnashing of teeth and all the rest of it. It’s quite an extreme position to hold –perhaps one more understandable in the early days of the Christian Faith. But why is this particular proposition, that the Trinity is truth, quite so important?

The creeds themselves, I suppose, are quite a good illustration of this focus on doctrine in the early church too. In our readings on Sundays, we often hear of things Jesus did or said – but think back to the Apostles Creed. ‘Born of the Virgin Mary, Suffered under Pontius Pilate’. Wait a minute – what about the life of Jesus? Why is all that stuff – the stuff that ostensibly fills most of the Gospels – why is it not there? Does the life of Jesus really matter so little that we go from Virgin Birth (note, another doctrine there) to crucifixion without a single mention of His actual actions?

Now a real skeptic could say – perhaps that highlights one of the problems with having an institutional church. Perhaps this is what happens when a bunch of first century men get together and ruin a religious movement. Rather than focusing on the realities, they all sit around and argue about philosophical and theological concepts, the ultimate purpose of which is to show how intelligent they are. But I think the answer is a little more complicated like that, and I’d like to launch a defense of thoughtful doctrine – because getting to the heart of idea of the Trinity helps us understand what that doctrine attempts to reveal, which is that, in His very essence, God is relationship, God is faithfulness, God is communion, God is loving service.

Much of the debate and discussion in the past couple of years in the Church of England around equal marriage or food banks or any number of other important Christian causes has seemed to pit two ‘sides’ against one another – those who talk of either The Church teaching X or The Bible teaching X, against those who say ‘but God is love’. To me, the doctrine of the Holy Trinity is where these two groups might find themselves uncomfortably close. To say that God is love is quite right – but where does that proposition come from? Do the liberals of 2018 really believe that to be a new finding, a new insight into God?

I would strongly argue that this is no new insight – it might be that we are delving deeper into what that love means, but it’s nothing new. For, to me, the doctrine of the Trinity is true because it expresses, in a limited and human way, how the Christian Church has come to an understanding of the meaning and substance of God Himself. One God, but three persons – that is the central tenet of the Christian faith, because it is to that which the Bible, the wider scriptures, human experience, reason, tried and tested tradition all point to. The Church and The Bible teach that the Holy Trinity is the truest human expression of our understanding of the divine, and that understanding shows us firmly that God is love. That’s what St Athanasius is getting so het up about.

Everything else is peripheral – or rather, everything else points us towards that truth. Whether it is Mary’s fiat, the wedding at Cana, the healing of the paralysed man, the cross, the resurrection, the ecstatsies of St Theresa of Avila, the arguments around infant baptism, the Second Vatican Council – all of these point towards and never cease to provide more evidence for the fact that, at the heart of it all, there is a God whose name is Love – who is unable to exist in any other way.

Now for the heresy hunters amongst you, I think you may have just struck gold. How can we talk of a God that needs anything? Isn’t He supposed to be omnipotent, omniscient and so on? I suppose that’s ultimately why the doctrine of the Trinity is a mystery. But because of this, perhaps talking about God having to exist as Love is not quite the heresy it seems.

For Trinitarian Christianity makes the point very clear – that God the Father did not create the Son and the Spirit, but that despite the Son being begotten and the Spirit proceeding, they are co-eternal and co-existent with the Father. In simpler terms – whenever The Father is or was, Jesus is or was, the Spirit is or was. All three persons are, have been, and will be, eternal. And this begins to give us an insight into the reality of the God we worship.

This is, perhaps, how God can ‘need’ anything – because the highest form of reality itself, God, is Himself a communion of persons. Reality is communion. God the Father doesn’t need the Son and the Spirit, so much as a three person God is the truest expression of the reality beneath. No person of the Trinity can exist without the others, because that communion is the essence of God. God the Father in heaven; God the Son as the fulfillment of the law; God the Spirit as the Advocate and Guide within and amongst us all now. God the Father loving God the Son; God the Son suffering and dying on the cross; God the Holy Spirit crying with us, rejoicing with us, nudging us to be our truest selves. And all of those are God, in communion with each other. That is what reality looks like.

Of course, the Church has developed the doctrine of the Trinity having contemplated God – but the Trinity has much to tell us about reality itself and thus the way our lives are best ordered. Contemplation of that God who we worship brings us to understand more about the world we live in – that the ultimate ordering of our lives must include that loving service and communion that is the Godhead.

And that is why this Sunday, Trinity Sunday, is such an important one when thinking about the theme for this term – service. God is loving service – and thus to be a Christian who contemplates the Trinity requires us to model that in our own lives too. This is why doctrine matters – it matters because by contemplating God, we can best understand how to live. God doesn’t model loving service –God is loving service. We, as creatures, can reflect that essence of God, and by doing so, bring in the Kingdom of Heaven and grow more into his children, who can call Him Father.

Think back to our reading - “God so loved the world that he gave”. That is what God is – He gave Himself to us. The Trinity is an essential doctrine for that very reason – it gives us a glimpse into God’s nature, and from that more fully reveals our own. And because of that, we must thank God for the doctrine of the Holy and Undivided Trinity – three persons, one in unity. Service to others – the very act of love – is nothing but the direct reflection of the Godhead. What else could we possibly ask for.

Amen.