Coming to Understand the Trinity
It was claimed above that one of the reasons why the Trinity is so seldom talked about in everyday Christianity is because it has been approached as if it were an abstract idea that has nothing to do with our daily Christian lives. The irony about this conclusion is that it is the exact opposite that should be the case. Indeed, historically speaking, it can be argued (as has been hinted at above) that the doctrine of the Triunity of God did not arise as something divorced from Christian experience, but something that flows from it and is intimately bound up with it.
Before we continue on and explain a more holistic and dynamic way of understanding how we come to believe in the Trinity, some terms will need to be defined and explained. First, reference will be made to our “evangelical and doxological participation in the Gospel.” This describes the two-way involvement of our basic Christian experience. The word “evangelical” literally means “pertaining to good news” and refers to the movement from God to humanity as Jesus Christ in the Gospel. The word “doxological” literally means “pertaining to glory,” and refers to the movement from humanity back to God in prayer and praise. So, what we are saying when we bring these two concepts together is that, in our basic Christian experience, we receive God’s mercy, love, et cetera, and, in response, we give praise and thanksgiving and adoration to God.
The next two terms are related, but they must be carefully distinguished. There has, since the very beginning, been a distinction between the “Evangelical Trinity” and the “Ontological Trinity.” Again, the word “evangelical” refers to the good news that is received by God’s mighty and merciful acts. In this case, the “Evangelical Trinity” refers to the fact that we do indeed see God’s activity spoken of within the New Testament in Trinitarian terms. In a sense, it could be said that the Evangelical Trinity is our perception of God’s activity toward us. The word “ontological” literally means “referring to what exists.” When we speak of the “Ontological Trinity,” we are speaking of a God who is Triune in God’s very existence as God.
The distinction between these levels of our evangelical and doxological participation in the Gospel, the Evangelical Trinity and the Ontological Trinity, can be said to be part of the problem. When we declare that God is Triune, we are making a statement about the Ontological Trinity, which, being two levels removed from our daily experience, is seen as abstract. However, it is hoped that this treatment will help to connect these levels together.
When we read the Bible, as has been already stated, there is no formal statement of the Trinity. There are, however, many accounts from different angles and people, of God’s mighty work in Jesus Christ. We are presented with a message of salvation, that God is for us and has given himself to us in an astonishing way. It is entirely possible to live a life in accordance with the scripture and yet never come to explicit and careful articulation of the doctrine of the Trinity. That does not mean, however, that a person who does not have conceptual clarity that God is Triune is not, in fact, Trinitarian. Indeed, it could be said that, by asking such a believer a few questions, the Trinitarian content of their basic Christian experience can be brought out.
Such a line of questions might look like this. The question could be asked, “What is your relationship to God?” The answer would sound something like, “I am accepted by God and in loving relationship with him.” Now, the question could be asked, “And how did you come to be in such a relationship with God?” The answer would more than likely be Christocentric. “Jesus died on the cross for me and to atone for my sins.” Finally, it could be asked, “And how did you come to know that you were in this loving relationship with God?” The language might be different, but the content would be similar to, “The Spirit of God spoke to my heart, telling me that I was a child of God.” What is important to grasp from this is that, even when we are not forthright with a carefully articulated doctrine of the Trinity, we find that our evangelical and doxological participation in the Christian faith is intrinsically Trinitarian. The problem at this point becomes how we can bring this basic Christian conviction to careful articulation.
This is where we come to the Evangelical Trinity. When we carefully allow the entire New Testament witness to impress itself upon us, through our encounter with the Scriptures, especially in the worshiping life of the church (where we baptize in the Triune name, among other things), we start to see a pattern in the way God interacts with humanity. God brings about salvation for humanity through the life, death, resurrection and ascension of Christ and this reality is communicated to human beings through the power of the Holy Spirit. The more we consider the scriptural witness and the core of our Christian experience, the more we realize that this is indeed the case and the more we come to the conviction that our experience of God is not simply of a God who acts in only one way as an impersonal force, but interacts with us as Father, as Son, and as Holy Spirit.
However, the moment we realize the fact that God interacts with us as a Trinity of Persons, Father, Son and Spirit, it comes into apparently sharp conflict with the radical monotheism of Jewish faith. What are we to make of this conflict? As it turns out, it is precisely at this point that the major Trinitarian heresies arise. The question that must be answered here is, “Does the fact that God interacts with us as a Trinity of Persons tell us anything about who God is in God’s own life?” In one way or another, the heresies of Arianism and Modalism (discussed below) both answer this question in the negative. “No. This threeness of revelation finally is not indicative who God really is. God is one, a single, undifferentiated unity. This threeness must be subordinated to the oneness of who God really is.” However, in one way or another, this causes the Gospel to fall apart. Exactly how this happens for each of them will be addressed in the discussion of Trinitarian heresies below. Suffice it to say at this point that, if the Gospel is to have any saving significance, this Triunity of God’s interaction we experience in our Christian lives and in the Gospel must be rooted in the being of God himself. That is to say, the Evangelical Trinity, the fact that God interacts with us as Father, Son and Holy Spirit, is also an Ontological Trinity (where God actually is Father, Son and Holy Spirit). If we wanted to deny this connection between how God is toward us and who God is in God’s self, we are free to do so, but we must understand that to do so is to negate the saving work of Christ (as should be clear by the end of this chapter).
No comments:
Post a Comment