The Strong Name of the Trinity

"Jesus came and said, 'All authority in heaven and earth has been given to me.  Go, therefore, and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you.  And remember that I am with you always, even to the end of the age.'"

--Matthew 28:  18-20

Right here.  In the Gospel passage above, which we call the Great Commission, is the only reference to the Trinity in the entirety of our Christian Scriptures. Yes, we can read Scripture and see the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit working at various times, but this passage is the only time in the whole of the Bible that those three words appear together! Jesus gives this command to the disciples to go and baptize people in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, but do they even know what that means?  Do we even know what that means?  It seems kinda crazy that we would build our faith upon such a doctrine as the Holy Trinity, when that doctrine is only mentioned in this very brief moment at the very end of Matthew’s Gospel. 

The Trinity as doctrine can be traced back to the Council of Nicea in 325 and the Council of Constantinople (not Istanbul) in 381.  The bishops and other theologians gathered at Nicea sought to answer the question of who Jesus was.  Easy, right?  They declared that God was one substance in three persons, which they called Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  But the original version of the Nicene Creed ended with “we believe in the Holy Spirit,” so another council was held in Constantinople, where the Holy Spirit’s role was shored up and it was declared that all three persons of the Trinity were God, yet there was only one God, that the Father was equal to the Son and the Son to the Spirit, and that the Father was Lord, the Son was Lord, and the Spirit was Lord, but that there was only one Lord….you know what, forget it, just go read the Athanasian Creed here. !

Saint Athanasius, whose creed, which attempted to unpack the Holy Trinity, eventually won out at the Council of Constantinople in 381 AD.  

As you can imagine this led a bunch of different people coming up with different interpretations of who and what the Trinity really was.  Many of these were branded as heretics, not so much because they were theologically inaccurate but because their view was different from the views of the folks who won, the ones that we today call orthodox, which means “right belief.”  Even today I bet I could ask each of you to describe the Trinity to me and you’ll all give me a different answer.  So which one is the right one, or the “orthodox” one?

Even that is tricky.  While the Church throughout the world has held the same belief of God in Trinity, there was one little piece of the Creed that caused the whole structure of the Church to be split.  Here’s your ecclesiastical history lesson for the day:

In the original version of our Creed, which was completed in 381 at Constantinople (not Istanbul) the line about the Holy Spirit said, “who proceeds from the Father, who with the Father and the Son is worshipped and glorified.”  If that sounds like something’s missing it’s because the western churches, whose bishop was in Rome, didn’t like that language and decided to hold their own councils in Toledo (Spain, not Ohio).  At the Third Council of Toledo in 589 the western churches added three words to that sentence about the Spirit.  They added “and the Son,” so the sentence read “who proceeds from the Father and the Son.”  This tiny edit is called the filioque, and if you can believe it, this little change shook the whole establishment of the Church in both Rome and Constantinople.  Fights broke out over whether the Son was subservient to the Father, whether the Spirit came from Jesus as well as from God the Father, and eventually in 1054 the Bishops of Rome and Constantinople officially excommunicated each other in what became known as the Great Schism, resulting in a Latin western Church (or Roman Catholic) and a Greek eastern Church (or Eastern Orthodox).  That split still remains and is still a bone of contention of folks to this day.

This pretty much sums it up.  

Why is this important to us Episcopalians in 2017?  For starters, as an offshoot of the Roman Catholic Church and a Church that traces its lineage back to these very bishops who threw their temper tantrums and excommunicated each other, this is part of our story too.  It also helps remind us that there is no “right” view of the Holy Trinity.  If you asked a western Christian they will give you one answer, and if you ask an eastern Christian they’ll give you another (and they’ll probably point out who the other is wrong).  Ultimately, nobody is right.  But in a way, nobody is wrong, either. 

The point of the Trinity is not a matter of doctrine, but rather relationship.  At the Council of Constantinople, a guy named Gregory from Nazianzus described the Trinity as a dance between the three persons.  A dance is a kind of relationship.  You trust each other.  You move in and out of each other.  Last year Richard Rohr and Mike Morrell wrote an excellent book called The Divine Dance, and in it they explore how the Trinity can change our lives.  In short, they echo Gregory’s description of the Trinity as a dance, only they call it a flow—like a river.  We, they say, are part of that dance, part of that flow.  We are in relationship with God, just as God is in relationship with Godself.  If you look at that picture from the cover of 'The Divine Dance', you see the three persons of the Trinity having a meal, but you’ll also notice a fourth seat at the table and each of the figures motioning to it.  That’s our seat!  We are part of the divine dance, part of the flow, and when we forget this we end up hurting one another and hurting God.  Those bishops and theologians long ago may not have been able to agree on certain details of the Trinity, but they did agree on one thing:  God exists in relationship, and we exist to be in relationship with God and with one another.  And that is something we can all understand!  Imagine what the world would look like if we danced with each other and were in relationship with each other the way God is with Godself?!

 Gregory of Nazianzus (right) coined the term perichoresis to describe the Trinity.  Richard Rohr and Mike Morrell used this as the basis for their book The Divine Dance, which you can order by clicking here . 

The Feast of the Most Holy Trinity is not about making sure we follow the exact teaching of the Trinity—because there isn’t one—or making sure we don’t commit a heresy—we probably have, I’ve probably committed five already.  Instead it’s about marveling in the mystery of God’s ability to be in relationship with Godself, and the extraordinary gift God has given us to be able to be in relationship with God ourselves.  This is what it means for us to bind unto ourselves the strong name of the Trinity