"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
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.
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