Trinity Sunday, 2003

For the most part, paganism, in its various forms, was pantheistic, that is, it held of the existence of many gods. This fiction was debunked to some degree by some ancient philosophers, but, after they had debunked the old myths, there was not much to go on in a positive light. For the people of the Old Testament, the matter was set straight with Moses’s solemn declaration, “Fix in your heart that the Lord is God..and that there is no other.” It was clear to them that God is one God. But whether or not He was a multiplicity of persons was not revealed, nor was it even likely that such a thought would have even been considered in Old Testament times. In any case, human reason alone could not have known one way or the other whether God was one or several persons. It was the New Testament revelation that expanded the knowledge of God as He who is one in three divine Persons: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. This fundamental dogma differentiated the Christian understanding of God from that of pagans, Jews and Moslems.

‘Trinity’ is a term not found in the NT. It’s traced to a certain Theophilus of Antioch, a Father of the Church who died around the year 185. But the reality of the three divine Persons is clearly scriptural. In time, various creedal formulas of the Church gave precision to various aspects of this doctrine. It became known that God is indeed a Trinity but in a unity of the divine Persons; and that He is a unity but in Trinity: ‘God-ness’ (the divine nature, in other words) being shared equally and completely by the three Persons simultaneously. We are, of course, well acquainted with this teaching and we accept it immediately. But during many centuries past, there have been dissenters from the dogma. So-called ‘anti-Trinitarians’ so exaggerated the unity of God, which they denied a real Trinity in God, while the ‘Tri-theists’ wanted to ascribe to each Person a different nature (which would result, practically, in three Gods). Then, too, there were the modalists who believed that there is only one God alright, but that He shows Himself in three various guises or at various times now as Father, or as Son or as Holy Spirit.

To get it right, one must have recourse to the holy Catholic Church. Indeed, it is now the rule, not the exception, that Protestant churches deny this doctrine of the Trinity, at least in the full sense that the Catholic Church upholds it. One reason for our success in preserving this truth through the ages is our method of arriving at knowledge. The Catholic way of knowing theological truth is not to begin study with an blank sheet of paper, without reference to all that has been revealed by the Holy Spirit over many centuries. The futility of what we often call the re-invention of the wheel should be a warning of the danger–if not also of the silliness–of starting from scratch, without the benefit of previously gained certainties. Real theology begins with the humble acceptance of faith that then advances to understand further what it already has grasped through belief. The modernistic approach, that so often ends in failure and heresy, would have us believe only the things that someone has decided are believable. And, for that issue at hand–the Trinity–that would surely be a risky enterprise. The truth about the Blessed Trinity is rightly grasped by believing in it first; and our knowledge of this three-Personed God is further enhanced by diligent study and prayer.

I want to give you a very brief summary of the basics of the Church’s doctrine on the Blessed Trinity.

God is in essence, substance and nature only one God, but His nature does not reside in a single person only, but rather in three distinct Persons. These three Persons do not mix together; nor are they merely three ‘ways of speaking’ about a single person. The expression three distinct Persons means that one Person is not another. These three Persons have no distinction, however, in nature, but only in their relative opposition: the Son being the one born of the Father, the Holy Spirit he who proceeds from both Father and Son. We often rightly speak of the Holy Trinity as a mystery. The ‘mystery’ here is due to the fact that we are saying both that God is one and yet that He is three. Reason says: ‘make up your mind; one or the other. There’s a contradiction in saying both things about God’. The clue to the mystery is being clear about just what it is that is one and what it is that is three. As an example of what would be a real contradiction: if I were to say that God is one Person and, at the same time, assert that God is three persons, would certainly be a contradiction. But that is not the teaching of the Church: God is one in one respect, and three in another respect: one nature, three Persons.

In wrapping up this doctrine so succinctly and neatly, I would not want you to think that this is all there is to this most complex and essential dogma of the Christian faith. In fact, if this were a whole semester’s theology course on the subject of the Blessed Trinity, this whole sermon would constitute only the first page of the first lecture. The study in depth would go on from here. But in saying that, I also want to make clear that this doctrine is not merely a subject for experts, something so high and sophisticated as to be irrelevant or dispensable for us. It’s essential, and it’s for everybody. Unlike a course in, say, higher mathematics, which most of us can get by rather well without, the Blessed Trinity concerns every Christian true believer in what is the very core of the faith: of the God to whom we pray every day, the Source and Goal of all our lives. If we do not know Him in the way He has introduced Himself to us, we are at an immense disadvantage: our prayers would not be acceptable; our thinking about Him would be confused; and much of our grasp of what God expects our conduct to be would be askew. It would take too much to demonstrate here how these consequences would follow from a distortion of the doctrine of the Trinity, but perhaps I could say, in a general way, that the reason the Catholic religion is noticeably different from all other Christian bodies, has to do, in some measure, with the whole truth we hold regarding this mystery of the Trinity.

Today we should not hang our heads in bewilderment at this baffling reality, but lower them humbly before the immensity of God as He is. And we should thank Him for having given us a little glimpse into the fathomless beauty and richness of His inner life.