Today’s Post

Last week we took a final look at Jesus from our secular perspective, and noted how quickly the highly integrated understanding of John became a victim of the endless human trend toward dualism.  From our secular perspective, we saw how John’s vision strengthened the immediacy (immanence) of God in human life and how Jesus was the ‘signpost’ for this spark of universal becoming which could be found in all the products of evolution, but only capable of being recognized as such by the human person.

This week we’ll take a look at the third stage of the unique evolution of the concept of God: the Trinity.

The History of the Trinity

As Bart Ehrman notes in his book, “How Jesus Became God”, unlike God and Jesus, the trinity isn’t addressed as such in any of the books of the Old or New Testament.  The idea of God as supreme supernatural creator somehow intertwined in human life is a common thread of the Jewish scriptures (the ‘Old Testament’).   As we have seen, the understanding of Jesus evolves over time in the New Testament, but the concept of a third ‘person’ wasn’t developed until late in the first three hundred years of the new Christian church.

The idea of something (or someone) involved in the coming to be of the universe, and in how this process is reflected in human life, shows up even in the Old Testament.  It is strongly suggested by Jesus, for example, in his statement to the apostles that a spirit (an ‘advocate’) would be sent after he was gone.

It wasn’t until the early days of the early church’s theological development until this agent began to be considered God in somehow the same way that Jesus was being considered.

In a nutshell, the new church began to consider God as being ‘triune’, somehow composed of three separate but unified ‘persons’ whose agency in reality was reflected in three separate ways.  The most commonly used terms ‘Father’, ‘Son’ and ‘Spirit’ are of little use in achieving an integrated understanding of this complex concept.  Thus in the same way that the church required belief without understanding (as we saw in the final determination that Jesus was both God and Man), as an ‘act of faith’ necessary for salvation, it was soon to follow with the statement that God was also ‘three divine persons in one divine nature’.

And, in the same way that the controversy over the nature of Jesus was debated up until the Nicene council, that of the trinity continued to be debated.  As the Arian controversy was dissipating following the Nicean council, the debate moved from the deity of Jesus to the equality of the Spirit with the Father and Son.  A key facet of this controversy lay in the lack of scriptural clarification of ‘the Spirit’ as a person of God in the same way as was ‘the Son’.  On one hand, some believers declared that the Spirit was an inferior person to the Father and Son. On the other hand, the Cappadocian Fathers argued that the Holy Spirit was a person fully equal to the Father and Son.

This controversy was brought to a head at the Council of Constantinople (381) which affirmed that the Spirit was of the same substance and nature of God, but like Jesus, a separate person. Gregory of Nazianzus, who presided over this council offered this explanation:

“No sooner do I conceive of the One than I am illumined by the splendor of the Three; no sooner do I distinguish Three than I am carried back into the One. When I think of any of the Three, I think of him as the whole, and my eyes are filled, and the greater part of what I am thinking escapes me”.

  As Karen Armstrong concludes in her book, “A History of God”, “For many Western Christians . . . the Trinity is simply baffling”.

Richard Rohr agrees with Armstrong that of all the Christian statements of belief, that of the Trinity seems furthest from human life.  The church didn’t make it easier by declaring such statements to be ‘objects of faith’ which must be believed without understanding even though such belief was a prerequisite for salvation.  But as we saw last week, faith is much more than adherence to precepts, it is an essential aspect of human existence.

So, what secular sense can we make of this?

The Next Post

This week we saw how the new Christian church evolved its concept of God from the Jewish ‘Father” to a complex triune but difficult to grasp concept.

Next week we will consider this concept of a ‘triune’ God from the perspective of our search for ‘The Secular Side of God’.