hedrick@geneva.rutgers.edu (03/18/90)
I promised a comment on the Trinity in the last group of messages, but didn't have time to do it. Here it is. I both agree and disagree with folks who say "the Trinity is not Biblical, so we shouldn't have it". The Trinity was not invented because people like philosophical elaboration. It was invented because people were saying things that seemed to many Christians like serious abberations of the Christian faith. In order to clarify the issues, they had to be formulated more precisely. That's basically what doctrine is for. In my view the groups that the Trinity was created to defend against (primarily the Arians) were wrong, and it would have caused serious damage had their view been adopted. Given the way the questions were being formulated at the time, I think the Trinity was the best doctrine that could have been developed. As you'll see in the following message, I have some problems with it. But if we are going to replace it, we have to replace it with something that tries to do justice to the same ideas. Historically, most proposed replacements of the Trinity turn out to be modern equivalents of the ancient heresies. Some people say we don't need to replace the Trinity with anything. The Bible is enough. We don't need to have doctrines like the Trinity. The problem with this is that we have to apply Biblical ideas to current issues, and we have to decide whether certain viewpoints are consistent with the Bible or not. If we aren't willing to draw any conclusions from the Bible, but simply repeat its words, we have no way to deal with these challenges. Now, for the problems I have with the Trinity: In order to understand the Trinity, we have to understand the questions it was answering. Quite often in theology we find that the way questions are asked is at least as important as the proposed answers. By the time of the Arian discussions, everyone had pretty much agreed on the concept of the Son as a separate eternal entity, usually using terminology based on the Logos. So the theological issues became: - is this entity fully equal to the Father, or is it a sort of demigod? The Arians took the latter position. - how is the Logos incarnate? This is the issue dealt with after Nicea, that culminated in Chalcedon. I certainly support the orthodox position contra the Arians. But I'm not convinced that the whole framework they were operating within is sensible. My basic problem is that I think the Church had moved to a neo-Platonic frame of reference. And Greek philosophy in general had trouble dealing with certain key concepts. The Greeks were big on substance and essense, etc. If the incarnation was real, it had to be expressed in this model of substances and essenses. Greek philosophy did not do very well with functions and relationships (even in mathematics). I believe that the unity between Jesus and his Father was functional. One of the Eastern theologians did in fact toy with such a concept. His view was considered acceptable at the time of Chalcedon, though after his death he was rule to be heretical because some of his followers got caught on the wrong side of the politics of the Eastern church. To me the main Biblical points that need to be emphasized are: - that when we look at Jesus, we see God - that God was crucified, i.e. that the incarnation means that God chose to experience Jesus' life as his own. To me this is not a matter of metaphysics, but of God's choice. Frankly I think we would have been better to start with Hebrew concepts rather than Greek. The OT tradition has a number of relationships of functional unity. The best known is the prophet. The prophet speaks for God. He represents God in a much closer fashion than many modern readers realize. The prophets created so much opposition not just because they were the messengers of bad news, but because their proclamations and their symbolic actions were thought to actually cause the things they proclaimed. But there are other instances of identification. Servants represented their masters and sons their fathers in a very direct way. To me it would be best to think of the incarnation as an intensification of these Hebrew ideas. Jesus was God present with us, not because there was some metaphysical difference between him and any other human, but because God chose to identify Himself with Jesus. And also because God arranged it so that Jesus' character and life revealed Him. One problem I have with classicial theology is that it leads us away from Jesus' life to his metaphysical constitution. In fact I think something very interesting did come out of Trinitarian theology, and I would like to see any modern equivalent preserve it. This is the idea that God is not just a mathematical point, but that he has some analog of human relationship within him. This shows in two ways: - we say that God is love. We believe that love is intrinsic to him. It didn't have to wait until there was a world and humans to love. But love is a relationship. How can there be a relationship within God? The Trinity says that God has enough "inner structure" that there can be a relationship among him. - people are called to a life of loving obedience. We are incapable of doing this alone. It can only come as a gift from God, through Christ. Only Christ was able to in himself live as a completely obedient servant. But for Christians, Christ reveals God. If we take this seriously, this means that Christ's loving obedience is something intrinsic to God. So God "in himself" is not just creator, father, etc. He is also son. When God calls us to obedience, he is not asking us to do something he is incapable of doing himself. Both of these considerations suggest that we need to think of God as having being from eternity Father and Son. (And Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit has always been an afterthought in Christian doctrine. As far as I can see, it is a characteristic of the relationship. It is probably best thought of as being the presence of the Father with the Son, and to the extent that we are incorporated in Christ, with us.) It's certainly possible to map my thoughts onto traditional doctrine, and I can even represent myself as being orthodox. But I'm not sure the traditional doctrine is really the best way of presenting things. To me the traditional presentation of the Trinity takes the number three too seriously. I am not convinced that there is anything which we can count and find three of. I think the whole issue of trying to figure out what hypostasis means in this context and how there can be three of them and still just one God is a complete red herring. I'd rather not start with the metaphysics of God, but with the concept of God as having within his own inner life the relationship of love and the roles of Father and Son. In fact I think "popular Christianity" has figured this out. To most Christians the Trinity is an abstruse mystery. What they talk about much more and more or less understand is the concept of a "personal God". I think that's really the implication of the Trinity that needs to be preserved. As far as the Incarnation, again I think it's a mistake to think of it as a metaphysical mystery: how can there be two natures with one hypostasis? I certainly agree with what the traditional doctrine was trying to do: to preserve the concept on the one side that Jesus is a true man, not Superman or an angelic being, and on the other side that he represents the real God, and not some subsidiary being. But rather than conceiving this in terms of Greek metaphysics, I'd rather start with the Hebrew functional ideas, and say that Jesus represents God because God chose him to do so. I think theology went off on its wild goose chase because of the Logos doctrine. Paul talks about Christ as being preexistent. So does John in his prolog. This led to the preexistent Logos, an entity that is more or less separate from God. It's the existence of this Logos that opened the philosphical questions that led to the Trinity. Frankly I think this was all a mistake. John's language about the preexistent Logos was modelled after Jewish Torah speculation. In the more speculative parts of Judaism, Torah/Logos had become a sort of preexistent entity. "The Word was with God and the Word was God" came right out of that tradition. But the Jews didn't mean this to be taken quite the way it was taken by Christian theology: as a real entity separate from God that required clever metaphysics if we weren't to end up with two Gods. Ultimately, the Torah's existence would have to be thought of as in God's intention, not as something separate from him. I think that's what John meant in the prolog. But the Logos took on a life of its own in Christian theology, and eventually had to be put back into God through Trinitarian doctrine. I think we need to remove the Logos imagery from metaphysics and put it back into the poetic realm where it belongs.