Dear
Rev. Know-it-all,
I
have a non-Christian friend with whom I got into a big argument the other day.
He is really offended by the idea of the Holy Trinity. He said that Jesus is
not the Son of God, and belief in the Trinity is just too much to swallow.
Jesus may be the Messiah, but He is just the Son of Mary and some other human
being. He was only a messenger of God, if that. One should believe in God and
His messengers, but there is no reason to believe that any of those prophets
are God, only God is God. It is a contradiction of His transcendent majesty
that He should have a Son. He went on to
say that Christians have no right to call themselves monotheists (believers in
one God) because they worship three Gods by claiming that God is a Trinity. I
couldn’t answer him, so automatically I thought of you.
Yours,
Otto
Mattock
Dear
Otto,
Our
difference with our fellow monotheists is not about the oneness of God, but
about the nature of that oneness. The
Trinity is a very reasonable idea if you believe what Jesus taught, that God is
Love. Human beings can only long for
perfect unity. God who is infinite can accomplish it. Who doesn’t want to be
perfectly one with his or her spouse and their children? For us it is not
possible, for God perfect diversity and perfect unity are possible if He is as,
so many people say, absolutely sovereign. I remember meeting a holocaust
survivor who was truly an amazing man. He was a good friend of a very dear nun
who taught me Early Christian studies in grad school. She loved to bring her students
to meet him and have him shake them up. We were having lunch when he looked at
me and said, “You Christians! You say God has a Son. We Jews gave the world
monotheism. This idea of God having a Son is step backwards to the religion of
the Greeks and the Romans. God can’t have a Son!” I looked at him squarely and
said who are you to say what God can and can’t do?” He was amazed. I was the
first of Mother Mary Agnes’s students who had dared to challenge him. I hold to
what I said.
Those
who say that God is so absolutely sovereign that He can’t enter into real
relationships effectually limit His sovereignty. If God wills to be
relationship, then He can be. If God is
love, true sacrificial self-giving love, then He reasonably has diversity
within himself. If God is Love, then whom is He to love? If He IS love, but has
only His creation as the object of His love, then He would be dependent on His
creation for His very existence and would disappear along with the universe in
a puff of logic! If you believe that God is love as Jesus of Nazareth taught,
then God can be a Trinity, of Lover, Beloved and perfect Love itself, Father
Son and Holy Ghost! The Trinity is a very reasonable idea, if (and only if) you
believe what Jesus revealed, that God is love.
Belief
in the Trinity also says a lot about humanity. Christians believe, as said by
St. John Paul the Great, that God is the perfect family. Your family and mine
attempt to be families, but God is family in its perfection. My destiny as a
human being is to be adopted into that relationship which is God, the
relationship that called all things into existence. The purpose for my
existence and all existence is eternal and perfect love. It is the destiny, not
the fate, of the universe and it is my destiny, should I choose to accept that
destiny.
The
purpose of existence for the Christian is more than existence. The other
monotheisms promise heaven, or at least the possibility of heaven. We
Christians don’t just go to heaven. We go home to a Father who loves us and to
a perfect family gathered from all time and space. Even in this world, to believe in the Trinity
means that we believe in the reasonableness of love. Spouses should be
faithful, neighbors should be kind, parents should love their children and children
should love their parents and the poor are our brothers. Life’s purpose and
fulfillment is relationship, not just power and pleasure.
To
believe that oneness of God excludes any real relationships is to isolate human
beings and to demonize God. In his classic the Screwtape Letters, C. S. Lewis contrasts the absolute sovereignty
of the Devil with the humility and self-giving of the Christian God. By “father
below” he means the devil.
One
must face the fact that all the talk about His love for men, and His service
being perfect freedom, is not (as one would gladly believe) mere propaganda,
but an appalling truth. He really does want to fill the universe with a lot of
loathsome little replicas of Himself - creatures, whose life, on its miniature
scale, will be qualitatively like His own, not because He has absorbed them but
because their wills freely conform to His. We want cattle that can finally
become food; He wants servants who can finally become sons. We want to suck in,
He wants to give out. We are empty and would be filled; He is full and flows
over. Our war aim is a world in which Our Father Below has drawn all other
beings into himself: the Enemy wants a world full of beings united to Him but
still distinct.
In
other words, the devil insists that two things can be perfectly united only by
one thing devouring the other. Two unique and separate things cannot be
perfectly one and perfectly other. In our limited existence that may be true,
but God who is absolutely and infinitely perfect can unite things which our
limited power hold as completely separate, in other word for the devil, three
cannot be one, unless one subjects the other two to its power. Unity must be a
devourer “Your enemy the devil prowls
around like a roaring lion looking for someone to devour.” (1Peter 5:8)
The Trinity is reasonable. To
hold that the creator of the universe is anything less is actually quite
unreasonable –and a bit disturbing.
Yours,
the
Rev. Know-it-all
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