Today we celebrate the most Holy Trinity, the Catholic dogma of God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. We must admit, though, it’s something of a troublesome dogma, difficult if not embarrassing for some. It’s always been so.

At Fountains Abbey in North Yorkshire, a medieval Cistercian monastery (in ruins now), the monks used to gather every week to hear a sermon from the Abbot, except on Trinity Sunday, “owing to the difficulty of the subject” it says in the visitor’s guide.[1] Opposition to idea of the Trinity is ancient too. Of the fourteen ways a Jew could forfeit his or her share in the world to come, said Maimonides, that great medieval Jewish philosopher, the first was to deny that God was one. To believe that God was anything other than infinite and immaterial was to become HaMinim, an apostate.[2] Of course, by the middle ages, it was an old, practically dead debate, not as controversially alive as in Jesus’ day. “My father is at work…so I am at work,” Jesus said. According to John, these are the words that first made people want to kill Jesus. Healing a man on the Sabbath, you see, was something only God could do. For Jesus to say he continued working just as his Father did was nothing short of blasphemous—some peasant Nazorean “making himself equal to God,” they said.[3]

In our own day, belief in the Trinity isn’t all that respected either. Iris Murdoch, the novelist and philosopher, in her Gifford lectures, argued that Christianity, if it was to survive at all, must change radically, giving up such peculiar and exclusive dogmas for theologies more palatable to modern tastes. “Perhaps,” she said, “Christianity can continue without a personal God or a risen Christ;” retaining the figure or Jesus, of course, just demoting him, rendering him a spiritual figure “analogous to that of Buddha.”[4] Even Christians have often let the side down through bad sermons on the topic or by simply being embarrassed and silent or willfully ignorant of this peculiar and scandalous belief of Christians. Many of us just don’t know what to make of the Trinity. It’s just a word that passes over us. Even some preachers have fooled us into thinking we don’t need to think about the Trinity. It’s easy to understand why we don’t understand the Trinity; but of course, it doesn’t mean it’s not important, that we shouldn’t wonder and think about it as if our life depended on it. Because it does.

At least that’s the ancient Christian tradition. The old Athanasian Creed, for instance, begins, “Whoever wishes to be saved, needs above all to hold the Catholic faith…the Catholic faith is this, that we venerate one God in Trinity.”[5] In Orthodox worship still today, after receiving Communion, the faithful sing, “We have found the true faith! Worshiping the undivided Trinity, who has saved us.”[6] It’s wisdom we’ve not officially let go of: our own Catechism teaches that the Trinity “is the central mystery of Christian faith and life.”[7] It’s not a dogma meant to be neglected, put in the corner, hidden away from the faithful, something only for theologians to think about. It’s actually really important. It is a matter of life and death.

But why? Because it is a dogma which both expresses and preserves the authentic and biblical experience of Jesus. That is, the Trinity is really nothing other than a concise summary of the Gospel. What I mean by this is that when people first encountered Jesus of Nazareth (and when we encounter him whenever we read the Bible), they couldn’t help but think of him in God-like terms. Jesus himself, several times, took for himself the divine name “I AM” (“before Abraham came to be, I AM,” he said, for example, in John’s gospel).[8] They believed in the miracles and signs he wrought, and they believed he rose from the dead. And when the first Christians put all this together, reflecting on their experience of Jesus, they couldn’t help but say and think the same things about Jesus that they said and thought about God, faithful monotheists though they were. And, of course, Jesus called God his “Father,” identifying himself with the God of Israel in both nature and power. Jesus works just as his Father works. “The Father and I are one,” he said.[9] And Jesus also talked about the “Spirit of truth,” the Comforter and Advocate, he called him. This Spirit, sent from the Father and the Son, would testify to the truth of Jesus, glorify him and lead his disciples to “all truth.”[10] This is the Spirit described in Acts of the Apostles at Pentecost, the Spirit that spoke (importantly like a person) to Philip and to Peter and to the entire Church, pushing the apostles out into the world, commanding them to proclaim the good news of Jesus.[11] This is where our belief in the Trinity comes from: from our experience of Jesus and his talk of the Father and from our experience of the Holy Spirit of whom Jesus also spoke. One God in Trinity of persons, God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit: it’s not some theological trick or metaphysical theory but simply a summary of coherent biblical belief. Which is why belief in the Trinity is essential: because it helps us encounter Jesus authentically, as Jesus himself wants to be encountered—as the Son of the Father, as giver of the Spirit, as the great I AM, as God. The Trinity preserves our belief in Jesus as he’s presented in the New Testament—as God incarnate. And it’s essential because without belief in the Trinity we’d lose our bearings, slipping here and then there into subtle and then not-so-subtle forms of heresy and paganism—as, sadly, so many have done and do.

But what does this mean? It’s all pretty theological stuff, I know, but it does matter. And that’s because if the Trinity preserves our biblical belief in Jesus as God, then it also preserves our belief in a personal God, in a God who cares for us, loves us, and saves us—in a God born for us, who walked among us, died and rose again for us. The word the tradition gives here is philanthrōpia: God became flesh for us simply out of his love for us.[12] If Jesus is God, then your relationship with him (in scripture, sacraments, and in prayer) is a relationship with God himself and not some lesser idol, avatar, or guru. Which means that you’re not alone in this universe, that you have a companion, a friend, a Lord, a lover, a rock, a God that’s close, that will never fail you, never leave you, never fade away.

It’s why I’m a Christian, because my faith in the Trinity gets me closest to God, unites me to him unbreakably. I don’t want to be alone, you see. This faith answers the deepest longing of my heart for pure friendship, for eternal love. Prophets and poets have dreamt of it. Ezekiel on the banks of the river Chebar looked up and saw God, seeing there in the middle of all that divine glory “the appearance of a man.”[13] Dante, at the end of his pilgrimage, in the center of the heavenly empyrean saw, like Ezekiel before him, “our likeness,” our image.[14] Our hearts want God, and our faith says he has a heart, beating eternally in the heart of the incarnate Son of God. Why does faith in the Trinity matter? Because by this faith we know we matter to the eternal and infinite God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

So, let us worship this God, the only God living and true. Because this is the true faith, worshiping the Trinity. For the Trinity has saved us: God, our lover and friend.

©2019 Fr. Joshua J. Whitfield

[1] Lesslie Newbigin, “The Trinity as Public Truth,” The Trinity in a Pluralistic Age, 2

[2] Asher Norman, Twenty-Six Reasons Why Jews Don’t Believe in Jesus, 265

[3] John 5:17-18

[4] Iris Murdoch, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, 419

[5] DS 39

[6] The Living God, 297

[7] Catechism of the Catholic Church 234

[8] John 8:58

[9] John 10:30

[10] John 14:16; 15:26-27; 16:7, 13-15

[11] Acts 2:1-4; 8:29; 10:19; 13:2

[12] Athanasius the Great, On the Incarnation 1.1

[13] Ezekiel 1:26

[14] Dante, Paradiso 33:131

© 2019 Rev. Joshua J. Whitfield