Firmly I believe and truly...

‘...God is Three and God is One’. So wrote Cardinal Newman – but few of us who sing that hymn really understand the importance of faith in God as Trinity, let alone can claim to understand this most complex of Christian doctrines. (I recall one lecturer suggesting that the only non-heretical statement about the Holy Trinity was the Athanasian Creed, because as soon as it said anything about the relationship between God and the three Persons it contradicted it - e.g. ‘The Father eternal, the Son eternal, and the Holy Ghost eternal. And yet they are not three eternals, but one eternal.’)

Orthodox theologians have always known that we cannot define God, or the nature and relationship of the three Persons of the Godhead. Evagrius of Pontus wrote: "God cannot be grasped by the mind. If he could be grasped he would not be God." There is, and must be, a mystery into which our minds and our language can only dimly peer.

But we have to say something. And Christians have agreed that that the least misleading thing we can say is that God is One, and at the same time eternally Father, Son and Spirit. We dare not divide God, if we are to be true to both scripture and theological reflection. But nor can we obscure, merge or confuse the different ‘Persons’.

Sermons and hymns on Trinity Sunday often focus on God as Creator, or on the mystery and otherness of God, and will usually steer well clear of talking about the relationship between the Persons. But the essential point to be made is that this is not an obscure dogma, but goes to the heart of what is distinctive and exciting about Christianity. For what it means is that we are not dealing with a single god who is transcendent and unknowable; nor are we talking about a god who is immanent and closer to us than breathing. The God we believe in is both of these - and more: wholly other, and incarnate in one place and time; beyond our comprehension and the source of inspiration and prophetic speech. We experience God equally in the Father, the Source of all; in the Son, who is known in Jesus of Nazareth; and in the Holy Spirit, giving life and enabling us to know both Father and Son.  And God is eternally all three of these, not merely acting sometimes in one way, sometimes in another; and each of these three are equally God.

All our language about God is provisional and approximate. But we can say that since God is in this way dynamic and ‘energetic ‘, we can relate to him directly, and not only by responding to his word or commandment. God is love – and that love exists within the Godhead from eternity. To put it rather baldly, God does not need us to express his love, but God draws us into this eternal ‘dance of love’ between the Persons. And just as God is not divided, nor the Persons ‘confused’, so we do not lose our identity through this relationship and love. We are not absorbed into God, as Eastern mysticism seems to imply. We – like the Triune God – retain our personal uniqueness at the same time as being drawn into a loving union.

And it may not be fanciful to see in the same way that the triune being of God provides an insight into the nature of human love and commitment. So we need not fear losing our identity to, or being absorbed by, those human persons that we love. On the contrary, just as – theologically – we only fully realise our potential in being related to God, so it is in our human friendships and love that we become the people we are created to be. ‘There is no fear in love,’ as St John reminds us; and because of who God is, we are not to be afraid to love God and other people.

We may not appreciate the subtle distinctions which the Fathers (especially in the Latin West) used in ‘explaining’ the doctrine of the Trinity. But it is to be hoped that we can glimpse its value and importance, and some of its many implications for our faith and life.

Come, Holy Spirit?

“We are fools for Christ, while you are such sensible Christians” (1 Cor 4:10.) For once, I feel the NEB  chose the right word. Most modern translations follow KJV in rendering phronimoi by ‘wise’ (though the Vulgate had chosen prudentes.)  Paul is contrasting the apparently foolish, costly nature of truly following Christ with the complacent and worldly style preferred by these ‘sensible’ Corinthians.

As we approach the Feast of Pentecost, this seems to me to highlight one of the problems we face as Christians today – at least in England. We want to be ‘sensible’ – not too extreme or different -  so as not to threaten or disturb our unbelieving neighbours.

But work of the Holy Spirit is one of transforming our comfortable habits, and taking us into uncharted water. In the OT, when the Spirit came on people, the results were visible – ecstatic speech and prophecy; once Saul in his rapture lay on the ground for 24 hours! As we know, on the day of Pentecost, the apostles were so overwhelmed that onlookers assumed they were drunk. None of these occurrences were ‘sensible.’ They remind us that the Spirit does not conform to our  ways, but disturbs us and often makes us very uncomfortable.

The truth is, we need God; and so we need the Spirit’s disturbing presence and activity. (Once more the NEB helps us with its translation of the first Beatitude – ‘Blessed are those who know that they are poor.’) We are poor and needy, yet we try to be self-sufficient and in control. Then we wonder why our prayer and our worship fail to satisfy us, and why our churches are shrinking year by year. We are too sensible; we do not want to be shaken or stirred - or to acknowledge our desperate poverty of spirit. After 50 years of charismatic renewal, we cannot say with the disciples Paul met in Ephesus, ‘We have not even heard that there is a Holy Spirit’ (Acts 19:2) – but for the most part we want ‘it’ to conform to our expectations; we want to limit the effect the Spirit can have on our lives.

In Biblical accounts, the Holy Spirit comes with life-changing, comfort-challenging energy. But the Church has been unwilling to accept that. In Christian art we reduced him/her to an innocuous dove; in traditional liturgy we called him the Holy Ghost, who did little except give our collects a nice ending; and in the life of the church today, we have largely marginalised the Spirit’s role in decision-making and the discernment of God’s will.

One nice example can be seen in John Keble’s hymn, When God of old came down from heaven, which includes the lines:   ‘Softer than gale at morning prime /       Hovered his holy dove.’ One wonders if Keble had really read Acts 2! And we would prefer the Spirit to bring peace, rather than fire, ecstasy and strange ‘tongues.’  Sermons at Pentecost sometimes describe it as a ‘healing’ of the divisions of language at Babel, when it rather implies the gift of a new language, which we cannot control. Christians should not all speak the same – yet often believers appear to conform to some kind of identikit model, often a parody of real humanity. We prefer what we might call ‘Churchianity’ – noting Michael Marshall’s description of that as a ‘decaffeinated Christianity’, which promises not to keep us awake!

The Spirit wakes us up; stirs us, turns us, and the church, upside down and inside out. Pope Francis has recently written: “Take note: if the Church is alive, she must always surprise. It is incumbent upon the living Church to astound. A Church that is unable to astound is a Church that is weak, sick, dying, and that needs admission to the intensive care unit as soon as possible!”

We must allow the Holy Spirit to astound us, to make us not ‘sensible Christians’, but fools - fools for Christ, non-conformists in the true sense of the word. We are called to be fully human, as Jesus was. And if the world thinks us then a bit weird – so much the worse for the world!

Ascension Day

Why is Ascension Day so neglected? (It probably does not help that in Britain – unlike secular France – it is not a public holiday.) I think it is because we find it hard to understand what we mean when we assert in the creeds, that Christ ‘ascended into heaven and is seated at the right hand of the Father.’ That may reflect the modernist obsession with ‘what actually happened’ – which makes much of our reading of the Bible problematic. We are not comfortable with mystery and metaphor; we are cowed by an over-respect for what we think of as scientific facts.

But the important thing about the Ascension is not so much ‘what actually happened’, but the significance of the event. For the accounts we rely upon Luke and Acts, which give us the only explicit narrative of Jesus’ ascent ‘into heaven’. Indeed, we are given two distinct accounts: one to finish the Gospel, which ends where it began, in Jerusalem, and one to begin the Acts of the early church, which traces the growth of that Spirit-filled community from Jerusalem to Rome. The writer is telling us that Jesus’ life and ministry have a beginning and an end; but the life of the church continues - in the power from on high, promised by the glorified Lord.

Although the other Gospels (apart from the later ending to Mark) do not describe an ascension, it is implicit in the accounts of the appearances of the risen Christ in both Matthew and John. The former ends with the commission to the disciples on a mountain in Galilee, with the promise ‘I am with you always, to the very end of the age.’ Since there are no further accounts of appearances, this is clearly both an end (as in Luke) and a beginning of a new relationship with God (as in Acts.) And in John, there is the message given to Mary Magdalene in the garden ‘I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.’  It seems that John is saying that resurrection is completed by ascension (so Mary must not try to cling to Jesus during the transition.) And that is supported by the way that in the Epistle to Hebrews, the language of exaltation largely replaces that of resurrection.

The theological point is that the victory of Christ really transcends our comprehension. It is not a resuscitated human being whom the disciples encounter and in whom we believe, but a human being who – in a physical but not restrictedly material form – is now united with the divine glory. That may be why Luke makes such a clear connection between the Ascension and the Transfiguration which prefigured it (and why Matthew places his main account of the appearance of the risen One on a mountain in Galilee.)

Why the Ascension should matter to us is hidden in the insight of Hebrews that the exalted Christ is now for us a ‘Great High Priest’ who represents us in the glory, the presence of the Father. He is not further away from us as a result of ascending to the Father. Rather he is closer than he could ever be while subject to the limitations of material and historical existence.  Now he ‘always lives to intercede (for us.)’

But he is still the incarnate One, and still bears the wounds of his Passion. The Word made flesh continues in some way to be fully human as well as fully divine. In words of A.W. Tozer ‘there is a man in heaven.’ This means – in a way we cannot grasp fully – that there is an eternal bridge between humanity and God, between the two realities we call ‘earth’ and ‘heaven’. In Jesus’ exaltation, our humanity is re-affirmed and shown to be ‘capax Dei’ – capable of sharing in an intimate relationship with the Divine.

Is Ascension Day important? It certainly is!