One in revelation and glory
Commentary
The late Cardinal Cushing said that, when he was a parish priest, he was summoned to a store to give last rites to a man who had collapsed. Following the custom of his church, he knelt by the man and asked, "Do you believe in God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit?" Then, the Cardinal said, the man roused a little, opened one eye, and said, "Here I am dying -- and you ask me a riddle?"
I don't think anyone understands the doctrine of the Trinity. Athanasius apparently thought he did, but the creeds that bear his name (Athanasian) or influence (Nicene) render the doctrine more impenetrable than ever. In my experience, homiletical attempts to explain the matter usually fail. For what its worth, though, I have always been able to believe in the Trinity without understanding the dogma. And -- even when suffering through a ten-week seminary course on the subject -- I have always sensed that God was not obsessed with whether I had all the p's and q's straight on this one.
Having admitted to this much theological inadequacy, I offer nonetheless a couple of miscellaneous points on the topic, which in view of the foregoing admissions you may take with the appropriate grains of salt.
1. It seems to me that "Father, Son, and Holy Spirit" is the only useful language for the Trinity. "Creator, Redeemer, Sustainer" is too generic to serve as a Christian confession (Moslems believe God is Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer). "Parent, Child, and Spirit," is essentially gnostic, divinizing asexuality in a way that seems alternately boring and dangerous. "Yahweh, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit" lacks the relational component for the first two persons and, in any case, the eternal Second Person is not to be simply equated with Jesus, the human incarnation of that person in time and space (see, I did learn something during those ten weeks). No, "Father, Son, and Holy Spirit" seems to be best -- according to the Bible, it is the language that Jesus himself used (Matthew 28:19). I am the first to admit that "Father" is a limited metaphor for God. All metaphors are limited and limiting. "Father, Son, and Holy Spirit" does not say everything about God, but it does say something about God, something that Jesus himself wanted to affirm.
2. It seems to me that the Trinity is essentially a Christological doctrine. That is, there is no problem until you introduce Jesus. Pre-Christian Jews believed and confessed God to be Father. They also had a healthy concept of the Spirit of the Lord. Still, they were not motivated to develop a doctrine of the Binity, to confess God as "two-in-one," or in some other way try to explain how God could be both Father and Spirit. The problem is a peculiarly Christian one, prompted by the complexity of the God revealed through Jesus Christ. The concept of the Trinity makes sense of God in those terms. Thus, for instance, when we call God "Father" in this expression we do not mean the same thing as when we call "Father" in the Lord's Prayer. We do not in this doctrine confess God to be our Father, but the Father of Jesus. This, by the way, is another reason why the traditional formulation of "Father, Son, and Holy Spirit" should be acceptable to all Christians. Many Christians today, for quite understandable reasons, do not like to think of God as their "Father," but that may be beside the point here. We can at least recognize that Jesus thought of God as his Father, and that is really all that we are here confessing.
Proverbs 8:1-4, 22-31
This is one of the most intriguing passages in the Bible. The "wisdom of God" appears here to be personified as a female figure, a sort of co-deity, who was present with God before creation and in fact helped in the work of creation.
The text is chosen for today because of supposed parallels this offers to the Christian doctrine of the Trinity. In the early church, it was often cited as a prooftext for that doctrine. Irenaus claimed that the wisdom of God was in fact the Holy Spirit, the Third Person of the Trinity. More recently, some theologians have sought to identify the wisdom of God with the Second Person of the Trinity, with the one who is (then ironically) called "The Son." This Second Person is thus revealed to be essentially female, although when she becomes incarnate she takes the form of a male person, Jesus.
Don't write your sermons yet! I do not know of any major church body that would not regard these identifications as heretical. For one thing, verse 22 would end up indicating that at least one of the three Persons of the Trinity was "created by God." Even I know that that is a theological no-no. Simply identifying the wisdom of God with one Person of the Christian Trinity also does violence to the Jewish understanding of this text. As indicated above, Jewish interpreters have never taken this personified wisdom to represent a part of a Godhead. In general, they have done a better job than Christians at understanding personification for what it is: a figure of speech.
What is fairly certain is that this text helped to inspire Christians as they developed the Christology that necessitated Trinitarian dogma. The language seems to have influenced the Logos hymn in John 1 as well as passages in Philippians 2 and Colossians 1 (coming up on July 19, Proper 11). So, Christians did not have to begin from scratch. As they came to believe in Jesus as God incarnate they turned (especially in their hymnody) to poetic expressions in the scriptures that personified God and found help there in believing if not in understanding what was now revealed.
Romans 5:1-5
One of the most beautiful expressions of the gospel anywhere, these verses are chosen for today because they mention God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit all within short compass. As such, they are not quite as Trinitarian as last week's lesson which mentioned the Father, Christ, and the Spirit. In the doctrine of the Trinity, we confess Jesus Christ and the Spirit as God, not simply as mediators through whom God's peace (v. 1) and love (v. 5) come to us.
That aside, the text receives its power through juxtaposition of verb tenses: past, present, and future. Justification is past. It's a "done deal." There is nothing that we could possibly contribute to it. Sharing the glory of God is still future. We don't do that yet and if we expect to do so here and now, we will be disappointed. We will not ultimately be disappointed, however, because we already have ... hope! We also have, if you want a full account, peace, grace, love -- a lot of good stuff -- plus, suffering, which doesn't seem so good but, as it turns out, leads to hope and so isn't bad after all.
Hope is the key word here, an important one to grasp. Our English word for "hope" has been so diluted by disappointment that it no longer conveys any sense of certainty at all. Indeed, when someone speaks of the future and says, "I hope this will happen," they usually mean, "Maybe it will and maybe it won't, but I'd like for it to happen." Hope, almost by definition, has come to mean "wishful thinking." How far this is from the Pauline concept of "hope that does not disappoint us"! The hope that Paul speaks of is grounded in absolute certainty, based on the revelation of a God who knows the future, inhabits the future. There are no "maybes" with this hope. And if "the proof of the pudding is in the eating," then the guarantee of God's future is to be found now in the love that has been poured into our hearts.
John 16:12-15
Again, we have a text that speaks of Father, Son (Jesus), and Spirit and of their interrelationships. Like many Johannine passages, it's a little hard to unpack. All that the Father has is the Son's (v. 15). The Spirit takes what is the Son's (namely, all that the Father has) and declares it to us (v. 14). Okay. Also, the Spirit glorifies the Son by doing this, and -- though it's not said in these verses -- we know that the Father is always glorified in the Son (see, for example, John 14:13).
So, John understands the Trinity in what we might call a functional sense. He is not the least bit interested in the Nicene question of whether the Father, Son, and Spirit are the same substance, whether they consist of the same God-stuff. He does want to affirm, however, that they are one in revelation and in glory. Each reveals the other; each glorifies the other. In a sense, for John, whether one begins with the Father, the Son, or the Spirit, one will end up with all three. Specifically, if you believe in one, you will believe in all three, and if you worship one, you will worship all three. This seems to represent a fundamental understanding of the Trinity riddle, before all the p's and q's got worked out.
FIRST LESSON FOCUS
By Elizabeth Achtemeier
Proverbs 8:1-4, 22-31
Perhaps no doctrine of the Christian Church is more obscure in the minds of churchgoers than is the doctrine of the Trinity, the fact that God is One in three Persons. The early church councils of the fourth and fifth centuries A.D. debated long and hard before they arrived at a satisfactory statement of the doctrine, and still today, persons misunderstand or distort the teaching.
The doctrine of the Trinity took shape out of the testimony of the Scriptures, beginning with their witness to Jesus Christ. Most of the writers of the New Testament were originally Jews who believed in one God. But when the apostles and disciples encountered Jesus of Nazareth and witnessed his life, death, and resurrection, they became convinced that he was fully Immanuel, God with them, the Person of God incarnated in human flesh. After Christ's resurrection and ascension, the apostles and disciples also found that God in Christ continued fully to be with them in the Person of the Holy Spirit, as Christ has promised. Thus, the one God of the Old Testament was fully present in the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. He was One, in three Persons. Not only the Father, but also the Son and the Holy Spirit are wholly divine, the Son also having been fully human and incarnated in human flesh in Jesus of Nazareth. The Son who is with us is God. The Holy Spirit who comes to us is God. They are not lesser deities than the Father, and to all of them -- Father, Son, or Holy Spirit -- we pray and give our adoration.
It is rather strange, therefore, that the lectionary for this Sunday of the Trinity designates a passage about Wisdom from the Old Testament, as if Wisdom is somehow a Person in the Trinity.
The figure of Wisdom in our text for the morning is personified as a female figure. She calls to human beings to listen to her and to learn her teachings (vv. 1-5). She is described as the product of God's first act of creation (v. 22), and she says she was present when God made all of the rest of the universe (vv. 23-30). God rejoiced in her (v. 30), and she rejoiced in God's creation of the world and of human beings (v. 31).
On the basis of this text, many persons in our time have therefore claimed that Wisdom is a divine figure, and we have abroad in our society what has come to be called Sophia worship, Sophia being the Greek translation of Wisdom. Principally such Sophia worship has appealed to radical feminists, because Sophia or Wisdom is a female figure, and they do not wish to say that a male, namely Jesus Christ, is their Savior and Redeemer. So for many such radical feminists, the worship of Sophia has replaced the worship of our Lord Jesus Christ.
Such Sophia-worshipers find their deity in all of creation, in, through, under all things, as a kind of spirit pervading the universe. She is identified with the vital forces in the natural world and even with sexual drives in human beings. Thus, at the Re-imagining conference of 1993 -- a conference that since has been repeated every year -- Sophia was prayed to in these words:
Sophia, creator god, let your milk and honey flow ... Our sweet Sophia, we are women in your image. With nectar between our thighs, we invite a lover, we birth a child. With our warm body fluids, we remind the world of its pleasures and sensations ... We celebrate our bodiliness, our physicality, the sensations of pleasure, our oneness with earth and water. (From tapes of the conference, Tape 12-1, Side B)
We need to call such worship by its proper name, however. It is idolatry, because you and I worship the one God who has commanded us, "You shall have no other gods besides me" (Exodus 20:3; cf. Mark 10:17-20). He has revealed himself to us in his incarnation in Jesus Christ, and he continues to be our God and to be with us in the Person of the Holy Spirit, who is given to us from the Father and the Son.
So how, then, are we to understand this text from the Old Testament about Wisdom? This personified figure of Wisdom in Proverbs 8 will probably become clear for us if we understand Wisdom in the Old Testament (and indeed in the apocryphal book of Wisdom) as the plan of God. Wisdom was there with God when he made the universe, the fifty billion galaxies that our astronomers tell us they have discovered through their telescopes. God had a plan when he created all things and persons. And he delighted in his plan, because he wanted to make a creation that was "very good" (Genesis 1:31).
On the basis of this text from Proverbs, you and I can celebrate God's good plan -- how he brought forth the rivers and raised up the mountains; how he laid out the fields with their good earth, and how he established the deeps of the seas; how he brought order out of chaos and made a world of delight and beauty and fruitfulness, that you and I were given to enjoy.
We can, however, also realize how often we distort God's plan for a good world -- how readily we trash our environment and how sinfully we distort the loving relationships in which he has set us; how blindly we have turned his abundant life into darkness and death for ourselves and all things.
But the scriptures have something else to say about God's wisdom, about his plan for his world. In the New Testament, who becomes identified with the wisdom of God and in fact replaces all which that female figure does in the Old Testament? Jesus Christ -- "Christ Jesus," Paul writes, "whom God made our wisdom, our righteousness and sanctification and redemption" (1 Corinthians 1:30). Christ is the wisdom of God, and in him is found the truth of God (John 14:6). Moreover, the eternal plan of God is to unite all things in Christ (Ephesians 1:10).
So through Christ God has made all things (John 1:3) and according to Christ he orders all things. According to his love in Christ Jesus, God loves his world. According to the teachings of Christ, God calls and instructs all people. According to the forgiveness of Christ, God forgives and redeems his world. According to his purpose in Christ our Lord, God will save his world.
There is no other name under heaven given to us by which we may be saved than the name of Jesus Christ our Lord (Acts 4:12). Sophia is not our God. Jesus Christ is our God, the one through whom the Father in his mercy revealed himself, and the one with whom he sends his Holy Spirit always to be with us.
I don't think anyone understands the doctrine of the Trinity. Athanasius apparently thought he did, but the creeds that bear his name (Athanasian) or influence (Nicene) render the doctrine more impenetrable than ever. In my experience, homiletical attempts to explain the matter usually fail. For what its worth, though, I have always been able to believe in the Trinity without understanding the dogma. And -- even when suffering through a ten-week seminary course on the subject -- I have always sensed that God was not obsessed with whether I had all the p's and q's straight on this one.
Having admitted to this much theological inadequacy, I offer nonetheless a couple of miscellaneous points on the topic, which in view of the foregoing admissions you may take with the appropriate grains of salt.
1. It seems to me that "Father, Son, and Holy Spirit" is the only useful language for the Trinity. "Creator, Redeemer, Sustainer" is too generic to serve as a Christian confession (Moslems believe God is Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer). "Parent, Child, and Spirit," is essentially gnostic, divinizing asexuality in a way that seems alternately boring and dangerous. "Yahweh, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit" lacks the relational component for the first two persons and, in any case, the eternal Second Person is not to be simply equated with Jesus, the human incarnation of that person in time and space (see, I did learn something during those ten weeks). No, "Father, Son, and Holy Spirit" seems to be best -- according to the Bible, it is the language that Jesus himself used (Matthew 28:19). I am the first to admit that "Father" is a limited metaphor for God. All metaphors are limited and limiting. "Father, Son, and Holy Spirit" does not say everything about God, but it does say something about God, something that Jesus himself wanted to affirm.
2. It seems to me that the Trinity is essentially a Christological doctrine. That is, there is no problem until you introduce Jesus. Pre-Christian Jews believed and confessed God to be Father. They also had a healthy concept of the Spirit of the Lord. Still, they were not motivated to develop a doctrine of the Binity, to confess God as "two-in-one," or in some other way try to explain how God could be both Father and Spirit. The problem is a peculiarly Christian one, prompted by the complexity of the God revealed through Jesus Christ. The concept of the Trinity makes sense of God in those terms. Thus, for instance, when we call God "Father" in this expression we do not mean the same thing as when we call "Father" in the Lord's Prayer. We do not in this doctrine confess God to be our Father, but the Father of Jesus. This, by the way, is another reason why the traditional formulation of "Father, Son, and Holy Spirit" should be acceptable to all Christians. Many Christians today, for quite understandable reasons, do not like to think of God as their "Father," but that may be beside the point here. We can at least recognize that Jesus thought of God as his Father, and that is really all that we are here confessing.
Proverbs 8:1-4, 22-31
This is one of the most intriguing passages in the Bible. The "wisdom of God" appears here to be personified as a female figure, a sort of co-deity, who was present with God before creation and in fact helped in the work of creation.
The text is chosen for today because of supposed parallels this offers to the Christian doctrine of the Trinity. In the early church, it was often cited as a prooftext for that doctrine. Irenaus claimed that the wisdom of God was in fact the Holy Spirit, the Third Person of the Trinity. More recently, some theologians have sought to identify the wisdom of God with the Second Person of the Trinity, with the one who is (then ironically) called "The Son." This Second Person is thus revealed to be essentially female, although when she becomes incarnate she takes the form of a male person, Jesus.
Don't write your sermons yet! I do not know of any major church body that would not regard these identifications as heretical. For one thing, verse 22 would end up indicating that at least one of the three Persons of the Trinity was "created by God." Even I know that that is a theological no-no. Simply identifying the wisdom of God with one Person of the Christian Trinity also does violence to the Jewish understanding of this text. As indicated above, Jewish interpreters have never taken this personified wisdom to represent a part of a Godhead. In general, they have done a better job than Christians at understanding personification for what it is: a figure of speech.
What is fairly certain is that this text helped to inspire Christians as they developed the Christology that necessitated Trinitarian dogma. The language seems to have influenced the Logos hymn in John 1 as well as passages in Philippians 2 and Colossians 1 (coming up on July 19, Proper 11). So, Christians did not have to begin from scratch. As they came to believe in Jesus as God incarnate they turned (especially in their hymnody) to poetic expressions in the scriptures that personified God and found help there in believing if not in understanding what was now revealed.
Romans 5:1-5
One of the most beautiful expressions of the gospel anywhere, these verses are chosen for today because they mention God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit all within short compass. As such, they are not quite as Trinitarian as last week's lesson which mentioned the Father, Christ, and the Spirit. In the doctrine of the Trinity, we confess Jesus Christ and the Spirit as God, not simply as mediators through whom God's peace (v. 1) and love (v. 5) come to us.
That aside, the text receives its power through juxtaposition of verb tenses: past, present, and future. Justification is past. It's a "done deal." There is nothing that we could possibly contribute to it. Sharing the glory of God is still future. We don't do that yet and if we expect to do so here and now, we will be disappointed. We will not ultimately be disappointed, however, because we already have ... hope! We also have, if you want a full account, peace, grace, love -- a lot of good stuff -- plus, suffering, which doesn't seem so good but, as it turns out, leads to hope and so isn't bad after all.
Hope is the key word here, an important one to grasp. Our English word for "hope" has been so diluted by disappointment that it no longer conveys any sense of certainty at all. Indeed, when someone speaks of the future and says, "I hope this will happen," they usually mean, "Maybe it will and maybe it won't, but I'd like for it to happen." Hope, almost by definition, has come to mean "wishful thinking." How far this is from the Pauline concept of "hope that does not disappoint us"! The hope that Paul speaks of is grounded in absolute certainty, based on the revelation of a God who knows the future, inhabits the future. There are no "maybes" with this hope. And if "the proof of the pudding is in the eating," then the guarantee of God's future is to be found now in the love that has been poured into our hearts.
John 16:12-15
Again, we have a text that speaks of Father, Son (Jesus), and Spirit and of their interrelationships. Like many Johannine passages, it's a little hard to unpack. All that the Father has is the Son's (v. 15). The Spirit takes what is the Son's (namely, all that the Father has) and declares it to us (v. 14). Okay. Also, the Spirit glorifies the Son by doing this, and -- though it's not said in these verses -- we know that the Father is always glorified in the Son (see, for example, John 14:13).
So, John understands the Trinity in what we might call a functional sense. He is not the least bit interested in the Nicene question of whether the Father, Son, and Spirit are the same substance, whether they consist of the same God-stuff. He does want to affirm, however, that they are one in revelation and in glory. Each reveals the other; each glorifies the other. In a sense, for John, whether one begins with the Father, the Son, or the Spirit, one will end up with all three. Specifically, if you believe in one, you will believe in all three, and if you worship one, you will worship all three. This seems to represent a fundamental understanding of the Trinity riddle, before all the p's and q's got worked out.
FIRST LESSON FOCUS
By Elizabeth Achtemeier
Proverbs 8:1-4, 22-31
Perhaps no doctrine of the Christian Church is more obscure in the minds of churchgoers than is the doctrine of the Trinity, the fact that God is One in three Persons. The early church councils of the fourth and fifth centuries A.D. debated long and hard before they arrived at a satisfactory statement of the doctrine, and still today, persons misunderstand or distort the teaching.
The doctrine of the Trinity took shape out of the testimony of the Scriptures, beginning with their witness to Jesus Christ. Most of the writers of the New Testament were originally Jews who believed in one God. But when the apostles and disciples encountered Jesus of Nazareth and witnessed his life, death, and resurrection, they became convinced that he was fully Immanuel, God with them, the Person of God incarnated in human flesh. After Christ's resurrection and ascension, the apostles and disciples also found that God in Christ continued fully to be with them in the Person of the Holy Spirit, as Christ has promised. Thus, the one God of the Old Testament was fully present in the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. He was One, in three Persons. Not only the Father, but also the Son and the Holy Spirit are wholly divine, the Son also having been fully human and incarnated in human flesh in Jesus of Nazareth. The Son who is with us is God. The Holy Spirit who comes to us is God. They are not lesser deities than the Father, and to all of them -- Father, Son, or Holy Spirit -- we pray and give our adoration.
It is rather strange, therefore, that the lectionary for this Sunday of the Trinity designates a passage about Wisdom from the Old Testament, as if Wisdom is somehow a Person in the Trinity.
The figure of Wisdom in our text for the morning is personified as a female figure. She calls to human beings to listen to her and to learn her teachings (vv. 1-5). She is described as the product of God's first act of creation (v. 22), and she says she was present when God made all of the rest of the universe (vv. 23-30). God rejoiced in her (v. 30), and she rejoiced in God's creation of the world and of human beings (v. 31).
On the basis of this text, many persons in our time have therefore claimed that Wisdom is a divine figure, and we have abroad in our society what has come to be called Sophia worship, Sophia being the Greek translation of Wisdom. Principally such Sophia worship has appealed to radical feminists, because Sophia or Wisdom is a female figure, and they do not wish to say that a male, namely Jesus Christ, is their Savior and Redeemer. So for many such radical feminists, the worship of Sophia has replaced the worship of our Lord Jesus Christ.
Such Sophia-worshipers find their deity in all of creation, in, through, under all things, as a kind of spirit pervading the universe. She is identified with the vital forces in the natural world and even with sexual drives in human beings. Thus, at the Re-imagining conference of 1993 -- a conference that since has been repeated every year -- Sophia was prayed to in these words:
Sophia, creator god, let your milk and honey flow ... Our sweet Sophia, we are women in your image. With nectar between our thighs, we invite a lover, we birth a child. With our warm body fluids, we remind the world of its pleasures and sensations ... We celebrate our bodiliness, our physicality, the sensations of pleasure, our oneness with earth and water. (From tapes of the conference, Tape 12-1, Side B)
We need to call such worship by its proper name, however. It is idolatry, because you and I worship the one God who has commanded us, "You shall have no other gods besides me" (Exodus 20:3; cf. Mark 10:17-20). He has revealed himself to us in his incarnation in Jesus Christ, and he continues to be our God and to be with us in the Person of the Holy Spirit, who is given to us from the Father and the Son.
So how, then, are we to understand this text from the Old Testament about Wisdom? This personified figure of Wisdom in Proverbs 8 will probably become clear for us if we understand Wisdom in the Old Testament (and indeed in the apocryphal book of Wisdom) as the plan of God. Wisdom was there with God when he made the universe, the fifty billion galaxies that our astronomers tell us they have discovered through their telescopes. God had a plan when he created all things and persons. And he delighted in his plan, because he wanted to make a creation that was "very good" (Genesis 1:31).
On the basis of this text from Proverbs, you and I can celebrate God's good plan -- how he brought forth the rivers and raised up the mountains; how he laid out the fields with their good earth, and how he established the deeps of the seas; how he brought order out of chaos and made a world of delight and beauty and fruitfulness, that you and I were given to enjoy.
We can, however, also realize how often we distort God's plan for a good world -- how readily we trash our environment and how sinfully we distort the loving relationships in which he has set us; how blindly we have turned his abundant life into darkness and death for ourselves and all things.
But the scriptures have something else to say about God's wisdom, about his plan for his world. In the New Testament, who becomes identified with the wisdom of God and in fact replaces all which that female figure does in the Old Testament? Jesus Christ -- "Christ Jesus," Paul writes, "whom God made our wisdom, our righteousness and sanctification and redemption" (1 Corinthians 1:30). Christ is the wisdom of God, and in him is found the truth of God (John 14:6). Moreover, the eternal plan of God is to unite all things in Christ (Ephesians 1:10).
So through Christ God has made all things (John 1:3) and according to Christ he orders all things. According to his love in Christ Jesus, God loves his world. According to the teachings of Christ, God calls and instructs all people. According to the forgiveness of Christ, God forgives and redeems his world. According to his purpose in Christ our Lord, God will save his world.
There is no other name under heaven given to us by which we may be saved than the name of Jesus Christ our Lord (Acts 4:12). Sophia is not our God. Jesus Christ is our God, the one through whom the Father in his mercy revealed himself, and the one with whom he sends his Holy Spirit always to be with us.
