The doctrine of the Trinity is one of the queerest things about Christianity, and I honestly don’t know exactly what or how to think about it. As many Christians will celebrate Trinity Sunday tomorrow, I do think it’s important to remember what Buddhists like to say about doctrine: “the finger is not the moon.” The best we can hope for from any doctrine is that it will point us toward something important, but it can never capture it.
Liberal Protestants tend to shy away from Trinitarian doctrine, but I have at least three reasons (appropriately enough) why I queerly love the Trinity: you can’t sell it on Wall Street; it irritates politicians; and it won’t fit on a Hallmark greeting card. Here’s what I mean:
1. You Can’t Sell it on Wall Street
We live in a world of nearly total commodification. There’s hardly anything left on this planet that can’t be packaged, advertised, and sold. Big banks even made billions from packaging and selling something that didn’t exist and no one understood: the future value of debt.
The Holy Trinity, by contrast, resists every attempt to package it – even by theologians. Every attempt to say exactly what the Trinity means never quite works, sending the theologian back to the drawing board. And that’s how it should be.
As Augustine once noted many centuries ago, “si comprehendis, non est Deus” (if you understand something, it’s not God). To put this in another way, Trinitarian perplexities can help guard against idolatry. Or to paraphrase Augustine, if you can sell it in the gift shop, it may not be an idol, but it’s not God, either.
2. It Irritates Politicians
Fortunately, not every politician needs to be irritated, but more than a few do. In an era of dissolving social safety nets and in a society where the top 1% of the population controls 40% of the wealth, more than a few politicians need to be reminded about the corrosive legacy of modern western individualism.
That reminder will irritate them, especially if they believe that every man (or rather, every rich, white man) should live for himself. Respecting the rights and dignity of every individual is good, but not at the expense of destroying any notion of the common good. It’s even more irritating to these politicians to talk about this with theological language. The Holy Trinity can work really well for that.
Trinitarian doctrine developed, in part, as a way to describe the very heart of reality itself as social. Some theologians find the language of choreography helpful for this. In the dynamic interrelations of the Trinity, we cannot distinguish the divine dancers from the divine dance; indeed the dancers are the dance and vice versa, and the dance itself is endless, deathless love.
As social creatures created by a social, dancing God, we are bound together, inextricably interwoven with each other – friend and stranger, lover and enemy – and all of us need each other to hear the music, learn the steps, and dance our way into the abundant life that God intends for all. That’s both a hopeful and a challenging view of reality, regardless of political party or income bracket.
3. It Won’t Fit on a Greeting Card
Actually, there’s not much I can think of worth saying that does fit on a greeting card – unless the card is really big. Take love, for instance. If love is more than a feeling or a sentiment, I don’t see how we’ll ever squeeze it into an envelope – and I think that’s a good thing.
I’ve been learning a lot about love just recently from working with my colleagues in the Episcopal Church on developing resources for the blessing of same-gender relationships. We’ve been trying to craft liturgical language about how relationships of any kind can become a blessing to the wider community when committed love brims over into lives of hospitality, generosity, and service.
There’s something Trinitarian going on there. Augustine, for example, experimented with several ways of talking about the Trinity, including this one: “The Lover, the Beloved, and the Love Itself.” I like that, especially when other theologians expanded on it by suggesting that the Love itself was uncontainable, welling up and spilling over from the Lover and Beloved into the act of creation – and that includes all of us, as we are caught up more and more into the great dance of divine love.
No, the finger is not the moon. But I do find Trinitarian finger pointing not only hopeful and challenging but also inspiring, enticing, and inviting. So, shall we dance?
I am glad to see the Trinity expounded with such verve and style. Thanks to Jane R for the FB link. I think of the general position you point towards as classic orthodoxy: straight, no chaser. I’ll be back, I think.
That’s way more clever than I was expceitng. Thanks!
And I thought I was the sensible one. Thanks for steitng me straight.
It’s much easier to udensrtnad when you put it that way!