(Proverbs 8:1-4, 22-31; Romans 5:1-5: John 16:12-15)
‘When he marked out the foundations of the earth, then I was beside him, like a master worker, and I was daily his delight rejoicing before him always, rejoicing in his inhabited world and delighting in the human race.’
For reasons I don’t quite understand at Mirfield, we have the Old Testament reading for the Mass as the Mattins reading, and so we heard these words earlier on. It is of course from Proverbs, and from those passages that talk about the Wisdom of God as the first-born of all creation, and God’s helper in the work of creation. Now I know that these passages have traditionally been taken to refer to our Lord, but it has always seemed to me a slightly odd choice, as these words from Proverbs can be, and have been by some, interpreted as implying that the Christ, the Word of God, is in some way subordinate to the Father. So they can seem an odd choice for Trinity Sunday, when we are supposed to be celebrating in the words of today’s Collect, ‘in the power of the divine Majesty to worship the Unity’, the unity revealed in ‘the glory of the eternal Trinity.’
Perhaps it was easier to know how to interpret these words back in the days of the Book of Common Prayer, when Trinity Sunday was still one of the days appointed for the Athanasian Creed to be read in church. Then there was little chance of misunderstanding how the words from Proverbs should be taken when you heard –
‘Whosover shall be saved, before all things it is necessary that he hold the Catholic Faith.
Which Faith except everyone do keep whole and undefiled, without doubt he shall perish everlastingly.
And the Catholic Faith is this: That we worship one God in Trinity, and Trinity in Unity, neither confounding the Persons, nor dividing the Substance.’
Of course if one knows the history of the Prayer Book, one will be aware that by the 19th century the use of the Athanasian Creed was becoming a source of controversy. Not least that for more and more people, as they found out more and more about the rest of the world, the uncomfortable question arose about what happens to all those people who never got a chance to hear about the Catholic Faith?
While this is a legitimate question, the sidelining of the Creed did perhaps play a part in something that we may feel has become endemic in the Church of England, even if not in other parts of the Anglican Communion. This is an uncomfortableness with what we are supposed to do with the dogmas of the Church, the dogmas proclaimed in all the Creeds – Apostolic and Nicaean, as well as the Athanasian. Given that it is the 1700th anniversary of the Nicaean Creed this year, perhaps this is an appropriate thing to raise on Trinity Sunday in 2025. So what exactly are dogmas, such as those of the Trinity and the Incarnation, which we are supposed to teach and believe? How are we supposed to interpret them, and what are we supposed to do with them? Unfortunately in the Church of England, one solution was just to abandon them, as outdated historical accidents. I suppose some people here may be too young to remember the kerfuffle there was in the 1970s when a group of theologians, including some prominent Anglican ones, produced the book entitled The Myth of God Incarnate?
While I can’t say that I agree with Bishop Rowan Williams on everything, here I think he does hit the nail on the head. He was still a student when the Myth book came out, and some of his own teachers had contributed to it, and he was profoundly troubled by it. As he later wrote, he was dissatisfied with the idea ‘that doctrinal formulae are rather poor attempts to solve intellectual questions that we no longer ask’, and so can be abandoned. Instead, he asked what if they are symbols ‘shaped by the desire to find the least problematic way of holding a profoundly elusive truth, and by the impulse to push towards the edge of what can be said.’ In other words, what if the dogmas, doctrines and creeds of the Church are not supposed to be like mathematical or logical formulae, instead they are attempts to say the unsayable. Attempts to point us in the right direction towards God, so that we do not get side-tracked into dead-ends, which will lead us away from what the Living God revealed in the Bible is trying to say to us. Whatever else a creed should be, it should stir up our imaginations to push towards the edge of what can be said about the mystery of the God who revealed himself as a dead man on a cross over two thousand years ago, and who then overcame death.
One way in which we can do that is by looking again at what the Athanasian Creed actually says, if we leave aside those damnatory clauses with which it begins. If we do, we will find an image of God very different from the caricature many opponents of Christianity claim that we believe in. That pretence that all Christians believe that God is an over-sized version of Brian Blessed doing one of his more shouty performances a few mile up in the sky. Instead in the Athansasian Creed we find that we are supposed to believe that ‘the Godhead of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, is all one, the Glory equal, the Majesty co-eternal. Such as the Father is, such is the Son, and such is the Holy Ghost. The Father uncreate, the Son uncreate, and the Holy Ghost uncreate. The Father incomprehensible, the Son incomprehensible, and the Holy Ghost incomprehensible.’ Of course the more cynical outside and inside the Church may well say, that’s the problem – it’s incomprehensible. But if we really believe we are talking about what has created and sustained a universe of a million, million galaxies, each with a million, million stars, I’ve always found it difficult to see how God, its creator, could be anything other than incomprehensible to us. How in any talk about God, if we are dealing with Something that pushes up against the edges of what can be comprehended, how we are supposed to say anything unless this Something has found a way to reveal Itself to us. A way we are supposed to find in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth.
In the Creeds, whether Nicaean or Athanasian, the Church is trying, no matter how inadequately, to find the least worst way to say something about this mystery that should be for us overwhelming in its awfulness, to use that word in its original sense. Inspiring awe not least because of what the Creeds imply we are called to be through Christ. Many during the Reformation, and after, became uncomfortable with all creeds because they used language that could not be found in the Bible, and so they jettisoned them. Unfortunately it never seems to have occurred to them that it was the same Church that came up with the Creeds, which also decided which books should be in the Bible. Anyway, our awful destiny can be summed up in a word that didn’t make it into any Creed, and which is not in the Bible, but which derives from the period when the creed was defined at Nicaea and Constantinople.
This is perichoresis, a word used by the Church Fathers to describe the relations between the Persons of the Trinity. It is apparently a compound of the Greek word for ‘around, and a verb meaning ‘to give way’ or ‘to make room’, and which can be translated as ‘rotation’ or ‘going around’. The word, appropriately enough, came to be used in three distinct, but interrelated, ways in the early Church. First, it referred to the way the two natures of the Christ – divine and human – interrelated with each other in perfect union. Second, it referred to the way the omnipresence of God interpenetrates all his creation, and sustains it. And thirdly, it was used to describe the mutual indwelling of the three Persons of the Trinity that the passage I quoted earlier from the Athanasian Creed was pointing us towards, and which we will find witnessed to in the Nicaean Creed we will say later.
This perichoresis expresses the intimacy and reciprocity that the Fathers saw at the heart of the relation between the Persons of the Godhead. And one of the texts they used to support their ideas about the Trinity was today’s Gospel. As we heard, Jesus said that the Holy Spirit ‘will glorify me, because he will take what is mine and declare it to you … All that the Father has is mine.’ So that as the Holy Spirit glorifies the Son, so the Son glorifies the Father, and the Father glorifies the Son, so shall we, through Christ’s life and death, and through the coming of the Spirit in the Church, be able to know that glory in our own lives. Today’s reading from the Apostle Paul of course witnesses to the same hope, though in slightly different language. Paul told the Romans that we could boast in the hope of sharing the glory of God, because of the divine love that the Holy Spirit has poured into our hearts. Just as nothing can separate the Persons of the Trinity, so nothing in Paul’s view can separate us from that love which is revealed in the Trinity.
I said just now that one of the awe-full things about the Creed should be what it calls us to be as Christians – about what the Christian life should mean. If we are to share the glory of God as Paul says, that is because the doctrine of the Trinity points us to the amazing realisation that we are called to be with God. With God, in some unfathomable way, in the same relationship that there is between Father, Son and Holy Spirit. This ‘relationship’ that existed before creation, and which reveals, despite the incomprehensibility of God, that love is what he essentially is. The love that created us to be part of that relationship, and that when that relationship was broken, was willing to come into the world, and through the life and death of Jesus of Nazareth restore that relationship with us. A relationship through which we are drawn ever more into the fire of divine love symbolised by the Trinity. While we will always remain created, because only God is truly eternal, so that we can never fully comprehend him, nonetheless we are being brought into the circle of divine love. We are the beneficiaries of the incredible mystery that God is making room for us in the perichoretic relationship between the three Persons, as the Fathers put it.
We will through all eternity be drawn closer and close into relationship with God, even if God – the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit – will always be incomprehensible to us. Part of the ineffable mystery that the doctrine of the Trinity points us to, is that while we may be drawn up into the relationship between the Father and the Son and Holy Spirit, God will always be going on before us. God will never be within our grasp, and so we will have the awful destiny of being continually transfigured, as this relationship between us grows deeper and deeper throughout all eternity. Perhaps that is the significance of the passage we had from Proverbs, we will like the divine Wisdom also be rejoicing before him always, rejoicing in the limitlessness of his creation. Meanwhile, on this earth, we can do worse than remember the words of today’s Collect, or as it was in the Prayer Book – Almighty, and everlasting God, who hast given unto us thy servants grace by the confession of a true faith to acknowledge the glory of the eternal Trinity, and in the power of the divine Majesty to worship the Unity; We beseech thee, that thou wouldst keep us steadfast in this faith, and evermore defend us from all adversities, who livest, and reignest one God world without end. Amen.