A Short Sermon

 

Good Lord, what tumult. Yet moar war as Israel launches against Iran, astroturf riots in, you guessed it, Democrat run cities, an awesome military parade to mark the 250th anniversary of the US Army, President's Day and last but certainly not least, Trinity Sunday.

Behold the Holy and Undivided Trinity, revealed to us by God Himself and, for a fact, it's not the kind of thing you'd cook up if you wanted to invent a religion for fun, gain and personal profit. Three Divine Persons, one God. Theologians tell us the key to the mystery is love, which I find helpful, perhaps you will too.

Love, in its various aspects, involves a giving of self to the beloved. Imagine this taken to perfection in the life of God. From eternity the Father pours Himself out in a perfect act of love, a total donation of divine being, and the Son is begotten, who in turn gives Himself perfectly to the Father. In this eternal, timeless exchange of being Father and Son are one in substance or essence, and the love which flows between them is itself a Person, the Holy Spirit, who proceeds from the Father and Son and gives Himself back, perfectly, in love to them.

So, in a dynamic of perfect love Father, Son and Spirit are one in divine substance but distinct as persons by virtue of their relationship one to the other. Excellent, we say, but how can relationship amount to personhood. Good question and worth reflection, eh? Regardless, here's the inestimable Farrer:

THE disciples who were present at the Supper saw and heard Jesus Christ making eucharist to the Father over the bread and the cup.  They were witnesses of the intercourse between the Eternal Son and his Eternal Father.  Mortal ears and eyes at that moment perceived the movement of speech and love which passes in the heart of the Godhead; human minds entered into that converse of the Divine Persons which is the life and happiness of the Blessed Trinity.  Belief in the Trinity is not a distant speculation; the Trinity is that blessed family into which we are adopted.  God has asked us into his house, he has spread his table before us, he has set out bread and wine.  We are made one body with the Son of God, and in him converse with the Eternal Father, through the indwelling of the Holy Ghost.

 

Beautiful and true.

God bless you all,

LSP

Trinity - Augustine

 

Everyone knows Sunday's the Feast of the Trinity, that central doctrine of the Faith which describes the inner nature of God as He has revealed Himself. One nature, divine, three persons, distinct, and unless you believe this you're in big trouble, says the Athanasian Creed. This, NB Anglicans, has been shunted to the back of our latter day Prayer Books where presumably it'll cause less offense by virtue of being well hidden. Here's the intro:

Whosoever will be saved, before all things it is necessary that he hold the Catholic faith. Which faith unless every one 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 Essence.

So, there's most definitely a three line whip on orthodox Trinitarian doctrine. That said, can we make any sense of it? St. Augustine most certainly endeavored to do so in his magisterial De Trinitate, read it if you can and I found this short commentary helpful. An excerpt:

The Father, Son and Spirit are distinct, and yet they are a unity in the equality of the one substance. Any inferiority of the Son refers to his human nature or to the Trinitarian order whereby he has received his equal being from the Father. “The Father is God, the Son God, the Holy Spirit God…yet there are not three Gods – but one God – the Trinity Itself” . . . “so total is the equality of this triad that not only is the Father not greater than the Son as far as divinity is concerned, but also Father and Son together are not greater the Holy Spirit, nor any single person of the Three is less than the trinity Itself” (8.1).

Still, within this equality there are distinctions between the Persons. The Father is distinguished as Father because He begets the Son, and the Son is distinguished as Son because He is begotten. The Spirit, similarly, is distinguished from Father and Son inasmuch as He is ‘bestowed’ by them; He is their ‘common gift’, being a kind of communion of Father and Son.

The distinctions between the three persons are grounded in their mutual relations within the Godhead. Augustine resorts to the category of “distinctions based on relations” even though this may seem contrary to the doctrine that God as simple and as such cannot be differentiated from his attributes. The reason for this assertion is to escape a cunning dilemma posed by Arian critics. They argued that the distinctions within the Godhead, assuming they exist must be categorized as either substance or accidents. Everyone agrees that God has no accidents. On the other hand, to view the distinctions as substance would result in three independent substances in the Godhead.

Augustine rejects the dilemma. He suggests that the terms Father, Son and Holy Spirit denote not difference in substance between the Persons but eternal and unchangeable relations between them within the one substance. That is to say, what differentiates the Three Persons in the Trinity is the specific form of relations. The persons retain substantial equality.

The relationships do not simply distinguish the Persons from each other – they are the persons. In technical language, they are subsistent relationships. Accidents in ordinary things like qualities or quantities can change. For example, the quantity of stuff in a man can change without him ceasing to be a man. But in the case of the divine, relationships are actually substantive predications since they are identical with divine nature or substance. But a relationship requires real distinctions between two referents at the poles of the relationship. The Father is distinct from the Son. Neither is distinct from God; and they are each distinct from the Holy Spirit, not as Father and Son, but as ‘from whom he proceeds’.

Edmund Hill elaborates, “Therefore [the Father] is not only Father, he is the fatherhood (the relationship) by which he is Father. So too the Son is the sonship by which he is Son. And the Holy Spirit. . . the relationship of being Gift, the relationship of ‘givenness’ if you like.

 

Now, per the above, what do "subsistent relationships" in the life of the Trinity teach us? To put it another way, if distinct personhood, real personhood has been revealed to us as relationship, what does that mean for us who have been created in the image of God? Read Augustine's triads, obviously, but perhaps we get a glimpse of the truth when we reflect on how dismally we behave when self-obsessed, and how much better when the opposite applies. 

In other words, we become ourselves when we forget ourselves in relationship. The last shall be first, and all of that. 

Just look at Victoria Nuland and tell me I'm wrong. By the monkey, I dare you.

Guinea on,

LSP