More-Ness and Beyond-Ness
Reflections on the Lectionary for Trinity Sunday
A year ago on this Substack, I offered my thoughts on the Trinity for Trinity Sunday. In case you missed it or don’t want to go back and read it, I wrote then that the Trinity is pretty marginal to my own theology and the theologies of my religious tradition, and that the Trinity is difficult to find in the Bible—though you can look to scripture to find some of the building blocks for it.
Now Trinity Sunday has come around again, this time with different readings. I still feel the same way about the idea of the Trinity, and this year’s lectionary texts are perhaps even less revelatory about a fully-formed notion of a Trinity than last year’s were. We don’t see in them any explicit references to a Trinity, and we don’t even see any references to the three “persons” of the Trinity together in these texts—no so-called “Trinitarian formulas.” Instead, we see a collection of texts that offer glimpses of those three “persons”—“father” or creator, Jesus, and Spirit. There aren’t models of the Trinity here, but there’s something more like a LEGO set. The lectionary is giving you some pieces, out of which you could build a Trinity if you wanted to and if you followed some very specific instructions, but you could also build a lot of other things instead. I’m not a Trinity hater by any means; if it works for you, then that’s great. It simply isn’t something I find a lot of meaning in. I do value the Trinity as a model of relationality, and if we think of it as a starting point rather than a bounded entity—“God shows up in at least these three different ways”—then I can get on board.
What’s more interesting to me is the way these texts all offer different theophanic visions—different ways of describing and understanding appearances and experiences of the divine. They’re all different from each other in that way, offering distinct ways of imagining how humans relate to divine presence or experience it. If you want to take all of these together and combine them into something Trinitarian, you can do that, but you can also take all of these instances together and separately as a way of observing the wide range of ways human beings imagine the divine and find ourselves in the presence of it.
First, the text from Isaiah. Ever since I heard a lecture about this passage close to 30 years ago now, I have thought about this text as a juxtaposition of the political and the divine, or as a way to think about the way our experiences of living in the world matters to our experiences of God. The lecturer (I can’t remember who it was) pointed out that the first clause, “In the year that King Uzziah died,” is a strange introduction to what turns out to be a scene of God enthroned in the Jerusalem temple. Isaiah is situating his divine vision in a very earthly context, pinning it down in time and place by linking it to the death of Uzziah. Uzziah was king of Judah for five decades, an exceedingly long time in the ancient world, and his death would have represented a cataclysmic shift for the people of Judah and their self-understanding. In the King James Version, which is the way this passage often comes through in my head, there is an “also” in that first line: “In the year that King Uzziah died I saw also the Lord….” The “also” links this vision of God enthroned with the absence of Uzziah on his throne in a way that’s really effective.
We modern folks also often understand the spiritual in context with the political, and the political in context with the spiritual. One striking feature of the 21st century in the United States is the degree to which politics, and not religion, has become the privileged venue for debating morality. Perhaps this began with the rise of the “Moral Majority” in the 1980s and the religious right in the latter quarter of the 20th century, but these days it seems like most of our debate about so-called “social issues” (like abortion, sexuality and gender, racism, and poverty) happens in politics. I think this is part of the claim of folks like the Poor People Campaign, which seeks to shift political conversations about morality. Our debates about morality have devolved into congressional vote-counting and electoral college math, and religious folks (especially religious folks who are not conservative Christians) often figure as remainders in those equations, not as variables. The “also” in the KJV version of Isaiah 6:1 might be familiar to those of us who identify as religious but not conservative Christian; we too see the political world as a strange juxtaposition with our religious convictions.
Psalm 29, meanwhile, is a straightforward doxology. The word “doxology” comes from the Greek word doxa, which means “glory,” and this Psalm is all about praise and glory. In it, the praise and glory are directed toward “the LORD,” which is translating God’s personal name (which Jewish tradition does not pronounce and often does not even write). The Psalmist attributes mighty qualities to the LORD: splendor, majesty, power, and strength, and the ability to control things like waters and thunder and nations. The Psalmist is taking care here to intertwine praise for the LORD with both the natural world and the political world, and to claim that God’s presence shows up everywhere.
In Romans, Paul is somewhat famous for making convoluted arguments, and in 8:12-17 he is certainly doing that. This passage plays with a bunch of different language that’s related to status. There are children, heirs, siblings, debtors, and slaves, each implying corresponding others (parents, ancestors, siblings, lenders, and masters), and each carrying privilege and stigma in varying degrees. Paul is calling on a particular expression of God, the Spirit of God, and making some claims about it. (Spirit is not capitalized in the Greek because Greek doesn’t work that way, and the word for “spirit” is not a special theological term or name, but simply a generic word for breath or breathing, so in my opinion a capitalized translation of “Spirit” is always a bit over-determined theologically). For Paul in this passage, the Spirit of God is something like the Parentage of God—a way of making belonging—as you can see in 8:14 and 8:16. Paul’s overarching point seems to be that “we” (Paul and his intended audience in Rome, but keeping in mind that Paul probably never thought of anyone like you or me within the “we”) are children of God and also heirs of God—an odd mixture of metaphors. The Spirit, in this passage, leads and bears witness.
Finally in John 3:1-17, we have the story of Jesus’ visit with Nicodemus. I have said a lot about this passage in a commentary I wrote about it for the Visual Commentary on Scripture, which you can find here. But thinking about this story as an appearance of God, we ought to turn our attention to Nicodemus. It is, after all, Nicodemus who goes seeking Jesus, and not the other way around. The text of the Gospel of John wants us to appreciate what an unlikely pairing this is. Nicodemus is understood as “a leader of the Jews” who comes to Jesus by night, presumably to avoid being seen. And Nicodemus is contrasted in the gospel to the Samaritan woman at the well, one chapter later, an outsider to Jesus’ people who meets Jesus in the middle of the day. Readers are supposed to understand that Nicodemus is seeking Jesus out, but not in a very public way, and in a way that’s different from the way Jesus encountered a lot of other people (like the Samaritan woman). Nicodemus’ curiosity is a big part of his story; he goes looking for an appearance or an experience of Jesus (of the divine?), and he gets what he’s looking for.
This passage is typical of the Gospel of John, in that it turns on wordplay and misunderstanding (see the link to the Visual Commentary on Scripture piece above for more). That’s a curious pattern in John, and it’s related to this question of divine presence and experience. In John, Jesus is never quite accessible in the way he is in other gospels. Jesus always knows more, and sooner, than everyone else in John, and Jesus always takes a teaching posture toward everyone else. So even as Nicodemus seeks out Jesus, and even though Nicodemus is portrayed as a bigwig among the Jews, this story places him in a place of misunderstanding. Nicodemus doesn’t quite get what Jesus is trying to say, even as Jesus grudgingly lets him in on the meaning. So it’s an appearance of Jesus—a theophany—but it’s a partial one, and personally I cannot tell whether Nicodemus would have walked away from the encounter feeling like he had experienced divine presence, or not.
These four passages together can give you something like a Trinity, if you put the pieces together just so. You’ve got God in the Isaiah passage and the Psalm, you’ve got Spirit in the Romans passage, and you’ve got Jesus in the John story. But there’s a lot of assembly required to get to a Trinity. Do that assembly work if you like—certainly most Christians do. But I also encourage you to view these collected passages as a way to appreciate the diversity of the ways divinity shows up in biblical texts, from presiding over floods and trees in Psalms to witnessing to adoption in Romans to enthroned in the temple in Isaiah to a sphinxlike and playful teaching in John. Rather than using these passages to point toward a Trinity, which by its very nature puts a boundary (three) around the ways God shows up in the world, I prefer to use them to index the sheer variety of ways that ancient and modern people understand God’s presence. We can reduce these stories and others like them to three “persons,” but in reality the scriptures record dozens of different ways to describe God’s presence, and there are thousands more if we look beyond biblical texts.
So this Trinity Sunday, I will be thinking about the way the Bible always gestures towards more-ness and beyond-ness, in ways that surpass the language and framework of Trinity. Biblical texts were written in a time that had not yet developed Trinitarian language, and so they explore God’s presence freely, without recourse to the three parts that Christians know so well today. There’s a wildness to it, and a liberty, like a horizon that has not yet been foreshortened. This week’s four passages point to that horizon and ask us what might be over the next hill.