Quarries, Stones, and Buildings

Reflections on the Lectionary for Trinity Sunday, June 7th

A depiction of the Trinity from a fourteenth-century Welsh manuscript. Image in the public domain, taken from Wikipedia.

The Trinity is at the center of Christian history and theology, and it is also marginal to Christian history and theology. It is simultaneously one of the core ideas of the whole tradition, and also very peripheral when Christianity is viewed as a two-thousand-year story. This Sunday, Trinity Sunday, is the day of the church year when the Trinity sits most clearly at center stage of things in the Western church. But even on Trinity Sunday, the idea of the Trinity is an ambivalent thing, both very important to the way many Christians think, and very much an afterthought in the development of Christian thought.

One of the first things to note is that the Trinity itself—as a way of talking about the essential unity of three distinct expressions of God’s presence—is not really present in the bible. That might be surprising, but it’s a byproduct of the timeline of ideas in Christianity. The Trinity was an idea that developed relatively late, well after the period of the New Testament. You can find precursors to the Trinity in the New Testament, if you look hard enough, and in the Hebrew Bible too. Those texts are a quarry where the buildings blocks of later Christian theology are mined, and so you can always revisit the quarry and see where the blocks come from. But—to extend the metaphor—the structure of the Trinity isn’t the same thing as the building blocks. It took centuries of construction work to create the doctrine of the Trinity out of the raw materials found in both testaments of the Christian scriptures. Depending on how you think about it, the doctrine of the Trinity dates from the third century, the fourth century, the sixth century, or even beyond. It took a while to finish construction.

The readings for Trinity Sunday in the Revised Common Lectionary (linked above) are some of the building blocks. These readings might seem like they are speaking in a trinitarian way, or they might appear to be the words of people who are thinking in trinitarian terms. And that might be true, in a limited, proto-trinitarian kind of way. But in the same way that blocks of stone are not the same things as a building, these readings are not themselves evidence of the Trinity. They are evidence, instead, of a long tradition of people recognizing that God might be present in several different forms.

Take, for example, the gospel passage for the week, Matthew 28:16-20. This passage is often known as the “Great Commission,” and it’s the clearest expression of a trinitarian formula in the New Testament. In it, Jesus commands the disciples to baptize “in the name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit.” (I have not capitalized these words, as the NRSV and many other translations do, because I’m not convinced that the gospel of Matthew intended these terms as proper nouns). Some scholars don’t think that the trinitarian formula, including what would come to be known as the three persons of the Trinity, were part of the earliest versions of Matthew. The thinking is that that language was added later, as trinitarian ideas became more common. That might or might not be the case, but even if we accept that the author of Matthew wrote those words, we shouldn’t take them as an expression of the Trinity as we know it today, on this side of centuries of theological development, and certainly not as a universally-held theological tenet. The father/son/spirit trio might have been part of an early baptismal saying or creed (which is why some scholars think it might have been added later), but if that’s true, it’s a building block, not the building itself. Many forms of Christianity use that trinitarian formulation today when baptizing people, even traditions that are not explicitly trinitarian. The three words appearing together does not necessarily imply that the full doctrine of the Trinity existed in the first century, or that people who use it today buy into the full idea either. In fact, if the Trinity had been a common doctrine in the first century, then we might expect other New Testament baptism moments to be accompanied by a trinitarian formula. But they aren’t. (By the way, in Acts 8 when the Ethiopian eunuch is baptized, another kerygmatic phrase was introduced later in the tradition to retrofit the story with the “right” kinds of words. That’s why your bible likely doesn’t have Acts 8:37, and skips right from 8:36 to 8:38–because most modern translations recognize that the verse was a late addition).

2 Corinthians 13:11-13 works much the same way. Looking at this passage, you might wonder why it rises to the level of inclusion in the lectionary at all. It’s just a fragment of the closing passage of Paul’s letter, not especially laden with meaning, just the ancient equivalent of writing Sincerely at the conclusion of an email today. It’s here, in the lectionary, because Paul invokes what we now understand to be the three persons of the Trinity. It’s a stone from the quarry, one of very few, so it’s included here.

More interesting (to me) is the passage from Genesis 1 and 2. This is the creation story, of course—the first of the two that are found in Genesis—and on the surface it doesn’t have a lot of obvious connection to the Trinity. So why is it in the lectionary for Trinity Sunday? The answer, I think, is that here we have both the building blocks and a glimpse at the architectural drawings. We can see the raw materials, and the way they are being put together. I’m surprised, to be honest, that the first chapter of John isn’t included in these readings, because it’s an essential part of how Genesis 1:1-2:4 relates to the idea of the Trinity. In John 1, this part of Genesis is glossed and retold, with Jesus being made part of the story as the Logos (the Word) of God. When God creates in Genesis 1, God creates by speaking (in contrast to the hand-crafting God of Genesis 2), and the writer of the gospel of John imagines that Jesus was the Word of God that gave verbal expression to God’s creative urges. There’s some thin textual cover for this in Genesis, with the strange plural of 1:26 (“let us make humankind in our image”), so you can see how and why people understood the God of Genesis 1 as multiplicitous. The plural in that verse is likely an artifact of the way Hebrew was written, and the way ancient near eastern people thought of divine cosmologies, but for Christians it was a useful building block to join with something like John 1 to build a Trinitarian likeness into scripture. When you view Genesis 1 through a Christian lens, you can start to see the scale of the architectural plans, and the way exegetical practices of the church through the years helped to bring those plans into reality.

I myself am not especially trinitarian. My own religious tradition has a long history of questioning or denying the Trinity, dating back to our earliest founders, and so it’s something I have always held loosely. I do love the idea of God showing up in lots of different ways, which is what I take the doctrine of the Trinity to be suggesting, and so I’m not hostile to trinitarian thinking exactly. It’s just not something that’s very central to my own understanding. And, I don’t think that the knowledge that grand buildings come from raw materials should undermine our appreciation of the buildings themselves. The Trinity is a doctrine that holds a lot of meaning for a lot of people, and understanding where it comes from shouldn’t lessen anyone’s appreciation of it. To the contrary, I think the Trinity is a great example of how ingenious Christians have been in reading and interpreting the bible. Christians have succeeded in constructing great edifices out of the stones quarried there, and perhaps none are grander than the idea of the Trinity. I’m just not sure it’s a building I want to make my home in.