Some Assembly Required
Reflections on the Lectionary for June 15th
It’s Trinity Sunday! What does that mean? And what is the Trinity, anyway?
There’s a moment that I’ve seen happen again and again, in discussions and conversations in classrooms and churches. A group will be talking about something unrelated, and somehow the Trinity will come up. Suddenly everything changes. People look at each other like they’re seeking some kind of permission, and they turn to the discussion leader with a plaintive look in their eyes. What is the Trinity, someone will venture, and everyone’s face will reveal gladness that someone had the gall to ask, and the conversation will veer off in a new direction.
Some aspects of Christian theology receive more protest than the Trinity, like the virgin birth and the bodily resurrection of Jesus. But in terms of the sheer number of questions, nothing beats the Trinity. Usually, people begin autobiographically. I never understood it, someone will say, and another will add, my youth pastor explained it to me once but it never really clicked. There’s a whole genre of Trinity-based-youth-pastor folk wisdom that gets shared in those moments: the Trinity is like water (existing in the three forms of water, ice, and vapor, even though it’s only one substance), or the Trinity is like earth, fire, and water, or the Trinity is like an egg, with the shell, the white, and the yolk. Some say the Trinity is like the sun, which sends out both light and heat. None of these seem to be especially satisfying metaphors, judging by the assessments of them that I have heard people give over the years. The Trinity remains mysterious.
If you’re a part of the “Western” church broadly (Protestant, Catholic, etc.), Trinity Sunday is the first Sunday after Pentecost. (In the “Eastern” church, Trinity Sunday is Pentecost). Of course many “Western” forms of Christianity don’t pay much attention to the church calendar and the Revised Common Lectionary readings that go with it, so some parts of the tradition don’t recognize or celebrate Trinity Sunday. But for those that do, it’s an interesting moment in the church year—especially for parts of the Christian tradition that allow or encourage a diversity of thinking about the Trinity.
I feel fortunate that my own religious tradition, the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), holds the Trinity pretty loosely. As part of the broader Stone-Campbell Movement (or Restoration Movement), the Disciples don’t insist on very many doctrinal points, instead preferring to foster unity by leaving most theological matters up to the individual conscience. One of the founders of the movement, Alexander Campbell, was uneasy with the term Trinity, viewing it (correctly) as unbiblical, though in many ways he espoused a fairly Trinitarian theology. Others in the tradition have followed his lead, and it has been possible to be a part of the tradition without being Trinitarian. As for myself, I am neither Trinitarian nor anti-Trinitarian. I see in scripture and tradition a great many models for thinking about God, and I see no good reason to insist that only three of the models are true, or that only one of them is true, or no more than three can be true. Perhaps this is a byproduct of my having been formed and trained in a theological world infused with the thought of Sallie McFague and other metaphorical theologians; if one metaphor is useful and three metaphors are better, then why not a dozen?
The lectionary texts for Trinity Sunday witness to the way metaphors for God proliferate in the Bible. It’s worth noting that—in accordance with Campbell’s observations in the last paragraph—the Bible has no clear explanations of the Trinity that can be included in the readings for Trinity Sunday. There are no places where Jesus talks about it, or Paul explains it, or Jeremiah proclaims it or Moses gets it written on a tablet, or anything like that. That might be the first and most important thing to notice: that when we collect passages about the Trinity, none of them are about the Trinity, because there are no biblical passages about the Trinity. Instead, the lectionary collects metaphors for God and it gathers different kinds of theological imaginations into one place. Biblically speaking, the Trinity is a container for metaphorical characterization of God—it’s a way to organize the way we talk about God.
Take, for example, the passage from Proverbs.
Proverbs 8 is about a woman named Wisdom—or, perhaps, it is about Wisdom, which is personified as a woman. This figure Wisdom is described as existing in close proximity to the divine, but the text is careful to establish a boundary between Wisdom and God. “The LORD created me at the beginning of his work, the first of his acts long ago,” it says in 8:22-23, “Ages ago I was set up, at the first, before the beginning of the earth.” If this sounds suspiciously like the language used for the Logos (Word) in the first chapter of the Gospel of John, there’s a good reason for that. Both Wisdom (Sophia) and Word (Logos) were ways of talking about aspects of divinity that floated around the Greek-speaking world in antiquity; both figures could be described and accounted for by neo-Platonic philosophy, which thought in terms of a “One” being from which emanations extended. When Judaism and Christianity went looking for language to describe beings who were in close association with God, but who were not themselves God, Sophia and Logos were a natural fit—they were handy metaphors, available for borrowing. In Proverbs, Wisdom is described as an ancient force, aligned with God and present at creation, who calls human beings into relationship with God and with good ways of life. She’s clearly more than human, but also clearly a created being who is not identical with God. It’s a rich set of associations if you’re looking for Trinitarian language.
The Psalm for Trinity Sunday, like Proverbs 8, also imagines God’s relationship to creation, but it uses a different language set and a different metaphor. Here, in the NRSV and NRSVue, God is called Sovereign. In most other translations, the same word being translated Sovereign in the NRSV and NRSVue is rendered as Lord, which I think is probably the more natural translation. (The first word in the sentence in Hebrew is YHWH, the personal name of God, and the second word is adon, which is the word that the NRSV and NRSVue translate as Sovereign. Both can be translated as Lord, which is why many translations put it “O LORD our Lord”). But however you parse the Hebrew, there’s a hierarchical relationship being claimed between God and the created order, and God is being described as a figure of dominance and power.
The epistle for this Sunday is fascinating, from a Trinitarian point of view. At first glance, it might look like Romans 5:1-5 is about Jesus. After all, it says “we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have obtained access to this grace in which we stand….” Jesus shows up prominently, right? But look more closely, and you’ll realize that in this passage Paul is placing all the power and agency with God, not Jesus. This is a consistent pattern in Paul’s writing: Paul nearly always reserves saving power for God, and he nearly always describes Jesus as either the object of that power or as the conduit through which it flows. This is almost certainly because Paul, as a Jewish monotheist, would have wanted to carefully guard God’s supremacy as the only fully divine being. Not only did Paul not use Trinitarian language, but he seemed to be actively resisting attempts to put Jesus on par with God (“the Father” or “the Creator”) in terms of power. In Romans 5:1-2, we have peace with God, and it is through Jesus. Jesus is the means of peace, but God is the one who’s worth making peace with. Paul wanted to protect God’s primacy in the relationship.
If you look at the end of the epistle reading, in Romans 5:5, you might think you’ve found some Trinitarian language. After all, you have both Jesus and God in the first part of the passage, and now here in the last part it says that “God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.” Christians of the 21st century will readily recognize “the Holy Spirit” as a member of the Trinity. Bingo, right? Not so fast. The first thing to recognize here is that proper nouns are not capitalized in Greek, so the capitalizations in “Holy Spirit” have been introduced by translators. So this passage isn’t using a proper name or referring to a person of the Trinity, necessarily, except in retrospect. Instead, this is probably an example of Paul affirming that God manifests in many different ways, including as a sacred spirit or a spirit of holiness. That certainly sounds Trinitarian in some ways—and maybe it is, for you! But it doesn’t have to be, and I don’t think Paul meant it that way. The second thing to recognize here is that, again, Paul is protecting God’s role in it all. “God’s love is poured through the Holy Spirit,” it says, which reserves the love for God and makes the spirit (or Spirit) a conduit.
Something similar happens in John 16, though the author of John works with a different logic of God’s actions than Paul does. In 16:13, Jesus (who is speaking) says that “when the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth; for he will not speak on his own, but will speak whatever he hears….” Furthermore, in verses 14 and 15, “He will glorify me, because he will take what is mine and declare it to you,” and “all that the Father has is mine.”
There’s lots to unpack here! Again, this looks Trinitarian, and it might be—but on closer inspection the relationships are maybe more complicated than our modern notions of Trinity would allow. Here it’s not a “Holy Spirit” but a “Spirit of truth,” and really a “spirit of truth” if we disallow the gratuitous capitalization. But this “spirit of truth,” like Wisdom and like the Word, is personified; “will guide you,” Jesus insists. So again we have a kind of divine emanation, using logic and language borrowed from neo-Platonic philosophy. And again we have a kind of subordination and dependency on God (“the Father,” “the Creator”). This Spirit doesn’t act of its own accord, but rather it mirrors what it has heard from elsewhere. It’s something like a messenger God in Greek mythology or an angel in Hebrew cosmology—an intermediary and announcer. Meanwhile, Jesus says confidently in verse 15, “all that the Father has is mine.” Where Paul was careful to differentiate Jesus from God, the Gospel of John has Jesus asserting a more equal role.
What is the takeaway from all these passages? I can think of two, at least.
First, if you want to find a Trinity in passages like these, you can probably do it. All the words are there—Father, Jesus, Holy Spirit. And it’s clear, in all these passages, that figures like Wisdom and Holy Spirit and Jesus are seen as being associated with God, and maybe even as expressions of God’s presence. Divinity is understood in these passages as multiple, as variegated, as showing up in the world in a variety of different roles and with several different discrete functions. If you want to treat these passages like a connect-the-dots image and draw the lines yourself, you can make it look Trinitarian.
But the second takeaway is that despite having all the raw materials for a Trinity, none of these passages make the move of asserting the existence of the Trinity or even describing God’s work in Trinitarian ways. To claim the existence of the Trinity in these passages is kind of like claiming that a grocery store is a BLT sandwich. Sure, all the ingredients are there, but nobody has put it all together yet, and there are lots of other ways you could put the ingredients together, and there are a lot more ingredients present than just the ones you’re thinking of, and even if it does get put together it probably won’t happen right away. It’ll take some prep.
So where does that leave us? Well, maybe there’s a reason all that Trinity-based-youth-pastor folk wisdom is so unsatisfying: the Trinity is a slippery concept, and it’s not a concept that was part of the thought-world of the earliest Christians. That doesn’t make the Trinity invalid, useless, or wrong—for many people, the Trinity is a helpful way to organize their thinking about God and to describe God’s presence and action in the world. But it should help us realize that when we encounter texts in the Bible that seem to point to the Trinity, the Trinitarian-ness of them relies more on a subsequent history of interpretation than it does on the biblical texts themselves. We can find the Trinity in the Bible, if we go looking for it.
But we will always have to do some of the assembly ourselves.