Have you heard Charlie Puth’s “We don’t talk
anymore” which features Selena Gomez? They are wrong. Our problem is not the
scarcity of talking. We talk too much. The trouble is the loss of thinking so
much so that whenever we need to explain the Trinity, we seem to retreat behind
a kind of veiled mystery before which we stand condemned to a muted silence.
Sure, our prayers are Trinitarian in nature—to the Father, through the Son and
in the Holy Spirit—-but that is probably the best description we can or dare to
give.
Why?
We have lost the language of God—theologia.
Instead, we are more at home with the language of work—oikonomia.
Given our “homelessness” with theologia when faced with such
a mystery as the Trinity, we easily resort to a practical explanation (oikonomia)
that is, we speak of God in terms of how He is related to us. So, we resort to
what we are most familiar with, that is, functionality. For example, we all
habitually use a calculator and do we really care “how” pressing
of this and that would yield a certain result except that it generates a
number? Our idea of the Trinity is basically the economic Trinity. It means we
generally do not talk about Who God is but rather What
God is in relation to creation and humanity. Now, apart from
functionality, is it important to understand inner life of the Blessed Trinity?
It is because the Trinity is “the central mystery
of the Christian faith and of Christian life” (CCC 261). In order that we
worship the one true God, we need to know the God whom we adore. If not, we
might fall in any one of these heresies—monarchianism, modalism, tritheism,
subordinationism and so forth.
So, who is He? The God who is one in three persons.
When someone asks: “Who are you”? This question
might elicit a reply like “I am a human being”. That is not properly the
answer. Instead it should be the response to this question: “What are you”? The
question who one is should draw the response, “I am so Mary” or Joseph or Peter
and so forth.
Both the pronouns “what” and “who” may help us
navigate one of the hardest theological mysteries that Christianity stands on:
a belief in One God who is a Trinity of persons. The Trinity are the same in
what they are—they are one. But, they are different in who they are—they are
three. If you were to ask God this question, “Who are you?”, you will draw
three answers as in “I am the Father”, “I am the Son” and “I am the Holy
Spirit”. But, when you ask them “What are you?”, then the Father, the Son and
the Holy Spirit, each will answer, “I am God”.
But that does not make them three gods.
The Council of Florence in AD1338-1445 gives us
definitions which might help us understand better the reality that God is
Trinitarian. When we speak of what constitute the Blessed Trinity, there is one
nature in God. There are two processions—generation and spiration. There are
three persons and finally there are four relations.
There are two processions in God because the Son
“proceeds” from the Father, and the Holy Spirit “proceeds from the Father and
the Son”. Out of these two processions we derive four eternal relations but
realise that there can only be three persons in God. The four eternal relations
in God are.
1. The Father actively and eternally generates
the Son.
2. The Son is passively generated of the
Father.
3. The Father and the Son actively spirate the
Holy Spirit.
4. The Holy Spirit is passively spirated of
the Father and the Son
Only relations 1, 2 and 4 are persons. Both the
Father and the Son actively spirating the Holy Spirit cannot constitute another
“person” because they are already persons in relation to each other in 1 and 2.
The Trinity in One is how we describe our God. If
you can remember your baptism, you were not baptised in the Names but
specifically in the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.
Nor did you sign yourselves after dipping your finger into the Holy Water font,
in the Names. This doctrine is not of our invention but rather it is a
revelation from God Himself. Apart from the Great Commission at the end of
Matthew’s Gospel, Sacred Scripture gives us plenty of references to God as
being one in three.
According to the Compendium of the Catechism, “God
has left some traces of His trinitarian being in creation and in the Old
Testament but His inmost being as the Holy Trinity is a mystery which is
inaccessible to reason alone or even to Israel’s faith before the Incarnation
of the Son of God and the sending of the Holy Spirit. This
mystery was revealed by Jesus Christ and it is the source of all the other
mysteries [CCCC 45].
Before Jesus and Pentecost, we could not have known
in a definitive manner that God is a Trinity. It is God Himself who draws us
into the relationship He wants to have with us as Father, Son and the Holy
Spirit.
A good analogy for the description of the 4
relations but 3 persons, that is, a good way of conceptualising the Trinity, is
to describe God as love. If God is love, then the nature of love is
self-communication. Humanly speaking, we describe a person as “bursting” with
joy. Is that not a metaphor for self-communication? If God is the penitude of love,
then the Father is the lover. The lover has to have a beloved. Hence, God the
Son is the beloved. St Paul’s Letter to the Colossians gives us this beautiful
insight that Jesus is the image of the Unseen God which
makes our Creed comes alive when we recite it—“God from God, Light from
Light, True God from True God, begotten not made. consubstantial with the
Father”. In the eternal reflexion of the Lover and the Beloved, we find
the mutual love between Father and Son who is the Holy Spirit. The best illustration
for this mutuality is to picture both the Father and Son breathing or actively
spirating in one accord the perfect love for each other. It is in this image of
the Father, the Son and the Love between them that man is called Imago Dei,
made in the image and likeness of God. He invites us into the love that exists
within the Trinity of persons.
When we know a person, we often know him or her
through the work they perform. In a way then, God’s work, that is the economic
Trinity, is how we get to know Him. But, to know someone functionally is rather
different from knowing someone personally. We ease without effort into a
functional relationship. You see this in our Church—people calling each other
only because of work, no?[1]
There is a shortage of EOMHC and a functional call is put out to get people to
step up and fill the vacuum. Functionality helps us to keep a distance but when
we get to know a person personally, we enter into their lives. At a human
level, the entrance into a person’s life can be messy because of the human
condition. For example, a beggar. It is so easy to give him RM10 and in out in
our mind the Last Judgement hoping that Jesus will remember us when He
separates sheep from goats. At the same time pray that the beggar will have
moved on to his next target. It is too messy to get into the reality of a
beggar’s life.
But with God, it is different altogether. To enter
into the personal life of God is to enter into the love of God. If God is love,
then the Trinity is His best description. This Trinitarian God loves us and
wants us to know Him. He created us out of love, and we are meant to live in
His love and to live for love. Without an appreciation of the love that God is
and what we are called to, it is impossible to embrace Jesus’ teaching of
laying down one’s life for the other and also to love one’s enemies. If God is
relationship, created in the image of God just means that we are created for
relationships. Thus, every Sunday is basically Trinity Sunday—a celebration not
of doctrine or dogma but of who God is and whom we are called to be—imago
Dei—a reflexion of the relationship that God is. This is the
magnificent power of love that the world sorely needs to witness. Instead, like
the rest of the world, we are often drunk in the love of power failing to
realise that only the power of love can change the human heart. Hence, if
Christianity were to make more sense than all the competing religions, then the
best conviction it can give the world is the love of the Trinity, the Father,
Son and Holy Spirit working in us and through us.
[1]To a certain extent, utilitarianism, practical
though it may be, can leave us with a sense of dissatisfaction that is
destructive. How so? Highly autonomous self-made creatures usually prefer
functional relationships because they are practical and professsional, minus
the messiness of emotional attachments. Hence, we use others as stepping stones
to becoming who we are. In a world which is thoroughly messing, utilitarianism
which has for its principle the greatest happiness of the greatest number of
people, may account for the fact that we are trying so hard to proof to God
that He is deficient in His works. The quest for justice, even though noble,
could also be symptomatic of us trying to show God short and we here on earth
struggle our mighty best to make the world aright so that we can present the
world, a better world, back to God. It is definitely a symptom of our lack of
trust in this God whom we have been invited to know personally.
