Is that possible?
On one side, there is the monolithic monotheism, quite a mouthful, in what we experience of Judaism or Islam. We share an Abrahamic history with these two major religions and unsurprisingly, they hold Christianity in disdain for what they view to be a blasphemy against the central tenet of monotheism which is the unicity or oneness of God. On the other side, in the face of the many divinities of the other religions, we have to defend a central but perplexing dogma which in the first place resembles the pluralism of deities as we confess that in God there are three Persons in One.
In short, the belief in the Trinity divides rather than invites. Even Karl Rahner, the noted theologian at Vatican II lamented that by and large, Christians are “mere monotheists” and if the Church were to declare that the Trinity is no longer a dogma, this will have no impact on their lives. Ironically, the only “trinity” which truly matters to many is “I, me and myself”.
The Trinity is the self-revelation of God that is somehow conveniently ignored, if not forgotten. In fact, it is so inconsequential that we may have been praying to Three Gods (Tritheism) for all we know.
How so?
The Collect is Trinitarian because it always addressed to the Father through Jesus Christ in the unity of the Holy Spirit. The familiar formulæ of the different Collects end like this in Latin: “Deus, per omnia sæcula sæculorum” which, when translated into English, became “ONE God, forever and ever”. In May of 2020, a notice came from the Congregation for Divine Worship that the English translation must reflect the correct formulation of the Church by removing the word ONE.
Why is the omission important?
Firstly, this prayer is a 4th century formulation, adopted to combat the Arian heresy which held that Jesus Christ became God, rather than having been God eternally. Thus, “Deus” in Latin refers to the earlier mention of “the Son” and it is a Christological and an anti-Arian affirmation. A way to understand this formulation is to read it like this: “through our Lord Jesus Christ your Son, who lives and reigns with you (O Father) in the unity of the Holy Spirit, [for He is] GOD, forever and ever”. The parenthesis [for He is] captures Who Jesus is in His nature. He is divine in nature. Therefore, there is no need for the word “ONE” because the focus of our prayer is not on the unity of God. Even though the Collect is Trinitarian in expression, the context of the usage of the word “Deus” or God shows that it is not referring to the oneness of the Blessed Trinity.
Secondly, our prayers are expressions of the ancient principle of lex orandi, lex credenda—the Church believes as she prays. According to the explanatory note of Bishops of England and Wales, to add the word “ONE” before God “undermines the unique dignity of the Son within the Trinity or it could lead to an interpretation that Jesus is one God amongst three Gods”. In other words, such a formulation damages our faith in the uniqueness of God.
The Creed we profess expresses a belief that God is one in essence but three in Persons. In the Old Testament, there were already hints. In Jesus, the picture becomes clearer because He is the revelation par excellence of who God is ad intra. He reveals that God is trinitarian in nature.
And why is this important?
Who God is, is central to the Mission of the Church. Just before Jesus ascended, He gave the Great Commission to the Apostles that they should “go and baptise all nations in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit”. They were not commanded to go and baptise in the NAMES of the Father… This formula, reflecting, who God is, is as important as to render invalid a priest’s ordination because a très chic cleric chose to deviate from the norm when baptising a child by using these words “We baptise you”. [1]
Christ gave the Great Commission to evangelise so that He can incorporate every man, woman and child into the family of God. Right at the beginning, we are initiated in the life of the Trinitarian God who is the Father, who is the Son and who is the Holy Spirit. The relationships between these three distinct Persons characterised by one who loves and one who is loved and the love between them become the template for us with respect to our relationships. The language surrounding the Trinity is hard because its task is to safeguard the truth about who God is as He reveals Himself to us through Jesus Christ in the Holy Spirit.
Therefore, who God is, is the measure of who we are supposed to be. Just like the “standard” weight kept somewhere in a vault in Paris,[2] there must be a measure for us in building up human relationships. We find that fundamental measure in the Blessed Trinity of Father, Son and Spirit[3] because we are “imago Dei”—created in the image and likeness of God. But, given our inclination toward “self-determination”, it would appear that our need for God has grown weaker. In fact, a forgetfulness of the Trinity may be the cause of our “destructive inward turn”. When Man forgets that there is a standard beyond himself, when there is no “objective measure” like the Parisian kilogramme, he will always be tempted to remodel God according to the dictates of his present narratives. If we have no need of God, then His only utility is that He serves to validates who we are or rather who we want to be. And currently, in an era of identity confusion, as seen in the recent attempt to redefine marriage, we are now caught in yet another ideological war that continues to pummel the Christian understanding of the human person, marriage and the family.
How God chooses to reveal Himself to us is our salvation. No matter how much we want to dismantle patriarchy, it is basically an effort to remodel Him into our image and likeness and that is not salvation but self-destruction. To become more human, we need to become more divine or rather we should reflect in our lives, the God who is a trinity of relationships. As St Irenaeus said, “Vita hominis visio Dei”, which means that "the life of a man is the vision of God." We who are baptised are granted a vision of this Trinitarian God in which the Father and the Son united in the Holy Spirit is a loving and self-giving unity. The Holy Trinity is the pattern for our love and our life. Hence, we who have been given the grace of the Gospel are empowered and energised by this Trinitarian love to go out to make more disciples because there is still a world waiting to accept what we have been privileged to receive.
[1]It was trendy at one time to baptise using a formula that is less “patriarchally offensive”. Thus, “I baptise you in the name of the Creator, the Redeemer and the Sanctifier”. It definitely sounds enlightened to use neutral language, but it misses the theological reality that the Father and the Son are relational terms whereas the Creator and Redeemer could mean anything from “modalism” to “bitheism”. An American priest was baptised with this formula “We baptise you…” as in “In the name of the father and mother, of the godfather and of the godmother, of the grandparents, of the family members, of the friends, in the name of the community, we baptise you…”. The implication is immense because invalid baptism invalidates the subsequent Sacraments of Confirmation and Orders as well as render invalid the sacramental acts of priestly absolution in Confession and consecration at the Eucharist.
[2] This piece of information may be useless, but it gives us a clue about what is needed to make the world run. It is standards or measures. When every form of behaviour is acceptable (except for a few crimes), then “objectivity” or measure becomes by and large irrelevant. Yet, there is a meticulousness about this so-called “standard” kilogramme upon which all weights are measured from. The bid to dismantle “objectivity” arises because it is considered to be too “judgemental” except for a few crimes—like murder or child molestation, thereby “curbing” human “freedom” for self-expression. The useless bit of information is that there is a metal piece of kilogramme made of platinum and iridium that resides under lock and key. It is called the International Prototype Kilogramme (IPK). Since its creation in 1889, it is the standard by which the world’s weights are defined. Originally, 1kg was defined as the mass of a cubic decimetre of water, while the metre itself was calculated as a fraction of the distance between the North Pole and the Equator. In 1798, the Metre was officially redefined as 1/10,000,000th of half the Earth’s meridian. They have since adopted Planck’s constant, which is the smallest action that can be taken by a photon. And so a kilogramme is now defined as Planck’s constant divided by 6.626,070,15 × 10−34 m−2s. The painstaking scrupulosity with regard to the accuracy of the weight reminds us that there is still some “objective” reality to which we conform ourselves too. The world may have been created for us. But, we are not the sole measure of the world.
[3]The Father begets the Son from eternity. The Son is begotten of the Father from eternity. The Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son from eternity.
