e- maging the rinity

Our Personhood and the Trinity

Here is a new, contemporary way to look at the Trinity. We have heard a lot of coded words, such as "Father, Son, and Holy Ghost", "from the substance of the Father", "homoousios!!!", and so forth. These phrases arise in the second through fourth centuries in trying to understand how there is one God, yet Jesus is divine and had sent the divine Holy Spirit to us. So is there one God or three? Here is a metaphor, which may help understand how there is only one.

We are made in God's image. So let our metaphor be a human person. When we think of ourselves, we think of a person with a body, mind, soul, personality, etc. We have an interior life and self-identity that we may or may not share with anyone. Often we share it only in part and filtered. This is the first person, the "I".

When someone else interacts with us, they see our body and mannerisms, hear our words and our affected directly by our actions. What they see is an expression of our total selves and a partial, mediated image of that first person. Further this expression varies depending with whom we interact. This is the second person, the "You".

When we are absent, having interacted with someone, they are still influenced by us and through them, our influence may continue, although mediated by the "apostle". This is the third person, the "S/He".

Now, likewise is the Godhead. God, "the Father" is like the first person with a sense of self and personality, often hidden and never totally revealed. Jesus, "the Son" is like the second person as an external expression of the first. And the Holy Spirit is like the third person maintaining and sustaining Jesus' influence from generation to generation, but dependent upon the faithfulness of the believers.

However, we are imperfect. We may be unaware of whole parts of our 'first person' and even feel alienated from parts of it. Our 'second person' is not always charismatic and may be even unintentional in many of its acts. Our 'third person' may not be as nourishing as it ought to be. But God is perfect. So God is perfect in knowledge of the Godhead as Jesus and the Holy Spirit is perfect. Yet just as our 'first person' is influenced and changed by what our 'second person' did and what our 'third person' affects (if we get wind of it!), so the first person of God was deeply affected by Jesus and continues to be by the Holy Spirit.

These three persons emerge out of a single 'personhead', united (we hope!), yet thricely appearing.

Questions for discussion

1. In what ways might the Trinity be a model for our living?
2. In what ways does your 'persons' express the divinity of the Godhead?
3. How would you re-image the two natures (human and divine) of Jesus?

The Trinity in the Communion Prayer

See the Service of Word and Sacrament I, A, New Century Hymnal, pp 6-8.

1. How is God (the first person of the Trinity ) expressed?
• works in creation
• will for creation
• convenant with creation
• sending Jesus to us
2. How is earthly Jesus (the second person of the Trinity) expressed?
• humanity and passion
3. Where is the Holy Spirit's (the third person of the Trinity) presence and power invoked?
4. What is said of Christ? Is this Jesus? or all three persons?

The Iris and the Trinity

Consider the iris. It consists of three layers of petals. Each layer has exactly three petals. Hence there are 3x3 petals total. The inner, hidden ones are the anthers protruding above three bristle beards (that look like catepillars). These are laden with pollen and surround the stigmatic. Hence the reproductive organs are here. The upper layer of petals are the standards. These petals are vertical. The lower three petals are the falls and these are horizontal.

The iris is a case of God's image made visible in the creation. From a Celtic point of view, this is what is call færie. Imagine the anthers as the inner life of God: the first person of the Trinity. Herein lies the mystery of the creative power of God. The vertical standards can be seen as representative of Jesus Christ, the second person of the Trinity. Jesus "stood up" for righteousness and is our model of faith and praxis. The horizontal falls can be seen as representative of the Holy Spirit, the third person of the Trinity. They reach out from the iris to all of creation. And the Holy Spirit is our guide and our sustainer in reaching out and embracing the world.

Yet God is one. If you remove any of the three layers, you no longer have a working iris. The blossom is a whole and its beauty and wonder and mystery is in its wholeness. And similarly God is one, a unity represented by three interrelated parts or persons. The Trinity, three persons in one, is an image of community and interrelationship. God is not so much an individual any more than the anthers or standards can stand alone, but a community. God is a unity of community in relationship interiorly with itself and exteriorly with all of creation.

Just as God's image is reflected in the creation. We should reflect God in our private and public affairs. In this praxis, we must recognize that we are a community of people and of nations, not separate colonies independent, but identifiable groups interdependent. All people are children of God; all nations are in God's love, including Iraq, Iran, Palestine, Africa, the USA, the EU, ... "No [one] is an island unto themselves. Therefore, ask not for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee." We are called to order our affairs to reconcile, to make peace, to celebrate the beauty of diversity in community.

Questions for discussion

1. Consider H₂O: it is ice, water, and steam; three in one. What does this tell us about God?
2. Where else in nature do you see three in one?
3. What can be understood about God through this natural entity?

Consider that God has made the creation open-ended with free will. This is the eternal or primodial nature of God; the First Person. God has created creation to be co-creative with the attraction towards God. But with free will intrinsic in that creation, even in the unconscious creation in the form of tectonic plates and biological mutations, the very forces that make life possible can also destroy life. For example, earthquakes and associated tsunamis are caused when the tectonic plates slide under each other. This is caused by the rotating core of the earth. But this same rotation creates the magnetosphere which protects us from solar and cosmic radiation.

But the Loving God does not just wind up the creation and watch it run. God also enters into the creation and partakes of its joys and sufferings. God, the Second Person, truly, really enjoys the creation and suffers because of it. God, the Crucified, knows and understands the danger of free will. God suffers in natural disasters, and probably like any creator, agonizes over a creation that at times is harmful.

But the Loving God does not just empathize with us. God also is present in the deeds and actions to overcome the suffering cause by nature. God, the Third Person is the Spirit of compassion, hope, and resolution that can follow on a natural disaster.

Questions for discussion:

1. Where have you experienced God in the power and might of nature?
2. Where have you seen the suffering of God in the midst of suffering?
3. Where have you seen the loving God in recovery and restoration after a natural disaster?

God, the First Person, in God's eternal or primodial nature, is the ground of all potentiality. God knows all possibilities and provides the wherewithal to activate possibilities. This is the divine mystery: that no matter how much we learn of God, there is always more to be learned. The universe reflects the mystery of God in Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle that is at the root of the universe as veiled reality. As we are in the image of God, it is this nature of God that gives us the ability to explore, discover and create. Our striving for transcendance is rooted in the God, the mysterious. But God, the First Person, is also the ground of being that sustains the mystery and the becoming of the universe.

God is dipolar: not only eternal, but also temporal. But this temporal or consequent nature of God for Christians is manifested discretely in the person of Jesus Christ, the Incarnated God and Resurrected Christ. And the consequent nature is also manifested in an on-going fashion in the Holy Spirit that continues God's temporal presence.

God, the Second Person, in God's discrete consequent nature, is the kenotic aspect of the Godhead: God's self-emptying for the sake of the creation. Murphy and Ellis in their book On the Moral Nature of the Universe describes how God's kenotic image is reflected in the creation, God's renunciation of the divine self for the sake of the creation. We see the image of God in the kenotic behavior of the creation. A central feature of biological life is the recycling of materials through many generations. We are only lent the materials of our body to use for a while and then to return them to nature. Similarly the stars become and perish in the great chain of being. Death, therefore, is necessary. Giving of one's life is, therefore, redemptive. Thus, the kenotic God is non-coersive, but persuasive. No matter how much God wants something, God will not impose it. Therefore, God keeps God's covenant of free will with the universe, by making the universe deeply ordering, but yet open-ended. Though God remains hidden, God has created a love-friendly universe full of grace, through the attractive forces of diversity, complexification, and self-organization we see in immergent behavior. Through the Resurrected Christ, the Logos, we discover the mystery of the beautiful, surprisingly rational order that God has created. It is the Second Person that is reflected in the "unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics."

Yet at the root of this order is openness, uncertainity, and transformation. God, the Third Person, in God's on-going consequent nature, is the manifested transformative interrelationships holding the actualized cosmos together in a balance of order and chance. This is God as continuing co-creator inviting us into the creative process. Through a Providence only discernable through the eyes of faith, creation is given the gift of creation. Not only is God continuing to create, but the creation -- humans intentionally -- also create augmenting the cosmos. The cosmos is an information generating universe. Out of the dialectic of becoming and perishing, of the old giving way to the new, new information emerges. God may intereact with the creation by the input of new information through the openness of the cosmos as codified in such principles as Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle and Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem, and organized in such theories as neo-Darwinian Evolution and consilience. But the creation itself generates new information in the evolution of the genome, in the inventions of humans, and in the contemplation of the Divine. It is through the Third Person that we form transformative communities, including the Body of Christ and the community of scientists, that, intentionally or unintentionally interact with God to transform the creation.

Where have you experienced in nature:

1. the mystery of God?
2. the self-emptying of creation?
3. tranformation?