The Divine Universe

The doctrine of the Holy Trinity is often over-mystificated, but religious people should be mystified. A sense of mystery is an important element of religious experience. God is the ultimate mystery. Jews do not even attempt to speak his name. The ninety-nine names proclaimed by Moslems are abstract attributes; physical images are forbidden. Christianity, Michael Ramsey said, is the most materialistic of all religions (this will be evident as this essay proceeds) but many Christians recognise the shallowness and near idolatry of our masculine, human images.

The doctrine of the Holy Trinity is not intended to mystify us with an arithmetical riddle; it is intended to give clarity and precision to our thinking. The Nicene Creed is a brilliant summary of many centuries of Jewish religious experience, and the Christ event in particular. It is immensely helpful in any attempt to put our own experience of God into some order. But the danger of fragmenting or partitioning our image of God is ever present. Athanasius and the church fathers of Nicea and Chalcedon were at pains to affirm the absolute unity of God. Any devotional or dialectic use of the doctrine of the Trinity that compromises or confuses us about God’s absolute unity is bad theology.

The council of Nicea was called by the emperor Constantine, primarily to settle the hotly debated question of Jesus’ fundamental nature: was he, the Jews’ Messiah, holy but simply human, or was he divine, the God-man? The council finally voted to affirm the latter opinion: Jesus was divine.

The form of their statement reflects classical philosophical thinking. The Creed states that Jesus was “of one substance with the Father”. The word substance (Greek ousios) is used in the sense that Plato used it, meaning the essential nature of something. On the religious level also, the notion of a divine human being is Hellenistic. Though entirely foreign to Jewish tradition, human gods and goddesses were a familiar part of Greco-Roman culture.

There is no doubt that the intention of the Council was to affirm something much more than that Jesus was merely one of the Greek gods, but their idea was more acceptable in the predominantly gentile fourth century church than it could have been earlier in a predominantly Jewish one. (We recall that Jesus had been condemned to death by the Sanhedrin because they deliberately interpreted his answer to their question as to whether he was the Messiah as a claim to be equal with God.)

However, against the background of the earliest Christian writings, the Creed tells us about much more than the nature and status of one man. In Paul’s letters and in the prologue of John’s Gospel there are clear statements that Christ is an eternal and cosmic being – infinitely more than one individual man. The whole of creation is in Christ and comes into being through him. If then, as the Nicene fathers affirm, Christ is divine and co-equal with God, it follows that everything is part of the material embodiment or incarnation of God. This fits in with the belief of creation from nothing (ex nihilo). There is nothing from which God can create the universe except himself

Jesus referred to God as “our Father”. Bear in mind that, at that time, it was believed that a woman was merely an incubator for a complete potential human being, generated and delivered by the man. Paul saw creation as female to God, “in labour” like a woman in childbirth. And Saint Francis saw that our divine kinship extends to the whole of creation.

The really new idea that emerges from the Nicene Creed, and the early Christian writings I referred to, is that physical reality – matter and energy, space and time – is divine. The fourteenth century German mystic, Meister Eckhart, said, “God is everything, but everything is not God”. No single entity, not even Jesus the Messiah, is all that we mean by God; God is the totality of all existence. God is the very essence of existence, the source of all being. And this includes material nature.

Importantly, we need not regard material nature as a finite entity. Our range of observation will always be limited, but many cosmologists believe that the universe, the totality of physical existence, is infinite, though all but a small part is beyond any possible observation.

The work of scientists of many disciplines over the last century has revealed that the universe is not just a collection of inanimate things with a tiny amount of biological matter here and maybe elsewhere also. The whole universe is a living, growing, evolving organism. Some philosophers of science also argue that the universe is also a psychic entity – it has mind. In animals, mind and matter meet. Cosmic mind is materially manifest in brains. But our thoughts and imagination are not spatially located in our skulls; to some extent they are a globally shared experience. Physicist, Brian Swimme, says we should see the universe as a spiritual event, not a material entity. We should notice that this contemporary thinking originates in some of the earliest Christian writings and was codified in classical philosophical terms in the fourth century.

The doctrine of the Trinity gives us a way of ordering our experience of God. It suggests that we experience God at three levels. Firstly, with our faculty for abstract thought, we define God as the very essence of existence and source of all being – the “Father” of creation. Secondly, with our spiritual sensibility we perceive God as goodness. Paul specified the qualities of goodness to the Galatians: love, joy, serenity, faithfulness, gentleness and so on. And thirdly, though we see these qualities only in people, God shows himself also through the beauty and wonder of all of nature.

We also experience what we think of as not God. If we only ever experienced pleasure, the idea of a good God in a flawed world would not enter our minds. But we know both the warmth of the summer sun and the cruel winds of winter, the fertility of the earth, watered from the heavens, and the dire experience of drought and famine, kindness and wisdom in some people but viciousness and stupidity in others. Finally, with our analytical faculty, we think about God in abstract terms: pure being, both immanent in and transcendent to everything.

The doctrine of the Trinity is not about three gods in one God; it is about three ways in which we experience the Holy One, the un-nameable LORD, the ultimate mystery.