The Politics of the Trinity Michael Knowles

At the Core of Christianity

The reality of the Trinity is not just a doctrine to be believed. It is a reality which must govern every aspect of our being as surely as the Trinity created our being in its likeness. From a religion’s notion of God should flow all its moral teaching and all its perspectives on human relationships. To be true to their theology adherents of a religion should work to create a society in the image and the likeness of its god. An emphasis on authority and power will logically follow from Islamic theology, specifically its understanding of revelation. Exclusivism will follow on the Judaic belief that the Jewish people alone are God’s people. The Christian God being community and equality of persons, the direction any truly Christian society should take should be towards community and equality. Christendom should be a commonwealth where wealth and power are diffused equally -and in a sense removed in that process.. Furthermore, because at the core of the Christian message is the revelation that God is Love and the Persons of the Trinity are equal, every relationship between human beings made in God’s image and likeness should be one of love and equality, be it marriage, parenthood, employment, and citizenship. And so it should between nations. As the three Persons are equal, their image and likeness should be equal. The subordination of women to men and denying women opportunities available to men is contrary therefore to our faith. “Bone from my bone, flesh from my flesh…the two become one flesh” (Gen. 2.23f) anticipates the ‘ab utroque’. Differences exist of course. Just as the Father is not the Son and neither the Spirit. But inequality, no. Anything therefore in church practice which entails or implies inequality is contrary to faith. There is always development in understanding and in due course in this matter the People of God will become aware of what their faith entails and recognise the prejudice they operate under. One day we will be able to apply to this matter that pivotal statement of St.Augustine: “This is indeed my faith since it is the Catholic Faith” (De Trin.bk.1.ch.4) As he says in the same book: “We must not shrink from inquiry if we are in any way in doubt; or be ashamed to learn if we are in any way in error”.

“Put love first”, said St. Paul (1.Cor.14.1). “Let all you do be done in love” (16.14). Unless we live out the community of the Three Persons in our own being, we frustrate our own being at it deepest existential roots. In Christianity ‘love’ is not a pious thing. It is an existential thing. “With deep roots and firm foundations, may you be strong enough to grasp with all God’s people what is the breath and length and height of the love of Christ and to know it, though it is beyond knowledge. So you may attain to fullness of being, the fullness of God himself” (Eph.3.18f). That isn’t about piety, that is about being. The writer of the letter spells it out even further: “Be generous to one another, tender-hearted, forgiving one another as God in Christ forgave you. In a word, as God’s dear children, try to be like him and live in love as Christ loved you and gave himself up on your behalf as an offering and sacrifice whose fragrance is pleasing to God” (4.32-5.2). What Christ did wasn’t piety. The embrace of death, even death on a cross, wasn’t piety. God’s greatest, first and foremost commandment is not fear or wonder or awe or submission or obedience. Such things do not express the being of God. They just are not what religion’s about. They do not express the relationship of the Three Persons who are the Triune God. That relationship is what religion should be about and that relationship is not one of power but of love. Love expresses what God is. Love is attraction which seeks the well-being of the beloved as of oneself. ‘I am my beloved’s and my beloved is mine, he who delights in the lilies” (Song. 6.3).

This is mystery. And there is a momentous radicalism here too in Christ’s revelation of what religion is. Not just radicalism in the sense of going back to the roots of a movement. What Christ did was tear up the very roots of human religious understanding , till then grounded in human concepts and revealed God’s own thinking. God’s ways are not our ways. He made all things new. The Incarnation is total transformation, “born not of any human stock or by the fleshly desire of any human father but the offspring of God himself. So the Word became flesh” (Jn.1.13). This constitutes ‘grace and truth’ (v.14). In Christ the Triune God revealed his way of thinking and shredded our ways of thinking. God revealed himself in Christ, which revelation repudiates all human notions of religion which might fashion religion after the image and likeness of its own authoritarian, hierarchical, sexist and racial structures. In Christ the Triune God revealed himself as love; which revelation makes all things new.