The Politics of the Trinity Michael Knowles

God as Understood in Judaism

It is helpful to compare the Christian faith in these matters with the faith of Judaism and Islam.

The Judaic understanding of God as in the Old Testament is not the fullness of God’s revelation as in Christ. As became crucially apparent and significant for early Christianity in its understanding and defining of itself in the very first moments of its existence, one major aspect of the Judaic understanding of God is of God as god of a tribe or nation. He is their God. He has one chosen people and no other. His power and concern is conceived as centred on one people. The rest of humanity is secondary to the election and status of Israel. “For you are the people whom the Lord brought out of Egypt, from the smelting furnace, and took for his own possession” (Deut. 4.20). The Jews conceived of him as a very jealous God (ibid.v.24) who in return for making them and them only to be the people he has chosen demands that they have no other gods and serve and worship him only.

This notion of God and of God’s people is not the Christian notion, though it is one that served a primary preparatory purpose in salvation history. The exclusivity that is intrinsic to this Judaic notion is not Christian. Peter saw that, though as the Acts describe the experience for us, it took him a colossal effort to do so. His encounter with the Roman soldier Cornelius in the midst of all the debates he was involved in in the Christian communities of Jerusalem and Antioch and the vision he had while praying on a rooftop in the town of Joppa finally swept away the Jewish religious and nationalistic prejudices of his mind. With astonishing bravery of mind he recognised, he acknowledged and he repudiated the deep-rooted, indeed institutional, racism of the religion he has been brought up in: “I need not tell you that a Jew is forbidden by his religion to visit or associate with a man of another race. Yet God has shown me clearly that I must not call any man profane or unclean. …I now see how true it is that God has no favourites but that in every nation the man who is god-fearing and does what is right is acceptable to him” (Acts 10.34-5).

This was likewise the great insight of Paul in the monumental struggle he had with the early Judaic versions of Christianity: “There is no such thing as Jew and Greek, slave or free man, male and female, for you are all one person in Christ Jesus” (Gal.3. 28). Never has racism, class divisions and sexism been so thoroughly, pithily, profoundly and expressly denounced. It is of enormous significance for our day and age, when the barriers between races and peoples are breaking down on all sides in a way the world has never before experienced and when peoples of many different races are having to live with each other cheek and jowl, doorstep by doorstep, that the very first decision of the Church in Council, among the very first declarations of the apostles Peter and Paul themselves, was this profoundly theological, and thundering, denunciation of racism –a Council decree we must, for all its difficulties and all our prejudices, put into practice in our own lives and in the life of the Church if we want to be Christian. In like manner we must recognise and acknowledge that the Church will never be fully Christian until in its liturgy and its sacraments and in the exercise of its teaching and authority it puts into practice, not just the repudiation of racism, but also this repudiation of sexism; and that it will never be fully Christian until it repudiates the structures, practices, strappings and company of secular power. Secular power is ‘of this world’. It is prone to sin. The Church of Christ should stand without fear and hesitation at the side of the powerless and everyone at whom the exercised of power is aimed, which was where Christ stood, as did his mother beneath his cross. Power in a Christian state should be as exercised by Christ, as a servant. Power in a Christian state should be modelled on the Trinity, a relationship of equals