Michael Knowles: the Politics of the Trinity 6

The Politics of the Trinity Michael Knowles

The Politics of the Trinity

On the Trinity our Christian faith rests. God as Triune –three equal persons who are one substance- and God emptying himself and taking human form, even the form of a slave –that must be the template for a Christian society, for its politics, its economy, its law, every workplace, every family distinguishing it from any other. It is not piety. It is hard practical stuff. It is the living out of justice, fairness, sharing and love.

It requires that our political and social structures be democratic. We must do our best to share political and economic power equally because the Three Persons are equal. That applies with equal force in the workplace and the family. Christ in Matthew chapter 23 is telling us to repudiate all the power structures of this world that deform and clutter up our minds. Somehow we must clean out our heads and see things in a completely new way. “But you must not be called ‘rabbi’ for you have one s (teacher? master? rabbi? The meaning varies from translation to translation) and you are all brothers. . That is so radical, it is virtually too difficult to handle). Do not call any man on earth ‘father’ for you have one father and he is in heaven. Nor must you be called teacher, for you have one teacher, the (Christ? Messiah? The latter I’d say). The greatest among you must be your servant”. This is all so radical it is virtually too hot to handle. This is the template, this is the blueprint. Any society which aspires to be Christian must be one where all are brothers and all are servants to each other. One wonders where Christianity has been for the last two thousand years.

It is highly significant that two of the most radical revolutions of human history - the French and the Russian- tackled language. They recognised that language can both imprison and liberate the mind, individually and collectively. For all the sad and sorry way both turned out, the titles ‘Citizen’ and ‘Comrade’ are powerful statements which still speak to us. Likewise the terms ‘brother’ and ‘sister’ in the monastic movement and in the British trade unions -used till very recently in the Labour Party. Used even by Labour Party leaders and prime ministers as well as the rank and file at annual conference but now of course very deliberately repudiated! Words matter. They can liberate the mind or they can manacle it. Honorific titles manacle the mind of both their holders and their audience. They are false consciousness both ways. They sit very badly in the vocabulary of the Church of Christ. Christ got by well enough with the name his father and mother gave him. It was the secular power which imposed on him the title King of the Jews. Peter was just called Peter, and Paul was just called Paul. Words matter. Christ prayed for this Father’s protection of his followers as people ‘not of this world as I am not of this world’. Yet the strappings and the garments and the company of the powers of this world exercise apparently irresistible power, now as then. “Whatever they do is done for show. They go about with broad phylacteries and wear deep fringes on their robes; they like to have place of honour at feasts and the chief seats in synagogues, to be greeted respectfully in the street and be addressed as rabbi” (ibid. 5-7).

Difficult though it is to find the golden mean and avoid stifling enterprise and initiative, significant and structural disparities in wealth and ownership of land and property are unchristian. “Give what you possess to the poor and come follow me” are the words of the Lord. Words purposely spoken, purposely preserved and purposely handed down by the gospel writer. For all their difficulty they are not decorative. We just have to work them through in a commonsense manner and apply them rationally in our lives. The grotesque disparities of wealth that exist between the rich developed world and the third world are unchristian.

So too are the disparities in income and opportunity which exist between men and women. If we are Trinitarian in our faith, we cannot accept them and we must oppose them. That is what the Christian religion must be. It is appalling that the disparities can be so great. In an article in the Guardian newspaper April 17^th 2003 in which she demonstrates the need to maintain the feminist struggle, Kristin Aune, lecturer at Westminster University, a Christian, spells out some of the major disparities very graphically: “British women earn 82% of men’s hourly wage. The two thirds of pensioners who are female exist on 53% of the income of the third who are male. Among new graduates women earn 19% less than men, (yet) have to pay the same for their education as men. Women do two thirds of the world’s work, earn a tenth of the world’s income and own a hundredth of the world’s property. Two thirds of illiterate people are women. More than 80% of the world’s two million girls between five and fifteen are coerced, abducted, sold or trafficked into the sex market. In Britain one in four women suffer domestic violence”.

All injustice and unfairness contradict the reality of the Trinity and therefore contradict our being. That is the essential point. Religion is not about worshipping God or fear of God. That is the ‘pagan’ or non-Christian notion of religion that by the grace and revelation of God the Judaic-Christian religion transcended. “There is no need for fear in love. Perfect love banishes fear. Fear brings with it the pains of judgement, and anyone who is afraid has not attained to love in its perfection. We love because he loved us first. Religion should be about being. God has no need of anything. God didn’t give with such ineffable generosity in the creation and the incarnation just for us to tremble before him and to worship him. The existence of God is the sharing of being, and injustice and unfairness negate us existentially. They hinder or prevent the indwelling of the Trinity. The indwelling of the Trinity, that ultimate existential goal, is what religion is about.

Christ “went about doing good”. Goodness is being. Evil is the absence of being. God alone is good for God is Being itself. To work for any institution or organisation, be it a bank, an insurance company, the World Bank, GATT, the WTO, a firm of lawyers, a government, private medicine, whatever, that exploits need or employs its power to subordinate the weak to its purposes or makes charges for its services, which exploits its power and the needs of others to its own advantage by its fees and charges, or like private or alternative medicine excludes the poor by reason of its fees, is unchristian. To be in an army that uses the weapons which the Church as condemned, indeed to have such weapons in the first place, is unchristian. To work for any pharmaceutical company in any capacity which exploits the sick and the poor, and that not just in the Third World, is unchristian. To engage in any military or scientific research which produces weapons of mass destruction is unchristian. To manufacture or sell cigarettes is unchristian. These are examples only. Christianity will only be taken seriously when Christians themselves take it seriously enough to live by it. Catholic Christianity is now in a farcical state when the Pope can condemn a war such as the Iraq war 2003 and thousands of American and British Catholics engage in it. Who can possibly take such a religion seriously? It is making itself a laughing stock.

Democracy and subsidiarity bring us closer to the being of God. The freedom which is an essential element of our own nature, and with it personal and collective responsibility, must be given fullest scope. The gospel has to be applied. If Christianity is not taken seriously by those who profess it, why should anyone else? Our ‘post-christian’ society may well be a product of a Christianity where those who profess it have actually ceased to take seriously. “My brothers, what use is it for a man to say he has faith when he has nothing to show for it?” (James 2.14).

“The faith of all Christians rests on the Trinity” is the assertion of the Catholic Catechism quoting St. Caesarius of Arles but if the belief in the Trinity is that important, in what way should it make the difference? The love that is the being of the Trinity and the equality and the oneness of the three Persons of the Trinity should be the difference. That is what should be our distinguishing feature -love, equality and oneness. Love of every human being, equality between every human being, oneness with every human being –that at the very least should be the hallmark of the Christian. Those three, based not on a philosophy but on our Christian faith that every human being is made in the image and likeness of the Triune God, inspiring a burning hope that God’s kingdom of love, quality and oneness might be achieved here on earth as in heaven.

This must not be a pious aspiration. It must be hard, practical and achievable. It must be realised in how we live. How we live is how we are. No employment may exploit anyone. No employment or career or profession should hurt or damage or humiliate anyone. Morality matters and Christian morality must be based, not on mere human reasoning, but on the reality of God as revealed in Christianity. Justice is the issue. Every single workplace, venture, industry and working practice has to be subjected to the torch of the law of Christ. Wages must be fair and there must be equal pay for women doing the same work and equal career prospects. That’s what Christianity is about and we should see to it that that’s what it’s about. There is no morality without God because there is no being without God and all talk otherwise is empty talk; and as God is Three Persons, all political, commercial, financial, legal and employment practices which do not express the love, community and equality which is the nature of the Trinity are unchristian. All fees and charges must be fair and commensurate to what people can afford. Fees and charges must never be such that only the rich can afford the service on offer. No one should make profit out of scarcity or the desperation of a community. No one should take advantage of another’s person’s need or weakness. And why? Because when mankind was in need and in sin and crying out for redemption, God emptied himself, taking the nature of a slave. That tells us what God is. That is how we should be. God is existent giving. Therefore the accumulation of wealth for its own sake and not for distribution is contrary to our being. God is not about power and majesty and authority. Those are man’s thoughts, not God’s. God is love. And he who abides in love abides in God and God in him. The reality of the Trinity must govern every aspect of our being as surely as the Trinity created our being in its own likeness. What else in practical terms, among other things, can Matthew Chapter 25 mean?

There is a distinct Christian ethic. Its source and foundation is the reality of the Triune God as revealed in and by Jesus Christ. It is God in his own Being as Three Persons existing in mutual love and equality, it is God as Giver of being and life in creation, and it is God as Redeemer and Grace-giver to all mankind in Jesus Christ, who by the will of the Father and the work of the Holy Spirit emptied himself and made himself a slave and died on behalf of mankind and rose again. It is an ethic which is not to be lost in the fog and maze of human philosophies or in the weaknesses and misgivings of academia. Christ declared himself in no uncertain terms to be the Light of the World, the Way, the Truth and the Life. He instructed his disciples to take his gospel to every creature. Like Christ Christian morality is distinctive and different and definite. That morality must as distinctive and different and definite in political affairs as in any other. The Peace of Christ must be set against the brutality of war, and the Generosity of Christ, even to death on the cross, against the greed and acquisitiveness of the powerful and the selfishness and hoarding of rich nations.

The love and community and equality of the Trinity must be the template of all relationships between nations, between the ruler and the ruled, between employer and employee, between husband and wife and between man and woman. The oneness and indivisibility, the one substance, of the Trinity likewise. We are one with each other. ‘Bone from my bones, flesh from my flesh’. All of us. Irrespective of age, sex, race, creed, colour, culture we are one. Existentially we are all from one source and we will return to that one source. Existentially we cannot escape our oneness and any effort we make against it results in existential frustration. That is the nature of our being. That is the point of the parable of the Good Samaritan. That is the criterion of the final judgement of each and everyone of us. “I tell you this: anything you did for one of the least of my brothers, however humble, you did for me” (Mt.25.40). (Gal. 3.28). The very purpose of God’s redemptive plan –the dispensation of the fullness of times - was the restoration of unity, of both man and the universe to God, so that God can be all in all, and “the universe, all in heaven and on earth, might be brought into a unity in Christ”(Eph.1.10.The Equal Opportunities Act, the Equal Pay Act and all legislation against discrimination for reasons of race or disability are reaching out with hands outstretched towards the fulfilment of this divine economy, God’s redemptive plan in Christ; and it is this that should be the preaching and campaigning of the Church which is the Body of Christ