“For: the Institute of contemporary and Emerging Worship Studies, St. Stephen’s University, Essentials Blue Online Worship Theology Course with Dan Wilt”
Ok, the Trinity. God is one but three. Weird. Who can blame our fellow Jewish and Muslim monotheists for misunderstanding Christian theology as polytheistic. I have to admit, I follow pretty well with the Father and the Son but the Spirit gets a little, well. . . , ethereal.
I think this difficulty is nothing new. In fact, as I understood it from my last church history class, the theology of the Trinity evolved as the church and its councils began sorting out the divinity of Christ and his relationship with his Father. The Holy Spirit was then understood as a part of that relationship but much less defined.
Perhaps brushing up on my church history could lead to a later post, but for now I just want to ask some of the questions in respect to the Trinity.
First, we start with the Creator. Obviously the Father, right? But then he didn’t just speak his fiat by himself, rather the Spirit was brooding on the waters, and later we learn in the eighth chapter of Proverbs that Wisdom was not only with God (v.27) but was his craftsman (v.30.) Before I get accused for trying to add a fourth member of the Trinity we find the statement at the outset of John’s Gospel that the Word (clearly a personification of Christ here, which becomes flesh in v. 14) was with God in the beginning and through whom all things were made.
My point, or rather the understanding of many biblical scholars [1 & 2] is that the traditions of Word and Wisdom combine in the Logos, the second Person of the Trinity: the Son–although Wright seems to put these traditions into the Holy Spirit [3].
But regardless whether the Son or the Holy Spirit culminate the Word and Wisdom traditions of the Old Testament, we are left with the fact that the Father was not alone at or in creation.
In light of this, one might ask the question whether any member of the Trinity acts independently of the other members. Well, Christ did seem to die on the cross independently. That is, in the moment he took on the sin of the world the Father turned his face on him, right? Certainly, the Spirit led him there.
On the other hand, all persons were present and active even in this most terrible execution. Perhaps that’s it: if God is one being with different persons, perhaps those persons always act together in one accord, as it were, but with different roles.
Hmmm, food for thought…
[1] Brown, Ramond E., The Gospel According to John (i-xii) Vol.29. The Anchor Bible. Doubleday & Company, Inc: Garden City, New York, 1966.
[2] Talbert, Charles. Reading John. New York: Crossroad, 1992.
[3]N.T. Wright, Simply Christian: Why Christianity Makes Sense (San Francisco: HarperCollins Publishers, 2006)
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