Theology Corner: Examining the doctrine of the Trinity
March 21, 2007
Logan Fidler
I was raised in a Pentecostal church. My church had a well-groomed, well-tanned pastor who had a stereotypical pastor’s wife with rock-hard hair done up with an entire bottle of hairspray. Every Sunday morning I would go and observe 500-plus people raising their voices and hands to the heavens, worshipping God. I didn’t understand. In all my years at that church, the one thing I learned was that people go crazy on Sunday morning, and Jesus loves me. I didn’t learn about theology, eschatology, the nature of original sin, the doctrine of the Trinity, or any other theological concept central to Christian faith and praxis.
An interesting dialectic is at play in many mainstream Christian hermeneutics of both everyday life and the Bible, as was evident in my church experience. This dialectic is between two “aspects” of religion commonly seen as opposing one another: the theological and the experiential. The church I was raised in emphasized the experiential aspect of religion at the cost of any serious theological understanding. This overemphasis on the experiential is a deficient way of approaching Christianity.
The common question that arises when theology is discussed is, how in anyway does understanding theology contribute to my life as a Christian? Or, in other words, what’s the point of dedicating mental resources to what is often a contentious task?
In the early years following the time of the apostles, Christian theology began to blossom and became more widely discussed. How is Jesus related to the Father, and the Holy Spirit? How should the church be structured? How should the Christian life be oriented? These were the types of question that arose. They were questions that had to be answered if Christianity was to present itself as a relatively united force in the Greco-Roman world and beyond.
Many of the early Church Fathers took as a fundamental assumption that Christian faith and praxis should be structured as the heavenly was structured. This assumption was based on New Testament teaching, and, in particular, on the Epistle to the Ephesians: “And he put all things beneath his feet and gave him as head over all things to the church, which is his body, the fullness of the one who fills all things in every way” (1:22-23). For this reason the older traditions, such as Catholicism and Eastern Orthodox, structured their sacraments and praxis as re-enactments of already divinely established structures.
For the early Fathers, having a right understanding of God led to salvation, and a wrong understanding led to ruin. For this reason, the early Church produced creedal statements, such as the famous Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed, which cemented the basic, orthodox theology of Christianity. The early Church understood that the theological and experiential were immanently connected.
Now that I have explained the need for theology, I will try to illustrate briefly how a greater understanding of a commonly held theological concept, the Trinitarian nature of the Godhead, can lead to a distinctive Christian spiritual life. An important aspect of the doctrine of the Trinity is the posture that each member has towards the other, and the love that exists between them. The posture of the Father, the first member of the Trinity, towards the Son is an eternal act of gifting the divine nature to the Son; the posture of the Son towards the Father is an act of an eternal reception of that gift. The Holy Spirit, breathed forth by both the Father and the Son, represents their love to the world, and thus keeps the Trinity from being a self-enclosed love. Each member of the Trinity is what the other is, but not who the other is; identity is maintained but also one-ness at the same time.
Though this is hardly a thorough explanation, it offers us an interesting insight. First, as the Father, our posture towards other people should reflect a gifting of ourselves towards the other; second, as the Son, our reception of others should be an open embrace, with a willingness to accept them, not despite their foibles, but because of them.
This shouldn’t be seen as exhausting the insights we can receive from understanding theology, but only as a baby step into a place where we can start to understand that theology can be efficacious for living a distinct Christian spiritual life.
Now you go...
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