The Park Road Pulpit

Math – “The study of the measurement, properties, and relationships of quantities, using numbers and symbols.”[1] Math is the language of all that is empirical -- that which can be seen, known, measured, evaluated, defined. 2 + 2 = 4. Math always “adds up.”[2]

Math is essential in our world. (I am glad some people actually understand it!) The economies of all the world’s cultures are dependent upon math: 2 + 2 = life (or death). And, the advancing understanding of math led the scientific revolution that gave birth to a world of “Enlightenment.” The theories of Copernicus, his “math problems” born out by observation and testing, led to the reframing of our entire universe. We are not the center of it all.

We moderns were born in the light of mathematics, out of the Dark Ages of superstition, fear, and magic. And math, this world’s great intellectual mid-wife continues her work, as scientists, whose titles I can hardly pronounce, write equations, whose terms I cannot even read, in pursuit of formulas, whose answers, like that of Copernicus, will continue to give birth to vast new worlds of understanding and life. Some wildly optimistic mathematicians, in fact, hold out hope that at the heart of the universe there is one formula (maybe one, simple formula) that defines the very meaning of life.[3]

Math is the language of all that is empirical -- that which can be seen, known, measured, evaluated, defined. Math always “adds up.”

Myth – The word is grossly misunderstood, and scarcely used in the modern Church. It conveys to many people the idea of that which is make-believe, a statement or story or proposition which is in opposition to fact. Such a definition could hardly be more incorrect. The word “myth” is one that the Church ought to reclaim with passion and excitement. The word “myth” is one that the Church must learn if we are to re-learn the art of reading the Bible in a highly mathematical world. Let me share with you several definitions.

A myth is a sacred story… describing in fictional form the fundamental truths of nature and human life. Mythology gives body to the invisible and eternal factors that are always part of life but don't appear in a literal, factual story.[4]

People say that what we're all seeking is a meaning for life… I think that what we're seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonances within our own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive. That's what it's all finally about, and… Myths are clues to the spiritual potentialities of the human life.[5]

In the old police drama, “Dragnet,” Joe Friday was famous for saying, “Just the facts, Ma’am. Just the facts.” But Truth can never be contained in “just the facts.” So it is, then, that only through “myth” do finite minds approach The Eternal. As a language in itself “myth” lacks the definitive, fact-only, empirical value of the grammar of mathematics. I love Frederick Buechner’s definition: A Myth is “a Truth that can never be proven” (which is the very point of math – to prove equations) – myth is a truth that “can only be lived for, believed in and loved.”[6]

If matters of faith could, in fact, be proven, we could simply gather on Sundays and recite mathematical formulas to one another. There would be no need for worship in that setting; we would just convene to “solve for”[7] a god who did not need to be believed in. To “solve for” a god who did not call to be lived for. To “solve for” a god who could not beckon us to love.

Give me the beauty and the potential of myth – any day – and I will gladly accept the tension and ambiguity, the great risk of misunderstanding that will always be inherent to such language.

In a conversation that extends back to our first, eight-hour interview with the search committee here, I have consistently defined myself, over against a Unitarian position (a theology defined by the radical Oneness of God), as a Trinitarian Christian. Trinity: “The union of three divine persons, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, in one God.”[8] Three. In. One.

A study of the history of the Trinitarian debate makes the definition of this three-in-one proposition even more confusing. It’s almost comical! (Bear with me for one brief trivial pursuit.) The heated debate raged through the fourth and fifth centuries over the definitions of the Greek and Latin terms for “substance,” “essence,” and “person.” At the heart of the controversy were two Bishops. Arius claimed that Christ was of a similar substance to God. He used the Greek word homoiousios. Athanasius, on the other hand (whose argument eventually prevailed), believed Christ was of the very same substance as God -- homoousios. All of the fighting was over two words, spelled identically, except for one letter, the Greek “iota.” You’ve heard the expression, “an iota’s difference” – it comes from this theological debate.

St. Augustine once remarked, “all these theories sought to speak of things that cannot be uttered, and [because of all the confusion] the Trinity is a favorite target of critics out to show the logical incoherence of Christianity.”[9] For example, a Muslim cleric addressed American troops in the Persian Gulf war:

“Your clergy tell you that Christian belief is founded on the doctrine of the Trinity, but when you ask them to explain it they tell you it is a mystery. If they cannot explain it, then why should you continue to believe in such nonsense?”[10]

Neither is critique of the doctrine limited to non-Christian skeptics. Bishop John Shelby Spong voices this word of caution:

I… support efforts to reexamine and perhaps even to transcend the Trinitarian compromise, if those now-literalized words prove to be no longer capable of leading us into the experience of God toward which they originally pointed.[11]

I am not yet ready to “transcend the Trinitarian compromise,” but I do believe the controversial Bishop is correct when he asserts that the words of Trinitarian language (as with much else representing Christian orthodoxy), have today become so literalized, that they very often fail to point Christians to “the experience of God.”

Where did this language of Trinity come from? Why has it been deemed essential to Christian thought for seventeen centuries? Why is it still relevant today?

Very early after the death of Jesus, his followers began to testify to an experience of God – not to some abstract notion of God – an experience that they had not known before Jesus. God was “Creator,” far and removed. Transcendent and powerful. Untouchable. Fearful. But, in Jesus, they saw the face of God. In Jesus they heard how God talked. They saw where God walked. They witnessed how God loves. In Jesus, they found Immanuel – God With Us.

And after Jesus had left them, gathered together in Jerusalem, this ragged, but now radically empowered band of misfit-followers experienced, again, the presence of God. This time, not in the awe of a Creator, not in the flesh of a Redeemer, but in the moving, unexplainable-yet-undeniable presence of a Sustaining Spirit – within them.

This three-fold experience of God – an experience which the early Church insisted could not be adequately conveyed in speaking only of “One God” – led to the defining of a doctrine called Trinity.

I believe that the three-fold experience of God is still revelatory, still relevant, still reliable today. But the language of a “Triune God” is not mathematics. It never has been.[12] The language of Trinity is mythological – that is, it points beyond itself to a God who can never be fully defined.[13] Who can never be delimited by tidy formulas. Who will never be proven, mathematically. The Three-In-One God is a God who can only be proven in the living – “believed in, lived for, and loved.”

The language of Trinity developed out of a people’s experience of God – a living and dynamic experience that is still accessible. But in this debate, another vitally important insight was achieved. In his book, When Religion Becomes Evil, Charles Kimball says of the radical monotheism of Islam: “The most heinous sin in Islam is shirk (‘associating something with God’). God is one… There is no God but God.” Much as their Jewish brothers and sisters do, Islam insists on a radical Unitarianism – God alone is God. And, so…

It was precisely this kind of Alone (and, therefore, lonely), Absolute (and, therefore, unsympathetic) Divine Power that Athanasius rejected. He insisted that we could not speak of the God who was revealed in Jesus Christ, and who is continually experienced through the Holy Spirit, as this kind of Lonely, Absolute, Autocratic Dictator on High. Trinitarian theology rejected a god who is distant and isolated; unsharing and unshared; static and unchanging. In a Trinitarian God, the Church discovered community, for they discovered a radically different God, who models, within God’s very nature, equality, sharing, mutual-accountability, risk, vulnerability, need.[15] Yes, need. Far from the static, absolute God of Power who needs nothing, the Trinitarian God needs community.[16] In the Trinitarian God, community is the highest Truth; Community is the greatest good.

If you are still unconvinced, I ask you to consider what is lost in our Christian theology if we do not use the word “Trinity” to speak of God? And let me give you my three-fold answer: 1) I believe we lose our greatest argument for the importance of sharing and equality and mutual respect– for the Trinitarian God is community. 2) I believe we lose our greatest argument for an inclusive God – a God who not only tolerates, but invites diversity and pluralism of thought – for the Three-in-One God is unity – but unity-in-diversity. 3) I believe we lose our greatest argument that God is love, and that this Love, therefore, calls us to make God real for a world who cannot believe – for the Triune God is sacrifice and risk and vulnerability and need.

Someone once said that it is not so much that God is “three in one” as opposed to “five in one” or “fifteen in one,” but that God is not just one.[17] Which is to say that God is never alone. The Christian experience of the Trinitarian God reveals a God who is “above us, with us, within us”[18] – and that experience of community and diversity and love – calls us beyond ourselves to a formula that never quite adds up in mathematical terms: “The two shall become one flesh.”[19] “The first will be the last.”[20] “The greatest will be the least.”[21]

[1] The American Heritage College Dictionary

[2] Someone in our congregation who is “a mathematician of sorts,” has already taken issue with my definition of math as “always adding up.” The theories of advanced mathematics, calculus, physics, etc… certainly open a world that is less than “definitive,” yet I stand by my usage of math as such, for the sake of my argument that the Trinity is not simply about the numbers (three in one).

[3] As little as I understand of the advancing formulas of the quantum sciences, I know that there are some scientists/mathematicians who believe that the universe will one day be explained by one great, unifying theory that can be represented by a mathematical formula. (In the same way that E=MC² is a “definitive” formula.)

[4] Thomas Moore, Care for the Soul.

[5] This quotation came to me by way of a friend. I do not have a source citation.

[6] This definition connects us to our recent conversations on “belief.” Is believing (in resurrection, or God, or Trinity) just a matter of mental ascent, or is there an experiential quality that is required. This positive understanding of myth has led one interpreter to conclude, “Everything that is True about Christianity is a Myth,” (Charlie Milford), which is not do deny anything, but to push Christian faith into the realm of the “more than.” More than fact. More than history. More than mental understanding.

[7] In Algebra, students learn to “solve for ‘X’,” an unknown quantity which can be determined by proper manipulation of the numbers and terms of the equation.

[8] The American Heritage College Dictionary.

[9] William Placher, A History of Christian Theology: an introduction.

[10] Quoted in J. Robert Wright, The Living Pulpit, April – June 1999.

[11] J.S. Spong, Why Christianity Must Change or Die, p.19.

[12] I have argued in a number of recent conversations that the language of Christian faith has always been “mythological” in character. Even the language of the creeds, the very early language which gave shape to Christian theology, has always had a more-than-literal character. It might be tempting to believe than in our “advanced” and modern world, that we have a better grasp of faith than did our poor, pre-scientific forebears, who thought only in literal, concrete terms. I think this is a huge mistake in understanding. In the bulletin of today’s worship service I used the following quotation as justification for this point: “[Speaking of the Holy Trinity] When it is asked three what, then the great poverty from which our language suffers becomes apparent. But the formula three persons was coined not in order to give a complete explanation by means of it, but in order that we might not be obliged to remain silent” (Gregory Nazianzus, 325-389 CE). Even in the fourth century Trinitarian language was not about mathematics!

[13] I thought here of our conversation on the Ten Commandments, and the prohibition against creating “graven images.” In that discussion we talked of language and theological images as potential “graven images” – images that sought to be too definitive of God and could, therefore, become idolatrous in themselves.

[14] Kimball, p.43.

[15] The critic will certainly ask if we ever really discover God, or if we simply continue to “create God in our image.” I am aware of this tension, yet believe that God’s nature is, to some extent, revealed in human experience; I also admit, however, that theological language and structures are created. We live in faith, dependent upon, and influenced by, the frameworks for our understandings of and relationships to God, developed in this tension between the revealed and the created. Therefore, I stand by the Trinitarian formulation, confusing as it may be, as crucially important to an inclusive, fully Christian understanding of God.

[16] For this insight, and much of my understanding of the Trinitarian debate, I am indebted to Arthur C. McGill in his book, Suffering: A Test of Theological Method.

[17] Dr. Bob Ratcliffe of Candler School of Theology at Emory University.

[18] The Living Pulpit, p.39

[19] Genesis 2.24.

[20] Mark 10.31.

[21] Matthew 23.11.

[22] “Truth is more a becoming that it is a having,” has become an important statement for this church’s understanding of theology and its pursuit of knowing God.