Triune Relationship – 11 June 2017 – Holy Trinity Sunday

This Sunday rejoices in the Church having found ways to reason about the three-in-one God of scripture, tradition, and human experience despite the complexities of language. The Trinity is not three “gods” or three “persons” with different jobs. Those who have studied the early church councils know how pin-pointed the arguments came to be in order to fend of heretical conceptions. But that doesn’t leave the preacher with an easy task.

The preacher has this Sunday, however, to help people imagine an impossibility: the relationship between person of the Trinity who are each other. And yet not quite.

Matthew 28:16-20

In a world wherein nothing needs more healing than our relationships, could it be that the understanding of God as Trinity could be the most healing word of all? For what the doctrine of the Triune God shows us is that God is relationship, that each Triune Person is identified precisely by relationship with the others.

The Father speaks the universe into being through the Word who is the Son. The Son is begotten, not made; filiated, not built, and so organically, substantially, ontologically united with the Father, not a product or construction. The Father breathes life into the creation through the Spirit who proceeds through space and time, bringing God's presence into the height and depth, the past and future of all that is.

God with us, always, creating and recreating us, saving and healing us, bringing us into the fullness of relationship that is the very image of God. – Paul G. Bieber

Genesis 1:1––2:4a

This account bears some similarities to the Babylonian creation account, enuma elish, but there are notable differences. In particular, unlike the enuma elish, the Genesis account posits no conflict, does not relate the birth of the gods, nor does it suggest that mankind was created to serve the gods. While many readers are familiar with the opening words of Genesis as “In the beginning God created…,” many may not be aware that the preferred translation (cf NAB and NSRV), is “In the beginning, when God created…” This translation implies further that for the writer there was no “creation out of nothing,” but rather God brought order out of chaos.

It is interesting to observe that the term for a watery chaos. . . bears a striking similarity to Tiamat of the Babylonian creation myth, from whom the world was created. The term for create. . . is reserved for God, who creates by the word, that is, God speaks and it happens. The reference to the Spirit of God in verse 2 is best understood as the wind of God, not a distinct being.

Now although some have found a reference to the trinity in verses 1–3 (God, Spirit, Light), this is untenable. The highlight of the majestic poem is the creation of humankind in the image of God. Humankind is placed in a position of responsibility for the creation and in a real sense, the creation continues in the creative activity of men and women. – Jeffrey Galbraith

2 Corinthians 13:11-13

The interest in this pericope for Trinity Sunday is the supposed reference to the Trinity found in verse 13. While it is clear that Paul does refer to God, Jesus, and the Spirit, in words that are familiar to every churchgoer, it does not follow that Paul had any notion of the Trinity as it was to develop in the following centuries. For example, Jesus is not referred to as the “Son,” but the Lord. God is not referred to as “Father,” but the source of love, and the Spirit is not a distinct being, but rather is the source of community. – Jeffrey Galbraith

Paul Bieber is pastor of All Saints Lutheran Church, San Diego, California.  

Jeffrey Galbraith is pastor of St. Paul's Lutheran Church (ELCA) in Greenfield, Massachusetts, and a professor of business administration at Greenfield Community College.

Homily Service 41, no. 3 (2008): 15-23.

Trinity and Liturgical Experience

In the latest issue of Liturgy published by The Liturgical Conference, theologian Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen explores the trinitarian shaping of Christian worship. He approaches the three persons of the Trinity as a systematician who is deeply committed to the ways in which the Trinity fund our primary communion with God.

I wish to lay out as clearly as I can the basic trinitarian logic and narrative that undergirds and funds all of Christian life, but particularly prayer and liturgical life. This base is the trinitarian narrative that can be found in the New Testament and that was formulated doctrinally in later Christian tradition. . . . Liturgy is deeply Trinity-formed. 

. . . The Reformed Karl Barth rightly intuited that the Bible points to “the life of God Himself turned to us, the Word of God coming to us by the Holy Spirit, Jesus Christ.” [See Church Dogmatics, vol. 1, bk. 2] This same insight was reached in the common ecumenical statement by Roman Catholics and Lutherans: “What God has done for the salvation of the world in Jesus Christ is transmitted in the gospel and made present in the Holy Spirit. The gospel as proclamation of God's saving action is therefore itself a salvation event.” [See http://www.pro.urbe.it/ dia-int/l-rc/doc/e_l-rc_malta.html] Liturgy and prayer is the place to present that Gospel of Christ. Liturgy is the arena in which the proclamation and sacramental acts reflect the triune nature of One God who manifests Godself as Father, Son, and Spirit.

Regarding each of the Trinity in turn, Kärkkäinen lets the reader ponder the thoughts of theologians through the ages. Here is Martin Luther on the first person of the Trinity:

The meaning and distinctive nature of [God’s] deep and wide fatherly love was masterfully captured centuries ago by the Reformer Martin Luther. While better known for his theology of justification by faith, Luther is first and foremost a theologian of love. He makes the famous distinction between two kinds of love: divine and human love. Whereas for the latter, self-interest and the principle of reciprocity is in the forefront, God's love purely and unselfishly seeks the well-being of the Other.⁴ [See Evangelical Quarterly 74, no. 3]

Human love is oriented toward objects that are inherently good, where self-love defines the content and the object of the love. Men and women love something that they believe they can enjoy. God loves in a way opposite to human love: “The love of God does not find, but creates, that which is pleasing to it …. Rather than seeking its own good, the love of God flows forth and bestows good.”⁵ [See Luther’s Works, 1957, 31:57]

 Here is Karl Rahner on Christ:

In contemporary theology, probably no one else has reflected as deeply on the theological and spiritual implications of divine embodiment as the means of God's self-identification with humanity as has the Catholic Karl Rahner. 

“It is a fact of faith that when God desires to manifest himself, it is as a man that he does so,” as a man who appears only in the bodily form. Indeed, on the basis of this divine embodiment, we not only know the Divine but also the meaning of the human. . .  If we want to know what man is, or what flesh means, then we must, so to speak, choose this theological definition of the statement ‘And the Word became flesh,’ saying: flesh, man as a bodily, concrete, historical being is just what comes into being when the Logos, issuing from himself, utters himself. Man is therefore God's self-utterance, out of himself into the empty nothingness of the creature.”⁶ [Rahner, in Theological Investigations, vol. 17]

Finally, Kärkkäinen’s thoughts on the Holy Spirit beckon us to expand our sense of the Spirit’s work so that we do not settle on personal piety alone as the gift but come to see in an ever-larger scope the Spirit’s role in creation itself. Those who lead the church’s worship in word and sacrament will gain a deepened energy for corporate prayer through renewal of seeing the fullness of the Three in One in the liturgy. The author’s goal is a lively trinitarian prayer for all.

- Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen is professor of systematic theology, Fuller Theological Seminary, Pasadena, CA, and Docent of Ecumenics, University of Helsinki, Finland. See Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen Trinity and Revelation, vol. 2: A Constructive Christian Theology for the Pluralistic World (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2014), chap. 2, for a full treatment of this subject.

Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen, “Loving Father, Embodied Son, and Life-Giving Spirit: The Trinitarian Narrative and Liturgical Experience,” Liturgy 30, no. 1 (2015): 60-66.