Today is Trinity Sunday. (Far more important, today is a blood-drive Sunday at my parish.) I got into a theological discussion about the Trinity over at TitusOneNine the other day. It’s always been hard for me to understand how trinitarians could be so sure they were right about their view.
Conjecture about the Trinity is not evidence
To be sure, we can’t say definitively that God could not exist as a Trinity. But we have no reason to think he actually does. We might as well posit that God is an infinitely-intelligent house cat; we’d be about as successful trying to confirm the one as the other.
Biblical arguments and patristic teachings about the Trinity aren’t persuasive — they’re just unsupported conjectures that happened to get recopied enough over the centuries to avoid being lost to the ravages of time. The fact that Christian copiers were motivated to do the copying is interesting, but Christian writings weren’t the only ones that were saved that way — so, too, were the writings of many Jewish and Muslim and Hindus thinkers; no Christian claims their unsupported conjectures about God’s nature should be treated as binding on all believers.
The Athanasian Creed rehearses the main tenets of trinitarianism (and damns to hell all who believe otherwise). But it offers no explanation why all people must believe those tenets, other than in effect shouting “because I said so!” (which for most people stops being persuasive at about age three).
My friend Fr. Gawain de Leeuw alludes this morning to the Trinity as representing three aspects of God that we perceive. My understanding, though, is that according to many traditionalists, this is heresy; God is three persons, they claim, full stop. Again, how do they know that?
God is what he is
Recall the story in Exodus (3.13-14), where Moses asked God: Who are you; what should I tell people your name is? God responds, I am what I am (or I am that I am“), thought to be the meaning of the Tetragrammaton transliterated as YHWH.
The author(s) of Exodus were onto something: God is what he is, not what we insist he must be. We simply don’t know enough about God’s nature to be making falsely-confident claims on the subject.
Does it even matter whether God is a Trinity?
Would very many followers of Jesus do things differently in their lives if God turned out to be two persons? Or four? Or one?
I doubt it.
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