Why Liberal Christians Should Let the Trinity Go: (The Joy of Socinianism Part Two)

Richard Rohr’s Trinity is not the Trinity.

Comedian Simon Day once commented that he liked Later with Jools Holland, but wished it had a different presenter, was on earlier, and featured something instead of music. 

In a classic episode of Only Fools and Horses, Trigger, the seriously thick dustman, was awarded a medal for having kept the same broom for 20 years. After driving everyone mad boasting about it he explained how he had managed to keep his broom in such good condition. Every now and then he replaced the head, and every now and then he replaced the handle.

In Jane Ayre, Caroline Bingley says to her brother that she would “like Balls infinitely better, if they were carried on in a different manner ... It would surely be much more rational if conversation instead of dancing made the order of the day." "Much more rational, I dare say," he replied, "but it would not be near so much like a Ball." 

All of which is to make the point that when you completely change the essence of something you change what it is, and it is no longer the thing that it was - even though it may have the same name. 

This was my thought when reading an interview with Richard Rohr about his celebrated idea of the Trinity.  Rohr, a Franciscan Roman Catholic Priest, says that we should see the Trinity as a Divine Dance. There is a flow, he says, in God. He is relational, he says. We need to get away from the idea of a ‘static’ God. 

What Rohr is referencing here is the way that the Church shoehorned Greek metaphysics into a Jewish, Biblical worldview, to create something alien and unchristian. The God of the Bible is relational and emotional, he says, yet the church, in thrall to neo-platonic, and then Aristotelian philosophy disfigured the biblical texts to impose a false God that is aloof and unchanging.

These are all excellent points and would be accepted by huge numbers of Christians. But what does any of this have to do with the Trinity? Rohr says the way out of our idolatry is to rediscover the Trinity. But Rohr’s version of the Trinity is not the Trinity, it really isn’t, it’s something entirely different. What he has done is replace the Trinity with an entirely new doctrine, but called it the Trinity. So the Trinity he wants us to rediscover is not the Trinity any more than Trigger's broom is the same broom he was issued with all those years ago.

The Trinity says that Jesus is God, so is the Holy Spirit. The Father is God, the Son is God, the Spirit is God. They are all God, but there is only one God. They are three separate persons, and yet they are all God as well. Philosophically, this is not just unlikely - it’s impossible, completely incoherent.  

Don’t forget, the Trinity took centuries to emerge in the church, and only became Doctrine in the fourth century, under pressure from Emperor Constantine. The Doctrine was fixed at Nicea in 325, and then further refined at Chalcedon in 451. It says that Father, Son and Spirit have no beginning, and have always existed as three separate personalities, yet remaining one entity, God. It’s unbiblical, incoherent, and violently inconsistent with Judaism and early Christianity.

The Trinity undermines Progressive Readings of Homosexuality in Scripture

The Bible is overwhelmingly Unitarian. There are thirteen thousand verses stressing the oneness of God, and Jesus, a devout Jew, commended the Shema - Remember Israel, the Lord your God is one, (Deuteronomy 6:4). On the other hand, there are about half a dozen verses which potentially suggest something different. 

This ought to be a red flag for any Christians who maintain that the Bible does not condemn homosexuality.  Those who continue to insist that the Bible rules out same sex relationships, even same sex feelings, lean on a few verses that jar with everything else the Bible has to say about love and justice.  

There is a vital principle of Biblical interpretation at stake here: the more obscure verses are interpreted by the verses where the meaning is clear. And the exceptional verses, that seem to contradict the majority of verses, are interpreted according to the majority. A few clobber verses don’t get to overturn thousands of verses that consistently say the opposite. So, we look very carefully at the small number of verses that seem to condemn homosexuality, and see if they can be brought into alignment with the thousands of verses that suggest a more accepting attitude. 

But if we don’t let a handful of odd verses dictate the Bible’s stance on homosexuality, how can we allow the same thing to happen with the Trinity? To do so fatally undermines a liberal hermeneutic.

The Trinity Undermines Christian-Jewish Relations

That’s just one problem with liberal Christians maintaining the Trinity. A much bigger problem is that the Trinity is utterly at odds with the Jewish world from which Christianity emerged.  Christianity’s self-understanding is as a faith given to the Jewish people first and then to the world. The fact that Jews have not become Christians is something that Christians have struggled to understand and explain for two thousand years.  It gave rise to the idea that the Jews were a cursed race, their misery (made possible by the church) a living example to us of what happens to a people who reject their Messiah. 

Jews are not going to accept Jesus as Messiah any time soon. But Jesus as Messiah isn’t the most toxic issue here. Considering Jesus to be God means that the Jews rejected, and continue to reject God, not Jesus. How offensive and dangerous is this notion? It was the Roman Empire that crucified Jesus, but the New Testament is easily read as portraying the whole nation of Israel as baying for his blood. The doctrine of the Trinity upgrades the ‘crime’ to deicide. For centuries the idea has been afoot that the Jews literally killed God.

I was talking to a Jewish associate about the complex points of tension between Christianity and Judaism and he identified the Trinity as the big one. ‘We can handle differences of opinion about a Messiah,’ he said, ‘but the Trinity - that’s the real obstacle.’

Benign Trinities built on Harmful Foundations

One habit of progressive Christianity is that when it is embarrassed by what the Bible says it builds new doctrines on the ruins of old doctrines, therefore bypassing scripture. It’s not just the most recent liberal scholars that have done this. Karl Barth did this when he made the Trinity the foundation of his systematic theology. Theologians such as Jurgen Moltmann and Karl Rahner then built what is known as a social model of the Trinity. 

According to the social model, God is a community. When we say that God is love, that is because there is love from one person to another inside the Trinity. There is also unity in diversity. So there we have it, two liberal principles staked out in the essence of God.

But at what cost? In an entirely Christian landscape it’s easy to see how tempting it must be to take the culture’s key idea about God and shape it to suit a liberal cause. What could be nicer than the notion that diversity with equality is woven into God's very being. But we are not in an entirely Christian landscape, and the doctrine of the Trinity has fuelled lethal antisemitism and created an insurmountable barrier between Christians  and Jews and Christians and Muslims. Would the Trinity have seemed so congenial to liberal theologians if they had had these considerations at the forefront of their thinking - or anywhere at all?

The social outcomes of the social model of the Trinity are not as benign as they might appear. Even so, if the Trinity is the truth about God then aren’t we going to have to deal with that? Well, yes, if, but it’s an enormous if. 

Neither Scriptural Nor Logical

It seems extraordinarily unlikely that the Trinity represents the true nature of God. The Biblical basis for it is perilously weak, and the doctrine evaporates when it comes into contact with logical philosophical analysis, never mind common sense. And ultimately, doesn’t this matter? However beautiful the doctrine, however good the results of believing it, does it really not matter whether it’s true or not? 

What basis in truth do liberal theologians claim for their Trinity doctrines? This is another thorny issue that exposes a confused epistemology.  Of course, liberal theologians refer to scripture when proposing doctrines, but much more loosely than conservatives. To say ‘scripture says’, is not a trump card among liberals. 

For the most part, those theologians who support a social model of the Trinity, do not subscribe to the doctrine of Biblical inspiration. Fair enough, you might say, but then what is the basis of their ideas of God being triune? Do they believe in biblical authority or don't they? 

Perhaps they would admit that the Biblical basis for the Trinity is very weak, but say that this is unimportant since they don't believe in the inspiration of scripture. But then where has the idea of the Trinity come from? 

The Trinity in Creation?

From whence have liberal Christians derived the Trinity if not from scripture? Richard Rohr, and others, see a version of the Trinity in creation. This sounds very pleasant and a la mode, but what are they really seeing? There are plenty of ways of seeing God’s hand in nature operating in diverse ways. If you like, you can classify these in threes - but why three? It is just as easy to pick another number. And three types of action do not a Trinity make. Nothing in nature suggests that God is three separate persons in a divine unity. All there really is, are various ways of seeing threeness - or fourness, or twoness depending on what it is you are trying to prove. 

The Trinity in World Religions?

Rohr, and others make a link with Hinduism, as further evidence that the Trinity is hard wired into creation. (It should be stressed that religion, including Christianity, is for Rohr and most liberals a phenomena in nature rather than a receptacle of special revelation).  In Hinduism, it is taught that God is essentially one (Brahman), but that there are three Gods within the one God: Brahma the Creator, Vishnu the Preserver, and Shiva, the destroyer. This is sometimes referred to as the Hindu Trinity, but that’s not how Hindus see it and it is not the Christian doctrine of the Trinity, not at all. And even if it did, why should a belief common to Hinduism constitute evidence for liberal Christians?  

It's also not a given that the parallel Rohr and other liberal Christians see between the Christian and Hindu 'Trinities' stacks up. The three Hindu gods may be seen in the academy as simply modes of the one God, but at village level, they are often entirely separate Gods. 

And even if we keep with the academic, monotheistic version of Hinduism, we are left with modalism, not the Trinity. At the time that Christianity defined the Trinity doctrine it condemned any attempt to formulate Father, Son and Holy Spirit, as one being in three modes. Any Christian describing relations between Father, Son and spirit in such terms would be violently persecuted as a heretic - and certainly considered non-Trinitarian. So how can a non-Trinitarain heresy now surface as supporting evidence for the Trinity? 

The Trinity Based on Church Doctrines Rejected by Liberals.

Where then have liberal Trinitarians got their Trinity from? It comes from the Church.  This kind of makes sense for Karl Rahner and Richard Rohr who are both Roman Catholics, but much less for Jurgen Moltmann and other protestant theologians.  They see God as a Trinity because the Church has always taught that God is Triune. But the church based their doctrine on a belief in the inspiration of scripture, and a particular  interpretation of scripture that was reached under pressure from a psuedo-Christian warrior-emperor, in an empire that was saturated in Greek metaphysics.  How are Liberal theologians able to make such claims for the Trinity, when they reject each link in the chain that gave them the Trinity? 

Theologians who reject the inspiration of scripture and the authority of the church, yet proclaim historic church doctrines are behaving strangely indeed. It is reminiscent of money laundering, the process by which illegally acquired money is sent through a chain of accounts and holdings so that it can appear pristine. The Trinity has a rotten beginning before it begins its convoluted journey from the fourth century to the pen of today’s liberal theologians.  However beautiful your theology, the question must always be asked, what is the basis on which you make this claim? However beautiful your house, if it is built on sand it cannot stand.

There are lots of things that Christians have always been supposed to believe that liberal Christians no longer agree with.  They don’t believe scripture is the inspired word of God, they don’t believe in the divine right of Kings, they don’t believe that sex outside marriage is necessarily a sin, and they don’t believe that homosexuality is wrong. They don’t believe in original sin, they don’t believe in hell. They don’t believe that only Christians go to heaven, some of them think that everyone goes to heaven, and others don’t believe that heaven even exists. They promote race and gender equality, while deconstructing  gender and race. Plenty of Priests and Ministers who follow process theology  happily opine that God is not omnipotent, They are happy for all the pillars of historical Christian teaching to tumble - except for one, The Trinity. 

And yet I began by saying that the liberal Trinity is not the Trinity.  So what if Conservative Triniatarians are outraged by their use of the word Trinity to describe a doctrine that is not remotely Trinitarian? The conservatives can’t justify the Trinity either. But at least there is a consistency to the Conservative position. They support either the authority of the church, scripture or both. They may be wrong about what they think the Bible says, and they are wrong to grant the Church the power to take the ultimate role in defining truth, but at least it makes sense, given these mistakes, that they then support the Trinity.  But liberals are all over the place in supporting a doctrine that was arrived at from sources they reject. 

The Ethics of Maintaining the Trinity

Does it even matter, given that the liberal Trinity is not the Trinity? This depends on how much you care about truth and credibility - but there is a large ethical dimension as well. Imagine South Africa had not abolished apartheid, but instead redefined it to mean that people of different races were free to live and work together. Or, imagine laws against homosexual behaviour were still in force, but same sex couples had been reclassified as heterosexuals. 

Yes, these are absurd examples, but so is keeping the Trinity, while denying its content. And these examples make the point about ethics. If a law, or a teaching, has caused great harm, and cannot be justified, then abolish it, don’t redefine it. 

This matters hugely in the field of Christian-Jewish, and Christian-Muslim relations. If we believe that Jesus is not God, and we understand what it has cost Jews to be accused of rejecting and killing God, then why would we want to retain the word Trinity, let alone the doctrine?  Islam considers Jesus a prophet, virgin born, but not God.  The Qur’an says explicitly that this is a ridiculous and blasphemous idea. If we now accept that Jesus was not God, then why retain language that has fuelled Crusades and centuries of bloody mistrust and fighting?

The Trinity Undermines Christian Credibility

But as important as the ethical dimension is, it’s still not the central issue. What really should matter to us, is that the doctrine of the Trinity fatally undermines the credibility of Christianity. Admittedly, not many people yet realise this, and yet it is so. 

Because Christians are so uninformed about Judaism, Jewish thinking, and Jewish history, they remain blissfully unaware that the Trinity is about the biggest reason why Jews reject Christianity. Now, I don’t say this in the sense that what matters is that Jews should accept Christianity, but its self-understanding, as the culmination of second temple Judaism means that it must bear some logical relation to the faith from which it emerged. The Trinity makes a nonsense of the Hebrew Bible, Christianity’s Old Testament, and this is fatal to Christian belief. Christianity cannot be true if it cannot be seen as a continuation of the Old Testament narrative. 

Even without the Trinity, there are plenty of important differences between Christianity and Judaism. But in the matter of monotheism, of believing in the same God there should be unity between us. Properly Unitarian Christianity would still cut across a number of Jewish beliefs - most importantly over the Messiahship of Jesus. But these would be manageable differences. From a Jewish perspective, the Trinity combines blasphemy, absurdity, and danger.  

If liberal Christians, who don’t really believe in the Trinity, stopped saying that they did, it would be a great help. Not just to Christian Jewish relations, though God knows this would be welcome.  It would make it so much easier to make Christianity seem reasonable. Christianity is not Judaism, but it is very Jewish. More and more its theologians realise this, but they do not see how pagan, and frankly non-Jewish the Trinity is. The Trinity blows a giant hole in Christianity’s claims about itself, sinking every good thing about it for the sake of an error. It is that serious, except the church has yet to notice. But it will have to one day see that Christianity  cannot be authentic and credible when it hangs on to an idea about God that is absurd, blasphemous, and dangerous to Jews.