Bring Back the Holy Spirit - Not the Trinity!

This is now the third post in what, to my great joy, has become a dialogue with Jo James, minister of Mill Hill Chapel, in Leeds, on the question of the Trinity - and what it should mean to Unitarians. It's a response to his sermon/post It's a Magic Number.

Jo was, in part, responding to my post: Why Liberal Christians Should Let the Trinity Go. He raises many so many important questions that I'm going to have to split my response into two posts.  Jo is a friend, and this is a friendly exchange, so here goes with part one:

In his sermon/post, It’s a Magic Number... Jo James makes a case for the Trinity being an ongoing part of Unitarianism. It’s not a defence of the doctrine of the Trinity, which he sees as more of a dazzling mystery than a comprehensible teaching. Rather, Jo sees the Trinity as a means of recovering our lost sense of the sacred, and even of illuminating new theological horizons. 

It's an eloquent and nuanced argument. And anyone that can reference Augustine, Servetus, Desmond Tutu, The Beatles and De la Soul along the way, has to be worth reading. And yet, I don’t agree that three is the magic number. And when it comes to the Trinity, I still think Unitarians should let it be. 

Jo worries about an increasingly impoverished role for the spirit in contemporary Unitarianism. This can be seen, he observes, in the decline in Whitsun traditions, such as Whit walks, new clothes, joint services etc. (Whit Sunday is the day in the Christian Calendar that celebrates the sending of the Holy Spirit to the early church). Well, amen to that. We have driven the spirit out, and we are hardly flourishing without it. But seeking a revival of the Holy Spirit does not, by my reckoning, make an opening for the Trinity. In fact, I believe that pro-Trinity Unitarians are making a category error by seeking a revival of the spirit through the Trinity.  Here’s why:

This Whitsun, I was heartened to hear Andrew Parker, minister at Old Chapel, Dukinfield, set out the classical Unitarian understanding of the Holy Spirit as: ‘The presence of God with us’. This is what Unitarians believed for centuries: the spirit of God is simply an extension of God, God’s active, immanent presence, moving before, above, beyond and among us.

In fact, Jo provides a perfect illustration of this Unitarian view of God’s spirit when he talks about tools as extensions of selves, and creative activity as an extension of the self that creates. God’s spirit is, indeed, his ‘overflow’ into our lives. But this is a Unitarian view. If the tool is an extension of the person then it cannot be Trinitarian. For the Trinitarian analogy to work, the tool would have to be a self in its own right. Instead it's an overflow or extension of the self that wields it. 

So the Holy Spirit is (or should be) eminently Unitarian, and yet the Trinity is increasingly being used by Unitarians as a shorthand for asserting the real presence of the spirit, and of genuine transcendence. This is a mistake. The appropriate answer to spirit deficiency is the spirit - not the Trinity.  We urgently need a revival of the spirit - the presence of God with us - but God being with us through his spirit, and God being triune are two radically different ideas. 

Of course, it’s a problem of our own making. I said before that Unitarianism believed in the Spirit as the overflow of God’s presence into the world for centuries, and so they did. But then they stopped. Unitarianism quenched the spirit. 

Our spiritual ancestors denied the Trinity but embraced the spirit. So far so good, but then succeeding generations denied the miraculous, then diluted the transcendent, before denying it altogether. It’s a classic baby and bathwater situation. So now, let us rejoice that spirit starved Unitarians are looking to recover that lost sacred presence. But does this call for a return to the Trinity, of all doctrines? The Trinity is not a guarantor of the existence or presence of the spirit. It is a doctrine that says that the spirit is one of three distinct persons in the Godhead. 

Arians and Socinians, (definitely not Trinitarians) never doubted, or lacked an experience of the transcendent. God’s spirit was, for both forms of anti-Trinitarianism, most certainly evident in the world, and in Jesus. They believed God’s spirit was manifested in Christ, and continued to be so, and that that it was available to be experienced in the life of the believer. They believed that the spirit of God was active in governing the world, including responding to prayer. 

The point of Arianism was that the divine Jesus was a lesser divinity than God. The point of Socinianism (which is where Unitarianism really comes in) was that Jesus was the son of God, not God: fully human, but still the son of God, risen, ascended, and seated at the right hand of the Father (whatever that means).  

These understandings of Jesus and the spirit collapsed as Unitarianism embraced rationalism. Jesus was downgraded from the son of God, to a Son of God; from inspired prophet to inspired teacher, and from that to a religious genius who was nevertheless a man of his time and devoid of miracles. Most significantly, it became practically an article of faith among Unitarians that the resurrection could not have happened. 

The ‘could not’ is important here. It wasn’t just that they disbelieved the particular historical claims around the resurrection. They were committed to a belief that such things do not and cannot happen. This is because such an occurrence would undermine their presuppositions of naturalism, that the universe is entirely materialistic. This is the point at which the ‘spirit’ gets squeezed out of existence, though of course the word ‘spirit’ hangs around, being redefined as various psychological, historical or emotional phenomena.

It is in this religious landscape, a veritable spiritual wilderness, that Unitarians are looking to the Trinity as a tool with which to resist the secular obliteration of the spirit. It’s a noble quest, but it's not what the spirit needs because the Trinity confuses and distorts the spirit.  

I’d also suggest that any institution, never mind, denomination that embraces the very thing it was set up to oppose is asking for trouble. What is the foundation of a faith community that redefines itself as the opposite of what it came into the world as?  Every other belief in Unitarianism seems to have been imported.  The denial of the Trinity is all that we have that is uniquely ours. Who or what are we if we are not anti-Trinitarian?

What of the proposal that the Trinity is, in itself a mystery, but might be, for us, a tool with which to explore new possibilities? That's a big question indeed. And Jo raises many others. What about triangulation? Are there ‘new’ Trinities out there? And of course, Is three really the magic number? 

I can’t help but respond - but, given the richness of the discussion, it will have to be in a separate post, which hopefully will be along soon.