Why isn't Two the Magic Number?

 

This is the second part of my response to Jo James's brilliant post/sermon It's a Magic Number. Read Jo's piece here, and part one of my response here.

Jo suggests that the Trinity can be, for us, an intellectual, conceptual tool for extending our spiritual capacity. But if it is this, (which I doubt), it is first of all part of the doctrine of God: that vital part of theology that seeks to answer the question: what is God like?

It’s hard to overstate the importance of the question of God’s ‘nature’. There’s just too much riding on the answer to questions like: Does God intervene? Does God judge sin? Does God love us? These are questions that concern our eternal destiny.

Then there’s a hugely important debate about whether God knows the future. If so, why does God permit evil? If not, what, if any, security can God offer? In what sense is God Sovereign over all things? Does God predetermine all events? Is God’s sovereignty limited by human freewill? 

But perhaps there’s no more urgent question than the question of evil and suffering. How can evil and suffering coexist with an all powerful, all loving God? Is God less powerful than we thought, or less loving? 

These are mysteries of the utmost importance. Or rather they are antinomies. This means they involve apparently irreconcilable contradictions. The last example, the co-existence of an omnipotent, benevolent God with evil and suffering is perhaps the greatest, and most vital antimony of all. 

So the doctrine of God, and its attendant questions, are important. Sometimes they throw up mysteries and antinomies and we struggle to make sense of them. Yet struggle we must, for the questions are so pressing, and in our struggle we may extend our spiritual  capacities. 

But where does the Trinity fit into the doctrine of God? In what way does existence demand an explanation of how God can be three yet one? Why would anyone think that this was so in the first place? And what would it matter if it was true? 

It certainly is a mystery how God could be three yet one. The crucial question, though, is why are we even asking this question. The question of evil and suffering suggests itself. As does the debate about freewill and determinism. But the riddle of the Trinity only persists because of imperial, state and institutional power. 

The question did not arise in the early church but centuries later, in a church that had made a deal with the devil. The church that came up with the Trinity was remote, to say the least, from Jesus, having torn up its Jewish roots, surrendered its thought world to Greco-Roman philosophy, and allied  itself with the very empire that had occupied the Holy Land, put Jesus to death, destroyed the Temple in Jerusalem, and slaughtered and dispersed the Jews.  The curious doctrine of the Trinity, a creation of the fourth century Europeanized church, was then imposed by imperial decree and successive state churches. Other questions arise out of life’s experience, irrespective of money and power. But the riddle of the Trinity is only still with us because of the residue of imperial power, still resonating through the power structures of states, churches and university theology departments. So, I don’t accept that the Trinity riddle is a necessary question. 

The counter argument is to point out the threeness in creation. If nature, and life itself, suggests a threeness in God, then an unfortunate association with imperial Rome and oppressive state power should not prevent us from recognizing this. 

To be fair, Catholic theology has long looked to nature to confirm the doctrine of the Trinity. The argument goes like this: the creator is triune; is it not, therefore, reasonable to assume that such a creator would leave traces of this in creation? However, it has always been clear that this is a case of ‘nature crowning grace’.  Aquinas, and his successors in this endeavour, were adamant that nature is only able to confirm what we learn in scripture. They insist that nature could never have led us to the knowledge of the Trinity on its own (though Richard Rohr may disagree).

Of course, Unitarians are not beholden to this, or any other tradition. They are entitled to seek God in nature alone, but I wonder: would they really be seeing a Trinity in creation if the weight of power and tradition had not first imposed the question upon our minds? 

And anyway, does nature really provide any evidence that three is the magic number? Jo’s description of the third entity that comes into any relationship is astute and valuable. But is it a Trinity? Even if such phenomena suggest threeness, are they not massively outnumbered by evidence of another number? 

If we are to disregard special revelation, and look to the life that we lead and the world that we live in as our primary spiritual source material, are we not struck that, actually, it’s the number 2, not 3 that is everywhere? 

So much of life boils down to an either/or, one thing or the other. We live or we die, we succeed or we fail. So many questions can only be resolved by choosing yes or no. Life is full of binary choices and forks in the road. We go left or we go right. We have a left and a right of key parts of our bodies. We are biologically male or female. Why not then see God as 2 not 3?

If God is, in some sense, plural, and traces of this can be seen in creation, then why ignore all the twosomeness of life in favour of a three? 

I don’t believe that God is 2 any more than I believe that God is 3. Twos may be everywhere we look , but the ‘good news’ of the gospel is that there is something beyond all these binary oppositions. We may be divided but our destiny is to be united. We may be male and female, Jew and Gentile, but ultimately we are more than that: we are one flesh, one body. Life is division but it won’t always be so. One is the magic number.