Total Possibility

In this post I hope to explain in detail, in a thousand words or less, the entire theology of the Trinity.

Just kidding… that would be impossible.  I always get a headache when I think about the Trinity- no doubt it is certainly a mystery.

Trinity was one of the toughest classes I took while I was at the Great and Wonderful Gregorian University in Rome.  It was the second semester of my first year, and I had one of the “Three Amigos,” not to mention one of the best Trinitarian theologians that the Jesuits produced, Luis Ladaria, teaching the class. 

(The “Three Amigos” were three professors we had who came from Spain that semester, hence the name.) (I did not have Steve Martin as a teacher.)

Fr. Ladaria spoke impeccable Italian… there was nary a hint of Spanish mixed into his Italian like some of the other teachers. (I called that Spitalian by the way.)  The only problem with Fr. Ladaria was that he spoke in a sort of resonating tone.  One minute he was completely audible and loud, then mid-sentence he would be silent as a mouse.

(Here he is whispering some important point)

My favorite day, and I am not sure if he was messing with us or not, was when he said:  “The most important thing that you can know about the Trinity and this class is….” At that point we all leaned forward to try and figure out what he had said the most important thing was to know.  He trailed off, and that most important thing was lost to the ages.  I am not even sure that the Italians caught it as there was a collective groan that went through the 400 other students in the classroom.

The Trinity is probably the most important and central mystery in Western Theology.  It is the proposition, based on the revelation of Jesus Christ, that God is within Himself, a relationship of three persons, Father, Son, and the personification of the love between Father, and Son, the Holy Spirit.  So one God, three persons.  For the first thousand years or so of Christianity, the western culture tried to figure out just what the heck that meant.  All sorts of differing opinions arose at that point saying all sorts of things- such as Jesus was created by the Father, or Jesus was just another expression of the Father, or that Jesus was another God etc etc.  All sorts of conflicts arose between sects called Modalists or Arians or even Nestorians who believed that Mary was not the “Mother of God,” implying that Jesus wasn’t God, or that he was somehow separated from his humanity.  It took about a thousand years to work out all the kinks, and to either eliminate the opposing sects, or to re-educate them and absorb them back into the fold.

There are a lot of places that we can look in scripture to support a Trinitarian theology, my favorite actually being Genesis 1:26, where God says:”Let us make man in our own image.”  There is a plural going on there- “us.”  This implies a relationship within God Himself.

So how does this work out philosophically?  Does the idea of a relationship within the being of God make rational sense?  Well let’s start with the philosophical notion of God.  We can go with Plato on this one, that God would be the supreme Good- that being from which all beings flow- the mind of God is where all forms originate and are given to material existence.  God would be the supreme being, containing all things and lacking nothing because he would be all being. (I realize I am skipping over a giant explanation here of how I come to this conclusion, but this is basically what Plato taught).  Given over to Aristotle, the notion of God is that there would be an unmoved mover- that is a being that starts the ball rolling who itself never had a beginning.  (He basically says that you cannot have an infinite regressing series of events, that you have to have a being that itself has no beginning in order to get the universe moving.)

Taking these two philosophical ideas of the supreme being without a beginning, we can begin to apply philosophical concepts to the idea of this supreme being which we will call God.  This idea of God, assuming that we can have a reliable understanding of the world around us through our senses, is completely rational to believe in based on the premesis of nature.

Two distinctions we might have to make though right now- that of “accident” and and “substance.”  This is important for applying some philosophical concepts to this supreme being known as God.  A substance is a thing- this shirt I am wearing is a shirt no matter what color it is.  The color is what we know as an “accidental” quality.  Its size or shape or color etc.  Even if I change the accidental quality of my shirt, let’s say from white to blue, it still remains a shirt.  Shirt-ness is a substantial quality.  Accidents can change in a substance without changing the thing itself.  There are other accidents that are important to things, such as quantity (number of shirts) or most importantly for our purposes- relation- where the shirt is in relationship to other things- like me… or other shirts.  This relationship to me or other shirts can change- I can take off my shirt and throw it into a pile of other shirts- thus the relationship has changed.  On a more complex level, in humans relationship is much more profound, whether we talk about being a stranger, or a child, or a friend, or a lover etc.  The accidental quality of relationship is much more difficult to talk about the more complex a substance is because we can talk about the metaphysical relationships as I mentioned above.

Even if my particular relationships change, I do not change substantially- I am still Josh Wagner no matter what (although my relationships help to determine my identity, I am still a human no matter what my current relationships to other humans or the universe might be- no changing that.)

In the philosophical concept of God, since he is the totality of being- the supreme good, lacks nothing by definition, he would have no “accidental” qualities.  However he does have relationship just like us.  Unlike us however, that relationship is not an “accidental” quality, it is a “substantial” quality.  In other words, if God has relationship (which my definition all beings have relationship) then that relationship must be within HIMSELF, or more philosophically within the SUPREME BEING.  If he were to have an “accidental” relationship, that would mean that he would have “accidental” qualities, which means he can change- God cannot change by definition because he is the supreme being and lacks nothing- change by its definition is a move from non-being to being- that means you change from something you were not before to something you currently are- God can’t do that because he lacks nothing to change into!

This all having been said, it makes philosophical sense that God has a relationship within himself that is substantial, or innately part of who he is as the supreme good, being, lacking nothing etc.  Whether or not that is one relationship or three like the Trinity is left up to revelation, but the theological concept of a relationship within the supreme being is philosophically sound.

Anybody got a headache yet?

What this further means that if freedom is a concept that we have as people, then freedom must necessarily exist within the concept of God as well- so God if he is in a relationship within his own being, must be in a free relationship within his own being.

How is that important to us?  Remember what I said yesterday, that theology, and really all sciences, are a way of studying humanity.  The way that theology understands humanity is by understanding the source of humanity, namely God.  If this concept of relationship within God is philosophically valid, then it does tell us a couple of things about humanity.

First, that if we are made in the image of and likeness of God it follows that we can glean two important things from that- first that we are in relationship- it is fundamental to who we are as people- our relationships to God and to those around us help us to determine our identity.  So if we have an unhealthy relationship in our lives, then we have an unhealthy identity somewhere as well.  Second, is that we are free.  Freedom is something that is divine- the ability to choose to give ourselves freely for the good of someone else mirrors what happens within the Godhead- theologically speaking the Father gives everything he is to the Son in the Holy Spirit.  Philosophically speaking, if there is a relationship within God, one person (or relationship) must necessarily give all that it has to the other person(s) or (relationship(s)).

 That gives us a program for life- first to find out if our relationships are healthy, and second to see if the choices that we are making are being made for the supreme good of the other people in our relationships.  That choice of the supreme good- is called love.