Trinity Sunday; 12 June 2022; Trinity Sunday C (RCL); Proverbs 8:1-4, 22-31; Psalm 8; Romans 5:1-5; John 16:12-15.
It seems like the designers of the lectionary might have found passages that seemed more directly to refer to the persons of the Trinity — some of the blessings in Paul’s letters seem to come close to a doctrine of the Trinity. Perhaps we used all those up in Years A and B, and this is all that’s left for Year C. In any event, the doctrine itself isn’t explicit in the New Testament, and was only settled after centuries of reflection on the life and ministry of Jesus of Nazareth, and took its shape from the doctrine of the Incarnation.
The reading from Proverbs was understood by Christians to provide a hint of the doctrine of the Trinity, although it speaks of Wisdom as being created as the first of God’s creatures. Philo had elevated wisdom to a divine principle, and can even be read as a bit of binitarian. The preface of John’s Gospel takes Wisdom (now the Logos — a bit of gender fluidity) as fully divine (the Word was God), and incarnate in the person of Jesus. The understanding of Jesus’ presence in the church’s eucharistic worship helped cement the doctrine of the Incarnation, and extend it beyond the human life of Jesus of Nazareth. The Incarnation of the Word came to be seen as eternal.
Add in the Holy Spirit as the agency of God active in Jesus’ ministry (overshadowing Mary at his conception, and alighting on him at his baptism) and in the Church (alighting on the Church at Pentecost), and you all the elements of the doctrine. The church developed the concept of Person (hypostasis) to explain these three share in the One deity.
Hints are present in the New Testament, particularly in Paul and John, but putting those hints together in a workable doctrine took centuries. Even after the drafting of the Nicene-Contantinopolitan Creed, questions still remained. If God is not constrained by necessity, why did God create? What does the internal life the Trinity look like, and how is that connected to the economic Trinity (the external life of the Trinity involved in the creation and redemption of the world)?
Maximos the Confessor is one of the more profound thinkers on the doctrine of the Trinity. He saw the internal life of the Trinity as the flow of the energy of self-gifting love between the three Persons (allowing us to say that God is Love). As God created the world in freedom through the agency of the Logos, each of the creatures has its own logos (reason or purpose), and the energies of God flow into the creatures in God’s self-gifting love, keeping creation in existence. The logoi (plural of logos) of created things find their fulfillment in the return of gift to God.
Human sin interrupted the flow of the divine energies, when humanity claimed the creation as its own and failed to return it to God as loving gift in thanksgiving for God’s gift of self. This interruption threatens creation with dissolution back into its natural state of nothingness, but God, unwilling that creation should thus dissolve, enters it in the Incarnation, and the loving self-gift of the Son back to the Father, under the contingent aspect of human sin looks like the cross. The resurrection and ascension take the created nature of Christ back into the flow of energies in the divine life, restoring the flow of divine energies in creation.
The church’s eucharistic worship, returning the created order back to God as loving gift in thanksgiving for God’s first gift participates in the flow of divine energies through creation and back into the divine life. In the eucharist, we join the divine dance (perichoresis is the technical term). Maximos saw the eucharist as participating in the self-gifting love of God which characterizes the internal life of the Trinity and holds the world in existence.