Week after week in the liturgy we have “Father, Son and Holy Spirit.” How do you, as a progressive Christian scholar, understand this?
Dear Margaret,
The doctrine of the Holy Trinity has been a cornerstone in the Christian Church since the fourth century CE, but it has not been unchanging. It has been modified over the years to remove the exclusively masculine characteristics of patriarchal language. “The Holy Ghost” has been changed to the “Holy Spirit.” The word “Ghost” might have communicated something to traditional Christians, but to those of us living in the 21st century, it sounds somewhat like Casper with a halo! At one time the idea of the Trinity identified liturgically about half the Sundays of the church year since those were known as the “Sundays after Trinity.” This has now been replaced in modern lectionaries by what we call the “Sundays of Pentecost.”
The Trinity was a conclusion to which the Christian Church came after a long journey through history. It was not a part of early or original Christianity. If you read Paul closely, you will find that he is not a Trinitarian!
I think what people fail to understand is that the Trinity is not a description of God, it is rather a description of the human experience of God couched in the language of 4th century, Greek-speaking Europe. We experience God as the source of life beyond any limit that the human imagination can impose on anything and we call that God “the Father.” We experience God as the ultimate depth of life, deeper than our own breath and we call that dimension of life “Spirit.” We experience God coming to us through the lives of others, and, for those of us who are Christians, coming to us uniquely through the life of one called Jesus of Nazareth, and we name him “Son,” offspring of “the Father.” Have we in this manner defined God? No, of course not. We have defined only what we believe is our experience of God.
In that sense, I have no trouble with Trinitarian language. I do not believe that I can say that God is a Trinity, for I do not think the human mind can ever define God with human words without becoming idolatrous. On the other hand I can say that I am a Trinitarian for that formula helps me to make sense of the God I experience as real and the God to whom I am drawn.
~John Shelby Spong
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