Resurrection - A Reality or a Pious Dream? Part V Matthew’s Story of Easter

Column by Bishop John Shelby Spong on 21 May 2015 1 Comments
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Question

How does the Trinity fit into the true humanity of Jesus for a new story of faith?

Answer

Dear Thelma,

First, I need to tell you that the name “Thelma” has a deep significance for me. A woman named Thelma Denson of Tarboro, North Carolina was the godmother of my middle daughter Katharine and with her love she transformed the meaning of “Godmother” for me forever afterward. So I feel a warmness whenever I hear that name. Thank you for bringing up that memory. Secondly, we spent some time in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan last year and it made an indelible impression on me. You live in beautiful country.

To get to your question we first have to recognize that the Holy Trinity is not a description of God, but a description of a human experience of God. The Holy Trinity is a doctrine, adopted by the Christian Church in the 4th century CE, as a way of processing and understanding their experience with God. It is a product of dualistic Greek thinking which separated God from humanity; the holy from the profane; the flesh from the spirit, and the body from the soul. That was a cultural mindset and no one in that era of history knew how to step outside that frame of reference. However, that frame of reference died in that period of history we call the Enlightenment, leaving modern Christians with the impossible task of fitting a 4th century doctrine into a 21st century world view out of which it does not come and to which it cannot speak.

Does that mean that the Trinitarian experience is wrong? No, I don’t think it means that, but it does mean that the Trinitarian language, which we use as we to seek to relate the Trinitarian experience is simply irrelevant.

When we go back of the Trinitarian vocabulary we discover that what we are trying to do is to find words that will make sense of that human ability to discover the “Beyond in our midst.” What we call God is beyond every category that the mind can develop. God is the ultimate reality that the human mind can embrace and it never does so except partially. The Trinitarian word for that is, “Father,” the source, the originator of all that is. We also experience God as the ultimate depth of meaning that is within. That is what the symbol “Holy Spirit” stands for. Finally, we experience God coming to us from other lives and most especially through the life of the one we call Christ. That is what the symbol “Son” stands for. So, Holy Trinity is an attempt to give rational form to our God experiences. It is not a creed to be believed so much as it is an experience to be explored.

The biggest problem with making sense out of a doctrine like that of the Holy Trinity is that it was framed against a fourth century, Greek-thinking, dualistic background. That is not the frame of reference in which anyone thinks today. I, for one certainly do not think of the divine and the human as distinct and mutually exclusive categories. I see them, rather, holistically as if on a scale or spectrum. The way into divinity, I believe, is to enter the fullness of the human. I do not envision God as external to my world. The reality of God for me is always found not outside of life but within the depths of life itself. Divinity is the fullness of the human. We can speak of the Holy only from within the experiences of the human. Someday the Christian church will be forced to rethink all of its theological constructs in terms of our contemporary world view. The reality of God will still be eternal, but the way we explain that reality is always transitory. The theological constucts of antiquity, like the doctrine of the Holy Trinity, will always be honored and respected, but their words will inevitably in time become irrelevant to the world in which we live, for those words were formed in an age that no longer exists. The Holy Trinity is a human attempt to explain the eternal truth of God. That task will never succeed. Time has a way of making all of the explanations of antiquity seem uncouth. A church that literalizes its own explanations will be a church that dies when those explanations die.

John Shelby Spong

 

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