Trinity Schminity

Column by Rev. Dr. Mark Sandlin on 25 May 2017 6 Comments

From “extreme monotheism” to “homoousion” to “partialism” to “modalism,” Christianity has a wide and wild variety of understandings of the theory of the Trinity. Frankly, that reality should not be too surprising. After all, the Trinity is in fact a theory and it is a theory that one must be fairly creative with to fit into all the necessary theological perquisites it comes burdened with. That is not to say it is too convoluted to have meaning, but I certainly don't bestow upon it the meaning that most mainline theologies would like for it to hold.

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Question

The question that has always haunted me is this: if the Holy Mystery is love and that is already in our essence, then how do you account for the Holocaust, inhumane conditions and treatment of the people of Somalia, Southern Sudan and all of the other atrocities that are happening around the world and in our own country? Where is the Beloved, the Holy Mystery, and the love of God?

Answer

Dear Louise,

Your question is the cry of the human heart, plaintively seeking to know where the Beloved is in the midst of such barbaric human evil. Human history being replete with atrocities has led not a few to conclude that human beings are essentially evil and corrupt creatures (Augustine) and/or subject to a satanic force at work in the universe (dualism). I don’t have a counter argument. Rather, I offer the insights culled from my experience. You will need to discover what resonates with your own soul.

My experience, which is consonant with so many of the mystics of east and west, is that not only is the Holy Mystery in our essence, it is who we essentially are. This Mystery is the Holy Source and is Boundless Love, which means that Boundless Love is the quality of the very fabric of life whose Presence we can come to know immediately and directly as the Being of our own being. Such knowledge is the soul’s deepest desire. Human beings are not essentially bad, but as the Celtic mystic, Eriugena, realized, essentially good – for God is our essence. This is why we can say that we live, move, and have our being as manifestations of the Holy Mystery.

In my experience, what happens is that we gradually lose contact with our true nature. I find that the language of “blindness” is helpful here. Sin, contrary to the dominant tradition, is not essential badness, or evil, but our blindness to the essential truth of our divine nature. In our blindness, as history all too painfully makes clear, there seems to be no end to the bestial destruction we can wreak on one another and inflict upon creation. But – and this is what is crucial – the Holy Mystery is never, nor could it ever be absent and somehow withdrawn. Essential Reality is what it is. Yet, the Holy Mystery does become lost to our sight, hidden within the distortions of the human heart. I believe hatred is love mangled and distorted.

Why do we become blind? Or what constitutes the blindness itself? These questions go beyond what I can say in this brief response. But it is inevitable in the course of early childhood development that significant parts of ourselves – namely our painful experiences and emotions – are split off into our unconscious. To the degree that we do not later come to understand and include as part of our whole self these early split off segments (such as trauma, rejection, shame, hate, anger, envy), they blind us to our selves, our motives, and determine much of our behavior as destructive. To better understand the evil we perpetrate upon one another, we need to better understand the psychology of early human development, which means to more fully understand the soul’s unfoldment.

~ Kevin G. Thew Forrester, Ph.D.

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Bishop John Shelby Spong Revisited

The Miracle in Abingdon, U. K.

SpongOne of my favorite biblical characters is the disciple Andrew. I regard him as the patron saint of ordinary people, little people. It is his brother, Simon Peter, not Andrew, who catches the Gospel headlines. According to the 4th Gospel Andrew is the one who brought Peter to Jesus and the one who recognized that even the young lad’s small gift of five loaves and two fish could be used by Jesus in the narrative of the feeding of the five thousand. Andrew is depicted as honoring each person’s gifts, however small. Later in John’s Gospel Andrew guides some Greek citizens to the place where Jesus was teaching. They had come to him saying, “Sir, we would see Jesus.” Andrew was the door opener, not the hero. He did the little things that mostly go unnoticed, yet his actions made possible some rather amazing things.
I thought of Andrew quite specifically recently when I responded to an invitation to speak in Abingdon, a village in Oxfordshire in the United Kingdom. The invitation came from a small number of that village’s female citizens who called themselves simply “The Spirituality Group.” This group began its life in 2001 when three women, Pauline Sykes, a Methodist; Jill Gant, an Anglican; and Susie Howard, a member of the Baha’i movement, shared with one another their discontent with the resources they were being offered in their religious life. This was not about some petty disagreement over a real or imagined hurt in their religious institution. It was rather a far deeper sense that religion itself, at least as they were experiencing it in their churches, was no longer related to their lives. These were women not threatening to “quit the church” in disillusionment. They were simply people with high spiritual interests and inquiring minds. None of them would be known far outside of Abingdon.
They were like the vast majority of the world’s people, living their lives in the intimate relationship of family, neighborhood and immediate community. They were content to remain largely in the environment in which they found themselves but they wanted their lives to be lived deeply and well. The churches they attended offered them lots of answers but none addressed the questions they were asking. Indeed their churches seemed uncomfortable with their probes. They were thought of as ‘those who disturbed the religious status quo’ of that village. That was not their intention but that response made them feel as if the task of exploring the spiritual life was no longer, strangely enough, regarded as the business of the churches. They accepted that verdict without a whimper and decided to try to develop something new, not to replace their church affiliations, which were very real, but to supplement what they received there, which they assumed must satisfy the majority of the people even if it did not satisfy them. In that way, the Spirituality Group of Abingdon came into being.
To their surprise, these three pioneers discovered that when they began to talk about their hopes with their friends, others were interested in joining them. They sent out a general notice announcing their plans and a core of about twelve deeply committed people responded. They defined their task to be that of “Exploring spirituality through the insights of modern-revelation theology, other faiths, the mystics, psychology and science.” They were also quite willing to examine, as legitimate for their purposes, two other things: traditional Christian doctrine and personal experience.
For the first six months this group met regularly with the self-imposed task of “Exploring and Sharing our Personal Beliefs.” “What is it that each of us really believes” which is quite distinct from what it is that “we are supposed to believe.” This was a time of trust building that enabled members of this group to realize that it is quite acceptable to think outside the box of traditional religious ideas. This sense of growing freedom was itself both exhilarating and exciting. These people insisted on putting the old ideas about God and religion that they had learned in childhood and had never challenged since, into their own language. The ecclesiastical power word “sin,” for example, which has been used in their churches to enhance both guilt and control, was redefined as our “failure to grow in wholeness within ourselves, with others and in relation to the whole of creation.” It was their willingness to become something other than dependent children before a father God and to take responsibility for themselves as mature adults that gave them a sense of their own worth and power. In their words, we refused to “ignore the divine within us.”
Their approximately two-hour long monthly meetings always begin with 15 to 20 minutes of quiet centering time led by members in turn. This is followed by a presentation of the topic for the day, which might be a book, an article, a personal talk or even a visitor with a unique experience to share. Then there comes a lively, no-holds-barred discussion, where opinions are freely shared and ideas explored. The session concludes with a kind of Eucharist with the sacred elements being, not bread and wine but homemade cakes with coffee or tea. They meet in a large comfortable room with a log fire at St. Ethelwold’s House Community Center.
Between their September meeting in 2001 and their October meeting, the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon occurred. This gathering was the place where the members of this group sought to understand, in a new way, the roots of violence and hatred and even to share their fears. So in November 2001 they decided to broaden their horizons and engage a wider world. To accomplish this, they began to look at growth movements in their own lives and to learn more of the organizations that helped people grow. They visited a meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous, an Eco village in Scotland and the Baha’i World Center. They had conversations with people who had been forced to confront evil or to integrate light and darkness in their lives. One person who came to talk with them had survived a Japanese prisoner of war camp. They explored the meaning that people found in poetry, music and prayer. They also began to go to various public lectures given by a variety of people who were pressing various boundaries, religious or otherwise. It was in this latter activity that this group crossed my life path. I was in the United Kingdom in Sheffield to lecture on my book, “A New Christianity for a New World” at one of those rare Anglican churches that is seeking to reinvent the church in the 21st century. For the Abingdon group Sheffield was a two-hour journey. I was not aware of their presence that night. As the stranger in town, I have no knowledge of who is in the audience or out of what experience their questions arise. I only know that I tend to speak to those who cling to their religious identities by the slimmest of threads and to those who have departed from their ancestral faith for membership in what I call “The Church Alumni Association.” I seldom am invited to speak to unquestioning true believers. Upon returning home, this group decided they would seek to bring me to Abingdon to do a lecture. It was for them a bold initiative.
Since I was an Anglican Bishop in good standing, they went to the local Anglican Church to see if that church would host this visit and provide the venue for the lecture. I gather they were rebuffed fairly harshly. The idea that this group of ordinary citizens might wish to provide a learning opportunity for the Church or even for the village fell outside traditional roles and traditional lines of authority. Perhaps the vicar also felt the threat of his own inadequacy since this group was seeking to offer something that he clearly was not providing. It was discouraging for the Spirituality Group to discover that negativity always comes when the status quo is disturbed. By now, however, they had no doubts that what they were doing had value. So in an act of enormous hubris, according to the values of English village life, these ladies decided they would sponsor my visit themselves. Twelve women who had no structure and whose organization had no status, secured the local school auditorium for the venue thus avoiding church politics. If they had guessed wrong, if there was no interest, they would be embarrassed and would slink back into their holes of conformity.
However, when the day of the event arrived, the auditorium was filled to capacity with more people than the Easter congregation of any of the churches in the village. The level of interest and excitement was high and this small group of women, assisted primarily by their own families, changed the conversation in the village of Abingdon from the staid religious traditions of the past to a new quest for spiritual meaning and ultimately to a new quest for God. Through the work of these women the non-traditional faith communities of Quakers and Baha’i discovered a new sense of worth and the traditional churches, Anglican, Methodist and Roman Catholic, had to face the existence of a spiritual hunger right under their noses that they had never recognized and by which they were clearly threatened. The dullness of traditional English Church life is not addressed, as some clergy like to suggest, because change may upset the people, but because change seems to threaten the authority of the clergy. Nothing wins over the clergy quicker than the vision of a full house. Recently in response to this event, the Anglican vicar approached a member of this group to see how his church might work more closely with them in the future. It was a new day for Abingdon.
Twelve English ladies have transformed a village. In their last letter to me, they said that their hope was not to be co-opted by a single church but to maintain an “overall open, inter-faith perspective.” Above all they expressed their intention to “continue to be a bastion of liberal spirituality in Abingdon,” Andrew, the patron saint of ordinary people must be smiling.

~ John Shelby Spong
Originally Published November 5, 2003

 

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