Christian speech of God as Trinity is the attempt to express the mystery of who God is and what God does in statements. Abstract as the attempt to speak of the Trinity of God sometimes is, it is of great importance to keep in mind that the subject matter of our words about the trinity is God in action. The doctrine of the Trinity is the framework within which we get a proper perspective on the Mission of God for our salvation. In view is who God wills to be for us, of ourselves brought by God into knowledge of God and intimate relation with God.

The doctrine of the Trinity does not just tells us about God. It is the basic framework of meaning within which we live our lives. The exploration of the mystery of human life and experience, as also the purpose and meaning of faith, are set in the content of the identity, purpose and acts of God. Our understanding of God shapes at the deepest level our understanding of ourselves. In the doctrine of the Trinity, theology and experience come together into a unified field in the expression of Christian faith and life. This is not an abstraction. It is an experienced and known relation of God for and with us and of us in God. In this way we can say that the doctrine of the Trinity is the grammar of all talk of God and of all attempts to live the Christian life.

God is none other than who God is in Jesus Christ toward us; and whom we experience God to be toward us in Jesus Christ is who God is as God. This is the soteriological and epistemological significance of the Nicene homoounion ton parti. There is no other God, no hidden God, no secret God lurking behind the façade of God’s revelation in Jesus Christ. As the writer to the Ephesians puts it, God "has made known to us the mystery of his will, according to his good pleasure that he set forth in Christ, as a plan (oikonomia) for the fullness of time, to gather up all things in him." (1.9-10) It is the point of Trinitarian theology that it brings together into indissoluble bond the acts of God in history and God’s presence now, with the identity of God in eternity. At the risk of putting it too cryptically, God is as God acts, and God acts as God is, through Jesus Christ in the power of the Holy Spirit, though with this important caveat-God is not reducible to our experience of God in history. To dissolve God into God’s being for us leaves no place for God existing a se (the so-called immanent Trinity). Yet God is none other than who we know God to be for us in the life, death, resurrection and ascension of Jesus Christ.

Two core theological assertions regarding the doctrine of the Trinity can be made. First, the doctrine of the trinity refers accurately, appropriately and singularly to God. Without the doctrine of the Trinity there is no Christian knowledge of God as God, and Christian faith, worship and practice lose all groundedness and coherence, and fall apart. Karl Barth answered the question: ‘Who is God,’ with the reply: "It is He who gives Himself to humanity as Trinity." Either the doctrine of the trinity is a true way to speak of God as God gives Himself to be known, or else we really do not know who God is, and we have no basis to assume that God really is like Jesus. In which case, Christianity loses all transcendent reference and is viewed consequently as a speculative or symbolic system of meaning and ethics with no revealed basis in or experience of the reality of God. Everything becomes abstract nouns.

Second, and perhaps surprisingly, the church has appropriately understood the doctrine of the trinity to be a practical doctrine in the most basic meaning of that word: it has to do with action. It refers to the acting God, and therefore to a basis for our action through our participation in God’s action by the Holy Spirit. IN general, the doctrine of the Trinity is inherently a practical theology, for knowledge of God is knowledge of the God who acts- if God does not act, we would have no way of knowing anything about this God. This also means that there can be no Christian practical theology, no theology for Christian action, no understanding of action in God, that is not a Trinitarian theology.

These two theological assertions are offered as starting points- that there is no appropriate Christian speech of God that is not Trinitarian, and that the doctrine of the Trinity has at its core the act of God-with an awareness of a problem. While indeed "one of the most important developments in the field of theology in the last two decades has been a genuine revival of interest in the doctrine of the Trinity, "there is," as one report noted recently, "a feeling abroad that (it) is an irrelevance. Once the centre of fierce debate, it now seems to belong to out religious past, and to have little to say about the great issues of the day." For many it would rank alongside the Virgin Birth and the Ascension on the scale of liturgically obdurate and theologically abstruse but less than meaningful appendices to Christianity today, not denied as such, but pushed to the periphery with little power any more to define the nature of God or Christian faith and practice. Unlike the eighteenth century Anglican divine, Samuel Clarke, whose copy of the prayer book in the British Museum is marked where with hostility to the doctrine he slashed through every Trinitarian reference with a violent stroke of his pen, the doctrine of trinity today, at least at the popular level of religious observance, seems to be dying by the little cuts of absentmindedness, apathy, disinterest and neglect. It suffers from functional atrophy due to lack of being vigorously exercised. "It need not be argued that the Western church now little uses or understands Christianity’s heritage of trinitarian reflection and language," writes Robert Jensen. The Forgotten Trinity, the title of the Report of the British Council of Churches Study Commission on Trinitarian Doctrine Today may be, for many people, an adequate description of their experience. The trinity is largely forgotten.

Do theologians and ministers also share that view? According to Nicholas Lash, "if one were to aska representative sample of Christian theologians ‘what do you mean by God’?, I doubt most of them would answer in trinitarian terms." There is nothing new in emphasizing monotheism at the expense of the doctrine of the Trinity, as far as western theology was developed. Already at the beginning of the fifth century, Augustine reversed the earlier eastern fourth century Alexandrian and Cappadocian view of the dynamically personal intra-Trinitarian relations within the Godhead with a more static metaphysical manner of thinking about God. Later, of course, Augustine would get to the Trinity, but not before he had first asserted the unity of God. By the middle of the thirteenth century, Thomas Aquinas was able to complete the process, separating the doctrine of God into two books, De Deo Uno and De Deo Trino. The oneness or unity of God was given priority. The Trinity must later be fit as an add-on. The doctrine of the Trinity, by dint of theological method, was already on its way to the margins of faith.

Arguably, at least for much western theology, the doctrine of the Trinity has always been a bit of a struggle. What is not so recognizable, however, is that by thinking first on the unity of God we are en route not only to natural theology, but, more seriously, to driving a wedge between Jesus Christ and God that has epistemological and soteriological consequences. It is forgotten that the center of the New Testament is the relationship between Jesus Christ and the One whom he called ‘Abba,’ and that there is no fully adequate knowledge of God outside of Jesus Christ. This means that we know God through the Father-Son relationship, and by the adaptation of our minds to its truth, and that it is by Christ and in Christ, through his vicarious priesthood, that salvation is wrought and experienced. Yet for many Christians, the model of liberal protestantism stemming from Schleiermacher, reworked by Adolf Harnack in 1900, and revived by John Hick and others today, is pervasive, insisting as it does that the heart of religion is the soul’s direct relationship with God without any need for the meditation of Jesus Christ. According to Harnack, we stand, with Jesus, and Paul, and Moses, as brothers and sisters, worshipping the Father, but not worshipping any Incarnate Son nor needing any complicated doctrine of the Trinity or of a mediator in order to know God. We, no less than Jesus, are sons and daughters of the one God. This, says Harnack, was Jesus message: the Fatherhood of God, and the siblinghood of humankind. It is precisely the Trinity, the incarnation, and the priesthood of Christ that are the alien doctrines in this scheme. As classical Christianity has been rewritten by Harnack, Hick and others, Jesus becomes the teacher of ethics and the example of goodness, but long lost is his priestly ministry as our Mediator who brings us home to God in himself. Knowledge of God becomes a private and unmediated experience and Christianity is evacuated of both soteriological and epistemological clarity. Exclude the doctrine of the Trinity and Christianity is no longer a religion of revelation and salvation for the reason that the incarnation is abandoned in favor of an understanding of Jesus as earthly symbol only of God’s intentions.

Let me put the issue sharply: if faith and theology abandon the doctrine of the Trinity, or, to speak more gently, push it to the periphery of faith’s experience and reflection, we have in fact advocated a theology of a mute and unknowable God and concocted a faith reducible to our own moral efforts. Precipitating the coming ethics-centered approach of liberal Protestantism, Kant summed up the problem as well as anyone. His dictum stated that "absolutely nothing worthwhile for the practical life can be made out of the doctrine of the Trinity taken literally." Many theologians and people of faith seem to have followed Kant, with the result that the doctrine of the Trinity is now more or less a musty monument to a forgotten God. The problem is that insofar as the doctrine of the Trinity is in fact the basis for the Christian apprehension of God amd for a Christian view of salvation, and of worship and Christian vocation in the world, its functional demise has serious consequences. Without the doctrine of the Trinity, Christianity is a faith without its defining doctrine of God; it becomes faith as a self-referencing act that has no coherence or cogency in a reality outside of the self.

"Who do you say that I am?" Jesus’ question at Caesarea Philippi, then as now, this is the central question. Functionally, Trinitarian doctrine stands or falls on the answer. The viability of the doctrine of the Trinity is proportional to the success of the rebuttal by orthodox Trinitarian tradition to the assault on Christology made since the Enlightenment. The details of that assault need not detain us, only its consequence. If Jesus is only human, providing an instance of religious experience, acting as a symbol or pointer to a God who otherwise remains hidden, as much modern Enlightenment-influenced theology advocates, then the doctrine of the Trinity is indeed an unnecessary appendix. It is a speculative metaphysical superstructure imposed upon God by the Greek mind of the early church. The problems that lie to hand with this approach, though, are many, not the least of which is that God remains essentially mute, a shadowy figure behind Jesus rather than the one known through Jesus. Further, the soteriological significance of God in Christ reconciling the world to God gets smudged into one variation or another of the moral influence theory of atonement. If Go was not in Christ, so the tradition argues, there is no knowledge of God nor of salvation.

The doctrine of the Trinity was impressed upon the mind of the Church in large part because Christians were compelled to deal with whom they experienced Jesus to be. We are back to the Who? Questions again. As the incarnation of the Word of God, In Christ Jesus God was really seen to have entered into our human experience-God as a man. This meant that our salvation in Christ is rooted in God, and because Jesus was fully human, salvation takes shape within Jesus’ human experience in history. This led to the huge leap of disciplined theological imagination that gave birth to the doctrine of the Trinity. A profound connection was made between the act and identity of God in Jesus such that talk of God was seen, not only to be made possible, but also was compelled by, the Church’s experience of Jesus as Lord. The problem would arise, as Catherine LaCugna has made so clear, when the theological imagination would fly from its incarnational moorings and lose connection with Jesus (The so-called economic Trinity), and rest its speculative genius in abstract reflection upon a discarnate being of God as such (the so-called immanent Trinity). By the Middle Ages a legacy was being forged that endures today of a Trinitarian reflection on the inner being of God quite separated from Jesus. A Trinity separated from Jesus in history rightly comes to appear as an irrelevance. But on the basis of Jesus, the doctrine of the Trinity allowed the Church to say that who God was known to be in and through Jesus is who God is in God’s own eternity. It is on this premise that many theologians today, as in the past, would see Christianity to stand or fall.

The working out of this Trinitarian perspective in the doctrine of our union with Christ will be the subject of my remarks tomorrow. Allow me a few thoughts in closing in the problem of speaking about the Trinitarian God.

The traditional naming of the Trinitarian God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit is frequently replaced by the functional and modalistic equivalent of Creator, Redeemer and Sustainer. This is both a reframing of the doctrine of the Trinity and, by implication, a rejection of the priestly ministry of Christ. In a way that is not often clearly understood, the question turns on the nature of theological language itself. How does theological language work? Practically speaking, obviously, the language we use in theology is the language of ordinary speech taken from our common experience. The theology I do is done in Pittsburgh. I think in a Scottish accent. Similarly, the doctrine of the Trinity arose out of a particular people reflecting on scripture. The Irish theologian John Thompson puts it clearly: "Trinitarian language is not a direct transcript of biblical language but it does attempt to interpret biblical teaching."

However, this is not the same as saying that the meaning we give to words in ordinary experience is the meaning thay have in theology, for we cannot move from ideas to being, from our words and their connections to some hitherto unknown reality like God, as Feuerbach, Marx and Freud knew so well. In fact, theological language is iconic, definite at one end, while open at the other.

According to Calvin, we speak of God by the mouth of Jesus. This means that while using ordinary language, theological speech of God is filled from beyond itself with content that is given by God. This is what the doctrine of revelation and the authority of scripture really mean. The effect is principally two-fold. First, theological speech is speech that really does talk of God, but always cloaked in the language garment of human experience. Second, it is speech that in its realism profoundly calls into question and dethrones all idols of the mind that we seek to project on to God. Even theology itself is questioned to its core again and again, demythologized, if you like, by the reality to which it bears witness. Thus we speak of the doctrine of the Trinity – while it refers appropriately to God, we do not confuse the referencing capacity of the doctrine with the reality of God as such. The doctrine is an icon, albeit necessary and unsubstituable, but it is not God.

Whatever misuses the Church has made of its language for God – and there is no doubting at all the use of language to dominate and abuse- we must try to understand the tradition on its own terms. Theologically, the reciprocal concepts of the Fatherhood of God and the Sonship of Jesus do not derive either from an inherent likeness between the creature and the Creator, or from a view of religious language understood as a projection of social values or political ideology on to God. While employing a necessary anthropomorphism, for there is no other way to speak of God, theological concepts reflect the fact that all theological language is inherently referenced away from itself to its subject matter. Mary Daly’s view that "since God is male, the male is God," quite misunderstands the nature of theological language in this regard, just as it draws a wrong consequence. Neither the Trinitarian theologians nor the Reformers operated with a role-model or projectionist metaphorical theology in which God-talk was filled in with expression of human experience, value and aspiration. Rather, they operated with an analogy of grace (analogia gratiae or analogia relationis) in which the ground of the analogy or the basis for our speech about God (analogia analogans) was God as revealed in Jesus, and in which human fatherhood was the analogate(analogia analogata). The text "The person who has seen me has seen the Father" (John 14.9) and Matthew 11.27 and Luke 10.22 "All things have been handed over to me by my father, and no one knows who the Son is except the Father, or who the Father is except the Son and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal him," are central. Athanasius later would comment that "it would be more godly and true to signify God from the Son and call him Father, than to name him from his work alone and call him Unoriginate."

Of central importance for classical theology was the primacy of the Father-Son relationship over the Creator-creature relationship. In consequence that "in Jesus Christ we have access to God…" the writer to the Ephesians could say that "For this reason I bow my knees before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth takes its name" Ephesians 3.15). Analogically, classical theology insisted, our speech concerning the Fatherhood of God is controlled by god’s self-revelation in Jesus Christ, and not mythologically (the word and usage is from Athanasius), by inverting the analogy, projecting ourselves on to God thus making the human male the ground of the analogy.

The concept of God’s Fatherhood was tied utterly to Jesus’ naming of his own relationship to God, into which relationship we be the Spirit participate-this is the point of the doctrine of our union with Christ. The Father is the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. Whenever ‘Father’ is used of God in the classical tradition it always means ‘the one whom Jesus called Father.’ The term doe not denote a generic title for God outside of the Father-Son relationship.

It was Athanasius who noted that the only reason we have for calling God ‘Father’ is that God is so named in the Bible. This points to the historical shape that the Gospel as a matter of fact took- Christian faith is a biblical faith and a Jesus-based faith. But the language of faith is used in such a way that it is bent away from its creaturely denotation to point instead to its source in the revealed self-giving name of God through Jesus Christ. God’s Fatherhood was not intended by the Trinitarian theologians to be the expression of human fatherhood projected on to God- that was truly the very last thing they tried to do, and they would be horrified to be so misunderstood. Rather, God’s Fatherhood was understood to be filled out by God’s relationship with and revealed act in Jesus Christ, that is, relationally as a communion of self-giving love, and not as a human image or concept projected on to God. Theological talk of God had its transcendent ground in Jesus’ relationship with the One whom he called ‘Abba’ and that had nothing to do whatsoever with general male experiences of fatherhood. There is, in fact, a necessary apopphatic element that is appropriate to insist on here, that is, an appropriate ‘thinking away’ of that which is inappropriate. By this I mean explicitly thinking away all biological and sexual imputation whatsoever into the theological concept of God. The God revealed in Scripture has no sexual identity; sexuality, after all, is part of creation, as Genesis 1 and 2 make clear, and in any case it would be idolatry to use creation as the content for speech about God. The Imago Dei is not reversible! As it was intended by the fourth century theologians especially in their defense of the doctrine of the Trinity against Arius, The Fatherhood of God had to be thought in such a way that they thought away from themselves and instead thought out of a center in God. It was this kind of thinking that the Greek Fathers called kata phusin, thinking according to the nature of God, as opposed to the thinking of Arius, thinking out of a center of human experience, which Athanasius called mythological thinking in contrast to theological thinking. The personalized language of Trinitarian theology intended to bear witness in Christ, and especially in the cross, to the liberation of humankind from all patriarchical idols and divinized ideologies, and that where this did not and does not happen there is the perversion of intent that must be utterly criticized on the ground of the nature, intent, and reference of theological language itself.

I am very aware what I have said cuts against the grain of much popular liberal and even mainstream thought in our church. Without doubt, the word ‘father’ calls to mind abuse and pain for many people, making the word virtually unusable, apparently, as it also calls to mind positive notions for others. The church, as always, however, must seek to educate the ‘natural mind’, as it were, in this as in all issues, and turn it away from inappropriate denotations by the very content and grace of the Gospel itself. That content is given with Jesus clothed with his Gospel, so that we come to think of God by grace and not by nature. This surely is what Paul meant by the transformation of our minds in Romans 12.2. Today, with our heightened sensitivity to issues of abuse, this is a huge educational task that must be tackled with love and gentleness, yet also with resolve not to concede the point of proper theological method.

It is then by the mouth of Christ that we call God ‘Our Father.’ But not in words only-and this point now is very important. For it is above all the goal of our salvation, of which now we have a foretaste, to share in a relationship, none other than the communion of love between the Father and the Son. As John McLeod Campbell used to say, it is only in and through the sonship of Jesus that we know the fatherliness of the Father. It is in Christ and from Christ that, in McLeod Capmbell’s felicitous phrase, we inherit the Father as our father. Thus it is that the gift of the Father to us in and through Jesus Christ is the gift of sharing in the communion of the Son with the Father. This means that Christ in a priestly way showed that the love wherewith the Father loved him might be for us and in us through himself. It is thus in and through Jesus Christ that we come not only to know God as the Father, and to speak thus, but to live in God as our Father, and in that way to know ourselves as we really are, as dear children of the Father, by adoption through Christ. Apart from Christ we are orphans, for he has not only revealed that God is a God of love, but also that as God, God is our Father by the grace of our sharing in the Sonship of Jesus. As McLeod Campbell has written, "For we are called to hear the Son that we know the Father through knowing the Son in whom He is well pleased, and so may know what is the Father’s desire as to ourselves, and what He has given to us in the Son, that that desire of His heart for us may be fulfilled in us."