The social Trinity can inform a new, agapic, progressive Christianity

[The Great Open Dance]

We can ground an agapic, progressive Christianity in the social Trinity.

The open, vulnerable relations between the three persons of the Trinity provide a ground for Christian progressivism, because they model egalitarian relations that challenge our unjust social structures. As such, the Trinity provides a powerful analytical method by which we can transform society in the image of our loving God.

We find a tripersonal (based in three persons) experience of salvation in the New Testament, which is where we’ll begin our exploration. Within the Christian tradition, the most consequential speculation on the nature of God occurs in the unrecorded period between the resurrection of Christ and the writing of the New Testament. We have no writings from this period, although we do have writings about this period, such as Acts. But with regard to the Trinity, we have no description of the origins of Trinitarian worship or thought. Although the earliest followers of the Way (Acts 9:2; 19 , 23; etc.) were Jewish worshipers of one God, their experience of salvation was tripersonal. That is, they experienced one salvation through three persons, whom they called the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

They expressed this tripersonal salvation in their liturgy (their language of worship), which the authors of the New Testament then incorporated into their writings. For instance, Paul provides a Trinitarian benediction, probably drawing on preexisting liturgical language: “May the grace of our savior Jesus Christ and the love of God and the friendship of the Holy Spirit be with you all!” (2 Corinthians 13:14). The earliest Gospel, Mark, describes the baptism of Jesus in a Trinitarian manner, referring to Jesus himself, the descent of the Spirit upon him in the form of a dove, and a voice from heaven declaring Jesus the Beloved Child of God (Mark 1:11). In the Gospel of John, Jesus declares, “Abba and I are one” (John 10:30) and promises to send a Counselor (the Holy Spirit) to the new community of disciples (John 14:16). So transformative was the community’s experience of tripersonal salvation that the rite of entry into the church became a rite of entry into Trinitarian life: “Go, therefore, and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of Abba God, and of the Only Begotten, and of the Holy Spirit” (Matthew 28:19 The Inclusive Bible).

Since no historian recorded the transition from Jewish monotheism to early Christian Trinitarianism, we cannot know exactly how or why it happened. But given the vigor of the young church, we can infer that the liturgical expressions recorded in the earliest Christian scriptures were generated within the Christian community and resonated with that community’s experience. In worship, they preached, prayed, and sang the healing that they had received, a healing which came through three persons but led congregants into one body.

In other words, the early Christian community’s experience of salvation was Trinitarian—one salvation through three persons as one God. To assert that their experience was Trinitarian is not to assert that their theology was Trinitarian. The earliest Christians did not think the same way about God that later Christians would think. They felt that their lives had been transformed by the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, whom they worshiped as one. (Please note: when discussing historical theology, we will use the traditional, gender-specific terminology of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. As the series of blogs progresses, we will substitute our own, gender-inclusive terminology.)

The early Christians’ liturgy expressed their experience and laid the foundations for tripersonal (three person) theology on the experience of tripersonal salvation. By the time the church wrote its new Scriptures, it could not talk about the Creator without talking about Jesus and the Holy Spirit. Euclideans needed three lines to draw a triangle; Christians needed three persons to talk about God. So John writes: “There are three who give testimony in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost. And these three are one” (1 John 5 DRA).

How did a monotheistic Jewish justice movement become Trinitarian Christianity?

As mentioned above, Jesus and his first followers practiced Judaism, a religion replete with commandments to worship God alone: “I am YHWH, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. Do not worship any gods except me!” (Exodus 20:2–3). Jesus’s favored prophet, Isaiah, reiterates the exclusive status of the one God: “Thus says the Lord, the King of Israel, and his Redeemer, the Lord of hosts: I am the first and I am the last; besides me there is no god” (Isaiah 44:6 NRSV).

Jesus himself affirms Jewish monotheism. In Mark, the earliest gospel written, when a scribe approaches Jesus and asks him which commandment is the greatest of all, Jesus responds by quoting (and embellishing) the Jews’ beloved Shema: “This is the foremost: ‘Hear, O Israel, God, our God, is one. You must love the Most High God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength’” (paraphrasing Deuteronomy 6:4–5). Jesus then couples love of God to love of neighbor by quoting Leviticus 19b: “The second is this: ‘You must love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no commandment greater than these” (Mark 12:29–31).

So, when asserting the greatest commandment in Mark, Jesus offers the preamble of Deuteronomy 6:4 (“Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one”). Deuteronomy refers to God with the proper name of YHWH. For the Deuteronomist, God is one deity with one personality bearing one name. But in Matthew 22:35–40 and Luke 10:25–28, which were written after Mark, the greatest commandment conspicuously lacks the monotheistic preamble: “One of them, an expert on the Law, attempted to trick Jesus with this question: ‘Teacher, which commandment of the Law is the greatest?’ Jesus answered: ‘You must love the Most High God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ That is the greatest and first commandment. The second is like it: ‘You must love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments the whole Law is based—and the Prophets as well” (Matthew 22:35–39).

Both Matthew and Luke were written fifteen to twenty years after Mark. Was the early Christian community already shying away from pure monotheism? This historical development may seem to come out of nowhere, but it has some precedents in Hebrew thought. Prior to the rise of Christianity, and presaging the Trinitarian inclination, Judaism had a “rich tradition of speculation about heavenly intermediaries.” These celestial beings could be the angel of the Lord (Zechariah 1:12), or personified Wisdom (Proverbs 8:22–36), or the sons of God (Genesis 6:2–7), or Satan the accuser (Job 1:6), all of whom fulfilled roles within the heavenly court. For this reason, the earliest preachers of Jesus and the Holy Spirit, all of whom were Jews, could have initially identified Jesus and the Spirit as figures in the heavenly court, then seen their status increase over time.

In his analysis of John’s Prologue (John 1:1–14), Jewish scholar Daniel Boyarin quotes this passage from Philo of Alexandria, a Hellenistic (Greek speaking) Jew who wrote before the birth of Jesus:

To His Word [Greek: Logos], His chief messenger [Greek: Archangelos], highest in age and honor, the Father [Greek: Patēr] of all has given the special prerogative, to stand on the border and separate the creature from the Creator. This same [Logos] both pleads with the immortal as suppliant for afflicted mortality and acts as ambassador of the ruler to the subject. He glories in this prerogative and proudly proclaims, “And I stood between the Lord and you” [Deuteronomy 5:5].

This passage presages the early Christians’ experience of Jesus as an advocate for humankind to the Father, and as a revelation from the Father to humankind. Further, in his speculative work On Dreams, Philo goes on to offer language anticipatory of the Trinity itself: “The Divine Word [Theios Logos] descends from the fountain of wisdom [Sophia] like a river. . . . [The psalmist] represents the Divine Word as full of the stream of wisdom [Sophia].”

Remarkably, Philo is working with an explicitly tripartite spiritual experience: of a Sustaining God who provides a Mediator to humankind, that Mediator being full of Wisdom. If read in a Christian context, then Philo’s Logos anticipates Christ and Philo’s Sophia anticipates the Holy Spirit. While we cannot know the exact genesis of his thought, Philo’s theology may represent a widespread, pre-existing notion among Hellenized Jews. If so, then for some this expectation was fulfilled by Jesus of Nazareth, then ratified by the appearance of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost.

The social Trinity exemplifies agape—the universal, unconditional love of God.

Whatever the historical source of Trinitarian thought, these first Jewish-Christians sensed the love of the Parent, salvation through the Child, and inhabitation by the Spirit. They sensed that three persons were producing one salvation. They sensed the Trinity. In keeping with their monotheistic tradition, they also sensed a unifying quality of those three persons: love.

Whenever Jesus speaks of God, Jesus speaks of love—love of God, love of neighbor, and love of self (Matthew 22:37–40). This law of love admits neither exception nor compromise: Jesus teaches his followers that outsiders will recognize them by their love (John 13:35) and commands them to love their enemies (Luke 6:35). Indeed, Jesus so deeply associates God with love that John later declares, “God is love” (1 John 4:8).

Love cannot be abstract; love needs a beloved. All love is love of; hence all love implies relation. If God is love then God must be love between persons: biblically, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The early American theologian Jonathan Edwards writes: “God is Love shews that there are more persons than one in the deity, for it shews Love to be essential & necessary to the deity so that his nature consists in it, & this supposes that there is an Eternal & necessary object, because all Love respects another that is the beloved.”

So, according to Edwards, when John asserts that God is love, he necessarily asserts that God is internally related. Indeed, if he asserts that God in Godself is love, then he asserts that God in Godself is interpersonal—inherently more than one. Love is not the Godhead beyond God, a singular, pure abstraction. Instead, love is the self-forming activity of the triune God, the most salient quality of each divine person, and the disposition of each person toward the other—and toward creation.

Paradoxically, Christianity has inherited an experience of God as one and many, singular and plural. The tradition has articulated this experience by adopting a both/and epistemology, a way of knowing that preserves creative tensions rather than resolving them into a simplistic absolute. God is both three and one; God is tri-unity; God is Trinity. This concept of God presents Christianity with its greatest challenge and its greatest opportunity: to think, act, and feel as many who are becoming one. (adapted from Jon Paul Sydnor, The Great Open Dance: A Progressive Christian Theology, pages 42-47)

*****

For further reading, please see:

Boff, Leonardo. Trinity and Society. Oregon: Wipf & Stock, 2005.

Boyarin, Daniel. “John’s Prologue as Midrash.” In The Jewish Annotated New Testament, 2nd ed, edited by Amy-Jill Levine and Marc Zvi Brettler. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017.

Gerstner, John H. Jonathan Edwards on Heaven and Hell. Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1980.

Juel, Donald. “The Trinity and the New Testament.” Theology Today 54 no. 3 (October 1997) 314–24. DOI: 10.1177/004057369705400303.

Keating, Daniel A. “Trinity and Salvation: Christian Life as an Existence in the Trinity.” In The Oxford Handbook of the Trinity, edited by Gilles Emery and Matthew Levering, 442–53. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Oxford Academic Online. Accessed 14 Nov. 2022.

Moltmann, Jurgen. The Trinity and the Kingdom: The Doctrine of God. San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1981.

[slightlv]

1. Intriguing... thank you for posting!

Bookmarked to go back and re-read when the noise and cacophony of kids and dogs is not quite so overwhelming to thought! One question... was it at the Council of Nicea where the Trinity was established as Dogma? Obviously, there would be history up to that point...

[The Great Open Dance]

2. A difficult process

Hi, thank you for reading! The development of the doctrine is very difficult to trace. This passage is one part of a chapter on the origins of the Trinity. The doctrine probably took about 700 years to fully develop. But using the concept to promote social justice only began in the 20th century. I'm trying to carry that effort into the 21st. Godspeed you in your busy family life!