[Ed. This is the text of the sermon which I preached at St Albans Church in Ottawa on Trinity Sunday, 26 May 2013.]
These days it often seems as though the doctrine of the Trinity is an answer to a problem nobody asked. Theologians who rabbit on about the Trinity appear to be like the engineer in the joke about the manager in the hot-air balloon, providing information that may be technically correct, but which help the balloonist not at all.
These days it often seems as though the doctrine of the Trinity is an answer to a problem nobody asked. Theologians who rabbit on about the Trinity appear to be like the engineer in the joke about the manager in the hot-air balloon, providing information that may be technically correct, but which help the balloonist not at all.
Consider the bewildering and tongue-twisting formulations of
the sixth-century Athanasian Creed, which can be found near the end of the old
Book of Common Prayer:
Now
the Catholic Faith is this, that we worship one God in Trinity, and the Trinity
in Unity; Neither confusing the Persons, nor dividing the Substance. For there
is one Person of the Father, another of the Son, another of the Holy Ghost; But
the Godhead of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost is all one,
the glory equal, the majesty co-eternal. (BCP 695)
And on it goes, well past the point at which we might
consider uttering an expletive and chucking the book into a dusty corner. The
mystery writer and Christian essayist Dorothy Sayers once parodied this kind of
language, writing of ‘the Father incomprehensible, the Son incomprehensible,
and the Holy Ghost incomprehensible.’
