Archive: Trinity

Misha Glenny delves in to the In Our Time archive to select ten episodes for listeners to revisit. His final choice is the Trinity, an episode first released in March 2014. The idea that God is a single entity, but one known in three distinct forms - Father, Son and Holy Spirit - has been a central belief for most Christians since the earliest years of the religion. The doctrine was often controversial in the early years of the Church, until clarified by the Council of Nicaea in the late 4th century. Later thinkers including St Augustine and Thomas Aquinas recognised that this religious mystery posed profound theological questions, such as whether the three persons of the Trinity always acted together, and whether they were of equal status. The Trinity's influence on Christian thought and practice is considerable, although it is interpreted in different ways by different Christian traditions. With: Janet Soskice Professor of Philosophical Theology at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Jesus College Martin Palmer Director of the International Consultancy on Religion, Education, and Culture The Reverend Graham Ward Regius Professor of Divinity at the University of Oxford and a Canon of Christ Church. Producer: Thomas Morris Reading list: Susan Ashbrook Harvey and David G. Hunter (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Early Christian Studies (Oxford University Press, 2010), especially chapter ‘The Doctrine of God’ Lewis Ayres and Andrew Radde-Gallwitz Lewis Ayres, Nicaea and Its Legacy: An Approach to Fourth-Century Trinitarian Theology (Oxford University Press, 2006) John Behre, The Way to Nicaea: Formation of Christian Theology Vol 1 (St Vladimir's Seminary Press, 2001) Gilles Emery and Matthew Levering (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of the Trinity (Oxford University Press, 2011) Susan Frank Parsons (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Feminist Theology (Cambridge University Press, 2002), especially chapter ‘Trinity and Feminism’ by Janet Soskice George Herbert, The Complete English Poems (Penguin Classics, 2004) Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love (Penguin Classics, 1998) Ben Quash and Michael Ward (eds.), Heresies and How to Avoid Them: Why It Matters What Christians Believe (SPCK, 2007), especially essay on ‘Biblical Trinitarianism’ by Janet Soskice Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Hymn of the Universe (HarperPerennial, 1976) Miroslav Volf, After Our Likeness: The Church as the Image of the Trinity (William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co, 1998) Graham Ward, Christ and Culture (Wiley-Blackwell, 2005) In Our Time is a BBC Studios production Spanning history, religion, culture, science and philosophy, In Our Time from BBC Radio 4 is essential listening for the intellectually curious. In each episode, host Misha Glenny and expert guests explore the characters, events and discoveries that have shaped our world.

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• 2:05Speaker 04

  Hello. In this summer special of In Our Time, we're looking at the very heart of Christian theology, the Trinity. Traditionally understood as the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, ever since the death of Jesus Christ and the emergence of Christianity as an organised religion, Christians have been wondering and arguing about the significance of the Trinity. What is the relationship between the three entities? Is there a hierarchy within the Trinity? And if so, who stands at the summit? And what exactly is the Holy Spirit or Holy Ghost? Polemics about the nature of the Trinity were especially intense

• 2:46Speaker 04

  during the first three centuries of Christianity. Some rejected the idea altogether, while others could not support the idea that the Son could be anything other than subordinate to the Father. This led to an early split in the church at the Council of Nicaea, but the concept of the equality of the three entities of the Trinity did emerge as dominant. The issues surrounding the Trinity would reappear periodically, and a dispute about the nature of the Holy Spirit played a role in the arcane debates that led to the Great Schism between the Western Roman Catholic Church and the churches of the Eastern Orthodox

• 3:25Speaker 04

  Rite. Indeed, as Melvin's guests articulate, the nature of the Trinity almost invariably features in divisions within the Christian church. Enjoy listening.

• 3:38Speaker 05

  Hello. One of the beliefs that sets Christianity apart from all other faiths is known as the doctrine of the Trinity. From the early years of the religion, Christians believed that God existed in three forms: God the Creator, His Son Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit or Holy Ghost. But also central to Christianity is the belief that there's only one God. How a single God could appear in three forms was a question which preoccupied early theologians and caused disputes and even splits in the church. Since the fourth century, most Christians have accepted the doctrine of the Trinity, the idea of three divine individuals who together make up one God. The doctrine also raises philosophical problems which have occupied some of the greatest religious thinkers of the last 2,000

• 4:18Speaker 05

  years. With me to discuss the Trinity are Janet Soskice, Professor of Philosophical Theology at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Jesus College, Martin Palmer, Director of the International Consultancy on Religion, Education and Culture, and Reverend Graham Ward, Regius Professor of Divinity at Christchurch University of Oxford. Janet Soskice, when did the idea of the Trinity emerge and where did it come from?

• 4:44Speaker 06

  Well, I'd say it's emergent from the earliest days. I mean, first of all, the doctrine of the Trinity is about what Christians think about God, and it's not, and Jesus, of course. It's not something extra. Christians believe that God is Father, Son and Holy Spirit. And then they don't believe in something extra, and they say, and also the Trinity. But where, there's a biblical foundation, of course, because Jesus, and we've got to believe that this was something He was saying, was calling God His Father. So there's Jesus addressing God as His Father. And then very early on, we find the earliest Christians praying to Jesus as though He were God. We've got a secular report of this from Pliny, who was a governor in what's now Turkey, around 115, and he was asked to report on

• 5:29Speaker 06

  this infidel group. And he said, well, they claim they do nothing wrong. They get together and sing hymns to Jesus as though He were God. So that's a report from about 115. So obviously, people are asking, well, who are these people? These people are praying, these early Christians? Well, we know a lot of them were Jews, and Jews worship one God. So what's going on here? I mean, you can understand both pagans and Jews who weren't followers of Jesus saying, well, you say you believe in the one God, but you're praying to this man, Jesus. Is he a lesser God? What's the status? So that's all the anchorage. I think it's one of the revolutions in thinking about the Trinity now, is to see that it's really anchored very decidedly in Jewish practice. And you could say that it goes

• 6:14Speaker 06

  earlier than than the first century, really, because in the centuries, the three centuries prior to the emergence of Christianity, Jewish believers were quite accustomed to invoking God or speaking of God using certain titles or names. They spoke of, when they were speaking about God acting in the world, they'd speak of God's mighty wisdom, or God's mighty word, or God's mighty name coming down to act on behalf of the people of Israel in times of persecution. And all these ascriptions get assigned to Jesus.

• 6:47Speaker 05

  You've brought, you know, obviously, because it's the whole basis of it, brought in the monotheism of the Jews. Why did the Christians feel it necessary to have a Trinity?

• 6:57Speaker 06

  Well, I think at first, it seems they felt it necessary to have a binity, that they were praying to Jesus as though He were God. So this forces the question. Either this is somehow this man, Jesus, is the same as God, which of course, many of the gospel writings suggest, the Gospel of John, somehow Jesus says, I and the Father are one, or they're different. But it was a murky story, and that's why there were so many disputes that had to be hammered out later at councils.

• 7:25Speaker 05

  But then the Holy Spirit or the Holy Ghost comes in. So you've got two, but why do you need a third?

• 7:31Speaker 06

  Well, I don't think you strictly need it, but you do get very, very early on, already in, for instance, the account of Jesus' baptism by John, you get this voice coming from heaven saying, this is my beloved Son. And a dove, you know, this idea of spirit-formed dove, which is obviously a symbol of some kind of spiritual gifting to Jesus. So you get this idea, and then Jesus apparently promised his followers that they, He would give them the Spirit. And we get very early on, for instance, in the Book of Acts, Trinitarian invocations, the idea that the early Christians are calling upon God, Father, Son and Spirit.

• 8:10Speaker 05

  But the word Trinity, the idea, real idea Trinity, Janet, is not mentioned in the New Testament. It isn't a foundational belief, is it? And yet it's become an essential part of Christianity. So when did that happen? It isn't there, it's been made to be there by persons like yourself, 2,000 years ago.

• 8:28Speaker 06

  Well.

• 8:29Speaker 05

  So I think we can explore one more question. Why did they think they needed it?

• 8:34Speaker 06

  I think they felt, it's a regulative teaching. That's why I say it isn't, it isn't a foundational doctrine, but it's, it's a teaching that regulates the other foundational confessions of Christian truth about believing that God's the Father, that He's one with the Son and the Holy Spirit. And so, because there were different ways of interpreting the New Testament material, it was very important, and people were debating this. They were arguing in the marketplaces, women were arguing at home. It was, it wasn't just theologians with this job creation scheme said, oh, we've nothing to do, let's come up with a new doctrine. I think there's a nice one here in the Trinity. No, it was what actual people were really concerned about, and that's what drove it.

• 9:13Speaker 05

  Martin Palmer, as Janet said, quite true, this occupied people in disputes and in the marketplace, we're told, as well as in the libraries of the time. Let's move to the Council of Nicaea in 325 AD, which was a defining council. Can you tell us what it defined?

• 9:30Speaker 07

  Well, it tried to sort out some of the questions that you've just fired at Janet, which is essentially, what on earth is this all about? I mean, essentially, Christianity and those around Christianity, because, of course, much of this dialogue took place in debate with Jews, in debate with the Greek philosophical world within which early Christianity emerged. And nobody really had a problem with the idea that there was God. The problem comes with, well, quite who is this figure, Christ? And how on earth do you have two natures in one body, a divine nature and a human nature? And essentially, various answers came forward in the sort of two or 300 years that Janet's referred to in the early church.

• 10:11Speaker 07

  One was adoptionism, that Christ was, or Jesus was such a good person, that God looked down and said, well, now, this is the embodiment of everything I want human beings to be. And that at the baptism, the Holy Spirit descends, and in a sense, God takes on Jesus as his exemplar, his messenger, if one was to speak in Islamic terms, and gives him a divine status by adoption. A second response, named after an extremely remote person called Sibylles, was to say that, actually, there is no difference. This is, you know, we're really, we're just looking at different aspects of the same phenomenon. There is God, and God has different aspects, but to go too much into what they are, whether

• 10:56Speaker 07

  they're persons, whether they're entities in their own right, that gets us confused. And this was sort of attacked by the Orthodox Christians, or what emerged to be Orthodox Christians, in saying, well, if you say that, then it wasn't Christ who was crucified on the cross, it was God who was crucified on the cross. And then the third approach, and this is really why the Council of Nicaea was hosted by an exceedingly triumphalist Constantine the Great, and that was to deal with the Arian controversy. And that was a very fine point, which was essentially, Arianus, who was a priest in Alexandria, said, there is God, and then God created before creation the Son in order to be his instrument of creation.

• 11:39Speaker 07

  And he creates Christ out of nothing, not out of himself. And therefore, you have a sense that Christ is lesser than God, is a later derivative from God. And that was challenged, and the Council of Nicaea was called essentially by Constantine, desperate to have a united empire, he'd just united the empire and himself, a united faith as part of the panoply of faiths. Constantine didn't make Christianity the official religion, but he did give it recognition. And he finds this church riven with debates about the nature of Christ. And then, when we come to the Holy Spirit, in the Nicene Creed, he's kind of, or she is a kind of add-on, it's, and the Holy Spirit, we believe in and the Holy Spirit.

• 12:24Speaker 07

  So I think, really, by the time we get to Nicaea, the issue is, who or what is Christ? And how can Christ be both God and man? How can he be the pre-existent element of creation, or that creates creation, as well as someone who walked in Nazareth and Bethlehem and Jerusalem?

• 12:42Speaker 05

  Are we approaching a stage where this discussion, not our discussion, but the discussion that's gone, perhaps our discussion as well, the discussion that's gone on for the last year, is considered to be, or accepted as being beyond words?

• 12:54Speaker 07

  Yes, sort of. I think one of the dilemmas is that this debate takes place within a Greek-speaking context, not Latin. And I've had it said to me by Orthodox patriarchs and bishops, that wasn't it fantastic that Christian theology had to be developed in a Greek-speaking world, because they had the philosophical tools from Platonism and Neoplatonism with which to deal with it? So at one level, you have a group that actually do think that if you keep at it long enough, you'll pin this down. But I think over against that, one has to put, for example, Saint Augustine, who is later than Nicaea, he's at the beginning of the fifth century, but is very influential

• 13:37Speaker 07

  in the interpretation of the Nicene Creed, who says, when we speak of three persons, it's not because we believe that's true in the sense of absolutely accurate, it's simply we've got to say something. So the limitations of language are recognized, but there is a dialectic between, if you like, the mystery, which you were talking about earlier, and the desire of some to try and pin it down so that you can say, aha, Melvin, you're not actually a proper Christian.

• 14:06Speaker 05

  Graham Ward, can you tell us the main points of the Nicene Creed, then, which established quite a strong bridgehead, didn't it?

• 14:15Speaker 04

  It did. In fact, it's interesting, the whole kind of relationship between the different creeds and, in fact, the Nicene Creed in many ways is a sort of shortened, briefer version of the Athanasian Creed, and the Athanasian Creed coming out in the kind of fourth century. And the shortened part of it means that you have certain kinds of, not just three relationships, as in the Apostles' Creed, you've just got God the Father, and then you've got the Son, and then you've got God the Holy Spirit, but you're not really going into the relations between them. In the Nicene Creed, you start to get a language about the relations, so you get the language of begotten, for example. So Jesus is the begotten of God.

• 14:59Speaker 04

  And then you've got the relation with the Holy Spirit, that the Holy Spirit is the procession of God, that relates the nature of the Son to the nature of the Father. So you've got a kind of expression of the relations between them. Why I think it's difficult is because the way in which, if you take that too literally, you get some kind of hierarchical notion, I mean, Martin's talked about the Arian difficulty, that Jesus or Christ was the kind of afterthought created out of nothing from God the Father, which already gets you a sense of the kind of notion that, therefore, this is a lesser being in some kind of way. And in some ways, the Nicene Creed actually opens up some of that kind of possibility,

• 15:42Speaker 04

  because it doesn't, in using this language of the begotten, and the one that then proceeds from this, you've got almost this sense of, then you've got a kind of declension, if you like, or a hierarchy within the Trinity. And why I think that that's problematic is if you go back to the Athanasian Creed, which is a much longer creed, and is still actually authorized by the Book of Common Prayer to be used on certain occasions, what the Athanasian Creed does is, it also wants to talk about Jesus Christ as the begotten Son. It also wants to talk about the Holy Spirit as proceeding from the Father and the Son.

• 16:22Speaker 04

  But the first third of it is a complete emphasis upon how these things are, in fact, equal. And that equality is a repetition that he uses to demonstrate that equality, which balances then, or at least kind of raises a question, then how can this be equal when you're suddenly getting into a notion of the hierarchy?

• 16:43Speaker 05

  Yeah, and in a simple, if you said my question, really, how can people accept that it could be equal when God is, as it were, the entity in charge?

• 16:53Speaker 04

  And I think that that is part of, coming back to what Janet was saying, it's part of the difficulty of how you understand the relationship between the revelation of God in Jesus Christ, which quite early on, I mean, you find it in the Epistle to the Hebrews, for example, the Epistle to the Hebrews is probably first century, and although not written by Paul, and it was, it quite demonstratively is there to say to the Jewish people that this person, Jesus Christ, was God. So you've got the revelation of Jesus Christ then as God. How does that then relate back to the monotheistic God as Creator?

• 17:34Speaker 04

  And so you're having to find a way in which you're actually doing this without being hierarchical.

• 17:40Speaker 05

  Was this, you think, a way in which Christians wished to define themselves against the Judaism?

• 17:45Speaker 04

  It could be taken as that. I mean, I don't take it as that. There's a politics involved in all kind of theologizing, there's no way of getting around that. And there is a politics, we've seen this quite recently, in the way in which you define yourself by your doctrine, to whom you belong, what kind of church you belong to. But in fact, as a theologian, I don't see it in those particular ways. I do see this more as a real wrestling attempt to, how do we understand then this relationship? Insofar as we don't know what God is in God's self, all we are treating is the operations

• 18:27Speaker 04

  of God in the world, the coming of Jesus Christ is the operation of God most visible in the world, in it becoming historical. How, therefore, do we understand this manifestation of God in the world in relation?

• 18:41Speaker 01

  To the creator God, the father God before that. So that's where that language then, which can lead to notions of hierarchy comes in. But that's what I mean. You balance that off against the way in which Athanasius emphatically keeps telling you, this isn't about hierarchy. These relations are equal. They are one and the same.

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  Hey, it's Niall Rogers, host of Before the Moment, a Lincoln original series. I'm driving across the country, meeting some of today's most fascinating artists. We're exploring the stories before the moment that changed everything. This week, I'm joined by my friend, John Ledge. What still makes you just sit down at the piano? If you sat down at nine AM and then at noon, you had a full song that you recorded and put in your voice recorder or you recorded at your studio, you just created something brand new that didn't exist when you woke up. What a beautiful feeling it is. I'm always excited to write something new. I've been writing for Broadway, which has been a new

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  challenge with new collaborators and these amazing performers who are triple threats, who can sing and dance and act and do all these amazing things. And I want to keep feeling that. And so that means not resting on my laurels, going out there and continuing to create something new. Experience Before the Moment, a Lincoln original series on the iHeartRadio app, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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• 22:01Speaker 05

  Jonas, Jonas Soskice, can we explore this a little more? The idea of three, which is so riffed through culture in very many ways, and the idea of three in one, I wondered if it makes any sense at all, that one way to understand the notion of reaching out three is at the moment of conception, when you have a man, a woman, and a child. And the moment that the child is conceived, Christians think this is a living person. And that you have one in three there, you could say. Do you think that might be some sort of root to people's understanding of it?

• 22:33Speaker 06

  Well, that was certainly one that was explored, not least in the Syriac Church.

• 22:38Speaker 05

  The Syriac Church?

• 22:39Speaker 06

  Yes. But I think it was generally thought to have, as Martin said, subordinationist implications, to make the spirit somehow lesser than the two principles. I think one thing that's important, and here's something the Islamic tradition brings up, is that when Jews and Christians and Muslims say God is one, that's not one of a cardinal series. In fact, in Arabic, I think they have an entirely different word to describe the oneness that is God from the one of cardinality. So it's not as though there's one God. There might have been seven, but there's actually one. So and this God, here's another difference with the father, mother, child. Those are all creatures. We're talking about God, who is God the Creator here, who is not a creature at all, who can't be lumped in in any cardinal

• 23:24Speaker 06

  series with creaturely reality. But I want to come back to something Graham said about, and your question to Graham about, is this something defining oneself against the Christians?

• 23:34Speaker 05

  Against the Jews.

• 23:35Speaker 06

  Against the Jews, or either way. We've got to remember that the first Christians were Jews. And for instance, if we look at Paul, already Paul in his writings, and the author of Hebrews, almost certainly Jewish, but Paul definitely is, Paul is already singing out these hymns of praise to Jesus as though he were God. And he's citing, there's a wonderful hymn, Christ hymn in Philippians, where Paul's, which is very early, about 50 or 60, Paul is apparently citing a hymn that he expects his Philippian audience to know. And he says that, "The name of Jesus, every knee should bow, and every tongue confess that Jesus is Lord." Well, what's bombastic, what's startling about this is it's almost a direct quote,

• 24:16Speaker 06

  it's clearly intended as a direct quote, of part of Isaiah, where the Lord Yahweh speaks and says, "Turn to me, for at my name every knee shall bow and every tongue confess." So Paul, the Jewish Christians are already making this identification. As I say, it's bombastic. What does it mean? They're claiming to worship one God. It's not, it's not something that comes, historians of later antiquity now think the division between Jews and Christians came much, much later, maybe a couple of centuries later. And the same people could self-identify as Jews and Christians for a long period.

• 24:48Speaker 05

  Indeed, from very early on, people think that these three entities, or these three, whatever they are.

• 24:54Speaker 06

  Yes, you see the problems.

• 24:56Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah. I wonder why you say yourself those problems, but never mind. Had different, had specific different functions.

• 25:04Speaker 06

  That was also tried. Many things were tried. And the whole history of Trinitarian theology is almost like saying, not what saying what works, because as Graham has alluded, what God is and God's self, we don't know. But saying what can't be said. And a lot of it is about saying what can't be said. And

• 25:22Speaker 05

  So what can't be said that you're saying?

• 25:23Speaker 06

  Well, you can't say, you can't divide the functions of God off, say, God the Father is Creator, and God the Son is the Redeemer, and God the Spirit is Love. All of the developed faith of the Christian church is that all God's actions in the world are the actions of the triune God. So it's not a job creation scheme for three different bits of God. And I think this has come up recently, when there's been trouble in feminist language with wanting to get away from Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, move over to rubrics such as Creator, Sustainer, Redeemer. Nothing wrong with that in itself, but it can lead to a kind of real tritheism where you're saying, oh, this is a bit of God that does this, and not the bit of God

• 26:07Speaker 06

  that does that. And that's been shunned.

• 26:10Speaker 05

  Okay, Martin Palmer, I think following on from that, one of the bitter disagreements at Nicene concerned, the single word filioque. Can you tell us why that was such a problem then? And appears to be quite a problem now.

• 26:27Speaker 07

  Well, it wasn't so much at Nicene. It creeps in much later. And this is a phrase which means that the Holy Spirit descends from the Father and the Son. And filioque is of the Son. And this does not appear in the Nicene Creed, neither in 325, nor at Constantinople in 381, nor at Chalcedonian at 451. It starts coming in from the West, from probably the sixth century, probably in Spain. And really, it, the problem with it is that the Eastern Church, the Orthodox Churches, will not accept this phrase. And it has crept, I think that's the right way of describing it, into the Western Church, Catholic and Protestant. As Graham alluded to, if you look in the Book of Common Prayer,

• 27:12Speaker 07

  you'll find the Athanasian Creed, you'll find the Nicene Creed, and you will find that the Holy Spirit in the Book of Common Prayer of the Anglican Church says, proceeds from the Father and the Son. Now, what this does, as far as the Eastern Church is concerned, the Orthodox Church is concerned, is that it brings in this issue of a hierarchy. Because if the Holy Spirit is not of God direct, in the same sense that Christ is, then you've got a derivative Holy Spirit. Are we talking about two personalities, God the Father and God the Son, and then some sort of force, force field, like a lifesaver that sort of spins off out of them? And that's in a sense what the filioque clause does at one level.

• 27:55Speaker 07

  It produces a subservient Holy Spirit.

• 27:59Speaker 05

  Graham Ward? I just wanted to actually kind of come in and give you an example of that, because the West has got itself into one or two kinds of descriptive problems. So that you have got these two persons and a relationship, which doesn't actually suggest that in fact the three are equal and one. So you get someone like Bernard of Clairvaux, for example, who will image the Trinity in terms of God who gives the kiss, and then Christ who is given the kiss, and then the Holy Spirit as the kiss. Or you get notions like God is the lover, Jesus is the beloved, and the Holy Spirit is the love that's actually, and

• 28:42Speaker 05

  it's those kind of descriptions which tend towards this difficulty in how then are you defining it? And I don't think the iconography of the bird helps here, because, again, it's something that is smaller than the two other, other things between. But the way you were talking about it suggests it opened off a poetic

• 29:02Speaker 04

  Interpretation, isn't it?

• 29:03Speaker 05

  It is an open door for poetic interpretation, but let's, I mean, if you want a poetic interpretation that would be more accurate, then go to not Bernard of Clairvaux, but Dante at the end of the Commedia, where he has the vision of the divine, and the division of the divine is three intersecting circles, the Baromane circles, if you like, or rainbows, as he actually puts it. And that figuratively becomes, is much more the kind of sense certainly that you get at the opening of the Athanasian Creed, that in fact, this is about oneness and it is about unity. I mean, the same thing could be said with Andre Rublev, when, you know, when he painted the Trinity.

• 29:44Speaker 05

  It's three persons, I mean, he goes back to the tradition in the Old Testament about the three angels coming to Abraham at Marmara, and he paints the three persons around a single round table, and all three are bending in towards each other. So announcing a kind of doctrine of the perichoresis, or what came to be known as perichoresis.

• 30:06Speaker 04

  Janos Tuskis, the Trinitarian belief seems to have been influenced by Greek philosophy. Can you take us there?

• 30:14Speaker 06

  It was fairly common amongst philosophical circles to know there was one God, but to combine that with a kind of polytheism, so there might be also many gods or many powers of God, so that the one God who is beyond being or whatever, but the many powers that actually acted in our creation. And it certainly, we sometimes see in Greek-speaking Jews like Philo, who's a Jew of the first century, he'll talk about the one God, and then he'll talk about the logos of that God through whom the world is made. This logos sounds a lot like John's Gospel, the prologue, that the world is, there was, in the beginning was the Word, and it was with God, and through this Word, everything was made.

• 30:56Speaker 06

  But Philo will describe this logos as a dutoros theos, a second God. And I think it's pretty clear, Philo was a monotheist, and he was, what he was doing was inflecting Greek philosophical terms towards his own Jewish thought. He's pretty clear elsewhere, there's only one Creator and so on. And this happens again and again, when we get to the idea of the formulation of the doctrine of the Trinity, because there's some pretty fine tuning was needed. These people, especially in the East, but in Rome as well, were Greek-speaking, and it was quite natural for them to try to refine what they were getting at in Greek terms. But if it was totally Greek, in a certain sense, then the mystery of the Trinity is why,

• 31:39Speaker 06

  why these early Greek fathers just didn't go for the more obvious and easy to explain option of saying, well, that, yeah, there were actually three gods, or there are lots of gods. That was a perfectly acceptable idea in the Greek milieu, but they didn't. They kept insisting, perversely you might say, no, there's only one God, and using Greek philosophy to try to articulate this. So I, I think one can overestimate the sense this is, in which this is driven by the Greek philosophies. I think the Greek philosophy is instrumental in helping these Jewish Christian, Christian Jews to try to get across what they believe.

• 32:11Speaker 04

  There does seem a split of Martin Parry in the Orthodox Church and the Western Church. Can you tell us what that, on this subject, can you tell us what that consists of?

• 32:21Speaker 07

  At, at the heart of it is an understanding of, of what human beings are. The Orthodox Church does not believe in original sin. And therefore, the role of the Holy Trinity, or the role of Christ as Savior in the Orthodox Church, is not to rescue us and wrestle us out of the, the morass of evil and sin that we are in, which is very much what Augustine presents us with, but to fulfill us. And so their understanding of the Holy Trinity, taking that phrase at the beginning of the Bible in Genesis, that we are created in the image of God, is to bring out the best within us. The Holy Spirit comes as a, a light into our lives, into our mind, into our body, and, and illuminates the best within us.

• 33:05Speaker 07

  There's a, a wonderful phrase in, in John the Venerable, a fourth-century mystic, who talks about this being like a pearl that we take into ourselves, and the Trinity is a pearl that sheds light and illuminates us from within. And it's very much this notion that our relationship with God is a fulfilling relationship. And it goes back to the problem that Graham was, was touching on. Is this a set of philosophical notions that work in a hierarchical or quasi-hierarchical way, and you work your way through them, and they, they, they affect salvation on them, on you? Or is this actually something that you are invited into?

• 33:43Speaker 07

  So the Rublev fantastic icon of the Trinity, which is the three angels that met Abraham and Sarah, is recorded in Genesis, they're seated around a table on which there is food. And Russian, well, particularly Russian icons, but all Orthodox icons, there are no shadows, because you are not looking at the picture. You are being observed by the Trinity, and the table is not complete. There is a fourth side to the table, that's where you join the feast. And therefore, the Orthodox understanding is that you are invited into this relationship, not as the West would have you, in a sense, you approach on your knees in a position of petition,

• 34:27Speaker 07

  and hope that they'll come to your rescue.

• 34:30Speaker 04

  Graham Ward, I want to come to St. Augustine now, but before that, can you give us some idea what you think that the faithful people, the masses who went to the churches, that, what they were getting out of this? Were they getting confusion? Were they getting a mystery that they basked in, or were they feeling cut off?

• 34:47Speaker 05

  Well, I'm, I'm not sure what most of the people, as most of the congregations today, make of the various, I mean, controversies about these positions. In, in many ways, I often think that, first of all, the Trinity is written into the liturgies. In various forms, it's written into liturgies even today. I mean, if you go to a communion service, it starts with in the name of the Father and the Son, the Holy Spirit. And it'll end with a blessing in which, again, the Trinity is invoked, and it may even have a creed or the gloria in which the Trinity is actually spoken. But in, in some ways, it's, it always comes to me across as, as like gravity. We don't understand gravity, most of us, and we certainly, probably most of us don't understand the mathematics,

• 35:30Speaker 05

  which actually helps to explain gravity. But nevertheless, we live within that world which has got gravity in it. And I would say the same thing to most of the people at that particular time, there were, it didn't mean in the same kind of way.

• 35:43Speaker 04

  Why do you think that theologians from St. Augustine onwards, St. Augustine mentioned by Martin, why do you think they have grappled with the philosophical implications of the Trinity so consistently?

• 35:56Speaker 05

  I think so consistently because of the way that it is something which is abstract. So you're dealing with abstractions, one, three, one, many. Abstractions that's written into Hellenistic philosophy about how you actually relate the one to the many, whether you're talking about Plato or you're talking about Plotinus. It's all about how does the one relate to the many? So you can see the way in which then it can get taken up into philosophical abstractions about the nature of persons, for example, or the nations, the nature of economy, and the nature of action, and God's action in the world. So you can see how it does that.

• 36:37Speaker 04

  And mathematics related to mysticism, and something like Pythagoras, that three was the perfect number, because it had a beginning and a middle and an end.

• 36:43Speaker 05

  Absolutely, and you still get people who are quite fascinated in trying to relate into faithways how triads and threeness might actually relate across Christianity to, to other, other faiths entirely.

• 36:56Speaker 04

  Janos Tuskis, one thinker was the medieval theologian Julian of Norwich, I'm curious. Anyway, Julian of Norwich, can you talk about her approach?

• 37:06Speaker 06

  Well, Julian claimed she was an unlettered woman, but wrote this marvelous book, which is the, the first book of any sort we have in, in English. She may have dictated it, she may have just meant she didn't know Latin, but she knew a lot of theology in this book, her showings, it's an unfolding of, of a kind of deathbed. She nearly died when she was about thirty-three. The priest came to her with a crucifix, and looking at it, she had this kind of vision and unfolded it. But what's very interesting is the unfolding is so thoroughly Trinitarian and in a very, very sophisticated way, because she doesn't make any mistakes. Now, she's famous for speaking about Christ as our mother, and that's one thing that people have picked up,

• 37:49Speaker 06

  especially in modern times, he has a strong vision of Christ as our mother, even bearing us in his body and giving birth to us on the cross. But she also describes all three persons of the Trinity as our mother. She describes the Father, she said the Father is truly our mother, and Christ is truly our mother, and the Spirit is truly our mother. And she's rotating us around these three persons continually. And it's quite a good example of what, you asked Graham to sort of articulate, what ordinary people thinking, because although she is a kind of anchorite and dedicated, she's not a person of official theological formation. But this triune understanding of God is informing her whole religious life,

• 38:32Speaker 06

  and the one she wants to get across to her ordinary, she says she's writing for ordinary, even Christians, she said just ordinary Christians. And it's this beautiful rhythm of the love between the Father and Son of Spirit embracing her, described in this maternal imagery, and I think it shows some of the flexibility. And also that for ordinary Christians, as, say, it isn't as though they can articulate and say, well, I believe in God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, and then also the Trinity. You don't need an also. If you believe in Father, Son and Holy Spirit, you have a Trinitarian faith. The Trinity is just a name officially theologians lob onto it.

• 39:08Speaker 04

  Graham Ward, how does this doctrine affect the religious practice, both for the Church and for the individuals?

• 39:16Speaker 05

  What, today?

• 39:16Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 39:18Speaker 05

  I think that we live it, rather than it's necessarily something that we keep coming back to and trying to explain.

• 39:25Speaker 04

  I'm sorry to interrupt, but what does we live it mean?

• 39:27Speaker 05

  Well, as in, within the liturgical setting, any act of worship is an act of worship of God, and that God is triune, and that that is signaled in the liturgies and, and in the worship, in various kind of formulas that are actually used.

• 39:44Speaker 04

  So would it be, would it be impertinent to say it's an act of faith rather than an act of logical thought?

• 39:50Speaker 05

  I wouldn't want to separate an act of faith as something that seemed to be illogical, or...

• 39:56Speaker 04

  No, outside, a different sort of, I wasn't saying it was illogical, I'd say it might be a parallel. A way of experiencing.

• 40:01Speaker 05

  Parallel, I could go along with, a parallel I could go along with. In other words, that when you enter the faith, however you enter the faith, or you come to believe, then you want to understand what it is you're believing. And that this is what ways in which, right from the very beginning, as we've explored, we've tried to understand what it is we believe about the coming of Jesus Christ in relation to God as Father and Spirit.

• 40:29Speaker 04

  Martin Palmer, the Trinity is one of the things that sets Christianity apart from other Abrahamic faiths. Have Judaism and Islam seen anything in this doctrine to accept?

• 40:43Speaker 07

  No. I mean, Islam is absolutely absolute about it. There is a verse in the Quran which says, you know, those who believe in the Trinity are wrong, and they've got it wrong, and God has no son. And this was considered so important that when they captured Jerusalem and started to build on the site of the of the temple in Jerusalem, and they built the Dome of the Rock, it's one of the few texts that's actually written up on there to sort of say to the Christians in that city, you're wrong. And particularly within Judaism, you have this notion that the Torah was created before the creation. But it's this sense that here is this teaching, here is this voice of God, which is, in a sense, an emanation.

• 41:24Speaker 07

  And Philo, who Janet was referring to in the first century A.D., refers to it as the firstborn of God, the first child, the first daughter, in fact, in certain times. And then sees the wisdom, this very strong tradition of wisdom, which is feminine, and particularly in the Orthodox Church, is kept as a feminine notion, this idea that you can be inspired, your life can be transformed and changed by the wisdom coming into you. So you almost have a Trinity in Judaism. In Islam, in the in the Sufi tradition, you have this notion of the love of God, which is an emanation, a manifestation of of God's compassion for you. But how can an unmoving, unchangeable God be passionate?

• 42:08Speaker 07

  So that the struggle, I think, for Judaism and for Islam is how do we maintain a monotheistic belief, but not make God so remote that I, as an ordinarily troubled human being, cannot have a relationship? And in many ways, I think that reflects, going back to your question, I think that reflects where an awful lot of Christians find themselves as well. They want a personal relationship.

• 42:33Speaker 04

  Janet Soskice, it's frequently been, the Trinity have frequently been a subject for religious art. How is the, in your view, how is the art reflected, the philosophy?

• 42:47Speaker 06

  Well, it's quite interesting because you might say it's only recently that it's been a strong figure for religious art. In the earliest iconography, the Eastern Icons, there's a prohibition on representing the Father. And this was tied up with the valorization of icons in general, which were icons of Christ and the saints. Why can you represent Christ? Because in Jesus, the Word became flesh and dwelt amongst us, and we beheld His glory. That was the apology the the pro-icon group used. But the Father, there was a big prohibition in the Eastern Church against representing the Father. Now, we do get this coming in, and particularly in the Western Church. The Rublev icon has been mentioned already.

• 43:30Speaker 06

  But I think amongst purists in Orthodoxy, the Rublev icon, which is 15th century, is slightly controversial if it's regarded as representing the Trinity. But if we look at an early representation, we get a wonderful aps mosaic in in Rome, in San Clemente, which is Byzantine, it's 1125, where Christ is on the cross, water's coming from his side, going down to a fountain, which is nourishing a vine whose tendrils fill the whole space. But at the top of the cross is a hand holding the cross in place. And that hand represents the Father. Now, is this a representation of the Trinity? It's probably a representation of that God, the Father, is present even at this darkest moment, which is almost always the moment of new birth, too.

• 44:13Speaker 06

  So later, we do get, in Renaissance paintings, then we get, to my mind, some rather creepy paintings of the Trinity, although I'm culturally biased, where you get a man wearing a papal tiara, holding up a cross, or holding the body of the crucified one. Usually, there's a bird in between them. A lot of these paintings are Spanish and Italian. And these are depictions, but I think they're rather degradation of the tradition to myself. The earliest British tradition, I think Martin could correct me, are are simple things like in stone on cathedrals with three intersecting circles, or something like that.

• 44:49Speaker 04

  Graham Ward, why do you think the Trinity has been particularly important, a particularly important subject for 20th century theologians?

• 44:56Speaker 05

  It became an important turning point for Protestant theology with Karl Barth, because in many ways before this, the Trinity had either been kind of made into an appendix, which is what Schlemacher does in the 19th century, or it was demythologized. So he comes back with a very strong doctrine, and his whole kind of church dogmatics have been central to that. To me, why it's become more important was actually as a as a post-war phenomenon, really, in in theology. And that was the way in which it figured forth communion, or communio, that one of the notions of the Trinity as pericresis was that they interpenetrated, we'd done that rings business, they interpenetrated one another.

• 45:38Speaker 05

  And this then offered a kind of notion of democratic relations, justice, equality. And so in the rebuilding of, well, not just Europe, but the world, really, after the Second World War, a lot of these kind of, a lot of theologians were actually drawing upon these kind of images in terms of what came to be known as a kind of social trinitarianism. You find it in liberation theology, for example, that with Beuth, where the image of the Trinity becomes an image of the kind of society that we actually want to move towards.

• 46:14Speaker 04

  Finally, let's start with Janet, we go around the table. What, not all Christians subscribe to the Trinity. Why do some denominations reject it, some persons reject it? Most outstandingly, Newton, who was a Unitarian and wouldn't have the Trinity at all, Isaac Newton.

• 46:30Speaker 06

  Well, for the same reason that Muslims and Jews do. If you don't believe that Jesus is God incarnate, you don't need the doctrine of the Trinity. And not all people who call themselves Christians do believe that. If you do believe that Jesus is God incarnate, you've got to have something like the Trinity.

• 46:46Speaker 04

  Martin?

• 46:48Speaker 07

  I very much go with Janet. I think it's a lot easier to actually just maintain the unity of God. It does get extremely complicated and confusing to explain. And yet, I think what is intriguing is that even those who are Unitarians end up, in my experience of working with them, still with a sense that God manifests himself, herself, in different ways to the individual. And so, yes, you maintain, I believe in one God only, but I experience that God. And this is a phenomenon right through the major religions. Taoism, Buddhism, Hinduism do the same thing. That, yes, there is the unity, but to experience that unity, you experience it in diversity.

• 47:33Speaker 04

  And finally, Graham.

• 47:35Speaker 05

  I would go along very much with what Martin was trying to say. What is going on here is trying to get a conception of the divine, which is transcendent, and therefore other than the world. And yet, also that this transcendence is experienced within the world, imminently within the world, within our experience. And so, how do you relate these two things? And so, yes, I can see, exactly, if you don't want to believe in in Jesus as being the Christ upon which this might be formulated, then you could do without that. But you're still going to be living this kind of tension between the immanent and the transcendent, and finding a way in which you can actually understand that.

• 48:16Speaker 04

  Well, thank you very much. Thank you, Janet Soskice, Graham Ward, and Martin Palmer. Next week, we'll be talking about the 17th century empiricist philosopher Bishop Barclay. And thank you for listening.

• 48:26Speaker 06

  I'm Kate Lamble, and from Understand from BBC Radio 4, this is Rinced.

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