Holy Trinity?

God Almighty, Christ, and Holy Spirit – these are different aspects of the One God. Though understood metaphorically as distinctive divine persons, the differences among these aspects are occasioned only by human sensibility. God is triune only in traditional Christian understanding, not in essential reality. While it may be useful to conceptually differentiate the aspects of God’s ultimate unity, and it certainly is traditional in Christian orthodoxy, it is not religiously necessary.

Early Christian theological doctrine distinguished between the three divine “persons” who are, ineluctably, one “substance” - but not the same - by extrapolating from clues found in their study of the Greek wording of the sacred Biblical texts available to them. The venerable Jewish tradition, from which the Christian church fathers diverged, of course, affirmed simply, “Adonai, your God, is One.” The more ancient religion was, of course, the religious tradition of Jesus of Nazareth, who was not a Christian, but an observant Jew.

In individual religious worship, what I call the “God relation,” there is only one person involved, that is, the human person. God in Godself is not a person. God-consciousness is a uniquely human personal capacity. In my terminology, it is the conscious relation of personal being with being itself.

“Being itself,” drawn from the theological lexicon of Paul Tillich, is for me an equivalent of the Hebrew vocalization, Adonai, a name signifying the ineffable reality of God. “God” is a word; like all words, it is a sign, standing for and pointing toward the reality it signifies.

Every human being, that is, every person, is an instance of what I call “personal being.” Every human person is an “image” of God, Imago Dei. For me, to aver that we are “created in the image of God” is to see that we are personal manifestations of being itself, that is, of God.

As I’ve said before, if there were no minds to know God, there would be no God to be known. We, creatures of God, are given minds in order for God to know Godself. So, in a sense, we are the minds of God. We are the creaturely lenses through which God regards Godself. Without minds, God would be as God in Godself is – unknown and unknowing oneness of being itself. What I describe in these terms is, of course, the same core meaning described metaphorically in the Biblical words of Genesis.

God, Adonai, is One, but we creatures, or manifestations of God, are many. A more philosophical way of saying this is that we, finite, temporal, relative, and conditional instances of the infinite, absolute, eternal, unconditional, ultimate reality, necessarily regard ourselves, and everything in being (most often including God), as multiple separate realities. That’s just the way our minds are made.

This is because every aspect of being upon which we focus our attention appears to us, necessarily, as a discrete object at the moment we are attending. This is the nature of conscious attention. (I am not sure there is such a thing as unconscious attention – if there were I imagine it would not discern multiplicity in the oneness of being.)

Thus, it is the nature of our consciousness to experience ourselves as unitary subjects in relation with a multiplicity of objects of our attention. This ordinary mode of awareness is what I call personal self-consciousness, or “personal being.” (The altered mode of awareness, in which the person in being realizes the oneness of being, I call “transpersonal consciousness.” This is the center of God-consciousness. It happens in centering prayer and meditation.)

To return to the subject of the Trinitarian Doctrine, then, I see that the church fathers, in their sincere human penchant for diffraction of the one light of God’s truth, gave names or identities (picked and later translated from their Greek Septuagint texts) to the diverse ways in which the reality of God was apprehended.

The ontologically prismatic element here was the Pauline divinization of the Jewish Meshiach (Messiah) - the Christos, or Christ. This vision of Jesus as the Christ, uniquely God incarnate, was developed by the authors of the several gospels, culminating in the extremely exalted “high” Christology of the Gospel According to John. These first-century and early second-century scriptures contained the sources of the singular “Father-Son” conceptualization of God in Christ. (The term “Son of God” existed much earlier in Jewish religious lore, referring to any particularly holy person, not to be confused with God as Godself.)

The figurative Holy Spirit was an ancient Hebrew concept signifying what I understand as the acute awareness of God-consciousness, the transformative “power” of God that “touches” the human spirit and brings about a profound sense of holiness and “repentance” (a “turning” or re-orientation of the mind toward God.) The figure of the Holy Spirit was evoked in the Christian narratives deriving from the Jewish tradition, and, no doubt, from the oral testimonies of the Jewish followers of Jesus, who understood their experiences in those terms.

Thus, the doctrine of the Holy Trinity consisted in a theological synthesis of certain elements of the Greek interpretation of the ancient Hebrew Scriptures, with the newer Greek texts of the early Christian scriptures.

For me then, the concept, “Christ” (signifying both the human person of Jesus Christ and the “Godness” of Christ) is a symbol of the reality of God-consciousness, a mode of awareness and of personal being available to all people, at all times. This state of being is a saving grace in that it “saves” us or “delivers” us from sin, which is a state of alienation from God – the opposite or converse of God-relation. I believe this is what Jesus was calling for when he proclaimed, “Repent, for the kingdom of God is at hand.” (Of course, the trick of salvation is only temporary, because we are only temporal entities, and thus it needs to be rehearsed frequently, which is what we do in prayer and worship.)

In this understanding, Christ is an eternal dispensation, a gift or grace of God present and available to humanity from time immemorial, consistent with the Christology expressed in the Johannine gospel.

I identify myself religiously as a Unitarian Universalist Christian (or, meaning the same, as Christian, Unitarian Universalist.) I affirm that God is One in All, in Christ.

Unlike me theologically, most members of contemporary Unitarian Universalist congregations are not particularly interested in Christology, and have little use for Christian tradition, or any Biblical tradition for that matter, although most would agree with the humanistic ethics attributed to Jesus. Thus, I am something of a throwback to an earlier form of Unitarianism-Universalism, and accordingly, I believe I belong in today’s United Church of Christ more properly than I do in the Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations.