All humanity stands as children beckoned into vibrant, moving relationship and activity within the sacred community of the Triune God. Dan Wilt says it beautifully in this prose:
The We opened the circle, and the We invited the Children into the dance.1
There may be no point more humbling to the western worldview than the doctrine of the Trinity. The architecture of linear thought that pervades secular humanism and our culture at large has built a system of understanding (and learning) that will not allow us to leave its infected self-reflection to comprehend a Divinity that ascends beyond the scientific method. Problematic with this schism of natural logic from Divine reality is the secular humanist claim of "search for truth". Such a search is done only after the secular humanist properly removes the Divine from the evidentiary search domain. This is done by saying, "search for truth, but if truth leads beyond our measurements it can't be truth".
And this is precisely the problem. When we are confronted with truth that belies our worldview, we simply cannot accept it through mental acumen. And this is not something that began in recent Centuries. The earliest disciples dealt with this as well. Even within their understandings of the monotheistic truth about Yahweh, centuries of tradition had bent them towards a supposition of a human agent as Messiah, not a divine one. As N.T. Wright explains in his book "Simply Christian":
"In the same way, the phrase "Son of God" is often quoted as if it meant… "the second person of the divine Trinity." It didn't-… At the time it was simply another epitaph for the Messiah...A high rank for a human being, no doubt; but there was no thought of such a king being the very embodiment of… Israel's God himself. "2
It is within that timeframe (and mindset) that Jesus arrives, claims the Messiah-ship of Israel, and begins his revolution of love and the resulting birth of the first century church. The earliest Christians (Wright says) though thoroughly steeped in Jewish monotheistic thought, recognized Jesus as divine. And though confronted with this conundrum, it was this community of early Christian's that came from there to perceiving, understanding and later articulating the doctrine of the Trinity. Indeed, rather than fragmenting and destroying the early church through this apparent contradiction, a genuine search for truth galvanized into a theology that was tested through persecution and martyrdom. This shakes our "drive-through", "instant fix" world to the core-- that the tension of the doctrine of the Trinity existed relatively unarticulated for nearly 200 years before Tertullian wrote "Adversus Praxean" and gave the first language for the word "Trinitas" (Trinity)3. Today, we can find help in the tension by articulating these truths in simple prayers, as Wilt quotes Wright in his "Online Studies in Worship Theology and Biblical Worldview" by praying:
Father almighty, maker of heaven and earth:
Set up your kingdom in our midst.
Lord Jesus Christ, Son of the living God:
Have mercy on me, a sinner.
Holy Spirit, breath of the living God:
Renew me and all the world.4
I find this struggle continues in me today (and perhaps in you, as well)- that when we strain to gather language for God, we are often looking for a way to appease our embedded linear dogma with a formula that can keep our western worldview from being harmed too much by our childlike dance with the Truine God.
1. Dan Wilt, Essentials in Worship Theology (Franklin, TN: Dan Wilt, 2009), Pg 26.
2. N.T. Wright, Simply Christian: Why Christianity Makes Sense (New York, NY: HarperCollins Publishers, 2006), Pg 117.
3. Roger Pearse, The Tertullian Project (online at http://www.tertullian.org/. Specifically, the chronology timeline regarding Tertullian is extracted from CCL II pp. 1627-8 and presented at http://www.tertullian.org/chronology.htm)
4. Dan Wilt, Essentials in Worship Theology (Franklin, TN: Dan Wilt, 2009), Pg 29.