Tuesday, January 4, 2011

The true mystery of the Trinity

In the previous post, I argued that the doctrine of the Trinity is not some inexplicable paradox about how God is three and one. This does not mean there is no mystery to the doctrine, but rather that the mystery lies elsewhere.

The church fathers (the theologians who articulated the doctrine in the 4th and 5th centuries) are very clear where the mystery is. They insist that God is incomprehensible precisely because of the mystery of the Trinity. But the mystery is not about how God can be three and one. The mystery is about the eternal begetting of the Son.

Unlike the notion of “three and one,” this mystery is stated right in the creed, which confesses that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, “eternally begotten from the Father.” For the word mystery, in its original sense, refers to a secret meant to be revealed (notice how the word is used in the New Testament, for example, in Eph. 3:4-6 or Col. 2:2). Like the rest of the doctrine of the Trinity, it is meant to be taught.

To see what it's about, you could start with the question, “Can God create God?” The orthodox Christian answer is No, because God is by definition uncreated (meaning that God has always existed, never came into being, was never created). Since God is uncreated, he can't be created—not even by God. (By the way, orthodox Christianity has no problem with the notion that God can't do what's self-contradictory—but that's a topic for another post).

So God can't create God. But what God can do is beget God. That's how the Son of God has his being: by being begotten, not created—as the creed says. He has his being from the Father, but like the Father, he has always existed, never came into being, was never created. The mystery is how he can originate from the Father even though he has always existed.

The mystery, in other words, is summed up in two words of the creed: “eternally begotten.” For you would normally think that begetting must be a process that takes time, and before you're begotten, you don't exist. The word “begetting” is just an old word for conceiving, in the biological sense. The way ancient biology thought about it, you could say: I was conceived by my father in the womb of my mother. And of course before that happened, I didn't exist.

But with the eternal Son of God, it's not like that. He has no mother, and he was begotten by the Father before all ages, so that there was never a time when he didn't exist. He is just as eternal as God the Father, even though he originated (was begotten) from the Father. When you track what the church fathers say about the incomprehensibility of God, this is always at the center of it.

But the mystery is not mere confusion. It is taught as Christian doctrine for good reason. And it has several consequences that are important to know about.

First of all, it means that the Son is just as eternal as the Father. So he is, in terms of his being, equal to the Father. To make this absolutely clear, the creed says he is “of one being with the Father” (you can also translate this, “of one essence”). This famous phrase is a sort of commentary on the statement that the Son is God (= statement #2 in my first post on the Trinity). It means he is just as fully God as God the Father is, and just as fully deserving of worship. So even though he originates from the Father, he is not less than the Father, as if he were some later, subordinate or second-rate god. All that follows from the fact that he is eternally begotten from the Father—begotten not created.

One last clarification. It is important to notice that everything we have said so far is about the nature of God, not about the human nature of Jesus. The doctrine of the Trinity has much to say about Jesus Christ, but it says it about his divinity, not his humanity. To talk about his humanity, you have to bring in the doctrine of the Incarnation. That's coming up soon in future posts on this blog.

But to get the essential gist of the difference between the two doctrines, Trinity and Incarnation, think of two births (as the 5th century church father Cyril of Alexandria put it). The one birth is eternal, when the Son of God is eternally begotten of the Father, as I've been describing in this post. The other birth takes place on Christmas day, when he is born of Mary, a baby boy laid in a manger. So in addition to the eternal birth of the Son of God, there is his temporal birth as the son of Mary. Two births: in eternity and in time. Two births, but only one person: the same person, the eternal Son of God, is eternally begotten of the Father before all ages and also born of the Virgin Mary on Christmas day.

To contemplate those two births is to enter into the deep and beautiful mystery of God.

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