I shall stand by my word that “trinity” is a philosophical position. Scriptures offered varied pictures of Jesus’ relation to the God of Israel. The terms “son”, “father”, and “spirit” are the most often used. The drive to take these word-pictures and to unify them in a clear and systematic way meant it was necessary to analyze them logically within the confines of some system of logic. The prevailing logic of the day was that put forward by Aristotle. It was rather straight forward to logically connect the father and son. It was considerably more complex to arrive at their sharing of a nature, and even more complex to then decipher which parts of Jesus were human, which divine, and how eternal perfection could enter into temporal flux and imperfection. The spirit’s position was even more complex in so far as the texts spoke of the spirit in so many seemingly contradictory ways. Was this the father’s spirit, was it the son’s? Could it belong to the father and yet be sent by the son? I could exhaust a fortune in ink listing all the questions in need of systematic answer around this “trinity”. Here is the problem: visionary religious imagery was tugged and pulled into terms for syllogistic argument. Once this appropriation of mythos into logos began, the game was on.
Two major camps came about. Augustine was a philosopher somewhat beholden to Plato. He wanted to understand how we know, how we think, how our thought is related to the world outside our thought. His presentation of the trinity is a summation of his epistemology. Thomas Aquinas became beholden to Aristotle’s somewhat different theory of knowledge, and so his trinity reflects that somewhat different epistemology. He, like others of his day who embraced the “pagan philosopher”, had more than one confrontation with authority as a result of it, and when he died, the kindly bishop of Paris burned his work. But this ancient Greek thought filtered through Iberian Islam and Mozarabic Judaism, distilled by an Italian monk dislocated to France was not easily cremated.
All western theologians have basically been in either the Augustinian or Thomist camp. For each of them, father, son and spirit exist and are related in a manner consistent with the theorizing of how knowledge, understanding and will inter-relate in the human mind.
Modern philosophy threw a bit of a curve to this two camp culture. Suddenly new ways of considering the divine inter-workings were being discussed. This was not appreciated by institutions in charge of transmitting the teachings of the ages. By the early nineteenth century there emerged a concerted effort to standardize the philosophical framework of dogmatic language. Thomism was the winner. The Vatican still has no will to consider dogmatic discussions that are not framed within the Thomistic parameters.
It is not just the “trinity” that is fundamentally a philosophical proposition. All dogmatic statements are philosophical. All dogmatic statements begin with a religious vision and then proceed to reduce it to a logical, an empirically-based, term, relate it to other such “translated” terms in a proposition, pair it against another such proposition to deduce a statement that is “logical”,“true”. Unfortunately, as lovely to behold as some of these arguments are, they are all surds. Terms from one system of knowledge (imaginative vision) cannot be reduced to being valid terms in another system of knowledge (empiric knowledge). And with that falls all the power of systematic theology to explain trinity, creation, fall, virginal birth, incarnation, resurrection, spirit, and life everlasting. With that also the church gains the power to narrate and celebrate the unending creativity of faith, hope, and love in the world and for the world. The loss is one of academics. The gain is one of genetics– palingenetics.
Having said all that, it must be patent that when I use the expression “God is Love”, the reality I am talking about is empirical experience and understanding of love. The “God” term means I make it my highest principle, goal, idea, ideal. Words and ideas like “god” and “nature” are just terms or masks for the ultimately inexpressible power we find ourselves a product of, immersed in, and moving along in. It is a power beyond all our reason or understanding; it can certainly be seen as cruel, heartless, mindless, chaotic, and violent, but I, and I think most of us, do not want to live in that sort of way, and as a product of that power I have the power to say there is more to be said, and the best I can say of it and make of it is to interpret it as a field wherein I am called to create as much as possible well being for myself and others. The best thing I can do as a person is to act lovingly. To say “God is love” is simply, poetically, and truly to say “to love is to be god”. That is the best thing one might aspire to. That I can praise. To that I can open my heart.
Do I believe in God as some uber-father with humanoid personality? No. That, in all sincerity, is akin to believing in a tree-god or a cow-god etc. It is, at best, a pictogram for the mystery of mysteries. No one ought to belittle so great a power with so piteously poor an equation. Person may be the greatest and most comprehensive concept for intelligent and caring existence we can conceive of, but to apply that concept to the absolute as absolute, to the most high power, as anything more than a shield, a mask, for religion’s task to make integrated persons, is a sacrilege and a travesty of life’s innate quest to be. It is to worship the idol rather than that to which the idol points, the sheer and overwhelming power of being.