The Entangled Trinity

Quantum Physics and Theology

Ernest L. Simmons

• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780800697860
• eBook ISBN: 9781451438574
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

The Doctrine of the Trinity is an exercise in wonder. It is drawn from the wonder of our own existence and the diverse experiences of the divine encountered by the early Christian community. From the earliest days of Christianity, theologians of the church have drawn upon the most sophisticated language and understandings of their time in an attempt to clarify and express that faith and this task is no different today.

But how should we attempt to articulate that faith today? In this volume, Ernest Simmons engages precisely that question by asking what the current scientific understanding of the natural world might contribute to our reflection upon the relationship of God and the world in a Triune fashion.

The result is a fruitful engagement between the ancient and the current, the theological and the scientific.

2

Trinitarian Development

4

Bible to Nicaea

The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all.

St. Paul (2 Cor. 13:13)

The doctrine of the Trinity uniquely expresses God’s accessibility to all of creation, humanity in particular. Encountering Jesus as the Messiah, the anointed one of God, early Christians also experienced the creative and sustaining activity of God. Reflection on the Trinity moved from three to one, the early Christian community giving priority to the diversity of their spiritual experience. Over centuries of reflection, as theologians attempted to coherently place this threefold Christian experience of the divine somewhere between the pluralistic polytheism of the Greco-Roman world and the singular monotheism of the Jewish tradition, this diversity crystallized into the doctrine of the Trinity. Early Christians developed a paradoxical language that allowed them to speak of the divine as both transcendent and immanent at the same time. In effect, early Christians experienced pluralistic monotheism, multiple relatedness to the singular God. Elizabeth Johnson states,

In shorthand, we might say that they [New Testament Christians] experienced the saving God in a threefold way as beyond them, with them, and within them, that is, as utterly transcendent, as present historically in the person of Jesus, and as present in the Spirit within their community. These were all encounters with only one God. Accordingly, they began to talk about God in this threefold pattern: “the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all.”^[1]

The experience of the divine in the biblical witness connects both the beyond and the intimate.^[2] The early community of faith embraced a complex idea of the transcendence of God, the “beyond”; the immanence of Christ, and the abiding presence of the Spirit, the “intimate.” The Christian encounter with God thus began in threeness and moved toward oneness. The Trinity was neither a logical puzzle nor a philosophical assertion but rather a dynamic engagement with the living God in all aspects of life.

Understanding God as an intrinsically differentiated union, early believers started with multiple intimate vantage points of observation as they gazed toward the far-off infinity of the divine. The Trinity gave them perspective on the mystery of God and highlighted the ultimate inadequacy of all human thought to contain it. William Placher observes,

Traditional trinitarian terminology does not embody some appropriate theory of how the Trinity fits together; rather, the terms were developed to preserve the mystery of a God we cannot understand. So why try to talk about the Trinity at all? It is hard to answer that question if we begin with one God and ask why we should think of that God as three. But that is not the logic of trinitarian thought. Rather, Christians begin with three, and the doctrine of the Trinity is the explanation of their oneness.^[3]

The concept of the “Trinity” was an expression of heartfelt faith.

As the early Christian community sought to articulate its experience of God, it eventually developed a scriptural canon that it believed was true to the witness of such a God in history. As time went on, Christians employed this canon in their reflection on the Trinity. As Ted Peters observes in God as Trinity, “The task of Trinitarian theology is to explicate the biblical symbols in such a way as to gain an increasingly adequate set of ideas for conceiving of God’s creative and redemptive work. . . . The notion of one being in three persons is simply a conceptual device for trying to understand the drama of salvation that is taking place in Jesus Christ.”^[4] As a result, the roots of the idea of God as Trinity most profoundly developed out of biblical witness. It is the purpose of this chapter to explore that biblical witness and the early developments following from it. Later chapters in part 2 will selectively follow this development into our own time.

1. Roots of Trinitarian Thought: Biblical Witness

A. Hebrew Scriptures (Old Testament)

In his book The Tripersonal God, Gerald O’ Collins indicates that there are three images for God in the Hebrew Scriptures (Old Testament) that are germane to the discussion of the Trinity: God as Father, divine Wisdom and Word, and the Spirit of God.^[5] However, before we can turn to these images, we must first examine the image of the name of God given to Moses out of the burning bush (Exod. 3:14, 6:6-8: YHWH—a verb meaning “I am what I am.” Or “I will be what I will be”).

Yahweh: This four-letter personal name YHWH (Yahweh, distinguished in English Bibles as “Lord”) occurs 6,800 times in the Old Testament.^[6] Known as the Tetragrammaton (meaning four letters),^[7] this name, which is the name of the God of Israel, is considered by many Jews to be so holy that it should not be uttered out loud. Some believe the reason for this has to do with caution surrounding the commandment, “You shall not take the name of the LORD in vain” (Exod. 20:7 NRSV). Various other terms such as El Shaddai (“God,” “the one of the mountains,” “Almighty God” in some translations), Elohim (“divine God”), and Adonai (Kyrios in Greek, “Lord” in English) were spoken instead. Indeed, in some of the Dead Sea Scrolls, YHWH was considered to be too holy to even be written and was replaced with four dots (. . . .). So at the beginning of our discussion of the biblical sources for the Trinity, we see first of all that God is revealed through a holy personal name.^[8] All other names or images of God reflect on the divine squarely with human experience and in human history while at the same time stressing divine mystery. Hebrew witness of grappling with the name of the divine such as in Exodus 3 forms the foundation for all later biblical reflection. The tension between the “beyond and the intimate” is thus foundational in all reflection on God in both Judaism and Christianity.

This tension between the beyond and the intimate is why metaphor and symbol become so important in theological expression. As mentioned in chapter 2, metaphor has an “is, is not” character to it that illuminates at the same time that it makes us aware of the incompleteness of the illumination. The dialectical tension built into the very nature of metaphor helps keep us mindful of the limitation of human language as well as humble in the presence of the divine we seek to understand. When we turn to the other biblical images for the Trinity, we must acknowledge both their status as metaphors and that they capture something true and resonate within religious experience.^[9] This is certainly true of the heavily used metaphor of “Father.”

Father: God is addressed as “Father” a little more than twenty times in the Old Testament.^[10] Within this image are many nuanced meanings of the word. The people of Israel were reminded who their true parent was when they were tempted to stray to other deities (Deut. 32:6). Also the royal psalms conveyed Davidic kingship as a divine choice and legitimation (Ps. 2:7). Gerald O’Collins notes, “The Davidic king will address God as Father, the God whose strong fidelity to his covenanted love allows God to be also named as Rock of salvation”^[11] (Ps. 89:26-29). This imagery will, of course, be continued in the New Testament, where Jesus is portrayed as being from the “house and lineage of David.” This image of personal relationship leads to other divine images that are central in the Hebrew Scriptures, that of Wisdom, Word, and Spirit. Each of these becomes a personified expression of divine activity. They are not to be seen as independent personifications but rather more as personal characteristics of the divine. This is especially true for the personification of Divine Wisdom.

Wisdom: Hokmah (Sophia in Greek) occurs 318 times in the Old Testament in one form or another (noun, verb, or adjective), especially in what is referred to as the “Wisdom literature” (Job, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Sirach, and Wisdom). Characteristics or attributes of the divine, especially Wisdom, are often personified, indicating how or in what manner the Wisdom of God finds expression in the world. Wisdom will come to be seen as divine gift that works in mysterious, inaccessible ways. O’Collins states, “Personified Wisdom or Sophia becomes increasingly related to the divine work of creation, providence, and salvation and grows in dignity and power along with OT sapiential thinking. Within a monotheistic faith, Wisdom takes on functions and attributes of YHWH, and within a strongly patriarchal religion, Wisdom emerges in a feminine way.”^[12] These last two points are especially important for our later reflection on the Trinity. Not only do they specify several of the ways in which the activity of God finds expression in the experience of the community of faith, but the concept of Wisdom/Sophia also enfranchises the feminine dimension of human life as a legitimate expression of divine activity. The book of Wisdom clarifies this point in a classic passage, which reads, “She [Sophia] is a breath of the power of God and a pure emanation of the glory of the Almighty: therefore nothing defiled gains entrance into her. For she is a reflection of eternal light, a spotless mirror of the working God, and an image of his goodness” (Wis. 25-26). Divine Sophia is active in the life of creation, liberation, and the life of faith. She is a major expression of divine presence in reflection on biblical sources for the Trinity. Wisdom also prepares the way for reflection on the Word and the Spirit.

Word: While many are familiar with the understanding of the use of Logos (“Word”) in the New Testament from the Gospel of John, there is an active sense of the Word in the Hebrew tradition as well. Like Wisdom, the Word is with God from the beginning and is active in creation, “and God said, ‘let there be . . .’” (Gen. 1:1—2:4). O’Collins observes, “At times, the OT scriptures set word in parallelism with spirit or breath as instruments of creation: ‘The Word of the Lord created the heavens; all the host of heaven was formed by the Breath of his mouth.’ (Ps. 33:6).”^[13] He concludes, “In brief, word matches wisdom as a way of expressing God’s creative, revelatory, and salvific activity.”^[14] Spirit also matches wisdom in the process of creation.

Spirit: The Spirit (ruach in Hebrew, pneuma in Greek) is often associated with wind and breath. Indeed, the English “spirit” comes from the Latin spiritus, which means breath. The word implies an animating power that moves and enlivens but that is not visible and is only detectable by its effects. In the Hebrew tradition, ruach is that which moves over the face of the waters in creation (Gen. 1:2) and enlivens prophets, enabling them to speak God’s word (Isa. 61:1; Ezek. 2:1-2). The Spirit moves “where it wills” and is associated with the expression of God’s will and activity in the world. The Spirit is the ongoing presence of God in the creation. As such, ruach is frequently associated with Wisdom and Word as almost equivalent expressions for God’s creative, redeeming, and revealing activity in the world. The Jewish Scriptures bear witness to the activity of God in the world and grounded the faith tradi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Table Of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Foundational Concepts
• Trinitarian Development
• Science and the Trinity
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index