June 15, 2003 -
First
Sunday after Pentecost
Romans
8:12-17
NRSV
KJV
CEV
John
3:10-17
NRSV
KJV
CEV
“The
Fatherhood of God,
the Brotherhood of Humanity
and the Neighborhood of ?”
Forgive me if today I wax a bit historical, I’ve been doing some reading and thinking this week that has sort of set me off. When I was in graduate school my major professor spoke about the development of Unitarianism in this way, the movement embraced “the Fatherhood of God, the brotherhood of man, and the neighborhood of Boston.” While we can trace the roots of the whole controversy on the doctrine of the Trinity all the way back to Arius and company in the fourth century, it is brought home to Americans, and to Congregationalists in particular, with the flowering the Unitarian movement in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. While the movement may have embraced primarily the “neighborhood of Boston,” it carried a powerful effect and it continues to do so down to this day.
As I have read some of the materials produced by Charles Chauncy, minister of Boston’s First Church in the mid-1800s, and then the writings of William Ellery Channing, I am struck by the elegance of expression and the depth of thought. These were people who were deeply in love with God and, as children of the Enlightenment, were simply trying to think through one of the most difficult concepts in all of Christian doctrine -–the Trinity.
Those early classical Unitarians had no trouble understanding Christ to be the savior. Some, reflecting their ties to ancient Arianism, could even see Christ as a semi-divine being, though less than the fullness of God. Others, like the minister at Boston’s King’s Chapel, James Freeman, would hew to the ‘humanitarian’ or Socinian view that Jesus was simply a man with a special divine mission.
And there was no question that they were Congregationalists, they held clearly to the autonomy of the local church, to the primacy of individual conscience, and the desire for the intellect to be as honored equally as the heart. Like us, they struggled to maintain “the harmony of the spirit” without coercion. Unfortunately, it broke.
The straw that broke the camel’s back came with the controversy over the Hollis professorship of divinity at Harvard. When Henry Ware was appointed to the chair in 1805 the fight was joined. Jedidiah Morse, father of Samuel F. B. Morse of the code, entered into the fray and helped to found a new seminary in Andover, Massachusetts. This church would be affected by the controversy, because our first settled minister, Luther Clapp, was a graduate of Andover – so you can see where, at least early on, this particular church came down in the controversy. Over time the Unitarian Controversy led to the Unitarian Departure, with a goodly number of historically Congregational churches, including the First Parish Church in Plymouth, becoming Unitarian in the 1820s.
Now the whole Unitarian controversy and subsequent departure is more than just a doctrinal dispute. The doctrine of the Trinity may stand at the core of it, but there is a great deal of political and ideological maneuvering involved in it. It’s significant to us because we have a whole sister denomination – the Unitarian Universalist Association – with whom we need to have a series of talks, at least in my opinion. It is also significant because the issue of the Trinity still continues to be a point of discussion not only within our National Association of Congregational Christian Churches, but even among the members of this church.
I can understand the discomfort and the intellectual difficulties that folks have with the doctrine of the Trinity. Part of the problem is that the language that is so often used to articulate the doctrine is rooted in the philosophical positions of the fourth century Greek East. Unless one spends a great deal of time working on the nuances of the concepts of ‘substance’ and ‘essence,’ to name only two, it is extremely difficult to understand. We twenty-first century Americans are not educated or oriented to think in those categories. Because of our orientation toward science and technology we tend to be linear thinkers and there is nothing at all linear in the Trinity. Another problem is that most Christian believers are what I like to call, “naïve tri-theists.” Most people talk about God, Jesus, and the Spirit, without referring to the oneness. It is as though they are three separate persons – and here again, the philosophical concept of ‘person’ and what that means doesn’t particularly help us get a grip on this. The position taken by those early Unitarians is really far easier to grasp and far more logical in its construct. I can even embrace what they embraced, the idea of God’s fatherhood, humanity’s brotherhood, and in our case the neighborhood of Wauwatosa and surrounding communities, is attractive to me. However, the issue isn’t about what is ‘graspable’ by the measure of our own minds. The issue is about God’s mind and how God has disclosed God’s self to us. For this reason I cannot give up on the doctrine of the Trinity and, while I struggle like everyone else to understand it, I still see it as key to understanding what it means to be Christian. Let me explain.
For me the essence of the doctrine is found in the community of the Godhead. In other words, there is a family in God that relates to one another and shares the same nature and the same being. Very early on people realized that in Jesus they had come to know God in a new and different way, and that Jesus had talked about God in a very familiar, and familial, way as “father.” We hear that in today’s lesson from Paul’s letter to the Romans when he says, “For all you are led by the Spirit of God are children of God. For you did not receive a spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received a spirit of adoption. When we cry, ‘Abba!’ Father!’ it is that very Spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs, heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ . . .”
Those early believers understood that it was not just that Jesus taught about the Father, but that the Father was intimately present to them in Jesus’ very person. The encounter with Jesus, with what he said, how he acted, what he did, and who he was made them think long and hard about how God was present to them.
L. William Countryman gives us an insight into why this conception of God as Father and Godhead as family could grow. He writes:
The father or patriarch was the public face of the household, embodying it to the rest of the community. Accordingly, the “father” was not, as in modern Western culture, merely one parent out of two. The “father” was the preeminent embodiment of one’s household identity. To claim God, as Christians did, as Abba was to claim a familial connection with the Holy. To take the next step of claiming the status of “co-heir” with Christ was to move oneself into the very center of the household, no longer a slave but a full member of the family. [Proclamation, p. 80]
We come to know the Trinity, as those first believers did, because we experience the love, the presence and the oneness of our own persons with the personhood of God. We are drawn into a love relationship that enwraps and enfolds us in a way never before understood or seen – we can know God.
We are enabled to do this because of what we hear in John’s Gospel, “God so loved the world.” God reveals, again and again, that the Divine Nature is love. Our fourteenth century friend, Julian of Norwich, would declare, “I saw that love was his meaning” and so it was, and is. In the twelfth century an Italian scholar named Bonaventure began to think about the love of God and what it meant in a book called Disputed Questions on the Mystery of the Trinity. There he began to work with the premise that God is love and came up with a different approach to the triune nature of God. Bonaventure said that if God is love, then it would follow that since the nature of love is to love another, that God would love the Son into existence. Where love exists between two, it is natural for a third to come forth out of that love, and so the Father and the Son loved the Spirit into existence. And when love is shared in a community it cannot help but share itself, so the Divine Trinity loved us and our world and all that is into existence. And the love continues and continues and continues.
God gives of God’s self over and over. When Christ goes to the cross, that is a social act, and it is the fullness of God present there. What we experience in the passage from Romans and in that wonderful passage of John, “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believe in him might not perish but have everlasting life. Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him,” is God’s extravagant generosity. God offers us the gift of God’s love. So God is giver, God is gift; God enters into an intimate union with us and we experience within ourselves a new birth “from above” that draws us to love and to live in harmony with God and with all that God has made.
What we experience when come to know God’s love is precisely what those early believers came to know. And if we struggle with trying to explain it, there’s precedent. We’ve been trying to understand from the very beginning how the God who made the universe and everything in it would care enough to want to know us and to share life with us. Yet, we can’t get away from the reality of it – it’s right there in front of us. God loves us. I so like what the contemporary theologian Thomas Oden has written on this. He goes through various passages of scripture that have Trinitarian language in them, like the Romans passage we read today, and says,
In those passages, we are listening in on the primitive Christian community seeking to articulate accurately its actual experience as it compellingly felt the real presence of God in Jesus.
This implied no diminution of the oneness of God. The earliest Christians were steeped in monotheistic faith, but they had to make sense out of this inescapable revelatory event – this living, resurrected presence of the Lord in their midst. They understood Jesus be not a demi-God, not part God, not proximately similar to God, but in the fullest sense “true God”. This is the reason we have triune thinking. If the disciples had not had that fundamental experience, we would not be talking about the Trinity today. [The Living God: Systematic Theology vol. I, p. 185]