Shut-Up! No, Keep Talking! (Trinitarian Musings and Flying Divergent Opinions)

One thinker says this of my thoughts,

If you don’t think that one can be equal in essence and subject eternally in person, well then you are going to be committed to rejecting the Christian doctrine of God. Some of your unconsciously held philosophical beliefs are incompatible with Christianity. And that is good for you to discover, for now you are more aware of your beliefs than you were previously. Of course, should you choose your philosophical beliefs over Christianity, that will be bad for you. You can’t serve two masters.

That’s not all he said. For the record, I printed out his words and read them carefully.  He’s a profound thinker and someone I know I can learn from. Though I may not agree entirely (assuming I can understand it in the first place), I know there is probably truth in some of it, particularly the admonitions to shut-up and go study for a few more years.

Then, when I decide the best thing for me to do is probably to just leave off this topic altogether, since my lack of scholarship is only too painfully apparent (and therefore what can I possibly do beyond act like a bull in a china shop?) another thinker goes and says this,

It doesn’t happen every day in the blogosphere that someone posts on statements made about the Trinity by people like Hilary of Poitiers, Athanasius, Augustine, Gregory of Nyssa, Basil of Caesarea, and Gregory of Nazianzus, and relates them to the debate raging among evangelical Christians around gender roles and lines of authority. The cool factor, as far as I’m concerned, is off the charts in a case like this. But Molly Aley has done it again, with a post that has already attracted 102 comments.

As far as I can see, the big theological guns she takes on have no one on the net able to defend the use of the doctrine of the Trinity they make to bolster the complementarian point of view. Still, I can’t help but thinking that both sides in the debate are missing something… [read rest here]

He follows those paragraphs up with some insightful thoughts and I do recommend reading the rest (as well as the conversation that has just begun below it). As for me, I’m mostly just confused. I really don’t like the idea of bordering on heresy. Of course, it’s not the first time I’ve been accused of this. Leaving the conservative-homeschool-patriarchal camp was a true lesson in sticking with what you believe you are seeing of God, despite the fact that a gabillion of your former friends now think you’re going to be struck by a lightening bolt from on High. I’m glad I listened to my gut instinct and not to them (well-intentioned though many of them were). And I’m beyond glad that I didn’t shut up when they suggested I shut up.

So cries of heresy tend to impact me less, now, though I still take them seriously. I’ve come to discover that no matter what you think, it’s likely someone in a different camp will be all too eager to tell you why you are in heresy. After all, their camp is the one with the monopoly on the truth, right? (Stop rolling your eyes, yon skeptics. Who knows, maybe it’s possible. At the very least, it’s nice that some are able to feel that secure in their camp. There are parts of me that wish for nothing more than to go back to that phase and the great comfort its ample bosom provided me).

When it comes to matters of the Trinity, I am intrigued and at the same time admittedly put off. Sure, I know there is a Right Way to see it (and, er, that would be the way that the Trinity actually operates in). But the tricky part is figuring out what that is this side of the glass.

There are already plenty of different views and explanations. How do I think that I can uncover anything in the Scripture when a million others already have their own complicated unique takes on the matter. And what pomposity in the first place–thinking that something like “The Way God Is and Relates to Himself” can be grasped at all?

But at the same time, these things do matter. Doing the nervous-ostrich with my head, no matter how appealing, is suicide, and I know it. In fact, it was under a teaching that charted out Trinitarian relationships in hierarchical form (”The Son is 100% under authority and yet 100% equal,” in descending order from Father to Son to Spirit) that I believed that patriarchal authority was not only possible, but probable to the extreme.

I mean, since humans are made in God’s image, we would take the same relational form God takes, right? And since Christ can be 100% under the Father’s permanent eternal authority (relating always as one under authority) and yet simultaneously be 100% equal to the Father, then, by golly, so can I. It wasn’t only in my marriage. I adopted a very authoritarian view of parenting from this doctrine as well, and other relationships too.

I learned that the Trinity itself operates in hierarchy: I also learned that authority is the most important issue of all. I was taught in Bible College that nothing overshadows authority, that is was the primary controversy in the entire universe, both in our relationship to God and therefore also in all our relationships elsewhere. There was nothing higher than obedience, nothing more great than to subject oneself to the established authority. And since the Trinity relationships operated in perpetual hierarchy, so did all the rest of relationships.

Love? Where was Love? I’m not sure. But that didn’t matter, as long as there was obedience without question.

I say all of that to try and explain why a subject like the Trinity attracts me, even though I’m not foolish enough to think it can ever be comprehended in full. All I know for certain is that a false comprehension of the Trinity impacted my life in ways that are deep and painful. I will bear those scars even as I currently learn the dance steps of liberty, and yet I can’t sleep comfortably at night knowing that others may be receiving those same wounds now, in a childlike trust that if it’s good enough for the Godhead, then it must be the right way to relate—even as the cuts go deep. It drives me to want to know, even if I fumble around a bit and break fine china in the process. I figure it’s better than sitting on my hands.