Trinity Sunday.... Deus Est Non?

This article will start out seeming Christian, but end in great heresy. Trinity Sunday has come again. It is not like Easter Sunday or Ascension or  Pentecost either. It is a Sunday specifically created to celebrate or really to teach the doctrine by which the Catholic churches explain God, Three consubstantial persons where God the Father is not the Son or the Holy Ghost and the Son is not the Father or the Holy Ghost and the Holy Ghost… , we are not entirely sure who is he is, but he is not the Father or the Son. But all of them are God because they are consubstantial.

Having heard the development of the doctrine of the Trinity explained, I find it troublesome. It knows too much, and it knows too much about things Jesus never said. It states too much never stated by God even if you own that the God of Scripture is largely a Middle Eastern  creation, and there are too many Christians who have not believed it, considered it, or known about it. Jesus, the only part of this trinity we’ve ever hung out with, says the Father and him are one. He does not use fancy Greek and philosophical terms to say “of one substances.” He says, when you have seen me, you have seen the Father, which would denote they are indeed the same. In the Book of Acts, as discussed in the Pentecost article, Luke refers to the Holy Spirit as The Spirit of Jesus, insinuating once again that the unity is not trinity, but, well… unity.

A few years ago I was intrigued to learn about the doctrine of modalism. It is preached by certain restoration churches including some Pentecostals and early Mormons,  namely that the Christian God exist not in three distinct people, but three distinct modes. It may even be that some early Christians believed this. It is, as the Mormon Paul Toscano says in one interview, that God the Father is Jesus, that God could not send his son to die. This would be a wretched idea, but that God took the burden on himself, becoming the Son. To me this actually squares with Scripture as well as good parenting and takes care of one deeply thorny problem with the Christian story of salvation.

Another problem with the Trinity is the definition of God as “is not”. Deus Est Non is unfitting and untrue to the nature of God. When Moses asks for God’s name, he is told God’s nature: I AM. Deus Est. God IS, and if we speak of God we must always speak of what the Divine is, not what He is not. The Christian interpretation of God, any interpretation of God should ever be open. The first Christians were not philosophers;. they were mystics experiencing the fullness of God, and this is a difficult thing. How do you explain fullness without it sound confusing? They did not seem to be confused at all. But centuries later their spiritual descendants were. They were also at a deficit never having made it to India where people had and would deal with the multiplicity of God’s faces standing as a unity. In India, where Visnhu, Shiva and Brahma would come to be seen as three facets of God as well as each God, but where Vishnu and Lakshmi, Shiva and Parvati, Brahma and Saraswati would also be God in male/female couples, but where every imaginable incarnation of those couples, Radha and Krishna, Sita and Ram, etc, etc, would not only be individuals and sometimes mortal or animal individuals, but all and each be God and part of each other… in such dizzying wonder, the Father, Son and Holy Ghost would not have been an issue. In fact, they would have been too simple.

And I think they are too simple, this nameless Father we mistakenly identify as the God of the Old Testament, this sexless Spirit we think of as a bird, and Jesus of Nazareth who is the earthly face of an eternal Son. This trinity is not too tall of an order, but to simple of one.

Three is the number of multiplicity. It is not the limit of it, but the sign of it. Maiden, Mother, Crone, the Three Faces of Hecate, Osiris, Isis Horus. In this I believe Trinity Sunday and the acknowledgement of the Triune perfection is beautiful and necessary, but only when we realize it does not define the limits of God, but rather stand as a sign for the limitless of the Divine.

I am always reminded that, whenever you cross yourself in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, you actually mark your body four times, sometimes even five, a strange symbol that, though you speak three names, some names can never be spoken.