[A sermon preached to Hinckley Unitarians on Sunday 12th of June 2022]
(Readings: An extract from The Way Out of the Trinitarian Controversy by James Martineau and Romans 5:1-5)1
“It is often supposed in orthodox circles that Unitarian ministers spend a good deal of time in their pulpits attacking the official doctrine [of the Trinity], whereas in reality we hardly ever mention it.” – so said the Unitarian Minister and one time Principle of Manchester College, Oxford, Sidney Spencer.
Well today I am going to mention that doctrine and, in speaking about a doctrine concerning the nature of God anyone, myself included, can run into problems. In some respects, then, this is not an easy sermon for me to preach.
James Martineau, in our first reading today, perfectly captures the difficulties in talking about God, when he presses home the need to free oneself from the “snare of words” to be able to look at “what the words denote”. This is in part a result of the natural difficulties that arise from trying to use human language as a tool to communicate understanding of the Divine. Human language evolved to be able to communicate about things very efficiently. “There is water over that hill,” “There is food behind those trees,” “Do not go into that valley as there is a sabre-toothed tiger there that will eat you,” – these are all examples of simple items of communication that it was very important to our ancestors to be able to communicate to each other quickly, effectively, and unambiguously if they wanted to survive. The trouble is that when we theologians start talking about say, “three persons in one triune godhead that are coeternal and coequal in majesty” our tools of language begin to fail us – we encounter unfamiliar concepts, or, even more confusingly, words that we think we are familiar with but used in a different way. When theologians refer to ‘The Son’ is a person of the Trinity, they mean something rather different than say, “Dave is a person of Earl Shilton” but that meaning is not immediately obvious to us.
What is even worse is that some concepts we refer to though language are contested. Martineau maintains that ‘the Son,’ and ‘the Father’ are contested concepts as Unitarian and Trinitarian theologians both use the same terms but both have a different concepts behind them. This makes communication between the two somewhat difficult!
This should hardly be surprising to us. ‘God’, despite being one of the most commonly used terms in theology, is probably the ultimate contested concept. “God is not a god” is one of the first sentences a student in theology is likely to read on the subject. This is due to the Abrahamic traditions having developed a completely different concept of what God is and is not from other faiths but having borrowed the term as a convenient shorthand approximation from other faith traditions that held to a completely different conceptual understandings for their deities referred to as gods. With this background, is it any wonder that we quickly get into difficulty when trying to talk about distinct persons of God that is not a god?
Even saints have fallen into pitfalls with this. Saint Patrick is widely depicted with a three-leaf clover that he apparently used to convince people of the trinity by claiming that each leaf represented a person of the Trinity but did not form the whole clover. The problem is that, if Saint Partick ever taught such as thing, he would have been guilty, by orthodox (small ‘o’) Trinitarian standards of the heresy of partialism – that God can be neatly separated into three parts rather than being three persons all of whom are fully God. The analogy of saying that the trinity is like water – one substance that can be found in three different expressions (ice, liquid, and vapour) – falls foul of the heresy of modalism – that Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are three mods of the same God rather than three distinct persons – again a heresy condemned by orthodoxy. The analogy of the trinity being like the sun, where the Father is the star and the Son, and the Spirit are the heat, and the light is actually an analogy for the old school Arian take on the Trinity – that the Son and the Spirit are created by and issue forth from God. Arianism is of course condemned as a heresy by orthodox Trinitarian theologians, but this has not stopped some Sunday School teachers in Trinitarian churches from teaching it as a good analogy for the trinity. Ironically this was the conception supported by Arius, thus the name Arianism, who some Unitarians consider to be an early ancestor of our movement.
The view that has the consensus among my Trinitarian friends is that the only way one can accept the Trinity is not via explanation but by accepting it as a holy mystery that one accepts on the basis of faith alone as it is set out in the creeds.
And I have very few problems with this. The inner workings of God after all, have to be a mystery. If we understood everything about how God worked, then we ourselves would be greater than God – and God would thus no longer be God. As St. Anselm said, “Lord, you are then not only that than which nothing greater can be thought; you are something greater than it is possible to think about.” God ultimately dwells in the inaccessible light of mystery and we have no rational way of penetrating that light. Yet I am a Unitarian, not on the basis of rejecting the trinity per-say but because I refuse to be held to, and refuse to hold other to, a doctrinal or creedal understanding of the nature of God that ultimately, we can only speculate about. And I certainly have no desire to make such a doctrine the litmus test for deciding who is allowed into the community of faith and certainly no desire to assert that a particular conception of the trinity or unity of God is needed for salvation.
Some of you who take notes of my sermons might now be thinking, “hang on a moment… Robin stressed that God was Spirit last week at Pentecost, but now reads Martineau approvingly who stresses that God is the Son… surly you cannot both be right?” Well… the answer is unsurprisingly yes and no! The key moment for me is Martineau’s reference to the Unitarian worshipping “Him who dwelt in Christ”. For me Jesus Christ was a uniquely Spirit-filled human – not unique in substance but by degree. As Martineau says elsewhere “The incarnation is true, not of Christ exclusively, but of Man universally, and God everlastingly” The Spirit is present in us all but I think it evident that Christ was especially full of the Spirit or at least far more aware of the divine presence or in tune with it then anyone before or since. Like the Trinitarian theologian Schleiermacher, I would say that it is Jesus Christ’s ultimate God-consciousness that makes him unique. You could say I adhere to a form of Unitarian Spirit Christology – Martineau, at times, sounds more in tune with a kind of Unitarian Logos Christology.
Yet in one sense this difference is just semantics, I do not much care if the language you use for God is all that different to mine. If your language of God authentically connects you with the Divine and orientates you to love what is Divine and love the person next to you as yourself then all is well and good indeed. Amen
