THE TRINITY IN FIVE MINUTES
Author: Fr. Michael Byron
May 29, 2021
For a few years of my life
teaching seminary students, I was assigned to teach the semester-long course on
the Trinity of God. It’s required of
priests-to-be. I had several gut reactions to that responsibility – none of
them positive. The first one was – let’s
be honest – who cares? God is one and
God is three, but there is only one God and not three gods, so we have to talk
about persons and procession and relations, and we have to appeal to diagrams –
all which are literally incorrect. And
again, who cares? The second negative reaction that I had was to the very idea
that I or anybody would presume to stand in front of a classroom and explain to
people just what the inner life of God is like. Really? Dissecting Almighty God for an academic
credit? Who could be that presumptive?
Or delusional? Who do we think they are?
And a third negative reaction came in the middle of the seminar at the annual
convention of the Catholic Theological Society of America, of which I am a
member. A young scholar from Notre Dame
was critiquing the thought of an early 20th Century Russian Orthodox
Theologian whose writings on the Holy Trinity had recently been translated into
English, and the speaker was concerned that these writings were at risk of
modalism, or tritheism, or subordinationism. And I recall sitting there in the room asking myself, “what if none of
this stuff is true? Either the Russian scholar or this guy…what if none of it
is true? Would it matter to anybody’s faith?” My honest answer was, NO!
That experience led me in to
an argument with the academic faculty of the seminary back home here in St.
Paul. I said that the course on the Holy
Trinity should not be a full semester in length, because the one and only thing
to be known about the subject is that our God is both three and one, one and
three, and as soon as people presume to say any more about it they are engaging
in speculation that is both unenlightening and boring. I was overruled by the faulty
colleagues. BUT I still think I’m right
about that!
There is no more foundational
or important truth about God that we profess and believe than the fact that God
is a Trinity of Father, Son and the Holy Spirit. Absolutely everything else
about our faith rests upon that conviction. It is where we have to set out in our thoughts and prayers with God, and
in our daily lives. With all due respect
to Unitarians, Catholics are not Unitarians. For us, God is not a singular or
solitary or a vague source of spiritual life. God is a communion and so we who strive to worship this God – convinced
that we are created in God’s image and likeness, must know that our most true
self – identity is to be in communion. That’s who God is, and what we are when we are most true to ourselves.
The one thing we can know
about God for sure is that God is not apart or aloof from relationship. Anyone else would be a false God. That’s all a seminary student really needs to
know. Not exactly a semester’s worth of
study. And why this homily doesn’t need to be any longer. (And I will apologize
in advance for the preface prayer!)
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