“Now the Catholic Faith is this, that we worship one God in Trinity, and the Trinity in Unity; Neither confusing the Persons, nor dividing the Substance.”
So says the Athanasian Creed, also known as the Quicunque vult, which for many centuries was recited in the Western divine office every day at prime. This creed summarizes in its own way the dogmatic tradition of the Church given in the Nicene Creed and the ecumenical councils of the first millennium.
I call it the “dogmatic tradition” deliberately, and not as an insult. People today may dislike the concept of dogma, or authoritative teaching, but there’s no other true way to describe the way that trinitarian theology functions in the Christian and Catholic tradition. It is dogma, which is to say, it is not an opinion that you can take or leave based on personal preference. It is not one interpretation of things that can be revised at any time. It is a line in the sand, a boundary, a marker, that says, Here is something that is so central that we cannot be who we are if we deny it. In other words, we may wrestle with the dogma of the Trinity, we may try to understand it better, we may try to state it in new ways—but we cannot revise it or alter it and remain who we are as the Church for which Christ gave his life
But maybe many people will then ask, So what? Perhaps we feel no need to maintain a creed that is recognizable to the apostles and their successors. We have moved on, after all, in so many things. For certain strands of skeptical modernity, embracing a creed from the fourth century makes about as much sense as embracing medicine from the fourth century.
And yet, I think, the intrusion of that larger and longer story is exactly why the dogma of the Trinity matters to us in a direct and personal way. I hope it goes without saying that, as a Catholic priest, I believe what the Creed says about God’s unity and trinity; it goes without saying that the Church has insisted, since a very early time, that this was the only way to understand what happened in the life, death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus Christ. But those are intellectual responses to intellectual problems, and I doubt that most of us spend much time from day to day wondering how it is that God could have an eternal Son, and what it would mean for that Son to become incarnate, and how they could both be one unchanging God while remaining distinct.
I wonder if the gift of trinitarian dogma is valuable and useful for us precisely as dogma. What I mean is this: By giving us a foundational tradition that can neither be proved nor disproved through normal human reason, God’s self-revelation has shown us not just what God is like, but also what the world is like. We are born into a world that we did not choose. Creation, life—everything that we know and love about existence—is a gift. Sure, we can look at it and think about it and try to understand it, but to do all this in any meaningful sense, we have to take that first leap of faith, which is to just acknowledge that it is, that we are. This has always been the most basic existential proof of God.
Our takeaway, then, from the givenness and permanence of the Church’s faith in the Trinity is that the life lived in faith is a gift. We do not have to make it up as we go along. We are not thrown into the cosmos naked to fend for ourselves. We are free because we are born into a story that we did not choose, a story whose foundation is the infinite love of God’s own choice to create us and to be with us forever.
On this Octave Day of Pentecost, we do well to remember our baptism. Baptism is birth. Did we choose to be born, in biological terms? The notion is ridiculous. Life is simply given. And even though the Catholic Church views adult baptism—the baptism of converts, in other words—as the theoretical norm, the baptism of children is a norm in another way, for it highlights the graciousness of God’s gift. When we baptize a child, the choices, the stories, that precede her own choices frame her story and shape it toward freedom and love. She doesn’t need to figure out or invent who she is, and neither do we; we are children of God, made heirs of God’s kingdom in Jesus Christ.
God delights in us, his children, and he wants us to take for granted that this is so, however much we sin, err, and choose bad over good. Consider this: I may be disappointed in or angry with my children, but I never want them to have to stop and think and puzzle their way to the conclusion that I am still their father and that I love them. I want them to take my love for them, and their identity as part of my family, as dogma—non-negotiable, unalterable, absolute.
God is, thank God, more of a Father than I will ever be. And I give thanks that God’s eternal identity, and his love for me, is not dependent on what I happen to think about it. To this God most holy, in his divine majesty of Trinity in Unity, be praise, honor, power, and glory, now and forever. Amen.