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Dullest of Doctrines? Fullest of Doctrines

Particularly from the 1920s through the 1940s, members of the Catholic Evidence Guild enjoyed considerable success—and drew considerable crowds—when speaking in London’s Hyde Park. Like speakers representing other religions or ideologies, the Guild members set up their “pitches” (small, portable stands that allowed them to be elevated slightly above their listeners) and just started talking. If they were good speakers, and if their topics were sufficiently interesting, in no time they would have dozens or even hundreds of people gathered around them.

I was surprised to learn from the autobiography of Frank Sheed, the last century’s top Catholic apologist and a frequent speaker in Hyde Park, that one of the best crowd-drawing topics was the Trinity. Who’d have thunk it?

Like many, I used to think that the doctrine of the Trinity was one of those abstract, theoretical things talked about by scholars and by the theology students they were browbeating but not by regular folks. Sure, we all believed in the Trinity, and most of us could regurgitate that by the term we understood “three divine Persons in one divine nature.” But that was about it. We didn’t pursue the matter too much further because we thought it unpursuable or, more likely, just not interesting enough to be pursued.

That was a mistake, and we should have seen it. If you think about it, there is no more important Christian belief than the Trinity. The entirety of our religion relates us to God, sensibly enough, and the doctrine of the Trinity tells us about God’s own inner life. What could be more central? Everything else in our faith flows ultimately from that inner life, so, by rights, we should see the Trinity as the most fascinating of all our beliefs. 

Some Catholics stop short in learning about or thinking about the Trinity because they have been told (rightly) that it is a “mystery,” and to them that word implies (wrongly) that we can’t know anything about the Trinity, so why bother? They misunderstand what mystery means.

As Sheed put it, a mystery is “not simply something we do not know, but something which in the nature of the case we never can know fully: i.e., given our finite intelligences on the one hand and the infinite being of God on the other, the lesser obviously can never fully comprehend the greater.” 

But, he goes on to say, “neither is it something before which all thought is futile: God did not reveal mysteries simply that we might ignore them. They are the richest food for the intellect, not like a blank wall stopping all progress but like an endless gallery—the mind can go deeper and deeper, yet never can come to the end. . . . The mind may eternally grow on a mystery precisely because it cannot be exhausted.”

Once we realize that, once we see that we can understand something about the Trinity precisely because our Lord has revealed the mystery to us, then the excitement builds. This dullest of doctrines becomes the most exciting of doctrines.

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