“The Three Images of God – A 21st Century Trinity”

Dr Richard Smith

Readings - Genesis 1: 1:1-3,  1:24-28   Matthew 28:16-20

 40 years ago, the first thing I learnt when studying theology was the importance of Christianity being a Trinitarian religion making it very adaptable, evidenced by over 2.3 billion adherents spanning the world. I have long pondered why belief in a triune God is so important? 

While pondering this question, I discovered that three is the smallest number needed to create a pattern or rhythm. Music, the language of the soul, comes to us predominantly in the three dimensions of pitch, duration and volume. Also, we have inherited three-dimensional vision from our primate ancestors, without which we would be in constant danger of tripping over curbs, falling down steps and walking into lamp posts. We also see the world in the three primary colours of Red, Blue and Yellow, beautifully displayed in rainbows on rainy days reminding us of the fullness of God’s promises. St Patrick used the three leaf Shamrock, to explain the holy trinity to the Irish who adopted it as their national symbol.

Religion derives from the Latin re-ligare– to bind together; A binding achieved through three shared beliefs; The First - about the nature of the world; Secondly - the role of the individual in this world, and Third - the values needed for the individual to fulfil their role. Religion has been a characteristic of the human species since the beginning of time; distinguishing us from other animal species. 

To have built the megalithic structure of Stonehenge 5000 years ago, the ancient Brits must have had a compelling religious belief – which to this day remains a mystery. 

The Aboriginal people’s religion, enabled them to occupy, share and manage our continent for over 50,000 years, through massive changes in climate and the brutality of colonisation. The Uniting Church’s Aboriginal members some years after Union, challenged the colonial Trinitarian belief that God had been finally and fully revealed to them in Jesus Christ. The Uniting Church after much debate recognised their claim and changed its constitution, to recognise that:  

The First Peoples had already encountered the Creator

God before the arrival of the colonisers; the Spirit was

already in the land revealing God to the people

through law, custom and ceremony. 

The first two chapters of Genesis lays the foundations for what in time becomes our Trinitarian belief.  In Gen. 1.1, the first image ofGod is, as Creator of the Universe. In Gen. 1.2, the second image of God: is of an unseen Spirit or Wind hovering over the chaos bringing forth life in all its beauty and diversity. In Gen. 1:27, the third imageof God is found in humankind, created in God’s image - an imagefully revealed in the life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth. The Post-Easter Jesus instructs his disciples in Matt 28:19-20 to share this triune image of God by:  going and making disciples of all nations, baptising in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit and teaching all he had commanded. 

However, religion despite its importance, is in serious decline or being held hostage by fundamentalism or as we have seen in recent days in America by the Empire of the rich and powerful.  Religion is fulfilling its role less and less; because its functions are being supplanted -- or overwhelmed -- by another belief and value-system that we barely recognise.

Today the most powerful shared explanation of the world is science. But science brings new moralchallenges evident in the pandemics of Covid-19 and Global Warming, and new insights into the origin of racial and sexual differences which many find hard to accept. Such scientific challenges are not alien to religion and can reinvigorate religious belief. Even Charles Darwin the father of evolution so marvelled at the scientific view of the world that he concluded his Origin of Species poetically with:

There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved. 

What has also changed in modern religion is that the most attractive role and value-system for the individual has become consumerism. Its theological offspring is economics, probably the most influential of the ‘social sciences’ - with its own laws to regulate human behaviour according to the demands of the market.  The discipline of economics is less a science than a theology of a vicious circle of ever-increasing production and consumption, offering a secular salvation of ever more stuff, as we burn the house down to secure it. The Market is now the first truly world religion, binding all corners of the globe into a world-view and set of values whose religious role we overlook. 

So, it is no coincidence that our times of ecological catastrophe also happen to be a time of extraordinary challenge to most traditional religions. Although it may offend our vanity, it is hard to conceive of conventional religious institutions as we know them serving a significant role in solving these crises. Our more immediate problem is whether the church will survive in any recognizable form the onslaught of this new religion. 

This situation is becoming so critical, that the many crises, may actually turn out to be a positive thing for religion. For ecological catastrophe is awakening us not only to the fact that we need a deeper source of values and meaning than market capitalism can provide, but to the realization that contemporary religion is not meeting this need either. People, in their spiritual emptiness are seeking an alternative. Our Christianity’s trinitarian foundations guide us to affirm the sanctity of:

First:Creation and nature’s laws, which have no mercy, as they exist to ensure sustainability of the Earth for future generations.

Secondly:The creativity implanted in in our own souls, revealing to us both the moral imperatives and ways of salvation, and 

Thirdly: The Kingdom of the Common Goodrevealed in Jesus’s life and teachings - found also within the Golden Rulecommon to all the world’s great religions.

I conclude with the Prophet Job 12:7-10 (NIV) who advised his tormentors and doubters: 

7 “But ask the animals, and they will teach you,

    or the birds in the sky, and they will tell you;

8 or speak to the earth, and it will teach you,

    or let the fish in the sea inform you.

9 Which of all these does not know

    that the hand of the Lord has done this?

10 In his hand is the life of every creature

    and the breath of all mankind.

Let us embrace anew the Trinitarian Foundations of our Faith in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen. 

References

Gordon Dicker, 1981, Faith with Understanding. Ch 4. The Doctrine of the Trinity.

Lloyd Geering, 2000, Tomorrow’s God: How we create our worlds. 

Mike Pitts, 2020, Who built Stonehenge – and why? BBC History Magazine. May 2020

Bill Gammage, 2011, The Biggest Estate on Earth. Ch. 4 Heaven on Earth.

David Loy, 1997,  Religion and the Market. J. Am. Academy of Religion  65, (2) pp. 275-290

Charles Darwin, 1859,  The Origin of Species. Pp. 703 

Matthew Smith, 2020, Some ways the number 3 appears in music. Private Communication