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Dilatato Corde 6:1
January - June, 2016 
The ancient Celtic Triquetra interlaced with a circle and used as a Christian symbol of the Trinity (a “Trinity knot”)
A LETTER TO MOHAMMAD In recent years DIMMID has been giving more attention to dialogue with Muslims. Here too, as in our encounters with Buddhist and Hindus, we focus on the dialogue of religious practice and experience. Inevitably, however, doctrinal questions arise, and—as might be expected—the questions from Muslims are often about Christian faith in God as Trinity. Last year an Iranian Shi’a Muslim who has been directly and indirectly involved in the three Muslim-Monastic dialogues sponsored by DIMMID (Rome 2011; Qum 2012; Assisi 2014) wrote to some of the monastic participants to ask for help in increasing his and his colleagues’ understanding of what Christians mean when they say God is triune. Father Benoît Standaert, who participated in all three of these dialogues, accepted the invitation and wrote the letter that follows. Knowing how central the recitation of the Holy Qur’an is in the Muslim tradition, he focuses on the way Christian faith in the Trinity emerged from a prayerful, reflective reading of our holy Scriptures, and he also emphasizes how the spiritual life of Christians is shaped by faith in God as Trinity. As he explained, “I tried to remain close to biblical language and intentionally did not clarify that language with categories from theological schools of later generations.” He agreed to have his letter published in Dilatato Corde in the hope that it would stimulate reflection on how we Christians might respond to questions about the central convictions of our faith tradition, doing so in a way that accurately represents our tradition and, at the same time, can be intelligible to someone from a tradition that does not share our philosophical categories and cultural presuppositions. Even though we who are Christians live in and from the Trinity, we do not often speak among ourselves about our understanding of God as Trinity. The question asked by a Muslim friend is an exceptional opportunity to think and speak clearly about the core of our faith-tradition. We therefore express our gratitude to this friend for the challenging invitation he offered us. My dear Mohammad, Thank you for your kind letter and for the trust you express by asking me to help you and your colleagues better understand the Christian belief in the Trinity. What can I say about this tremendous topic? There are of course good manuals and dictionaries in which you will find the doctrines and theological speculation that Christians have developed to approach the Mystery of God, the God whom we Christians confess as One and Triune. I can mention the Concise Theological Dictionary of Karl Rahner and Herbert Vorgrimler, which originally appeared in German in 1961. Following the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965), Karl Rahner contributed a work on the Trinity to a theological series called Mysterium Salutis (“Mystery of salvation”) which was translated into English as The Trinity. Two classic works that deal with the Trinity are J. N. D. Kelly’s Early Christian Doctrines (1977) and E. Jüngel’s God as the Mystery of the World (1983). The first is the work of a historian who traces the major theological developments from the time of Jesus and the first apostles down to just beyond the sixth century. The second is the work of a theologian and philosopher who proposes new ways of thinking and speaking about the mystery of God in itself and the relation of God to creation and history. I think you will understand that I cannot write a complete new treatise on the Trinity. What I want to offer you are some thoughts on how I have come to understand the Trinity from my prayerful reading of our holy Scriptures and my study of the history of Christian theology, and also to indicate how my faith in the Trinity affects my spiritual life. To me the “Trinity” is not primarily a complicated theological question, but the way I relate to God in prayer. My thinking is nourished by reading over and over again the New Testament (the second part of the Bible) and the First or Old Testament, especially the Psalms, which I use in my daily prayer. What I would stress at the very beginning is the Christian belief that God is ONE. On that point we will agree. When I pray, I seek God and address my words to Him. I call Him God, God our Lord, God our Father, or my God. I should also say at the outset that the word Trinity does not appear in the Greek New Testament. In English it comes from the Latin word trinitas, which did not apply only to the mystery of God but indicated anything that is “in three” or threefold (as does the Greek word trias So let me turn to some important Bible passages that give us a sense of how Jesus and then his disciples spoke about his relation to God Jesus himself prayed to God as his Father, Abba (in Aramaic, his mother-tongue). This way of referring to God was not all that unusual in his time. Even in the First Testament (the Bible of the Jews) we find several instances of God being referred to as “our Father.” In some of his sayings, Jesus stresses that our being in relationship with God as Father means that we are all children of God and therefore brothers and sisters of one another. In one of his sayings he distances himself from his own family by asking, “Who is my mother, who are my brothers and sisters?” That saying is found in the Gospel of Mark: Then his mother and his brothers came; and standing outside, they sent to him and called him. A crowd was sitting around him; and they said to him, “Your mother and your brothers and sisters are outside, asking for you.” And he replied, “Who are my mother and my brothers?” And looking at those who sat around him, he said, “Here are my mother and my brothers! Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother” (3:31-35). Jesus’ high consciousness of his relationship with God as Father implies that he felt himself to be God’s “son.” But the expression “son of God” is also to be found in the Old Testament. For instance, we can read in the so-called messianic Psalms (those that are understood as prophecies of the coming of God’s “Anointed one,” i.e., the Messiah): I will tell of the decree of the LORD: He said to me, “You are my son; today I have begotten you” (Psalm 2:7). I have found my servant David; with my holy oil I have anointed him;my hand shall always remain with him; my arm also shall strengthen him. The enemy shall not outwit him, the wicked shall not humble him. I will crush his foes before him and strike down those who hate him. My faithfulness and steadfast love shall be with him; and in my name his horn shall be exalted. I will set his hand on the sea and his right hand on the rivers. He shall cry to me, “You are my Father, my God, and the Rock of my salvation!” I will make him the firstborn, the highest of the kings of the earth. Forever I will keep my steadfast love for him, and my covenant with him will stand firm (Psalm 89:20-28). This psalm is a rewriting of the oracle of the prophet Nathan to David, as we can read in the Second Book of Samuel, chapter 7: When your days [addressed to David, by the LORD, through his prophet Nathan] are fulfilled and you lie down with your ancestors, I will raise up your offspring after you, who shall come forth from your body, and I will establish his kingdom. He shall build a house for my name, and I will establish the throne of his kingdom forever. I will be a father to him, and he shall be a son to me. When he commits iniquity, I will punish him with a rod such as mortals use, with blows inflicted by human beings (7:12-14). So when Jesus referred to himself as the “son of God,” his contemporaries would understand that in terms of the way the expression had been used in their Scriptures. Even today, if you were to ask a Jew, “Who is the ‘Son of God’?” he would answer, “Israel,” not in the sense of the country of course, but in the sense of the entire chosen people of God. So if someone presented himself as being the “son of God,” that would be understood to mean, “I realize in myself the vocation of us all, of Israel.” After the awful death of Jesus on the cross, his disciples experienced that he was still powerfully present among him, and this sense of his living presence brought them to firmly believe that he had been taken up by God into His glory and now lives, seated at God’s right hand and continuously interceding for his flock and for all humankind. Out of this conviction, the disciples’ worship of God was enriched by also praying to the Lord Jesus. We begin to see Jesus being more and more drawn into what we might call the “sphere of God.” The first Christians no longer related to God without also mentioning the presence of the One who had been appointed Lord and Christ (Messiah) and Son of God. They do this because they believe that God raised and glorified Jesus. Jesus and God are now considered as somehow deeply one. In short, they began to speak of Jesus as the “Son of God” in a way that went beyond what that expression meant in the Hebrew Scriptures of the First Testament. As the early Christians continued their reflection on Jesus, they started to meditate on his origin, before his birth and even before his conception. Almost all the concepts and images they used were taken from the First Testament of the Bible, in which we find a tradition that presents Wisdom not just as a quality that belongs to God but as a figure that stands near God, even at the very beginning of all creation (see Proverbs 8:22f., which is a commentary on Genesis 1:1-4). And so we read in the opening verses of the Gospel of John: In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. [“Word” and Wisdom are here fundamentally the same.] All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it. (…) He was in the world, and the world came into being through him; yet the world did not know him. He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him. But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God, (…). And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth (John 1:1-5, 10-14). This is a rather exceptional poem, written fifty years or more after Jesus’ death. Behind this poem we may find allusions to what we find in chapters one and twenty-four of the Book of Ben Sirach (Ecclesiasticus) about the Wisdom being with God and coming down, dwelling in history and in the heart of the chosen people, in Sion and in the Temple of Jerusalem. Chapters three and four of the booklet of Baruch (Greek Old Testament) also speak about the nearness of God’s wisdom in history, speaking through the Torah, the Law of Moses. These references from Ben Sirach and Baruch make it clear that new developments in the understanding of the relationship between Jesus and God have their roots in older biblical traditions, mainly wisdom traditions. One more example. In the book of the Wisdom of Solomon, written in Greek, about 50 years before the birth of Jesus, we have a splendid meditation on the high qualities of Wisdom (21 of them!) and about the exceptional nearness of Wisdom to God himself (see Wisdom 7:21- 8,1). In some letters of the New Testament, the same expressions will be used to speak about the position of the risen Jesus in relation to God. I will first cite a passage from chapter 7 of Wisdom and then the beginning of the Letter to the Hebrews. For wisdom is more mobile than any motion; because of her pureness she pervades and penetrates all things. For she is a breath of the power of God, and a pure emanation of the glory of the Almighty; therefore nothing defiled gains entrance into her. For she is a reflection of eternal light, a spotless mirror of the working of God,and an image of his goodness. Although she is but one, she can do all things, and while remaining in herself, she renews all things; in every generation she passes into holy souls and makes them friends of God, and prophets (Wisdom 7:24-27) Especially revealing are the verses that express the extreme nearness of Wisdom to the Divine Source (“reflection of eternal light,” “spotless mirror of the working of God”). In our traditional Creeds we speak of Jesus as “light from Light” to express the same nearness. Here is the opening sentence of the Letter to the Hebrews, an old Christian text: Long ago God spoke to our ancestors in many and various ways by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by a Son, whom he appointed heir of all things, through whom he also created the worlds. He is the reflection of God’s glory and the exact imprint of God’s very being, and he sustains all things by his powerful word. When he had made purification for sins, he sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high, having become as much superior to angels as the name he has inherited is more excellent than theirs (Hebrews 1:1-4). Here, in verse 3a and b, we find the same care to express the proximity to God of Jesus as Son and Word of God; he is “the exact imprint of God’s very being.” What I have hoped to do thus far is show that a Trinitarian approach to God has roots in the first revelation, that of the so-called Old Testament, and that this approach was not seen to detract from faith in the perfect oneness of God. I have not yet said anything about the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is what we call the “third person” of the Holy Trinity. (I might note here that when some people hear the word “Trinity,” they think that this refers to the Father, the Son, and Mary, the mother of Jesus. But nowhere in all the traditional creeds of the Church will you ever find Mary taken up in the heart of the mystery of God Father and Son.) The case of the Holy Spirit is a good example of the slow growth in the construction of a theology of the Trinity and a consensus between the theological development taking place in the Eastern (Greek speaking) and Western (Latin speaking) Christian churches. The Spirit of God is also very present “from the very beginning.” We read in the first chapter of Genesis that already at the beginning of creation “a Spirit of God was sweeping over the face of the waters” (Genesis 1:2)! The Ruah Elohim or Spirit of God has three semantic fields: one is cosmological—the “Spirit of God” is a tremendous “wind” that is blowing. A second field is anthropological—the “Spirit of God” is the vitality of my own “breath” of life. The third field is angelo-logical or demonological—the “Spirit of God” is an angel, an intermediary between the Divine and the human beings. When later theologians will consider the Spirit as “a person,” it will be on the basis of this third semantic field. Several times in the First or Old Testament we also see that Wisdom and Spirit are very close to one another. “In the Wisdom there is a spirit” (Wisdom 7:22). When Jesus is baptized in the waters of the Jordan, the Spirit of God is present “as a dove” coming down and dwelling on him. Jesus teaches about this Spirit, showing through his acts of exorcism and healings that the power of God, the finger of God, or the Spirit of God is working through him, bringing in the Kingdom of God in history (see Luke 11:20:“But if it is by the finger of God that I cast out the demons, then the kingdom of God has come to you,” and the parallel passage in Matthew 12,28, where “by the finger of God” becomes “by the spirit of God”). So the Spirit is not just an afterthought. One cannot become a new member of the community except by “receiving” the Holy Spirit. In the oldest rituals of baptism, when the newly baptized came up out of the water, they were one with Jesus in the “spirit of childhood” and with him and in this Spirit could call on God as Abba (see Romans 8,12-14 and Galatians 4,4). It will take at least four centuries for the Christian community to give the Holy Spirit the same personal strength and identity it was already giving to the Father and the Son. Basil the Great, Church Father of the fourth century in Cappadocia (not so far from Iran, at least as seen from here!) and probably the best Christian theologian of his century, wrote a complete Treatise on the Holy Spirit. It is a beautiful work, but he avoids saying that the Spirit “is God.” He does accept that we should honor the Spirit in the same way as we honor the Son and the Father, but he says, “Do not go any further, please!” But less than a century later a common agreement on that point will be obtained. The on-going theological reflections that takes place during these first centuries determine that there are three ways of thinking/speaking about the Trinity that must be avoided. A first is to see the three persons of the Trinity as just variant expressions of the One, without giving real identity to Father, Son or Spirit. According to this view, these names are not much more than “modalities.” This theory, therefore, was called: modalism. There were not many theologians who shared this view, but in some Gnostic milieus that tendency could be found (see, for example, the subtle way of speaking about the Trinity in the Gospel of Truth, a Greek text of the Valentinians from the beginning of the second century, but known to us only in Coptic). A second “heresy” that was to be avoided is thinking of the Father, Son and Spirit as three gods. “Tritheism” is the name of that tendency. By putting too much stress on the divinity of each, there is a great risk of losing the Unity and Oneness of God. This tendency may be more present than we would suspect. Many formulas in liturgy and worship are so static that they lose the dynamic integration of the three persons. To give one example: Glory be to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit, is frequently used at the end of a prayer or a Psalm of David. There the three are in a kind of juxtaposition. A better, and older formula is Glory to the Father, through the Son, in the Holy Spirit. Here we have a dynamic and integrating formula, where the three divine persons have their specific role. A third heresy, one that stands midway between the other two, is to affirm a kind of subordination in the Trinity: first the Father, then the Son from the Father, and then the Spirit. This heresy is known as Subordinationism. The accepted understanding is that the three persons are “equal in majesty”; there is no more or less in the divine character of each of them. Officially Christian theology has done all she could to avoid those three heretical errors. It may be that the faith of the Church was not communicated very well. But the intention was always to affirm that Christian faith is monotheistic, even with its Trinitarian vision of God. This is a paradox and a high challenge, and over the centuries there were at times very harsh debates between Greeks, Egyptians, Syrians, and Romans. The decisions of the so-called ecumenical Councils that took place in the fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries generally involved a compromise position, but always with a consensus that tritheism, modalism, and subordinationism had to be avoided! Again the roots of all this later theological development can be found in the New Testament, which builds on teachings of Jesus and on older Jewish-biblical traditions. Let me give you, from the New Testament, a few examples of beautiful formulations in which we find “God,” “the Son” and “the Spirit,” without any Trinitarian theory as such. First of all, from the letters of Saint Paul The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with all of you (2 Corinthians 13:13). Now there are varieties of gifts, but the same Spirit; and there are varieties of services, but the same Lord (=Jesus); and there are varieties of activities, but it is the same God who activates all of them in everyone (1 Corinthians 12:4-7 . From the First letter of Saint Peter: Peter, an apostle of Jesus Christ, To the exiles of the Dispersion in Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia, and Bithynia, who have been chosen and destined by God the Father and sanctified by the Spirit to be obedient to Jesus Christ and to be sprinkled with his blood: May grace and peace be yours in abundance (1:1-2). From the conclusion of the Gospel of Matthew, which was written more or less fifty years after the death of Jesus: And Jesus came and said to them, ‘All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. 19Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, 20and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you. And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age’ (28:18-20)* Here baptism is no longer just “in the name of Jesus” as was usual before (see in the Book of Acts, many times), but it receives the larger mystical depths: “in the name of Father-Son-Holy Spirit.” As Jesus is fully Jesus and Lord through the Father and in relation to the Spirit, so we baptize the new members in the threefold divine name. Let me come back to my personal experience, to show that “trinity” is not a complicated problem for the mind or heart. The basic understanding of my being is given in the baptismal rite. There I was introduced in the Body of Christ, becoming member of him. From that moment on I am “in him,” “in Christ,” “in the Lord.” He dwells in me through the Spirit, who is the Spirit of God, and I pray in the Spirit, through Christ , the mediator between God and men. My prayer is addressed to God, the Source of all. Christ in me takes me up, brings me to freedom and glory. He prays in me. He does everything “in me” and I “in him,” to the degree that this possible. Paul has given us the formula: “it is no longer I who live [and pray and act] but is Christ who lives in me” (Galatians 2,20, a famous sentence that I call “the grammar of the Christian way of life”). The Spirit works inside of us. He is the Spirit of holiness, of sanctification. His work is that of unifying, sanctifying, purifying, blessing, achieving, bringing me and the whole creation to full achievement and glory. I live from beginning to beginning, in beginnings without end, as Gregory, the brother of Basil the Great said. The Spring of Living Water is inside the city. Hope is there, renewing and refreshing life, continuously. Irenaeus of Lyons, a very early Church Father (ca 200) expressed his understanding of God poetically: “God has two hands: his Word, that is the Son, and his Spirit. With both He works the clay we are, bringing it to achievement. Let the clay be humid, let us be humble enough that he can let his fingers impress the digital marks of his Love.” Let me briefly refer to two major Christian thinkers who reflected on the meaning of the Trinity after the doctrine had been officially defined, Augustine, bishop of Hippo (354-430) and Julian of Norwich (end of the 14th, beginning of the 15th century). Augustine was fascinated by the mystery of a Trine God. Starting with the statement that we are “created at the image” of God, as is said on the first page of the Bible (see Genesis 1:27), he concluded that everything that is threefold in our human experience is a trace of God’s work. He went so far as to say that everything that is threefold in nature may be seen as a sign of the invisible God. He began by examining the human person, in whom he discerned a first triad: intelligence, will, and memory. He then associated this triad with Paul’s triad of virtues: faith (with intelligence), love (with will), and hope (with memory). Some scholars—Olivier Roy, for example—have drawn up lists of all the circumstances of daily life where Augustine discerned triads—and which he regarded as so many signs of God's presence in everyday experience. Julian, a English mystical writer, is surely rooted in the tradition of Augustine and of other mystics, such as Bernard of Clairvaux. For her, every divine action involves the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Father Son Holy Spirit Power Wisdom love, goodness Creator Protector, caring Lover Father Mother Lord Nature Pity, compassion Grace Notice that she gives the role of motherhood to Jesus. She is not the only one to do that, but that approach has not been widely developed in Catholic theology. Once we accept this fundamental insight of the Divine in its Trinitarian depths, we can read again every experience but also every text of the Bible, using that profound hermeneutical key. For example, in the Letter to the Ephesians, we read, “for through him (Jesus) both of us (Jews and Gentiles) have access in one Spirit to the Father (2:18). In one sentence you find Father, Son and Spirit. Further on in the same letter, we read “to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace. 4 There is one body and one Spirit, just as you were called to the one hope of your calling, 5 one Lord, one faith, one baptism, 6 one God and Father of all, who is above all and through all and in all” (4:3-6). We find the three, and some will even in the last threefold formula (v.6) again distinguish the role of the Father (‘above all’), that of the Son (‘through all’) and the one of the Spirit (‘in all’). That kind of creative interpretation is allowed, once you are rooted in the given tradition. If you will allow me to reflect on your tradition, I wonder if it would not be possible to say that Allah speaks through the mediation of Gabriel to give the Holy Qur’an? So, as a friend told me just this afternoon, we have here the Divine Source, the Angel/Spirit, and the Word, written down in the Holy Book. That, at least, would be my attempt to recognize the divine way of communication within a Tradition that is different from my own. A biblical parallel to this triad of Divine Source, Angel/Spirit, and Word can be found in the Book of Daniel (Old Testament) and in the Book of Revelation (New Testament). I have tried my best to introduce you into our tradition, which took several centuries to arrive at a coherent and satisfying way of speaking about the mystery of the Trinity. And once a way was found that was generally accepted, there were different theologians and mystics who used concepts and words like “nature” (physis in Greek), and “person” (persona in Latin, prosōpon and more frequently hypostasis in Greek) to help us come to a deeper understanding of the relations of the Father, the Son, and the Spirit to one another. Many writers and philosophers in both the East (Greek) and the West (Latin, and modern tongues) have affirmed that the modern understanding of the notion or concept of “person” is rooted in the theological reflection on divine relationships within the Trinity. An contemporary Greek-orthodox writer who has done research on that point is Bishop John Zizioulas. Another theologian, Francis Xavier Durrwell, made it clear to me that the inner work of the Spirit in us is the same as the Spirit’s work in the Father and in the Son. He makes me to be fully a “person”: “The Spirit works personalizing.” As Bishop Zizioulas writes, the category of “person” is even prior to the one of just “being.” One becomes a “person” through recognition of the priority of the Other; the Son is Son in the way he recognizes the priority of the otherness of the Father. The Father becomes fully “father” in the full recognition of the otherness of the Son. (Here we see the influence of the Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas). There is much on which to meditate here. But all this belongs to the further developments of a theology of the Trinity. One final remark. In modern manuals of theology you will frequently find the useful distinction between “immanent Trinity” and “economic Trinity.” The distinction here is between the Trinity in itself (“immanent”) and the Trinity insofar as the Divine came into history an revealed itself in the “economy” of time and space. Some theologians would say that we can only speak about the revealed, “economic” Trinity and must remain silent when we consider the immanent Trinity. Others would say, let us take the revealed Trinity so seriously that from it we receive the opportunity to reflect ever more deeply on the mystery of the immanent Trinity. My dear friend in the faith of your fathers, May the Divine create peace on earth as He creates peace in heaven. May our exchange bring us somehow closer to one another, in full respect of His mystery, revealed in the Holy Qur’an, and in the Torah of Moses, and in the Gospel of Jesus. Salam! Peace and joy in the study of his Word. With my most friendly greetings, fr Benoît Standaert Bruges, 28/11/2015 |
_Web(2)_Web(3)_Web.jpg) Benoit Standaert (b. 1945), a Benedictine monk of the Abbey of Saint-André in Bruges (Belgium), has long been engaged in Monastic Interreligious Dialogue and is a frequent contributor to Dilatato Corde. He was editor of Heiliging, a review of spirituality, from 1978 to 2003. Since 1998 he has been regularly invited by Father Lucien Legrand to direct a research seminar on the Faculty of Theology of St. Peter's Seminary in Bangalore, India. Since 2001 he has been teaching Sacred Scripture at STIM (Studium Théologique Inter-Monastères) in various monasteries in France. He is a Biblical scholar specializing in the analysis of ancient rhetoric and is also well versed in the history of spirituality. Several of his works, written in Dutch and French, are translated into Italian, Hungarian, Polish, and Spanish. Among his recent publications are Sagesse comme art de vivre. Un abécédaire de la vie spirituelle, Bayard 2009 ; Evangile selon Marc. Commentaire, Gabalda 2010 (3 vol.) ; Il vangelo secondo Marco. Composizione e genere letterario, Collana Studi Biblici n°69, (trad. Franco de Carlo), Bologna 2015. |