The Holy Trinity

The Anglican Church in America

The Most Rev. Louis W. Falk, Primate

(With thanks and acknowledgment

to C. S. Lewis)

People often tell their priests: “The ordinary Christian in the pew doesn’t want theology; just give him plain practical religion!” But I think such advice is mistaken. Theology means “the science of God”, and I believe that anyone who wants to think about God at all would like to have the clearest and most accurate ideas about Him that are available. Right?

I think I know why some people are put off by theology. Suppose you have had a real experience of the presence of God, and then you turn from that experience to the Creeds. You might easily get the idea that you have turned from something real to something less real. In the same way, a person who has stood on the West Coast of the Island and looked out over the Pacific, and then goes and looks at a map of the Pacific, will feel that he has turned from something real to something less real – from the crash of the breakers on the beach and the salt spray, to a bit of colored paper, but there are two very important facts about that map:

First, it is based on what hundreds and thousands of people have found out by sailing the Pacific. It has behind it masses of real experience and the map fits all those experiences together, whereas yours was only one person’s isolated glimpse.

Second, if you want to go anywhere, the map is essential. As long as you are content to walk along the beach, your own glimpses of the ocean are more fun than trying to make sense of a map. But if you want to go to Japan, or want someone else to take you there, the map is going to be more useful than your walks in the beach.

Now, Theology is like a map. Dogmas (theological truths) about God are not God; they are only a kind of map. But that map is based on the experience of thousands of people who really were in touch with God – so much so that any one single experience you and I may have had must be very elementary and confused in comparison.

That is why theology is practical religion. In the old days, it was possible to get along with a very few simple ideas about God; but not now. Consequently, if we don’t pay attention to theology (the map) that will not mean that we have no ideas about God. It will mean that we have a lot of wrong ideas, bad, muddled and out-of-date ones. And frankly, to believe in the popular religion of most people will prove to be a backward step, like believing that the earth is flat! When you come right down to it, isn’t the man-in-the-street’s idea of Christianity simply this: that Jesus Christ was a great moral teacher, and that only if we took His advice we might have a better social order and stop all this fighting and bickering? Now that is true. But it is very much less than the whole truth. It has no practical experience at all.

If Christianity is only one more piece of good advice, then Christianity is of no importance. There has been no lack of good advice for the last 4,000 years (what about Plato, Aristotle, Confucius, Buddha?). A bit more makes little difference! But as soon as you look at any real Christian writings, such as the New Testament or the Prayer Book, you will find that they are talking about something different from this popular religion. They say that Christ is the Son of God, that those who give Him their confidence can also become sons of God, and they say that His death saves us from our sins. It is no good complaining that these statements are difficult. Christianity claims to be telling us about another world, about something behind the everyday world we can touch and hear and smell and see. If the claim is true, what it tells us will be bound to be difficult, at least as difficult as nuclear physics, and for a similar reason.

Now, one of the points in Christianity, which causes the greatest shock, is the statement that by attaching ourselves to Christ we can become “sons of God”. But aren’t we sons of God already? Isn’t the Fatherhood of God one of the main Christian ideas?

And that, by the way, is probably the biggest difference between the Christian idea of God and that of all other religions. In Christianity, God is not a static, impersonal ‘force’, but a dynamic, personal, pulsating activity, a life, almost a kind of drama, almost a kind of dance. The Father begets the Son and bestows on Him all the Father has and is, and the Son gives Himself back to the Father in a torrent of love, who is the Holy Spirit. The union between the Father and the Son is such a live, concrete thing that this union is also a Person, the Third Person of the Trinity who is God.

And now, what does it all matter? It matters more than anything else in the world! Each one of us has got to enter the dance, or drama, or pattern of this three-person life. There is no other way to the joy for which we were made. If you want to get wet you must get into the water. If you want joy, peace and eternal life, you must get into the thing that has them. They are not prizes, which God could, if he chose, just hand out to anyone. They are the great fountain of energy and beauty springing up at the very center of reality. If you are close to it, the spray will wet you; if you are not, you will remain dry. Once a person is united to God how could he not live forever? Once a person is separated from God, what can he do but wither and die?

But how is any of us to be united with God? How is it possible for us to be taken into God’s Three-Person life? We must come to share the life of Christ, a life which was begotten, not made, which always has existed and always will exist, but also the life of a real human being, which we can share. Christ is the Son of God. If we share in his life, we also shall be the sons of God. We shall love the Father as He does, and the Holy Spirit will live in us.

We must do what Christ told us to do. We must be baptized, and confirmed, and then we must take our part in the Holy Eucharist. We must eat the holy Bread that gives life, and drink from the Chalice that gives everlasting salvation. That is the way for us to “evermore dwell in Him, and He in us”. That is what makes us living members of his Body and heirs of God’s everlasting Kingdom. We can be taken into the very life of God here and now, and be kept in that life, until we see God the Blessed Trinity unveiled, and behold Him face to face in Heaven.