The Trinity - what it is and is not

I love these diagrams because they demonstrate the absurdity of the Trinity. These diagrams put God in a three sided box and we Lutherans know that God cannot be put in a box. To be relevant in the 21st century, we have to be clear about what the Trinity is and what it is not.

What it is. The Trinity is a non-scriptural concoction of the 4th century church fathers who were looking for a statement about the nature of God. They came up with this convoluted concept and agreed to agree but not debate the nature of God any more. We have been stuck with it ever since. Lutherans accept three creedal statements about the Trinity - The Nicene, the Apostles, and the Athanasian. Fortunately the Athanasian Creed has been removed from our latest hymnal. This creed is absolutely irrelevant in the 21st century and we should say so, not just remove it from our hymnal.. 

The church has a much better term for God - the magnum mysterium or great mystery. God is unknowable. In one of our sacred stories, God was asked "who are you?" God's response? YHWH - "I am" or "I will be who I will be."

The Trinity is a metaphor for helping us realize that God cannot be put in a neat box. God is a mystery and we can only talk about God using the language of the unknowable - mythology. 

Follow this link to see a modern artist's interpretation of the great mystery.

What it is not. The Trinity is not a definitive statement about the nature of God. If we accept that God is unknowable, we cannot then turn around and declare that we know who God is. 

The Trinity makes no claim about the gender of God. Lutherans in the 21st century know that the men who created the concept of the Trinity were constrained by the world view of people in the 4th century. We look really silly when our modern "theologians" jump through twisted hoops of reason and logic to defend the masculine language of the Trinity. 

Three creation stories - which one do we embrace?

Two creation stories appear in Genesis and one is from ancient Babylonian mythology. Walter Wink makes the case that the western church ignores the two biblical stories but embraces the story of creation  found in the mythology of Tiamet and Marduk. 

Our sacred stories are high religion, as Joseph Sittler says in the post below. Joseph Campbell says that a story (myth) is that which can never be yet ever is. All human civilizations are defined by their sacred stories. 

The first biblical account of creation describes a creator that is good and the creation is good. The second creation story about Adam and Eve reveals how this good creation was corrupted by humanity with the introduction of violence - Cain and Abel. Humanity created violence, not God.

A very strong case can be made that if we embraced these stories, we would take better care of creation and ourselves. If we worshiped the God of the bible we would care for the earth and its people and resources because God's creation is good. If we worshiped the God of the bible, we would reject violence because violence is not what God intended for the world that God created.

Clearly, the church has not embraced these stories. The fundies reduce the creation myths to stories of history,   or science, or geology that require that you believe that Adam and Eve rode dinosaurs to church on Sunday. By focusing on the literal facts of the myths, they suck the life out of our sacred stories.

Tiamet was a great Goddess who mistreated the lesser gods. Marduk made a deal with the other gods that if he killed Tiamet, he would be rewarded. The universe was created when Marduk filled Tiamet with a great wind and impaled her on his sword (think Jaws) so that Tiamet's entrails became the components of the universe. The essence of this myth is that violence is redemptive.

Look at our popular culture and you can see the story of Tiamet and Marduk played out over and over. Most children know the Popeye story. A bully beats up the hero for most of the story until the hero eats his spinach and defeats the bully in a terrible act of violence. Have you ever seen a Popeye episode where he and Bluto sit down and talk about their differences over OliveOyl? Is non-violence ever a factor?

The hollywood movies that follow the Tiamet and Marduk are too numerous to list but they include the Terminator movies, Zorro, Superman, Rambo, and on and on. Violence is always redemptive.

When we were attacked by 17 Saudis and two Pakistani's on 911 our response was extreme violence. A trillion dollar war that we still wage.

Please see the op-ed I wrote after 911 ( on the page bar at the top of this blog) which offers a non-violent response to that attack.

The church of Jesus Christ was virtually silent on the build up to the invasion of Iraq. For sure, all of the Christian denominations - except the Missouri Synod Lutherans and the Southern Baptists - took positions opposing the invasion, but these statements were toothless because the pastors preaching from the thousands of pulpits in the church were afraid to go against the thirst for retribution that was motivating the people in the pews. 

If we Lutherans want to be relevant in the 21st century, we must return to the roots of the church. Non-violence. We must not equivocate on this issue.