In the calendar of the greater Christian Church, this past
Sunday was Trinity Sunday.
I am not Trinitarian, and I personally believe the doctrine
of the Trinity to be heretical, scripturally unsupported and socially destructive.
I won’t spend a great deal of time on this; for most people,
this comes under the heading “churchy, boring, and who cares?” I mention it
because I care.
I do not have much in the way of scholarly authority, but I
do know that the notion of Trinity hangs on one slim line of scriptural text,
Matthew 28:19: Go ye, therefore, and instruct
all nations; and baptize them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of
the Holy Spirit. There has been a great deal of argument, in recent years
as to whether this sentence is spurious or genuine. One of the main reasons for
this is the fact that baptism as recorded in “The
Acts of the Apostles” isn’t described in a way that matches
with the description in Matthew. It seems obvious that things happened one or
more ways in the beginnings of the early church, after which changes were
adopted then for some reason, helped along by the zeal to establish an
orthodoxy of practice.
There are triads all over the place in mythology and in many
other cultural manifestations. The formula of “thought, word and deed” appears
in Christianity by way of Judaism from Zoroastrianism. Three is a magical and a
basic number, and I have no argument against the loveliness of three.
However, what I find offensive about the Christian idea of
Trinity, as it comes to us today, is how it treats the feminine aspect in the
world.
For me, three is the number that defines the basic family
formula: Father, Mother, Child. Even in this modern era of wonderful families
of two moms with a child or two dads with a child, it is still true that the
only way for most kinds of children to arrive is by means of a fertile male
component mingling with a fertile female component.
The oldest versions of words for Spirit or Wisdom are
feminine. Ruaḥ is the Hebrew word for spirit (and Hokmah is the Hebrew word for wisdom;
Shekinah is the Aramaic word for presence).
Ruaḥ was
translated into Greek as Pneuma, a
neutral gender form, and the Vulgate has translated that into the Latin word Spiritus, which is masculine.
Just the other day, I wrote, in
an Introduction to a collection of poems, “The more basic truth about words is that their
accumulation constitutes the collective memory of our species, for better and
for worse.” What I meant by that is that
meanings and contexts can be and are lost through the avenues of translation.
In terms of scriptural devices, the Trinitarian formula is invoked to make Yeshua
into a super divine being, rather than a spiritually aware human. I’ll
come clean and say I don’t think that is what Yeshua was
about—Yeshua believed in YHWH, above all. Yeshua also believed that YHWH expected each person to respect, uphold and serve the holiness in every other person.
The Christian Religion has done
a lot to ignore the recorded example of what Yeshua did during his ministry, opting to go its own way with generations
of dogmatic hogwash and contradictory or even demeaning doctrine and theology, all
of which has resulted in so much injustice and bloodshed. Indeed, most people
who claim to be followers of Yeshua have no idea how many people were killed so
that they can be materialist snobs, follow the ravings of ideologues, and revere
commercialism during the Christmas season.
Getting back to that
three-in-one idea, I have to say that I’ve never heard a single sermon
on Trinity that has ever seemed anything but completely lame. But, we have to
swear to it, because that is what came out of the Council of Nicea (in the year
325); a loyalty oath that was intended to build consensus throughout the church.
I’ll be honest and say that the
only scripturally supported Trinity I can get behind is the one that Yeshua
spoke as first clause of the Great Commandment: “Love God with all your heart,
all your soul, all your mind.” The second clause is equated
with the first: “Love your neighbor as yourself.”
Returning to an earlier thread,
you might ask why I quibble over the translation of Ruaḥ? It
is because I look around me and see that the feminine has been written out of
the picture in exchange for a purely patriarchal understanding and mode of
operation. I know that it just happened that way… one language was more
masculine than the other when it came to matters of spirit. But I also know
that men try to own spirituality. Men cannot own spirituality, but they try to
do so.
Yeshua was for people, male and
female; conversely, the church seems all about sacerdotal hierarchy, which is
dominated by males. Not only true of Christian denominations, this seems to be
a global enterprise. Even in this modern era, women pushed out of the picture,
as much and as far as possible. Daily, I read about women being assaulted, cheated,
kidnapped, denigrated, trafficked, enslaved and murdered. Hundreds of girls are
kidnapped from their school! Who is doing these things? Some men are doing them. Societies,
the world over, have allowed women to be treated as inferiors and as objects by some men.
With the exception of a token few, women are not allowed to be identified as holy. And this
priestly business has turned out so well, hasn’t it? The terms episcopoi, presbuteroi, diakonoi
mean (respectively) overseer,
elder and servant; these titles do not automatically imply priesthood at all, but a role in community rule.
But again I digress. Perhaps my
meandering thoughts are no better than any sermon you have heard on the
doctrine of Trinity, if you have heard any.
In the creation story that I
read for our congregation, it says very plainly “male and female, He created
them… God saw all that
he had made, and it was very good.” For me, this is the essence of what it is
to follow the example of Yeshua: we must acknowledge that every being in this world is good, and we must respect, uphold and serve
this truth with our actions.
If there is a Trinity that must be respected, served
and upheld, there is no mystery about what it is and what it means—it is the
family unit: parent, parent, child. Everyone is both a parent and a child, worthy and beautiful: male and female, however they identify.
Peace be to you.
