The Trinity and the Next 500 Years

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Everyone seems to have a Reformation take these days, but as in most things, the best Reformation opinion belongs to Stanley Hauerwas. Writing in the Washington Post, Hauerwas argued that with the end of the Second Vatican Council, the Reformation ended. According to Hauerwas, the theological differences between Catholics and Baptists, Baptists and Methodists, Methodists and Orthodox, have receded, replaced by a common commitment to the centrality of Jesus’s life, death, and Resurrection. While distinguishing features remain, they are largely distinctions without a difference, retained mostly for the sake of identity rather than theology.

For the past 500 years, theological debates revolved around what became known as the five solas of the Reformation. The 16th century reformers argued that Scripture rather than tradition, faith rather than works, and grace rather than merit are necessary and sufficient for salvation. These three solas, scriptura, fide, and gratia, were joined by Sola Christus, the idea that Christ, not a priestly class, is the mediator of grace, and Soli Deo gloria, the idea that all glory belongs to God rather than saints. All five of these solas emerged out of the Reformer’s critiques of the Catholic Church, and Hauerwas argues that these critiques were largely or entirely resolved by the end of Vatican II.

But if the Reformation of the Church has really been reformed, if these five solas are no longer the cornerstones of our theological distinctions, what will replace them? What will motivate our thinking about God? What is the paradigm of the next 500 years of thinking about God?

Fittingly, to answer this question we must turn from Hauerwas, a Protestant, to Richard Rohr, a Franciscan. Rohr’s recent book on the Trinity, The Divine Dance, is a masterpiece that contains both a powerful criticism of the last 2,000 years of Christianity, and the solution to that critique. Rohr argues that our God is still the pagan god that we inherited from Greece and Rome. To Rohr, our current God is a three-person entity, prone to anger and judgement, and separate from ourselves and itself. We say God is three-in-one, knowing that this makes no sense and hoping that no one asks too many questions about how that all works. Rohr argues that this is not the scriptural or ancient view of the Trinity. To Rohr, God is the relationship, the metaphysical love, between the beings of the Trinity and you. To borrow a metaphor from astronomy, the Trinity is like two galaxies orbiting a third; God is the interaction between them, the force of gravity keeping the galaxies in their dance around each other. And you are a distant star, invited to the dance, pulled by gravity towards the massive galaxies.

Much like the solas of the Reformation, this view of God has profound implications. If we truly are self-deluded pagans worshiping a judgmental and violent God who is isolated from us and itself then it should not surprise us that we are often individualistic, judgmental, violent, and isolated from each other. Conversely, if God is a relationship, an interaction, and a love between and among us, then we are profoundly interconnected. Thus, Rohr’s vision of God implies a radically different understanding of what it means to be human. We are not isolated individuals responsible only for our own actions and wellbeing. Instead, we are one.

Perhaps Richard Rohr has given us a new sola, sola unitas, or only unity. After 500 years of divisions and in a globalizing world wracked with divisions, perhaps our theology should be guided by the centrality of the relationship among all people and between those people and the divine. Instead of obsessing over salvation and who is or is not “saved,” perhaps we can focus on loving and being in relationship with others and with the divine.

For centuries, our theologies have been absorbed in what divides us: divisions between Catholics and Protestants, divisions among various branches of Protestantism, and divisions between Christians and non-Christians. Theologians have repeatedly drawn ideological lines to separate and exclude the wrong sort of people and theologies from their churches. But these theological lines do not simply exclude people from a church; they exclude them from being seen by the community as a child of God. Our failure to see people as children of God has often proven violent and occasionally genocidal. Theologies have consequences.

Of course, our contemporary theologies and theologians continue this process of line drawing, of deciding who is a Methodist and who is not. Who is Wesleyan and who is not. Who is a Christian and who is not. The irony is that none of us are Methodists, or Wesleyans, or even Christians. That is not our identity. Instead, we are humans. Beloved children of God, brothers and sisters of the Divine. Beings of metaphysical Love. And that is quite a bit better place to start the next 500 years of theology.

Brian Snyder is an Assistant Professor of Environmental Science at Louisiana State University and a member of First United Methodist Church in Baton Rouge, La.