Trinity Sunday

Gen 1:1-2:4a

While the two other readings today provide more explicit elements of what was to become the Trinity—the triad of God/Father, Son/Jesus and Holy Spirit—the Genesis reading asks or teaches something more conceptual. God is creator—not as first person alone, but as Trinity (sic).

The extended reading from the priestly creation account in Genesis is the most significant appearance of this foundational story in the whole lectionary, apart from the Easter Vigil. I suspect however that it raises a few eyebrows as a choice for Trinity Sunday. It is not “traditional” for this day as I recently read somewhere else, but a quite new contribution by the Revised Common Lectionary editors; Roman Catholics will instead read part of the Sinai covenant and the pronouncement of the name of God (Exod 34). My guess is that this Genesis passage was thought to deserve a Sunday morning, and that this day was apt.

Genesis and the Trinity though? Biblical studies has for over a century emphasized the original historical settings of biblical texts, and the possible intentions of authors, over traditional methods such as allegory and other readings that interpret the texts via later doctrine. This historical-critical method has made a contribution that is impossible to overestimate, but it has come at a cost. I suspect that many preachers don’t know what to do with texts from ancient Israel beyond this, i.e., to consider the original meaning and to look for resonances about human existence. Micah calls for justice and so do we, the Psalms bring the whole of human experience before God and so do we, etc.

Yet the Church has often read—as did ancient Jewish interpreters, including Jesus and Paul—the texts in ways that are quite distant from the apparent original meanings.

We have done some of this recently in Passiontide and Easter. Suffering and lamentation recounted in Isaiah and other prophetic texts that originally related to experience of the prophet, or to Israel itself, are attributed to Jesus. Easier may be the parallel between the Exodus and Easter, since the experience of Jesus does not (or should not) supplant the ancient story. And maybe even a text like Jonah can scrape through being re-read (in part) Christologically, since it is a sort of fable, and since the Gospels already do so (Matt 16:4).

Yet for some thoughtful people, reading the Hebrew Bible as a Christian text or even just as a test for Christians seems problematic, not only for the reasons of historical consciousness noted, but because of how Christianity has tended to erase the original Israelite and then Jewish character of the texts.

This however means treating the Old Testament as a sort of Restricted Section (think Hogwarts) meaningful only relative to Jewish tradition, which itself ironically has often gone on to interpret the same texts creatively and variously, rather than sitting with some original intention as the only and inflexible guide. We cannot pay our debts to the history of anti-Judaism simply by now imagining that either original meanings or later Jewish tradition become the last word on any interpretive issue for what is also Jewish scripture. The answer to this dilemma lies in respecting and learning from the most ancient forms and meanings as well as from other contemporary ones, and being open about the fact that the Church believes these texts can and do also speak to different situations, and that Christians can read them in reference to Christ.

The Trinity, San Pablo Mitla, Oaxaca, Mexico (disclaimer: not presented as a model to ground your Trinitarian faith…). Author photo.

With Genesis and the Trinity we certainly have these issues to deal with, and perhaps some others. Let us be clear that Gen 1 does not “teach” the doctrine of the Trinity. However there are Christian believers and interpreters who read the passage relative to trinitarian doctrine but, to be frank, wrongly. I am thinking of those who imagine that this text (and even presumably its use on Trinity Sunday) refers only to the first person of the Trinity, to God the “Father.” This mistake is grounded in a wider misconception not just about how to read particular texts of scripture, but about how the Trinity relates to history itself.

In this view, the God referred to in the Jewish scriptures we know as the Old Testament is simply the Father (or Creator—the assimilation of these two words in well-intentioned attempts at making liturgical language more inclusive is exacerbating this misunderstanding). The Son then appears only with the incarnation and the New Testament, with Jesus. If the Spirit is part of this picture, she only appears at Pentecost. All this, which keeps the Trinity out of Christian reading of the OT, sometimes becomes a back-door means of (supposedly) harmonizing with Jewish tradition—the God of the Old Testament is then the same as God in Judaism generally, but not in Christianity.

This isn’t actually how the doctrine of the Trinity works; Christians believe that the Trinity refers to the nature of God eternally, not to “phase 1” or to creation. The God who in Genesis says (strikingly) “let us make” is the Trinity. And of course that plural was not a reference to the Trinity when the text was written. Yet it is a reminder that purists who want to claim that Israelite religion was only and always radically monotheistic have their work cut out for them, although that is only tangentially related to this issue. Early Christian interpreters nevertheless saw in hints of a divine assembly the encouragement to look for traces of trinitarian understanding.

More significant for a Christian reading though may be considering how (other) elements of this account were subsequently interpreted, even in biblical literature, to relate to the doctrine of the Trinity directly.

God here creates by speaking, by word (Gen 1:3); John’s Gospel interprets this as “the Word” who was to become flesh, but was in the beginning, making God’s creative purpose the personal means by which the ineffable meets the material. The Spirit of God—or a mighty wind, in Hebrew it’s the same—hovers over the chaotic deep (1:2); in ancient Jewish as well as Christian interpretation this is seen to hint at an abiding divine presence (see Ps 104), not just primeval meteorology. And so while the Nicene Creed does name the Father as “Creator,” it also claims the Son as the one “through whom all things were made,” and the Spirit as “the life-giver,” making all three active in creation.

It would be wrong to lose Genesis under this. The poetic rhythms of the priestly account, its solemn recitation of the days of creation and the resulting cosmic order, invite reflection not just on that order but on what—who—underlies it, and the implications. The same priestly vision of a God in deep relationship with humanity, the cosmos, and Israel continues through its Pentateuchal narrative, inviting reflection not only (or not so much) on cosmic existence, but particularly of the fact that we and the cosmos are drawn into a relationship of mutual dependence with God and one another (so no, I don’t think this is the day to sing the deist ditty “The Spacious Firmament on High,” even if the tune is nice).

The point of Genesis as a trinitarian story is not so much that the divine “we” formally allows some complexity such as three-in-one, but that the complexity of divine purpose, action, and presence in and after this story, through all done in and by the eternal Source, incarnate Word, and life-giving Spirit, demands this confession.

So Christians do not confess God as Trinity just because of the NT proof texts, but also because the experience of God in Christ requires the affirmation of the incarnate Son and the missional Spirit as part of God’s reality in all space and time, and even beyond them. The fact of a Trinity Sunday after Eastertide is not just to say that all the players are now on the liturgical stage, but that the drama into which they have caught us up requires us to confess God as three, as well as one, from the beginning.