“Mr American”

So I’m reading one of the few George MacDonald Fraser novels that isn’t a “Flashman” novel (which is the reason I bought it in the first place). It’s an historical novel (all of his are. Not quite the pulp fiction I expected). As such it includes sometimes daily details about the English debate over Irish home rule in the first and second decades of the 20th century. Issues like the actions in Parliament; the actions of the military officers who resigned en masse to protest the government’s proposed policy (this affects the characters in the story). In short, the details of history which create the “ big events” of history, which in turn change the daily lives in history. The complexity of history, in even shorter.

Sort of like history of the doctrine of the Trinity in Christianity. 

Mainstream Christianity believes in God as a Trinity. This God is very different from the vague notions mentioned above, and if someone says ‘I do not believe in God’ they do not usually mean that they have considered and rejected the Trinity. Faith in the Trinitarian God is remarkable enough to require some basic explanation as to how it came about and what it means. I will tell the story about this from a mainstream Christian standpoint and also point to some of the big questions about it. Jesus and the first Christians were Jews, and so the God they worshiped is to be identified mainly by looking at the Jewish scriptures, which Christians call the Old Testament. One key story there is about Moses at the Burning Bush in Exodus Chapter 3. It is what is called a ‘theophany’, a manifestation of God, and it became one of the main texts used in Jewish and Christian discussion of God. Moses in the desert near Mount Horeb comes upon a bush that is blazing but not consumed, and a voice addresses him which says: ‘I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob’ (Exodus 3:6). The voice goes on to say: ‘I have observed the misery of my people who are in Egypt … I know their sufferings, and I have come down to deliver them …’ (3:7–8). God sends Moses to Pharaoh and promises to be with him, and when Moses asks God’s name he is told: ‘I AM WHO I AM’ (3:14. Other translations are: ‘I am what I am’ or ‘I will be what I will be’). What conception of God emerges from that? The discussion is inexhaustible, but for now three points are crucial. 

First, God is identified through key figures who worshiped him: Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob; their stories are the main way to understand who this God is. Second, God is known through God’s compassionate involvement in the sufferings of people, and is on the side of justice. Third, that mysterious name ‘I am who I am’ or ‘I will be what I will be’ means at least that God is free to be God in the ways God decides: there is no domesticating, there is ‘always more’, and God can go on springing surprises in history. 

Now leap over hundreds of years to Jesus (of whom much more will be said in Chapter 6). He is in this tradition of worshiping God. But, as his followers tried to come to terms with who he was and what had happened through his life, death, and resurrection, they came to affirm that he was one with this God. Is there any way of making sense of that extraordinary conclusion? His resurrection is the pivotal issue. We will look at it in more detail in Chapter 6, but for now let us look at it from the standpoint of the early Christians.  

For the first Christians the resurrection was a God-sized event which affected their understanding of Jesus, of history, of themselves, and of God. In terms of the Burning Bush story, God was now decisively ‘the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Jesus’, and through Jesus God was compassionately involved in history at its worst. The resurrection was the great surprise. They ascribed it to God, seeing the raising of Jesus from the dead as comparable to creation. The content of this event was the person of Jesus, who in this way could be seen as identified with God by God. Jesus was seen as God’s self-expression (or Word), intrinsic to who God is, so that their worship began to include him. There was a wide variety of expressions, names, and forms of behavior with reference to Jesus, but the central tendency was to see him as having unlimited significance, liveliness, and goodness, inseparable from God. Not only that, his life was shareable in unlimited ways. This was expressed in the New Testament’s stories of the pouring out of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost and the risen Jesus breathing the Holy Spirit into his disciples. 

So the basic theological structure of the resurrection event could be summed up as: God acts; Jesus appears as the content of God’s act; and people are transformed through the Spirit that comes through him. That can be seen as the seed of the later doctrine of the Trinity. A creator God says ‘I will be what I will be’; and this God’s decisive self-expression and selfgiving are in Jesus and the Spirit. It is directly in line with the God of the Burning Bush, but tries to do justice to a massive surprise. 

Yet it took over 300 years for these implications to be worked out and agreed in the doctrine of the Trinity. That process in itself says a great deal about the nature of Christian theology. The complex setting for theological thinking included teaching the faith to new members (culminating in their baptism ‘in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit’), continually worshipping this God, deciding on the contents of the New Testament, interpreting scripture and tradition, wrestling with the most sophisticated contemporary philosophy and culture, responding to challenges from pagans and Jews, settling internal Christian disputes, and engaging in ordinary living in faith. As the church moved from being a persecuted community to becoming a major force in the Roman Empire, there were also new political dimensions in Christian debates about doctrine. 

That was a messy, complicated process. It makes a fascinating story which it is essential to study in order to be educated in Christian theology. The points it suggests about the nature of theology as understood by Christians include the following: theological conclusions are not just deductions from authoritative statements, but are worked out by worshipers responsibly engaged with God, each other, scripture, the surrounding culture, everyday life, and all the complexities, the ups and downs of history; the Bible is the model for this sort of thinking which is deeply involved with both God and real life; the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus show the extent to which God is vulnerably involved in life, allowing people the freedom to misinterpret, misunderstand, and do great evil, while yet never letting that be the last word; there is an endless process of learning to live with each other before this God, and theological thinking is essential to that. There are still intensive debates about the issues of that time, but as regards our present topic, God, there is to this day a remarkable agreement among the vast majority of Christians that the conclusions of those early centuries were right. It has become basic Christian wisdom that God is Trinitarian, and in the 20th century there was a new explosion of theologies of the Trinity. From many quarters the doctrine has been thought through afresh— by Catholics, Protestants, Orthodox, Evangelicals, Pentecostals, feminists, liberation theologians, missiologists, natural scientists, psychologists, social theorists, musicians, poets, philosophers, Africans, Asians, Australians, theologians of world religions, and so on!

A messy, complicated process which history has worn down to a simple (often simplistic) doctrine which is then easily misunderstood (if not discarded), much like Irish history in the 20th century is regarded (by all but the Irish) as either “Easter 1916,” or, worse, “what were they ever fighting over?” 

The devil is in the details. And history is never as slick and glossy as we think it was. Nor the present ever more complicated and perplexing as it was in the past. There is no straight road for how we got here; for what we are doing here; or for where we are going now. Look at that catalogue that ends the quoted passage, and consider the richness of the ideas and perspectives that are possible.

Or be as ignorant as Trump, and rail against all the people who aren’t just like you. One is a way of solving problems; the latter is the way of just compounding problems and preventing solutions, all the better for blaming “the other” for all the problems you won’t let be solved.

“Federal emergency response personnel on Saturday had employees operating in hard-hit Rutherford County, N.C., stop working and move to a different area because of concerns over ‘armed militia’ threatening government workers in the region…” pic.twitter.com/20bwCnXsrx

— David Gura (@davidgura) October 14, 2024

Yes; just like that.