"God as Trinity: An Approach through Prayer" by Sarah Coakley

The image of the Trinity, from the 15th century, appears with a hymn from the same period in a blog by "A Clerk of Oxford". Here are verses two and three of many more:

2. O three persons in one unity
Being but one god and no mo, [more]
One in substance, essence and might,
O deus sine termino.

3. O, which hast made both day and night,
Heaven and earth round like an O
By thy wisdom and endless might,
O deus sine termino.

The Clerk notes that 21st century Christians write tortured arguments about the Trinity while their medieval counterparts wrote beautiful and playful hymns. The "O," she writes, is a standard vocalisation in hymns, but also a common expression of "one," and also an image of the earth and heavens "round like an O."

Looking for images of the Trinity, I ran across an article about conflicts over the doctrine at another blog Anxious Bench (06/2016). One group of Baptists accuses other Baptists of making up a new (false) god by pushing the Trinity; their opponents accuse the others of imposing their own views and limits on the Bible.

My assignment this week, however, has been to read an essay by Sarah Coakley printed in the Reading and Reflection Guide, Volume B used by participants in Education for Ministry (pp. 253-264).

Coakley's "approach" to the Trinity "through prayer" comes with assurances that she understands why Christians would dismiss "seemingly alien formulas" of the Council of Chalcedon in the 5th century. The focus of scholarship and devotion on the person of Jesus has been much more appealing to believers in the past 200 years, and the many references to Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in the New Testament are "unsystematic." Even charismatic Christians think of having the Spirit as an expression for having an experience of "God with us." That the Trinity is an obstacle to interfaith dialogues is another point against pushing the doctrine.

Even as Coakley introduces the idea that Christians in silent prayer to God feel they are being prayed in, she first lists caveats. The "phenomenon of prayer is varied" and its descriptions are "inexact," and there's "circularity" in using "certain cherished doctrines" to interpret prayer that has already been influenced by those same doctrines; and other faiths have "contemplative" traditions in which the sense of a Trinity has not arisen.

To all this, Coakley answers that Paul struggled to express his sense of the spirit within that leads us to Christ and God the Father. "No one can say Jesus is Lord except by the Holy Spirit" (1 Cor 12.3). Christ is not just "an external model," she writes, but indwelling: "It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me" (Gal 2.20).

When we experience abandonment by the Spirit, Coakley writes, it's neither the historical Jesus nor the eternal Father who leaves us. The "dark night of the soul" that St. John Chrysostom (ca.400 CE) wrote about is, she says, "the death-throes of the domineering ego" as the Spirit breaks down our the barriers of our individualism. (The analogy comes to mind of the symptoms that resulted from a recent vaccine: I felt the fight between my body's defenses and the force that was teaching my body to resist the virus.)

Coakley up to this point in the essay is taking bits from Paul and presuming to tell us what our experience will be like when we really pray. I'm on the edge of resenting the essay.

Coakley is on more solid ground when she goes back to the councils that established the Trinity, and even further back, to show that the Trinity was something that Christians experienced and were passionate about. The councils were not "periodic bureaucratic reviews of a continuing theoretical problem." She shows first that Christians of the first three centuries prayed longer, and more often, than we think of today; "spiritual life" was not for specialists. Second, she shows how the liturgy of the eucharist embeds the doctrine of Trinity, even in the simple exchange "May the Spirit of the Lord be with you...And with thy Spirit: it is the Spirit in the priest who invokes the presence of Christ, not the priest's incantation.

While Coakley stresses Christian experience of the Trinity through prayer, she tells us that the councils' trinitarian formulas were "primarily" defenses against alternatives that were "misleading."

Regarding other faiths, Coakley admits that the Trinity is a barrier. "Yet," she writes, "the darkness, the sheer defencelessness of wordless prayer usually lead ... to a greater openness to other traditions."

Just at the end of her essay, Coakley raises the tradition of the Spirit as feminine and motherly, who was called "Our Mother" by Julian of Norwich. Gregory of Nyssa saw a balance of masculine and feminine between Son and Spirit.

[Our clergy's sermons on the Trinity have been helpful to me. See Belief in Things Unseen and Episcopal Wisdom on Death, Trinity, and Church Architecture]