Hilton Head Island, SC – June 15, 2014
The Chapel Without Walls
John 10:22-39; II Corinthians 5:11-21
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting to us the message of reconciliation. – II Corinthians 5:19
Is Christianity TRULY Monotheistic?
It is only fair that I begin this sermon with a clear caveat for all of you. I am not a Trinitarian Christian, although I believe I am a Christian. I have become increasing skeptical of both the validity and the theological arguments which led to the doctrine of the Trinity. A second caveat: Many have doubted that I am a proper Christian at all, and have told me so with zeal.
That having been said, today, purely by chance, is Trinity Sunday in the ecclesiastical calendar. I had to call an Episcopalian priest to find that out. Another of my many quirks and peculiarities is that I do not follow the church calendar except for Advent, Christmas, Lent, and Easter. Nor do I use the lectionary from which to preach. I just come up with countless sermon themes whenever they pass through my addled cranium, and either scripture passages determine the themes of the sermons or the themes require me to search out corresponding scripture passages. What can I say: I am a theological and homiletic mess, and I readily admit it.
It is important for everyone to know that the doctrine of the Trinity did not become the orthodox essence of Christian theology until the 4th century. Even then, however, there were (and still are) many holdouts. Until the 20th century, I suspect most Unitarians considered themselves orthodox Christians, although most of them rejected the notion of the Trinity. But during the first four or five centuries of the Christian era, there were a number of groups who proposed many different and conflicting ideas about Jesus. Some believed that Jesus was purely divine, and not human at all. Others believed Jesus was purely human, and not at all divine.
By means of the Council of Nicea in the year 325, the Church officially stated that Jesus was at the same time both fully human and fully divine, although they admitted that was a mystery. With that I most heartily agree. But they also stated that Jesus was the Second Person of the Trinity, the First Person being God the Father, and the Third Person God the Holy Spirit. The essence of the Trinity is also a mystery, said the assembled bishops, who had been called into their council by Constantine, the first Christian emperor of the Roman Empire. Constantine had become a Christian only a few years before 325. Some historians question whether he ever truly became a Christian at all, but there is no point in our going down that historical dead end.
The concept that Jesus was and is the human Incarnation of God became the orthodox position regarding Jesus, and the concept that God exists in three separate “persons” as the Trinity also became the orthodox position. Those two ideas are central features of Christian theology. But understand this: “orthodox,” from the Greek language. means “right” or “proper,” and “heresy” means “not right” or “improper.” The orthodox won the arguments, and the heretics lost. I suspect that a few of you are also heretics, along with me, but most of you are orthodox, affirming both the incarnation of Jesus as God in the flesh (which is what “incarnation” means), and you also affirm the idea of the Trinity. Both of those doctrines are intellectually extremely problematic, but they also certainly became orthodox.
Why, you might wonder, would a minister who considers himself a Christian, albeit technically an heretical one, preach a sermon like this at all? Perhaps fundamentally I am trying to explain why I think what I think. I don’t expect anyone to affirm any of this, but I do hope you will think about it, and think hard about it. Furthermore, I want all of you to understand that whatever you think about the Incarnation or the Trinity, you are not alone. Millions of other people think what you think. Nevertheless, far more affirm both the Incarnation and the Trinity than do not, and that is unlikely to change anytime soon (meaning the next few centuries), if ever.
This morning I chose two well-known hymns whose primary theme is the Trinity: Holy, holy, holy and Come Thou Almighty King. Previously I have said that in the church into which I was born and in which I lived for the first eight years of my life, the First Presbyterian Church of Dixon, Illinois, every Sunday morning we began the service with Holy, holy, holy. By the time I was five or six I knew every word, the two most memorable being the last two words of the first and last stanzas, “blessed Trinity.” Our last hymn, The God of Abraham praise, expresses the radical one-ness of God, which is a notion that has come to take precedence in my mind.
I believe the doctrines of the Incarnation and the Trinity were undoubtedly intended to elevate Jesus in the minds of potential converts to Christianity. The Early Church Fathers wanted pagan Greeks and Romans to know that Jesus was unique among all the humans who ever lived. Had they merely emphasized Jesus as the Messiah of the Jews, I believe that would have been sufficient. Their problem, it seems to me, is that they also wanted to insist that Jesus was divine, and that he was one with God in the so-called “godhead,” or, in other words, in the Trinity.
Believe it or not, folks, I am trying to make this sermon about very difficult ideas as simple as possible. Were I to quote some of the things which were written in the 2nd and 3rd centuries or later about these issues, there would be a string of words such as you read on the bulletin cover from the Athanasian Creed. The way words were put into tortured usage when talking about the Trinity and the Incarnation, whether in Greek, Latin, English, or any other language, surely must give professional linguists, philosophers, and philologists headaches.
Judaism does not have and never has had a creed. But if it did have one, it would be what all Jews refer to as the Shema: “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is one Lord” (Deut. 6:4). It also is translated as “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is ONE.” It is said that when they came to the last word, biblical Jews would shout it: “The Lord is ONE!”
However well intended, the elevation of Jesus tends inevitably to diminish God, unless one can honestly believe that Jesus IS God, and the Trinity honestly represents the idea of God in Three Persons. To ask three basic questions, If Jesus is God, who is God? And if God is in three persons, why are there not three different Gods? Is Christianity monotheistic, or is it tri-theistic?
All of us need to acknowledge that the doctrines of the Incarnation and the Trinity may be implicit in the Bible, but they certainly are not explicit. Neither of those words appears anywhere in scripture. The three Synoptic Gospels – Matthew, Mark, and Luke – never clearly imply that Jesus was divine at all, and only by some convoluted verbal machinations from them can anyone even hint that Jesus was perceived to be divine, either by the three Gospel writers or by most Christians during the lifetime of Jesus or anytime afterward for the next century or so.
The Fourth Gospel, on the other hand, unreservedly both implies and clearly states that Jesus was divine. Even at that, however, the Fourth Gospel often hedges its bets. For example, it has Jesus say the following: “I can do nothing on my own authority; as I hear, I judge; and my judgment is just, because I seek not my own will but the will of him who sent me. If I bear witness to myself, my testimony is not true; there is another who bears witness to me, and I know that the testimony which he bears to me is true” (John 5:30); “Everyone who has learned from the Father comes to me. Not that anyone has seen the Father except him who is from God; he has seen the Father” (John 6:45-6). Like much of the language in the Gospel of John, these words are elliptical and seem to be deliberately unclear. But they certainly imply Jesus was not divine.
However, there is that astonishing statement of Jesus at the Last Supper from the Fourth Gospel, where he says, “I am the way, the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father but by me” (14:6). Or there are those words from our first New Testament reading, John 10:30, “I and the Father are one.” That is no ambiguity in either of those statements, is there? When Jesus says that, John reports that “the Jews” (in other words, Jesus’ theological enemies), “took up stones again to stone him” (5:31). “The Jews” were always ready to fling rocks at Jesus, according to John, but only to John. When John wrote his Gospel seventy years or so after the death of Jesus, the writer, whoever he was, had become vehemently anti-Jewish. And he was a Jew! Strange.
Nonetheless, immediately after Jesus made such a deliberately provocative statement as “I and the Father are one,” he began to dissemble and back-peddle a bit. “Do you say of him whom the Father consecrated and sent into the world, ‘You are blaspheming,’ because I said, ‘I am the Son of God’? If I am not doing the works of my Father, then do not believe me; but if I do them, believe the works, that you may know that the Father is in me and I am in the Father” (John 10:36-38). It is as though Jesus realized he had overstepped himself, and he tried to soften the obvious blatancy of saying, “I and the Father are one.”
I do not intend to speak for any of you, although some of you may agree with what I am now going to say. The concept about Jesus I find most intellectually and theologically offensive is that it was God who died on the cross. In his famous hymn When I survey the wondrous cross, Isaac Watts had a line which declared, “Forbid it, Lord, that I should boast/ Save in the death of Christ my God.” Because it is one of the great hymns of the Church I have continued to choose it before and during Holy Week, but whenever I hear that phrase “Christ my God,” it is like fingernails scratching down a blackboard, for those of you who remember what a jarring sound that was. God did not die on the cross; Jesus died on the cross. And it is my firm opinion, from which I am unlikely to deviate for the rest of my life, that Jesus was not and is not God. God is God, and Jesus is Jesus. Furthermore, the two are not one, the same, or co-terminous. Whether I shall change my mind when I pass into eternity I cannot say, but I don’t think or believe so.
Nobody in the New Testament spoke more reverentially or glowingly of Jesus than the apostle Paul. In isolated places Paul seemed to suggest that Jesus was the incarnation of divinity, but nothing he ever said clearly suggested that Paul believed in the Trinity. Yet even Paul seemed finally unwilling to ascribe divinity to Jesus, or to hint that when Jesus died on the cross, it was really God who died. There is no better illustration of that statement that the words Paul wrote in our second New Testament reading, II Corinthians 5:11-22. Listen to these particular verses: “From now on, therefore, we regard no one from a human point of view; even though we once regarded Christ from a human point of view, we regard him thus no longer. Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has passed away, behold, the new has come. All this is from God, who through Christ reconciled us to himself and gave us the ministry of reconciliation; that is, God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting to us the message of reconciliation” (II Cor. 5:16-19).
As is true of many Pauline statements, many ideas are raised in those relatively few words. But I want to focus only on one key idea: God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself. Over half a century ago the famous Yale theologian H. Richard Niebuhr wrote a book about the Incarnation called God Was in Christ. Richard Niebuhr was an outstanding Christian and theologian, and when I first read his book in seminary over fifty years ago, I thought it was terrific. But in my old age I have reluctantly come to object to the title. It implies, and is intended to imply, that God was in Christ, that God was incarnate in Jesus of Nazareth. It is orthodox to say that, but not on the basis of II Corinthians 5:19. What Paul clearly is saying in that verse is that “God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself,” to God, and not that “God was in Christ.” God was in Jesus, just as God is in everyone, not in the flesh, not in a divine incarnation, but spiritually within all of us, in the inner “us,” whether or not we even recognize or acknowledge that. God was not fully incarnate in Jesus of Nazareth, because God is not fully incarnate in anyone. If He were, we would all be gods. And if we are, goodness, what a mess we have made of our god-ness!
To say that God was fully incarnate in Jesus is inevitably to declare that there are two Gods: the God who is God, and the God who is Jesus. The doctrine of the Trinity makes that even more arithmetically murky be proclaiming that God is also the Holy Spirit.
Jews and Muslims can agree with Christians on many things, but on the doctrines of the Incarnation and the Trinity they part company with us. I am neither ashamed nor proud to say that I agree with them, but I do agree with them: “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is ONE!” and also “La illaha il’allah: There is no God but God.” It is hard enough for many people to believe in God to begin with; why make it even more difficult by bringing the Trinity and the Incarnation into the divine equation?
I have just waded through a book called How Jesus Became God. It was written by Prof. Bart Ehrman, who teaches religious history at the University of North Carolina. It is about the Christological and Trinitarian controversies of the Early Church. Slogging through it is like trying to wade quickly and easily through quicksand or to stroll across a pit of recently heated asphalt. It is thick and dense and gooey. Here is what I chose to deduce from this book on your behalf, should you have any interest in knowing it: If you believe that Jesus was God Incarnate, or if you are convinced that God exists in separate and distinct “persons,” but as one God, you’re in good company. But if you don’t get it, don’t worry; in that you’re not alone either.
There is a local church which sends out leaflets every month in a pack of leaflets with various offers from local businesses. They too make an offer, but of a different sort. The church’s logo is printed in one corner, and across the top in bold letters it says, “No Religion … Just Jesus!”
Perhaps other contrarians such as I find themselves asking, “How can you have Jesus without some form of religion?” But of more importance, “If you proclaim ‘Just Jesus,’ where is God in your proclamation?” Jesus focused exclusively on God, but countless Christian focus exclusively on Jesus. It is understandable why they do that, but it is also, it seems to me, unfair to both God and Jesus. Neither is properly glorified by a sole interest in only one, especially when that one is subordinate to the other on the basis of any of the brouhahas in the Early Church.
True Christianity is truly monotheistic. Orthodox Christianity, for all its complex and complicated explanations of the Incarnation and the Trinity, is ultimately either tri-theistic or forever hopelessly mysterious. And why? Because God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself. As John Keats said (although he said more than just this, and in quite a different context), “That’s all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.” Amen, and amen.