Baber’s Trinity

Trinity Sunday is possibly one of the most feared dates in the Christian year. It is so easy to be heretical about the Trinity – to fall into polytheism, tri-theism, Sabellism, or any one of a plethora of heresies that await the unwary. And, when it comes to the Trinity, we are all unwary. On the upside, it is unlikely that we will, in our blundering around, come up with a really new heresy. There does not seem to have been a decent original one for fifteen hundred years or so.

Nevertheless, it does behove us to try. I was once told off in a systematic theology class for ‘playing the mystery card too early’. If we bunk off from the difficult questions, then the easier questions also become more difficult and we regress into an infantile religiosity. So we do need to try.

I have been reading Harriet Baber’s new(-ish) book:

Baber, H., The Trinity: A Philosophical Investigation (London: SCM, 2019).

As the title suggests, this is more a philosophical study than a theological one, although part of the point of the book is, I suspect, to show that really there is not much difference between the philosophy of religion and philosophical theology. Indeed, one of Baber’s targets seems to be ‘religious studies’ academics, those who study religions but who do not get involved. To such people ‘theology’ is odious, a holdover from the dark ages. Religious studies is a social science, a true academic subject, while theology is just uncritical expounding of dogma (p.3).

There is also, as again Baber notes and articulates what I have suspected, that there is an understanding that unbelievers do not need to concern themselves with theology, especially with difficult ideas such as the Trinity. Of course, the concept might not be important to them as a cornerstone of their belief system, but surely there has to be a requirement on everyone to tackle, reasonably intelligently, the past, and religion, and arguments over Christian doctrines, do form a part of that past. We neglect it at our peril.

Baber divides her argument into two – the ‘Latin’ and the ‘Greek’ questions on the Trinity. This paradigm dates back to the 1892 work of Theodore de Regnon, SJ, who characterised the Latin tradition as emphasising the unity of God while the Greek tradition emphasises the Persons as distinct centres of consciousness participating in a divine society, the so-called ‘social Trinity’ (p. 45).

The de Regnon paradigm, as it has become known, has been broadly accepted, at least by analytic philosophers interested in the Trinity (p. 46). Some scepticism is expressed, however, that there is such a clear distinction. The questions seem to be more about the language used and the meanings expressed rather than different theologies of the Trinity.

Baber suggests that the investigation of the Trinity should address the Latin and Greek questions: ‘How are the Trinitarian Persons distinguished?’ and ‘What makes them one God?’ (p. 60). Baber’s aim is to find some sorts of answers to these questions without, it seems, giving hostages to concepts of ‘Social Trinity’, particularly as it is often found (apparently) as being used as a paradigm for some sort of perfect human society in political theology.

The discussion gets undeniably technical, but the bottom line Baber draws seems clear: the Athanasian Creed declares that the Father is God, the Son is God and the Holy Spirit is God; that the Father is not the Son and the Father is not the Holy Spirit. The Persons of the Trinity are not identical, they do not have the same properties, but they are all God (p. 110). Anyone, believer or not, must see that there is some philosophical and theological work to be done here.

Baber comes to the conclusion that the Latin question elicits a Latin answer: the Trinitarian processions (of the Son and Holy Spirit) are to be understood as discerning relations, that is, they are how we distinguish one Person of the Trinity from another. The Greek question obtains a Greek answer: the processions are relations of ontological dependence, best understood as grounding relations. These answers avoid what is worst (or heretical0 in either camps, while not exactly presenting the same answer to the question posed by the doctrine of the Trinity.

Baber’s point is that we should not look backwards to some pre-existing human answers to the questions posed by the Trinity. The Fathers of the fourth century did not have special access to the divine essence to work out the Creeds; they did not, as Ian Ramsey notes, telephone CHALcedon 451 for the latest updates on the Godhead. The Scholastics were not, and did not think they were, writing definitive conclusions about God. Baber suggests that current philosophical and theological work should build on previous work but not be held to ransom by it (p.185-6). Their context was different from ours.

We should, therefore, start from current theological praxis and modern philosophy. The foundations of any investigation for Baber should be the discourse and praxis of the church, that is, what we as ordinary church-goers say and do. The liturgy, hymnody, art, customs, practices, religious objects and devotions together constitute the Christian religion and its practice. The aim of philosophical theology is to make sense of all of this and to avoid, (so far as is possible, I would add) logical incoherence (p. 186-7). This, Baber asserts, tells us all we can know about the supernatural world, and that is what religion is about.

This raises a number of questions. There are, after all, varying practices and discourses in the church, let alone among the faiths of the human race. How do we choose one to be the starting point of our reflections on the Christian religion and its practice? Most of us, most of the time, would take our practice as the starting point, but that surely begs the question. While, pace Kierkegaard, being born in a Christian country does not make you a Christian, nor does being born in a Christian family. Being thus born, however, may well inform your practices and your understanding of where you stand. It does give a solid starting point, but can we really question it?