Magazine letter May 2024
May 26th is Trinity Sunday, not a festival many will be marking I fear. It lacks the fairy lights of Christmas or the chocolate of Easter. But in its way it is a significant day, marking the contribution of Christianity to mankind’s understanding of the nature of God; not a topic now of general conversation, but it was not always so.
The following was written of Constantinople in 381AD by Bishop Gregory of Nyssa:
“Every part of the city is filled with such talk: the alleys, the crossroads, the squares, the avenues. It comes from those who sell clothes, moneychangers, grocers. If you ask a moneychanger what the exchange rate is, he will reply with a dissertation on the begotten and the unbegotten. If you enquire about the quality and the price of bread, the baker will reply: ‘The Father is greatest and the Son is subject to him. ‘ When you ask at the baths whether the water is ready, the manager will declare that the Son came forth from nothing. I do not know what name to give to this evil, whether frenzy or madness…”
But I am sure that Bishop Gregory would not be so impressed with our generation either when few speak of God, beyond cliché and platitudes, let alone indulge in discussion of doctrine. To those 4th century townspeople of Constantinople it mattered who they thought God was, because the nature of the God you believe in will determine how you see the world around you and the people who inhabit it. If your God sits on high, a creator who has spoken, who desires sacrifice and penance, whose holiness is akin to aloofness, then your attitude to your life and those who fill it will be of a particular kind. If, on the other hand, your God is a caring and concerned Father who is intimately bound up with the world, suffering with it, suffering for it, taking it into his being, and who is constantly and eternally encouraging it to grow and develop, then your attitude will be of an altogether different kind.
Even more, if you see in the very nature of how God is a desire to relate to us, that the very being of the author of the universe is one of relationship, then that must, in turn, be the life to which, in the image of its creator, you have been called. A life characterized by the struggle, the challenge, the imperative to relate – even if at the risk of pain and anguish.
Theology matters, because how we see God affects how we see ourselves, our priorities, our opinions – how we speak and how we act.
William