June 3, 2007

A Trinity You Can Deal With

By Harry T. Cook

For reasons that escape me, the Episcopal Church still has Trinity Sunday in its liturgical calendar, with specially appointed readings and with the expectation that the clergy will regale their congregations with liberal doses of trinitarian theology, despite the impossibility of the concept. There are plenty of pulpits and websites that will provide you with treatises on the trinity today, and if that's what your heart desires, you should go to one of them. Meanwhile, I will talk about a trinity, but not the abstraction of Three In One and One In Three. I'm not sure whether the arithmetic there is worse than the theology.

The trinity of which I will treat today is the classic Anglican approach to the philosophy of religion. There may be a lot of things wrong with the Anglican Communion today and with its American offspring, the Episcopal Church, but one of them is not what, until recently at least, was its approach to deciding what is worthy of human belief. That approach has often been accounted for in the metaphor of a three-legged stool - the seat part being our platform of belief, the legs being that by which the platform is supported.

You long-time, even cradle Episcopalians will remember the names of the three legs: scripture, tradition and rationalized experience. The thing about our metaphorical three-legged stool is that the legs are of equal worth and necessity to the purpose of the whole enterprise. Two- or one-legged stools do not do the job. You need at least three to keep upright.

SCRIPTURE is the collection of documents that comprise the "Bible." The Bible is important to us in the Judeo-Christian stream of thought because from it we have derived our vocabulary, our mythology, our stories and the general themes of our religion. In particular, the 1611 King James Version of the Bible has given shape and texture to spoken and written English, yea these almost 400 years. We do not properly say that the Bible is "the Word of God," because insofar as we know, any deity that might be behind all this does not speak in the words of any human language - or speaks words in all human languages. So we are content to say that scripture sets forth our principal ideas, themes and language.

TRADITION is the means by and through which we try to understand and use scripture. It is the second of the three legs. Our tradition has respected the phenomenon of common prayer as expressed in the several editions of the Book of Common Prayer that have graced the life of our church - the prayer book containing the order of things, the way we express ourselves formally as a community. Scripture is evident on every page of the prayer book; it is its warp and its woof. This tradition, though, is one of intellectual honesty and evolving understanding. It respects biblical and historical scholarship and is not content to take the Bible literally. Our tradition, however, takes it seriously.

RATIONALIZED EXPERIENCE is the third leg. It is our individual and collective experience as run through the reasoning process that yields the most immediate understanding of our religion and its main ideas. A passage of scripture as presented to us through our tradition may be useless to us unless we can call it our own as it may give meaning to or insight into what we are experiencing right now. Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil becomes an immediate reality to one standing at the bedside of a dying loved one. Give us this day our daily bread becomes an immediate reality to the homeless, hungry person as he or she approaches a church or soup kitchen hoping for some small bit of sustenance.

This trinity of ours is, in fact, three in one and one in three. The stool is useless without all three legs lending more or less equal support to the platform itself. It is a trinity well worth having. I wish it were more important to those in the Anglican Communion who now accuse the American church of abandoning the authority of scripture in our embrace of gay and lesbian persons. The Bible is important, yes. But it is not the only thing about our church that is important. How we extract meaning today from the Bible is important. So is our life experience as filtered through the process of reason in the light sometimes shed by scripture.

Our trinity of scripture, tradition and reasoned experience is a trinity you can deal with. It is more than worthy of our corporate sanctus: Holy, holy, holy.

© Copyright 2007, Harry T. Cook. All rights reserved. This article may not be used or reproduced without proper credit.