The Archbishop Asked Me If I Was Preaching Heresy Today
Solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity
The Archbishop asked me in the kitchen yesterday if I was going to be preaching monarchic modalism or adoptionism for Trinity Sunday. For those of you who haven’t had the chance to sit in a seminary classroom for a semester and study ancient theologies of God, the Archbishop, basically, and in the nerdiest way possible, was asking me if I planned on preaching heresy today. Monarchianism is an ancient heresy that taught there is only one God with no distinction of persons—no Father, no Son, no Holy Spirit, no Blessed Trinity. And to accomplish the work of salvation, the one and only God who exists has two options: either he adopts a normal human being as his son and fills him full of divinity and calls him Jesus Christ and has his adopted son die on a cross and brings him back to life, or the one and only God who exists does all of the work himself and just shows up in history pretending to be Christ or the Holy Spirit whenever necessary, but really there is only one God who operates in different ‘modes’.
Anyway, when the Archbishop asked me if I planned on preaching heresy for Trinity Sunday, I wasn’t going to let myself be out-nerded. I told him that yes, my plan was to preach the non-trinitarian theology of Paul of Samosata. Paul of Samosata was a Bishop of Antioch in the 3rd century, and he taught that the one and only God adopted a human being for a son, named him Christ, and sent him out to accomplish the work of salvation. I told the Archbishop that he might expect some letters from parishioners angered by my preaching the monarchic adoptionist heresy. The Archbishop responded by telling me that these days things are tough enough that he would love to get a letter from someone who wanted to argue about Trinitarian heresy . . . so, I guess that means you have all received permission to complain about my homily today.
I want you to know that I do not plan to preach ancient heresies today, but I do want to mention those ancient controversies about the nature of God because I think they are important. St. Athanasius, who lived not too long after Paul of Samosata, talks about how because of original sin, God is faced with two divine dilemmas. Here is the first divine dilemma: because of sin the world is broken, and corrupted human beings will die, so, somehow, God needs to fix that problem. Here is the second divine dilemma: because of original sin, human beings cannot know God. In the Garden of Eden, human beings would walk with God in the cool of the evening. But now there is distance and separation from God and God needs to find a way to help us know him.
The first divine dilemma usually gets most of our attention; we focus a lot on the reality of death and our need for eternal life. But the second divine dilemma matters just as much; if we can’t know God, we do not possess the promise of eternal life. The solution to these two divine dilemmas is Christ, says St. Athanasius. Christ—the Son of God, eternal Word of the Father— resolves the first divine dilemma by offering his life on a cross in atonement for human sin, in a way that conquers death without diminishing human freedom. And Christ resolves the second divine dilemma because he lives a human life, teaches us, gives us an example to follow, and shows us how to live so that now we can know God.
St. Athanasius gave his teachings on Christ during a century of heresy for the Church. Many Christians disagreed on the nature of God and the nature of Christ, and so St. Athanasius wrote the short work On the Incarnation to help Christians learn the truths of the faith. St. Vladimir Press puts out a nice little edition of the book, and you should read it.
Notice how St. Athanasius teaches us about the nature of God and Christ: he uses history to make clear to us the deepest truths of our faith. If you start with the reality of creation and original sin and then move through the story of salvation, you will learn two essential truths about God: first, that there are three distinct persons in God who perform specific kinds of work; and second, that these three distinct persons are equal to one another, each of them God, existing, somehow, in a mystery of perfect unity and simplicity. There is a Father, and a Son, and a Holy Spirit, each a distinct person, each fully God, each performing a role in the story of salvation.
Basically, the Fathers of the Church are looking at the scriptures and asking a single question: What is God doing right now? And if you study scripture long enough and keep asking that question, you will discover that there exists in the one and only God a Trinity of persons. The history of salvation reveals to us the nature of God.
Maybe those teachings sound abstract to you, but the stakes are pretty high when it comes to God’s Trinitarian life. What we are talking about is knowing God and getting back to God. What I mean is that if you are the kind of person who takes a strong interest in not dying forever, receiving the gift of eternal life, and making your life now as meaningful as possible, you are going to want to take the Trinitarian life of God seriously.
Here is what I mean: we know who God is because God has revealed himself to us in history. And that revelation in history looks a certain way, it takes a certain form. The 19th century German theologian Johann Adam Mohler explains that: The Father sent the Son, and the Son sent the Holy Spirit: in this way God came to us. We come to him in the reverse way: the Holy Spirit guides us to the Son, and the Son to the Father. To use a lazy metaphor, there are 3 rungs on the ladder that is God, and the order of those rungs matter because God designed the ladder. God comes to us Father to Son to Holy Spirit, and we return to God in the reverse order.
St. Paul says as much in our second reading today. The gift of the Holy Spirit, sent to us by Christ, dwells within us and allows us to call God our ‘Father’. The Holy Spirit tells us that we are children of God, heirs of the Father, and joint heirs with Christ. If we want to get to God, the Holy Spirit is that first rung on the ladder and with a firm grip with can keep climbing up toward Christ and through Christ reach eternal life with the Father. The stakes are pretty high for us when it comes to God’s Trinitarian life.
I don’t think that, on average, we do a great job with living a Trinitarian faith in the Church today. The work of the Holy Spirit is misunderstood by many believers, identified either as wildly ‘charismatic’ and out in the world doing crazy things, or as a voice that whispers to you in the chapel letting you know what to do with your life, or as a divine agent on the progressive payroll doing his best to change Church teaching. Each of those conceptions of the Holy Spirit misses the real work that matters: the Holy Spirit brings us to Christ and brings Christ to us; that is the real work of the Holy Spirit, and there is no relationship with Christ without him.
We also talk very little about Christ bringing us to the Father. In the Gospels of Matthew and John, the noun most used by Christ is ‘Father.’ In the Gospel of John, Christ uses the word ‘Father’ more than the words ‘love,’ ‘believe,’ ‘faith,’ or ‘truth.’ The Father, to say it plainly, is a really big deal for Christ, and he makes it clear that his mission on earth is to help us get to the Father, to show us the way to the Father. But is that how we commonly think about salvation, eternal life, or the goal of our Christian lives? In my experience, we often stop talking about a relationship with God as soon as we get to Christ, forgetting the very point of Christ’s divine mission is clearing a way for us to live with the Father eternally.
Here is what matters: we know God only through the relations of persons within the Trinity. You cannot know the Holy Spirit unless you know Christ and the Father, nor Christ unless you know the Father and the Holy Spirit, nor the Father unless you know the Holy Spirit and Christ. The three divine persons of God are bound up with one another eternally, each working to bring us into contact with the others. You can’t really live in a relationship with one unless you live in a relationship with all.
The point of my homily today is that the Trinitarian life of God matters; it is important. The fact that in the one God exists a Trinity of persons is not an abstract theological concept; it is a truth revealed to us in history by a God who wants to save us and wants us to know him. The Father sent the Son, and the Son sent the Holy Spirit, and in that way, God came to us. Our return to God—if it matters to us—moves in the opposite direction. We need the Holy Spirit, we need Christ, and we need the Father—because without these three divine persons, we do not know God.
Homily preached at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary on May 26, 2024