Trinity Sunday sermon by Rev Harry Newton on the nature of God as Trinity
Rev Harry Newton, Vicar of Sumner Redcliffs Anglican Church, delivers a Trinity Sunday sermon on Matthew 28:16-20.
Summary
Rev Harry Newton preaches on Trinity Sunday at Sumner Redcliffs Anglican Church, using the occasion to explore what Christians mean when they use the word "God." He argues that the Trinity is not merely an abstract theological puzzle but flows directly from the biblical claim that God is love — and that love, by its very nature, requires relationship within God's own being. Drawing on thinkers including Feuerbach, Freud, Gregory of Nazianzus, Tertullian, Karl Barth, and Thomas Aquinas, Newton contends that God is not a being among other beings but the very ground of existence itself — and that this "otherness" of God makes the Incarnation and the sending of the Holy Spirit all the more remarkable as acts of deliberate, relational love toward humanity.
Key Takeaways
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Welcome and the Church Calendar
Rev Harry Newton: My name's Harry. Welcome to church. You may have just noticed we've just said Father, Son, and Holy Spirit quite a few times. There's a reason for that. We'll get there in a minute. But I'm going to invite you to have a quick yarn with the people around you. What special dates are there for you? Maybe in your family or your household or just in your life — things like birthdays, anniversaries, key events, things you'd rather forget. Special dates that matter to you.
In my family, I've got two kids — Josiah and Ariana. Josiah is 12, going on 13, and Ariana's 10, going on 30, because she's got a boyfriend called Montgomery. The most important dates in our life as a family are, of course, their birthdays — November and December — followed, of course, by Christmas. And after that, in order of priority for them, Easter, because you get lots of sugar. And then, in a distant fifth place, Amy's birthday, and then mine.
But it's not just anniversaries and birthdays, is it? It's other things. We came to the church on April Fool's Day, and my kids weren't very happy about coming back to Christchurch, I'll be perfectly honest — they missed their friends in the North Island. We turn up, and as we're walking into Redcliffs School for our first service, my daughter says to me, "Dad, it's still time." I said, "What do you mean?" She said, "Well, it's April Fool's. We could run back to the car, leave, and just yell, 'See you, suckers!'" We didn't. But now every April Fool's, we go out for dinner and we all say, "See you, suckers." That's a thing we do.
The Church Calendar and Trinity Sunday
Anyway, the point being, just like my household and probably just like yours, the church has special days throughout the year where we commemorate and celebrate important things. For example, Easter — kind of important in the whole church thing, right? We have a precursor to Easter called Lent, 40 days long, which reaches its crescendo in what we call Holy Week. It begins with Palm Sunday, where we remember Jesus' triumphal entry into Jerusalem on the back of a donkey. Then a few days later we have Good Friday, where we commemorate and mourn the death of Jesus. And then we have Easter Sunday, where we celebrate the resurrection of Jesus.
Then every year, 40 days later on a Thursday — I don't know why it's on a Thursday, well I do, but it's a long story — we have Ascension Day, which because it's not a Sunday we move to Sunday, and that's where we remember Jesus ascending into heaven. Then the following Sunday, which incidentally was last week, we have Pentecost, the birthday of the church, where God sent his Holy Spirit to empower his people to go out and spread his good news.
And then that brings us to today — the final date in this series of important events in the life and calendar of the worldwide church. Today is what we call Trinity Sunday. It's a special day where we take time to commemorate and remember and delve a little bit into the great defining Christian doctrine that is the Trinity — that God is three in one, one in three, three persons yet one undivided essence. If you're a theological geek like me, that sounds wonderful. Most people go, "Oh, good Lord, I wish I hadn't come today."
Why the Trinity Matters
Why should you care? Because on days like today, there is a real risk of being what my old section commander used to call an oxygen thief — where you just stand up and wax lyrical about the philosophical ins and outs of Trinitarian ruminations. But realistically, what's the point? To what end? Why should you care?
Here's the thing. Trinity Sunday is important. And I'm not just saying this because the bishop wrote an email earlier in the week reminding the clergy that Trinity Sunday is very important. I'm actually saying it because it actually is. It's relevant to your life, and it's relevant to everyone's lives, if only because it challenges us to think very carefully about what we mean by the word "God" — and whether this God is actually God or just a vague spirituality of our own making.
Has anyone heard of a guy called Stanley Hauerwas? He's actually a bit of a hero of mine, to be honest. He's apparently one of the most boring people to ever hear talk — my dad heard him once and fell asleep. But he's an American philosopher and theological commentator, and he once said that whenever he sneezes at work and someone says, "God bless you," he always responds by saying, "Ah, but which one?" Which may be so annoying. But his point is that when we say "God," we need to be clear about which God we actually mean. Because not all conceptualizations of God are the same, are they? And which God we believe in matters, because it has implications for how we then understand God and understand our relationship with God.
The version of God people believe in — or even choose to reject — can differ a lot. Some people see the notion of God as a mythical thing from ages past that we have vaguely in the background as a moral guide — something we can draw from, a bit like old fables. Others see God as a distant first cause, a deistic approach to the world: God exists, but is kind of outside our lived experience, like a divine watchmaker. And others even see God as an existential threat to our freedom and to our very humanness.
Which means if someone says, "I don't believe in God," it's always worth asking — unless you don't know them, in which case don't be weird — but it's always worth asking, "Which God don't you believe in?" Because honestly, there are versions of God that I think we'd both agree we don't believe in.
Feuerbach, Freud, and the Projection Argument
This idea of belief in God being a threat to human flourishing and freedom is what underpins a lot of the pop culture output from the new atheist movement over the last 20 years. You might have noticed that in the last four or five years they've gone rather quiet. Remember Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens and their angry cohort? They wrote a lot about how the very notion of God is anti-human flourishing and freedom, something we should push back against at all costs.
Much of what these so-called new atheists have written about over the last 20-odd years is actually not new. A lot of it is a re-articulation of the work of a guy called Ludwig Feuerbach. Interesting guy. His main lasting impact on Western philosophical thought is this: he said that God is simply a projection of your inner desires — of who you secretly want to be. So, for example, you say God is good only because you deep down want to be a good person. You say God is all-powerful because you feel disempowered and wish you had more power.
Now, a disciple of Feuerbach was Sigmund Freud. Heard of him? Strange guy — Google him, just don't watch the videos because you don't know what will happen to your algorithm. He's sometimes referred to as the godfather of psychology. Freud took Feuerbach's work to another level and declared that belief in God is, quote, "an infantile fantasy." His point being that God is a fantasy onto which we project our childish desires.
Now, obviously I disagree with him. But to be fair to Freud, to a degree there's an element of truth at play here. Because if our conceptualization of God is simply something we've made up, drawn from our own internalized ruminations, then Freud is right — our faith or spirituality or religion is nothing more than a projected infantile fantasy, because we made it up in our own heads.
But there is a problem with Freud's argument. It only works if God is something we created. The Christian claim is that God invented us, and that God revealed himself to us through three key ways. One is thousands of years of tradition and rich theological discourse — not just Christian, but for thousands of years before that, through Judaic philosophical thinking. The second is through the witness of Scripture — and we'll touch on why we should even take the Bible seriously another time. But most importantly, the third way he's revealed himself to us is through the personhood of Jesus.
So the question isn't whether God is a projection of our desires. The question is: who is God actually?
God Is Love — and What That Requires
What does the Christian God look like? The best place to start, from a Christian perspective, is with the Scriptures. The Bible says a lot about the nature of God, and if we wanted to, we could be here for a month of Sundays — I would love it, and you would all leave with good reason. So I just want to focus on one key element. It's from 1 John chapter 4. Does anyone know what it says?
God is love.
Now, that doesn't simply mean that God loves, or that being loving is one of God's attributes. Many faiths, religions, and spiritualities can say that — that God is loving. The Christian claim is more radical and frankly stranger. As Christians, we proclaim that love is what God is. God is love. Therefore, love is not simply something that God feels, or something that God does, or something that God experiences passively. God is, in his very fundamental being, love.
Now, how does love function? Generally speaking, in our experience of love as humans, love functions in a quite distinct way. There is a lover — one who actively loves. There is a beloved — one who experiences that love. And in a healthy relationship, the two are interchangeable. And there's a third dynamic at play: the love between lover and beloved is itself a living thing.
Therefore, for God to be love — not simply loving, not simply beloved, nor simply able to experience love, but for God to be love itself — this necessitates within the oneness of God some sort of interplay between lover, beloved, and love. In other words, if love is what God is, not just something God does, then within God's very self there must be relationship. And that's what we mean by Trinity.
The Doctrine of the Trinity
Now, I had a snazzy diagram I was going to put up, and it didn't work, so just pretend it's there. The point of this make-believe diagram is that there is one God. Scripture affirms this over and over from beginning to end. The very first Christians were Jews who considered themselves to still be Jewish, and to this day practicing Jews are fiercely and proudly monotheistic. And yet those very first Christians, who were proudly Jewish and monotheistic, were clear that nonetheless they believed Jesus is Lord. They believed God is one, and yet also that God is Father, God is Son, and God is Holy Spirit. And yet the Father is not the Son, the Son is not the Spirit, the Spirit is not the Father — and vice versa. And yet somehow they're all still God.
There's a guy whose name is Gregory of Nazianzus — I can never say it properly. He's one of what we call the church fathers. He once wrote that the Trinity is "distinct in persons, yet undivided in essence and power." Which is why a man who came after him, Tertullian — another early Christian theological writer — coined the phrase Trinitas. It's Latin, and it's a genius word. It's where we get our word "Trinity" from. It combines trios, which is Latin for three, and unitas, which is Latin for unity, into one word: Trinitas — meaning three, yet united in one. To most of us "Trinity" just means three, but the Latin root word carries this quite powerful connotation. His point was that we have God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit — three distinct persons, yet one God whose very nature is love.
Has anyone heard of Karl Barth? He's one of the most influential Christian thinkers in history, and as a friend of mine once said, no one understands what Karl Barth says because he writes mostly in German. But one thing he said that I do understand is this: all this stuff about the Trinity that makes your head spin a bit — that's a good thing. He called God ganz andere, meaning "completely other," meaning strange. And he didn't mean God is strange in an offensive way. He meant that the triune God — Father, Son, Holy Spirit — is completely different to our understanding of the world. God is other.
Which is why Christians for hundreds and hundreds of years have said that God isn't a thing amongst other things. He's not even the biggest or best thing amongst other things. God is more like the ground beneath all things — the very essence that makes existence possible.
Thomas Aquinas and God as Being Itself
I've quoted this guy before — Thomas Aquinas, a bit of a hero of mine. He had an amazing haircut. He used to shave the top of his head and have these amazing sideburns around the side because he genuinely believed it was a good look. He used to travel across Europe, going to the universities, sending heralds ahead to announce he was coming. And the people — including common people — would come to listen to him debate. He was that famous. He'd get the wisest and smartest people to stand up, one after another, and have as long as they wanted in front of the crowds to explain, as great orators, why God doesn't exist. And then he would sit there and listen. Wouldn't take notes. And then he'd stand and respond to each person in order, starting with the person who began. They might go for hours, and he'd go back and respond to each one.
Underpinning a lot of what he talked about was his metaphysics of the world — all to do with substance and being. One of the things he talks about is ipsum esse subsistens — the idea that God is being itself. Everything exists. You exist, I exist, this exists, that exists. Spiders — don't know why they exist, but they exist. Everything exists. Why? Because of God. God, on the other hand, just is. God is the essence that underpins reality.
Now, this is important for today. What it means is that God is not a being amongst other beings or things. All beings are in competition with each other. You and I can't sit on the same chair — I'd have to sit on your lap, and that would be awkward. Two beings can't occupy the same space. Can a being become another being? Well, sort of — an antelope can be eaten by a lion, but it ceases to be an antelope. All beings are in some sense in competition with each other.
Whereas God is not. If you read your Old Testament scriptures, there's a story where there's a burning bush, and God's voice is coming out of it, and there's heat and there's smoke, but the bush isn't consumed. That's all a bit weird. The purpose of that story is to illustrate the otherness of God. God is the fire in the bush, burning the bush, and yet he doesn't consume the bush. Why? That doesn't make sense, because fire and bush are beings in competition — and yet they don't consume each other. Why? Because God is not a being amongst others in competition with us. God is, instead, the essence that underpins our reality. He is the thing that makes all things exist.
The Incarnation, Ascension, and Holy Spirit
Now, because God is not a being or a thing amongst others, the end outcome is that God is completely and utterly beyond our ability to understand, conceptualize, or even know. If you find this all a bit weird — that's okay. But the point of all of this is that God is other. He's beyond our ability to fully articulate and comprehend. We can't see him, we can't smell him, we can't touch him, we can't hear him.
And so we have a problem. How do you relate to a God who is beyond your ability to tangibly perceive or comprehend?
That's where Jesus comes in. Because in Jesus, God — who is beyond all things — steps into the middle of our world and becomes someone we can actually know. And then we have the Ascension. He goes physically. And what happens on Pentecost? He sends his Spirit. And the Holy Spirit is with us today in the world, being God's active presence with us on the daily.
Now this is key. Because once we grasp all this, there's something we learn about God: God is inherently relational. Because God didn't remain other. He came — in the person of Jesus — and became knowable. And then when he left, he sent his Spirit to continue to be knowable to us. This incomprehensible God has reached out to us — not out of pity, not out of mercy, not because he needs us — but because he wants to know us. He wants to relate with you.
And right there we get to the heart of who God is. God is relational. God, ipsum esse subsistens, the creator and sustainer of all things, wants to have a relationship with you. With me, sure, but with you. With us. He wants you to know him personally — to revel in the joy, the peace, the love, and the hope that we can find in Jesus through the power of the Holy Spirit.
So much so that this other, relational God was willing to humble himself into the form of a little baby and come onto earth as 100% human whilst remaining 100% divine. And how does he do that? It's not mathematically possible unless — like the bush — he's able to not be a being amongst other beings. And why did he do that? He did it because he wants to have a relationship with every person on the planet, including you. Why? Because he loves you. Not because you frankly deserve it — sorry. Your mum might think you're great, and you probably are, but we're all imperfect. But God nonetheless wants to know you personally. Why? Because that's who he is. God is love.
Conclusion
So, summing up Trinity Sunday: there's a bit of confusion nowadays about what we mean by God. You might have your own thoughts, your own questions, your own doubts about who or what God is. But the classical Christian understanding of God is that God is love. And this God — this essence who we can't taste, smell, hear, touch, or see — is made knowable to us through Jesus and the Holy Spirit. And through Jesus, you and I are able to enjoy a relationship with our creator and sustainer of the universe.
And tonight at our 7 p.m. service, we're going to be unpacking how that works. But more than that — this God, this unquantifiable essence, doesn't just begrudgingly like you. He actually loves you. Why? Because that's who he is. God is love, and he wants you to know him too. That's what we mean when we use the word "God" in church.