Godhead and Trinity
Gerald Drewett reflects on mystery, language and the divine
Michael Servetus (‘The Friends of God’, 8 July) was a polymath who realised that the theological concept of the Trinity was a product of Greek philosophy and not of the Bible. He dared to publish his belief, was condemned by Protestant and Catholic alike, and for his heresy was burnt at the stake in 1553.
The nature of God is such that we human beings can be aware of it where it touches us. Hence, the Christian concept of the Trinity involving three aspects of personality: God the Father represents God’s unconditional love and forgiveness; God the Son (the Christ [Greek] or the Messiah [Hebrew]) represents the potential in humankind to achieve a higher state or divinity; and God the Holy Spirit is the life blood of God running through everything that exists.
Because ‘the Father’ is too easily juxtaposed with ‘God’, some have found it helpful to refer to that which is beyond the Trinity (the transcendent God beyond our comprehension) as the Godhead.
The Godhead is the source of everything that exists, both that of which we are aware and that of which we are yet to become aware. Here the limitations of language fail us. We fall into the essentially human trap of asking: ‘Who created the Godhead?’ This is a non sequitur and simply arises from the limitations of our human thinking. The Godhead, or God, is meant to answer those limitations. It is a concept to reflect the ‘Mystery of Creation’. The fact that scientifically the Creation that we know through our human senses may have come from the other end of a black hole is irrelevant. The word God, or the Godhead, reflects the Mystery, which is beyond the ability of our human minds to comprehend.
The physical universe exists; it must have been brought into existence; it must have been created by intention, otherwise, from the point of view of our human comprehension, there would have been nothing – hence the concept of ‘God’ as creator.
What I am struggling to express was well understood two or three thousand years ago by whoever put into writing the story of Moses’ mystical experience of the burning bush (Exodus 3). As evening drew on, the shepherd Moses experienced the Mystery of God as the setting sun glowed through the vegetation. Moses said to the Mystery: ‘Who are you?’ and the Mystery said: ‘I AM that I am’ (Revised English Bible). Literal attempts at the translation of language between different cultures should be eschewed and the translation of the enigmatic Hebrew phrase can be something like ‘I am what I am and what I will be’. God is everything, and everything is more than the human being can comprehend. Moses felt impelled to take his sandals off because wherever he stood was holy ground.
That of God is struggling everywhere and in everything to be born, to evolve. Does ‘God’ exist or is it always struggling to be born? Let he who has the answer light the first match! My answer lies both in my faith and my personal experience that it is a transcendent God that gives birth to an immanent God, but just one God.
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