Trinity Taylor Quotes

Because Jesus died instead of ushering in the messianic age, Paul responded with a doctrine of atonement. Because the risen Christ struck his followers as very close kin to God, the early church responded with a doctrine of the Trinity. Because Christians did not turn out to be much better behaved than anyone else, Augustine responded with a doctrine of original sin. The doctrines are works of genius, for the most part, but like books they tend to draw people's attention away from the living human neighbors who are standing right in front of them. They can also lead people to look to outer authorities for direction instead of to the inner teaching of the Holy Spirit.

This cyclical view of history, whether in Joyce, Rattray Taylor, Vico (Joyce’s source), Hegel-and-Marx, etc. is only part of the truth, but it needs to be stressed because it is the part that most people fearfully refuse to recognize. Whether we speak in terms of Taylor’s Matrist-Patrist dialectic, Vico’s cycle of Divine, Heroic and Urbanized ages, the Marx-Hegel trinity of Thesis-Antithesis-Synthesis, or any variation thereon, we are speaking of a pattern that is real and that does repeat. But it only does so to the extent that people are robotized: trapped in hard-wired reflexes.

After all his peregrinations, Coleridge, like his mariner, found haven and firm footing at last in the land of the Trinity.

O Holy Trinity, we adore Thee. My God, my God, I love Thee in the Blessed Sacrament.

One of the first things they understood (in my midrash, at least) was that there was more than one way to say something important. Hashem. Brahman. Sunyata. Holy Trinity. Allah. Sometimes, when they used words like these, they were pointing at the same thing, and sometimes they were not, but just trying to explain the words slowed them down long enough to make them think about what they really meant. What do you mean when you say God? This was not a problem they had when they all understood each other. They had just assumed that they meant the same thing when they used the same word, which was not the case at all—but speaking the same language had allowed them to cling to that illusion for longer than was good for them. Then God came to their rescue and confused their speech.

Once I started reading up on the third Person of the Trinity, I discovered how many theologians were ahead of me.2 The feminine pronoun is not as important to all of them as it is to me, but the idea of divine multiplicity is—the idea that one God can answer to more than one name and assume more than one form. Even if Christians will not go higher than three, the case is made: unity expresses itself in diversity. The One who comes to us in more than one way is free to surprise us in all kinds of ways. This is especially meaningful to people like me, who mean to hang on to our singular Christian identity with one hand and our love of many neighbors with the other. Within the community of the Trinity, the one and the many do not cancel each other out. They lean toward one another in eternally circling, mutually inclusive love. That is the image in which the rest of us are made.