A Multi-faceted God for All People

by Philip Sudworth.

This year is 1700^th anniversary of the Council of Nicaea of 325, which produced a creed, which is still recited regularly in many churches and acceptance of it is a requirement for membership and for ordination. The traditional church celebrates that this creed has remained largely unchanged over hundreds of years and sees this as mark of the unchanging nature of God.

In other aspects of knowledge and understanding, there have been huge developments over the 1700 years. The creeds have largely ignored most of those developments. Language has also moved on. I wonder how many of the people who recite the Nicene creed week by week fully understand what it is they are saying. “Seated at the right hand of the Father” rather suggests a medieval stained-glass window. To what extent do the words they recite reflect or conflict with their own perceptions and experiences of God?

Our children and our doctors, our rugby mates and our parents, our lovers and our lawyers will all see different sides of us.  Yet that does not stop each of them having a genuine relationship with us, even if none of them know everything about us.  Do we even know all there is to know about ourselves? If humans are too complex for us to know even ourselves fully, how much less can we even begin to comprehend the creative force that formed the billions of people and innumerable other life forms on this one small planet which orbits one of trillions of stars in an expanding universe that would take us 43 million years to cross travelling at the speed of light. 

I suspect that the Trinity doctrine, as defined in the creeds, is an attempt to put a mind map, a structure on something infinitely more complex than we could ever hope to grasp – just as scientists talk about light as either particles or waves to enable them to calculate its effects. 

Perhaps, if we see the Trinity as dimensions of our individual experience of God, as in the diagram, then the interplay of relationships between the persons provide an infinite number of points or ways in which we can encounter God.  One is just right for us personally at this phase of our faith journey. 

I’ve been to church services that have focussed almost exclusively on the Spirit, several that have substituted Jesus for God throughout and others that have been totally Father-centred and ignored both Son and Spirit.  We clearly need a better balance than this but the point of equilibrium is probably different for each of us.  We can’t prescribe it for others. Indeed, our own perceptions are likely to change as we develop spiritually.

Although the Trinitarian theory of God, if interpreted in a broad rather than a dogmatic way, can allow for a variety of approaches to God, it may still be too limited for modern thinking.  In their attempts to unify the fundamental physical forces under one single theory, scientists are now postulating that there are far more than three dimensions.  Perhaps we ought to be open to the thought that God is more multi-facetted than just Trinitarian.

If “God is a Spirit and they that worship Him must worship Him in spirit and in truth” as Jesus said (John 4:24), then he is too fluid to be compartmentalised.  You might as well stand in the sea off Cape Agulhas in South Africa where the Atlantic and Indian oceans merge and try to work out which water belongs to which ocean, as to try to divide up an omnipresent spirit God.

It is not how we define or describe God that matters but how we live in relation to him.  Astronomers know that stars exist that they have not yet seen, because they can see the deviation in other stars and know that some as yet unseen body is exerting gravitational pull.  People will know that God exists if they can see him transforming our lives. Christian witness is not about telling people of a God up in Heaven who will judge them when they die but about showing them a loving God who is active in the world right now.  That way, we earn the right to share our faith.