WORDS, WORDS, WORDS . . .

By Donald Phillipps in Articles

Donald considers the meaning of the Trinity.

WORDS, WORDS, WORDS...

Remember the song from My Fair Lady. Eliza Doolittle's complaint that Freddie Eynsford-Hill (I think it was) used too many words when what she wanted was action. But she was also thinking of Professor Henry Higgins and his insistence that she pronounce her words 'proper'. And I recall that famous quip of Winston Churchill about Anglo-American relations - founded on long history and shared ideals but 'separated by their common language'. Though I've now discovered that something like it was said by both Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw many years earlier.

Just a few days ago, in the middle of a tense discussion about church affairs, I was unexpectedly asked: "Do you ever preach on science and religion?" Almost instantaneously there flashed into my memory a most significant personal encounter with words from over 50 years back.

One of the books I somewhat regretfully discarded when we moved into our present home was A.C.B. Lovell's The Individual and the Universe - the BBC Reith lectures of 1958. Though I hardly understood all that Professor Lovell, the head of the Jodrell Bank Observatory was saying at that time, one concluding phrase (or the general sense of it) has remained with me always. At that time the creation of the universe was subject of intense and often acrimonious discussion within the scientific world, even as the Jodrell Bank radio-telescope was reaching further back into time than had ever been possible.

Lovell believed it might even be possible to get to that original creation moment. If that were so, then what lay behind that original moment would not, he said, be for the scientist to ponder but the philosopher. What that meant, for me at least, was the truth is not to be given expression only in the language of science. And though I do not often venture into the field of scientific discovery in my preaching, my silence is out of respect rather than a capitulation.

Even more recently - just last weekend, in fact - I watched a lengthy BBC documentary on Charles Darwin and evolutionary theory. As always, when thinking of that man and his world-changing research, it is hard not to be both astonished at his perception and intrigued by his reticence. As if his theory was a Pandora's Box, to be kept tightly shut lest unexpected or unimagined consequences were to be unleashed on an ignorant and unthinking world. He was deeply troubled about how his words would be read.

All this is by way of pulling the curtain open on Trinity Sunday, when Christians again venture into a world as inexplicable and as unimaginable as that encountered by Lovell or Darwin.
Before Jesus (and since then, too, for many of Abraham's posterity) there was and is a God remote in God's heaven - unknowable, except in the inexplicable events that bewilder the human mind. God must be behind what cannot otherwise be explained. Creation, not just of the universe but even of everyday life has its miraculous element, so God must be there. And the God who was there at the beginning must surely be there at the end. That apparent logic lies at the very heart of much religious belief.

It's the appearance (epiphany or incarnation) of Jesus that has created such a 'word' problem. How does one deal with a person who claims such a unique relationship with the creator God. Is God's uniqueness compromised? - so would say the Jew and the Muslim. Not so the Christian who has for 2000 years found new words and new ways for describing a traveling preacher from Nazareth who went about doing good, telling great stories, and who, according to his friends, was found alive after the execution they had witnessed.

Trinity Sunday is one day in the year when we allow ourselves to go beyond the written record and witness of Scripture to make a greater statement of faith about the way God relates with God's creation. We stretch words to the limit of their meaning when we talk about one God being known in three distinct yet totally related ways.

That's what words are for - for making sense of what we can only partially comprehend. What goes so wrong for us when we assert that the last word has been said - and Churches have been very good at saying that.

Our words should be like the daily bread for which we pray - sufficient for the day - nourishing us for another and another day of wrestling with God's truth.

-- Donald Phillipps.

This item was first printed as a Connections article in the Parish Church bulletin, 30 May, 2010.