Over the holidays, my mother was attempting to explain Mormonism to a 14-year-old boy who lives with her and my dad. He's got a Mormon friend and he was wondering about that faith, especially because he's in confirmation class this year and learning more about Christianity.My mom looked at me and asked, "Are Mormons Christian?" It's interesting that she didn't ask if, in my opinion, Mormons are Christian, but more as a matter-of-fact. This, of course, opens that millennia-old can o' worms: Who gets to say who is and who is not "Christian"? (More on that in another post.)
My immediate response was, "They do consider themselves part of Christianity, but they're not. They don't believe in the Trinity."
In fact, that wasn't quite right. The Church of Latter Day Saints does believe in a trinity, per se, but not the orthodox Christian Trinity as articulated at the Council of Nicaea (325). Mormons understand the Godhead to be three distinct divine beings who eternally relate to one another. At Nicaea and after, the orthodox belief has been that God is three persons (hypostases) but one substance (homoousias). I, myself, tend toward the social trinitarianism articulated by theologians such as Jürgen Moltmann and Miroslav Volf. While Moltmann has ocassionally been accused of tri-theism, that charge doesn't stick based on a thorough reading of his work.
But that's less my query than the importance of the Trinity for a claim of Christianity. I'm sure that many of my conservative Christian readers won't even have to consider this question, and neither will the liberals. I'm more interested in those of you who are moderates. Put the LDSers aside for the moment. How about Unitarians? They do trace their origins to Protestantism, and many consider themselves Christian, though others do not. Indeed, some Unitarians (a minority, to be sure) have a traditional (or "high") Christology.
So my question is basically this: Is an orthodox Christology enough to be considered Christian, or must one also articulate a Nicaean Trinitarianism?
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I certainly HOPE that one doesn't have to believe Nicaean Trinitarianism to be considered Christian. Otherwise, NO ONE could be considered Christian.
The bottom-line is this: people may say they do, but no one actually believes the Trinity as articulated at Nicaea.
To believe something, one must first think it; if something cannot exist in the mind, it is incapable of being believed. The Nicaean Trinity is (in a completely non-colloquial way, but still with the voice of Vizzini from the Princess Bride) "inconceivable."
Suppose someone asked you to believe that they knew someone that knew someone that discovered a "four-sided triangle." Then after they saw the dumbfounded look on your face, they asked you to just believe the mystery.
You can't believe in the existence of a "four-sided triangle," because you can't conceptualize what it would mean for a triangle, any triangle, to have four sides.
A human being is not capable of conceptualizing one being as three persons. You can memorize the words, and even confess them every Sunday, but you can't believe them, for you can't even know what they mean.
On one Trinity Sunday my then Pastor described the trinity like her relationships. She is a Mother, a daughter, and a Grandmother. She was a wonderful pastor, but her description was condemned as a heresy by the Church (Sabellianism).
The best simple explanation I heard was God is One "What" and Three "Whos" (One essence manifest in three persons).
If most Christians (laity and clergy) can't explain it correctly, then it cannot be criteria for inclusion.
The earliest Christians prayed and sang songs to Jesus. As one pagan historian noted, "They rise before sunrise and sing hymns to Jesus as unto a god". How one squares this with the commandment, "To worship God alone" is important but not a test for inclusion.
Your Name, I've heard the whole "one what and three whos" thing before, and I must confess that it is a great modern articulation of the Nicaean Trinity. But it is far from an explanation!
Words are simply symbolic representations of ideas.
Every idea doesn't NEED to have a symbolic representation, but every communicable idea does. Ideas without symbolic representations are expressed in everyday speech as "I can't really put it into words."
Most ideas have more than one symbolic representation. That's why we can translate the Bible into different languages. An English Bible and a Spanish Bible may have different symbolic representations, but (hopefully) the ideas are approximately the same.
Conversely, there exist many symbolic "representations" that actually represent no idea. Using a random sentence generator that I found on the Web, I generated these five sentences:
The tall breakdown precedes a judge.
A ditch boosts the contest into the recursive earth.
The venture mails a virtue over the demolished magic.
Past the traveled wound reacts the aerial rose.
An unworkable vowel turns.
These sentences can't be believed, since they can't be thought (i.e. conceived in the mind). They're pure nonsense, in the most literal sense of the word.
Such is the Nicaean Trinity: pure nonsense.
One can conceive of other Trinities, like Sabellianism and tri-theism (neither of which, in my opinion, are compatible with Holy Writ). But the orthodox doctrine is utterly nonsensical.
It is literally unbelievable, because it is literally inconceivable.
If someone says they are Christian, whose right is it to say they are not--by whose criteria? What would Christ say? I'm pretty sure he wouldn't exclude ANYONE who worshipped Him, confessed His divinity, believed in His eternal atonement, and--most importantly--behaved as he taught and treated others as He would.
I just don't know if its the right question. But the one I would substitute is this: is it possible to articulate an enduring missional theology apart from the Trinity? And the answer to that I believe it "no."
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