Photo credit: Carla J Roth
Romans 8: 12-17; John 2: 1-17.
“What is born of the flesh is flesh, and what is born of the Spirit is spirit.” (John 3:6)
TRINITY SUNDAY has long been known as a graveyard slot for preachers, who find themselves tied up in all kinds of theological and philosophical knots – and even diagrams, perish the thought – wondering whether there is any hope of escape.
Much the same thought probably passes through the mind of their congregations, too! (The great Methodist orator Colin Morris once described sitting through a sermon on ‘The Effulgence of God’s Splendour’. That means radiance, in case you were wondering. He noted that most of the listeners seemed to have responded to this by adopting suitably pious or inscrutable expressions… but he could still not resist the considerable amusement brought on by wondering exactly who or what was really passing through the minds of the congregation as they listened to this lofty rhetoric!)
So I am going to simplify things daringly at the outset by making two bold suggestions. The first is that we might helpfully think about the triune God as Love, Lover and Loving: three distinct but also inseparable apprehensions of one reality. And secondly, that the story of how this understanding of God developed is actually about how our journeying towards God is reshaped by God’s journeying towards us: a new world coming, as we are transformed in the present and for the future. What I want to do is to unpack and illustrate those proposals through some of the rich (and, yes, also puzzling and complex) ideas we find in and behind today’s Gospel and Epistle readings.
It is reasonable to say that St Paul and the author of John’s Gospel share the view that to enter the divine presence and to be brought gradually into the full likeness of God (that is, to have the fractured image of God already in us restored and fulfilled) means that our bodies have to be transformed and transfigured by being “clothed in immortality”, to use the stark resurrection language of 1 Corinthians 15 – which talks of what is mortal and perishable being changed by God into something immortal and imperishable.
Now a major difficulty in getting to grips what this means is that most Christians these days still tend to think of such matters in dualistic, Cartesian terms. That is, many religious believers talk about the soul as something mysterious and immaterial which somehow inhabits a material body – something akin to Gilbert Ryle’s famous ‘ghost in the machine’. [1] But this is not at all how Paul would have seen things. He was shaped by (and responding to) the very different worldviews of the Graeco-Roman era and late Second Temple Judaism.
So when he talks about ‘the body’, Paul means not just a physical frame but the whole embodied person [2] – everything you are in terms of your personal identity: your thoughts, feelings, experiences, history, kinship and relationships. In this understanding, ‘body’ and ‘soul’ are not separable. ‘Soul’ might, in a modern context, be more helpfully construed as something like the whole embodied person animated towards life (that is, towards God ultimately), rather than towards death. [3] That is one of the important things Christians and Jews mean when we talk about ‘being created in the image of God’. The conviction that the fundamental human orientation (even if we are deeply marred and broken, and need repair) is towards life in its fullest sense.
The problem, however, is that in the temporal realm this divinely imaged ‘body-soul’, this ‘who we really are’, is evidently subject to limitation, corruption, disease and perishability. That is a basic feature of our contingent existence. So when Paul talks about ‘the flesh’, what he is referring to is our bodies (that is, our whole selves) being trapped in a mortal frame – one whose orientation, in existential as well as physical terms, is towards decay, debasement (what is otherwise referred to as sin) and death. It is this condition that we need to be released from, starting right now.
To live according to the Spirit rather than the flesh, Paul says, is therefore to prepare ourselves in the here and now – by the way we live and the choices we make – to begin to receive the incorruptible nature that is our final destiny. This is what he refers to (again in 1 Corinthians 15) as the sōma pneumatikos, the spiritual body.
In our age the word ‘spiritual’ is generally used in a way that sounds vague and airy fairy. But for Paul’s readers talk of a ‘spiritual body’ would have signified a reality far more substantial than ‘the material’, mere flesh – strange as that may sound to us today. On the contrary, ‘spiritual’ denoted something that was truly solid, incorruptible and imperishable, albeit in a re-embodied form given by God in a way which we can barely conceive. [4]
Similarly, in New Testament terms, ‘eternal life’ or ‘risen life’ is not to be thought of as just a post-mortem experience. It begins today, as we cease to live “according to the flesh” – rejecting things like hatred, bitterness, violence, anger, selfishness, cruelty, malice and various kinds of betrayal and greed: all those practices and attitudes which point us towards death rather than life. (Such things may be contrasted with the ‘gifts of the spirit’ in Galatians 5: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.)
In Romans 8, four verses on from where today’s reading stops, Paul goes on to speak movingly of us, and indeed of the whole creation, groaning and yearning “to be liberated from bondage to decay and brought into the freedom and glory of the children of God” (verse 21). The Eastern Christian tradition speaks boldly of this transformation, this incorporation into the risen life patterned for us by Christ, as theosis. That is, the journey towards our full union with God and the complete realisation of God’s purposes of love both in and beyond our temporal existence.
In other words, our true fulfilment is discovered through God who is the origin and destiny of the world, through God who meets us in and as Jesus the wounded healer, and through God the Spirit who shakes us up along the way – one God understood as the coherence of three distinct but inseparable ways of encountering the divine energies at work beyond us, with us, and for us. That is the trinitarian understanding. God as Gift, Giver and Giving, or better still as Love, Lover and Loving. It is precisely what Charles Wesley seeks to express in the traditional, marvellous (and, note, gender free) holiness hymn Love Divine, All Loves Excelling.
Of course there is a great deal more that could be said about the triune understanding of God in terms of the fourth and fifth century metaphysics and mythos through which this doctrine was formally constituted at two great councils of the church, Chalecedon and Nicea, and how we might make sense of this in our age. [5] But instead, and in conclusion, I want briefly to highlight some key images from Paul in Romans, and first from John’s Gospel, which show how the triune activity of God is (as I suggested earlier) all about how our journeying towards God is reshaped by God’s journeying towards us.
First, there is Jesus’s saying that we need to be ‘born again’ or ‘born anew’. This is one that has unfortunately been monopolised in recent years as the signature for a narrow, judgmental and exclusive kind of belief, which ironically is the very thing Jesus contends against in the gospels. The best exegesis of it that I have come across was provided by a midwife (someone who therefore knew a great deal about birth). She was a member of one of a number of small Catholic communities in Italy that I was fortunate to be able to spend time with as part of an ecumenical delegation back in 1984.
What she said was something like this. When we are born into the world we are initially helpless and dependent. To survive and flourish, it is necessary that the world and everyone in it revolves around us, to support and affirm us. But as we grow up we need to be moved away from the idea that everything and everyone exists for our benefit. That is, we need to make a journey away from ourselves and our self-interest, and to find ourselves turned around and re-oriented towards the needs and concerns of other people and of the world. Being born away from ourselves, and towards God and neighbour – perhaps this, she suggested, is what Jesus means when he says we must be born again, or in terms of experiencing God’s love and translating it into action, ‘from on high’. It is not about self-abasement, but rediscovering ourselves in and through relationship.
This fundamental re-orientation of our lives is also central to Paul’s message in Romans 8. There he speaks not of biological fatherhood in the use of the term “Abba” for God. (The Scottish biblical scholar James Barr demonstrated pretty conclusively some 60 years ago that “Abba”, from the Aramaic, does not mean “daddy”, as has often been questionably and sentimentally said. [6] Rather, calling God “Abba” is about intimately and filially acknowledging the source and destiny of all life, including our own, in the divine life. What makes us children of God, Paul says, is not birthright but “the spirit of adoption”. [7]
That is, God does not love us because we are from the correct family, the preferred community, the acceptable ethnicity, the right religious group, the dominant sex/gender, or the privileged class (for example). Rather, God chooses to love us beyond and even against the identities by which we humans often accept or reject one another. To find our hearts and home in this all-encompassing love is to live by the Spirit rather than the flesh, he declares. That, of course, is an immensely challenging message for any group of people brought up to think that God is for their tribe and their tribe alone, or that divine favour resides in the patronage of the Emperor (since empire is also a backdrop to these texts). Which is why Paul got into quite a lot of trouble. But that’s another story.
The real twist, however, is at the end. This spirit of adoption which makes us “joint heirs with Christ” (verse 17) of God’s unrestricted love, and is therefore indubitably a promise of glory, also means that in following Christ we will have to face up to the afflictions that come with the essential character of his way, his life and his truth – to anticipate John 14. Dietrich Bonhoeffer – speaking, remember, from the enveloping darkness of 1930s Germany – put this challenge without reserve. Our vocation as Christians, he said, is learning how to share God’s suffering in the world. [8] The gift of new life is not without cost when the world we are dealing with is bound to division and death-dealing in so many ways. There is a new world coming, but when we look around us it can seem terrifyingly far away. May the God who is Love, Lover and Loving, help us to live in its light, despite every discouragement.
References
[1] ‘The Descartes Myth’ In Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind (1949, Routledge, 60th ann. ed., 2009).
[2] David Bentley Hart, ‘The Light of Tabor: Notes Toward a Monistic Christology’ (Stanton Lecture no. 2, University of Cambridge, May 2024).
[3] In the ancient world “soul” or anima was the life-principle proper to the realm of generation and decay, the “psychical” or “animal” substance that endowed sublunary organisms with the power of self-movement and growth, though only for the short time of their mortal existence (David Bentley Hart, see note 4).
[4] David Bentley Hart, ‘The Spiritual Was More Substantial Than the Material for the Ancients’, Church Life Journal (University of Notre Dame, 26 July 2018). https://churchlifejournal.nd.edu/articles/the-spiritual-was-more-substantial-than-the-material-for-the-ancients/
[5] Hugely recommended in navigating this tangled and contested journey is Frances Young, God’s Presence: A Contemporary Recapitulation of Early Christianity (Cambridge University Press, 2013).
[6] James Barr, The Semantics of Biblical Language (SCM Press, 1961). See chapter one, ‘Abba is not Daddy’.
[7] The Pauline notion of adoption by divine grace, rather than selection by birthright (or any other human marker) is powerfully unpacked in Peter Selby, BeLonging: Challenge to a Tribal Church (SPCK, 1985).
[8] “It is not the religious act that makes a person a Christian, but participating in the suffering of God in the life of the world.” Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers From Prison (DWB vol. 8, Fortress Press, 2010) p. 553.
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© Simon Barrow is director of Ekklesia. This is the text of an address given at St James the Less Episcopal Church, Leith, Edinburgh, on 26 May 2024, Trinity Sunday. His book Against the Religion of Power: Telling a Different Christian Story will be published in the near future, and his Ekklesia columns can be found here.