Religion
Is this how God thinks?
Shirley Robin Letwin
The Divine Trinity David Brown (Duckworth £24)
The usual response of conservative Christians to the present state of Christianity is either a helpless lament about the loss of faith or an attack, as vague as it is vigorous, on liberalism'. But they leaves us to guess just what they are regretting under the name of religion or Christianity. David Brown has boldly broken with this practice by undertaking a reasoned defence for the Doctrine of the Trinity. It is addressed to the deist, though he believes that it also strengthens the argument against atheism.
His case is not an easy one to make, partly because the biblical foundation for the doctrine that God exists in One Sub- stance and Three Persons is tenuous, not least because Jesus himself seemed to be unaware of his divinity. By 325, when the Doctrine of the Trinity was formally de- fined at the Council of Nicaea, denials of the divinity of Christ and of the separate personhood of the Spirit had become entrenched in the Christian community. Nevertheless, the doctrine survived to be elaborated by St Augustine and St Thomas Aquinas, and to be accepted as the heart of Christianity until the 19th century when historical criticism of the Bible flourished and belief in the Trinity noticeably waned among the orthodox.
Brown argues that historical criticism can be used to support Trinitarian doctrine if it is properly understood. What has to be made clear first of all is that the Doctrine of the Trinity postulates an 'inter- ventionist view of God', according to which God does not merely establish the general order of the world but regularly performs specific actions within human history. These are not strictly speaking 'interventions' insofar as they are not restricted to stupendous events like mira- cles but appear every day in events of grace. Once we recognise that this is how God is related to the human world, the Incarnation ceases to be incredible because It ceases to be an exception to the estab- lished pattern.
The foundation of Brown's argument are the religious experiences reported in the Bible and he recognises that it obliges him to explain his conception of revelation. Against both the Biblical fundamentalist and the radical Biblical critic, he maintains that what matters is not the original inten- tions of Biblical authors but the theological truth that they convey. Conservatives need not insist that the Bible was written under divine direction since the important thing is the divinely inspired experiences recorded there. And these experiences are not to be understood as isolated independent occurr- ences but as parts of a continuing and progressive dialogue between God and man.
The idea of a progressive divine dialogue enables Brown to dispose of several prob- lems. He takes it to mean that God's communications belong to a particular tradition. Therefore their form depends on what already exists in that tradition and religious experiences are bound to bear 'obvious features of cultural condition'. At any given time, there may be a number of divine dialogues at different stages of development, which can account for the differences between Hindu or Buddhist religious experiences and Christian ones. This also permits the doctrinal conserva- tive to reject earlier orthodoxies or to defend the Church's right to give new readings of Gospel accounts since what is perceived at a later stage of the divine dialogue may make earlier stages redun- dant. It has now become evident, for instance, says Brown, that Christians need not insist on the bodily resurrection of Jesus to establish the divinity of Christ; they need insist only that the disciples' visions were caused directly by God rather than by natural processes. Such exercises run the danger of arbitrariness, Brown recognises, but he assures us that 'criteria of appropriateness' can be found.
If his arguments are not always easy to follow, they are down to earth. To explain why Jesus never spoke of himself as divine, Brown points out that it might plausibly be supposed that Jesus 'felt the Spirit's pre- sence so powerfully that, paradoxically, he identified that power with himself and spoke for it in his own name . . . this is quite a common experience: for an' indi- vidual to feel the Spirit so close that reference to his presence as a distinct entity seems redundant'. Since in Jesus that experience was not just occasional as it is with the rest of us but steadily present, it would account for 'the unparalleled confi- dence with which he acted in his own name'. Nor is there any difficulty about Jesus' failure to realise that he was inau- gurating a church destined to last for two thousand years. He was 'thereby enabled permanently to record in the divine mem- ory his direct experience of the ambiguities of the human condition'. Had he had privileged access to the future, 'just think how uninvolved would his perspective have been.' Or, had he given any hint that he was founding a new religion, that would 'inevitably put him at an enormous dis- tance from the perspective of his contem- poraries'. Similarly, if he had not been misunderstood by his disciples, they would have been reduced to instruments of an infallibly communicated revelation 'instead of freely responding to their experience as they see it'.
Whether God also reasons in the same matter-of-fact way is perhaps questionable.
In any case, if philosophical theology is to be revived, as Brown hopes, the argument has to be pushed a good deal further.
Something more has to be said about how' the religious experiences, on which Brown's argument rests, can be authenti- cated. Even if we accept the authenticity of Biblical accounts, why should we, as Brown seems to do, credit other accounts of religious experiences even among non- Christians? That an inverventionist God is postulated by the Doctrine of the Trinity does not establish that it is the right view of God. Indeed, that is the very issue that divides the deist from the theist. If the divine dialogue is progressive, what does that imply about the nature of Providence and human history? Nor is it obvious how Buddhists and Hindus can be engaged in the same divine dialogue when what' they believe to be their gods are radically different from the Christian Creator? Do religious experiences that confirm a pan- theist's convictions have the same status as those of St Teresa of Avila?
Brown is neither moved by Pascal's dictum that 'faith embraces many truths which seem to contradict each other' nor disposed to answer the sort of questions asked by Aquinas: 'Whether reasons in support of what we believe lessen the merit of faith? Whether matters of faith surpass natural reason?' But he has undoubtedly made it more difficult to feel sure that 'faith is believing what you know ain't so'.
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