My book
It has occurred to me that not all of those who subscribe to my blog are also people who follow me on facebook, so I thought I should publicise the fact that I have written a book, which was published at the end of March.
It’s called “A Holy Mystery: Taking Apart the Trinity”, and it’s published by Energion Publications.
It came about after I mentioned to Henry Neufeld, the founder of Energion, that I thought I’d now covered all major areas of doctrine in one or other of my blog posts, and was thinking of trying to put them together into a sort of semi-systematic theology – and he remarked that I hadn’t touched on the Trinity. I felt really stupid at that point, because Trinity is perhaps THE major doctrine of Christianity; the vast majority of Christian denominations are Trinitarian, and those which are confessional all have a statement of the Trinity in their liturgy. The Church of England, which is my home church, regularly recites the Nicene or the Apostles’ creed, and has hidden away in the prayer book the Athanasian creed as well, for those who really want to go into detail (which doesn’t include the clergy in any church I’ve actually attended).
You can have all sorts of beliefs about the way salvation occurs, you can have all sorts of beliefs about the nature of God, but Trinity rears its head almost everywhere…
It is perhaps not surprising that I’d not written about Trinity, because, as a mystic, I have an overwhelmingly unitive experience of God which does not easily translate to trinitarian thinking. Yes, I’m very well aware of other mystics who do find trinity central to the way they think – Richard Rohr and Ilia Deleo spring to mind – but they are people who have grown up in confessional trinitarianism and therefore have trinity kind of baked into their thinking. I was not on speaking terms with Christianity when I had my first mystical experiences, so I more or less inevitably had a different conception.
So, I set out to write a blog post to correct the omission. When it got to about 5000 words, I had another chat with Henry, because I could by then see that it was definitely over-sized even for my blog (I did originally contemplate titling the blog “tl:dr”, because I really cannot restrict myself to the recommended 500 words or so which someone advised me was the length a blog post should aim at). And he suggested that it might make a “Topical Line Drive” for Energion; Topical Line Drives are short books (less than 40 pages) which aim to go straight to the heart of a topic in a very concise form.
That was how the book started out. I did manage to fit what I wanted to say into a little over 12000 words (and 38 pages), which is perhaps remarkable, as it includes a survey of the scriptural evidence and of the church fathers who developed the concept, as well as a criticism of the philosophical basis, a meditation on other possibilities which the church fathers might have contemplated and a brief excursion into threenesses in the god-concepts of other religions. It also outlines the problem which I was addressing, which is that the early church were very keen to refine the doctrine and therefore determined that a number of ways of thinking of trinity were heresies. The result is that almost everyone who tries to talk about the Trinity falls into one or more of those heresies, and that includes a sizeable number of clergy. As I say in the book “…how did the church arrive in this position, of having what is generally regarded as a very important or even an absolutely fundamental doctrine, which is however extremely difficult (some would argue impossible) for even theologically trained people to understand?”.
I hope that subscribers to the blog will want to read more! In other words, please buy my book.
Indeed, if you’re likely to be in church listening to a sermon on Trinity Sunday or (and my sympathies go out to you if this is the case) actually preaching on Trinity Sunday, I’d suggest that you’ll probably get far more from that sermon if you have read “A Holy Mystery”.