In George Orwell’s clear, strong voice we hear a warning. Because we, too, live in a time when truth is disappearing from the world, and doing so in just the way Orwell worried it would: through language. We move through the world by naming things in it, and we explain the world through sentences and stories. The lesson of Orwell’s essays is clear: Look around you.

Describe what you see as an ordinary observer – for you are one, you know – would see them. Take things seriously.

And tell the truth. Tell the truth’.

In his recent essay marking the sixtieth anniversary of the publication of Nineteen Eighty-Four Keith Gessen recalls the novel’s philologist Syme telling its hero Winston Smith ‘Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? . . . Every year fewer and fewer words, and the range of consciousness is smaller’.

All doctrine, whether economic, political or religious, has the potential to be Newspeak. It has the potential to control thought through the control of language. We are aware of this potential, and it explains why we are suspicious of doctrine.

This makes life difficult for the preacher on Trinity Sunday, when the Church celebrates its faith and celebrates what is perhaps the most ambitious doctrine of them all, the doctrine that articulates the Christian understanding of God. At least - it would make life difficult if that doctrine did not have its roots in the one source of authority that our suspicious, cynical age respects. That is the personal, authentic experience of individual men and women.

For Dan Brown cannot be allowed to have it all his own way. The doctrine of the Trinity was not cooked up by a conclave of male hierarchs and imposed on a Church which had hitherto revelled in blissful diversity. We forget at our peril that the doctrine of the Trinity was born out of the prayerful reflection of the Church upon the events that shaped its early life.

So let us rehearse them and let us recall: that early life was nurtured in Jerusalem, a city which contained only one Temple. That made it unusual for the Empire in which it was a far-flung outpost. That one Temple bore witness to the conviction of the Jewish people that there was only one God.

That one God had no more devoted worshipper than a man called Jesus, from Nazareth. He visited the temple, prayed in the synagogues, and quoted the Scriptures. Yet the followers he gathered were forced to think hard about who their friend was. He was a teacher, yes; and a prophet, certainly: thus far he did not stand out from a great Jewish tradition of holy men, and his crucifixion only confirmed him in it. Many like him had been cruelly put to death, most recently his cousin John. But unlike John, and unlike the ancient men of God put to the sword by the Jewish kings, Jesus had been raised. His followers had seen him, walked with him, eaten with him. His touch had brought healing; his presence had calmed the raging storm; he had spoken words of forgiveness.

Now: only Israel’s God could not be destroyed by death; only Israel’s God was the source of life and health; only Israel’s God was the creator of sea and wind; only Israel’s God was the judge who could forgive. It was as if in Jesus Israel’s God had become human and had lived on earth. In fact, the followers of Jesus came to believe, that’s what had happened. Nothing else would explain it. In Jesus the one God had become united with the things of the earth.

And despite the withdrawal of Jesus from their sight his followers sensed that God was not absent. God was around them and among them, opening their eyes and their hearts, deepening their understanding, equipping them to speak, strengthening them to suffer.

Theology (doctrine, if you will) is faith seeking understanding, wrote Saint Anselm. The Church’s faith is that God is one; yet Jesus has united God to earth; and the divine Spirit will not allow the earth to forget God’s continuing engagement with it. We seek to understand this faith, and what we understand above all is that God reveals Godself to us: to Abraham the patriarch, Moses the lawgiver, David the King and Isaiah the prophet. God reveals Godself and the Church, reflecting on what the revelation of Jesus means for the revelation of God, is drawn ineluctably to the revelation of the Trinity.

‘We move through the world by naming things in it, and we explain the world through sentences and stories. The lesson of Orwell’s essays is clear: Look around you.

Describe what you see as an ordinary observer would see them. Take things seriously.

And tell the truth. Tell the truth’.

Doctrine becomes Newspeak when it stifles thought. The Church arrives at the greatest truths entrusted to it when it looks at its experience and reflects upon it. I am with Keith Gessen. Look around you. Describe what you see. Take things seriously. And tell the truth. Tell the truth. Amen.