Trinity Sunday 2012

'If the Roman Pontiff, seated on the lofty throne of his glory, wishes to thunder at us...and if he wishes to judge us and even to rule us and our Churches...what kind of brotherhood, or even what kind of parenthood can this be? We should be the slaves, not the sons, of such a Church'.

It might sound like Henry VIII or Edward VI, but those are the words not of an English monarch, but of Nicetas, twelfth century Archbishop of Nicomedia, railing against Rome in a way that Elizabeth II's predecessors were to do four hundred years later. On a day of national jubilation it may seem perverse to revive a controversy which in its day tore the world in two - I refer, of course, to the filioque controversy, never, I am sure, far from your thoughts - but the Spirit blows where it wills and lease us into truth.

Filioque is a Latin word meaning 'and the son'. It appears in the translation of the Nicene Creed that we will say this morning and that we have all said a thousand times and scarcely noticed. 'We believe in the Holy Spirit...who proceeds from the Father and the Son'. However the Council of the Church which met at Nicaea in 325 AD did not include it in the common declarations which were to form the basis of the Creed. It was added by the Spanish Church approximately five hundred years after the Council, and became entrenched in the Creed used by the Western Church, which looked to Rome for its leadership. But it was never adopted by the Eastern Church, which looked to Constantinople. To this day Eastern Orthodox Christians profess their faith in God the Holy Spirit who proceeds from the Father. The Eastern rejection of the filioque underpinned the great schism of medieval Christianity, the devastating split between Rome and Constantinople which culminated in the sack of Byzantium and the overthrow of the greatest Christian Empire the world has ever known.

So what on earth was all the fuss about? It's a very reasonable question and in the spirit of today's Trinitarian preoccupation I will attempt to make the answer comprehensible, brief and not too dull. I may fail. 'And the Son'. It's just three words, one in Latin - but they are three words that have consequences for what we believe about God the Holy Trinity, and what we believe about God the Holy Trinity is the hallmark of whether we are bona fide Christians - or whether we are not. For the Eastern Church their impact was and is fundamentally to change what the Church believes about God.

Father, Son and Spirit: God is three Persons. Yet if God is three Persons, what is it that makes God One? The Eastern Church has long maintained that what makes God One is the Father. God the Father is the cause or source of Godhead. In theological terms, they would say that the Father is the monarch within the Godhead. God the Father begets God the Son 'before all worlds'; God the Spirit proceeds from the God the Father 'before all worlds'. God the Father is, as it were, the apex of a triangle. If God the Spirit proceeds from God the Son as well as from God the Father this pattern is disturbed completely. Suddenly there is nothing distinctive about the Father. The Father is no longer the source of Godhead. He shares that privilege with the Son. By introducing the filioque, said Constantinople, the Western Church blurred for ever the unique characteristics of the three Persons of God.

This blurring is alive and well. You'll all have heard the Son described as Jesus, who shows us who God is; and the Spirit described as the wind of Pentecost, who gives us life; and the Father described as...well, often, and rather lamely, as the Creator of the Universe. It's a standard sermon for Trinity Sunday. Yet whether we are Western or Eastern Christians, it's inadequate. Creation is the work of God, Father, Son and Spirit. Creation is not the work of the Father alone. The Father is the Father of the Son. God is the Father of all Creation. The blurring of the Persons inhibits the diversity within the Godhead, insists the East, and, in its place exalts the unity. It does not allow the Father to be the monarch within the Trinity - but it makes a diverse Godhead into a monolithic God. And for more than a thousand years the Eastern Church has detected a similar trend in the polity that allowed the filioque to find its way into the Creed. The creed of the whole Church had been re-written by the Bishop of Rome. Nicetas remarked memorably that he had thereby assumed to himself a monarchy. And that was a thing to be resisted.

It would probably be overstating the case to claim that the Greeks' current unhappiness with the economic prescriptions of those who think of themselves as her betters can be attributed to the filioque controversy. But it is indubitably the case that to this day the East treasures the diversity of the Trinity and, through the patriarchates that constitute its ecclesiastical polity, it resists the temptation to enthrone any one of its bishops as a monarch. In the West the style of Church government is either determinedly monarchical, as in the Roman Communion, or is, in response, rather dysfunctional and unhappily congregationalist, as in the Anglican Communion. Our Trinitarian theology has often been weak and subsumed beneath an agenda which emphasizes the oneness rather than the plurality of God. Perhaps - perhaps - it is time for the West to look again at both its credal formulations and at how it arrives at them.

It may appear that this sermon is tilting in a direction that is utterly inappropriate for a Diamond Jubilee. So let me conclude with this. As I have said, the Eastern view remains that the Father is monarch within the Trinity, but the Father is monarch only by virtue of what he enables in the other persons of the Trinity. The Father's monarchy is a service to the whole. It allows it to be. It gives it life. It never dominates or domineers. I would like to suggest that there could be no better exemplar of this understanding of monarchy than the monarch whose long reign we celebrate today. Her singular achievement has been for sixty years to serve the whole. Perhaps she has something to teach us about both theology and holy order.

May God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit bless and keep her - and all of us - this Trinity Sunday, this Jubilee weekend, and for evermore. Amen.