The Trinity As a Clue to Community
David H.C. Read

There are some themes for preaching which are both daunting for the preacher and puzzling for a congregation. One of these is obviously the doctrine of the Trinity. Part of the program of The Living Pulpit is to encourage one another to delve into the classic doctrines of the Church and to listen more alertly to the lively Word of Scripture. As our readers know, we are not the mouthpiece for any particular theological or ecclesiastical or political "-ism" but seek within the boundary of loyalty to the "one holy, catholic and apostolic faith," to give expression to a wide variety of insights
through which the living Word is speaking to our generation.

As an editor with responsibility for what we print I have already experienced some of the tensions involved in such a policy. Recently I read an article submitted which, frankly, I didn't like on first reading. It seemed to me a rather violent attack on a doctrine I held dear. On re-reading I
found that it was becoming, not an attack but an enrichment of my own understanding of this doctrine. I realized, as I hope many others will, that loyalty to our Christian tradition by
no means excludes the famous reminder of Oliver Cromwell to some of my Scottish Presbyterian ancestors, "I beseech you gentlemen, in the bowels of Christ, conceive it possible that
you may be mistaken."

Our difficulty with the word "community" has to do with our instincts that it refers to an experience rather than to a truth that can be defined. Some years ago, when I was a university chaplain, the local branch of the Students' Christian Movement asked my help with a series of discussion groups that were to run for six months. They were to cover a wide range of topics, theological, political, biological and aesthetic. They hoped to discover one important function of a Christian movement in an academic community, that of providing a forum where the Gospel could be explored and experienced as a living spiritual force. When the series ended I was told that the one group which had notoriously failed to develop a sense of community was the one to which that topic had been
assigned! Don't we all discover that in the life of a Christian church community or the communion (koinonia) of which the Bible speaks, is either there or not there, no matter what the pulpit may be saying about it?

What the preacher can do is encourage an atmosphere of openness in discussion of spiritual topics and a frankness in exchanging personal experiences. Some have found it helpful to draw groups of laymen and women into the process of sermon creation so that the work of exegesis and homiletics becomes a communal effort. Others tend to restrict such "opening-up" to a select few-with obvious dangers. I once attempted to open every session meeting in my church with a period called "sharing" and had to give it up when I found very few used it in this way and most just as a way of slipping in some business they had not got on to the agenda!

In recent years I have come to emphasize the "moment of communion" represented by the benediction, given its full liturgical significance. When the classic scriptural phrases are used (and extempory elaborations shunned), a congregation departs with the embrace of the Trinitarian Gospel in the communion of the Holy Spirit. We have not yet devoted an issue of The Living Pulpit to the Trinity or the Holy Spirit, but I hope our readers will note how the different topics relate to
one another as we seek a new vitality in the preaching of the Word.

The most thorough and stimulating, if somewhat controversial treatment of the theme of community in our time for me has been Jurgen Moltmann's recent book, The Spirit of Life. (I try not to let myself be prejudiced by the fact that my own first book, published when World War II broke out in 1939, has the same title. My advice: read Moltmann!).

The third section of Moltmann's book deals specifically with "The fellowship of the Spirit" and opens with these arresting words:

Why is the special gift of the Spirit seen to be its fellowship (koinonia), whereas grace is ascribed to Christ, and love to the Father? In his "fellowship"the Spirit evidently gives himself. He himself enters into the fellowship with believers, and draws them into his fellowship. His inner being is evidently capable of fellowship-of community-of sociality. Does this mean that the Holy Spirit draws human beings into the community he shares with the Father and the Son? Is he present as community, and is he experienced in the community of believers with one another? For an understanding of the Spirit himself, and also for the theological understanding of community or fellowship in general, it is of decisive importance whether we start from a trinitarian or from a unitarian concept of the fellowship of the Spirit.

Moltmann justifies this provocative statement at some length, but the gist of his thinking is expressed in these words:

If it is a characteristic of the divine Spirit not merely to communicate this or that particular thing, but actually to enter into fellowship with believing men and women -- if indeed he himself becomes their fellowship -- then "fellowship" cannot merely be a "gift" of the Spirit. It must be the eternal, essential nature of the Spirit himself. Whereas Christ, the Son of God is called the source of grace, and God the Father is called the source of love, "fellowship" is designated as the nature of the Spirit himself. The Spirit does not merely bring about fellowship with himself. He himself issues from his fellowship with the Father and the Son, and the fellowship into which he enters with believers corresponds to his fellowship with the Father and the Son, and is therefore a trinitarian fellowship.

These words opened up for me some new ways of creating a sermon on community which would be something more than an attempt to explain what the New Testament means by the word koinonia and to lament that the English language has no one word that will do. There is a wealth of meaning behind the discovery that the doctrine of the Trinity indeed offers a clue to the experience of living community in our churches today.

David H.C. Read is Pastor Emeritus of the Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church, New York City, and Chairman and Editor-in-Chief of The Living Pulpit.