Even if it was legitimate at Nicaea to describe God as uniting the three persons of the Trinity, in practice and in popular imagination, it robs the Creator of His majesty, and replaces this with the wonderful image of Jesus, loving even unto death. It glosses over the fact that this same Jesus washed his hands entirely of the need to organise society and maintain Law and Order. Bearing in mind that Rome regarded these matters as being entirely within its prerogative, I do not think Jesus had any alternative; but these are matters which we most certainly have to attend to. And to refuse to recognise their crucial importance is to lack all public spirit. Times have changed since those days. Jesus may have led us out of Plato’s cave of shadows into the bright sunlight of the world outside, but a different type of character and a different type of intelligence are needed to build a decent, just society in the sunlight, from those needed in the hero who led us out. Symbols are useful, but never entirely satisfying. Whether you call Jesus “the Word” of God, or the “Hero” who led us out of the cave of shadows, it is only a parable and indicative of who he was, and what he did. Neither symbol encapsulates the whole truth.
It might be thought unintelligent to continue to try to solve a problem, the proper relationship between Church and State, by repeating what had failed in the past. And in considering the problems of creation, that is assuming we were created, it might seem better to go to the Creator, and ask Him for suggestions. His answer was the Incarnation. And we should take the incarnation seriously, consider whether it includes all of us, and the dangers it inevitably invokes.
I think the chief danger is hubris, which may seem strange when we are all faced with the danger of atomic extinction. But there is a poignancy in the view that in the church’s insistence on trying to arrest the evolution of the human spirit in one moment of divine revelation of the Son of God nailed to a cross, the churches had failed themselves, civilisation, and the religious urge they professed to serve. Yet the idea that the Church may have utterly failed society never seems to occur to the clergy. So they perpetuate that failure, and swell their congregations with a little arm-waving and the singing of choruses, and leave the welfare of society severely alone. They limit their vision to their parish affairs, and never ask whether they should consider the welfare of society and the nation. I have laboured the point that sense of perspective is everything, but few agree. And hubris is a very real danger in congregations that predominantly think of themselves.
When Catherine says in Wuthering Heights, “I am Heathcliff”, we all understand what she meant. She did not mean she was physically the same as Heathcliff. I doubt if she meant they shared the same spirit, because she was ashamed to marry him. She meant he was part of her being. One is reminded of the Greek, pre-Christian, prayer, “O God in whom we live and move and have our being..” And if the son-ship mentioned in the opening verses of John’s Gospel and in St.Paul’s letter to Galatians is more than the flattery of name, then it means that Jesus is only the first among equals. And if God’s being enters into the man, and the man is to be more than a puppet in the hands of God, then the man’s being must enter into God. And the doctrine of the Trinity is torn into little shreds. So yes, hubris is the greatest danger.
“God became Man, so that men might become God” is a saying usually attributed to Augustine, but which I think goes back to Athanasius. This is strange, because he was a fierce upholder of orthodoxy and the equality but separateness of the Persons of the Trinity. He never seems to have had the courage to draw the proper conclusion from his own aphorism.