Can Modern People Accept Better? 現代人更能接受這奧蹟嗎？

Solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity, Year C
Theme: Can Modern People Accept Better? 現代人更能接受這奧蹟嗎？

The Blessed Trinity is one of the two fundamental articles of faith of Christianity. If one does not confess that God is Three Persons in One and that Jesus Christ is both divine and human at the same time, he cannot claim to be a Christian even if he knows the Bible from cover to cover and is able to quote correctly the biblical passages to prove his opinions. These two articles of faith have been settled within roughly the first five centuries of the existence of the Church. The Church humbly admits that this article of faith is a truth beyond her understanding. She calls it a “mystery” which needs the support of faith to supplement the inadequacy of rationality.

Christians believe in one God. This much they share with Judaism and Islam. However, the God they believe in is more complicated, in the sense that there are THREE PERSONS IN THE ONE GOD. How did Christians come up with such a strange idea? It is agreed among scholars that human beings have a sense of mystery and religions answer to this call to mystery. Usually, anything unknown was taken to be a deity. That was pantheism. Gradually, these deities took on personalities and each specializes in a particular area, such as fertility and war. This is polytheism. Among the deities, a hierarchy was established. There is a Lord of the lords and God of the gods. Monotheism is established. Some social scientists are even able to correlate this evolution with the evolution of societies. Judaism as a sole worship of Yahweh was a victory over polytheism in the Middle East! Therefore, the emergence of a THREE-IN-ONE God within Judaism was destabilizing and heretical, to say the least.

Christians claim that this is a revelation from Jesus Christ, their Lord who is the Second Person of God, i.e. the Son of God. This is more than an evolution but a paradigm shift, a fundamental change in the perception and interpretation of the relationship between God and sinners. At first, Christians found themselves persecuted by Jews who thought that Christians were heretics who believed in three gods. At the same time, Christians became scapegoats in the Roman Empire because they were perceived as atheists who refused to worship the Roman deities, thus bringing defeats and diseases to the Empire! In the first three centuries of their emergence, early Christians survived these persecutions. Many converts were intelligentsia of the age and they tried to explain their faith in terms understandable to the contemporary. At last, a time came when a Caesar found Christianity beneficial to the empire and it became an imperial religion. Roman Empires came and vanished until a Max Weber came along. He saw Christianity provide a hotbed for the emergence of Capitalism! Then are industrial and informational societies receptive to Christianity?

More than 17 centuries have elapsed since the first Nicaea Council and nowadays in every Sunday mass, we recite the Creed which reads, “I believe in one God, the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, of all things visible and invisible … I believe in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only Begotten Son of God, born of the Father before all ages. God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, consubstantial with the Father; through him all things were made … I believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life, who proceeds from the Father and the Son, who with the Father and the Son is adored and glorified …” Is this narrative adequate for modern people? Are modern people more capable to accept the idea of the Blessed Trinity?

First of all, modern people have difficulty accepting a Creator. They have been baptized by scientific education and prefer objective repeatable observations using mechanical/electromagnetic instruments to subjective mythical explanations. They have no problem visualizing invisible atoms and subatomic particles with strange spins and colours. Yet, they cannot accept an external PERSONALITY on the other side as one of the variables in their equations! However, quantum mechanics challenges their understanding of reality. It is because every particle is a wave function, a probability. No matter how hard a scientist tries to measure accurately one property of a subatomic particle, he has to give up the accuracy of another property. There is an uncertainty which no objective measurement is able to overcome. Moreover, all possible states exist at the same time until an observation collapses all of them into one of the states. Modern people have to accept the paradox that the Schrödinger's Cat is both dead and undead before you observe it!
On the macro level, gravity is able to bend both space and time. Black holes are discovered and perhaps even worm holes, such that it might be possible to travel back and forth in time if we were able to survive the gravity of black holes. All of us are familiar with three spatial dimensions plus a dimension of time. But in order to solve all these relativistic and quantum equations, physicists propose the existence of at least seven more dimensions on top of the four dimensions we know. Perhaps Yahweh is a Being capable of travelling freely in all these dimensions …

All these scientific advances have enlarged our horizon. But it breeds a lot of pseudo-scientific speculations which lack substantial evidence. There arose best-sellers portraying God as aliens living in other dimensions, landing on earth or other habitable planets to seed them with humanoid civilizations; movies exploring our existence within virtual reality or multiverses; social media creating metaverses for our interactions and transactions etc. Rigorous scientific research is in short supply when money is involved.
On the optimistic side, Trinity is no longer a mystery despite the fact that, or even because God is infinite. It is because one infinity plus one infinity plus one more infinity is still one infinity! In the end, one plus one plus one can be ONE! It is not offensive any more to talk about three-in-one. Biologists are able to edit genes and DNA’s and what not. Artificial intelligence is able to defeat Chess and even Go Grand-masters. These techniques are now forcing us to question ourselves what makes human beings human. Is our rationality, or our morality, or our spirituality able to define our humanity? We need a better narrative than “the image and likeness of God” (Genesis 1:26) to distinguish us from animals and robots. In a similar manner, the concept of consubstantiality, the miracles of Jesus, transubstantiation, His ascension, His pledge to be present in the Holy Eucharist, among the needy and among the believers are easier to understand nowadays!

So far, best-sellers come and go. Media are able to generate short-lived hypes only. Up until now, only the narrative put forth by Jesus Christ seems to be the easiest to grasp. The THREE-IN-ONE God is a communion of love. In the simplest formula of John, “God is love” (1 John 4:8) Had God been an alien which harvests resources from our world, why would this alien not have simply siphoned energy off the sun directly? The hypothesis of multiverse seems promising except that no information is able to cross over from one universe to another. In other words, there is no way to prove or refute such a hypothesis. That is unacceptable for positivist science. Alas, nowadays, anything goes.

Brethren! Had Christ been crucified in this universe, the theory of multiverse tells us that the stories would have been totally different ones in other parallel universes in which alternative choices had been made. We should count ourselves blessed to have a merciful Father who sent His only begotten Son to be crucified for the repentance of and reconciliation with sinners, and together they sent the Holy Spirit to sustain them …
May the Blessed Trinity of Christianity be glorified forever and ever. Amen.
2019 Reflection