A Peaceful Trinity

July 1945. Trinity Nuclear Test at Los Alamos, United States

Invoking a John Donne sonnet “Batter my heart, three-personed God” the physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer insisted that the first nuclear test in Los Alamos be called Trinity. 

Last August marked the seventieth anniversary of the deployment of nuclear bombs by the United States on Hiroshima and Nagasaki that were built at that very site. On July 14, 2015, after two years of negotiations, the six nations of the United Nations Security Council reached an agreement with Iran to mitigate and survey Tehran’s nuclear weapon developments. This controversial agreement was most notably met with criticism from Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu and evangelicals in the United States. Seventy years after Trinity and the bombs dropped on Japan, humanity still bears the scars of the nuclear power that was credited with ending the Second World War. The nations that possess nuclear weapons today still hold the ability to unleash catastrophic global damage.

Trinity — a doctrine of the Christian tradition now shares a name with the most destructive force our world has ever known. How can Jesus, God, and the Spirit possibly relate to our current global context? Or as theologian Jürgen Moltmann asks, “Where is Christ after Chernobyl?" The search for a peaceful Trinity must now explore its meaning and the significance of Jesus Christ in a nuclear age.

Let's briefly meditate on the suffering Christ as a way of understanding the dynamic love of the Trinity in Christianity. Jesus’ suffering in the Garden of Gethsemane and on Golgotha demonstrates God’s love and fellowship with all people and creation. This suffering and death are God emptying God’s self which is transformative, becoming the God of the suffering by being stripped of God's very flesh and blood. This cosmic understanding of the suffering Christ highlights the significance of Jesus Christ in a way that “grasps him dynamically in the forward movement of God’s history with the world.” Therefore, the suffering of the Cosmic Christ is the radical hope of the Christian faith because of God's presence is with us who suffer. 

“The gospel of Jesus is not a rational concept to be explained in a theory of salvation, but a story about God’s presence in Jesus’ solidarity with the oppressed, which led to his death on the cross. What is redemptive is the faith that God snatches victory out of defeat, life out of death, and hope out of despair.”
— James Cone, The Cross and the Lynching Tree

So, where is Christ after Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Jesus is with those whose lives were stolen and the families who were left to mourn and pick up the pieces in the aftermath of the murder of loved ones and the destruction of the only world they had ever loved. Jesus Christ emptied himself in death for those that suffer, absorbing death and evil into himself so that all of creation would be redeemed for peace. The cross confronts us with a choice: Are we with Jesus and those he is in solidarity with on the cross or against him and with those who put him on the cross? 

Is Trinity nuclear or peaceful? As followers of Jesus, we have the opportunity to answer this question through our participation in a self-giving Trinity — the peaceful centrifugal force that flows outward from God and draws all of creation back into a dynamic cosmic dance of love. On this Trinity Sunday, the Christian faith urges us to participate in the emptying of Trinity each day alongside Jesus Christ who is making all things new.