I do not see a problem. Understanding is not necessary for faith. One can believe in the Trinity without understanding it. I would submit that all of us actually do just that but some of us deceive ourselves into believing we understand it as well as believe it. I know I cannot understand it as it is beyond human understanding. A human being is simply not capable of truly comprehending the relationship of God within Himself. By human standards, one God with three person makes as much sense as someone rising from the dead. I cannot really explain ,in any reasonable way, how each can possibly be the case but I still can believe both are the case. Salvation contingent upon understanding? Isn't that a contention from Gnosticism? Salvation does not require fully understanding the Trinity any more than it requires fully understanding how Jesus rose from the dead. It is enough to believe it is not necessary to be able to explain in detail.
Allow me to clarify: salvation is not contingent upon mental comprehension; in the Orthodox church we commune infants and the mentally disabled, who have traditionally not been communicated in the West; the comprehension of the sacraments is noetic and not psychological.
However, a Pietist approach of indifference to the Trinity and a lack of willingness by those who have the mental capacity to understand the ancient faith of the Church to engage with that faith and apply it positively to their lives is indefensible. "To whom much is given, much will be required,"
Thus, saying that debates about the filioque, and the question of the filioque and the correct understanding thereof, is purely the province of theologians locked away in their ivory tower, is a grave error, and by taking such a view, we cut ourselves off from a living faith based on firm catechesis in the meaning of the Trinity.
It is a lamentable fact that most American Christians who believe in the Trinity, correctly, have still not been catechized or exhorted by their pastors on how to apply the knowledge of the Trinity or why it is relevant. Indeed, in many churches, the only time one will hear a sermon on the subject of the Trinity is on "Trinity Sunday," the first sunday after Pentecost.
I would propose that in Holy Orthodoxy, in the traditions of the Eastern and Oriental churches which have endured continual persecution and which continue to preserve in minute detail the ancient liturgical rites, at a time when the fast-shrinking mainline denominations like the Presbyterian Church USA have openly declared that hymnals should have a fifteen year lifespan, and in which increasingly evangelicals are lured into attending non-denominational churches in which worship is conflated with listening to rock music, every Sunday is Trinity Sunday.
The entire pattern of our liturgy, and also of the ancient liturgy of the Roman Rite which has made somewhat of a comeback following near oblivion in the wake of Vatican II, and to a lesser extent, the pattern of traditional Lutheran and Anglican liturgies, is Trinitarian. The Orthodox liturgy is especially Trinitarian however, with hymns such as the Trisagion providing a chance to contemplate and understand this wondrous life-giving mystery, and with the anaphora structured in an expressly Trinitarian manner (most often, the Anaphora, or Eucharistic Prayer, contains an Epiclesis, in which God the Father is asked to send down His Holy Spirit so that the bread and wine become the actual body and blood of His only begotten son, our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ).
What is more, the rest of the liturgy contains clear "pointers" to explain the Trinitarian concept as it applies to life. "Let us love one another, so that we may confess Father, Son and Holy Ghost," intones the Priest before the Kiss of Peace in the Byzantine Rite.
It is the responsibility of those who have the ability to understand the meaning of the Trinity, not just as an academic doctrine, but as a template for our rebirth in Jesus Christ, to in turn impart this meaning through loving-kindness and compassion to those who are unable to comprehend it, such as infants, young children, and the mentally retarded. Because, while they may at present not be able to grasp the idea of the Trinity, they will be able to understand and receive the love and compassion directed towards them, which lies at the heart of Trinitarian theology.
Remember, the ancient practice of much of our depraved human civilization before the Incarnation of the Word of God was to expose and discard infants with obvious birth defects, and the contemporary evil of aborting children where in the (not infallible) opinion of medical doctors a severe disability exists, a practice ancient Sparta and Nazi Germany would find equally agreeable, entails the rejection of the Trinity. Most of the Trinitarian churches, even the mainline Protestant churches, have not endorsed such views on abortion, but the Unitarian Universalists would have no objection.
You cannot have a living faith in Jesus Christ without accepting through the grace of the Holy Spirit a living faith in the Trinity and thus a concomittant faith in each person as an icon of Jesus Christ, who is a perfect icon of the Father, actualized by the Holy Spirit, who is also a perfect spiritual procession of the Father, and therefore of infinite value.
This is not Gnosticism; Gnosticism rests purely on the idea of salvific knowledge, and the modern equivalent of it exists mainly in some extreme evangelical churches which in their opposition to "works righteousness" redefine Christianity as simply acquiring a knowledge and abstract belief in the salvific power of Jesus Christ, and then living as before, secure in this knowledge that one will "go to Heaven." In this neo-Gnosticism, no actual conversion of manners or evidence of rebirth is required; Luther's dreadful admonition to "sin boldly" becomes the watchword, and the Epistle of St. James and the words of our Lord and indeed of St. Paul are selectively deprecated wherever they appear to require an actual positive commitment of time or energy to respond to the prompting of the Holy Spirit and realize one's faith sacramentally in the Church, and by making a sacrament of one's relationship with others, by actually seeking to follow the example of Jesus Christ.
Following His example does require knowledge of what that example is, which is why even Martin Luther stressed the imperative of catechesis; indeed, in his development of the Shorter Catechism, which is largely although not entirely acceptable to the Orthodox, Martin Luther established himself as the foremost thinker on catechtical technique in the Renaissance and Baroque era, and his approach to writing catechisms and performing catechesis has been universally adopted; even my Syriac Orthodox Church has a Shorter Catechism.
Does this make Martin Luther a Gnostic? Because he clearly felt that the knowledge of scripture obtained through this method of catechesis was vital for salvation.
I would say "no" of course.
It should lastly be noted, because ancient Gnosticism is so often grossly mischaracterized, that Gnosticism stressed salvation through secret knowledge, knowledge that would allow the soul to escape the body; it denied the Trinity, it denied the humanity of Jesus Christ, and it regarded the material universe as evil, a prison for the elite few spirits endowed with this secret knowledge to escape, ascending to the heavenly pleroma, there to exist free from the comstraints of manner and in a sort of matrimonial union with the plethora of divine emanations that characterized the Gnostic religion, such as Christ, Sophia, Jesus (Jesus and Christ were not the same person or aeon in some schools of Gnosticism, such as Valentinism, to wit see St. Irenaeus,
Against Heresies, Volume 1, or alternately the
Panarion of St. Epiphanius of Salamis, Book II, for a treatment of the complex Manichean theology to which St. Augustine subscribed before his conversion, and other forms of Gnosticism to crop up after the repose of St. Irenaeus).
The fact that Christianity has to be learned by able, mentally healthy converts to it, and the worldly, secular lifestyle has to be unlearned, is not Gnosticism. Indeed many Christians also have to unlearn the psuedo-Gnostic Christianity I alluded to above; on CF.com many members of this forum, for example, think the end goal of salvation is for their disembodied soul to ascend permanently to Heaven, when in fact Scripture teaches that salvation entails a repose in Abraham's bossom, followed by a bodily resurrection in the flesh, and the dreadful last judgement, and our goal as Christians is to be accounted among the righteous on that day of judgement, not to put off a body as if it were a prison (the Gnostic and neo-Platonic idea), and ascend to a lofty spiritual cloud there to strum a gilt harp saeculae saeculorum.
It is equally vital that we unlearn the Pietist indifference to doctrine which has allowed so much of this collapse to take place. Doctrine matters, and there is such a thing as heresy, and we must not be afraid to speak of heresy and orthodoxy as evil and good, respectively.
But this does not mean the mentally disabled who cannot be catechized are not saved. They in fact have nothing to unlearn; they are saved through the grace imparted to their spirits noetically through the life-giving and sustaining sacraments of Baptism, Chrismation and the Eucharist. In the Orthodox, we commune them with 1 Corinthians 11:27-34 in mind, which, unlike those churches using the Revised Common Lectionary, we still actually bother to read on Maundy Thursday; we know that in their innocence, they are not actively sinning, and we hold that while psychologically they may not be able to identify or understand the Eucharist, they are more than capable of discerning the body and blood of our Lord
noetically, which is in fact more than can be said about many leading theologians who have openly embraced Gnosticism, Arianism and other ancient errors or rejected a literal interpretation of the Eucharist, or indeed, I would argue, whoever made the indefensible decision to delete 1 Corinthians 11:27-34 from the Revised Common Lectiomary.
