“The Father incomprehensible, the Son incomprehensible, the whole thing incomprehensible.”
Yes, it’s Trinity Sunday again — the only Sunday in the Christian year dedicated not to a story, not to a feast, not to a person, but to a doctrine. And the quote I just gave you is not, of course, a part of the doctrine itself. It’s Dorothy Sayers’ satirical summary of the doctrine as presented in the Athanasian Creed.
The creed itself is far more solemn — and far longer:
“Such as the Father is, such is the Son: and such is the Holy Ghost.
The Father uncreate, the Son uncreate: and the Holy Ghost uncreate.
The Father incomprehensible, the Son incomprehensible: and the Holy Ghost incomprehensible…”
And so it goes on — and on — and on. What I just read is only a small sample. The full creed is more than ten times that length!
Earlier this year at Concord Uniting Church, we recited almost the entire thing on Good Friday. I’m fairly sure most people had never heard of it before, let alone recited it aloud. And the real question, of course, was: did any of us understand it?
Years ago my friend Sheikh Mansour told me that a Christian friend of his in Iran once begged him to explain the Trinity. Mansour said, “It doesn’t make any more sense to me than it does to you”, and then he asked me the question many have asked: Why do we stick with this craziness?
Now, I’m actually a big fan of the doctrine of the Trinity — not because it is simple, but because I see it as the Church’s honest attempt to speak about God as based on our Scriptures. For years, though, I did see the whole debate as largely academic — the domain of philosophers and theologians — but this year something struck me afresh: Athanasius — the man most responsible for formulating the doctrine — was not just an armchair academic. He was a legend!
I’ve been reading Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, which includes a surprisingly detailed biography of Athanasius. I confess: I had no idea. I had pictured Athanasius as a brilliant but bookish old professor — the sort who can explain metaphysics but can’t change a tyre. I couldn’t have been more wrong!
Athanasius was a thinker, yes — but he was also a doer. He was a pastor, a preacher, and a strategist. He could hold his own in the council chamber as well as in the desert. At the Council of Nicaea in 325, he helped hammer out the Church’s confession of the faith. After Nicaea he became the bishop of Alexandria — and a great warrior for truth.
You might have thought that winning the debate at Nicaea, with the emperor’s backing, would have secured him a peaceful and prosperous future. In truth, though, it was after they made him bishop that his troubles really began!
Athanasius had enemies — men he had done battle with in the Trinitarian controversy who didn’t disappear when the council ended. They regrouped. They whispered in the emperor’s ear, and ten years after Nicaea, in 335, Athanasius was deposed by the Council of Tyre and exiled by Constantine — the very emperor who had been his biggest fan!
Two years after that, though, Constantine died, and his sons reversed the decision. Athanasius returned in triumph to Alexandria, but within another two years an enemy bishop was installed in his place, and he had to flee again, this time to Rome!
Athanasius spent ten years in Rome, ministering to the people and winning their love, but in 356, Emperor Constantius II ordered his arrest. Athanasius escaped by night and hid among the monks of the Egyptian desert.
In total, Athanasius was exiled five times, and the charges against him were wild: murder, sorcery, treason, and — wait for it — tax evasion!
The most colourful accusation was his alleged murder of Bishop Arsenius. His enemies claimed that Athanasius had killed Arsenius and cut off his hand for use in magic rituals. The prosecution’s case collapsed spectacularly, though, when Athanasius produced Arsenius alive at the trial — with both hands intact!
“Athanasius contra mundum”, they said of him — ‘Athanasius against the world’.
Interestingly, he was never charged with heresy. No one dared take him on where it mattered. They couldn’t defeat him on the Scriptures, so they attacked his character. They couldn’t silence his theology, so they tried to destroy his reputation.
This all sounds very familiar. As many of you know, Google recently accused me of supporting terrorism and permanently deleted my YouTube account. What was the real issue? Well … I’m pretty sure it had nothing to do with me supporting terrorism.
For Athanasius, the real issue was never academic. The doctrine of the Trinity may be complex in its formulation and incomprehensible in its fullness, but for Athanasius it expressed a simple, central truth that he refused to surrender:
We will never get more of God than what we get in Jesus Christ. And when God gives us the Spirit, God gives us God’s self — not simply some spiritual assistant.
This, Athanasius believed, is as faithful to the Scriptures as it is to our experience. It is God who comes to us in Jesus. He is, as Saint Paul says, “the visible image of the invisible God.” (Colossians 1:15)
Athanasius didn’t cling to a doctrine. He clung to God, and the God he clung to was the God he met in Jesus — the God who comes close, who takes flesh, who breathes His Spirit into us.
That is the Trinity: God above us, God with us, God within us – not three gods, not a maths problem, but one God who refuses to stay distant.
And that is something worth standing for, even if the whole world stands against you.
First published in Father Dave’s weekly newsletter – May 29, 2026
