Trinitarian Creation in Psalm 32
Monday of last week, the day after Trinity Sunday on the Roman calendar, I was struck by the Trinitarian view of creation while saying psalm 321 at Matins. This is not a scholarly article that digs into early sources, but I will note the Haydock commentary states “the Fathers here find the blessed Trinity expressed,” if you want some assurance my reading is not wholly eccentric.
For the word of the Lord is right, and all his works are done with faithfulness. He loveth mercy and judgment; the earth is full of the mercy of the Lord. By the word of the Lord the heavens were established; and all the power of them by the spirit of his mouth: Gathering together the waters of the sea, as in a vessel; laying up the depths in storehouses. Let all the earth fear the Lord, and let all the inhabitants of the world be in awe of him. For he spoke and they were made: he commanded and they were created.
I would not present this as a proof text of the Trinity to someone who wanted to debate the doctrine. It does tell us God can be considered in terms of Word and Spirit and that these are distinct from each other, but does not distinguish them as separate persons differentiated by sonship and spiration. It is not a proof but a place where later revelation, our having received knowledge of the role of the Word in creation from John the Theologian, casts light into the shadows of what came before. We who have heard “without him was made nothing that was made” and who know the Spirit is not a vague presence but “another Paraclete” will hear something very significant when we pray, “by the word of the Lord the heavens were established; and all the power of them by the spirit of his mouth.”
This kind of interpretation will seem bizarre if we try to understand the psalms primarily as a product of a particular culture grounded in a particular time and place, but it is not at all strange if we believe God is the primary author of the scriptures. When I first started reading the Douay-Rheims Bible as a new convert I found many of the headings giving messianic meanings to the psalms felt very strange and forced, as when Psalm 21 is labeled Christ’s passion and the conversion of the Gentiles. Years later it became possible to see Jesus himself applied this psalm to his passion, speaking the lines “my God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me,” from the cross. Even more explicitly, he quotes psalm 109, “my Lord said to my Lord, sit on my right hand,” to describe his unique relationship with the Father, introducing Trinitarian theology to the reading of the psalms. This method of interpretation is announced almost as a principle in Luke 24 when the risen Christ tells the apostles, “all things must needs be fulfilled, which are written in the law of Moses, and in the prophets, and in the psalms, concerning me.”
The unease many modern readers feel at these interpretations, the sense that they are forced and removed from historical context, is the result of a very low sense of the inspiration of the sacred text— a sense that they are a basically human production vaguely elevated by an atmosphere of ‘inspiration’. Is God the primary author of the psalms? Is God wise enough to inspire something that is not immediately understood? Do both the New Testament and early Christian tradition teach there are messianic and trinitarian meanings in the psalms? It’s hard to see how there could be a coherent Christian theology without answering ‘yes’ to all 3.
When we pray the psalms we shouldn’t necessarily be looking for proof texts to defend doctrine, but if we believe in the New Testament we should not be afraid to believe the ‘word’ and ‘spirit’ mentioned here are the 2nd and 3rd persons of the Trinity, and that we are announcing God’s having in some way revealed himself as Trinity from the first moment of creation. We don’t need it to stand as a proof of the Trinity because we already have those proofs elsewhere. We should be confident when we pray this psalm that we are speaking words that tell us about God’s inner trinitarian life, and that when the psalm later says “behold the eyes of the Lord are on them that fear him: and on them that hope in his mercy” it is the mercy of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit and no other God but this.
I’ll be back soon with some more short poems and with Chapter 2 of the story I’m writing for my kids. Be sure to check out Chapter 1 and consider subscribing if you’d like a physical copy of the finished product, or just want to support the creation of new children’s literature that is silly and bizarre but grounded in more elevated ideas.
The numbering of the psalms in the Septuagint and Vulgate editions are slightly different than most modern translations that follow the Hebrew division. In most cases the numbers are behind by 1, so that psalm 32 would be the same as psalm 33 in most translations.