Diary of a (Maybe) Retired Pastor

Pizza Theology (I Didn’t Know This! (2) )

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. ² He was in the beginning with God. ³ All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being.

John 1:1-3

You won’t be surprised to learn that one of my duties as a pastor was to teach baptism classes. For those of you belonging to a different tradition we only baptised adults and so baptism classes were always adult classes. Naturally, an important topic was the Trinity. I’ve never been very impressed with the classical analogies, using the sun or a stream, so in my early years I referred to particle wave duality, or the triple point of water, as much more satisfying analogies (the result of a former existence as a professional scientist!). But then I realised these were about as helpful to most people as the doctrine of the Trinity itself! So, I started talking about pizzas.

Pizzas are a shared experience. Everybody has chosen and ordered pizza, sliced pizza, and eaten pizza! Immediately there is common ground. And so, I asked them to imagine God as a pizza (apologies theologians – but this is the view from the pews!). The Trinity means that there is only one pizza, not three pizzas. It also means that the pizza cannot be sliced into three slices. Each person of the Trinity is the whole pizza all the time, at the same and every time – the persons are different and not the same, but there are not three pizzas. You know when students are engaging and beginning to grasp the topic when they offer alternative viewpoints. Once, one student suggested that we could imagine the pizza as being sliced horizontally so preserving the shape of the whole pizza, but then they realised that wouldn’t work because the pizza would still have been sliced in three – there would be three gods!

The last post chronicled my astonishment at recent modern teaching concerning the Trinity amongst evangelical circles. In pizza theology terms, what was taught (the eternal and essential subordination of the Son – remember that?) was that the Son, far from being the whole pizza, was just the salami on the pizza (or worse, a chunk of pineapple – who puts pineapple on pizza!). Apart from the gross distortion of the classical doctrine of the Trinity how does the salami (we won’t talk about the pineapple) accomplish salvation for us all?

This revised doctrine of the Trinity apparently penetrated the greater part of the evangelical world (although, not as far as yours truly – ignorance is bliss!). One of the other things I used to do was to help interview candidates for an international missionary organization. For some reason, I was always asked to focus on doctrine. Looking back, I realise candidates who had attended a certain theological college always gave rather “interesting” answers, not enough to disqualify them but enough to leave raised eyebrows! That college was, apparently, one of those penetrated by the new Trinitarian teaching. Maybe, I should have probed more deeply.

The sum of it all: the whole pizza and nothing but the whole pizza!