By RAY WADDLE

The oddest news from the summer cycle of official church assemblies was also the most serious-minded -- the Presbyterians’ grapple with the Trinity, Christianity’s most pivotal and most complex doctrine.

A Presbyterian Church (USA) study invites churchgoers to consider alternative words for the traditional “Father, Son and Holy Spirit.” They include unusual entries -- like, “Fire That Consumes, Sword That Divides, and Storm That Melts Mountains.”

This provoked laugh-out-loud ridicule among ideologues looking to find fault. But the phrases aren’t mandatory, only suggestions for discussion. The denomination is not officially changing – I repeat, not changing -- the traditional language.

Yet just by examining the faith’s most mysterious belief at all, the Presbyterians are going where few churches dare. The news exposed a deficit in American Christian practice -- a curious neglect in education about the meaning of the Trinity itself, its idea of divine love in the world.

This lack, over decades, has prepared the arrival of various spiritual mutations to fill the void and enthrall a hungry public -- “The Da Vinci Code” (denying Jesus is divine), gnostic gospels (denying Jesus was human) and apocalyptic fiction (asserting a God who hates this world he made).

The Trinity, the idea that one God is three “persons,” is notoriously elusive, a confusion that American denominations demonstrate every day: churches have trouble keeping the three elements in balance. Some emphasize Holy Spirit over the other two. Others stress majestic Father God more than Son or Spirit. Legions more proclaim a personal Jesus who overwhelms the Trinity entirely.

The word “Trinity” is not found in the Bible, but the idea is implied. From early on, Christians experienced Jesus as God’s incarnated Son, the person who perfectly reflected the God of the Hebrews. Once Jesus physically left the scene, believers experienced a third presence, the Holy Spirit, which extended the feeling that Jesus was still among them, redeeming all of life.

Three personalities, one God? Skeptics call it nonsense, a glorified polytheism. Yet the church always insisted on the three-in-one definition, a three-dimensional expression of divine compassion. Ignore the biblical creator Father, and it leads to a hatred of creation, ecological hostility and anti-Semitism too, a rejection of the Old Testament and Judaism. Subtract Holy Spirit, and it invites a mean-minded self-righteousness. Remove Jesus, and it isn’t Christianity.

Some philosophers wonder if the Trinity is God’s way of overcoming God’s loneliness: If God is love, then there has to be a relationship within the divine being so love can thrive. Love (the Father) and beloved (the Son) ???are different faces or moments of the same God.

Phil Leftwich of the Middle Tennessee Presbytery (overseeing 94 churches) hopes to sponsor conversations soon on the Trinity -- not whether to call it “Giver, Gift and Giving” and such -- but something bigger, an effort to clarify why the Trinity is worth the fuss in the first place.

“It’s not a trio of gods but a single divine being -- the expression of the will and actions of God,” he says.

“In a post-Christian world, the Trinity separates Christianity from other philosophical ideas. This is an opportunity for really good conversation.”