Say Yes to the Trinity

Say Yes to the Trinity

June 2, 2020

I have on occasion asked people attending some Bible study I was leading how many times the phrase Father, Son, and Holy Spirit appears in the New Testament. No one has ever known for sure, but they’ve all been sure that it must appear dozens of times at least. They are surprised, shocked even, when I tell them that appears only once. They may not even believe me so unlikely does that assertion seem to them. There are other places where something a bit like the classical Trinitarian formulation appears. 2 Corinthians for example ends “The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with all of you.” 2 Corinthians 13:13. Yet The only place in the Bible where Christianity’s foundational Trinitarian formula appears more or less in pure form is at the end of the Gospel of Matthew. There the risen Christ says to the disciples “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.” Matthew 28:19. That’s it. That’s all there is. The roots of Christian Trinitarianism are in the Bible, but classical Trinitarianism is not. It took Christianity over three hundred years after Jesus to develop a complete Trinitarian theology.

So what is Trinitarian theology, and should we keep it or move to a more unitarian understanding of God and Jesus Christ? The Christian doctrine of the Trinity is a way of understanding or at least talking about the nature of God. It says that God is “Three in One.” God is both three “Persons” and one God at the same time. Trinitarian theology is monotheistic. It confesses the reality of one God. That one God however subsists as three Persons traditionally named the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. God is not complete without each of them, yet each of them is fully God in its own right. No, that doesn’t make any sense. More about that below. Trinitarianism understands God as being what to our human minds nothing can be, three separate and distinct entities  that are at the same time one entity. Three and One, One and Three at the same time.

People have been trying to reduce the Trinity to something that makes rational sense ever since the doctrine reached its classical form in the fourth century CE. They have called each of the Persons a separate manifestation of a particular aspect of God’s being. The Christian tradition says no, that’s a heresy. They’ve said that sometimes God appears as Father, sometimes as Son, and sometimes as Holy Spirit. The Christian tradition says no, that’s a heresy. They say the Father is the Creator God, the Son is Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit is God present in creation. It may not hurt much to think of the Trinitarian God that way, but the Christian tradition still says no, that’s a heresy. None of these ways of explaining the Trinity retains the fullness of the Trinity. I’ve often said to people that there is no way to rationalize the Trinity that isn’t a heresy. I’ve also told them that’s OK, heretics are often more interesting than orthodox people. Still, I’ve never heard any Christian lay person say anything about the Trinity that isn’t a heresy.

So if the Trinity makes no sense and nearly anything we say about it is a heresy, does it have any value that makes it worth keeping? After all, we all like things to make sense. We want one to be one and three to be three—period. When someone says One is Three and Three is One as we do in Trinitarian theology our rational and rationalizing minds say Wrong. One is one and three is three. Three isn’t one and one isn’t three. I can have one thing or I can have three things, but I can’t have anything that is one and three at the same time. Fair enough, yet I am convinced that the Trinity has immense value as a foundational way of understanding, or rather not understanding, God. I will discuss the value of the Trinity here under three rubrics, that the Trinity makes God dynamic, that it makes God relational, and that it preserves the mystery of God. I will then briefly discuss one big problem with the way we always name the Persons of the Trinity.

The three Persons of the Trinity are not static. They are constantly in motion moving with, through, and around each other in an eternal cosmic dance. Theologians call this movement perichoresis, which means dancing around. I do not mean to demean anyone’s religious faith, but compare the dynamism of the Christian Trinity with the God of Islam. Islam places enormous stress on the radical oneness of God. It rejects anything that in any way detracts or even seems to detract from the total oneness of God. There is truth in this understanding of God. There is indeed no God but God as the Islamic confession of faith confesses. There is great unifying power in the oneness of God, for if all is one then all is united. Yet somehow Islam’s radical oneness of God makes God seem static to me, inert, unmoving. Perhaps Islam doesn’t intend to convey God as static, yet especially when you combine the radical oneness of God with the orthodox Islamic belief that the Koran comes directly from God and can never change you get an image of God as frozen in time. Remote. Unrelational. It’s not that Muslims don’t have a valid relationship with God. They do. Yet to me the God of Islam just seems relatively static and unmoving.

Not so with the Trinitarian God of Christianity. This God is in constant motion in the eternal dance of perichoresis. This God is a God of infinite energy, of constant energetic motion that fills the universe with power and light. This dynamic God models sacred dynamism for God’s people. This God says I am eternal motion, so you be in motion too. Don’t stand still. Keep moving. Keep moving forward to new insights, new truths; for my truth is infinitely greater than your truth, and I always have more truth for you to discover. So keep moving. Keep seeking. It’s the way of the Trinitarian God.

God is dynamic, and God is dynamic in relationship. Relationship is the very essence of the Trinitarian God. Of course God is in relationship with creation, but to God creation is an other. It is not God. The relationships between the Persons of the Trinity are different. They are mystical relationships of Self with Self, with Self as both the same and different simultaneously. Relationship isn’t something the Trinity does, it is something the Trinity is. In God the distinction between being and doing disappears. The Trinitarian God is relationship, and the Trinitarian God calls us into relationship with God, with all of creation, with each other, and even with ourselves.

God is relationship, and the nature of that relationship is love. If God is love—and God is—then God’s relationships must all be relationships of love. Try thinking of it this way. In God’s internal relationships we see demonstrated the three-fold love of the Great Commandment, love of God, neighbor, and self. Each Person of the Trinity loves the other Persons of the Trinity, yet those other Persons are both different from each other and the same as each other at the same time. Each of them is also God. So when the Holy Spirit for example loves the Son she loves God, another, and herself all at once. I know. It doesn’t make sense. It’s just true.

The Trinitarian God is love in motion, and God is both so much love and so much motion that the love that God is spills out of God into creation. God’s love in motion can’t be constrained. It pours out and brings creation into being. It even pour over and into the likes of us fallible, mortal earthlings. If we’ll let it God’s dynamic love will move us the way it moves in God. Less perfectly of course, for we certainly are not ourselves God, but still. When we truly feel God’s love filling our hearts and moving our souls we will move. We will join the heavenly dance of God. We’ll do it here on earth, spreading God’s love for all people to everyone who needs it, spreading it into the world’s broken and hurting places of which there are so many.

I’ll say it again. I know it well. I’ve said it many times before. None of this makes any sense. That undeniable truth however brings us to the last great virtue of Trinitarian theology that I want to discuss with you. Perhaps the greatest virtue of Trinitarian theology is precisely that it makes no sense. It insists that the impossible is true. It says One is Three and Three are One. Not some of the time, all of the time. It says that something called a Person both is and isn’t fully God at the same time. It says that when a Person of the Trinity relates to the other Persons of the Trinity that Person relates to him/her/itself at the same time because the other Person both is and isn’t the same as the Person doing the relating. It makes no sense, that’s clear; but how can it not making any sense be its greatest virtue?

Trinity not making sense is its greatest virtue because of what it is that Trinitarian talk talks about. It talks about God. It is human speech expressing human thoughts about that which utterly transcends human speech and human thoughts. That transcends human speech immeasurably. Infinitely. Like all theology Trinitarian theology is an attempt to define in human terms that which absolutely cannot be defined in human terms. That’ why every time we think we’ve got the Trinity figured out we turn out to be wrong. After we’ve wracked our brains for a while trying to figure it out we realize that we will never figure it out. We can’t figure it out. No one can. It remains always an unsolvable mystery.

That’s a great virtue because that which it seeks to describe is itself an unsolvable mystery. Trinitarian thinking preserved that mystery. It is an unsolvable mystery about an unsolvable mystery. The way that Trinity makes no sense points to the reality that God is infinitely beyond the capacity of our human minds to understand. It’s easy to forget that foundational truth about God. We do it all the time. That truth is that whenever we think we’ve got God figured out and reduced to concepts our human minds can grasp we’re wrong. The same is true of the concept Trinity. Every time we think we’ve got it figured out we’re wrong. We learn that the same is true of God. Making no sense is Trinity’s greatest virtue because it preserves the mystery of God better than any other theology ever has or ever will. That more than anything else is the reason why we must hold on to our Trinitarian understanding of God.

In closing let me discuss briefly one thing about traditional Trinitarian language that is not a virtue. The Christian faith has traditionally used exclusively male language for two of the Persons of the Trinity and gender neutral language for the third. Some people say the Trinity is two men and a bird. Many Christians today avoid especially the Father and Son terms for the First and Second Persons of the Trinity. We often say Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer instead of Father, Son and Holy Spirit. I suppose that’s less offensive to our gender equality sensibilities than Father and Son, but why don’t we avoid the problem by changing Father to Mother? Feminist theologians like the great Elizabeth Johnson have taught us that feminine language for God works as well, and as badly, as masculine language for God. They have also taught us how harmful using male only language for God really is. So let’s not get stuck using only the traditional language for the Persons of the Trinity. Mother works as well as or better than Father. Try it. It could change how you think about God, and that might be a very good thing. Just remember please always when you think of God to think Trinity.