What's the Deal with the Trinity?
Jun 21, 02:54 PM
"I’ve given up trying to understand it," my friend said, shaking her head in near-exasperation. I heard defeat in her voice.
And it’s not that my friend isn’t bright (she leads a department as an executive for a national firm). She’s well-versed in the Christian faith, having gone to church every week all her life. But we were talking about the Trinity, and she had concluded it was impossible to grasp.
I’ve heard others share a related conclusion: "I just don’t see why you need it. Why complicate things with trying to talk about the Trinity?" Some have called attempts to understand it "conceptual acrobatics." Can’t we just say there is God and leave it at that?
Let me confess that for decades, the Trinity seemed to me little more than a doctrine I accepted as true, yet thought had little to do with my life or faith. I experienced God in varied ways--his fatherly awe-inspiring presence, for instance. Or his forgiving kindness in Jesus. Or his moving in people through the Holy Spirit.
But even with those ways I experienced God’s three aspects, the Trinity itself did little to elicit awe or devotion. God was there, yes. Jesus—well, of course he was divine. And the Spirit, well, that was how God happened to move and function.
But not much more.
Something happened, though.
Part of the change has had to do with noticing how much the language of the Trinity pops up in the worship services of my faith tradition. How we use Father, Son and Holy Spirit together time after time in phrases such as "In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit."
And I noticed how often in the New Testament the three names appear together in the same breath.
I stood back a moment from Gospel passages to notice again the intimacy with which Jesus prays to the Father. I recalled the way the Father communicates his affection to his beloved Son. And I pondered Jesus sending the Spirit, the Counselor, mentioning him with clear familiarity. All these sketch out a portrait of loving relationship.
And some of the change in me has had to with seeing how the prayers of earlier generations of Christians seemed soaked in awed awareness of this three-personed God. They talked about the threeness of God not for intellectual sport, but because they knew the personal richness of the God to whom they spoke.
That made me wonder. It suggested that there might be more to the God that I know and worship than I had thought. I began to think that in my own teaching I’ve aimed too much of the discussion about the Trinity to the head, or I should say, perhaps, over our heads, instead of aiming at the heart.
For the images that have lately helped me most hark back to experiences I have in the richest moments of communion with others. I mean times we sit as children in a mother’s lap. I mean the kinds of motions of the heart felt when we look affectionately at a spouse or relative. Or times we sit around a table with a group of friends and know we belong.
For to picture God with Trinitarian names reminds us that God is deeply personal. The language alone—Father, Son, even Spirit (with roots in the word breath)--suggests relationship, not stiff science. Such vocabulary helps us realize how little God is a lonely, solitary force. And it tells me how amazing, how relational, God himself is. In his very being, God knows what it means to share in the richness of love and affection. Even before time, God’s nature was to relate.
Writes Brian McClaren, "If … there’s only one God but not three Persons within the one God, then we would expect that the ultimate reality behind the universe could be silence. It could be power. It could be peace. It could be domination." But it would not be love.
"Because for love to exist," he writes, "there has to be a sharing and there has to be a communication and there has to be a self-giving."
One more thing helps me here. Sometimes we throw up our hands and say, Well, the Trinity is a mystery. Since we cannot fully grasp it all we content ourselves with staying confused and confounded.
But there’s another way to think about mystery. A way related to the relational God I’ve been pondering. For we speak of mystery not simply in terms of things we cannot understand. We also speak of the mystery of things that touch us deeply
As professor of theology Steve Guthrie reminds us in his book, Creator Spirit, to say the word mystery is not to leave behind the world of the personal. "It is persons with whom we speak and who speak to us," he writes, "and it is persons who remain always beyond what we can say about them. It is persons whom we most genuinely speak of ‘knowing,’ and it is persons who are most truly beyond our knowing, who always remain, to some degree, mysterious. Indeed, the mysterious is preeminently the domain of the personal."
He gives some examples: "Things (how a television works; how many galaxies there are in the universe) may be unknown—but they are not mysterious per se. They are things that could be known, given additional research and exploration. But no amount of data or scientific analysis could ever eliminate the ineffable wonder I felt when I first held my children; no philosophical speculation could ever resolve the mystery of my wife’s face."
The Trinity is a mystery, then, not in the sense that we shrink back in despair of ever knowing God, but in the sense that we can spend a lifetime familiarizing our hearts with him.
For the Trinity is about relationship. God shows us in this threeness in one what God is like—relentlessly personal, as Eugene Peterson put it. And God comes to us not so much as an idea, but with an invitation. He wants to include us, too, in that heavenly, familial communion.
It’s simpler, when you think of it like that. Simple, and wonderful.