What Is a Trinity?
I have seen a significant increase in Trinity traffic online of late. People get pretty worked up about it, and I understand that. It’s an important doctrine, albeit one that few, if any, can satisfactorily explain. Consider this simple closing remark from the apostle Paul to the church at Corinth.
The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all
– Luke 10:29, ESV
Similar greetings are strewn throughout the New Testament. In this instance we have mention of Jesus and his grace. We have the less specific use of “God,” and we have specific mention of the Holy Spirit and fellowship of the Spirit
Some claim one cannot be a true Christ-follower and not believe in the Trinity. “It is an essential doctrine to the Christian faith,” they say. “You have to believe in the Trinity to be saved!” In response, I would immediately ask, “Which Trinity do you mean?” If I query thirty-five people, asking them to define the Trinity, I’ll get thirty-five different responses. It is more likely that the mandate here is that I must believe in the Trinity the same way they understand or misunderstand it.
I will agree to the essentiality of acknowledging that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are all fully God, but how that triad constitutes “one” is a mystery too vast for me to wrap my mind around. And yet, we are going to ponder that very thing in this blog posting.
One common, subtle misstep is the one wherein we are quick to agree that “God is the Father, Jesus is the Son, and the Holy Spirit is some manifestation that we don’t fully understand.” The distinction is so subtle that it is very easy to miss. I have heard well-studied theologians make this misstatement. The reality is that…
The Father is God.
The Son is God.
The Spirit is God.
To further complicate things, the term “Trinity” is not found anywhere in the Bible. Like the term “rapture,” Trinity is a human term—an attempt to explain or describe something we find it terribly difficult to explain or describe. Others prefer the term “Godhead” to describe three persons in one God, equal and eternal, unified yet distinct. But Godhead doesn’t define the concept any better than Trinity does. It is simply another term for the same puzzling concept.
If the term Trinity is new to you, a starting place is to know that it is humanity’s attempt to explain three in one, or three but one, or three while one, or three that are/is one. See? It’s difficult to explain or understand. How do we have God the Father, and God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit, while accepting that we worship one God rather than three.
Attempts to Conceptualize Trinity
Attempts to help us understand the concept of Trinity often come as an offering of synonyms. Some will say, “It’s a ‘tri-unity,'” or “It’s a way to understand the ‘triune’ God.” I don’t find those helpful at all. Just like Godhead, it attempts to explain a concept we don’t understand by labeling it with another word. That’s not an explanation or a definition.
Not surprisingly, many attempt to explain the Trinity by comparing it to tangible things we do understand. Examples include three leaves on one clover or an egg with the shell, yolk, and white. Each one object, but with three distinct parts. One of the most popular similitudes offered is the three states of water analogy. Water can be frozen (ice), liquid (water), or vapor (steam or fog). They are all three water, but in different forms. It’s an intriguing analogy but it fails when we consider that water can be in only one of those states at a time. It is ice or water, or steam. It is never all three at the same time.
God is Father, Son, and Spirit at all times and in all places. Some argue this as a logical impossibility suggesting, rather, that God moves between those forms, meaning when God is Spirit, he is not Father or Son, and while God is Son, he is not Spirit or Father. Others suggest a similar construct, with just a slight tweak, saying that God is one, but he expresses himself in whatever way is appropriate to the context. Such attempts to dismiss the Trinity are easily disproven from Scripture, and we will touch on that in a moment.
Trinity is Unique
Like the incarnation that we recently looked at, the concept of the Trinity is unique to the Christian faith. No other religious system teaches that there is only one God, yet three persons. Within that Trinity, we have the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, and each person in this triad has distinct functions and a distinct relationship to humanity. Yet, each is divine, equally, completely, and always, before the dawn of time and continuing beyond its ending.
One thing I find fascinating about the doctrine of the Trinity is that scripture assumes it is accepted and understood. It is not something that we can turn to book, chapter, and verse and find explicitly laid out—”This is what the Trinity is.” No, scripture just speaks of it as this implicitly understood and accepted reality where we all nod our heads and agree that we understand it.
Schema Yisrael
We get hints of the Trinity in the Schema Yisrael, usually referred to just as the “schema.” You’ll find it in the opening verses of Deuteronomy six.
Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one.
– Deuteronomy 6:4, ESV
The passage continues with what we later learn is “the greatest commandment,”1 that we are to love the Lord our God with all our heart, all our soul, and all our strength.2 So central is this concept to the Jewish faith that the Jews wrote it on their phylacteries. These are little strips of parchment that they would bind to their foreheads, wrists, breasts, etc. Morning and evening they would recite the Schema, “Hear oh Yisrael. Yahweh our God, Yahweh is one.”
All at the Same Time?
But what about those mentioned above who see God as one, but just manifesting in different ways (modes) at different times? That kind of makes sense, doesn’t it?
Not really, and without diving into it too deeply, it is a bad theology with crippling side effects. It is easily disproven by looking at a single event in the life of Jesus. When John baptized Jesus in the Jordan River in Galilee, the heavens opened, the Spirit descended as a dove, and the voice of the Father was heard from heaven. Note that we have all three persons in one scene, the Son in the water, the Spirit descending as a dove, and the Father speaking from the heavens—all three at the same time and in the same place.
And when Jesus was baptized, immediately he went up from the water, and behold, the heavens were opened to him, and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and coming to rest on him; and behold, a voice from heaven said, “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased.”
– Matthew 3:16-17, ESV
Matthew, Mark, and Luke all record an event in the life of Jesus wherein Jesus took Peter, James, and John with him to the top of an unnamed mountain, and there he was “transfigured” before their eyes. Jesus’ face changed, and his clothing became exceedingly bright. While in this transfigured state, Jesus met with Moses and Elijah. Some things happened indicating that the disciples were placing Jesus on-par with Moses and Elijah, failing to recognize his divine nature. The voice of the Father thundered from the cloud that had enveloped them, “This is my Son, my chosen one. Hear ye HIM!“
These examples, and many like them, place multiple persons of the Godhead in the same place at the same time. Hebrews speaks of the Son and the Spirit.3 Galatians speaks of the Son and the Father.4 In Matthew, Jesus speaks of all three, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.5 In Ephesians, Paul tells us that through Christ, we have access in one Spirit to the Father.6 In his discourse in John’s gospel, Jesus speaks of the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in the Son’s name.7 And again, in the very next chapter, he speaks of the Spirit who proceeds from the Father and how he will testify to and bear witness of the Son.8
My Encouragement to You
This is all heady stuff, I know. Some of you know that, by trade, I work in software development. This means I work in logic loops and established values. Nothing is vague or undefined. So, I find discussions like the Trinity rather unsettling, because I cannot wrap my mind around it. I cannot make it obey rules of logic as I understand them.
Let me encourage you with this: It is not imperative for us to understand the Trinity to accept it and believe it. The danger of even attempting to do so is to reduce the godness of God to a formula I can decipher. And anything I can wrap my mind around is not big enough to be my God!
To insist that for something to be true it must be something I can fully comprehend is to begin the process of defining God in my image rather than me in his image. Truth is truth whether I understand it or not.
Take the creation as an example. For starters try to mentally grasp the concept of “nothing.” Whatever you come up with as nothing, it’s wrong. We can’t grasp nothingness, because anything we imagine to be nothing is something, and something is not nothing! Yet, God spoke everything into existence with mere words. I don’t understand that, but I accept it. Ex-nihilo. Everything from nothing.
Seek the Lord while he may be found;
call upon him while he is near;
let the wicked forsake his way,
and the unrighteous man his thoughts;
let him return to the Lord, that he may have compassion on him,
and to our God, for he will abundantly pardon.
For my thoughts are not your thoughts,
neither are your ways my ways, declares the Lord.
For as the heavens are higher than the earth,
so are my ways higher than your ways
and my thoughts than your thoughts.
– Isaiah 55:6-9, ESV
Blessings upon you, my friends.
Victoriously in Christ!
– damon
DamonJGray.org
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1. Mark 12:29-30
2. Deuteronomy 6:5
3. Hebrews 9:14
4. Galatians 4:6
5. Matthew 28:19
6. Ephesians 2:18
7. John 14:26
8. John 15:26-27
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Funny thing, as I was reading, I kept thinking, “It’s called faith.” Faith to believe what we can’t see or understand. As you said (my “translation”), we make God awfully small if we’ll only believe what we, in hour human finite minds, can understand. I don’t want a God I can fully comprehend. I want the God of all knowledge, wisdom, power, providence, reason, etc. And I’ll stand on the faith He gives any day of the week!
Thanks for waking up my heart and mind today, Damon. God bless.
Yeah . . . that’s a great paraphrase, Susan.
I remember as I was growing up (we’re talking 6-10 years old) there was a book on my mother’s bookshelf titled “Your God is Too Small.” Of course, as I was just a youth, I never read the book, but I was so struck by the title that I pondered it at length, and here some 50 years later I still remember it.