Father, Son, and Holy Spirit: One God and One Truth

Photo by Chris Karidis on Unsplash

Trinity Sunday comes each year, the week after Christians commemorate the descent of the Holy Spirit on the believers at Pentecost. It comes at the end of the longer liturgical cycle of Lent, Holy Week, and Pentecost, before we enter ordinary time. Through this cycle, Christians liturgically experience the one true God, as He revealed Himself over time and in time to His creatures, to save a disordered and dying creation. 

Lent revealed a Creator, who made humans for a purpose, within a larger purpose for everything He made. That purpose was love and life. He made us to live abundantly (with bodies, and souls, and spirits ordered harmoniously by love for God and our neighbor). He revealed this way of life and love through His Law and prophets. 

And yet, we humans chose and choose ways that disorder our bodies, souls, and spirits, and harm others. We disregard God’s wisdom and purpose for us. That is what sin is. And sin, as it infects creation, community, and us, leads to deception, desolation, disturbance, disease, decay and death. 

Lent also revealed that this creator, this source of all that is, doesn’t want death for His creation or us creatures. He chose and chooses to interact. He made promises to Adam and Eve, Abraham and Sarah. He freed slaves and gave them a written transcript of His mind and intended order. “He spoke by the prophets.” This God is not some distant deist deity, setting spheres in motion and deserting his creatures, passionless to their fate. No, this God wants to bring everything back to life, back to Him. This God “wants all people to be saved and to come to a knowledge of the truth” (1 Ti 2:4). He is not just the Creator, not just the source of all that is. He is Father, true father, beyond any earthly father, the archetype of fatherhood. That is why he pleads for his children to turn from destruction, turn back to him, repent. 

This Father, “so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son” (Jn 3:16) to  reveal further the divine nature. His “Word (co-eternal with Him) became flesh and made His dwelling among us” (Jn 1:14). And not only was this “Word with God, … the Word was God” (Jn 1:1), the Father’s eternally begotten Son. God is not some isolated monad. “In the beginning” (Jn 1:1), God is relationship: Father and Son, a relationship of love.

In Holy Week, Father and Son freely and willingly sacrificed to reveal this love on the cross. God the Son offered Himself “for the sins of the whole world” (1 Jn 2:2), for everything that is messed up in us. God the Father endured the suffering of His Son, demonstrating “his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Rom 5:8). And then He rose. Forgiveness, a new start, a new life, a relationship with a living God the Father and a living God the Son. Two separate relationships with the one God.

And then came Pentecost. As the disciples waited in the upper room after Jesus ascended. Something…someone…descended on them like tongues of fire. He came upon those gathered, and within those gathered, and sent those gathered out into the world to proclaim the good news: that the ultimate sacrifice for sin has been made, that death is defeated, that abundant life in God is possible, now and for eternity. There is nothing, no barrier, to our being embraced by the love of God to become love–not the past messes we have made of our lives, not our present mistakes or confusion, not any evil forces in this world. “Nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” (Rom 8:39).

And that Holy Spirit, within, upon, and around us gives us a third relationship with the one God, testifying “with our spirit that we are God’s children” (Ro 8:16). We can have a relationship with our heavenly Father. We can have a relationship with Jesus, His Son. And we have a relationship with the Holy Spirit. Three persons, One God, who “is love.” (1 Jn 4:8,16)

While he walked the earth, Jesus told his disciples this would happen. Before he ascended, even before he was crucified, he gave a long speech on the night he knelt as a slave to wash the feet of his disciples. He told them he would be betrayed and that they would abandon him. He told them that he is “the way and the truth and the life,” that “no one comes to the Father except through me” (Jn 14:6). He said, “if you really know me, you will know my Father as well.” (Jn 14:7). “I am in the Father and … the Father is in me.” (Jn 14:11).

And after this, he began to tell them about the Holy Spirit. “If you love me, keep my commands,” He said. “And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another advocate to help you and be with you forever – the Spirit of truth” (Jn 14:15). 

A bit later, He continued to teach his disciples: “As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. Now remain in my love…. My command is this: love each other” (15:9,12). But remaining in Christ’s love, loving each other, is not something that comes naturally or easily. We need help, someone on our side, an advocate, someone who can be “our refuge and strength, an ever-present help in trouble,” as the Psalmist wrote (Ps 46:1)

He warned his disciples that they were not going to have an easy time living by different rules from the world, following an invisible leader. “The time is coming,” he said, “when anyone who kills you will think they are offering a service to God” (Jn 16:2). He then told them that although he was “going to him who sent me” (Jn 16:5), to the Father, He was not abandoning them. “Very truly I tell you, it is for your good that I am going away. Unless I go away, the Advocate will not come to you; but if I go, I will send him to you” (Jn 16:7).

It seems odd for Jesus to say that it is for our good that He is going away. But for God’s purpose to begin a counter-cultural movement of life and blessing to extend “from Jerusalem, to Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth” (Acts 1:8), it was necessary. Jesus, the Logos, the Word of God in the flesh could only be in one place at one time. That is what incarnate means. He could minister to and teach a few hundred people at a time. He could have intimate friendship with twelve. Now he was pouring out his Spirit on all flesh. The Spirit is everywhere, always, making Jesus present “where two or three gather” in his name (Mt 18:20). God, right now, is teaching and is in intimate friendship with billions. By His Holy Spirit, all humanity can know God, His life and blessing.

And what His Spirit teaches now is what Jesus taught, the Way of salvation through relationship with God, knowing and being known by Him. The Spirit reveals our nature and God’s nature. 

Some of His revelation is about the “world being pulled over our eyes,” to paraphrase a line from the Matrix. As Jesus told the disciples, the Spirit “will prove the world to be in the wrong about sin and righteousness and judgment: about sin, because people do not believe in me; about righteousness, because I am going to the Father, where you can see me no longer; and about judgment, because the prince of this world now stands condemned” (Jn 16:8-11).

Jesus lived a sinless life, and yet the world decided He was a threat. He needed to be humiliated and executed as a criminal. He defines righteousness, defines humanity. His life of humility, love and sacrifice has been vindicated, received by the Father, both His sacrifice for sins on the cross, and His humanity at “the right hand of the father.” And He defeated the Prince of this world, Satan, disarming him of his most powerful weapon of manipulation, the threat of death. 

 “When … the Spirit of truth, comes, he will guide you into all the truth. He will not speak on his own; he will speak only what he hears, and he will tell you what is yet to come. He will glorify me because it is from me that he will receive what he will make known to you” (Jn 16:13-14). The Holy Spirit’s mission is also to guide the community of believers in mission, across vast differences of time and geography and culture, and to teach the church how to be faithful, now, in all places, all cultures, all times, and all circumstances.

In recent years these verses from John 16 have been twisted to assert that God is now revealing something that contradicts what He previously revealed. Cultural changes in the understanding of humanity, community, and sexuality are aspects of a new “truth” that God’s Spirit into which God  is leading the world. The problem with this “logic,” apart from the fact that these “new truths” are actually very old–fully accepted by the pagan Roman culture that crucified Jesus–is that God doesn’t change. 

God is beyond human time. He is outside of time. There is no progress in God. Unlike humans who can decide to change our identities like we change our socks, “the Father of the heavenly lights, … does not change like shifting shadows” (Ja 1:17). As the hymn taken from that scripture says, “there is no shadow of turning with thee.” Whom God revealed Himself to be, in the past, is who He is now. He may reveal more of His nature in relationship with His creatures. But He is always revealing who He has always been. That is true of the Holy Spirit. He who descended as fire on the Apostles on Pentecost, is who hovered over the chaos in Genesis 1 to bring about creation, is the fire that descended on Mt Sinai, when Moses was given the Law, is that fire who teaches the church and can be in us.

Monotheism is out of fashion in our postmodern age, where truth is contextual, determined by communities or even individuals. Whose “truth” prevails is ultimately about the will to power, and the ability to control language. What you can’t express, you can’t think. Thank you Neitsche, Derrida, Foucault, and Gramsci.

But philosophies and culture-shaping programs run into a buzzsaw when they meet monotheism. If there is one God (even One who is also Father, Son, and Holy Spirit), then there is One Truth. Jesus said, “I am … the Truth.” That truth is God. That truth is what the Spirit of God gives individually, and more importantly as community. 

In time the Spirit led the Church into deeper understanding, and thereby deeper relationship with God. This has been articulated in the Nicene Creed, which a peculiar people, loved by the Father, redeemed by the Son, inspired by the Holy Spirit, adopted to provide a standard by which to measure true speech about God.

All that belongs to the Father is mine,” said Jesus. “That is why I said the Spirit will receive from me what he will make known to you” (Jn 16:15). 

Scott T. Kisker is Professor of the History of Christianity and Associate Dean for Master’s Programs at United Theological Seminary. He serves on Firebrand’s editorial board.