On the Trinity
Icon of the Holy Trinity by Rublev (Source: WikiCommons)
Last year on Trinity Sunday, I have to admit that I was slightly disappointed. On this Sunday of the year, I have a horrible penchant for a game I call “count the heresies.” Now, before anyone says otherwise, I do not support heretical preaching. But on Trinity Sunday for years and years, I have played this game, and at times the count has been quite impressive. But last year, there was nothing. Not even a whiff of heterodoxy. So on the way out of church as we all greeted the clergy, I met the preacher and said, “Peter, you ruined my Trinity Sunday. There wasn’t even a hint of heresy in that entire sermon!” He gave me a grin, thanked me, and then gave me the look that we all know in such lines that means “move on.”
I’m sure that we all have stories of well-intentioned preachers trying to do their best to communicate the mystery of the Trinity on this Sunday of the church’s calendar. St. Augustine of Hippo didn’t say this, but it is attributed to him and I wish that he had said it: “If you deny the Trinity, you will lose your soul. But if you try to understand the Trinity, you will lose your mind.” And that is the balancing act that preachers and congregations alike must tread when faced with the astonishing self-revelation of God. Some of the most egregious attempts to tackle the mystery that I’ve heard involve the infamous water, steam, and ice analogy (a modalist heresy, in which God exists as three modes of being rather than three distinct persons), or my favorite: God is like Neapolitan ice cream! He is chocolate, strawberry, and vanilla—three flavors, all ice cream! And yes, that’s another modalist heresy. In fact, all analogies will end up in heresy, so don’t use them—particularly in those short children’s sermons we all remember. God is not “like” other things. He is actually—and especially when we’re talking about his very substance—completely other.
Trying to describe the Trinity is not an easy thing to do. Nor should we imagine that describing God would be. But in that attempt to describe the indescribable, we have been given certain parameters, tools, insights—or, to use another word, revelation—to guide us. For some, even this has proven difficult. We all know of many who have tried to adapt the names of the Persons of the Trinity, often replacing Father, Son, and Spirit, with something without gender, such as Creator, Word, and Spirit, or Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer. This attempt, while likely attached to good intentions, is just as problematic as any other attempt to rewrite divine revelation. A general rule of thumb when describing God is, in fact, to follow his lead in this. But in this case, outlined above, there are at least three problems. One, if one Person of the Trinity is Creator, it implies that the other two Persons were created, and thus you have Unitarianism. Two, the name of Father and Son are not simply placeholders for One and Two, but rather speak to the very nature (ontology) of God, who is Father and Son eternally. It is the very nature of the Father that he is the Father of the Son, eternally. It is an eternal relationship signified by the names (i.e., being) of the Persons. Third, the attempt to assign different tasks to the different Persons of the Trinity, one creating, another redeeming, and another yet sustaining, undermines the unity of the Godhead. It is true that one Person may be a primary actor, but never without the entirety of the Godhead. God is not to be treated as three separate beings who happen to be on a committee. To say that the Spirit, for example, is not a part of the work of redemption is simply silly. Likewise, any reading of John, or many of Paul’s letters, will show that the Son was intimately involved in the creation.
The Church in her wisdom, though, knows that we need to focus on this essential doctrine, even if the mystery of it can undermine our attempts to describe it. And so on this Sunday of the year we have the only feast specifically dedicated to a doctrine. This isn’t the usual fare where we move through the life, death, resurrection, and ascension of Christ; this is a doctrine about the God who is three and yet one. It is so vitally important, however, that we need a fresh reminder of both its centrality and its truth. As Christians, we need to know that the word “God” is, in fact, shorthand for “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.”
While the doctrine of the Trinity is a mystery, it is not impossible to know its essential aspects. Doctrine is, after all, derived from God’s self-revelation. And in this case, the doctrine of the Trinity is the self-revelation of God’s very being. In the history of the Church, the doctrine can be traced back to the time of the apostles, even if its fuller expression would take some time to grasp. This is not to say that the fuller expression is out of line with the earliest witness, but that the fuller expression—in the Nicene Creed, for example—gives us the Rule of Faith in written form so that we might understand the sayings of Jesus and the writings of the apostles that constitute the New Testament. The Rule of Faith, or regula fidei, was the teaching of the early church that would ultimately emerge over time as the New Testament, the creeds, the liturgical patterns, and other aspects of church life were particularly identified in the church councils of the first five centuries.
The doctrine of the Trinity is easily seen in nascent form in the New Testament itself, particularly when Jesus says that “the Father and I are one” (John 10:30) or “whoever has seen me has seen the Father” (John 14:9). One of the most beautiful texts that points to the Trinity and its inner workings is the baptism of Jesus. Mark records in 1:10-11 that Jesus went to John, who was baptizing in the Jordan: “And just as [Jesus] was coming up out of the water he saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit descending like a dove on him. And a voice came from heaven, ‘You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.’” What we see in this text is the Spirit freely given within the full embrace of the Father, a glimpse of the divine community of self-giving love that is at the very heart of God. St. Augustine described the Holy Spirit as the love between the Father and the Son, and in Mark we see a glimpse of this reality, a reality into which we are now made a part by the waters of baptism. But keep in mind, we are often given a glimpse; the fullness of who God is cannot be grasped. He remains “Other” even in his self-revelation.
But what does the doctrine say about God? Arguably a great deal. We know from 1 John 4:8 that “God is love.” This implies, however, an object of love. And if we are to say that this object of God’s love is exterior to him, we would be saying that he was incomplete. But God is complete in every way. So to say, for example, that God is love is to also say that God is a community of love, a perfect and complete Tri-unity of love, that of the Father, Son, and Spirit. And it’s into this perfect community of love that we are offered redemption.
Additionally, the doctrine speaks of God’s eternal nature of self-offering or self-giving. If God is three and yet one, he is in his threeness an eternal self-offering. I was recently at a wedding where the priest described marriage as learning how to become self-less, to live life together in self-offering. The pattern for this self-offering and self-less love is none other than the Trinity, because this is something that God not only does, but it is who he is as Trinity.
Arguably, the doctrine of the Trinity reminds us that the Word made flesh, who lived and died for us, was not simply a human being inhabited by the divine, but the eternal Word “now in flesh appearing,” as Charles Wesley wrote. The doctrine of the Trinity is a constant reminder of Christ’s divinity even as it does not detract from his humanity, now itself taken in the very heart of God on our behalf. The same can be said for the full divinity of the Spirit. And so much more can be said! But just as we can’t expect a sermon to describe the fullness of God, neither can we expect it of a Firebrand article. Humility must be included in our approach, for to speak of God, to speak of the Trinity, is always to speak of the indescribable. For this reason alone, among others, our speech must be driven by revelation and tempered by the reality of human frailty.
In The Faith Once Delivered: A Wesleyan Witness to Christian Orthodoxy, the scholars of the first Next Methodism Summit spoke about the Trinity, saying that “the God of Scripture is the God revealed as Trinity.” This is nothing less than scriptural Christianity. And even as they pointed out the essential nature of God as one in three Persons, existing from eternity, they pointed to the reality of the Trinity as an invitation to be in a transforming relationship with the fullness of the God who is love. They wrote, “There is an expansiveness to God’s love for humanity that, through the incarnation and the gift of the Spirit, invites humankind into the life of the Trinity and makes us partakers of the divine nature (2 Peter 1:4).” It is this invitation that is made to us yet again on Trinity Sunday as we gaze into the beauty, love, and mystery of God’s self-revelation, all the while “lost in wonder, love, and praise.”
Ryan N. Danker is the director of the John Wesley Institute in Washington, DC, and assistant lead editor of Firebrand Magazine.