Why the Trinity Matters
Photo by Kelly
Sometimes in the church we get so focused on theological dogmas and their definitions that we neglect to help believers understand why these truths matter and how they change the way we live. It’s like explaining the technical requirements to drill a well in a parched land but forgetting to explain that drinking clean water improves sanitation, helps keep babies from dying, prevents people from getting sick from terrible diseases, and limits the grueling and lengthy journey to carry life-giving water. We must explain the blueprint—but also that the project is a lifesaver.
Similarly, when we speak in the church of the Trinity, we must take care that the technicalities of this theology don’t cloud the beauty and practicality of the doctrine. Yes, the technicalities are important: we believe that God is Triune—three persons, one essence. Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are co-eternal and equal in power and majesty. We recall that the theological debates raging 1700 years ago centered on the question of how Jesus was related to the Father. This debate led to the Nicene-Constantinople creed, which declares that Jesus is “the only Son of God, Eternally begotten of the Father, God from God, Light from Light, True God from True God, Begotten, not made; Of one being with the Father; Through him all things were made….”
But why does this matter? How does the understanding and proclamation of the Trinity change the way we think and how we live in the world? In what follows, we will explore just a few of the implications of our Trinitarian understanding.
The doctrine of the Trinity is unique. No other world religion understands their deity in the same way that Christians understand God as Triune. According to The Faith Once Delivered, a theological statement collaboratively written by more than 60 Wesleyan scholars, “To call God Trinity is to confess that God is both truly one and truly three. This distinguishes Christianity from all other faiths. Unlike Judaism and Islam, the Triune God does not exist in solitude but in the community of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Unlike polytheistic religions in which each deity has a separate will and power, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit exist together in perfect unity.” Thus, those who try to suggest that “the Christian God and the gods of other religions are basically the same deity” are comparing apples to oranges. The essence of deity is inherently different in Christianity. If you are talking to a non-Christian friend or coworker who declares, “All faiths just worship the same god,” an understanding of the Trinity gives you a starting point for describing the nuances of the Christian faith.
The Triune God continues to be active in the world, concerned about its direction and empowering its transformation. Scripture describes the One God as actively involved in creation and history. This is no deism, where a faraway god creates the universe and then allows the world to develop on its own as the god sits back disinterestedly. Rather, the God of Scripture is the God who created the world with care and purpose, unlike the descriptions often found in the Ancient Near East. (For example, the Babylonian creation myth describes creation as the result of war among the gods, and humanity as an afterthought designed to serve the deities.) The God of Israel, Yahweh, creates humanity in his own image and gives man and woman a purpose: to steward his good creation. In Genesis 1, God declares repeatedly (6 times!) that his creation is good, but the seventh time, after creating humanity, God declares that creation is very good.
Despite the sinfulness of the first humans, God does not turn his back on them. Rather, Yahweh makes a plan. He chooses Abraham to be the father of a great nation—Israel—and all the peoples of the earth will be blessed through them. This blessing arrives in the form of the Messiah, God’s own Son—the second person of the Trinity—who was willing to suffer and die to pay the penalty for the sins of humanity and reconcile believers to God. But the story doesn’t stop there. The third person of the Trinity—the Holy Spirit—is given to all who trust in Jesus so that believers can now be transformed into a holy people and live with God eternally. All three persons of the Trinity are involved in our salvation. The One God has simply refused to sit back and do nothing. This is the God we worship! We should be encouraged that God cares about what we do with our lives, our relationships, our vocation, and our families. The Triune God is working to bring about human flourishing.
The eternal relational nature of the Trinity models God’s nature: God is love. All three persons of the Trinity are equal and co-eternal. That is, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit have existed for all eternity and will continue to exist for all eternity in divine relationship with one another. As the Nicene Creed declares, Jesus was “begotten, not made.” That is, God has always been the Father, and Jesus has always been the Son. This eternal relationship is incredibly important for our understanding that God is love (1 John 4:8). As Michael Reeves has pointed out, “If there was once a time when the Son didn’t exist, then there was once a time when the Father was not yet a Father. And if that is the case, then once upon a time God was not loving since all by himself he would have had nobody to love” (Delighting in the Trinity: An Introduction to the Christian Faith, 2012, p. 27).
God’s eternally loving nature is further expressed in the design of a good creation and God’s efforts to redeem creation after it had been broken by sin. The famous passage of John 3:16 (“For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life”) demonstrates that this eternal loving relationship is not just for the Godhead, but for us as well.
Nonetheless, a startling implication arises from the eternal loving nature of the Trinity.
God does not need us. Since God is eternally in loving relationship, God did not create humanity because God was lonely or bored. It simply wasn’t necessary for God to create the world. Or us. But that’s good news! It means that God’s desire to be in relationship with us is a choice rather than an obligation.
Beth Felker Jones describes this independence of the infinite God, in contrast to finite creatures:
Divine sufficiency is the flipside of creaturely dependence. Where we depend on God for existence and all things good, God is enough for God. Another way to see this is to recognize that the God who is truly different from creation is not a needy God. Specifically, God does not need creation in order to be who God is; God is not lacking in love or goodness or relationships in any way that would make creation necessary…. God creates not because God needs us but because God wants us (Practicing Christian Doctrine, 2nd ed., 2023, pp. 82-83).
This understanding deepens our sense of God’s love for us, despite all our flaws, and motivates us to “do everything for the glory of God” (1 Cor. 10:31).
The beauty of the world is for us. If we let our imaginations run a bit, we might consider the glimpses of God we receive in creation compared with how God could have created the world. If you’ve seen the movie The Matrix, then remember the depiction of the dystopian world outside of the computer-generated matrix. Humans may have their freedom, but they are left in a world without much color, eating protein-rich and flavorless gray porridge: “everything the body needs.” Our Triune God could have created a world like that—giving us only one kind of food, flavorless and just enough to sustain our bodies for one more day. God didn’t need to invent colors or tastebuds or musical notes.
I am constantly astonished at the beauty of our world, even in its brokenness. Last year I traveled to Costa Rica, and the biodiversity there is astonishing. From the butterflies to the tropical flowers to banana slugs and sloths and jaguars, that small country is simply bursting with life. God did not have to create such rich biodiversity for us—but God chose to do so. And this kind of abundant provision we find throughout Scripture. In Rom. 5:5, for example, the apostle Paul tells us that “…hope does not put us to shame, because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.” In other words, God does not sprinkle just enough grace on us for us to get by, just enough for us to be able to enter the kingdom of God. Rather, this is abundance language. God pours forth his Holy Spirit so that we can be transformed as we walk with the Spirit and begin to produce the fruit of the Spirit. The richness of the love of God is indeed profound! God has a better future planned for us, and it is one that is empowered by the Triune God. This truth should increase our joy in our Creator and encourage us to explore the beauty and the complexity of the world God has created so that we might praise his name more fully.
In a social media age, quick sound bites are inadequate for describing the depth of God’s love. How can we possibly describe the amazing nature of the love of God in a 280-character X tweet or a 60-second Instagram story? Impossible! Our understanding of the Trinity requires the time to have rich, deep conversations about the character of the God revealed in Scripture. It’s too easy to flatten the Gospel into skewed ideas like prosperity theology, moralistic therapeutic deism, or hellfire-and-brimstone preaching, rather than taking the time to plumb the depths and the riches of Genesis through Revelation. We need to understand that the God of the Old Testament is the same God of the New Testament, and that we should never unhitch the Gospel from the fuller story revealed throughout all of Scripture. In a world full of distractions, we need to be intentional in creating space to explore the depths of God’s grand design.
Our worship practices must reflect the Triune nature of God. Depending on your own denominational affiliation, you may find yourself in a church that focuses on the power of the Holy Spirit and charismatic gifts. Or you may be in a church that focuses on justification by faith in Jesus Christ. But our worship practices shape our beliefs, as the ancient phrase lex orandi lex credendi suggests. If we preach only God the Father, we may think God is far away and distant, “up there” in heaven. If we preach only Jesus, we lose sight of the love of the Father and may deemphasize the role of the Holy Spirit for bringing about sanctification. If we focus too much on the Spirit, we may forget the Father’s plan that put salvation into motion and the Son through whom we receive the empowerment of the Holy Spirit, and we may find ourselves focusing on a spiritual experience rather than focusing on truly worshipping the Triune God.
Pastors should consider how often they preach or teach on the Trinity and whether they emphasize one person of the Trinity more than others. Are our prayers Trinitarian? Do the lyrics of hymns and worship songs we sing reflect the Trinity? We must take care to reflect the immense beauty of our Triune God, rather than presenting a simplistic or defective picture of God.
The way we live must be shaped by our experience of the Triune God. If we really understand and embrace the eternal love of God and the depths of our own sinfulness apart from Christ, then we simply cannot live the same kind of life that we lived before we were Christians. John Wesley describes it this way in his sermon, “God’s Love to Fallen Man”:
Beloved, what manner of love is this wherewith God hath loved us, so as to give his only Son, in glory equal with the Father, in Majesty co-eternal! What manner of love is this wherewith the only-begotten Son of God hath loved us so as to empty himself, as far as possible, of his eternal Godhead as to divest himself of that glory which he had with the Father before the world began, as to take upon him the form of a servant, being found in fashion as a man, and then, to humble himself still further, ‘being obedient unto death, even the death of the cross!’ If God SO loved us, how ought we to love one another!
When we are deeply loved by another, it changes us. We begin to see ourselves—and others—in a new light. And the Triune God graciously gives us the Holy Spirit so that we can live differently and love others more completely (Gal. 5:22-23). As we walk in step with the Spirit and model the love of God toward others, our communities are transformed. This was the experience of the early church, whose generous care for one another and authentic fellowship resulted in “the goodwill of all the people” (Acts 2:47).
For all of the reasons above, our churches must explain the Trinity, so that believers can recognize in the doctrine more than a technical description—but also a lifesaver.
Suzanne Nicholson is Professor of New Testament at Asbury University in Wilmore, Kentucky. She is an Elder in the Global Methodist Church and serves on the Editorial Lead Team of Firebrand.