“I have become its servant by the commission God gave me to present to you the word of God in its fulness– the mystery that has been kept hidden for ages and generations, but is now disclosed to the Lord’s people.”
As we look at the doctrine of the Trinity, it is often asked, ‘where is there room for mystery in all of this?’ The thinking is since God is beyond our understanding, we box him in with ideas like the Trinity. Respecting the mystery of God apparently looks less like carefully considered doctrine and more like an anything-goes agnosticism, as least when it comes to God’s essential nature.
Paul writes that the mystery was kept hidden for ages — the mystery of God is the hidden things of God that we can’t deduce from nature or logically reason out. But far from being an unknown grey area in which everyone is equally in the dark, Paul says that it is now revealed!
We can know certain things about who God is in himself, not because we can logically work them out, but because he has revealed things (like his Triune nature) to us through Jesus. We can know these things truly even though we will never come to the end of their depths. We can truly understand something of the Trinity without fully comprehending it. This isn’t to box God in, but to believe what he has said about himself.
So, we don’t collapse the mystery of God by affirming His one-ness and three-ness or even by carefully distinguishing what is one and what is three about Him. In fact, keeping these clear in our head helps us maintain the incomprehensible mystery that has been revealed to us.
"There is one God in three persons, the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit."
What are we affirming in this statement?
The Doctrine Basis (DB) is striking in the intentionality displayed by starting with the Trinity. The Trinity is the starting point for all Christian theology, as God himself is the starting point of our knowledge of him. It’s not something ‘advanced’ to dig into if you happen to be interested in it, but a confession about which God it is that we serve at the heart of the Christian faith and fundamental for pursuing theology that is oriented around the gospel. Some have gone as far as to say “the Trinity is the message of salvation.” (Gerard O’Collins “The Holy Trinity: The State of the Questions” in The Trinity, ed. Stephen T. Davis, et al.)
"There is one God in three persons,"
This points us back to the council of Nicaea and the ecumenical creed which that produced. In doing so it serves as an affirmation of classical Christian orthodoxy.
God is truly one in his fundamental essence or nature. There is only one uncreated God-being, only one divine will, only one divine power, one divine mind... He doesn’t share his status as God with any other being, and He doesn’t share worship and glory with any other.
This is the affirmation we see throughout the Old Testament that is summed up in the shema, “Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one.” (Deuteronomy 6:4, NIV)
This oneness of God means he stands alone, not needing anything or anyone outside of himself for his existence. He is totally sufficient in himself. It also means that he is not divided in himself into parts. Whatever we say about his three-ness, it is not a division of his being.
Yet God is truly three persons. He doesn’t merely appear to us in three main ‘modes’ from time to time, he eternally exists as three persons. But these persons are not three distinct gods who share status and happen to agree on everything. They are genuinely three distinct, eternal persons who are all yet fully God in nature, will, power and everything else that is God’s being.
"the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit"
There is not a generic ‘three-ness’ in God, but one revealed in the specificity of Father, Son and Spirit.
Many other titles are given to these persons of God in the bible (Son = Word of God, sometimes called Wisdom of God; Spirit = finger of God / power of God), but they are most consistently revealed as Father, Son and Spirit. In this we see that their personal relations are at the heart of how they are differentiated.
The Father is the one who eternally generates/ begets (always was, is, and will be ‘Father’), the Son is the one is eternally generated / begotten (always was, is, and will be ‘of the Father’), the Spirit is the one who is eternally breathed out (spirated) from the Father and the Son.
Whatever else we are able to say about each of the persons of the Triune God is rooted in their eternal relations with each other.
This description of the one-ness and three-ness of God resists easy comprehension and analogy – it is often a tightrope walk when speaking about the Trinity. Yet it also affords us so much depth to explore who God is in himself.
Where is this challenged or a challenge when studying theology at university?
The Trinity is challenged on many fronts in theology and religious studies. Judaism, Christianity and Islam are often grouped as the ‘Abrahamic faiths,’ emphasising the worship of the ‘same’ one God and implicitly encouraging a smoothing over of the significant differences between the nature of the Gods of modern Judaism, Christianity and Islam.
It is a common assertion that the Trinity can’t really be found anywhere in the New Testament and owes more to Greek philosophy than to Jesus. And sometimes the language of the Trinity, especially of ‘Father’ and ‘Son’ come under fire in the interest of finding more ‘inclusive’ language for God.
Perhaps the most subtle (and therefore dangerous) challenge to Trinitarian faith is found in ‘modern’ redefinitions of the Trinity along social-trinitarian lines. These approaches, at first-glance, appear to be affirming the Trinity, but in fact undermine some of the core basics of the Trinity. This isn’t only a danger in the academy, but in its subtlety occasionally emerges in one way or another in evangelical discourse.
In this scheme, the oneness of God is no longer taken as the basis for the three persons, but instead the three persons become the starting point. Their relations with one another—exemplifying unity, love of the other, and agreement—‘create’ the oneness. The Trinity becomes a society of three beings rather than one being who is three persons. This doesn’t just impact an understanding of God, but ripples out into our understanding of the gospel and salvation.
These specific denials of the Trinity aside, there still remains the underlying challenge that the Trinity, classically defined, is likely something that we’ve simply assumed. These redefinitions of or rejections of trinitarian theology can be the first or most exciting contact that we have with theology of God-in-himself, often presented as a renewed interest in the Trinity. It’s easy to be drawn into them, especially when the alternative of classical Trinitarianism is presented merely as an historical curiosity rather than a living faith.
You may not have the time or the will to dig into every challenge to the Trinity ahead of time and work out why it falls short of biblical revelation, but attention to the Trinity itself—digging in to the ways that God has revealed himself as the truly one Father, Son and Spirit—will help you develop your theological nose and sharpen your judgement when you do encounter some of these challenges head on.
How does this help us do Evangelical Christian theology better?
God’s Triune nature is the grounds for everything that we find precious about God’s character in the Christian faith. It is the basis of his love, his ability to graciously create, his eternal wisdom and might. Far from being arbitrary characteristics of a singular God who could be other than what he is, God’s perfect oneness subsisting in three persons is the basis of his unchanging goodness as eternal attribute rather than preferred mood. Understanding this will help us better articulate the goodness of the God revealed in Scripture.
The Trintiy is foundational also for all other areas of Christian theology. It is the grounds for how we understand the gospel, creation, our participation in God, the shape of our future hope. As we pay attention to God’s Triune nature and subsistence, and the way in which that plays out in salvation history we will become more precise in our understanding in all areas of theology.
But beyond any utility that the Trinity might have for other areas of theology, the Trinity teaches us that the first and greatest goal of theology is worship. As we gaze upon the incomprehensible beauty of God in his triune existence we cannot help but worship as a result. The doctrine of the Trinity can serve us as a model for theology to be doxology. As we spend more time contemplating this, it can shift our affections to seek God’s glory in all the theology that we do.
