I was thinking about the Trinity today. I will put a few of my thoughts here and perhaps add more in forthcoming blogs.

Generally Christians accept the idea of the Trinity as true, but beyond explanation. In some ways that is correct. We do not necessarily have the tools or the grammar to explain the nature of God in all its richness or even in its subtleties. Nor is our intellect capable of comprehending God fully. I remember a quote by G. K. Chesterton that goes something like this: “If God were simple enough for me to understand, He would not be great enough to meet my needs, not worthy of my worship.” True dat! Sorry I don’t have a source for that quote. It is just something lodged in my memory from years ago. But, you get the point… God is beyond our comprehension (Cf. Isaiah 55:8-9).

That being said, we do not want to fall prey here to the false premise of hard post-modernism which says that since we cannot know anything exhaustively, we cannot know (as in correctly know) anything at all. Or, if we can know something, we can only have a very limited perspective on it and are left without any mechanism to test whether our perspective is truly representative of the whole, or skewed. This is not true. We do not have to know something completely or exhaustively to know it to be absolutely true or to understand it correctly, though perhaps incompletely. For example: I know I am a man. I do not know or understand all there is to know about man, but I know that I am one. About that there is no question–I hope.

Such is the case with the Trinity. It may be beyond our comprehension and we may lack the grammar to fully describe the triune nature of God, but that does not negate the truth of the Trinity or its potency. The Trinity is an inescapable fact of the Bible. As one author said, “The doctrine of the Trinity is the grammar of the Christian faith.”1 Or, as another said, “The Trinity is the controlling logic of the New Testament.”2 (More on understanding the Trinity in a future blog)

So what? Well, this is what: If we get the Trinity wrong, we get Christianity wrong. 

Now, practically speaking, as has been said, “The character of a religion is chiefly determined by its identification of deity.”3 Our deity is triune in nature–a Trinity. We cannot get that wrong… the practical implications are profound! The character of the Christian religion is love. The determiner of this is the fact that God is love (1 John 4:8). Remember, that if love is meaningful at all it is a verb. Further, love requires that there is both diversity and unity (think about it). Which is exactly what we have in the Trinity. Without the triune nature of God, God could not be love.

A correct understanding of the Trinity is that it is one what, three whos. The what is the unity. The whos are the diversity. The what is God. The whos are the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. One what, three whos. 

What does it mean to be God? It means to be Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Three persons, one essence or being. And this Being, by its very nature, is in loving community. There is unity and diversity and harmony–community and love. God is love. God is love in the sense of the word as a verb; for example, the Father loves–and has always loved throughout eternity–the Son (John 3:35; 5:20; 17:23). 

Here is the point… Through the Cross, we are invited into this love and community. Again, the character of a religion is chiefly determined by its identification of deity. Our deity (The God of Israel) is love; made possible by the fact that God’s very nature is a community made up of unity and diversity. Therefore, we are called into love and community. Contrary to popular divisive Christian thought, community is not contingent upon unity, but rather requires diversity. If the Christian church, with all its diversity and fragmentation, fails to love and cultivate community–we fail at Christianity. The church is to reflect God in His unity, diversity, harmony, and loving community. 

1. Stephen Seamands, Ministry in the Image of God: The Trinitarian Shape of Christian Service (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2005), 11.

2. Adrian Hastings, and Alistair Mason, and Hugh Pyper, eds., The Oxford Companion to Christian Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 716.

3. Ibid., 715.