What is the Trinity?
By Rev. B. J. Beu
A while back, I got into a discussion on the Trinity with a visitor after church. She had spent years searching scripture for clear language on the Trinity and had come away stymied. She isn’t alone. While you will find a triune formula for God in the New Testament, the church’s pronouncements on the Trinity came out of theological debate and ecumenical councils.
Since Christians are historically Trinitarians, as opposed to Unitarians who deny the divinity of Jesus, I thought it was time for a little review. One of the popular ways of modernizing the Trinity is to replace “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit” with “Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer.” Proponents of this change argue that removing the exclusively masculine language for God (Father and Son) with gender neutral language (Creator and Redeemer) is more inclusive. Although I am a big proponent of inclusive language, you will not hear this formulation from me for two reasons.
First, Creator-Redeemer-Sustainer language loses the sense that God is personal. (Even progressive theologians who deny that God is a person (e.g. Marcus Borg) affirm that God is personal.) When Jesus taught us to pray to God as our Father, he was not implying that God is male, but that our relationship to God should be as intimate as our relationship to our father. Praying to God as “Creator” does not evoke the same personal intimacy that Jesus suggests we should have with God. Second, the tradition is clear that the three persons of the Trinity share a mutual indwelling—the Latin speaking Roman Church spoke of co-inherence; the Greek speaking Orthodox Church spoke of perichoresis. That is, the three persons of the Trinity are distinct but not separate. Jesus says to his disciples: “Do you not believe that I am in the Father and the Father is in me?” (John 14:10). As such, all three persons are involved in creating, redeeming, and sustaining creation. The idea that the Father alone creates, the Son alone redeems, and the Holy Spirit alone sustains was rejected by the early church as heresy.
The implication for our Christian understanding of the world is profound. The very essence of things, the very fabric of reality, is relational. We are woven by God into an interconnected tapestry, where no individual thread can be extracted without affecting the whole. We are distinct, but not separate from God, one another, and the world in which we live. The idea that we are isolated people, choosing whether or not to relate to one other or the world in which we live in is an illusion promulgated by the Enlightenment. It is not only wrong-headed, it is profoundly unchristian and misunderstands the very nature of God and reality.
The doctrine of the Trinity is not very sexy. Reading about it is even an excellent cure for insomnia. But I am convinced that the traditional understanding of God as Trinity helps us better understand ourselves and our place in creation.
Yours on the journey,
Pastor B. J.