The word ‘Trinity’ is not a word that comes from the Bible. It is, however, a word that is packed with Biblical content. It is a word that was invented by the Church to try and sum up as carefully as possible who God had revealed himself to be, as recorded in the Scriptures. And so, because it has the weight of both the Bible and the early Church standing so strongly behind it, we use the word ‘Trinity’ as a primary way of talking about God, and we use the concept of ‘God as Triune’ as the key to understanding Christian theology.
There are two critical halves to understanding the doctrine of the Trinity. The first half is the confession that God is the one and only God. From the opening verses of the Old Testament, it is God and God alone who rules over everything, and it is God who creates out of nothing. He is not pictured as the strongest among the rest of the gods—he is in fact the only thing that exists at all, except for the things he freely chooses to create. This theme that there is only one true God runs through the whole of God’s revelation to us. Isaiah prophecies: “This is what the LORD says—Israel's King and Redeemer, the LORD of Heaven's Armies: ‘I am the First and the Last; there is no other God.’” (Is 44:6) Paul writes in Romans 3:30 that “there is only one God, and he makes people right with himself only by faith, whether they are Jews or Gentiles.”
In theological language, when we want to describe this fact that there is only one God, we say that ‘God is one substance’ or, using the Greek technical term for God’s substance, that ‘God is one ousia’. To emphasize that this substance or ousia is not some kind of stuff that God is made out of, you could also just plainly say that ‘God is one God’; the key thing to remember is that this half of the definition of the Trinity simply communicates the Scriptural confession that God is the only God, and he cannot be added to or broken into smaller pieces: there is no other.
The second half of understanding the Trinity is the confession ‘Jesus is Lord’ that we find dozens of times in various forms throughout the New Testament, a radical break from the Judaism the disciples had grown up with and a reflection of Jesus’ own life and teaching. One of the chief reasons why the Jewish leaders were so inflamed toward Jesus was the fact that “he not only broke the Sabbath, he called God his Father, thereby making himself equal with God.” (Jn 5:18) In John 10:30, Jesus openly says “The Father and I are one,” and the Jews prepare to stone him on the spot for blasphemy. More privately, Jesus counsels his fearful disciples at the last supper that “anyone who has seen me has seen the Father.” (Jn 14:9) So then, following the resurrection of Jesus and the coming of the Holy Spirit when their understanding was made complete, the disciples did not hesitate to declare to the world that Jesus was indeed the “Lord of all” (Ac 10:36) and “our great God and Saviour.” (2P 1:1)
These two halves, then, form the foundation of the doctrine of the Trinity: God is one God, and Jesus is Lord. But how? How can the Father be God, and the Son be God, and God be one? Going even further, we find in both the Scripture and in the earliest Church, alongside the discussion of the divinity of Jesus, an equivalent and parallel discussion of the deity of the Holy Spirit and his relationship to the Father. Just as Jesus was recognized to be fully God, so was the Holy Spirit in every way, an equal of Father and Son. (see Mt 28:19, 2Co 13:14) When I consider each one, I confess that Father, Son, and Spirit are each God; when I consider God, I confess that he is the one and only God.
The word used by the Church to describe the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit—considered separately—is ‘Person’, or ‘hypostasis’. And from the very first, the Church has confessed all three of these as Persons of the Godhead: fully divine, fully equal, distinguishable one from another as we see them at work in the world, but participating together. The question of exactly how these three Persons could be fully God and yet God be one God was not a question that troubled the early Church; they were so totally convinced that both of the foundational halves of the definition were true, they were by and large unconcerned with explaining exactly how they fit together. Thus, the most basic description of God as Triune—the one that we use even today (and that you should memorize before your accreditation exam)—is simply a statement of the facts rather than an explanation: ‘God is three persons, one substance’, or ‘one ousia, three hypostasis’.
The term ‘Trinity’, then, and all the discussion that surrounds it, is the result of the Church’s struggle to explain this reality more precisely, especially in the face of a series of heresies (false teachings) that emphasized either the oneness of God or the deity of Jesus by marginalizing the importance of the other theme. The doctrine of the Trinity, then, is not a precise definition like Peano’s axioms, but a set of four boundaries that keep us from wandering off when we talk about God (I kind of imagine it like a big box). There is a lot of space inside the box to continue exploring who God is and who he is to me, and we can explore that space safely because the walls of the box protect us from going too far afield. Conversely, when we come across Trinitarian ideas that are ‘outside the box’, we are able to quickly identify them and protect ourselves and those to whom we minister from being led astray. The doctrine of the Trinity can be defined in this way by describing the following four boundaries (or ‘walls’ of the box).
First, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are distinguishable from one another. The Father is God, the Son is God, and the Holy Spirit is God; but the Son is not the Father, nor is the Father the Spirit, nor the Spirit the Son. Remember that the Trinity is simply a doctrine that is trying to express in words how God has revealed himself. God has shown himself to be a Father, who sends his Son, who is accompanied by and gives the Holy Spirit. We distinguish between Father, Son, Spirit because the Bible itself distinguishes between them; we acknowledge each one as a fully divine Person because the Bible shows them interacting together (which is why we cannot think of them merely as the one God merely appearing in different ways on different occasions, as in the heresy of ‘modalism’; see Mt 3:16-17) and treating one another as distinguishable divine Persons. (Jn 14:16, 2P 1:17) We never see them collapsed into or explained away by the presence of another. Each member of the Trinity is both genuinely divine and genuinely personal—meaning they are like a person—none is simply a force or an it (we use the pronouns ‘he’ and ‘his’ in reference to the Persons of the Trinity not because they are male but because they are personal, and ‘he’ is the most neutral personal pronoun we have in English; the word ‘it’ cannot be used of the Persons of the Trinity any more than it can be used of any other person). In formal theological discussion, the word ‘distinguishable’ is usually used when talking about the ‘three-ness’ of the Persons of the Trinity—rather than words like ‘distinct’ or ‘individual’ or ‘separate’—to help us always keep in mind that Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are not three different gods but the one and only God, expressed in three Persons. The Father is God, the Son is God, the Holy Spirit is God, but you can distinguish between them. Any doctrine of God that fails to thus distinguish between the three divine Persons must be counted as incorrect.
Second, God is one; although Father, Son, and Spirit are distinguishable from one another, there is only one God. However we describe God, we cannot even for a moment allow ourselves to consider that he could be broken into pieces or in any way duplicated. He, and only he, is the one, indivisible, un-reproducible God. This is what we mean when we say that God is one substance. Even though it can be difficult to describe in words just exactly to understand the relationship between the ‘three-ness’ of the Persons and the ‘one-ness’ of the substance of God, we never back down from our confession that there is, and can only be, one God. God is three Persons, but he is nevertheless one substance, and any doctrine of God that fails to assert this full unity (or ‘one-ness’) of God is incorrect.
Third, the primary way for us to understand the ‘three-in-one-ness’ of God is by looking at the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in relationship together. 1 John 4:16 says that “God is love,” that is, the very essence, or substance (the ousia), of God is love. Extending through all eternity, the Father has a relationship of superabundant love with the Son, and the Son with the Spirit, and the Spirit with the Father: Father, Son, and Spirit, sharing a perfect love. The unity of God—the one undivided substance that God is—is this love, this relationship. Only together, only loving, do the members of the Trinity mutually make one another who they are as the one God. The substance of God is relational substance, not something that can be comprehended apart from God himself, but rather the love itself which each divine Person equally gives to and receives from the others. The love is the substance. God is not merely a God who loves, he is the God who is love, whose very being consists of the eternal love between Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. This is why it is not problematic for us to consider the unity of God to be the kind of unity that can allow for ‘three-ness’. It is precisely on account of the Three, that the One exists, because it is the Three who love. The technical term for this kind of unity, a unity of members who interpenetrate and contribute together to the reality of one another, is ‘perichoresis’. It means that the Father is the Father on account of his loving and being loved by the Son and the Spirit—on account of his being Father; it means that the one God is in his very essence indivisibly one with the kind of ‘one-ness’ that is sustained out of ‘three-ness’. When we speak of ‘perichoresis’, we mean that although we distinguish between the Persons when we think about them, we remember that each one is always present in the other, because each one is who he is only on account of the others—the relationship of the three is the substance of the one. And because the very essence of God is love, the divine persons are never lonely or alone (or in need of us humans for companionship). The perichoretic unity of God is a festive and loving unity; God’s life is a vibrant and social life, not a solitary one. Even in the act of creation God says ‘us’. (Gen 1:26, 3:22) So, while the longer answer of how the One are Three and the Three are One is slower to explain, the broad strokes can be made clear, God can be described by the word ‘Trinity’—as the three-in-one—because God is love, and any doctrine of the Trinity which solves the problem of the ‘one-ness’ and ‘three-ness’ of God by pushing the love relationship between Father, Son, and Holy Spirit to the sidelines is incorrect.
Thus far: distinguishability, unity, and perichoretic love—the fourth fixed boundary of the doctrine of the Trinity is equality, the equality of the Persons. Spirit, Son, and Father are all equally God, each one equal in worth, equal in glory, equal in Personhood, equal in honor, equal in position, and equal in time. The Father is not before or above the Son and the Holy Spirit, nor is one more ‘God’ than another. You see, when we talk about the distinguishability of the divine Persons, it is often easiest to talk about what they do: the Father is the Creator and the Sender, the Son is the Redeemer and the Sent One, the Spirit is the Sanctifier and the Gift. This kind of language is totally appropriate (and Biblical), but when we think about God himself, it is more helpful to use relational terms to describe God rather than terms that are rooted in what he does for us. What I mean is this: I am in fact the ‘reader’ of bedtime stories and the ‘payer’ for my kids’ food and clothes, but if you are really trying to describe who I am, I prefer to be thought of as ‘dad’, which says something about my personal identity, not just what I do. My worth to my kids is not contingent on my role in the family, it is connected to who I am, independent of what I do. And so, when we take the time to try and formally describe God, we differentiate the Father by speaking of him as the unbegotten, of the Son as the only begotten, and of the Holy Spirit as the one who proceeds from the Father and the Son. This is a reflection of the Biblical revelation of the Son as the one who is begotten of the Father (Jn 3:16), and of the Holy Spirit as proceeding from the Father and the Son (Jn 14:16, 20:22), of course not meaning that the Son is begotten in same the way as you or I. To be extra careful, especially to rule out the idea that in the very beginning the Father was alone, and then only later the Son and Spirit came into being (the Arian heresy), it can sometimes be helpful to use language like ‘eternally begotten’ or ‘eternally proceeds’; distinguishing between the Persons does not lessen their equality, even when we refer to their very origin. Gregory of Nyssa, one of the great Christian bishops of the fourth century, said that the Trinity is like a family, like Adam, Eve, and Abel. Adam was not begotten, but formed by God from the dust of the earth, Eve was made from Adam, and Abel was begotten of them both. All are equal in nature—equally human, equally valuable—all of them in relationship together (and none of them on their own) make up that one family. Each one so very much the same, even though each one is different in origin and distinguishable in person. (“On the Faith”, NPNF2 v.338) That is a little bit what God is like. The Triune Persons are not identical, but they are radically equal. Any doctrine of God that fails to assert this full equality of the Triune Persons, that stacks them up as higher or lower than one another in deity or glory, is incorrect.
God is one; Jesus is Lord. These are the two foundational facts of revelation that explain what Christians mean when they say that God is Triune, that he is simultaneously three Persons and one substance. Our understanding of his three-in-one-ness, although not exhaustive, is one bounded by the distinguishability, unity, love relationship, and complete equality of the divine Persons. Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are each fully God, each fully glorious and worthy of worship, and each fully personal in the truest sense of the word. So too, God is one mysterious God, whose ‘one-ness’ the Bible sums up with a single word: love.
If I was preparing for accreditation I would . . .
• Be aware of the definition ‘three Persons, one substance’.
• Understand the meaning of the terms ‘perichoresis’, ‘hypostasis’, and ‘ousia’.
• Understand the how the terms ‘begotten’ and ‘proceeds’ are used in regards to the Trinity.
• Memorize Isaiah 44:6 and one of Matthew 3:16-17, Matthew 28:19, or 2 Corinthians 13:14.
• Think about how passages that are already quite common to us, like John 3:16 or Titus 3:4-7, teach us about God as Triune.
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