I think I have more books on my office shelves about the Trinity than any other subject. I find the topic endlessly fascinating: first because reflection on the Trinity is a kind of intellectual doxology, an opportunity to use the mind in prayer; and second because great Trinitarian theology enlivens and transforms the life of the church—Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Karl Barth’s resistance to Nazism is a prominent early 20th century example, and more recently social trinitarianism in the work of Jürgen Moltmann, Elizabeth Johnson, Leonardo Boff and John Zizioulas (to name just a few prominent theologians) have transformed liberation theology, feminist theology, base communities, and concepts of personhood and ecclesiology respectively.
Although Trinitarian theology has often been made to sound complex, the reason for its existence in Christian tradition is actually quite simple. Christians for millennia have found it is the clearest way we have for talking about Jesus as God.
Trinitarian theology is not an exploration of mathematical theories for how one can be three and three can be one. No, at its heart all the Trinity is is a language, a way of speaking about the awesome reality that in Christ was the fullness of God. Like any mystery, you need a language to unpack it a bit. That’s the Trinity.
Everything else proceeds from this: so the Trinity is the way we have for speaking about how the maker of all things can also be this one begotten son (God from God, true God from true God); how this Son remains and is present truly in the Spirit of gathered community; and perhaps most neglected, how just so all of creation including humanity is being caught up into this life of God in the Son and the Spirit.
In the end, it’s no more odd that we would talk about relationships in God than that we talk about a relationship between God and God’s creation. That God has created something with which to be in relationship appears to be in the nature of God, as it were.
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The church designates one Sunday each year as Trinity Sunday. When I was growing up this meant we read the Athanasian creed out loud, which at the time felt needlessly long. Nowadays as a pastor I still think it’s needlessly long and also I just don’t like it enough to make a group of people pay attention to it.
I much prefer the Apostles creed for use in corporate worship because that creed was actually designed to be recited by all the baptized as a brief summary of what Christians believe. If you’ve memorized the Apostles Creed you have a fairly solid faith statement inscribed in your neurons.
I do like using the Nicene Creed every once in a while just because it reminds us of the arduous yet compelling work the early Christians undertook reflecting on the Trinity and striving toward agreement. It was not easy to get to that creed, but once it was adopted, it aided the church in interpreting Scripture and world faithfully.
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But my favorite trinitarian concept is the understanding of the relationship between the members of the Trinity as a kind of dance. Early Greek theologians like Gregory of Nazianzus and Maximus the Confessor (love these two) coined a term for the dance—perichoresis.1
This is my favorite way of approaching the Trinity: simply think of it as the way God invites us into the dance of God’s own life. The original Greek term has a bit more of the sense of “going around into each other.” Movement, sharing, intimacy. It is to point out that the members of the Trinity, though each their own person, also share in each other’s life. For example, when God created, God spoke creation. And that speaking happened through “the Word,” which is understood in Christian theology as Jesus Christ. Meanwhile, it was the Spirit that hovered/moved over the “tohu wa-bohu,” the surface of the deep. Together each in their own way they share in the creating of creation.
That’s lovely, right? And that’s precisely what we see throughout Scripture, this emphasis on the shared life of the Trinity. Jesus talks about it a lot as recorded in the gospel of John, the sense that he doesn’t do anything that he wasn’t sent by the Father to do, nor will the Spirit do anything other than what is genuinely in and like Jesus himself. And so on.
Can you see why this is fun, and a form of prayer? I hope so. And the reason it matters far more than just as a kind of intellectual exploration or theological curiosity is that the doctrine of the Trinity leads us to understand that we are caught up in that life of God. Classic Trinitarian theology emphasizes a sense of divinization or theosis, that because God is in Christ gathering all things up, we are being made into God(s) through the perichoretic life of the Trinity. Which brings me to the book I’m reading right now by David Bentley Hart, who gives his most recent book exactly that title—You Are Gods.
If you decide to join a worship service Sunday morning that’s observing Trinity Sunday (you’re welcome to join ours) I hope you get reminded of that. That the metaphysics of participation and Trinitarian theology, in a Christology that sees all of us as gathered into Christ and so soteriologically divinized means the Trinity is exciting also because you are literally being caught up as a member of it.
[side note, perichoresis is also my e-mail address, and I’ve been using it for 20 years this year]
Trinity means that the one God is not an isolated super-individual. God is a community. The reciprocity and mutuality of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit mean that God is from all eternity a social being. And it is in the image of that God that we are made. Roman Catholicism knows what Trinity means. The theological and liturgical life of Eastern Orthodoxy is centered in the Trinity. Most Protestants, at least in the United States, mouth the words of the doxology but have hardly a clue about what Trinity means or why it matters. Pastor Clint's reflections on the Trinity fill a vast and troubling void in contemporary Protestant ideas about God.
The Trinity is the name of God, and summarizes the story and mystery of God -- all in one phrase and three words.