Trinity Sunday

(Image courtesy of Tofin Creations) 

Today is Trinity Sunday, and so the visiting preacher at our church this week began by trying to offer some helpful analogies to explain the concept of the Trinity.  What does it mean to say that God is One God, and yet is three Persons?

Well, she said, one analogy that she found helpful is that God is like water.  Water is sometimes liquid, sometimes steam, and sometimes ice, but it is always water.  Or she could look at God as being like a person who has different roles: just as she is a daughter, a wife, and an ordinand, but is nevertheless the same person, so God is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, but is still the same God.

Well, she finds these analogies helpful, and I expect that many people in the congregation did.  To me, though, they don’t seem to address the idea of God being three Persons.  In John Chapter 17, Jesus prays to his Father, first for his disciples (verse 10) ‘that they may be one as we are one’,  and then he prays the same for all the people, through all places and times, who will believe in him (verses 21-23):

‘that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you. May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me.  I have given them the glory that you gave me, that they may be one as we are one—I in them and you in me—so that they may be brought to complete unity. Then the world will know that you sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me.’

Presumably, given a conventional Christian understanding of identity, Jesus is not asking that all Christians should become a single, solitary person who performs multiple roles, nor that we should be melded into a single substance that shifts into different forms under different circumstances.

(Of course, it is possible to have a very different understanding of the universe in which humans, and everything else, do not really exist as separate individuals, or in which we are all reincarnations of the same person.  But if this were the case, it would be already true and Jesus would not have to pray for it to become true, so I’ll assume that this isn’t what he means.)

What he seems to mean sounds more like our being ‘one’ in the sense that a married couple are ‘one flesh’.  PDB11 and I are not a gestalt entity sharing two bodies, nor even two heads growing from the same torso or two personalities in the same head.  But the reason I didn’t sit down and write this article as soon as we got home from church was that he was feeling depressed, and so we needed to spend some time sitting on the sofa cuddling and talking things over.  It isn’t that I am a slave who exists to serve his desires, but that the troubles of one of us are the troubles of the other.

I think that the best argument for the Trinity is that, according to Christian theology, it is central to God’s character that God is love.  As the fourth century theologian St Augustine wrote:

“Now when I . . . love anything, there are three things present: I myself, what I love, and love itself. For I cannot love love unless I love a lover; for there is no love where nothing is loved. So there are three things: the lover, the loved and the love” (Basic Writings of St. Augustine, Vol. 2, p. 790).

So, for love to be the essence of who God is, God must be plural: there must be at least one Lover and at least one Beloved, and a spirit of love flowing between them.  But the best loving relationships are ones where each of the parties loves the other (or others, if there are more than two).

The idea of ‘lover’ and ‘beloved’ as distinct roles, incidentally, seems to derive more from classical Greek assumptions about sexual relationships than from the Bible.  Plato’s Symposium, in which a group of somewhat drunk, mostly gay or bisexual men at a party discuss romantic love, is built on the assumption that in any relationship, whether between people of the same sex or different sexes, there is the active partner (who is in love) and the passive partner (who is loved).  One of the characters, discussing the relationship between Patroclus and Achilles in the Iliad, argues that it must have been Patroclus who was the lover and Achilles who was the beloved, because Patroclus is stated to be the older of the two and because Achilles is mentioned to be notably good-looking.

Perhaps influenced by this outlook, some translations of the Song of Songs in the Bible designate the female speaker as ‘Beloved’ and the male speaker as ‘Lover’ – even though both characters are clearly passionately in love with each other, and the woman is frequently the one actively pursuing the man.  Other translations more accurately label them ‘She’ and ‘He’ or ‘Woman’ and ‘Man’.

So, if God is love, then God is plural.  This doesn’t explain why there have to be three Persons of the Godhead, rather than two Persons and an impersonal ‘spirit’.  But why stop even at three?

Jesus says that God the Father loves us just as He loves Jesus.  This is a mind-blowing claim, but as least its meaning looks fairly clear.  But in the same passage, Jesus says that he has given us the glory that God gave him, so that Jesus may be ‘in’ us as God the Father is ‘in’ Jesus.  And he also prays that we may be ‘in’ the Father and the Son.

It sounds to me as though what this means is that the Godhead was never meant to remain only a Trinity.  It seems to suggest that Jesus came so that we, by becoming adopted children in God’s family, become part of the Godhead (while still remaining individual human beings).

Incidentally, this is why I feel frustrated when modern versions of creeds and prayers replace references to Jesus as ‘God’s only begotten son’ with ‘God’s one and only son’.  I think: ‘No!  That isn’t true!  Jesus came to enable us all to become God’s sons and daughters!’

Still, it is one thing to say that we are God’s children, and another to say that we are part of the Godhead.  I’m not God.  I am not perfect, omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, uncreated, eternal, and virtually all the other qualities I associate with God.

But then – did Jesus himself, as a human on Earth, have those qualities?  Well, clearly not all of them.  Being incarnate, a physical body living in a specific place, meant that he wasn’t omnipresent.  Being physical, needing to eat, sleep, go to the lavatory and so on, meant that he wasn’t self-sufficient, existing without needs.  Being human meant that he had emotional need of comfort – from his human friends as well as from God.

As for whether he was omniscient – well, while I want the Bible to contain the perfect, infallible wisdom of God spoken through a human mouth, in practice I have to admit that the idea of a human brain containing infinite knowledge doesn’t make sense.  And besides, Jesus himself said that he didn’t know everything (Matthew 24:36 ‘No one knows about that day or hour, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father,’).

Some people have thought of Jesus as just an ordinary man who became God, or an ordinary man who was in touch with the God-consciousness that is latent in all of us.  But if he really was the Second Person of the Trinity who became a human, then he was God who gave up the powers of deity and lived as an ordinary human, until the time when he began his ministry, at which point the Holy Spirit came upon him and enabled him to do work miracles.

There are many legends in which Jesus showed miraculous abilities as a child.  Some are disturbing stories about a child who has miraculous powers without the emotional maturity to use them appropriately, and sometimes even uses them to murder.  A more benign variant is in the comic ballad The Carnal and the Crane, which is one of my favourite Christmas songs.

But none of these make sense in the context of the gospel narratives.  If Jesus had been showing supernatural powers ever since he was a child, why would his neighbours in his home village have been surprised by anything he said or did as an adult?

Before I leave, I should probably address a couple of other points.  I have encountered some theologians who claim that the phrase ‘God is love’ first and foremost only necessarily means that the three Persons of the Trinity love each other, and that while God may, if He wishes, choose to love some of us, we certainly shouldn’t expect Him to love everyone. 

I entirely disagree.  If love is intrinsic to God’s character, then it would be a contradiction of God’s nature for there to be any entity whom He does not love.  If the Devil exists (that is, if there is an actual sentient being created by God who turned to the Dark Side, rather than ‘the Devil’ just be a figurative way of speaking of the presence of evil or imperfection in our natures), then presumably God loves the Devil (or rather, loves the angel who became the Devil) and wants to save him.

I have also read theologians who start off writing a beautiful book about God’s love for us, and then seem to feel that they have gone a bit too far, and add in a late chapter saying something like, ‘Well, of course, everything that God does is done for His own glory, so He loves us for His own sake, not for ours, because of course He loves Himself more than He loves us, because it would be idolatrous to love any created being more than God.’  And so – probably without meaning to – these writers can give the impression that God might pretend to be a nice guy, but is ultimately a selfish narcissist who only cares about making Himself feel good about Himself.

This fails to ring true in two ways.  Firstly, it doesn’t make sense logically.  God is complete and has no needs, therefore the idea of a selfish God who wants to use us to fulfil His needs makes no sense.  It is no more rational than my paranoid belief as a teenager that God is a bully who gets a kick out of tormenting us.  After all, why would God be insecure enough to need us to make Him feel better about Himself, either by wanting our praise or by wanting to show off His ability to hurt and frighten us?

Secondly, it isn’t even consistent with what we find in the Bible.  After all, in a Trinitarian context, the sentence ‘God loves Himself more than He loves us,’ would be restated as ‘The three Persons of the Trinity love each other more than they love us.’  But if this were true – if God the Father loved Jesus more than He loved us – He would not have sent Jesus to die to save us.

Parents generally tell their children that they love them all equally, and to the children this can feel like a hollow promise.  After all, if a parent’s attention is taken up with caring for her new baby, so that she simply doesn’t have the time or energy to play with her three-year-old or listen to the worries of her teenager, ‘love’ becomes just a theoretical concept.

But God has infinite attention to spare for each entity.  He does not need to prioritise.  He does not love one person more than another, because He loves each of us infinitely.  I wish you all a happy Trinity Sunday – however big a Trinity can get!