I cannot think of the one without being quickly encircled by the splendor of the three; nor can I discern the three without being immediately led back to the one.
—Gregory of Nazianzus, On Holy Baptism
One of my Ethiopian theology students had invited me to speak to some youth leaders at her church. She guided us through many dark streets as I dodged potholes, driving up the side of the mountain on which Addis Ababa is built. Finally, we arrived at the building squeezed into a tight urban block and were escorted to a small back room, where about seven young adults waited for us. After a time of prayer, they manhandled a huge wooden pulpit through the doorway into the tiny room. Obviously, pastors used pulpits. I demurred and instead sat on a plastic chair at eye level with them as they formed a semicircle around me. I began to talk about the Trinity, the topic my student told me these youth group leaders had requested.
Since my conversational Amharic was woefully inadequate, my student served as translator. Only a few minutes into my talk, I noticed something odd. I would pause for her to translate after two or three sentences, but she went on speaking for thirty seconds or more. She spoke with great emotion and many hand gestures. Even with my limited Amharic, I soon realized she was not only translating my words but also embellishing all I said, sometimes even making points I had not even mentioned! Several times she turned and said to me in English, “Tell them about this,” reminding me of something we had discussed in class. As I went on, some of the youth leaders who knew enough English were now smiling to themselves as she translated. It ended up actually her talk far more than mine.
My greatest surprise, however, was discovering as I drove her home that this was not her own church after all; she had visited a few weeks earlier to speak to these same youth leaders about the Trinity. Because she was a woman, however, they did not give her their attention. Suddenly I put it together: she invited me along so she could teach them—through me—everything she wanted to communicate the first time! After we said goodnight, I drove home through the dark city with a bemused satisfaction. As I later told my wife how my student was so excited about what she had learned about the Trinity that she “used” me to share it with these leaders, I realized it was probably the greatest compliment I would ever get.
The Dance
Few of us begin our Christian journey with my student’s passion for the Trinity. For me, the triune God was similar to the dusty, ancient farm equipment in a shed on my grandfather’s farm—I was impressed with their venerable age but wondered what they were for. So is the Trinity—that ancient, venerable doctrine—for some of us. We wonder (if we think about it at all) how the three-in-one being of God makes any practical difference in our lives; it seems more at home in a theological museum than in everyday life.1
I track my student’s excitement in knowing God as Trinity to the day we talked about perichoresis, an ancient term uniting the Greek words peri (“around”: perimeter) and choresis (“dance”: choreography), hence to dance or flow together.2 Much to my students’ amusement (they had never seen a professor so undignified), I danced around the classroom holding an imaginary partner, swirling faster and faster until I was a little dizzy, all the while talking about dance partners moving so synchronized that it is difficult to pick out one from the other. The dancers become one in the dance, even as they retain their individual identities.
Love, I went on to explain, needs partners, for love, despite Hollywood’s best efforts to convince us to the contrary, is not a feeling but a relational act requiring a lover and a beloved. When the Bible says, “God is love” (1 John 4:16), it implies that God’s essence is a relationship of love.3 For all eternity, God has existed as a relationship or, if you will, a dance, of self-giving, other-directed love—the Father, Son, and Spirit each deferring in humility to the others and constantly saying, “No, you lead!” Creating human beings in God’s own image is God’s invitation to join this dance with God and one another.4 For my student and others in her class, comprehending the possibility of human love flowing from this eternal Trinitarian love was like fireworks lighting up the sky.
At another class session, we spoke of creation as the overflow of God’s own other-centered inner life.5 God could have spent all eternity enjoying a full and complete relationship of mutual, self-giving love; God lacked nothing. Yet God chose to create a universe, including other sentient beings, to share this life-in-relationship. Look at the amazing overflow: a universe with at least a billion times a billion stars, a planet with 250,000 varieties of plants and 750,000 species of insects. My wife maintains God could have been a little less overflowing in that last area! Yet some of her favorite experiences have been snorkeling in the teeming coral reefs off the coast of Thailand and in the Red Sea: the varieties of fish are so stunning in all their permutations of size and color that a battalion of artists locked in a room for a year couldn’t duplicate them.
If creation around us is only the overflow, imagine how rich and multifaceted must be the Trinitarian relational creativity of God to generate it all! Glimpsing new insights of God through the Trinity, my student wanted everyone she knew to get just as excited about the triune God as she was.
A Good Mystery
The only reason we know anything at all about the God of heaven and earth is that this God revealed himself to human beings just like us. God became known as the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob because these individuals experienced God’s messages, blessings, and presence in their lives. The Old Testament is not philosophical explorations—as Plato and Aristotle speculated about the Prime Mover, for example—but a collection of stories of God revealing himself in human events. The greatest story of all is of the Israelites experiencing firsthand the miracle of God leading them out of slavery from Egypt and into their promised land. Ever after, when they referred to God in their Scriptures, God was not an object of philosophy but “the LORD, who brought us up out of Egypt” (Jer. 2:6).
Now fast-forward many centuries. A man walked the dusty roads and verdant hillsides of Galilee making outrageous claims such as, “I and the Father are one” (John 10:30). Jesus spoke with the authority of God; he claimed God’s power and prerogative to forgive sins; he judged as God judges. Yet Jesus regularly prayed to the Father, spoke about the Father as someone other than himself, and, on the cross, told his Father, “Into your hands I commit my spirit” (Luke 23:46). The more emphatic the early church became that Jesus Christ was in fact God incarnate—God in the flesh—the more pressure grew to clarify Jesus’ relationship to the Father.
The situation was made more complicated by the early Christians’ experience of God in yet another manner. On the day of Pentecost, just as Jesus promised, the Spirit of God flowed into them in a truly miraculous way. From that day forward, Christians knew that God was not only out there but also inside them. “You, however, are not in the realm of the flesh but are in the realm of the Spirit, if indeed the Spirit of God lives in you. And if anyone does not have the Spirit of Christ, they do not belong to Christ” (Rom. 8:9). So the Spirit (different from both the Father and Jesus) was also involved in human beings’ experience of God.
British theologian Alister McGrath sums it up: “The doctrine of the Trinity wasn’t invented—it was uncovered. . . . [I]t is the inevitable result of wrestling with the richness and complexity of the Christian experience of God.”6
Humans experienced a God who created the world, whose glory is still reflected in the wonder of nature; a God who saved humans from ultimate darkness and death, whose tender love can be seen in the human face of Jesus Christ; a God who is personally present and active in the lives of believers. Uncovering the Trinity is like explorers entering a new land and drawing a map for people who will follow them. The mountains, rivers, and valleys are already there; the map simply pictures them in relationship to each other.
We are wise to remember at this point Saint Augustine’s comment in the fourth century: “If you can comprehend it, it is not God.” Clearly, we stand before a mystery. And it is a good mystery. Theologian Leonardo Boff writes that the Trinity “provokes reverence, the only possible attitude to what is supreme and final in our lives. Instead of strangling reason, it invites expansion of the mind and heart. It is not a mystery that leaves us dumb and terrified, but one that leaves us happy, singing and giving thanks. Mystery is like a cliff; we may not be able to scale it, but we can stand at the foot of it, touch it, praise its beauty. So it is with the mystery of the Trinity.”7
All for a Letter
Although the mystery of a three-in-one God was not invented but uncovered in human experience, mentally putting the Three and One together is a struggle, begun by our spiritual ancestors, that continues to this day. Arius, perhaps the most famous heretic of the early Christian centuries, emphasized that Father, Son, and Spirit were distinct in their three-ness, but not really one: the Son and Spirit were lesser beings to the Father. Modalism, popular at roughly the same time, suggested that God took different roles (or “modes”) in the drama of salvation (much as one actor might play different characters in the same play by donning different masks)—an image that promoted the oneness of God at the expense of a distinct three-ness.
The church wrestled mightily with the paradoxical three-in-one from the fourth through the sixth centuries. Prompted by the Arian challenge, the first ecumenical council at Nicaea (325 CE) proposed belief “in one Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, begotten of the Father, only-begotten, that is, from the substance [ousia] of the Father; God from God, Light from Light, Very God from Very God, begotten not made, of one substance [homoousios] with the Father.” Was the oneness between the Father and the Son to be described as homoiousia, “likeness or coequality of substance,” or homoousia, “unity of substance”?8
Notice the difference a single letter makes in this debate! Yet it was upon just such a small distinction that the integrity of the divine paradox depended: were the Father and Son absolutely one (seen through the lens of ousia, or substance) yet at the same time also truly distinct? We remember how G. K. Chesterton speaks of “only a matter of an inch,” keeping the black and white of such paradoxes distinct and pure. Even a single letter can spell the difference between orthodoxy and heresy! Diogenes Allen returns to a now-familiar theme, pointing to the Trinity as a prime example of mystery helping us understand what we cannot understand: “It is rather the being of God, full and complete in itself, which leads us to invoke mystery at specific junctures in our reflections. It is by means of the intellect that we understand where it is impossible for us fully to understand. Such mystery does not lead to unbelief or agnosticism. As Gregory of Nyssa said, it leads to awe and silence in the presence of the divine ousia.”9
At the end of the day, it is important to remember that our paradoxical concept of the Trinity is not reality itself. It is a mental model of reality, similar to a Tinker Toy assembly of balls and sticks forming a model of a molecule; the reality to which it points is incredibly greater than the model itself. As we have insisted throughout our explorations, we wish to look not only at the paradoxes of Scripture but also through them. As we look through the paradox of the Holy Trinity, what might we see?
First, we might see a different image of love. I began with the story of my student who became fascinated that the triune God is the center and source of Love. Love has been tragically degraded in our society, dumbed down into emotions, good times, or sex. Timothy Keller suggests that if the ultimate reality is indeed a community of persons who know and love one another, then “if you favor money, power and accomplishment over human relationships, you will dash yourself on the rocks of reality. When Jesus said you must lose yourself in service to find yourself (Mark 8:35), he was recounting what the Father, Son and Holy Spirit have been doing throughout all eternity.”10 Cornelius Plantinga offers a similar connection: “According to God’s intelligence, the way to thrive is to help others to thrive; the way to flourish is to cause others to flourish; the way to fulfill yourself is to spend yourself. Jesus himself tried to get this lesson across to his disciples by washing their feet, hoping to ignite a little of the Trinitarian life in them.”11
When it comes to love, I find people are most interested in specifics: what is the loving thing to do in this or that situation? While it is true that love always exists in concrete actions, perhaps we are wise to step back occasionally and see the big picture: we love because we are living out the nature, indeed the very being, of the God who is Love and created us like himself (in his image). “We love because he first loved us” (1 John 4:19). Let that truth get into our bloodstream and captivate our imagination; the specifics will come.
A second implication of the Trinity is a deep connection with creation. Consider Avatar (2009), the highest-grossing film of all time, breaking the record previously held for twelve years by Titanic.12 It is set on the distant planet Pandora, where the alien society interpenetrates the life force underpinning their reality; they connect with this life force to save the life of the movie’s hero, who rejects his fellow humans who are pillaging this peaceful planet and joins the aliens’ fight against them. In the greedy strip-mining of this innocent society, we see allusions to the exploitation of both the environment and indigenous peoples over the centuries. We also see hints of classic New Age spirituality, especially a desire to stand against exploitation and be in harmony with the forces that underlie all reality.
While exploiters throughout history have at times looked for justification in the Bible,13 the biblical worldview actually sides with the aliens in Avatar: the center of reality is a nurturing, relational, personal God (a very different God from an impersonal life force). “In the act of creation, God already manifests the self-communicating, other-affirming, communion-forming love that defines God’s eternal triune reality. . . . God is eternally disposed to create, to give and share life with others. The welcome to others that is rooted in the triune life of God spills over, so to speak, in the act of creation.”14 The triune life of a nurturing, communion-forming, loving God spilling over into creation is a good image. Every person who comes to see this triune God spilling over into creation will naturally and passionately care about sustaining creation; creation begins not in the book of Genesis but in the being of the triune God. To not care about creation is to go against the flow of the very being of God.
Yet a third way we might benefit from looking through the paradox of the Trinity is to ask the question: how do we get in tune with the universe? Many spiritual seekers are asking exactly this question today. Here again, Christians already sit atop the mother lode of Mystery. Dallas Willard makes this point memorably in words that are worth quoting in full:
The advantage of believing in the reality of the Trinity is not that we get an A from God for giving “the right answer.” Remember, to believe something is to act as if it is so. To believe that two plus two equals four is to behave accordingly when trying to find out how many dollars or apples are in the house. The advantage of believing it is not that we can pass tests in arithmetic; it is that we can deal much more successfully with reality. Just try dealing with it as if two plus two equaled six.
Hence, the advantage of believing in the Trinity is that we then live as if the Trinity is real: as if the cosmos environing us actually is, beyond all else, a self-sufficing community of unspeakable magnificent personal beings of boundless love, knowledge, and power. And, thus believing, our lives naturally integrate themselves, through our actions, into the reality of such a universe, just as with two plus two equals four. In faith we rest ourselves upon the reality of the Trinity in action—and it graciously meets us. For it is there. And our lives are then enmeshed in the true world of God.15
I like Willard’s word “enmeshed.” Too often, our spiritual disciplines become pragmatic means to get what we want by pushing the right buttons on the heavenly vending machine. What if our spiritual practices were ways to get in tune with what God is already doing, where the deepest reality of the universe is already moving? Perhaps our spiritual habits like worship, prayer, Scripture reading, fasting, solitude, and the rest are like a surfer catching a wave. The ocean is so vast, so powerful, it is ridiculous to think we can determine its direction, let alone control it or bend it to our will. Instead, we give ourselves to it; we ride its waves and let them take us where they will, all the while “enmeshed in the true world of God.”
Reflection Questions
1. Have you noticed any negative consequences when individuals—or local congregations or even entire denominations or Christian traditions—neglect one or more members of the Trinity in favor of another?
2. How does the ancient perichoresis dance metaphor expand or deepen your understanding of the relationship within the Father, Son, and Spirit?
3. Which (if any) of these practical consequences of the Trinity—love, creation, being in tune with the universe—make an impact on you?
4. How does the concept of God as three in one invite you into the mystery of God?