Essentials: The Trinity
Hello, friends!
Last week I began a series of exploring several essential characteristics of the Christian God. Last week we discussed His name, Yahweh, and if you haven’t checked that out yet, you can find that here. This week, I want to discuss the Trinity.
The doctrine of the Trinity is fundamental to the Christian faith and is the basis for all Christian theology. It is the fact that we believe our God is triune that sets Christianity apart from all other religions, because without the Trinity, Jesus Christ is not our Savior. Understanding the Trinity directly influences how we approach and interact with God and how we understand our salvation. Simply put, to know the Christian God is to know Him as a Trinity, whose triune nature is our means of salvation (more on this in 3 weeks!).
Though a formal doctrine of the Trinity is not explicitly stated in Scripture, images of the Trinity can be found throughout both the Old and New Testaments, with the most notable being at Jesus’ baptism in Matthew 3:13-17:
13 Then Jesus came from Galilee to the Jordan to John, to be baptized by him. 14 John would have prevented him, saying, “I need to be baptized by you, and do you come to me?” 15 But Jesus answered him, “Let it be so now, for thus it is fitting for us to fulfill all righteousness.” Then he consented. 16 And when Jesus was baptized, immediately he went up from the water, and behold, the heavens were opened to him, and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and coming to rest on him; 17 and behold, a voice from heaven said, “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased.” (ESV)
Christians are monotheistic, meaning that we believe in one God; however, He is “manifested” in three Persons. In other words, Yahweh God is one God who is three persons. God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit are three Persons who share a divine nature and operate in unison: they are, in the deepest sense, One.
There are two analogies which I find very helpful when trying to understand the Trinity. The first comes from Gregory of Nyssa (335AD-395AD). Gregory compared the Trinity to three humans: Peter, James, and John. Like the Trinity, Peter, James, and John are three distinct persons who share a common nature, their human nature. However, unlike the Trinity, though they share a nature, they operate independently from one another. Therefore, Gregory of Nyssa suggests that the Trinity must be understood as an operation rather than simply a common nature. Gregory says, “every operation of God upon His creation is named according to our Father, proceeds through the Son, and is perfected in the Holy Spirit” (Alister McGrath, The Christian Theological Reader, 162). I think Gregory of Nyssa’s analogy does a great job at showing the distinctness of the three Persons of the Trinity, but I think it overemphasizes their “separateness” (I hesitate to use that word). In my opinion, his analogy does not adequately emphasize their oneness. In response to that, I find the second analogy helpful.
The second analogy is a very common one among modern churches and likens each member of the Trinity- the Father, Son, and Spirit- to a different aspect of an apple. The Father might be the skin, the Son the flesh, and the Holy Spirit the core (the order truly does not matter and is often used interchangeably in this analogy). This analogy emphasizes the unity between the Trinity: just as each aspect of the apple is still the apple, each Person of the Trinity is still God. However, just as each aspect of the apple is unique and has a unique function, so do the Father, Son, and Spirit. This second analogy is certainly less theologically “high minded”, but I actually find it very helpful, and it has become one of my favorite analogies to use. In whichever analogy you prefer, the most important thing to understand about the Trinity is that though the Father, Son, and Spirit are unique Persons, they are united in their nature and operation as they never act independently from each other.
Christians have experienced God’s triune nature in their practices before the concise doctrine of the Trinity was explicitly affirmed by the Church in the Council of Nicaea. The best evidence for this does not need to be found outside of Scripture, as the apostles and early church leaders prayed to the Father and healed and preached to the sick and oppressed in the Son’s name through the power of the Holy Spirit (Matt 6:9-13, Luke 10: 1-20, Acts 3:1-10, Eph 1:15-20, Eph 6:18, etc.). The apostle’s lives were lived in constant interaction with the Trinity, and this is something we can do as well!
One of the most significant ways we interact with the Trinity is through prayer, because as we pray, the Spirit leads us into the communion between the Father and the Spirit and draws us up in such a way that we can become united with the Son. We can also interact with the Trinity in our daily lives as, just like the apostles, we too are called to minister in Christ’s name, through the power of the Holy Spirit, all unto the will of the Father.
I will be talking more about Christ and the Holy Spirit in the next two weeks, so I think I will end there for now. Stay tuned for those next two posts! As always, message me with any questions or topics you would like me to cover through the contact page and I will do my best to get to them. See you next Monday!
