Chapter 06, God the Holy Trinity, Perichoresis/Perichoretic Co-Activity

Perichoresis/Perichoretic Co-Activity

            Now that we have considered a few different ways of thinking out the threeness and oneness of God that have proved to be problematic, let us move on to a way of thinking out the Unity in Trinity in a way that is more indicative of the mainstream of theology in the early church.  The problem, as should be clear from the ways people have tried to understand God’s Triunity, is that we have no way in which to understand how something can be both three and one at the same time.  Depending on which analogies we apply to the problem, we tend to either collapse the three Persons into a solitary unity or separate them into different gods.

            The concept developed by the early church came to be known by the term “Perichoresis.”  Though the term was used in the fourth century by Gregory Nazienzen, it is not developed explicitly until the seventh and eighth centuries by John of Damascus.  The literal meaning of the word is somewhat difficult.  The standard interpretation is, “Dancing around together in a circle,” though it seems more appropriate to say that it means “to mutually contain,” which is far closer to its theological meaning.

            Perichoresis is, at its very core, an attempt to take both the threeness and the oneness of God seriously.  It is a difficult theological concept.  How could it be otherwise when we are probing deeply into the very Being of God?  And yet, we must make an attempt.  One text that will help us to get ready to deal with this concept is John 14:9-10.  “Jesus said to him, ‘Have I been so long with you, and yet you have not come to know me, Philip?  He who has seen me has seen the Father; how can you say, “Show us the Father?”  Do you not believe that I am in the Father, and the Father is in me?  The words that I say to you I do not speak on my own initiative, but the Father abiding in me does his works.”

            The idea that Jesus puts forward at this point is that he is in the Father and the Father is, at the very same time, in him.  Perichoresis is a concept where we proclaim that three Persons of the Trinity are finally not separable from one another, but mutually indwell and mutually interpenetrate each other so that, wherever one Person is, the other two are present as well.  This would mean that any attempt to understand the Trinity by saying, “God is a Trinity, but each of the three Persons are each God by themselves,” is not appropriate.  To say that the Father is God without reference to the Son and Spirit is not conceivable.  If we were to say something along those lines, it would imply that the Father can be considered apart from the Son, which has been claimed over and over again throughout this work to be impossible.  How can we consider God the Father independently of his Son?  How can we say that God the Son is God, even apart from the Father?

            The conviction here is that, if we attempt to consider either the Father, Son, or Holy Spirit in isolation from the rest of the Trinity, we are considering something that does not exist.  The Father does not exist except as the Father of the Son, the Son does not exist except as the Son of the Father, and the Spirit does not exist except as the Spirit of the Father and the Son.  To say that we can consider any single Person by themselves would be to lapse into Tritheism, where the Persons are not just personally distinct, but truly separate.  The one, undivided Being of God, which cannot be broken down into anything more basic, is the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.  The three Persons are the one Being and the one Being is the Three Persons.

            This is a difficult concept, but it may perhaps become clearer if we consider how this plays itself out in history.   The concept of Perichoresis, that all three of the Persons are contained in each of them (that is, you cannot have one without the others), is accompanied by an understanding of all of God’s activity as the activity of the Triune God rather than the activity of each Person independently of the others.  We say that God’s activity is truly a perichoretic co-activity, where each Person contributes to each of God’s activities in such a way that it cannot be attributed to one Person over another but that each Person participates in each activity in their own unique way.

            Let us consider two central doctrines of the Christian faith and how they manifest the Perichoretic Co-Activity of God:  Creation and the death of Christ as a sacrifice for sins.  The first passage we read in the Bible speaks of creation as an act of perichoretic co-activity (though, it must be noted, that it is only because of the revelation of God in Christ that we can see the Trinity in this passage).  “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.  The earth was formless and void, and darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was moving over the surface of the waters.  Then God said, ‘Let there be light;’ and there was light.”  Here we have the statement that God (the Father) created the heavens and the earth, but creation was not accomplished by the Father alone.  The Spirit hovered over the surface of the waters (which has a part to play in the creation) and God spoke a word (It is the Word of God who became incarnate in Jesus Christ and was called the Son of God, John 1:14) to establish light.  Each of the Persons of the Trinity are involved in such a way that each contribute in their own unique way, but yet the act is a unified act of the Triune God.

            Another important moment in salvation history is the offering of Christ on the cross as a sacrifice for sins.  It is clear that God the Son is very much involved in this act.  It was a sacrifice that is ordained by God and endured by God.  However, it was also offered to God the Father on our behalf and in our place.  It also must be noted that, according to the book of Hebrews (9:14), it was through the eternal Spirit that Christ offered himself to God.  The sacrifice of Christ was not the merciful act of the loving Son in order to appease the angry Father.  Instead, it was the perichoretic co-activity of the Triune God, where each of the three Persons is involved throughout the entire act.

            These are just two examples that help us to understand the general pattern of God’s activity.  All of God’s acts are the acts of the Triune God and each of the Persons work together in absolute unity.  It does not take too much effort to begin to see how other major activities of God are also perichoretic co-activities and we can even think of our basic Christian experience in these terms.  We are accepted by God the Father because of the life, death, resurrection and ascension of Christ and the offering made on our behalf and in our place by Christ at every point of the process is mediated to us by the Holy Spirit.

Chapter 06, God the Holy Trinity, Trinitarian Heresies, Arianism, Sabellianism/Modalism, Tritheism

Trinitarian Heresies

Before we begin to discuss some specific views of the Trinity that have been condemned by the church as heretical, something must be said about what heresy meant in the early church (as it took on something of a different meaning in the late middle ages), as well as a word about those who supported those heresies.

Heresy has taken on a very negative connotation and to even speak of heresy in today’s world is often met with anger and bad memories.  It is remembered that in the late middle ages and into the Renaissance, to be branded a heretic was to attack a person and give grounds to imprison or execute them.  Heresy became something that was decided by the church as an autonomous authority and used as a stick to beat people who disagreed with the church.  As such it became an extremely political term that is rightly rejected in modern times.

However, this is not the meaning that heresy had in the early church.  In the first centuries, heresy was a pastoral diagnosis.  If someone was teaching something that was going to be finally destructive to the laypeople, the rest of the church, out of mercy and compassion to those who might be led astray, felt the need to combat that view.  It was not nearly as political a term as it became.  Heretics were not put to death (though they were occasionally exiled).  It is also important to note that the mainstream of the church was not always of one mind.  In particular, the conflict with Arianism so impacted the church that, though the First Council of Nicaea in 325 AD had rejected the Arian heresy, the church soon after became very much influenced by it that it was said, “Athanasius (the greatest champion for Nicene theology at the time) against the world.”  Eventually the church once again rejected Arianism, but it was not the case that once the decision was made there was no room for disagreement, but that the truth of the Trinity continued to impress itself upon the church.

Another thing that needs to be kept in mind when considering various heresies is that those who developed heretical views (the founder of a particular heresy was often called a “Heresiarch”) often did so, not in order to lead people astray or to misrepresent the truth.  Instead, they were more often than not trying to do justice to the Gospel as we have it in scripture.  For example, the key question being asked at the time of the major Trinitarian heresies was, “What is the relationship between the Father and the Son?”  Those who denied what would later come to be known as “orthodoxy” were not trying to mislead, but genuinely believed that their views were correct, and used the Bible to back these views up.

This is a good place to state that, throughout the history of the church, not a single argument was solved simply by an appeal to scripture.  The questions were not based around, “What does the text say?” but “What does the text mean?”  A major interpretational strategy in the early church and in the Reformation was, “Scripture is the best interpreter of Scripture.”  This meant that it was best to allow the passages of the Bible that are clear to interpret those that are difficult.  The problem is, who decides which texts are clear and which are difficult?  Which texts were emphasized often made all the difference in the world.  The primary concerns in theology are not truly textual but methodological.  This is why the thrust of this work has been more on how we approach theology than on providing an utterly complete account of all Christian belief.  With all these things in mind, we will turn to consider some particular Trinitarian heresies and why they are destructive to Christian faith.

Arianism

            This is perhaps the most dangerous and insidious Trinitarian heresy.  It was, after all, the first heresy that was combated in an official way, first at the First Council of Nicaea in 325 AD and again at the First Council of Constantinople in 381 AD.  Arianism gets its name from an elder named Arius from Antioch (in present day Turkey) who moved to Alexandria and taught that Jesus, who is called the Son of God, is not fully divine.  The claim was that the Son was the greatest of all creatures and was brought out of nothing like the rest of creation.  He was not True God from True God as the creed would eventually declare.  Arians summed up their views about this with the phrase “There was when the Son was not”  (We could say “There was a time when the Son did not exist,” though that is not quite as precise).

            The concern of Arius was to preserve the unity of God.  If the Son was confessed as fully God, you now had a Father who is fully God and a Son who is fully God.  How could this mean there were anything but two Gods?  In light of his understanding of monotheism, this was not possible.  In the end, what became incarnate (and indeed, it was argued that Jesus was not quite God and not quite man, but something that is in between the two) in Christ was not the fullness of God, but the greatest of all creatures, unfathomably greater than human beings, but not God.  It must also be noted that, for many Arians, God himself could not become a human being as it would imply the corruption of God by entering into the brokenness of the human condition.  Athanasius would respond that, just as, when Jesus touched a leper, he was not made unclean but cleansed the leper, when God entered into humanity, God was not corrupted, but humanity was healed.

            This view has many insurmountable problems.  If Jesus is not really God, then the activity of Jesus cannot ever be more than the activity of one of God’s creatures on behalf of others of God’s creatures.  The activity of Christ finally tells us nothing about God, but is only a nice lesson of self-giving as a virtuous thing for creatures to do.  If Jesus is not really man, but some kind of human/divine being that is really neither one nor the other, then this action has not really even touched our humanity.

            Aside from this serious problem, that the salvation proclaimed and embodied in Christ does not touch either God or us and so is effectively useless, Arianism has catastrophic consequences for our knowledge of God.  What has been claimed to be the single most significant instance of revelation (indeed, revelation in the fullest sense of the word) is Jesus Christ.  If Arius is correct, and Jesus is not of one being with the Father, the word and activity of Christ is not the word and activity of God and so cannot tell us anything certain about God.  This means that we can finally say nothing whatsoever about God, since we have no point of access into the divine life on which to base our statements.  However, if we look at this same situation from a different perspective, it means that we can say anything we want to about God.  If something exists and we can know it, it calls into question any statement we might make about it because it is judged to be true or false in light of what actually exists.  However, if we can know nothing about God, there is nothing that can judge our statements about God and we are free to rethink God however we choose and we will inevitably create a god that we want instead of the God that actually exists and is revealed in Christ.

Sabellianism/Modalism

            This view takes its name from the name of Sabellius, who argued that the Father, Son and Holy Spirit are not truly distinct in any meaningful sense of the term, but are rather different facets of the One God that we name differently depending on how we come to encounter God at any particular time.  For example, when we encounter God as Creator, we call God the Father; when we encounter God as the redeemer who rescues us, we say we have encountered God as Son; finally, when we experience the power of God dwelling within us, empowering us for our lives, we say that God is Holy Spirit.  The names Father, Son and Holy Spirit do not refer to any distinction within God, but only distinctions in how God appears to us.  What are traditionally called “Persons” within the Godhead are really “modes,” or ways of appearing to us.

            This view, at first, doesn’t seem so bad.  After all, why does it matter if we interpret what classic Christian theology has called the Persons of the Trinity as our subjective experience of the One God who is far greater than we can fit into only one analogy?  The problem is that we are saying that, though God interacts with us in a three-fold way, though God declares himself to be Father, Son and Holy Spirit to us, it does not correspond with who God actually is.  We are saying that there is a tremendous breach between who God is toward us and who God is in himself.  If this is the case, we must ask the question, “What, then, does Jesus tell us about God?”  This is an important question because, if there is a gap between who God is in himself and who God is toward us, we must ask what God’s activity toward us in Jesus Christ tells us about who God really is in God’s own life.  Finally, Jesus tells us nothing certain about who God is because Jesus refers to distinctions between himself and the Father and Spirit, which, according to this view, simply do not exist.

            Again, it must be stressed that the goal of Sabellianism was not to derail the faithful or to collapse the Gospel.  The goal was to preserve the oneness of God that was seen to be threatened by truly calling Jesus divine.  However, by totally eliminating the distinctions between the Persons, it results in making Jesus misrepresent God.  This view grants that, when God interacts with us, it is as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, but denies that these distinctions have anything to do with who God really is.  In the language defined above, it grants that there is an Evangelical Trinity, but not an Ontological Trinity.

            There was an ancient view that came to be known as Patripassionism, which means literally, “The Father suffers.”  In effect, this view states that, when Jesus was suffering on the cross, the Father suffered as well.  It must be stressed that, by saying this, the intention is to say that there is no difference whatsoever between the Father and the Son.  We have already said in a previous chapter that the Father did indeed suffer when Christ was on the cross, but suffered as the Father who was giving up the Son, not as the Father who is at the very same time the Son.  Or, in other words, it was the Son who was crucified, not the Father, though the crucifixion of the Son was the cause of the Father suffering, but in a different way.

            Some have said that the problem with this view is that it allows God to suffer.  However, the fact that God suffers is only problematic if one presupposes from the beginning that God cannot suffer and to suffer is unworthy of God.  If we press this line of thinking very far, we end up saying that, either Jesus, as the one who suffers on the cross, is not really God (for God cannot suffer) or that he suffers only in his human nature (which ends up introducing a split between Christ’s divinity and humanity like in Nestorianism, discussed in chapter three).

            However, the problem is not that Patripassionism claims that God has suffered but because it finally eliminates any distinction between the Father and the Son, which ends up with a Sabellian or Modalist view of God.  If the Father is suffering on the cross, and not the Son in distinction from the Father, then the distinction that is proclaimed in the New Testament between the Father and the Son is done away with, yielding all the problems discussed above.

            As a side note, it is significant that, when some have bypassed Father and Son language when referring to God (believing it to be sexist), while attempting to name the Trinity, have spoken of God, Creator, Redeemer, and Sanctifier.  This is problematic for a few reasons.  First, if indeed it is meant to be equivalent to saying that God is Father, Son and Holy Spirit, it implies that the Father and the Father alone creates, that the Son and the Son alone Redeems, and the Spirit and the Spirit alone sanctifies us.  This is not compatible with the Biblical witness, which emphasizes that it is the joint work of all three Persons as the one Being of God that do all things.  Calling God Creator, Redeemer, and Sanctifier is more of a job description than the Trinitarian name and, in the final analysis, when claimed that it is equivalent to Father, Son and Holy Spirit, it is a modalist understanding of God.

Tritheism

            Out of the three classic heresies that are being discussed here, Tritheism is the only one that acknowledges that the distinctions that we see between Father, Son and Holy Spirit are rooted in the nature of God.  However, this view goes further than this.  This view argues that, in light of the three-fold way in which God reveals himself to us, where the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit are each spoken of as divine, we can come to no other conclusion but that there are indeed three gods.

            It must be said that this discussion will be far shorter than the others as it has not ever had strong support in the history of the church.  Indeed, when people like Gregory of Nyssa were accused of being polytheists, the response was immediate and passionate that they affirmed only one God, though that one God is indeed a community of persons.

            The primary concern with this view is that it violates the core convictions of Jews and all the early Christians, that God is one (as exemplified by the Shema, quoted above).  To say that there are actually three real gods and not just the one God that is explicitly claimed in both the Old and New Testaments is a radical departure from the history of Israel.  This separation from God’s historical interaction with Israel has many problems of its own (see chapter 2, God’s Interaction With Israel).

            If some speculation might be in order as to how Tritheism might still be present in one form or another in the modern church, it might be suggested that, if there is a sharp distinction between the work of Christ and the work of the Father or between the work of Christ and the work of the Spirit, Tritheism may be lurking nearby.  There has been a practice of many throughout Christian history where an idea is discussed called the Law of Appropriations.  In this view, there are some attributes and tasks that are particularly the dominion of the Father (such as creation), others that belong particularly to the Son (such as redemption and love), and others that belong to the Spirit (such as power for the Christian life).  If calling God Creator, Redeemer and Sanctifier while emphasizing the oneness of God was fundamentally a modalist position, doing the same while emphasizing the threeness of God (as the law of appropriations does) tends toward tritheism.  I do not mean to suggest that those who do such things would say they are Tritheists, but rather their sincere attempts to explain God imply such a view.

Chapter 06, God the Holy Trinity, Coming to Understand the Trinity

Coming to Understand the Trinity

            It was claimed above that one of the reasons why the Trinity is so seldom talked about in everyday Christianity is because it has been approached as if it were an abstract idea that has nothing to do with our daily Christian lives.  The irony about this conclusion is that it is the exact opposite that should be the case.  Indeed, historically speaking, it can be argued (as has been hinted at above) that the doctrine of the Triunity of God did not arise as something divorced from Christian experience, but something that flows from it and is intimately bound up with it.

            Before we continue on and explain a more holistic and dynamic way of understanding how we come to believe in the Trinity, some terms will need to be defined and explained.  First, reference will be made to our “evangelical and doxological participation in the Gospel.”  This describes the two-way involvement of our basic Christian experience.  The word “evangelical” literally means “pertaining to good news” and refers to the movement from God to humanity as Jesus Christ in the Gospel.  The word “doxological” literally means “pertaining to glory,” and refers to the movement from humanity back to God in prayer and praise.  So, what we are saying when we bring these two concepts together is that, in our basic Christian experience, we receive God’s mercy, love, et cetera, and, in response, we give praise and thanksgiving and adoration to God.

            The next two terms are related, but they must be carefully distinguished.  There has, since the very beginning, been a distinction between the “Evangelical Trinity” and the “Ontological Trinity.”  Again, the word “evangelical” refers to the good news that is received by God’s mighty and merciful acts.  In this case, the “Evangelical Trinity” refers to the fact that we do indeed see God’s activity spoken of within the New Testament in Trinitarian terms.  In a sense, it could be said that the Evangelical Trinity is our perception of God’s activity toward us.  The word “ontological” literally means “referring to what exists.”  When we speak of the “Ontological Trinity,” we are speaking of a God who is Triune in God’s very existence as God.

            The distinction between these levels of our evangelical and doxological participation in the Gospel, the Evangelical Trinity and the Ontological Trinity, can be said to be part of the problem.  When we declare that God is Triune, we are making a statement about the Ontological Trinity, which, being two levels removed from our daily experience, is seen as abstract.  However, it is hoped that this treatment will help to connect these levels together.

            When we read the Bible, as has been already stated, there is no formal statement of the Trinity.  There are, however, many accounts from different angles and people, of God’s mighty work in Jesus Christ.  We are presented with a message of salvation, that God is for us and has given himself to us in an astonishing way.  It is entirely possible to live a life in accordance with the scripture and yet never come to explicit and careful articulation of the doctrine of the Trinity.  That does not mean, however, that a person who does not have conceptual clarity that God is Triune is not, in fact, Trinitarian.  Indeed, it could be said that, by asking such a believer a few questions, the Trinitarian content of their basic Christian experience can be brought out. 

Such a line of questions might look like this.  The question could be asked, “What is your relationship to God?”  The answer would sound something like, “I am accepted by God and in loving relationship with him.”  Now, the question could be asked, “And how did you come to be in such a relationship with God?”  The answer would more than likely be Christocentric.  “Jesus died on the cross for me and to atone for my sins.”  Finally, it could be asked, “And how did you come to know that you were in this loving relationship with God?”  The language might be different, but the content would be similar to, “The Spirit of God spoke to my heart, telling me that I was a child of God.”  What is important to grasp from this is that, even when we are not forthright with a carefully articulated doctrine of the Trinity, we find that our evangelical and doxological participation in the Christian faith is intrinsically Trinitarian.  The problem at this point becomes how we can bring this basic Christian conviction to careful articulation.

This is where we come to the Evangelical Trinity.  When we carefully allow the entire New Testament witness to impress itself upon us, through our encounter with the Scriptures, especially in the worshiping life of the church (where we baptize in the Triune name, among other things), we start to see a pattern in the way God interacts with humanity.  God brings about salvation for humanity through the life, death, resurrection and ascension of Christ and this reality is communicated to human beings through the power of the Holy Spirit.  The more we consider the scriptural witness and the core of our Christian experience, the more we realize that this is indeed the case and the more we come to the conviction that our experience of God is not simply of a God who acts in only one way as an impersonal force, but interacts with us as Father, as Son, and as Holy Spirit.

However, the moment we realize the fact that God interacts with us as a Trinity of Persons, Father, Son and Spirit, it comes into apparently sharp conflict with the radical monotheism of Jewish faith.  What are we to make of this conflict?  As it turns out, it is precisely at this point that the major Trinitarian heresies arise.  The question that must be answered here is, “Does the fact that God interacts with us as a Trinity of Persons tell us anything about who God is in God’s own life?”  In one way or another, the heresies of Arianism and Modalism (discussed below) both answer this question in the negative.  “No.  This threeness of revelation finally is not indicative who God really is.  God is one, a single, undifferentiated unity.  This threeness must be subordinated to the oneness of who God really is.”  However, in one way or another, this causes the Gospel to fall apart.  Exactly how this happens for each of them will be addressed in the discussion of Trinitarian heresies below.  Suffice it to say at this point that, if the Gospel is to have any saving significance, this Triunity of God’s interaction we experience in our Christian lives and in the Gospel must be rooted in the being of God himself.  That is to say, the Evangelical Trinity, the fact that God interacts with us as Father, Son and Holy Spirit, is also an Ontological Trinity (where God actually is Father, Son and Holy Spirit).  If we wanted to deny this connection between how God is toward us and who God is in God’s self, we are free to do so, but we must understand that to do so is to negate the saving work of Christ (as should be clear by the end of this chapter).

Chapter 06, God the Holy Trinity, Biblical Roots of the Doctrine of the Trinity

Biblical Roots of the Doctrine of the Trinity

            This section will likely not be as long or as detailed as some might wish.  This is primarily because the main concern here is to briefly deal with some particular aspects of the Biblical roots for the Trinity and not to develop a Biblical “proof” for the doctrine of the Trinity (as should be clear from the preceding section).  In a sense, this is simply a clearing of the path to consider the actual way our knowledge of the Triunity of God arises below.

            One of the things that is very important is that there are key points in the New Testament text where God is named in various triadic formulae.  It must be stressed that this does not in any sense “prove” that God is Triune, but it does play a role in our understanding that Triunity correctly.  The first of these is at the very end of the Gospel according to Matthew, where Jesus is giving his disciples what has come to be known as the “Great Commission.”  Jesus tells his followers to “Make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.”  He links each of the Persons of the Trinity together in this statement about baptism, which has been central to the life of the church since the very beginning.  The next text is at the very end of 2 Corinthians (13:14), where Paul says, “The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit, be with you all.”  The last of these has been mentioned before but is often overlooked.  1 Corinthians 12:4-6, “Now there are varieties of gifts, but the same Spirit.  And there are varieties of ministries, and the same Lord.  There are varieties of effects, but the same God who works all things in all persons.”

            The reason why these three statements are mentioned is because each of them contains the three Persons of the Trinity and nothing else (as is not the case, for example, with the definition of the church in Ephesians 4:4-6).  The other reason, which is very important, is that, in each of them, a different Person is named first.  Though we often refer to the Father as the “First” Person, the Son as the “Second” Person and the Spirit as the “Third” Person because of the centrality of baptism to the life of the church, it is important to notice that there is nothing about the Father that demands that he be placed first.  Each Person can be named first because there is no hierarchy within the being of God.  This is being emphasized because there have been many throughout the history of the church who have insisted that the Father is first, not just for convenience in naming him, but because there is something about the Father that makes him more important than the Son or the Spirit.  This is not the case.

            The other major thing to remember at this point is that, for the majority of the relevant Biblical passages, the stress is not so much on naming the three Persons, but by illuminating the relations between them.  Throughout the Gospel of John (as one example for all), Jesus refers to the distinction and yet unity between him and the Father.  There can be no confusion that Jesus and the Father are not utterly the same, that is, the Son still refers to the Father using second and third person language (“you” or “him” language rather than “I”), and yet he proclaims that “I and the Father are one.”  When we read these passages (which, it must be noted, deal primarily with only the Father and the Son), we realize that we are not presented with a Son that is clearly distinguishable from the Father or a Father that is clearly distinguished from the Son, but a Father and Son that are profoundly united.

            The New Testament evidence leads us to conclude that there is not a lot we can say about the Persons of the Trinity in isolation from one another, but that there are distinctions between them.  We find ourselves coming to agree with the early church when they said that, whatever we say about the Father, we also say about the Son, except “Father.”  The point is that the relations between the Persons are as important as, if not more important than, the Persons themselves.  What makes the Father who he is?  He is the Father of the Son.  What makes the Son distinct?  He is the Son of the Father.  The Spirit is included as well, but the concept is best grasped with the Father and Son first.

            In light of this discussion that the bare mention of the three Persons is not the key, but rather the relations between them, it is important to raise a controversial point in Biblical Studies.  1 John 5:7 says, “There are three that testify in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Spirit, and these three are one.”  This is present in the King James Version and a few others, but is largely absent from modern translations.  The reason for this is that the evidence for this verse is found only in late manuscripts, that is, there is no truly reliable evidence (like there is for the overwhelming majority of the Bible) that this text is original.  There has been a debate and people have gotten very excited about this issue, but it seems that this particular text does not add all that much to the discussion.

            First, it must be said that, if your doctrine of the Trinity hinges on the single text of 1 John 5:7, it is not likely that you have an adequate grasp on God’s Triunity.  This text, examined in isolation from the rest of the New Testament, is easy to interpret in a modalist way (a view which will be explained below) rather than in a truly Trinitarian way.  The simple listing that there are three who are one can easily be distorted in various ways that are misleading at best.  There are other passages, such as John 16:5-15, where the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, are all involved, each in their unique way, participating in the unitary work of God, that are far more helpful as far as understanding the nature of God than this single, contested text in 1 John.

Chapter 06, God the Holy Trinity, Problematic Ways of Explaining the Trinity, Unique Nature of the Christian Doctrine of God

Problematic Ways of Explaining the Trinity

            As we transition from discussion of each of the three Persons in the one Being of God to the discussion of the entire Trinity, it must be said that we are treading on interesting and holy ground.  The Christian doctrine of the Trinity is one of the very most pivotal and important beliefs in all of Christian faith.  It provided both the content and the form of the classic Christian creeds (like the Apostles’ Creed and the Nicene Creed).  It appears in nearly every statement of faith of every church and denomination and yet is one of the most neglected doctrines in those same churches and denominations.

            Why is this?  It might be said that it is because the Trinity is a mystery, something that utterly transcends our limited minds.  If it is so far beyond us, it would seem foolish to spend much time on it.  However, as mysterious as it is, as much as it dwarfs our attempts to explore it to its depths, it is indeed an indispensable belief of Christian faith and we must explore and understand it as well as we can.  It is far more accessible and important to everyday Christian life than many would suspect.

            A major reason why many modern Christians do not understand or appreciate the doctrine of the Trinity is because it has been explained in very problematic ways.  The first major way the Trinity is explained poorly is when we use bad images to try to communicate it to young people in a children’s sermon or in another similar context.  We might say, “God is like water.  Water can be a solid (ice) liquid (water) or gas (steam), so it is three in one.  It is the same way with God.  He can be Father, Son or Holy Spirit.”  Another popular explanation is, “God is like an egg.  Just as there is only one egg but it has a yolk, a white and a shell, there is only one God but that one God is made up of a Father, a Son and a Holy Spirit.”

            We hear explanations like that and our response is not to wonder at the majesty and mystery of God, falling to our knees in praise and adoration.  Instead, we are more likely to say, “Wow, I know that the Trinity is supposed to be really important, but after hearing that, it doesn’t make any sense to me.”  As it turns out, if we actually take those two illustrations seriously, we end up with understandings of God that have been considered heretical since the fourth century; modalism for the former and tritheism for the latter, which will be discussed later.

            Another way people have attempted to understand and explain the Trinity is by starting by presupposing the Trinity, then attempting to try to find some way to show how three can be one.  This has taken up such images as the Nile, the human mind, history, candles, and many others.  These are either more or less (though usually less) effective at communicating an adequate understanding of the Trinity, but regardless of their orthodoxy, they simply do not reflect in any way how the fact that God is Triune should impact our lives and shape who we are.  If it does not bring life, then it must not be bringing us in touch with the living God.

Unique Nature of the Christian Doctrine of God

            One of the things that should make us realize that the Trinity is far more rich, dynamic and important than the above illustrations can possibly communicate is that the Christian doctrine of the Trinity is absolutely unique in the history of religion and philosophy.  Not a single other community has developed a doctrine of a Trinity.  They may have three main gods, they may have a single god who manifests itself in three ways, but no other group has ever developed a fully nuanced understanding of God being a Trinity in Unity.  This is significant because, if there were something intrinsic to human nature that compelled us to formulate a doctrine of the Trinity, we would expect to see it other places.  This is simply not the case.

            Given the unique nature of the Christian doctrine of God, it would be beneficial to consider some of the ways people have tried to explain the Trinity that have proved to be inadequate.  The first way we will consider is that the doctrine of the Trinity does not arise simply by starting with a few basic biblical principles about God and then, using rigid logic, ultimately deduce a Triune God.  If we were to take the “oneness” of God that is emphasized so strongly and add to it the reality that there is a Father, a Son, and a Holy Spirit, we would not come up with the classic doctrine of the Trinity, we would instead arrive at a logical contradiction (How can something be three and one at the same time) which actually is the source of all the Trinitarian heresies that we will discuss below.

            The belief that God is Triune does not come into view if we work inductively, either, that is taking every single verse that speaks of the Father, the Son, or the Holy Spirit, and combining them all together in some kind of creative synthesis.  In fact, this way of approaching the Trinity might actually result in some confusion in how to reconcile the fact that the New Testament speaks of each of the three Persons as God and yet, throughout the Bible, it is affirmed that there is only one God.  When approaching the Trinity in either of these two ways, it is just as likely that one will begin to have serious doubts about the validity of the Trinity and its Biblical roots than that they will come to conceptual clarity.  It is a difficult reality that eludes some of our standard ways of investigation.

            In point of fact, the belief that God is a Trinity arose organically and holistically within the worshipping life of the church.  The first believers were Jewish men and women who were radically monotheist (one of the most important statements in the Old Testament is the Shema in Deuteronomy 6:4; “Hear, O Israel!  The Lord is our God, the Lord is One!).  These men and women encountered Jesus, especially when he was resurrected in glory (John 20:28), and even more especially after they received the Spirit on Pentecost (remember what was discussed about the Spirit mediating Christ to us in the last chapter) and realized that, when they came face to face with Christ, they came face to face with the living God.  This reality was so potent that they proclaimed that the man Jesus, who was executed on the cross as a criminal, was nothing less than the one true God, who had interacted with Israel, delivered them from Egypt and walked with them for centuries.

            As the church lived dynamically, worshipping the Lord, they found themselves bound by the fact that the reality that they confronted in Christ through the Holy Spirit was nothing less than truly divine.  Very quickly, the apostles began to greet churches, not just in the name of God their Father, but also in the name of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.  Not only this, but, in some letters (such as Colossians and Hebrews), when Jesus is mentioned, it is done in such a way to emphasize that creation, one of the key events attributed to God alone in the Jewish tradition, was also attributed to Christ.  Christ was the one through whom everything was created (this is also present in the beginning of the Gospel of John).  That very same Shema that was so important to stress the unity of God was adapted by Paul (especially in 1 Cor. 8:5-6) to speak of both God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.  This distinguished between the Father and the Son, but also united them together within the same oneness of God that had been declared since the earliest days of Israel’s religion.

            When confronted with both God and the Son of God, who are personally distinct (they refer to one another as “you,” as opposed to “I”), the church eventually had to try to sort out the relation between the Father and the Son, but within the New Testament documents (where neither the term, “Trinity,” nor the classical expression, “One Being, Three Persons,” appears), we see this tension present, though not yet fully developed.  There are places where even the most skeptical reader must admit that the New Testament text creates a tension that would be addressed (for right or for wrong) by subsequent theology.

            The point that is important to note here is that the Christian doctrine of God, the Trinity in Unity, does not arise simply by taking our normal ways of arriving at conclusions, either deductively or inductively, but does so within the worshiping life of the church in response to the decisive act of God.  It is not something that human beings came up with one day and said, “Hey, this sounds neat,” but was something that the church felt they had to say in light of who God has revealed himself to be in Jesus Christ.

            It might be said that, next to the Incarnation, the Trinity is the most “realist” doctrine in all of Christian faith.  By this, I mean that it is, of all aspects of Christian faith, one of the most dedicated to proclaim what really is as opposed to what seems to be or what we have invented.  It is something like making scientific investigation.  When a scientist examines something in nature (such as light, motion, gravity, the structure of plants, etc.), they are not satisfied by simply stating what their first impressions are.  First impressions are often misleading.  Nor are they content to say what this natural reality is “as it seems to them.”  This kind of work is not considered to be sufficient for rigorous science.  Instead, the scientist probes deeply into their field of inquiry, searching it to its roots as far as they can, testing their presuppositions, allowing them to be challenged by what is found in their investigation, and finally presenting their conclusions, not just of their own personal feelings about the matter, nor simply their first impressions, but what, as far as they can tell, it really is in its own being.

            This is what the doctrine of the Trinity is attempting to do.  It is not an explanation of who God seems to be simply at first glance.  The Bible is full of examples where God utterly surprises humanity, where he challenges those first impressions and reveals himself to be far more rich and dynamic than we ever would have imagined and than we ever would have invented.  Further, the doctrine of the Trinity is not simply a reflection by particular Christian thinkers on who God is “to them.”  Rather, it is an in depth investigation, carefully studying the Biblical witness, not simply the words on the page, but the realities beyond those words that they point to, and a presentation of who God really is, and not just who he seems to be nor who he is to us.

            The Trinity is something that, like the incarnation, bypasses all of our human invention.  It is something that stands against our tendency and desire to read our own hopes and dreams into God, but rather presents itself as something that is truly real to which our reflection must be subject.  It is not something that is unquestionable, but something that has proved to be tremendously illuminating in understanding the nature of God as revealed in Christ.  It is in light of this that we will explore some aspects of the Christian doctrine of God.