Explaining the Trinity
13 : 1 x 1 x 1 = 1
The Father is God above us, the Son is God beside us, and the Spirit is God within us.
Douglas Jacoby
What is the Trinity?
The OED (Oxford English Dictionary) defines trinity:
Being three; group of three. From Latin trinitas, “triad.” Surely they are not distinct persons as are the Three Musketeers, the Three Stooges, the Three Tenors, or the Three Little Pigs. On the other hand, we aren’t simply dealing with one person in three roles, like a person who functions as mother, wife, and professional. The first error to be avoided is tritheism – three separate gods; the second is modalism – where God “morphs” from one form to another according to the need of the hour.
Part of coming to terms with the doctrine is grasping what theologians mean when they discuss the “persons” of the trinity. In modern English “three persons” strongly implies a triad of gods. But the theological term “person” is from the Latin persona, which means mask, part, character, as in the characters of a play. This of course does not mean that God is somehow “pretending,” like an actor. In brief, the holy trinity is the three-in-one.
C.S. Lewis – “People already knew about God in a vague way. Then came a man who claimed to be God; and yet He was not the sort of man you could dismiss as a lunatic. He made them believe Him. They met Him again after they had seen Him killed. And then, after they had been formed into a little society or community, they found God somehow inside them as well: directing them, making them able to do things they could not do before. And when they worked it all out they found they had arrived at the Christian definition of the three-personal God.”
Biblical Basis
Often the Father, Son and Spirit are mentioned together in the New Testament (2 Corinthians 13:13, Matthew 28:19, John 14:17-23). They are three in personality but one in nature or essence. Again, Father, Son and Spirit are each God (in essence), but none can be identified with the other.
Again, we must guard ourselves against false understandings of trinity, or we will drift into the errors of “unitarianism” (which roundly rejects the trinity) or tritheism. (The Qur’an mistakes belief in the Trinity for tritheism when it condemns “Those who say Allah is three.” )
In short, all three persons are divine. Obviously our heavenly father is God. In addition, many verses state that Christ is divine (2 Peter 1:1; Titus 2:13; John 1:1, 14), not to mention the indirect proofs of his deity, such as his forgiveness of man’s sins (Mark 2), and claiming as his own the name of God (John 8:58). But how can Christ have two natures simultaneously? An illustration may help.
Lemonade is 100% wet, and yet it is also 100% citrus. It isn’t somehow half wet and half citrus – it’s wholly both at the same time. In the same way, Jesus is human and God.6
Finally, it is also clear from the Scriptures that the Spirit, the third person of the Trinity, or the “Spirit of God,” is divine. Let’s check out the OED definition of the Spirit: “The active essence or essential power of the Deity, conceived as a creative, animating, or inspiring influence.” Now this may be an accurate definition, but how does it help us be closer to God? It makes a difference in our lives only when we sense and appreciate that God, through his Spirit , is living within us (John 14). The Spirit in nature is God; all members of the Trinity are equally divine.
Trinity in Church History
The earlier “ecumenical councils” strove to define and describe the relationships between the members of the godhead (Nicea in 325, Constantinople in 381, and Chalcedon in 451, to mention a few). Yes, many believers in the early Christian era spent generations hammering out the doctrine of the trinity, investigating the intricacies of the Spirit. Even in the Middle Ages, interest in the Trinity was strong. Aquinas produced the most thorough treatise on “The Blessed Trinity.”9 In the Restoration movement, especially in the 19th century, there was a reaction against trinitarian language. The famous hymn ‘Holy, holy, holy’ mentions “God in three persons, blessèd Trinity!” And yet in the overreaction to “traditional” doctrines, these words were changed to “God over all and blessed eternally.” Was this really necessary? Is it not true that Father, Son, and Spirit are all divine?
Analogies Good and Bad
While it is true that Father, Son, and Spirit are all God, we cannot correctly say that the Father is the Son, or that Spirit and Son are interchangeable. Analogies therefore need to be carefully selected, lest we inadvertently support false doctrine through our attempts to refute it.
The analogy I have most often used to explain the trinity is the analogy of the amorphous forms of H20. Ice = water, liquid water = water, and steam = water (in essence), but ice is not steam, etc. Though I like the water analogy, its shortcoming is that it implies the false doctrine of modalism – that God appears in one form now, another at another time. I have heard worse analogies: time (past, present and future), even an egg (shell, white and yolk)!
Or explain the Trinity by way of an atom: An atom is a single unit of matter, and yet is comprised of three components; protons, neurons and electrons. The atom IS because of those three, and yet those three are an atom because they are one.
A better analogy involving water is a river, which consists of a source, stream, and current (Father, Son, Spirit). Or how about the sun? This consists of the star (sun) itself, sunbeams, and the sunshine as it falls on the earth.
Trinitarian triangle [figure]
Opponents of trinity ask, how can 1 + 1 + 1 = 1? But the mathematics is all wrong. Really it’s a case of 13 : 1 x 1 x 1 = 1. Moving from simple math to geometry, the triangular illustration may better encapsulate the truth about the relations among the persons of the Trinity:
As someone put it more academically, “A better illustration based in human nature would be, as suggested earlier, the relation between our mind, its ideas, and the expression of these ideas in words. There is obviously a unity among all three of these without there being an identity. In this sense, they illustrate the Trinity.”
No single analogy captures the divine mystery, though the various pictures will be more convincing to different people.
