Growing up in a Christian home, I was fortunate to develop a strong sense of God as a loving, merciful Father. I was encouraged to think of Jesus as my friend, teacher and saviour, and was taught to pray for the guidance and inspiration of the Holy Spirit. All the elements of the Trinity were there, yet I struggled to put them together.
Later, occasionally, maybe during a Trinity Sunday homily, I would try to make sense of laboured explanations involving shamrocks or triangles or boiling water.
Perhaps the most memorable of these analogies came courtesy of a teacher at my school who, one morning at assembly, took on the daunting task of explaining the doctrine of the Trinity to a thousand jaded adolescent girls. Wheeling a large, newfangled IBM computer onto the stage—this was the mid-eighties—he likened the Triune God to (of all things) a PC: I think the hard drive was God the Father; the screen was God the Son; and the keyboard was God the Spirit.
While attention-grabbing, his presentation still left me feeling that, as Christian doctrines go, the Trinity wasn’t a particularly appealing one, just another conundrum that I somehow had to get my head around, a kind of impossible maths problem to be solved—and I hated maths.
The mystery of the Trinity produces in us the very attitude we need to begin to make sense of it, participate in it and be transformed by it. The quickest route to humility, after all, is to fail at something.
The problem with applying analogies to a mystery like the Trinity is that at best they’ll be inadequate and at worst they’ll lead us into heresy (as the examples cited above threaten to do). That school assembly engaged me for a moment, but it didn’t change my life. And as I’ve since learnt, the Trinity can change the way we see everything, illuminating every aspect of our thinking about God and the world.
So how can something so hard to get our heads around be so illuminating? The problem lies, I think, in that phrase ‘get our heads around’, as though the very being of the eternal God—the ultimate source of all reality—is something that we could ever fully encompass with our limited, human minds.
But that’s the beauty of the Trinity. The mystery of it produces in us the very attitude we need to begin to make sense of it, participate in it and be transformed by it. The quickest route to humility, after all, is to fail at something. As the theologian Alistair McGrath puts it, the doctrine of the Trinity ‘represents a chastened admission that we are unable to master God’.
The less I struggle to ‘master’ the Trinity as a concept, and the more I give myself to the reality of it, the more I receive from it.
So instead of seeing the Trinity as something we need to get our minds around, maybe we should look at it as a reality that encompasses us. Rather than approaching it merely as a brain teaser or an intellectual concept to be grasped, it might be more helpful to approach the Trinity in a spirit of prayerful contemplation, humbly seeking to embrace the mystery in the same way Father, Son and Spirit embrace each other—in self-emptying, self-giving love.
My experience has been that the less I struggle to ‘master’ the Trinity as a concept, and the more I give myself to the reality of it, the more I receive from it. As I have approached it in this way, the Trinity has become not an obstacle to be overcome in the life of faith, but a kind of key that has opened doors of understanding and insight, and that has led me deeper into relationship with God.
It’s no accident that when Jesus sends his followers out into the world to spread the word of God’s love and to make disciples (Matthew 28:16–20), he instructs them to baptise them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Baptism is our doorway to the Church, and the Trinity is the key that turns the lock.
While the word Trinity doesn’t explicitly appear anywhere in Scripture, the concept is implicit throughout the whole biblical story—a story that proclaims to us not only that God loves us, but that God is love. It’s a beautiful idea, and a familiar one to many of us, but we risk turning it into a platitude if we divorce it from the Trinity.
The idea that God is love only becomes meaningful and coherent when we understand that God is—in God’s very being, throughout eternity—a loving community of three persons. Relationship is essential to who God is. And not just any kind of relationship. The relations between Father, Son and Spirit are never coercive or controlling; there is no merging or confusing of identities—each remains distinct—but they delight in each other and there is such complete unity that they are, in the most meaningful sense, one being.
The Trinity is not simply a model for the Church—a blueprint to follow—but rather a relationship or ‘communion’ in which we are called to participate.
So what does this mean for us and for the Church?
First of all, the Trinity is not simply a model for the Church—a blueprint to follow—but rather a relationship or ‘communion’ in which we are called to participate. We don’t just observe and then imitate the triune life of God within the Church and the world. Unlikely as it might seem, we are invited to enter into that life—to be drawn into the circle of love that flows eternally among Father, Son and Spirit and then to glorify God by reflecting that love within the world.
If we simply attempt to ‘apply’ principles gleaned from our understanding of the Trinity to our lives, to the Church and to the world around us, then our spirituality, the Church and Christian mission remain our project, and our image of the Trinity becomes something like a glossy photograph in a cookbook: ‘This is what it should look like when you are finished.’ But of course, no matter how carefully we follow the recipe, it never ends up looking like the picture.
In the Eastern Church, they speak of the Trinity as a kind of beautiful, elaborate dance of continual giving and receiving. The love that flows within the Trinity is so abundant and so powerful that it cannot be contained but generously spills out into the world in acts of life-giving creativity, divine self-sacrifice and the sharing of their love. We see this most significantly, of course, in God’s creation of the world, in Christ’s saving death on the cross and in the active, guiding presence of the Spirit in the daily life of each member of the Church.
The Trinity, then, are themselves our grace—divine love that is graciously offered to us and that enables us to welcome the love of Father, Son and Spirit within our deepest selves. The Triune God generously draws us, and the whole of creation, into the dance. We are incapable of shaping ourselves or the Church, let alone the world, in the image of the Trinity. Ultimately it is God who does the shaping, but through the Spirit, we are called and enabled to participate.
I find this an incredibly exciting and encouraging thought—and it doesn’t involve any maths.
Banner image: Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin, Trinity, 1915 (detail).
