My Ongoing Journey to God the Trinity, Part 1

..."we worship one God in Trinity, and Trinity in Unity, neither confounding the Persons, nor dividing the Substance." - The Athanasian Creed

Photo by Megan Earl

---

I have at this point probably more than a dozen places where I’ve scribbled thoughts about the Trinity—everything from large consternated blocks of words in my phone with no regard for capitalization or punctuation to carefully crafted text messages with more knowledgeable (and less knowledgeable) people, to handwritten notes in the margins of books. I’m pillaging all of them to make this the one and most thorough collection of my many questions, frustrations, apostrophes to and paces with dead writers regarding the most holy Trinity. Who knows, maybe it’ll be a couple of posts.

Where to start? Well, first off I can say how I came to be so obsessed with this doctrine. I’m a Christian. If I weren’t, I’m sure I wouldn’t have a lick of interest in it. I have no memory of the first time I was told about the Trinity, but it was probably well after I heard the names Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. I never once remember thinking I worshiped three gods. Probably if you had quizzed me about it at age 12, say, I would have said something like, ‘Those are three names for God’. And then if you had pressed me and asked “Is ‘Jesus’ also a name of God?” I would not have known how to answer, but would most likely finally have said yes. 

It wasn’t until grad school that I really took an academic (and at the same time personal) interest. I was digging into Thomas Aquinas a bit and came across Ed Feser, a modern and very able expositor of Aquinas. It was he who first introduced me to Aquinas’ Five Ways of proving God’s existence. I was captivated. Not long after this I found out about James Dolezal’s book All That is in God, which I first listened to on Audible, and then later read. He thoroughly convinced me and dazzled me about divine simplicity, and introduced the tension between that doctrine and the Trinity. I’ll say more on all this later.

Let’s return to those names: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. They are actually one name, according to Matthew 28:19. The Trinity is one God. The three persons are one God. So far, so good. All orthodox Christians would agree. And yet, the persons are not nothing. They are not figments of the Christian imagination. So what are they? Theologians for the last two millennia, particularly in the first three hundred years or so after Christ ascended, have offered many different terms, none of which have always fully satisfied everyone. And that’s fair enough, since none of those terms are provided by Scripture. As the well-known truism goes, the word Trinity is not found in the Bible, but the idea certainly is. Hypostasis, subsistence, substance, person, relation of origin, subsisting relation, are just some of the terms that have been used to describe what the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are. These describe them according to their distinctions, rather than according to the one divine essence that they share. They are words for the three, not the one. The quest of orthodox theology (orthodox meaning right opinion, belief that meets the standard) has been to sort of put up guardrails to keep people from going far afield in their thinking about God, past what Scripture would allow. In the doctrine of the Trinity probably more than anywhere else in theology, words matter. Very specific terminology has to be employed, among those who know it, to show that those guardrails are being respected. So there has been a long and arduous process of trying to find and use proper words to describe God in his oneness and in his threeness. It might be helpful to point out that the word ‘trinity’ just means threeness.

Augustine says this after acknowledging the awkwardness of the word ‘person’ for the three:

“Why, therefore, do we not call these three together one person, as one essence and one God, but say three persons, while we do not say three Gods or three essences; unless it be because we wish some one word to serve for that meaning whereby the Trinity is understood, that we might not be altogether silent, when asked, what three, while we confessed that they are three?”¹

In other words, ‘person’ might not be the best, but we need some word to do the job of naming what the three are, just as we need a word for the one. 

And yet, that word is a bit dangerous for us moderns because we hear it somewhat differently than Augustine’s readers would have. We automatically equate ‘person’ with a solitary being with its own mind, will, and emotions. This will lead us astray. For, in a mystery, the threefold God is one being, one entity, one thing, of one nature. For the Church Fathers, this means that he has one mind, one will, one personality, to use a modern term. Not three of any of these. And yet the persons are not just the one God considered from three angles, or the one God shape-shifting into different modes. It’s worth commenting here that the term ‘mode’ has been spoiled for many Christians as soon as they learned of the heresy ‘modalism’, which is more helpfully called Sabellianism. 

‘Modes’ is actually a helpful and safe word used by theologians to describe the persons. By this they don’t mean that God has different settings like a fan, clicking into Son Mode one day and Spirit Mode the next. It’s more like speaking of water in three modes: falling from the sky as rain, sitting in the ground as a lake, or running along it as a river. It’s all H2O. Obviously this breaks down, because any physical analogy is—physical, while God is not. 

And yes, I’ve been told that analogies for the Trinity are a bad idea. But in their proper place, I am convinced they have a part to play. Are we really a whole lot better off without them? All of our thinking and speaking is metaphorical and symbolic anyway, as C.S. Lewis pointed out in his essay “Transposition”. All our language is unsuited to the Trinity, and sometimes putting an image to an aspect of it is better than staying in Abstraction Land forever or using only highly technical terminology. The technical terms are also very useful, and the road to understanding is walled by them on one side, and by the images on the other. Without a light, we must often touch both walls to proceed. So long as the floor beneath us is divine revelation, we can have reasonable hopes of not becoming heretics. 

But as I was saying, we are left to deal with the challenge of a being who is one in some sense but three in another. At this point, many Christians are willing to shrug and say “What else do you need to know? Can’t you just accept the mystery and move on?” Well, I admit that there is a mystery here and we will never plumb its depths. But that doesn't mean we should stop short of knowing all we can know about our God. My obsession is with running until I smash my nose into the limits of our knowledge and our language. And with the one bloody nose I hope I’ll be wise enough to be content and stop pondering so much. 

To get to the real grit of the problem, I need to say more about divine simplicity. This is the doctrine that God is simple, or not composed of parts. He is single, undivided, indivisible, uncomposed, irreducible.² He is the most fundamental thing there is, because he is the ground of all being. Most of the church for most of its history, from the Cappadocian Fathers to Herman Bavinck, has argued that if God were composed of parts, these parts would be more fundamental than he, and therefore would render him something less than the First Cause, the Almighty, the self-sufficient, a se God of the Bible. Certainly he is more than the First Cause, but he cannot be less. You might say, “Well, what parts could he have? He’s not physical.” Theologians have had in mind metaphysical parts, and have said that he is not composed of act and potency, or of essence and existence, or of supposit and nature. 

And this is where things get tricky. If our God is one and simple, subsistent being itself, the I AM, how can he also be three? Theologians get around this by say that whatever the three persons are, they are not three parts which make up one Whole. But it’s not so easy to actually conceive of how this is true. Whether you make the persons parts is irrelevant for my difficulty. The fact that we must say that the Divine Essence is the persons, as orthodox teaching says, means that threeness, rather than simple unity, is inescapable in God. I can accept the mystery. But I can’t accept how it can be so acceptable to so many theologians. I can’t feel intellectually satisfied, despite all the clever reasoning and precise terminology. I can’t escape the sense that the closer we get to describing the Trinity, the more our language is warped out of all recognizable or sensible shape, the way matter and time get warped the closer they get to a black hole’s event horizon. 

So that’s the broad outline of my quandary. In the next article, I will turn to the Bible’s own witness about God the Father, God the Son, and God the Spirit.

1. Augustine, De Trinitate. Book VII, Chapter 6.

2. For more short resources on divine simplicity, check out these:

https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/essay/divine-simplicity/
https://www.monergism.com/divine-simplicity
https://opc.org/os.html?article_id=498