The Trinity

“[T]he mysterious something which is behind all things must be more than a person… something super-personal… The whole purpose for which we exist is to be taken into the life of God.

“As you advance to more real and more complicated levels, you don't leave behind the things you found on simpler levels; you still have them, but combined in new ways—in ways you couldn't imagine if you knew only the simpler levels.. On the Divine level, you still find personalities; but up there you find them combined in new ways which we, who do not live on that level, cannot imagine. In God’s dimension, so to speak, you find a being who is three Persons while remaining one Being.. Of course we cannot fully conceive a Being like that: just as, if we were so made that we perceived only two dimensions in space we could never properly imagine a cube.

“All sorts of people are fond of repeating the Christian statement that ‘God is love’. But they seem not to notice that the words ‘God is love’ have no real meaning unless God contains at least two Persons. Love is something that one person has for another person. If God was a single person, then before the world was made, He was not love.. in Christianity God is not a static thing—not even a person—but a dynamic, pulsating activity, a life, almost a kind of drama. Almost, if you will not think me irreverent, a kind of dance.”

– C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

I’ve been thinking about the Trinity: it started with my studying the Holy Spirit in response to a question asked in small group, which led me to realize how less aware I am of the Spirit than of God the father and Jesus. Which led me to meditate on what it means that God is one God in three persons: not more one than he is three; not more three than he is one.

On one hand, it’s all incredibly mentally frustrating. Like trying to wrap your mind around something it just can’t grasp. I’ve heard lots of analogies—it’s like how Dave and I are separate people, yet we are one personality in the common language and intimacies and understandings we have—or how squares are separate two-dimensional shapes, yet come together to form a three-dimensional cube. But in the end, it’s something I can’t understand, and frankly, do I want a God that I can understand? Some argue that the Trinity itself is proof God is real: we never would have made up a God like this.

What I’ve found more fascinating to meditate on lately are the implications the Trinity has for, well, everything. If we are made in the image of God, and our ultimate purpose is to be loved by and absorbed into the life of God for all eternity, then the Trinity says so much about who we are and what we are created for. At the center of the Trinity is mutual, self-giving love. I like how Lewis points out that if God were not three persons, love would not have existed until the world was made: but God is love, and always was and will be love, because of the fellowship that exists in the Trinity. We were made in the image of a three-personed, forever-loving, unceasingly-dynamic God, and so we each long for those things: fellowship, understanding, response, and we find fulfillment in self-giving love.

We don’t have an autocratic, unipersonal God who existed without love until the world was created and thus could not have in himself been love. We don’t have a polytheistic, relativistic system with multiple gods: there is only one I-am God that we follow.

Sometimes I look at the created world, and it’s as if they are all singing the song of the Trinity: all bent to one God, but living out at the same time an ebb and flow, a giving and responding, an enjoyment in togetherness.

I think about what this means for community: how C.S. Lewis said when three people are friends and one dies, one of the remaining friends loses part of the second remaining friend as well, because the third had brought something out of the second that the first could not have seen otherwise. I see that when I’m together with a close group of girl friends, or in how my kids bring things out of each other.

So suddenly I’m glimpsing the Trinity everywhere, and for once I feel like I’m able to get past the mental entanglement (and mild anxiety) that word always brought, and enjoy what it means. I do an exercise now where when I read a part of the Bible, I ask myself, what can I see of the Trinity here? And suddenly it’s playing out all over the place: specific references to each person of the Trinity, yet interchangeable pronouns and meanings that flow out of their oneness. It’s like seeing an aspect of God I’d never really looked for before.