What is the Trinity and why does it matter?

This is a condensed version of a talk given by Graham Tomlin at Holy Trinity Brompton. To listen to the full version of this talk please visit http://www.htb.org.uk/downloads.

Ephesians 1
vv. 3-4 ‘Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in the heavenly realms with every spiritual blessing in Christ. For he chose us in him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight…
vv. 9-17 And he made known to us the mystery of his will according to his good pleasure, which he purposed in Christ, to be put into effect when the times will have reached their fulfillment—to bring all things in heaven and on earth together under one head, even Christ. In him we were also chosen, having been predestined according to the plan of him who works out everything in conformity with the purpose of his will, in order that we, who were the first to hope in Christ, might be for the praise of his glory. And you also were included in Christ when you heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation. Having believed, you were marked in him with a seal, the promised Holy Spirit, who is a deposit guaranteeing our inheritance until the redemption of those who are God's possession—to the praise of his glory. For this reason, ever since I heard about your faith in the Lord Jesus and your love for all the saints, I have not stopped giving thanks for you, remembering you in my prayers. I keep asking that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the glorious Father, may give you the Spirit of wisdom and revelation, so that you may know him better.’
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An old work colleague of mine once told of a time when he visited a very traditional church in Northern Ireland. During the service the congregation recited the Athanasian Creed – an ancient creed of the church which focuses on the doctrine of the Trinity. And as the congregation recited the line: ‘The Father incomprehensible, the Son incomprehensible and the Holy Ghost incomprehensible’ my colleague heard an elderly farmer mutter behind him, “The whole damn thing’s incomprehensible if you ask me.”

We can understand where he’s coming from. We all have some idea of the Trinity, namely that God is one and yet within that oneness there are three persons. There is Father and Son and Holy Spirit. And yet we don’t believe in three gods. We believe in one God. And it’s this strange divine mathematics that doesn’t seem to make sense according to the ordinary rules but somehow we have to make sense of it.

But that is what the Doctrine of the Trinity is and it is what Christians have always believed. Muslims call God Allah, Jews may refer to God as Yahweh, but Christians refer to God as Trinity. That’s God’s name: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. That’s the God that we worship. Christians are not polytheists (we don’t believe in many gods), nor are we strictly speaking monotheists (believing in one, nice, simple God). Instead Christians are Trinitarians – we believe in Father, Son and Holy Spirit. So how on earth do we make sense of that?

There are perhaps two questions which will help us in looking at the doctrine of the Trinity:

1. why is it that the early Christians spoke about God in this way – why did they think up this doctrine of the Trinity?

2. what difference does it make to our lives?

Why did the early Christians speak about God as Trinity?
Firstly, the doctrine of the Trinity was the only way the early Christians had of describing their experience of God. In Ephesians 1 Paul writes, ‘Grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ… Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ… Having believed, you were marked in him with a seal, the promised Holy Spirit.’ When these early Christians started to think about God they found their minds overheating because they were Jews and they believed in the one, single God of the Old Testament. But then they encountered Jesus Christ. And they had come to believe that Jesus Christ was not just a rabbi, a teacher, or a prophet but that in some way God himself was uniquely present in Jesus. And so God was both in heaven sustaining the world, and yet also in front of us as a human being.

In addition when the early Christians worshipped God together they sensed that they experienced God among them. Of course as time went on they found their lives being transformed and changed because of their faith in Christ and their knowledge of the Father. So they asked themselves, what is it that’s transforming us? What is it that we experience when we’re together? And their answer was: we’re experiencing God. And so there are these three forms of God: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. And yet they didn’t want to say ‘we believe in three gods’. No, they still believed in one God, but their experience and knowledge of God had changed. And therefore they had to find a new way of speaking about God.

However, the early Christians not only wanted to describe their new experience of God but also to express the mystery of God. When you read early Christian writings about the Trinity you always get this same sense that comes out time and time again that while they are trying to describe God and this doctrine of the Trinity, they’re always very aware that it is rather inadequate.

St Augustine, one of the great early Christian theologians who wrote on the Trinity, said this, ‘When it is asked what the three persons are, human speech is embarrassed by the great poverty of language. We say three persons, not because that expresses what we want to say, but because we must say something.” Augustine is saying that we describe God in the doctrine of the Trinity, not because that somehow captures God but because we’ve got to say something. We’ve got to make sense of this amazing mystery of God that we’ve come to know through Jesus Christ and the Spirit. And in order to make some kind of sense of it we have to find words. And the best kind of words are the words of the Trinity.
So that is why the early Christians spoke about God in this way.

What difference does the doctrine of the Trinity make to our lives?
Belief in the Trinity tells us to invest in relationships. Have you ever wondered what was there before we existed? What was there before creation itself? If there was just a single, non-Trinitarian God on his own, then at the beginning of all things, there was no relationship. And if there was no relationship, there was no love because you can only have love where there’s a relationship. But the doctrine of the Trinity states that before the creation of the world there was relationship and love, because there was relationship and love between the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. They were bound together in this perfect unity of love. And that places relationships and love at the heart of the universe. They are primary. As Ephesians1:4 says ‘For he chose us in him before the creation of the world to be blameless and holy in his sight. In love…’ Or, as The Message puts it, ‘…long before he had laid down earth’s foundations he had us in mind and settled upon us as the focus of his love to be made whole and holy by his love.’

So if it is true that at the heart of reality, the very heart of the universe that we live in, right before the beginning of creation is love and relationship, then that is what we need to spend our time investing in. In our culture we often think that if you’re working, your job is the central thing in your life and your relationships are frills around the edges. And so we are told ‘invest in your career, invest in your income, invest in your bank account, invest in your possessions’ and nice if you have a few relationships at the same time. Yet the doctrine of the Trinity tells us it’s the other way around. That relationships are far more important than our careers, our holidays and our salaries. We cannot live this life on our own because we are made for relationship. We are made in the image of God. A God who is Trinity. And because of that we need to invest in relationships.

Belief in the Trinity teaches us to get involved in building community. The word ‘community’ is about common life which is held together in unity. Common life that’s held together even though there is difference within it. In Ephesians 1:10 we are told that God’s goal of history, his ultimate plan, is to bring all things under heaven and earth together under Christ. Now this is the point at which secularists get nervous because they think this means boring sameness - something like the cultural revolution that happened in China where everyone had to wear green Mao suits and read little red books. And they fear that if Christians had their way it would be something similar - we’d all be wearing sandals and waving Bibles in the air. But the doctrine of the Trinity tells us something very different. Gregory of Nazianzus, an early Christian who helped form this doctrine of the Trinity, said this: ‘The three most ancient opinions about God are atheism, polytheism and monotheism. Anarchy, which comes from atheism, is disorder. Polytheism implies factious division. Both lead to disorder. But what we honor is monarchy, but not a monarchy confined to a single person.’

What he means is this. Whilst simple monotheism (the idea that there is one single God with no differentiation at all in himself) is in many ways attractive and easy to understand, it does have a problem with variety. Anything different from that single God is at best imperfect and at worse is sinful and evil. So monotheistic faiths can sometimes tend towards sameness – making everybody pray the same way, act the same way, live the same way and look the same way. It is no accident that the Qur’an, for example, is something that you can only properly read in Arabic. A translation of the Qur’an is not really the word of God. Whereas the Christian faith is very different. When you have the Bible translation in English, we don’t just say, ‘Oh well that’s a translation of the Bible’. It’s the Bible. And it can be translated into all different kinds of languages. So monotheism has a problem when it comes to variety.

On the other hand polytheism, the belief that there are many different gods, tends to endless variety and chaos. If, at the heart of the universe are many different gods, or perhaps in our culture many different opinions and perspectives and there is no one truth in them all, then at the heart of the universe is not unity but difference, disunity and conflict. And so in pluralist societies like ours where we think there are many different views and there is no one right view, and everything is somehow held together in a vague tolerance, there is always a struggle to find unity. And so our politicians are always trying to find something that holds us together. ‘Britishness’ is the latest idea. If we can define what that is then that will somehow hold us together.

But the doctrine of the Trinity tells us that at the heart of the universe is not boring sameness, nor disunity and conflict, but diversity in unity. There is unity in diversity. There are three persons in one. Different from each other, but one in purpose and unity. And that gives us a vision of society that holds together difference and unity. We don’t have to make everyone the same. We are gloriously different in our cultures and backgrounds and that’s fine. Because God can embrace difference. But it’s not limitless difference because it’s held together in unity.

So we should be people who seek to build community. To live out this vision of a community that is held together even though there is difference within it. One of the things you might want to try and do where you live is something very simple like talk to your neighbours. Just create a relationship. Build a sense of community. Connect people. Just imagine for a moment if every Christian in the UK had this goal in mind to go out there and live out the doctrine of the Trinity by building community where they live? So we are called to build community.

Belief in the Trinity calls us to live in the love of God. In Ephesians 1:17, Paul prays this prayer, ‘I keep asking that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the glorious Father, may give you the Spirit of wisdom and revelation, so that you may know him better.’ The point of the doctrine of the Trinity is not just to describe or to understand God, but it is an invitation to join in. And that of course is the special role of the Holy Spirit.

John Calvin wrote this, ‘As long as Christ remains outside of us and we are separated from him, all that he has suffered and done for the human race remains useless and of no value to us. Until our minds become intent upon the Spirit, Christ lies idle because we coldly contemplate him outside ourselves.’ The work of the Spirit is to bring us inside the love of the Trinity. Augustine puts it this way, ‘The Holy Spirit makes us dwell in God and God in us.’ The Spirit brings it to life. So you can understand everything about Christ, you can understand everything about the Father, but unless the Spirit touches our hearts and brings them to life and births in us a love for God, it’s all useless. And so when we experience the Spirit during worship, when we pray for each other or grasp something new and wonderful about God through study, we are not just having some weird, strange experience of some vague impersonal force, but we are encountering God.

There is a very famous icon of the Trinity which is painted by a 15th century Orthodox iconographer called Rublev. The three persons of the Trinity are shown gathered around the table, with a cup – a little bit like Holy Communion. But the interesting thing about the icon is that there is a spare place at the table. And it’s as if the three persons are inviting us in. God is inviting us in to the table. The spare place at the table is there for you and for me. We are invited in to the life of the Trinity to experience and to know the love of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.

And so the Trinity invites us every day to live our lives in the embrace of that love because that is where we find the strength and the security to invest in the relationships that we have. It’s where we find the strength to build community in the places where we live. That is the invitation of the doctrine of the Trinity. That we might live in that wonderful embrace of love that is Father, Son and Holy Spirit.