Getting Reacquainted with the Trinity

These days, one of the many things that is fascinating about life in the Church is that there seems to be a resurgence in interest in the Christian doctrine of the Trinity - the belief that God is best understood as three-in-one, one-in-three. For a while, it has seemed that the Trinity was one of those concepts that Christians were supposed to believe but didn't need to understand, and didn't really need to think much about.  After all, we said, "it's a mystery.  Don't bother."  So people sort of nodded their heads and said, "Oh sure, I believe in the Trinity, but I'm pretty confused by it, and I don't really know what it means, except that I think it has something to do with a shamrock.  But it certainly doesn't have anything to do with my daily life."  (No one really said exactly that, but that was sort of what we meant.)

Recently, however, it seems to me that the doctrine of the Trinity is being re-discovered, and a number of writers are writing about how Trinitarian thought is (a) central to understanding Christianity, (b) profoundly important in how we think of human beings as being made "in the image of God," and (c) profoundly important in its implications for how we think of the church and the world.  My own sense is that we are re-discovering the "three-ness" of God, while not giving up for a second on God's "one-ness."  God is one and three, not either-or.

One way that I have thought about the impact of our understanding of God comes from the biblical claim that we are created in the image of God (see Genesis 1:26-27).  If that is the case, then it matters enormously what we understand God to be like.  The way we think about God will shape the way we think about ourselves, since we are made in the image of God.  If, on the one hand, we think of God as a purely isolated, completely independent deity, then we may think that we should be like that, too, since we are made in the image of God.  We may think that we will be most fully ourselves when we, too, are completely independent and apart from others.  The goal of life would then be to be fully autonomous and not dependent on anyone else, because that is how we think of God.  We might expect to find a highly individualistic society among people who thought of God as completely independent from everything else and isolated in divine being.  We might also expect to find cultural icons like "the Marlboro man," who is lone, rugged, and doesn't need anybody else.

If, however, God is a Trinitarian fellowship of three divine, equal persons in complete unity with each other, who fully share themselves with each other, who adore each other, and are in complete unity with one another, then that offers quite a different model of how humans should live.  Then the goal of life would not be isolated independence, but rather to live in full communion with others, even as the Father, Son, and the Spirit live in full communion with each other. We would be most fully ourselves, not when we are all by ourselves, but when we are engaged with, and connected to, other people.


What questions does Trinitarian thought raise for you?