The Trinity

This blog post is from material I preached a few weeks ago at On Ramps Covenant Church.

The Trinity; Peering Behind the Curtain

The Trinity is the starting point for understanding God’s "yes" to us. 

Every aspect of God and every action God takes is a yes to us, BUT we will learn why that’s the case when we begin to explore the mystery of the Trinity.

The God we meet in the pages of scripture is an interactive God, and when God interacts with us, God interacts with us as Trinity. God the Father sends the Son who sends the Spirit to point us to the Son through whom we access the Father.
Exploring God in terms of God's revelation to and interaction with us is labeled by theologians the "Economic Trinity" which means, God in God's dealings with the world.

But the Trinity has another dimension, in trinitarian theology we get to spy, if you will, on God’s inner life... when God is all by God’s self. When all the doors and windows are shut and God is “all alone” what is God like then?
This is called in theology circles the "Immanent Trinity".
But it is important to remember the point made by Karl Rahner when he said:

"The "economic" Trinity is the "immanent" Trinity and the "immanent" Trinity is the "economic" Trinity"

The point here is that God doesn't act differently alone than God does in relation to creation, God is one and God has integrity in God's character. The point of thinking about the immanent Trinity is being able to explore what is most basic to God, or what is God's ontology. (God's being or essence).

So when we talk about the Trinity we get a glimpse into who God is when it's just God, the most basic foundational stuff about what God is like.
This will change everything; how we see God, how we read the bible, how we think about the world. The Trinity is square one in thinking about everything from a Christian perspective.

Colin Gunton states:

"It is only through an understanding of what kind of being that God is that we can come to learn what kind of beings we are and what kind of world we inhabit"

Scripture Reading: Mark 3:16-17

"And when Jesus had been baptized, just as he came up from the water, suddenly the heavens were opened to him and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and alighting on him. And a voice from heaven said, “This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.”

In this verse we get a little hint, not just that God is a trinity, but how that Trinity work, or how the persons of the Trinity relate to one another. More on that in a bit.

God's most basic attribute

God is triune because God IS love, and vice-versa. God isn't just loving, God IS love. Love is essential to God’s being. Because before God created the world God would have had nothing to love if God was only one "person".

The question about which attribute is most basic to God is one that has been around for some time.

Some say holiness is God’s essential characteristic, but holiness simply means to be ‘set apart’ and when all that existed was God, what did God have to be set apart from?

Some say righteousness or justice is God's most basic attribute, but if God's sense of right-and-wrong were greater than God's love, how could God forgive unrighteous sinners like all of us? "Mercy triumphs over judgement" (James 2:13), which means God's love precedes God's righteousness.

Some people think omnipotence (all-powerful-ness) is God’s essential characteristic, the thing that makes God, God. But think about this; If God was alone before the universe was created, sure, God had all power, God had all that there was to be had, but that is a meaningless concept because there is no object on which to exercise all that power. It would be like having the buffest arms in a room without anything to lift. Power is only a useful concept when there is an object on which to exercise said power.

On top of that, Jesus did not cease to be as much God as God the Father or God the Spirit when he was suffering and dying on the cross. Even in the most extreme moment of powerlessness, Jesus remained fully God! So naked and helpless, dying on the cross, Jesus retained in himself everything that is necessary to continue being fully God!

To quote the Swedish theologian Gustaf Aulén;

"The inmost character of the conception of God is love. Consequently, every affirmation about God becomes and affirmation of divine love. Nothing can be said about God, his power, his opposition to evil, or anything else, which is not in the last analysis a statement about his love. The Johannine statement... 'God is agape" summarizes... everything that can be said about the character of the Christian idea of God. No other divine 'attributes' can be co-ordinated with Love." 

Love, and only love, goes all the way down. Its what God is, it is why God created, it is the reason God does anything and everything God does, love is what the universe is made of. From eternity past God has been three persons in a perfect loving relationship. This is the secret Jesus lets us in on. This is what we will be exploring today.

The Trinity is a dance

In the story of the baptism of Jesus we see a glimpse of how the three persons of the Trinity interact with one another, Jesus is submitting to baptism, The spirit of God is praising the Son and the spirit is descending to rest on Jesus. This is a picture of what the early church fathers called the "Perichoresis of the Trinity"

περιχώρησις perikhōrēsis

Perichoresis is a greek word that means ‘circling around’ or ‘mutual indwelling’ its hard to translate, but

Peri = As in perimeter.
Choreo = Meaning circle or rotation or movement, (like to choreograph a dance).
So you could say perichoresis means a to dance around (around a center).
The Trinity is an eternal dance of love.

The three persons of the Trinity are not static, but constantly moving in an eternal flow of mutual love and adoration, each person moving from the center to the edge to make room for the other persons. Always glorifying the other person out of love.

Each person of the Trinity exalts and honors the others and defers to the others out of love.

“According to the bible, the father the son and the spirit glorify one another, the persons within God exalt, commune and defer to one another. Each harbors the other at the center of their being... each person envelops and encircles the others. Gods interior life, therefore, flows with self-giving love” - Cornelius Plantinga

This dance is like the kind of dance you see at a dance party full of good friends, sometimes there is a space in the center that opens up, and everyone is waiting for someone to get in the middle and show off some moves. Finally someone is pushed to the center and (reluctantly at first perhaps) does a little something. No matter how good the actual dancing is in this circle of loved ones, all you hear are cheers of appreciation and love until that person leaves the center and someone else gets pushed in to be cheered on.

This is what the trinitarian relationship is like. In the Godhead none of the persons are hoarding the spotlight, in fact each person is constantly vacating the center of attention to give space and adoration to the other persons.

The only two times the voice of God the Father shows up in the Gospels (baptism of Jesus and on the mount of transfiguration) is to tell people to pay attention to Jesus!

God the Father is constantly pointing the world to Jesus, who is the "image of the invisible God" (Col. 1:15)

Jesus said: " For I did not speak on my own, but the Father who sent me commanded me to say all that I have spoken." (John 12:49) and  “Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone" (Mark 10:8)

Jesus says of the Holy Spirit in John 16:

“When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth; for he will not speak on his own, but will speak whatever he hears, and he will declare to you the things that are to come. He will glorify me, because he will take what is mine and declare it to you. All that the Father has is mine. For this reason I said that he will take what is mine and declare it to you."

So you can see that each person of the Trinity acts in perfect love toward the other two persons, and love is always self-giving. This self-giving love is manifest in the persons of the Trinity constantly pointing to and giving honor and praise to the other persons. This dynamic resembles the dance where everyone is constantly vacating the center to make room for the others in the center.

This is the image in which we are made, all human relationships are made by God to participate in this perichoresis dynamic, this dance of self-giving love.

What if perichoresis was the "Image-of-God" standard we applied to judge how we related to others. Look at the systems and institutions of our world, do they look like a flowing dance of mutual trust, submission and love? Or do they look like pyramids of dominating hierarchy, of control, of coercion, calculation and mistrust? If the dance is God's goal for human relatedness, what must we call anything that doesn't measure up?

What would the world look like if our friendships, our churches our families, etc... were characterized by this kind of relational dynamic? What if the Trinity became the goal of our social ethic as the people of the triune God?

I think it would look like what Jesus called The Kingdom of God.