Trinity: The Nickname of God

June 3, 2007

Is it possible to love the Trinity? Is it possible to be loved by the Trinity? Not if the Trinity is an organization, an institution, even a team. Not if the Trinity is an association of three persons, like a small board of directors or a special task force. Who can love an organization, who can love a task force? How in the world would an association, a board of directors, love us?

Today is called Trinity Sunday. It is the only Sunday that is named for a doctrine. Who can love a doctrine? Did the church powers-that-be make a mistake? Or is there something else going on here?

Maybe we find a hint when we hear that this is also the first Sunday after Pentecost. This time in the church year is called ordinary time. Not a time, like Christmas or Easter, when we celebrate some extraordinary event in the life of Jesus. Not a time, like Advent or Lent when we prepare ourselves for those special events. Ordinary time is the time when in lessons, songs, and worship we focus on the day to day life of Christians. And, in parallel, the day to day life of Jesus as he went about the countryside, as he went door to door, as he went about his regular job—as we focus on his ministry. So Trinity Sunday is not part of any of the special seasons of the church. It is the first Sunday of ordinary time, and is therefore, we could guess, about our day to day life in the light of our following Jesus.

Yet it seems so complicated and weird and not at all connected to normal life. The Trinity is the idea that God is one God but in three persons. “God in three persons, blessed Trinity,” as we sang in the opening hymn. Some great theologians and philosophers—people who think about things like this—have dismissed the Trinity as unimportant or at least irrelevant in a practical way. When I was growing up, I asked my mother—a smart church-going person—about the Trinity, and she said to me, “Well, it’s a mystery.” By which I took at the time to mean: “Beats me. I have no idea.”

Yet something like the concept of the Trinity has seemed necessary from the very beginning of Christianity. It is an answer to some problems, which I’ll call problems number one, two, three, and plus. Three-plus problems.

Problem number one was an intellectual problem. Jews, Muslims, and Christians are pretty committed to worshiping just one God. There is only one God. God is one. I am your God; you shall have no other God’s. The worshiping of other gods besides God is represented in the Old Testament as adultery. But, says the intellect, then who is Jesus? If Jesus is divine—and the church was clear about that pretty soon—then is Jesus another God, making therefore two gods? What about the Holy Spirit, whom we are supposed to trust as the Spirit of God, the agent of the creation? Is the Spirit God, and if so, do we now have three gods? And wanting to keep God perfect and unchangeable—to my mind a dubious desire in any case—God cannot be divided or converted into modes, so to speak. So, primarily to protect monotheism in the face of the divinity of Jesus and the ongoing existence of the Holy Spirit, the Trinity says there is only one God (with a capital G) who exists in the form of three persons, equal, divine, and different.

Problem one starts with the oneness of God. The Trinity is about the inner life of God.

Problem number two was a problem of people’s experience of God. People tend not to treat the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in the same way. Though you might know, intellectually, that the triune God—“triune” is the adjective for the Trinity—you might know that God created the universe, but you might have a hard time getting your head around the notion that Jesus created the universe. Even though we believe it and it even says so, sort of, in the Gospel of John. In a similar way, for a long time people had a hard time saying that when Jesus died on the cross that God died, too. What does that mean, God died? When you pray, you might say you pray to God or to Jesus, even though the word “or” there contradicts the notion that in essence there is only one listener. God or Jesus—isn’t Jesus God? The three persons seem different in our hearts and in our experience. We experience God in different ways at different times and, it seems, in different guises. So, to preserve our sense of the diversity of God in our own daily experiences, the Trinity says there is one God who meets us in different persons.

Problem one starts with the oneness of God. The Trinity is about the inner life of God. Problem two starts with the diversity of God. The Trinity is about the outer life of God.

Problem number three was an emotional problem. A problem of affection, maybe we can call it. People don’t only have thoughts of God. People don’t only have experiences with God. People also have a relationship with God. A relationship that is not just with one of three sorts at different times. When you come to church, whom do you praise, to whom do you sing? Not, I think, just one of three versions of God. Our relationship with God can be as complex—more complex—than with another person. God of the Bible—as opposed to God of the Greek and Medieval philosophers—is someone who had and has a relationship with God’s people, is open to prayer and grief, who listens to our arguments, who suffered as a person, and who guides us and comforts us [from LaCugna]. God and people act as friends, lovers, and sometimes worthy opponents. To know God in an ongoing and joyful and sometimes troubled relationship makes sense to us because that is how we live our own lives, in joyful and sometimes troubled relationships. Parent, child, friend, significant other, partner, associate, teammate. Physicists suspect that even the physical basis of all things is the relationship between fundamental particles, whose existence is called into being through interactions and relationships. The world is not things that interact but interactions that yield things. So, to acknowledge and praise the complex relationship we have with God, the Trinity says that God is not one or even three particles, but a being whose very existence depends on relationships with others.

Problem one starts with the oneness of God. The Trinity is about the inner life of God. Problem two starts with the diversity of God. The Trinity is about the outer life of God. Problem three starts with the affection of God. The Trinity is about the relational life of God.

Nonetheless. The concept of the Trinity in all these formulations is both too simple for God and too complex, and not simple enough and not complex enough. That is, who are we to say that we have figured God out so thoroughly? We know some things. God the creator is big—and little. God’s glory reaches beyond the stars, the psalm says. God in the person of Jesus is physical and earthy. God in the Sprit is near and surprising. But God is not just big. Not just physical. Not just near. Not just anything you can say or imagine. The Trinity is a way to say this. To say that God is “not just …”

Dorothy Sayers, mystery writer and Christian, once said “the Father incomprehensible, the Son incomprehensible, the whole thing incomprehensible.” Not to make fun—or not only to make fun—but to acknowledge the ineffable. What we can most know about God is that God is mostly unknown and unknowable. That is not a bad thing.

For God knows us. We know that God is mindful of us, as it said in the psalm “what is humankind that you remember them,… that you care for them?” We need to have a name for God, which is problem number three-plus. A kind of nickname, really. We know the name God told the Israelites. That’s God’s formal name. But we need a name that fits God like the nicknames we give our friends. Not a perfect name, nicknames never are. One that deals with God’s unity, God’s diversity, and God’s affection for us. So the church has picked such a name. The nickname of God, a name we can call God that seems to fit. The name is: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

The Trinity is one name of God. It reminds us that God and we are connected. It reminds us that God is “not just …” something we can pin down. It reminds us that this big, small, physical, near God, more than we can imagine, is the God we love and the God who love us.