When you saw the title to this post, did you immediately think of the Trinity? The Christian God, as you probably already know, is triune. He is one God, but he also exists as Father, Son, and Spirit.
The title of this post, however, isn’t necessarily Trinitarian. It’s true that the triune God of Christianity is both one and three, but he is one and three in a specific sense. He is not one God who simply appears in three different roles in relation to creation. The Father, Son, and Spirit are not merely three different manifestations of a single divine person, to use the language of some cunning nontrinitarians. A single-personed god with three roles or manifestations is the god of modalism, a heresy Christians condemned a long time ago.
Nor does the Triune God consist of three separate gods who work together in a unified way. Worshiping three gods would be tritheism, a form of polytheism, not Christianity.
Defining the Trinity
To make the title of this post specifically Trinitarian, I could have written that God is one being and three persons. This is the most common formulation of the Trinity in English. When it comes to understanding this formula, however, the way we use those words in everyday English, especially when it comes to the word person, works against us. We use person to refer to separate individuals, but the persons of the Trinity—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—are not individuals. They exist as one being. The three persons are distinct, but they are never separate.
One What, Three Whos
My favorite way to explain what person means in the doctrine of the Trinity is to say that each person is a who. The triune God, then, is one what (or being) and three whos (or persons). (This formulation of the Trinity as one ‘what’ and three ‘whos’ is also useful for teaching children the doctrine of the Trinity without using eggs, shamrocks, water, or other illustrations that do more to confuse things than clarify them.)
J. I Packer says that each person is an “‘I’ in relation to two who are ‘you’.”1 Each person is himself and not the others. Still, all three persons exist as one being. The three “whos” are always together as one “what.”
Co-Equal and Co-Eternal
There are two other English words used to express the doctrine of the Trinity. Orthodox formulations say that the three persons in the one being of God are co-equal and co-eternal. That they are co-equal means that Father, Son, and Spirit are each fully God. No person is greater than or less than the others.
And each person of the Trinity is eternal, so we say they are co-eternal. Father, Son, and Spirit have always existed together as the one being of God. No person came into being; none had a beginning.
Safeguarding the Teaching of Scripture
These Trinitarian words—person, being, co-equal, co-eternal, and even Trinity itself—are not used in scripture, but they are thoroughly biblical because they explain the biblical data. For instance, the Bible records the Son praying to the Father and sending the Holy Spirit, so we know that Father, Son, and Spirit are distinct persons, not just different manifestations of one person. And scripture also makes it clear that the three persons are each worthy of worship, so we know they are each fully God. But at the same time, throughout scripture we are taught that there is only one God who must be worshipped exclusively. Drawing from scripture, then, we say that God is triune. He is one being and three persons (Father, Son, and Holy Spirit), and the three persons are coequal and coeternal. This formula and these terms are used to safeguard the biblical teaching about God.
The Trinity Is Greater
Because the Christian God is triune, he is greater the so-called gods of other religions. He is, for instance, loving by nature, something a single-person god cannot be. Since love flowed between the persons of the Trinity eternally, the Christian God does not need anything outside himself to be loving. He is eternally loving in himself and from himself, or, to put it another way, he is loving by nature.
A single-person god, on the other hand, cannot love—at least not with love that is not self-focused—unless there is something or someone outside himself to love. No eternal, from himself, by nature love flows from a single-person God. To love, a single-person god needs to create something or someone to love.
But love flows out eternally and naturally from the Christian God, who can, then, be the source of all love. “Love is from God” (1 John 4:7) can only be true of the Trinity.
And the Triune God can save us completely in a way no other god could. In the work of salvation, the Father chooses a people, and sends the Son to redeem them. The Son comes, redeems his people and then intercedes with the Father for them. The Spirit applies redemption to God’s people, recreates them, and keeps them. Our whole Christian life depends on our three-person God.
1Concise Theology: A Guide to Historic Christian Beliefs, by J. I. Packer, page 42.
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