Metaphors for the Trinity

Note: I’m back with some heavy stuff to chew on. If you’re Christian and reading this, you don’t really have a choice but to chew on it. If you want to know God truly, this is a theological struggle that you will have for the rest of your life. But it’s an awesome struggle if ever there is one.

I would go so far as to say that Trinitarian theology is the most distinctive and the most difficult part of Christian theology. It is one of the mind-blowing facts that our faith is built on: that God is three and one. But it's a little more complicated than that and many pastors, teachers, and parishioners have used a number of metaphors to explain how it works. I will attempt to show, through a treatment of a few of these metaphors (or similes), that each and every one of them reduces to a Christian heresy.[1] 

"God is like a man who is at once a father, a teacher, and a brother"

“It’s like God has three faces, but He’s still one God”

“The Holy Spirit descending on the disciples at Pentecost was the presence of Jesus Christ” (I'm being a little mean here. This depends on how strict the "was" is understood here. It's perfectly possible to say this sentence without meaning that the Holy Spirit and Christ are personally identical.)

           

The biggest pit we fall into when we talk about the Trinity is exemplified in these three statements. It falls into the archetypal Christian heresy of modalism. Modalism is the suggestion that the three persons of the Trinity are just "modes", “roles”, or “masks” of the Father. It’s clear in the first metaphor: one visualizes a man who has three different roles that he plays when dealing with different people. This description fails on a number of different levels. The Son and Holy Spirit are not roles that God the Father plays. They are distinctly existing beings who perform different acts than the Father, while still remaining united to Him in will and divinity. The best way to remember this is the fact that neither the Father nor the Holy Spirit died on the cross. That was the role of the Son. Creation was ordered by the Father, carried out through the Son, and sustained by the Holy Spirit. One must not make the mistake of rolling them all into one and deny their distinctions.

            But in another way, that’s exactly what we have to do! None of us are willing to say that we serve three Gods…because we don’t! We still affirm the Shema: “Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one.” It is absolutely necessary that we affirm the unity of the Godhead and thus avoid tritheism, the worship of three gods. But we are also told by Scripture that Jesus is God and the Holy Spirit is God. So the temptation will remain to smash it all together and call it the same thing. Thus we’ll have suggestions like the third one above, “the Holy Spirit is the presence of Christ (or the Father).” But Scripture doesn’t say that or allow us to say that. In John 15:26, Jesus refers to the Spirit as “the Helper, whom the Father will send in my name”. This is not the Father schizophrenically sending himself in the name of himself. But it is as Christ describes it: God sending God in the name of God. Another verse highlighting the difference of persons of the Trinity, specifically between Jesus and the Holy Spirit, is John 16:7- “But I tell you the truth, it is more profitable for you that I go away. For if I do not go away, the Helper will not come to you. But if I go, I will send him to you”(emphasis mine). There is a clear difference between Jesus and the Holy Spirit, in that Jesus has to leave so that the Holy Spirit can come. So we are in an age now where Christ is not bodily present on Earth[2] but a better age because we have the Holy Spirit. Pretty cool. And even cooler with orthodox Trinitarianism in mind.

            The crux of the issue is that we’re trying to perform an impossible task: exactly explaining God. We know that He has revealed himself in Scripture and through the person of Jesus Christ, but that can get confusing. Bishops of the early Church knew this and they were extremely particular about the words that they used to describe the awesome God they (and we) worshipped. So be careful how you describe the Trinity. Find a way to explain it that allows for the mystery but also stays true to the biblical testimony. That’s why I don’t just say that God is three in one, but He is three AND one. 

Post-Script:

Why go through all this trouble to flesh out what orthodox Christian Trinitarianism is? It is probably the most misunderstood of the Christian doctrines and if Christians don’t understand it[3], we can’t really expect it to go down easily with non-believers. It’s one of the biggest, if not the biggest, issue that adherents of Islam have with our theology. For us to lovingly and knowledgeably engage in interfaith dialogue, we’ve got to be specific about our language.

Interested in one of the first explanations and in my opinion, the best articulation of the Trinity? Gregory of Nazianzus' Theological Orations. Absolutely beautiful. 

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[1] This is not an exhaustive Trinitarian treatise. I'm only sitting down for about a half-hour to crank this out so I'm only using three common sayings. That treatise will probably, now that I think about it, be my first book. The Trinity for the Church…

[2] Except through the Church, the “Body of Christ”, a phrase that deserves a post in and of itself.

[3] This is not to say that the doctrine of the Trinity is comprehensible. Far from it. It’ll still blow your mind. But the challenge is finding a way to articulate it that conforms to the holistic testimony of Scripture.