The Holy Trinity - God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit

The Trinity is the foundational doctrine of God in the Christian faith. Although the word itself was not used in Scripture, it can be shown that the Scripture teaches the essential truths which lead to the doctrine. In essence, the doctrine of the Trinity explains how the following apparently incompatible statements can be true:

1. There is only one God ( Rom 3:30, etc.)
2. The Father is God ( 1 Cor 8:6, etc.)
3. Jesus is God ( John 1:1, etc.)
4. The Holy Spirit is God ( 1 Cor 6:19, etc.)
5. Jesus is not the Father ( John 1:1, Luke 3:21-22, etc.)
6. Jesus is not the Spirit ( Luke 3:21-22, etc.)
7. The Father is not the Spirit ( Luke 3:21-22) )

The Trinity tells us that there are three Persons in one Divine Nature. The names Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are names of persons. God can serve as either a name for the Father or a name for the Divine Nature. Before delving into the relative meaning of Persons and Natures it will be useful to make it clear that these terms refer to distinctly different things.

I will attempt to clarify this with an analogy. My hand has five fingers, but all five fingers are parts of one hand (and the words finger and hand do not refer to the same kind of thing). It is appropriate, therefore, that I will arrive at a different number if I count fingers than hands. Likewise, Person and Nature are different things, and when I apply these words to God I find that there are three of the former and one of the later.

As useful as analogies can be to explain a concept, in all cases we find that analogies can only provide an accurate picture to a certain extent. Therefore it is useful to point out the places where they fail, and to provide a variety of them. We will then be able to proceed to an understanding by comparison and contrast. The analogy of fingers and hands breaks down in the following ways:

1. God is not composed of matter. Instead his Nature refers to the eternal perfections that he possesses: Love, Goodness, Power, etc.
2. God is not composed of parts. If God were composed of parts, then it would be necessary to have a cause for the arrangement of the parts, and something else would be fundamental.
3. There is only one Divine Nature. While there can be many hands, there can only be one Divine Nature.

One can now construct another analogy to consider the Persons and Nature of God. We can say that the persons are like dimensions, and the Nature is like three-dimensional space. The dimensions are indeed distinct realities, which we may term height, width, and depth, but we cannot call them parts, nor can we remove one dimension from the space in which we live. Three-dimensional space is composed of three inseparable dimensions. This analogy fails at a certain point to describe God as well, because there is really no way to distinguish one spatial dimension as special or different from the others.

As yet, however, we have only discussed how something can be different and yet inseparable. We cannot yet comprehend what the meanings of the words Person and Nature are. Persons are objects and sources both of communication, and of love. St. Augustine explains the passage "God is love" (1 John 4:8) by noting that if God is to be "love" for all eternity, then there must always exist Divine Persons in God to love one another. Ludwig Ott suggests that we may think of Persons as somewhat analogous to personalities, John Henry Newman suggests that we might think of them as personifications of Divine attributes (i.e. the Son is the Wisdom of the God).

The Divine Nature is that through which the Divine Persons are and through which they act. The Divine Nature is to the Divine Persons what the body is to a human person. However, as I noted before, the Divine Nature is not something material, rather it refers to the Divine Perfections as noted above.

These next few points are somewhat detached from the above discussion, but it is useful to bring them up as they are common misinterpretations.

Although the idea that the Divine Nature is Goodness, Love, etc. rules the interpretation of Divine Nature as a term meaning Divine species, the interpretation is voiced on occasion. This idea leads to the suggestion that the Divine Persons are just instances of this species. Divine Nature is not meant to be taken as a term for species in the doctrine of the Trinity, and if we do allow the term Divine species the doctrine of the Trinity only allows us to have one instance of it.

One possible misinterpretation that one could make at this point would be to think of God as something like a man with a split personality. If you can imagine a split personality as a good thing, then this may have some merit, but it does not do justice to the unity of God. Believers in the Trinity recognize that there is but one Divine Will. This does not mean that the three Persons merely agree, but that there is numerically one Divine Will (there is a wrinkle on this, however, as the Son of God, since his Incarnation, also has a human will and thus we say that there are two wills in Christ).

It might be useful to discuss John 1:1 at this point.

Once you have grasped this, it is worthwhile to note that there is an important related doctrine to the Trinity called the Incarnation. In fact, it is inseparable from the Trinity in discussions about the God. The doctrine of the Incarnation unites the apparently contradictory statements: Jesus is God, Jesus is man.