Rev. Tim Ross lecture on the Trinity

The Trinity – An Impossible Thing Before Breakfast?

“‘I can’t believe that!’ said Alice.
‘Can’t you?’ the Queen said in a pitying tone. ‘Try again: draw a long breath, and shut your eyes.’
Alice laughed. ‘There's no use trying,’ she said ‘one can't believe impossible things.’
‘I daresay you haven't had much practice,’ said the Queen. ‘When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.’”
Through the Looking Glass.

When talking about the doctrine Trinity there are two questions:
Is it an impossible thing to believe in?
If not, then why is it important to believe that God is somehow a Trinity?

The traditional definition of the Trinity:
God is one in Being, but three in Persons.

In order to have a correct understanding of the Trinity, both these ideas have to be held at the same time, equally.
A slightly fuller definition found in excerpts from the Athanasian Creed, which written around 500AD:“…we worship one God in Trinity and Trinity in Unity. Neither confounding the Persons, nor dividing the Substance. For there is one Person of the Father, another of the Son, and another of the Holy Ghost. But the Godhead of the Father, of the Son and of the Holy Ghost is all One, the Glory Equal, the Majesty Co-Eternal.”
“So the Father is God, the Son is God, and the Holy Ghost is God. And yet they are not three Gods, but One God.”

The Trinity is sometimes represented diagrammatically like this.

 The concept of God being three but also one is difficult to visualise. Theologians and preachers have searched for real-world illustrations to help us picture the concept of the Trinity, but nobody has yet found the perfect one that keeps in balance the three-in-oneness of God.

Discussion – What’s wrong with the illustrations?

In groups discuss what you think is wrong with the following common illustrations of the Trinity (each group take one). Do they really show how God is one in Being, but three in Persons? Can you come up with a better illustration?

Ice/steam/water

Criticism: God is not one substance displayed three separate modes – each person of God is more distinctive. The three persons of the Godhead don’t just appear to be different, they are different. Steam and ice are forms of water – Son & Spirit are not forms of God – they are God – but also distinct.
This illustration has been accused of being Modalistic.
Note: ice, liquid water and steam can exist together in equilibrium at what is called the triple point of water. This is where the water is kept in a vessel at a very low air pressure (0.006 atmospheric, where steam water and ice all exist at 0.01 °C).

Grandmother, Mother, Daughter

Not three roles. Each is only a different description of the same person – we are talking about three persons.

An Egg

Shell, White & Yolk. Shell and white are only parts of the egg – you can’t say that the yolk is the egg – you can only say that with the yolk it is not an egg.

A River – The Nile

Source, Course and Water. The Nile has its source in Lake Victoria. We can think of the Father as the source. The physical course of the river , its banks and channels can represent the Son, whilst the Spirit is represented by the water, flowing out from the Father through the Son. There is only one river and all three are a part of it and essential to it.

An illustration with a difference - Magicpaste

Aquafresh toothpaste comes out of the tube as one blob, but with three stripes. Each stripe is distinctive and unique; it is three stripes in one paste. If you take away any of the stripes, it is no longer Aquafresh. So far, so good. The problem with Aquafresh is that it is not one thing, it is actually three things stuck together. The Trinity is not three things stuck together. God is one being, whom we experience as three persons.

Instead of real toothpaste, let’s think of an imaginary paste called Magicpaste.

When you buy a tube of Magicpaste, it is filled with one substance and one substance only, Magicpaste. Now it turns out that Magicpaste has some unique properties, one of which is that whenever you squeeze it, it comes out in a different form. First time you squeeze it, you get toothpaste. The Magicpaste has all the properties of toothpaste. It doesn’t just look like toothpaste, it is toothpaste, but it is also Magicpaste. If you analysed the Magicpaste toothpaste you would see that as well as being real toothpaste it also has all the properties of Magicpaste. The next time you squeeze the Magicpaste tube, paint appears. Again, it is real paint, which comes out, but it also shows the properties of being Magicpaste at the same time. When you squeeze the tube for the third time you get car body filler, and likewise this shows that as well being Magicpaste, it is also genuine car body filler.

This shows something of the problem that theologians have of trying to explain what the Trinity is all about. Whenever we think about the Trinity, we have to keep in balance these three things:

• God is three unique persons
• Each of the persons is divine – each is God
• There is only one being - God

To get some idea of how difficult the concept is we need to some idea by what we mean by the term “person”.

Discussion - What is a person?

The idea of person includes some concepts of:

• freedom of choice and self-determination
• a sense of self and recognition of self in others
• reason and mind
• relationship to other persons and the world around us
• individuality

We have an idea (however vague) of what it means to be a person, so when we say God is three persons but one being, we can think of it this way:

• I am one being and I am also one person.
• God is one being but He is also three persons.

With regard to the persons of the Trinity, the Christian Apologetics & Research Ministry website has the following:

• “Each [person] has a will, loves, and says "I", and "You" when speaking.  The Father is not the same person as the Son who is not the same person as the Holy Spirit who is not the same person as the Father.  Each is divine, yet there are not three gods, but one God.  There are three individual subsistences, or persons.  The word "subsistence" means something that has a real existence. The word "person" denotes individuality and self-awareness.  The Trinity is three of these, though the latter term has become the dominant one used to describe the individual aspects of God known as the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit”
• http://www.carm.org/doctrine/trin_against.htm

How the doctrine of the Trinity began

The Teachings of Jesus

Some of Jesus’ teachings imply that his relationship to God is deeper than that which God shares with the rest of the human race:

• “Anyone who has seen me, has seen the Father.” John 14:9
• “The Father is in me and I the Father” John 10:38
• “Father, glorify me in your presence with the glory I had with you before the world began.” John 17:5
• “Before Abraham was born. I am!” John 8:58
• Jesus also taught his followers to baptise “in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit” Matthew 28:19-20

Paul teaches that Jesus is “in very nature, God” (Philippians 2:6) and is “the image of the invisible God…For by him all things were created.”  (Colossians 1:15-16). He also said that “God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him.” (Colossians 1:19)

From the outset, the earliest Christians believed that God had somehow been born as a human in Jesus. Yet they also knew they prayed to God as Father and experienced the gift of the Holy Spirit.

The First Centuries

Theophilus, Bishop of Antioch, was the first person to coin the term “Trinity” around AD180, though it was not a specific reference to the doctrine of the Trinity as we know it.
The first person to outline a doctrine of the Trinity was Tertullian, a theologian of the 2^nd and 3^rd centuries. He is credited with being the first to describe God as a Trinity of three persons and one substance.

In Greek this was written as

“Treis Hypostases, Homoousios”

Which translates as “three person persons, same substance.”
One hundred years later a man called Arius appeared. For him, all this didn’t make sense. He believed that the son of God was not divine, but that he was created by God before God created everything else. Though the son was similar to God, he wasn’t God.

Arius inserted an “i” into the word Homoousios (meaning same substance) changing it to Homoiousios, which means similar substance .Homoousios meant that the son and the father were identical in their essential being.
Arius was saying the son was similar in his essential being to God; he was like God but the son was not God.
For Arius, there was no Trinity. This heresy was called Arianism.

To combat this, a council of churches was formed and met in Nicaea, in AD 325. They formulated what we now call the Nicene Creed.

The Nicene Creed (p190 The Methodist Worship Book)

• “We believe in one God, the Father, Almighty, the maker of things seen and unseen.
• And in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the Son of God; begotten from the Father; only-begotten – that is, from the substance of the Father; God from God; light from light; true God from God; begotten not made; being of one substance with the Father; through whom all things came into being, things in heaven and on earth; who for us men and our salvation descended, was incarnate, and was made man, suffered and rose again the third day, ascended into heaven and will come to judge the living and the dead.
• And in the Holy Spirit.”

Just because something is difficult to grasp doesn’t make it wrong – some of the propositions of quantum physics are equally perplexing. For example the field of quantum physics has something called Quantum Entanglement, which states that if two sub-atomic particles are allowed to interact, they will remain “connected” with each other, no matter how far apart they are. If these particles are separated and are placed far apart, say, one on earth and the other on Pluto, they remain entangled such that if you perform an experiment on the particle on earth, the particle on Pluto will also be affected. That doesn’t appear to make sense and is hard to understand, yet science tells us this is the case. You cannot say that the doctrine of the Trinity is wrong just because it doesn’t seem to make sense to us.

We need to remember that we are talking about the nature of God, a being who is greater than the entire universe and who existed before time began. You would expect it to be difficult to understand what he is really like.

Describing God as Trinity is just the best way we have of reaching for an understanding of something that we can only begin to grasp in a very basic way. Some modern theologians have said that the most accurate description we have of God is as three in one and that we have simply given three labels to the three – Father, Son and Spirit. But, they say, those labels are there for our convenience; they may not be literal definitions of three persons of the Trinity, they are our “best guess”, based on our experience of God and our understanding of personhood.

All the heresies and misunderstandings of the Trinity focus on the identity of Jesus as the Son of God. It is the identity of Jesus as the Son of God that is the reason why holding the doctrine of the Trinity is important. It is Jesus’ identity as the Son of God that we are going to look at in the next seminar.

A Prayer

Lord God, creator of the universe, saviour of our souls, we thank you for the abundance of the love poured out to us from God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. In the words of Paul we pray that we may have the power to grasp how wide and long and deep and high is that love, and that we may know your love that surpasses knowledge.

Amen