Getting to know the Triune God
In honor of Trinity Sunday
Gentle reader,
Yesterday was Trinity Sunday. Today’s post is an excerpt from my book Practicing Christian Doctrine: An Introduction to Thinking and Living Theologically (2nd ed., Baker, 2022).
The Baptism of Jesus (1886-1894), James Tissot
The doctrine of the Trinity expresses biblical judgments about God’s nature,1 and the doctrine coheres with Scripture as a whole, and so it is not a teaching that we try to “prove” with some simple list of verses. Instead, the whole of Scripture, from Genesis to Revelation, testifies to the character and identity of the Triune God. We know God as Trinity because we read the New Testament in full continuity with the Old Testament. Certain New Testament passages are key to understanding God’s triune nature, but those key passages do not stand alone. Consider these words of Jesus from the Gospel of John:
When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth; for he will not speak on his own, but will speak whatever he hears, and he will declare to you the things that are to come. He will glorify me, because he will take what is mine and declare it to you. All that the Father has is mine. For this reason I said that he will take what is mine and declare it to you. (John 16:13–15)
This text does not describe the fullness of the doctrine of the Trinity, but it does include several of the characteristics of New Testament talk about God that eventually pushed Christians to articulate the doctrine. In these few verses, the Father and the Spirit are named by the Son. It is clear that Father, Spirit, and the speaking Son are closely linked and in very significant relationship with each other. It is clear that the Spirit, as the one who guides us in truth, has immense authority and that “all” the Father has belongs to Jesus. The things that belong to God belong to Father, Son, and Spirit. What is more, the truth the Spirit declares is Jesus’s truth. This text and others like it, then, help teach Christians how to speak well about God.
The more practice we have in dwelling with the words of Scripture, the more familiar those words become, the more faithfully we are able to talk about Father, Son, and Spirit. In the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus prays and thanks the Father for making himself known, and then Jesus draws on his own relationship with the Father to talk about how we can know him. “All things have been handed over to me by my Father; and no one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal him” (Matt. 11:27). Paul tells of the Spirit who searches “the depths of God” (1 Cor. 2:10). In Hebrews, we read that the Son has come to do God’s will (Heb. 10:7–10). John’s Gospel is flooded with rich language about the Triune God. There, we see that Jesus is the way to the Father (John 14:6) and that to see Jesus is to see the Father. “Believe me,” Jesus says, “that I am in the Father and the Father is in me” (v. 11). The things Jesus does reveal the Father to us, and the Father is “glorified in the Son” (v. 13). We are not abandoned when Jesus goes to the Father, because he sends the Spirit who testifies on his behalf (15:26). Jesus makes the Father’s name known, and he fills us with the Father’s love and his own presence (17:26). Jesus does the Father’s work, and he and the Father “are one” (10:30). The doctrine of the Trinity seeks faithfulness to the patterns and judgments about Father, Son, and Spirit reflected in Scripture.
As Scripture directs our language about God, it also gives us clues about the relationships between Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. When we recognize that God is Trinity, we see that being in relationship is inseparable from what it means to be God. As Thomas Aquinas (1225–74) puts it, “Relations exist in God really.”2 Thomas is not the sort of thinker who uses a word like “really” lightly. Relationship goes right to the reality of the truth about God, and relations involve “regard of one to another.” This means that when we recognize the relationships of Father, Son, and Spirit, we are able to speak about real threeness in God without violating the truth that God is one. Because Father, Son, and Spirit are God, everything that is true of the Father is true of the Son and the Spirit except for their particular relationships. Everything that is true of the Father is true of the Son, except that the Father is not the Son. Everything that is true of the Son is true of the Spirit, except that the Son is not the Spirit. This kind of careful language is not finicky hair-splitting; instead, it is our best attempt to speak faithfully about the wonder that God is truly one and truly three.
…
Julian of Norwich (1342–c. 1416) wrote of the joy she knew in worshiping the Triune God. In her words, “The Trinity filled me full of heartfelt joy, and I knew that all eternity was like this for those who attain heaven. For the Trinity is God, and God the Trinity; the Trinity is our Maker and keeper, our eternal lover, joy and bliss—all through our Lord Jesus Christ.”3 Practice in the doctrine of the Triune God yields bountifully in worship. The heart of the doctrine is about who we worship, and there is nothing more wonderful, life giving, or joyous than to worship the true and living God, recognizing that God is wonderfully different from and superior to any false god we might imagine. The most proper and important fruit of the doctrine is worship, and we cannot forget the truth that opened the chapter. If idolatry turns us into echoes of our idols, worship of the true God shapes us too, drawing us into God’s own relational life of love and changing us into luminous testimonies to God’s true nature. John Wesley described the Christian life as that life in which, “above all, remembering that God is love,” we are “conformed to the same likeness.”4 As we worship the Triune God, God unveils our faces, so that others may see in us “the glory of the Lord as though reflected in a mirror,” as we are “transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another” (2 Cor. 3:18).
God—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—rescues us from dependence on false gods. God opens our eyes to see that idols are powerless to save. We are rescued from vague gods, from cruel gods, and from gods who are nothing but sad reflections of our own sinful desires. Instead of reflecting the generic fuzziness, the brutality, or the selfishness of those false gods, we are transformed into the image of the particular and loving God we know in the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. We are transferred from the tyrannical authority of false gods who ask us to love the wrong things to the righteous authority of the Triune God, who shows us how to love. Because of God’s self-revelation, we know who we are speaking of when we talk about belief in God. We know whom we worship. We know who the God is who enables us to witness and serve. We know what it looks like to be transformed in love, because we have seen love at work in the willingness of the Father to send us his only Son, of the Son to die for our sake, and of the Spirit to fill us with holy power so that we may become beacons of the triune love.
From Practicing Christian Doctrine: An Introduction to Thinking and Living Theologically (2nd ed., Baker, 2022). ©Beth Felker Jones, all rights reserved.
May the love of God the Father, revealed to us in God the Son through the power and presence of God the Holy Spirit, dwell within us, today and forever. Amen.
Grace & peace,
BFJ
This piece contains associate links. As always, I’m grateful if you choose to subscribe, forward, or share. Want to support my work but can’t become a supporting subscriber? Buy me a coffee.
Consider taking a class with me at Northern Seminary, where we talk about theology, doctrine, the bible, and many other wonderful topics.
And check out streaming video courses on theology, church history, biblical studies, and more at Seminary Now. See my course and others from leading authors and professors.
Love audio books? Try Audible plus.
David Yeago, “The New Testament and Nicene Dogma,” in The Theological Interpretation of Scripture: Classic and Contemporary Readings, ed. Stephen E. Fowl (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1997), 87–102.
Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province (Allen, TX: Christian Classics, 1948), I.28.1.
Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love, trans. Clifton Wolters (London: Penguin, 1966), 66.
John Wesley, ed. Albert C. Outler (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964), 184–85.