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by Marcellino D'Ambrosio, Ph.D.

The Trinity Matters

06/07/04

There is nothing new under the sun, says the book of Ecclesiastes. The DaVinci Code proves it. Jesus of Nazareth the Incarnation of the Eternal God? Second person of the Holy Trinity? This was all invented by the Roman Emperor Constantine in 313 AD, alleges the author.

Jehovah’s Witnesses and others have been singing this song for years. Of course it has no historical basis whatsoever. St. Ignatius of Antioch wrote seven brief letters around 110 AD in which he called Jesus “God” 16 times. True, the word “Trinity” is not in the Bible. But everywhere the New Testament refers to three distinct persons who seem to be equally divine. Yet these are not regarded as three gods but are rather identified with the one God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. So over 100 years before Constantine, a Christian writer named Tertullian coined the term “Trinity” as a handy way to refer to this reality of three distinct, equal persons in one God. It stuck.

But if the doctrine of the Trinity is authentically biblical, is it relevant? Does it really matter?

If Christianity were a simply religion of keeping the law, the inner life of the lawgiver would not be our concern. But if Christianity is about personal relationship with God, then who God really is matters totally. Common sense tells us that some supreme being made the universe and that we owe this Creator a debt of gratitude and respect. But we never could have guessed that this creator is one God in three persons and invites us to intimate friendship with Himself. This is something we can know only because God has revealed it.

God is love, says 1 John 4:8. If God were a single person, how could He have been love before the creation of the world? Who would there have been to love? Jesus reveals a God who is essentially and eternally love, a community of love, three persons pouring Themselves out in love to one another before the dawn of creation. The Father does not create the Son and then, with the Son, create the Spirit. No, the Father eternally generates the Son and with and through the Son eternally “breathes” the Spirit as a sort of personalized sigh of love. “As it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be.” That’s what the conclusion of the "Glory Be" really means, that the self-giving of the Three Divine Persons did not begin at a moment in time, but was, is, and is to come. It is the fundamental ground of all reality.

If we are truly to “know” our God, we must know this. But if we are ever to understand ourselves, we must also know this. For we were made in the image and likeness of God, and God is a community of self-donating love. That means that we can never be happy isolated from others, protecting ourselves from others, holding ourselves back selfishly from others. Unless we give ourselves in love, we can never be fully human. And unless we participate in the life of God’s people, we can never be truly Christian either. Because Christianity is about gathering with Christ rather than scattering; it is about building up the community of divine love which is called the Church. If God is Trinity, then there really is no place for free-lance, lone-ranger Christians.

There are Trinitarian traces everywhere in creation. The atom is proton, neutron, and electron. There are three primary colors, yellow, red, and blue. Our experience of time is triune — past, present, and future. The basic unit of society, the domestic Church, is a reflection of trinitarian love — the love of husband and wife, distinct and very different persons, generates the child who is from them and loves them, but is nonetheless distinct from them both, absolutely unique.

And that is the final point. One of the greatest treasures of Western culture is the concept of the uniqueness and dignity of the individual person. You really don’t find this idea in the ancient classical societies of Greek and Rome, where human flesh was cheap. And you really don’t find it either in cultures formed by other great world religions, such as Islam.

The concept of the irreplaceable uniqueness of each person came into our culture straight from the doctrine of the Trinity, Three Who possess the exact same divine nature, but Who are yet irreplaceably unique in Their personhood.

The irony? As it progressively abandons the triune God and His commandments in the name of “choice,” the Western world is undermining the very foundation of personhood, dignity, individuality, and freedom.

So yes, the Trinity does matter.