God the Three, God the One

Yet you have made him little less than a god;

with glory and honour you crowned him,

gave him power over the works of your hand,

put all things under his feet.

Psalm 8:5 – 6

It is a particular obsession of Christians that they need to know the nature of God. Their journey to the Trinitarian doctrine, missing – as we understand it – from the Hebrew and Christian scriptures, emerged in the 4^th century in clarifying concerns with the Arius and his followers. The debate flourished until the Council of Florence in 1442, ever since then Christians have attempted to reconnect the doctrine to the daily life of believers.

It is not unreasonable given that God is pretty well central to our being Christian, that we should have some idea about who and what s/he is. We preface our moments of prayer with the Trinitarian sign of the cross and are blessed at the end of our worship in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. But I suspect that a discussion on the Trinity with most Christians would be somewhat brief. 

God, both the word and the idea itself are, in fact, human constructions – we use words, images, analogy, metaphor – but they are all we have. Our words cannot encapsulate who or what God is, s/he is beyond our constructions, beyond our ideas and notions. God is God. If we could name his/her nature, would s/he still be God or only the extent of our imagination? Despite this, millions upon millions of words have been written, arguments and counterarguments tendered, excommunications, the church fractured into east and west. Of all Christian doctrines, the Trinity is the one most likely to evade us, and when we can no longer put words to it, we roll out the word ‘mystery’.

The writer of Psalm 8, on the other hand, focuses not on God, but on humanity. It is not how we describe God that is important, but it is the esteem, the glory and honour that God gives us, his creatures, that he would choose us out of all living creatures to rule over his creation. It is about relationship: the unreachable God, the numinous God, the God-whom-we-cannot-adequately-describe, the God beyond our comprehension - in our Christian tradition s/he is accessible and knowable. In our Abrahamic tradition the God who reveals her/himself to Moses at the burning bush is I am who I am. Our tongues and minds will never grasp the fullness of God, but what we grow towards is a sharing in the divinity that is God, for we have been made little less than gods (cf Ps 8:5)

The Catholic encyclopedia (p. 1270) neatly summarises this complex doctrine: “We are saved by God through Jesus Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit. This Sunday is Trinity Sunday.

Peter Douglas

The Holy Spirit and Mission: an MP3 by Bishop Barron

You can read Bishop Barron's Pentecost homily here.

Must we call the persons of the Trinity Father, Son, and Holy Spirit?

No matter the particular names you choose, the core message of the Trinity remains unchanging.

by Teresa Coda

One of the paradoxes of our Catholic faith is that its foundational element, belief in the Trinity, the flour to the bread of Catholicism, cannot be understood through human reason. The mysteriousness of the Trinity, however, hasn’t stopped the church from spending centuries examining and clarifying its doctrine. The core elements of the Trinity are described in no uncertain terms: God is only one, but exists in three distinct persons. The divine persons do not share one divinity but are each wholly and entirely God, existing in relationship with one another.

We almost exclusively refer to these three persons of the Trinity as “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit,” but we also know that God is without gender. Is it possible to think of the three persons in any other way? 

Since it can’t be deduced through logic, the nature of the Trinity is only known through revelation by God, mainly through the life and words of Jesus. Jesus refers to God as Father, telling his followers that “I and the Father are one” (John 10:30).  At the Last Supper, Jesus tells the apostles that though he is leaving them his Father will send the Holy Spirit to teach and guide them. It is largely through Jesus, therefore, that we have come to know the three persons of the Trinity as the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. 

Using these names to name the ineffable has both benefits and disadvantages. The merit of naming the persons of the Trinity is the merit of naming anything: A name encapsulates meaning. Father connotes a creator and transcendent authority with the loving and tender care of a parent. Son implies “begotten,” or coming forth from, and Spirit suggests pervasiveness, something that has an origin but is uncontainable.  Each of these names tells us something about the nature of each person of the Trinity while highlighting their intimate relationships.  

The disadvantage of naming the persons of the Trinity is that names can limit our understanding of God. God, who transcends the human distinction between the sexes, is no more a Father than a Mother. Jesus is the Son of God, but the point of the incarnation is less about God becoming a man, and more about God loving us so much that God decided to walk among us as a human. Given the sociopolitical culture of the time, perhaps it was pragmatic of God to come as a man, but the message of the incarnation would remain the same if God’s daughter had been born in Bethlehem.  

Father, Son, and Holy Spirit; Mother, Child, and Breath of God; Creator, Redeemer, and Sanctifier; no matter the particular names you choose, the core message of the Trinity remains unchanging. God is God, relational in nature, manifested in three distinct ways, and an example of perfect communion.

This article also appears in the February 2019 issue of U.S. Catholic (Vol. 84, No. 2, page 49).