What is the Trinity?

Unum Deus in Trinitate

 (One God in three persons)

 Father Pothin’s Reflection for Trinity Sunday

The Gospel. St. John iii.1.

One of the foundational truths of our faith is the “one God in three Persons: Father all-powerful, Christ Lord and Savior, Spirit of love.” How do we understand the Trinity?

We don’t! God, by definition, is ineffable, beyond conceptualization, beyond imagination, beyond language. The Christian belief that God is a trinity helps underscore how rich the mystery of God is and how our experience of God is always richer than our concepts and language about God.

We can reason our way into knowledge of the existence of God, but we would never know of God as Trinity if it were not revealed to us. The formula of the Trinity isn’t meant to give us perfect clarity. No formula can ever capture the reality of God because God is too rich to ever be captured, even half adequately, in imagination, thought, and word. The God that atheism rejects is precisely a conceptualized God, a God captured in a picture.

To what does this call us?

To humility. All of us, believers and atheists, need to be humbler in our language about God. The idea of God needs to stretch, not shrink, the human imagination. Our actual experience of God, just as for ancient polytheism, is forever eating away at all simplistic conceptions of God. Thank God, for the complexity of the doctrine of the Trinity. On this Trinity Sunday, it would be good to reflect on the God of our faith and worship. Do we honor the God of revelation, or do we honor a god of our own making?

–Fr Pothin