Letter from the Bishop: The Mystery of the Trinity

Dear Friends, 

This past Sunday was Trinity Sunday, the day in the church year set aside to focus on the nature of God, who is Father, Son and Holy Spirit. The doctrine of the Trinity is widely misunderstood, even among Christians, and it is vastly under-appreciated. 

The Trinity is not about theological hairsplitting and academic irrelevancies. The Trinity is the reality of God. It is the holiness and goodness and beauty of the God who made us and who knows us and loves us. The full expression of the doctrine of the Trinity was the great triumph of the Christian Church after three centuries of battling against heresies which threatened to destroy the faith. Those heresies still war against the truth in the form of such teachings as the Jehovah’s Witnesses, Mormonism, paganism, the Da Vinci Code, and revisionist teaching in the liberal Church. These are spiritual counterfeits to Christianity that deny the Trinity. And Islam, which misunderstands and rejects the Trinity, has attracted all too many Christians who do not know the powerful truth of their own faith. 

The word “Trinity” isn’t in the Bible, but there are more than 75 passages in Scripture which speak about the Trinity, not least the Great Commission of Jesus at the end of Matthew’s Gospel: “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.” 

Now it is true that we cannot fully grasp, let alone fully explain, the Trinity. We say that the Trinity is a mystery, and it is. A mystery in the theological sense—not in the crime drama sense—is something we do not fully comprehend. Saying something is a mystery doesn’t mean we don’t understand any of it. It just means that we do not understand all of it. 

But of course not! God is the infinite, omnipotent, creator of the universe, the creator of our very minds! Any god we could fully grasp and explain would be some two-bit deity of our own making, not the ultimate and fathomless source of all existence.

There have been many attempts by analogy to compare the Trinity to various things in our experience, but they are all misleading and inadequate. This clever Lutheran Satire video explains why human analogies break down. 

It is easier to say what God is not than it is to say what he is. Theologians call it the via negativa, the “negative way.” We do this all the time without realizing it when we say that God is invisible, infinite, immortal and so on. Those are all negative words that say what God is not. He is not visible, not finite, not mortal. 

The reason we find it easier to say what God is not is simply because God is God. He is the infinite creator of the universe and he is beyond all human language.

St. Augustine, the great theologian of the 5th century put it this way: “God more truly is than he is thought, and he is thought more truly than he is spoken of… [We speak of the Trinity] not that the godhead might be completely spoken, but that it might not be left wholly unspoken… It is better to speak than to say nothing and be silent about the best truth we know.”

The same could be said about God’s love in the face of evil and suffering. We know God’s love. We experience it. But can you explain God’s love in a precise, technical way? Of course not. But we go on believing the truth that God is love and we do our best to put it into words.

The Trinity, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, is essentially God’s Name: God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit, one God. There are significant distinctions between the Father, Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit. They are distinct, they are related and they are one.

If you reject the Trinity, you fall into one or another destructively false teaching. Bishop Fitz Allison entitled his wonderful book on all this, The Cruelty of Heresy, because these teachings that deny the truth are cruel; they offer people only a false gospel that cannot offer hope, cannot heal, cannot save.

If someone asks you to explain the Trinity, don’t feel defensive. It is the wonderful nature of God who is loving community even within himself. There is a depth and richness of the relationships among the Trinity that you can’t fully define and explain any more than you can explain the love in your family.  

So it is with the mystery of the Trinity. The truth of the Trinity leads us to know and worship and delight in the one true God, the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. 

Faithfully yours in Christ,

The Rt. Rev. John A. M. Guernsey