Trinity Sunday and the Church’s teaching on God the Holy Trinity

Apologies: I intended writing a few paragraphs. I've ended up almost writing a short book!

This year, 26th May saw many churches celebrating Trinity Sunday and that led me to thinking that this might be an appropriate time to share something on the Church's teaching about God the Holy Trinity. Those celebration prompted these reflections. I hope you find something valuable in them. Questions and comments (provided they are polite and respectful) would be welcome. There's a link for comments at the foot of the document, or email me at micl2025@gmail.com.

At its best, the Church’s teaching about the Holy Trinity offers the most beautiful and profound understanding of who God is and of how the world stands in relationship to God — or to say a bit more, of how the world stands in relation to that God in whose life the world has its origin and its goal, and also through whose work on its behalf the world can discover its way into that goal. And within God's creative relationship to the world, we are able, each single one of us, to discover our way into the wonder of our own divinely appointed goal. 

That first paragraph began: ‘At its best, the Church’s teaching about the Holy Trinity …’ and the phrase at its best must be emphasized because there is a lot of teaching about the Trinity that is anything but helpful. Indeed, much of it is not only disappointing but very unhelpful and seriously misleading. It has been said that more unhelpful sermons have been preached about the Trinity than about anything else. 

First, it might be worth saying that when we're talking about The Holy the Trinity we are talking about a mystery. Here an important distinction needs to be made between, on the one hand, a puzzle, and on the other, a mystery. A puzzle is the sort of thing that we can explain or solve. We can solve a crossword or jigsaw puzzle. We can solve a riddle or word-search. We solve problems (puzzles) in maths and science and medicine, or at least clever people do. Solving a puzzle can be hard work, but there is always the possibility of a solution; there's always the possibility (at least) of seeing through the problem. Mysteries are different. A true mystery can never be solved — regardless of how clever we are. A mystery can never be seen through — ever!

A true mystery will always remain a mystery. No solution is ever possible and any attempt to solve a mystery will be futile. But something else is possible ... With a mystery, such as the mystery of the Holy Trinity (or even the mystery of who Jesus really is), an invitation is offered to enter into that mystery and then to be gathered ever more deeply into that mystery. We can talk of a deeper understanding of a mystery or a deeper appreciation of a mystery, but however deep our understanding, however deeply we enter into that mystery, it will always remain, in some sense, beyond our grasp. It is indeed 'unfathomable'; we can never get to the bottom of it, sort it out or solve it. This is certainly true of the mystery of the life of God and the love of God. We might even say that the deep mystery of the life of God can grasp us, we cannot, as it were, grasp it.

And I think this is why so much teaching about the Trinity is unhelpful. It treats the Church's teaching on the Trinity as a puzzle, as something to be understood or explained, and not as a mystery to be encountered and drawn into ever more deeply. The mystery of the life and relationships of the Trinity is something we are invited to enter into and even — in some mysterious way — to become part of; we are invited to know, that mystery as it were, from the inside. (This is what the saints have done: they have learned to live within the unfathomable mystery of the divine love.)

There are lots of things in life which are also mysterious and therefore hint at what it means for the life and love of God to be mysterious. For example, love and joy and beauty and peace are all inherently mysterious. We can come to know them. We can experience them. In some measure, we can describe what it is to know love or joy or to experience beauty. But we cannot define them or describe them in a way that makes them 'experienceable' to anyone who has not known them. (So we cannot explain them to someone who hasn't experienced them or is deeply sceptical.) Joy is not merely pleasure, not even deep and lasting pleasure. It has a different quality. Similarly, to say something is beautiful is to say more than 'I like it very much'. There are depths to love and joy and beauty that are unfathomable, and inexplicable. Things like art and music and great literature can hint at things like love, joy and beauty. They can even manifest them, make them known (or knowable). A great painting, for example, can be an example of beauty and it might awaken joy within us. But it will never define or explain beauty or joy. And to someone who has never experienced them, we can never explain what beauty or joy are. Perhaps the best we can do is say, 'Go — be open — and see for yourself.'

(By the way, the 'murder mysteries' of authors like Agatha Christie aren't mysteries in the strict sense of the word. They are puzzles. These mysteries have a solution; on the final page, the puzzle is solved and the 'mystery', so-called, comes to an end. it dissolves and no longer exists. It never had any 'depth'.)

I hadn't thought of it before, but it now occurs to me that perhaps there has only ever been one real murder mystery. And that is the mystery of the murder of Jesus on the cross, linked as it always must be with his resurrection to life, a mysterious life, both new and eternal life, a life beyond any threat of death. There again, we can perhaps also see the death of the martyrs as murder mysteries, since they too, though put to death thereby (in some mysterious way!) enter into new life, a life that the world cannot explain or understand, a life beyond all threat of death.

Crucially, the Holy Trinity cannot be understood or explained through analogy with anything in our world. This is something guaranteed by the inherently mysterious nature of the life and love of the Trinity. The Holy Trinity cannot be explained by analogy with, for example, water that exists in three forms (solid ice, liquid water, gaseous water-vapour) or with the sun, which shines and sends forth both light and warmth. The life and relationships of the Holy Trinity cannot be described or explained by diagrams of three overlapping circles, or of three interlaced cords, nor with a picture of a three-leafed clover. This is because the Church's understanding (at its best) knows that the life of Trinity is essentially a life of interpersonal relationships — of relationships between persons.  Nothing impersonal or less-than-personal can ever come anywhere near explaining or describing the life of the Trinity. (This is also why it is not helpful to try to explain the Trinity by analogy with a single, individual person as made up of body, mind, and spirit. To do that is to miss the essentially interpersonal foundation of the life of the Trinity.) And just to add, what it is to be a person is also inherently mysterious. We can never fathom the full depths. This is true of the divine persons but of human persons too. (It is part of what it means for us to be made in the image of God.)

At the heart of the Church’s understanding (again, at its best) is a vision of the God who is by nature and character love: love flows from the Father to the Son, and the Son returns that love to the Father, while the Holy Spirit himself ministers or enables the flow and reflow of love from Father to Son and from Son to Father. None of the divine persons  (Father, Son and Spirit) holds life to himself, none clings possessively to life. Each of the divine persons chooses not to cling to the life that is naturally his, but instead chooses to have his life, so to speak, in the others — or in his relationship to the others. Each is perpetually (or eternally) giving, receiving, and sharing fullness of life — and never holding anything back, never (as it were) keeping anything for himself. Each of the three divine persons, in some sense, is always dying into the hands of the others, only to receive life back again. Between Father, Son and Spirit life and love flow and reflow perpetually, eternally. 

What does this all mean for us? Put very simply, we are called (each one of us) to stand in the Son, before the Father, and we are and we are enabled to do this by the work within us of the Holy Spirit. To stand in the Son is to share in his life, and to share in his life is to share in his work — which is none other than to receive all things (and all life) from the Father and to return all things to him. (Again it is the Holy Spirit working in us who will enable us to stand in that place of receiving and return, in that flow and reflow.) 

Of course, our world is disordered, and within it, each one of us finds ourselves disordered too. That means that our ‘standing’, our ‘receiving’, and our work of ‘offering back’ always takes place under the ‘pressure’ of that disorder. Nonetheless, the Spirit is always at work on our behalf seeking to enable us to accomplish our work. That work is, of course, a sharing in the work of Christ, the Son. And this, by God's own choice, is what it has to be. The Father wants us to be all that the Son is, and the Son (for his part) wants us to be all that he himself is. But inevitably that means that we are called to share the work of the Son — we have to be called to this work! To be like the Son is to be sharing in his healing work on the world’s behalf. There is no other way. Of course, it is essentially the Son’s own work, and it is only by his gift and grace that we can share in it. In other words, it is only through our co-operation with the work of his Holy Spirit within us that his work and our growth can move forward or come to completion. To stand in the Son before the Father inevitably means, among other things, to stand with him in his work, something which the Holy Spirit strengthens us to do.

Everything about the life of the Holy Trinity is essentially personal, and for our part we are called to make a personal response to the divine initiative on our behalf. We are invited to choose to co-operate in the work of the Son. This, we can see, amounts to ‘taking up our cross’ — and to being willing to be gathered into the cross and (in our own small way) into Christ’s own work of healing the world. By that very act, we are also opening the way to receiving the resurrection life, that life for which we were created and for the sake of which God has been at work from the beginning. 

A note on images of the Trinity 

First, let it be said, some images and representations are helpful, some are certainly not. (That’s why I have opted not to include copies of those images here.) 

Geometric patterns aren’t very helpful. They can suggest movement and inter-relationship but they miss out on the essentially personal (or inter-personal) character of Trinitarian life. Other geometric patterns, like Venn Diagrams with their overlapping circles aren’t helpful. Again, there’s nothing personal/inter-personal about them. 

There's a set of images that try to include an inter-personal aspect but which, to my mind —  and I’m not alone here — are decidedly unhelpful. I'm thinking of those paintings, popular in Renaissance times, which show the Father as an old man, the Son as a young boy (or as as a young man crucified on a cross, a cross perhaps supported by the Father), and the Holy Spirit as a dove hovering between the figures that represent the Father and the Son. Almost everything about these images is wrong! (The one thing that might be helpful might be the compassion shown on the faces of images intended to represent the Father and the Son — though the bird doesn't display this!) And the problems? First of all, it’s very unhelpful to represent the Father as an old man with long white a beard. Indeed, the image will often seem of someone like a great-grandfather rather than a father in the prime of life. 

And it isn't helpful to depict the Son as a young boy, or even as a young man. The Father isn’t older than the Son. They are co-eternal. If we want images of them, it would be better if both were represented by figures in the fulness of mature life. The Son receives life from the Father, but he isn’t stuck in childhood or infancy, and of course he isn’t defined by infancy or childhood. He is defined, if we want to put it this away, by the maturity of his decisions in sharing his life at the Last Supper, and then of laying down his life and taking up the cross. It is equally problematic to present the Holy Spirit as a bird. It is only at the Baptism of Jesus that the Spirit appears ‘in the form of a dove’, and so it is only in images of the baptism when it is appropriate to depict him in this form. Very importantly, the Holy Spirit is by nature personal. He is always someone, never something. 

This raises another point. It can be summarised in this way … From the beginning, the whole work of God on behalf of humanity and creation is trinitarian. This is hinted at even from the opening verses of Genesis where we hear of the spirit hovering over the waters and God speaking his word. (Deriving from this, in Psalm 36 we hear, ‘By the word of the Lord the heavens were made and by the breath of his mouth all their host.) In the Hebrew Old Testament, however, the reality and nature of the Trinity is only hinted at. But in the era recorded in the Gospels, Jesus reveals the nature and character of Father: ‘To have seen me is to have seen the Father’ (John 14:9). Then in the story of the first Christians and the early Church it is the Holy Spirit who reveals who Jesus really is and what the true nature of his relationship to God the Father really is. But if the Son makes the nature and character of the Father known and the Spirit makes known who the Son really is, who then is it that reveals and makes known the Holy Spirit? It is the Church. The relationships within the Church, relationships of care for one another and for the world — these reveal the nature and character of the Holy Spirit. And above all, the Church reveals how the Spirit is at work when enabled by his presence and work within them, Christians share in Christ's healing work on behalf of the world. 

I'll add another post soon about the celebrated Russian icon of St Andrew Rublev (15th century) — either that or I'll put something on the main pages of the site. The icon is commonly known as 'The Trinity' but a more accurate title is 'The Hospitality of Abraham'. If you're impatient here's a very good short video: https://bit.ly/4c1Y5mS.

How did the Church’s teaching about the Holy Trinity emerge?

Well, it certainly didn’t emerge as a result of speculation or abstract theorizing. In some sense, it isn’t a theory at all. In Hebrew tradition there was a strong sense that there is only one God. The nearest thing to a creed for the Jewish people of Jesus’ day was the affirmation, ‘Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one.’ It is from Deuteronomy 6, verse 4. It was a biblical injunction incumbent on all Jewish men and women to repeat this affirmation twice a day (morning and evening) and to teach it to children. The affirmation was offered at many other times too. It was quoted by Jesus (e.g., Mark 10:29); elsewhere in the New Testament it is also alluded to many times.  (For an introduction to the Jewish understanding of the Shema see this link to a Jewish education site. On that page there are also many interesting things in the collection of essays and stories, not least the essay about holocaust survivor Viktor Frankel, ‘A Psychotherapist in Auschwitz’.) 

Monotheism was absolutely fundamental in Judaism. That is why it is quite extraordinary (almost beyond belief) that there could arise from within a Jewish setting a belief in God as Trinity. And yet it did. Why? How? Again, the answer is that belief in God as a trinity of person, Father, Son and Spirit, does not come from speculation or theorising. It comes from experience. The first disciples, as good jews, knew that their God was Lord and God over all things and was without rival or ‘equal.’ And yet through their experience of being with Jesus in the time of his ministry and teaching, and above all his death, resurrection and ascension — and perhaps simply because of the power and impact of his personal presence with them — they came to see and believe that he was in a special and utterly unique relationship to the One they had come to know as the Father. This understanding was emerging through the time that the New Testament writings were taking shape. So too in that same period the disciples and first Christians were beginning to see and to experience the presence and action of the Spirit in a way that they recognised both as personal and as divine. They were recognizing the Holy Spirit as someone not just as an impersonal force or energy. (Even in the New Testament, the pronouns used when speaking of the Spirit are personal, masculine ones, not the impersonal, neuter ones that grammar would expect for the neuter word ‘spirit’.) 

So there is no developed teaching about the Trinity in the New Testament, no ‘doctrine of the Trinity’, that only emerged later, but Jesus often speaks in trinitarian terms (especially in John’s Gospel) and there is a trinitarian ‘shape’ to certain incidents (e.g., the Baptism, Transfiguration) and in Acts and the New Testament letters a trinitarian shape is also implicit (e.g., Acts 2:33; Romans 1:4; 13, etc.), and even explicit: ‘The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit, be with you all.’ (2 Corinthians 13:14.) But it is not at all surprising that it took a while for people of Jewish background to move towards a trinitarian understanding. 

Of course, even after the New Testament era it then took another few centuries for the church to formulate clear and settled teaching about the Trinity. But that is not a problem. For most importantly, this teaching about the Trinity is not something we need to feel we have to understand or prove (in the way we might have to learn or prove a formula in science or maths). The traditional Christian teaching about the Trinity arises from peoples’ experience of life in Christ and looks — not to set us a bewildering intellectual problem! — but to help us hold our hearts and minds open that we might trust the God who is all love, and in whom, in endless goodwill towards us, is ever at work for our good. We might sometimes see for ourselves the truth of best of the Church’s teaching about Trinity, meanwhile, let us trust that the God who is the origin and end of all things is also at work in us and around us enabling us to share in the life and work of the Son and come to that fullness of life an fullness of relationship that belongs by rites to him — but which, out of his goodness — he wants us to know and share too. 

Another Word on the Background to the Church's teaching about the Trinity — and why it matters to us

Another clarification or two might be helpful ... I said that the Church's teaching about the Trinity wasn't a result of speculation or theorizing. It's worth noting that the people involved in the development of trinitarian theology were recognized as being very clever and of immense learning. But beyond that (and more importantly) they were also people of deep prayer and were known for their concern with social care. Many were monks, many were bishops. But they weren't living in ivory towers. They were not only thinkers and theologians but were involved in founding hospitals and schools and in establishing systems of care for the marginalised. And they lived in times when the Church was suffering persecution. Some suffered exile or imprisonment themselves (or members of their communities did). There were martyrs in their recent family histories. Their understanding of the love of God and the work of God on humanity's behalf comes from their whole life experience, not just from speculation. And importantly their purpose in all this was not to 'define' an understanding of the Trinity. They were looking to help people open up to the true riches of the life offered in Christ and to help them steer clear of beliefs and attitudes that might lead them along false trails or dead ends. 

(Today that is how we might best see the Church's creeds: not as a mental straight-jacket — 'Believe these things or you're not a true Christian and are probably doomed', but rather as offering us an invitation to open our hearts and minds to the fullness of who God is and the wonders of what God is offering.)

As I said above, the Church's understanding of and teaching about the Holy Trinity gradually clarified only a few centuries after the time of Jesus but importantly, that teaching and understanding were implicit in the Gospels (and even in earlier Hebrew tradition) and later developments only 'firmed up' what had been emerging over a long period. Even so — and this is also very important — even when these developments took a more settled form (which happened largely in the third century), they didn't try to prove, define or explain anything. They didn't even try to describe anything. They looked only to affirm what from the beginning the Church had come to see and believe, or more precisely, what it had come to experience — and that experience went back to the time of the apostles and was known by Christians from the beginning. 

And what this teaching affirmed was something beyond definition or proof. As an analogy, notice again that there are many things in life, even very important things, that we cannot define or prove. We experience things like love and beauty and goodness but cannot define them. Even our attempts at describing them fall short except perhaps in some great works of art or literature, and even then they won’t convince or impress everyone. And however successfully we describe something like love or beauty that can never help someone experience them. 

So what does the teaching about  the Holy Trinity affirm? That God is always known as personal. God is always someone, never simply something. This is how, from the time of Jesus and on down the ages, Christians have known Father, Son and Holy Spirit — personally, each as someone. At the same time, Father, Son and Spirit are recognized as being in deep relationship with one another. They are both intimately connected. The diving persons are in fullness of communion with one another but each is always distinctly himself. (The fancy theological affirmation is that Father, Son and Spirit 'co-inhere', that is, they ‘mutually indwell’ one another while yet each always remains distinctly himself.) 

Again, the important thing is that these ideas and affirmations look not to define or explain anything but to invite us to be open to seeing and experiencing, and to knowing these things for ourselves. They invite us to keep our hearts and minds open. Again, to pick up the analogy mentioned above, none of us needs a definition of beauty or love or goodness but the affirmation that they exist can help us keep our hearts and minds open to experience them — and to value and appreciate more fully the hints and suggestions and intimations of them that we meet and experience in our lives.   

So we might ask: How and where do we enter into an experience of God as aTrinity of love, a communion of three persons who together reach out to us to invite us to share in their life? As the prayer we so often use in our sessions says, God, by the working of his Holy Spirit, is ‘everywhere present and fills all things’. God is not remote from us. He is not distant. He does not just pop into our world now and again, occasionally. As st Paul says, ‘In him we live and move and have our being.’ (Acts 17:28).  (That having been said, for the most part, we only have hints and glimpses of his presence with us — powerful those may be. Only the greatest of saints are aware of God being ever-present.) 

One key setting for our encounter with him in shared worship. We might find it hard to believe, but God is always more active and more present in our worship than we are. In our worship, the Kingdom of Gods is always breaking into time (or looking to do so), and the best forms of worship allow us to see and experience that this is happening. They can give us a glimpse or foretaste of the life of the Kingdom. When we are offering worship, the deepest reality of things is that we are standing in the Son, before the Father, by the Spirit.  

So too, when we are involved in pastoral care, say helping someone sick or suffering, we’d realise (if we could see the whole picture) that God is more at work and more involved than we are … and that again, our ministry is taking place within the son’s own ministry. Our loving actions are only possible because, by the working of the Holy Spirit, we are enabled to share in the Son’s own ministry … and this is done at the Father’s prompting and for the sake of the building up of his Kingdom. ‘Your will be done; your kingdom come.’ 

So, no one needs to worry about understanding or making sense of the Church’s teaching. (There are probably only a few odd-bods like me who are called to explore and expound these things.) But much more usefully and more importantly, all of us can look to find our place within the very life that Father, Son and Spirit share between themselves, and out of their love also offer us, and are ever at work to help us know and share in, They do so, so that we can know that life, as it were, from the inside — rather than, as one early theologian put it, ‘through mere hearsay and ink’  — that is, merely from what others have written and said. 

Everyone is invited to be open to respond to God’s promptings and to being gathered into the life and work of Jesus and the utter fullness of the divine promises. 

Jesus said, 'I have come that you may have life and have it in all its fullness.' (See John 10:10)