God’s Infinite Complexity: Grappling with the Trinity Mystery
“Thus, such forms of speaking do not so much express clearly what God is like as accommodate the knowledge of him to our slight capacity.”
The trinity is how God reveals himself to humanity. Thus, it is important that we take it seriously, that we treat God as triune and let it shape how we interact with God and those around us. Yet it is also impossible for us to ever approach the trinity and expect anything close to full understanding, for God is infinite. We are to grapple with the complexity of how God reveals himself to us, through all the different avenues in which his self-revelation occurs. From that, we are called to outwork this into the way we interact with God and how, with God as our foundation, that is meant to shape all that Christians do. It is impossible ever to cover everything on the Trinity, and here I feel like I have but only just begun.
The Trinity is a mystery primarily because it cannot be known or understood outside of God’s revelation. However, there are many ways that God reveals himself to us, through his creation, the way he works in our lives and the lives of those around us, the works of Jesus, and His word. The nicene creed helps to articulate scripture; it starts to put language to the unexplainable. It is all a part of his revelation of himself to us, an outpouring of who he is into the world he loves. However, we are not able to recognize the truth of that revelation without the Holy Spirit guiding us. It is only through the Holy Spirit that we can recognise these truths that are revealed around us for what they are. The Trinity is how God has revealed himself and his divine nature to us. We are to grapple with his multifaceted, complex nature. If God was not triune, then Christians would be worshipping a completely different God.
The Trinity declares God as one substance and three persons. What makes the Father God is what makes the Son God is what makes the Spirit God. They are all God, intertwined with each other completely, all of one substance. However, they are their persons, each having distinct roles. But it is always all of them. Even in acts, which we may typically associate with only one person, is always the work of the whole being of God. An example of this is salvation, which is typically associated with the Cross, and Jesus’ death and resurrection were an act of all the beings of God. Throughout the scriptures, he refers to himself as one but he also speaks of himself in the plural. This is the trinity turning up subtly in scripture.
It is difficult to comprehend how something can be one thing and multiple things co-exist in all states for eternity. People put things in categories; you either have one thing or three things. Categories and divisions are how we try to make sense of the world. At times, we do this with God while allowing ourselves to be complex. However, if I see myself as to how I was created, an image-bearer of God, then there is a way that God reveals himself through me. I contain multitudes. Those parts are all used to identify me, from my favourite colour and look to my actions and words. This does break down quickly as all metaphors for God are only partial if I can imagine myself complexly and makeup of parts. Who am I to think that God cannot contain multitudes that go above and beyond those ways in which I contain multitudes? Why should I view myself more complexly than God when God is infinite, and I am finite? The trinity is complex for us because it is a complexity of the finite and mortal trying to know and engage with the infinite and immortal.
The trinity shapes Christian devotion because, fundamentally, God shapes Christian devotion. When we intercede and pray to God, we expect him to be all-powerful enough to do something about it, but we also expect him to care. We expect him to be close, but also to be distant. We are forced to hold tension, as God always makes us to between him being our closest confidant, deeply personal and deeply relational, but also being completely self-sufficient, without any need of us, complete other to us. He is to be personal and not personal at all. The doctrine of the trinity always draws us back to this tension. When we find ourselves making God so close that he cannot change anything, the doctrine of the trinity always pulls us back to God being divine and other. However, when we make God too distant, it reminds us of God’s deeply personal nature and acts. We are to live in this tension, of God as close but distant. He does not need anything from us. The love that he has within himself and his self-fulfilling relationship pours out and flows out into love for the world and what he has created. This love means he cares. By him taking on humanity through Jesus means that he is close enough to humanity to care about our problems and have a plan to fix them, to be a part of fixing them. The whole Christian faith is built upon the idea of God being powerful enough to change things and close enough to care.
When we encounter the mystery of the trinity, we often try to do it with rationality, saying things like one does not equal three. But in many ways, this is our downfall, the assumption that we are rational or mostly rational beings. Yes, we have some rationality. However, we are also deeply emotional relational beings. The trinity is not something we go into trying to make sense of, instead it is something that is slowly revealed to us in new ways and that we slowly learn about with the guidance of the Holy Spirit. We too often try to ‘logic something out.’ However, we cannot logic God out, at least not fully. It is reflection and mediation on him and with him, alone and in the community where we grapple with the trinity, with God revealed to us. We need to cede to his knowledge first. The mystery of the trinity shapes Christian life because when we dwell on God in our own time and within our community, we uncover more of the mystery of God.
The trinity then from that fundamentally shapes how the church runs and what the church is. The trinity is God in relationship with himself, which echoes the idea of the church as a body. Just as God calls us to live in a relationship with each other through the church, he shows us how he does that within himself. God is not only the foundation of our faith but also our corporeal faith, the foundation of the church. Since God is triune, the church is built on the Trinity. The trinity is love and invites us into that space, so as the church, we are to invite those who are outside onto that foundation.
The trinity is a mystery that we never fully understand or cannot express fully in human language. However, the trinity, the triune God shapes everything we do. God reveals himself as triune throughout scripture and we are to sit with that scripture, to wrestle with it through the guidance of the holy spirit. The Trinity is to be encountered in personal reflection on God, but also in the community as we navigate how the outpouring of love from the trinity can become an outpouring of love from us into our communities. What we dwell on will impact how we act, and by dwelling on the trinity, we are dwelling on God.
