Christianity stands with both Judaism and Islam within the stream of monotheism in the belief of One God and yet Christianity stands apart from these two other great monotheistic traditions. The Trinity is central to Christianity’s monotheism because it defines who God is, explains how salvation works as well as reveals God’s eternal nature of love.
Why are there three persons in One God? How can one account for this anomaly? There are no explicit mentions of this reality in Sacred Scripture, let alone the very word “Trinitas”. Nothing of these three distinct persons, equal in divinity can be traced to the Bible. However, within Sacred Scripture, what we have are the traces of the Trinity.
Think about the creation scene, for example. In the beginning the Spirit was roaming the waters. In the New Testament, the Father’s Word was incarnate of the Holy Spirit which we recite this each Sunday at the Creed. When Paul wished the Corinthians, he used a deeply Trinitarian formulation: “The grace of Our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God (the Father) and the communion of the Holy Spirit”. At the Ascension, the Great Commission is nothing more than a command to baptise in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.
This last New Testament quotation is most instruction. Jesus did not send the Apostles to go baptise in the “Names” of the Trinitarian persons but in the One name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. While the Church received this fundamental expression of faith and has faithfully passed it on, however, it took a while for the articulation to be understood in the manner in which God chose to reveal Himself to us.
We cannot control how God reveals Himself. We can only receive His self-revelation and we make the most of understanding what we have received. In choosing to reveal Himself, the example of the Incarnation shows us that God is love. In His great love for an unmerited humankind, He decided to save us. That God is love is a revelation of His nature. Love, as it should be, is never “selfish”. Instead, love reaches out to the other. It is relational. In the act of loving, God invites us into His inner life to see that essentially, He is one but subsistently, He is three in relationships.
By nature, God is one. Essentially, this makes Christianity a monotheistic religion. While God is essentially one, He is also three in Persons and this reality is what drives another religion crazy. How we get to one God being three in Persons is the result of God’s internal organisation. Within this arrangement, there are two processions and four relations. But there can only be three persons.
Let us unpack this two processions and four relations.
The two processions are generation and spiration. To understand generation, we can use the process of thinking. When a person thinks, he generates a thought. Both the thinker and the thought are the same being. Here we appreciate how inthe process of thinking there is only one being but two distinct realities, the thinker and the thought. With this analogy, we can understand how Father eternally generates the Word. And the Son is eternally generated by the Father. Here already in this generation, we have two relations and two persons. The Father begets the Son and the Son is begotten from the Father.
To understand spiration, the same can be said but with a difference. Both the two realities or distinct persons of the Father and the Son together breathe. Their breath is the Holy Spirit. As the Father and Son breathe the Spirit, the Spirit is the breath of both the Father and Son. Here in this spiration, there are also two relations but only one distinct person meaning that both the Father and Son are not a new reality, a composite of the Father and the Son. Instead when both Father and Son breathe, the Spirit is the breath of the Father and the Son. He is the Love between the Father and the Son. Hence the Spirit is a Person.
In these four relations, eternally the Father begets the Son, the Son is begotten of the Father eternally, eternally the Father and Son breathe the Holy Spirit, the Holy Spirit is the breath of the Father and the Son eternally, we can only have three persons.
The Trinity is love and it a love that reaches out to the whole of creation. Out of love, God created the world and humanity. Out of love God desires to save mankind despite man’s rejection of the original covenant between the Creator and creature.
Sin ruptured man and nature’s aboriginal bond with the Creator and thus, Christ came to bring us back into the Father’s loving fold. In coming to us, in making Himself at home with us, He revealed the inner life of the God we believe in and invited us to a share of that life. We may not know the Trinity well. But the more we pray, the more we will get to know Him. As such our liturgies and prayers are heavily imbued with the Trinitarian dynamics where we are brought to the Father, through Christ and in the power of the Holy Spirit.
In 2021, Feb 17, a change was introduced into our liturgy. The Collect’s concluding doxology was changed from “in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, forever and ever” to “in the unity of the Holy Spirit, God, forever and ever”. Why? In the Latin version of the conclusion, there is no mention of “one” and the word “Deus” refers to Christ. If you read the Collect, it is directed to the Father and it concludes with a reference to Jesus Christ. The end of the Collect used to read like this. “Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, forever and ever”. We might think that the words “one God” refer to the Blessed Trinity but they do not. The word “God” is a reference to Jesus Christ and the translation which inserted the word “one”, suggests that Jesus is one God and hence the Trinity is “three gods”. The principle we follow is "Lex orandi lex, credendi". How the Church prays is what the Church believes in. The conclusion of the Collect might sound clearer in making a reference to Jesus Christ when it is reworded like. “Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, for He is God, forever and ever”. The correction after nearly 50 years of usage shows us how important the Trinity is in our lives. We worship One God but a Trinity of Persons. Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
