On The Trinity

I haven’t read anything by the Christian philosopher and theologian Richard Swinburne, but I know he posited a famous defence for the Trinity on the grounds that with the three-person God, where God is perfectly loving, He needs to be triune so you have each person loving the others, and each pair jointly loving the third. The thinking goes that if God were just one person, He couldn’t be essentially loving unless He had someone to love - which would make love dependent on creation. And mutual love between two persons of God is good, but not the highest form of love, because the highest love requires two persons jointly loving a third in a self-giving, cooperative way. Consequently, a three person God is both the minimum needed (as per above) and the maximum (because anything additional is superfluous).

Now, I’m of the school that says God is so far beyond our comprehension that speculating about the precise nature of God as triune is a bit like …I don’t know….a chimpanzee speculating on the equations in quantum theory. But that’s ok, it’s fun to speculate, and we are loved by God and made in His image, so I’ll share some thoughts.

I do think it’s probably right that God must be a Trinity - three persons - because perfect love requires mutual love (at least two persons), and shared, cooperative love (at least three persons). And it’s probably compelling that those two types of love are also fundamental to the three most powerful loves in the world; marital love, parental love and love between friends.

But I also think we have to be smart enough to see that the Trinity as described in scripture is (like a lot of scripture) the most simplistic way that humans can get a limited sense of who God is and what He is like. In other words, we know that in describing God as three persons, one God, we mean that somehow He is tri-aspectual (three aspects of one God) and that the Trinity is God's way of revealing Himself in scripture in a way we can grasp - allowing us to understand aspects of His nature. Apart from what we can discern through scripture, through the Incarnation where the Word became flesh, and through our own relationship with Him through the Holy Spirit, we perhaps only understand God as tri-aspectual in the same way that a foetus tries to understand its mother - surrounded by her, sustained by her, hearing the rhythm of her heart, yet unable at this stage to comprehend the fullness of her being.

It is at that level that we can comprehend God as three distinct persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, where each is fully God, not a part or a third of God - and where they are distinct in relation, not in nature or power. Perhaps the most helpful way to think of this - in admittedly very limited human form - is that of a single music chord; it is made of three notes sounding at once, and each note is fully itself, fully part of the chord, yet the chord isn’t the chord without all three. There's unity, diversity, and shared essence - and that might be a little like how we can sense God as triune, and how His triune nature invites us to love Him even more deeply.

We might even glimpse something compelling in the way God describes us: as His friend (John 15:15), His bride (Isaiah 62:5), and His child (1 John 3:1). Perhaps these are more than metaphors - they may be the ideal descriptors to echo the mutual, self-giving love within the Trinity itself - a love so complete and overflowing that it gives rise to the three most powerful forms of love we know: friendship, covenantal marital love, and the bond of family. These aren’t just ways we relate to God - they’re reflections of how God, in His very being, relates within Himself and then with us.