This post is part of the Credo Blog Series. For some basic information about the series, go here. Photo Credit.
I believe that God is three persons in one substance. Within the trinity exists the perfect and holy love communion between God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit. The trinity is a perfect, three-in-one relationship between the three distinct persons of God. The three persons in the trinity are unified together by the same goal: to do the work of Christ and to bring people into relationship with God. They are diverse from each other, but are all completely equal. There is no hierarchy between the Father, Son and Holy Spirit within the trinity.
Someone asked in the first Credo post on God why I didn’t refer to Jesus or the Trinity? Well – I could have been snarky and say something like, “Well – since the BIBLE never uses the word “Trinity” – why should I in my Credo? But it’s really just because I’m going through my Credo according to the way I split up the topics up when I made the Credo in 2000. However, I don’t know that one can really talk about God without talking about God’s relational nature and mutual indwelling (or, one of everyone’s favorite seminary words: interpenetration – snicker snicker…) of the other parts of the Godhead.
Now, I don’t feel like getting into any intensely philosophical debate and start throwing around words like homoousious or anything – but I do still connect with what I wrote in the second sentence. “Within the trinity exists the perfect and holy love and communion.” Through the Triune God, we know humanity is called to be in relationship with other humans. While there are many ways in which people talk about the imago Dei (image of God) – one of the primary ways I see that we are made in God’s image is that we are created to be relational. The community and relationality that exists in the Triune God has to be central to our understanding of both who God is and who we have been created to become.
The one line that I would challenge my 20-yr old self on is where I define what the goal of the Triune God is: “to do the work of Christ and to bring people into relationship with God.” I’m sure this is no surprise, but I don’t think I would want to “box” in the Triune God that much – to say that “These are the two goals of God.” Certainly the Triune God does continue on the work of Christ and draws people into relationship with Godself, but there is so much more than God is up to in this world, I wouldn’t want to simply say “these are the two goals.”
Credo 2009: Triune God
The Triune God consists of God the Creator, God the Redeemer and God the Sustainer. Rather than existing in an hierarchical relationship together, the Triune God is a relational being – one which is dynamic and organic. The relationship is best described as that of a 3-person dance (perichoresis). The relationality between the members of the Triune God gives humanity one of its greatest clues to what being created in the imago dei truly means – to be in relationship with others and with God Godself. Again, as with God, I don’t want to limit the ways in which the Triune God works in the world through Godself, God’s Spirit and others in the world. There is far more about the nature of the Triune God than I will ever know or understand – and that’s a good place to be, I think.
What do you think? What did I leave out?
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In avoiding the traditional designations of the three persons of the Trinity in the 2009 statement you lapse into designating the persons by their perceived function. One of your own critiques of the 2000 statement was that it tended to box God in terms of goals, but I wonder if you actually box God in more in the 2009 statement by limiting the work of the first person to creating, the second to redeeming and the third to sustaining. Also, is the lack of unity (“God is one”) language intentional in the 2009 statement? Or were you attempting to communicate as much with reference to perichoresis (which implies oneness, but doesn’t clearly express it)?
Adam, I appreciate your shift to the functional (and ungendered) diversification, and to the focus on community, but I’m frankly ready to go far beyond that. First, while the functional descriptions are much broader than the old familial titles (and not just because of gender), they’re still inadequately narrow for describing even the “unique and authoritative witness” of Scripture (PCUSA alert).
One of the best ways of thinking about the Trinity I’ve ever heard, and my pastor may have borrowed it from someone else, and even attributed it, was of the persons of whatever trinitarian formula as “three folds in cloth.” That takes care of the unity language that Andrew missed, and also leaves room for us to recognize other wrinkles — Wisdom, Hesed, Tao, the 99 (i.e., infinite) names recognized in Islam, … That’s right, my growing up in Trinitarian Protestantism has led me to a monotheism so radical it can embrace just about any of the human conceptions of divinity that have accomplished that Jack Nicholson line of ‘making us want to be better human beings.’
I’m not sure whether I’m glad or sorry that I didn’t get in on discussion of the first Credo post. I do hope not to be argued with (as I saw in some of those comments) as if the English translations of the canonical Scriptures can ever be reliably considered the once-for-all Word of God. They are witness, as much to our inadequacy as to our insights.
I’m definitely glad to see a maturity from 20 to 29. Just wait and see what another couple of decades can do.
Barbara,
I like the intention of the “fold” language, but am not sure that it works in the end. But first, a little background so you can understand my critique: The difficulty in playing with any of the traditional formulations for the Trinity is that the traditional language is intricately balanced to avoid losing the important tensions and realities of what we know about God. Such traditional language does not seek or claim to speak of God exhaustively (by no means!) but rather it is an attempt to speak of God delicately, with precision. While discussion surely should be had concerning the gendered nature of the classical terminology, easy attempts to discard of that language or any other facet of describing the Trinity must be undertaken with extreme care lest the careful balances that have been retained in classical language are lost. And I fear that the “three folds in cloth” language lapses into what has traditionally been called Modalism: That the persons of the Trinity are merely manifestations, different masks, or “folds” in a singular cloth. Modalism fails to maintain the distinction between the persons of the Trinity and rather sees the one God manifesting Godself in three different “forms” at different times and places. Your self-described “radical monotheism” and desire to recognize all of God’s “wrinkles” is very much a form of modalism. One of the many problems with modalism is that it messes with our understanding of the nature of love demonstrated to us by the inner relationships between the persons of the Trinity and evidenced in the work of Christ on the cross. Love for the Son by the Father (or, if you prefer, of the 2nd person of the Trinity by the 1st person of the Trinity) becomes a strange narcissism if the persons of the Trinity are but “folds” in a cloth.
This is less intended to be a criticism of your attempts to form an conception of God, and more a calling to attention that subtle shifts in our understanding of God can reverberate through the rest of our theology with unintended consequences.
Just a thought.
Well, Andrew, the most concise thing I can say (so as to avoid risks of you’n'me taking over Adam’s blog) is that I’m well aware of and fully intend the consequences of my position. I don’t think “we” actually can know much at all about God, but can only witness to each other about what each individually learns in relationship. The classical language witnesses for one set of the faithful and the balance that they found important. But their balance leaves me as a female hanging off the edge, and when the emphasis is put on inner relationships and love evidenced by horrific child sacrifice, I’d just as soon let go of that edge and drop into the singular, enveloping cloth, that, if you’ll allow me some other reverberating imagery, womb.
I really don’t come here to be scolded by other guests. If you’d like to converse, let me know.