A reader writes:
“I was reading a book about Isaac Newton and to my surprise learned that he spent much of his life studying translations of the Bible to prove Unitarianism. In my understanding, he was trying to disprove the Trinity.
In my own experience, I often wonder why we bother to pray to three Gods (which we then call one God). I feel that I can understand having an omnipresent God and then a mortal one. But the Holy Spirit somehow seems redundant to one or both of these.
Why do we believe in the Trinity?”
The Trinity is not something we could have come up with on our own. It is not the result of careful thought and reflection by theologians. Rather, it is rooted in the historical experience of Christian community. A group of (monontheistic!) Jews experienced, in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, and in the sending of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, the saving work of Yahweh. We believe in the Trinity first and foremost because the one God revealed Godself as Triune in history.
Of course, Christians would later work through theoretically what this experience of salvation in Christ and through the Holy Spirit meant about the one God who had first revealed himself to the Jewish people, but none of the beautiful reflections on the reality of God that this produced is the reason for believing in the Trinity. They simply help us to understand what we mean when we say that we do believe in the Trinity. They also help us to understand why such belief makes a difference.
Here are just three examples of the implications of Trinitarian belief, drawn from Joseph Ratzinger’s classic Introduction to Christianity, pp. 178 ff:
- The idea that the ground of being is already, before creation, “being in relationship,” indicates that the plurality that we experience in creation is not opposed to unity. In other words, unity does not require uniformity.
- It also highlights how God can be personal because to be personal means to be relational. The claim “God is love” is tough to wrap one’s head around if God is alone. Love requires company.
- Thirdly, it indicates that relationality lies at the “bottom” of reality, so to speak. That is, there are not first things that exist in their own right which subsequently come into relationship, but rather things are what they are because of their relationships. This is particularly important for our understanding of humans and human community, though it is not unrelated to developments in things as seemingly distant from such concerns as particle physics. If the very ground of being is relational, Christian won’t be surprised that all areas of creation are affected.
There is much more one could say to your question (my first draft of my answer was way too long), because it has so many implied questions built into it – things like the relationships between reason and revelation, e.g. But I will restrain myself by ending with a comment about your concern about the Holy Spirit and recommending some reading.
The word “person” which we use to denote that which there are three of in God is certainly confusing in this regard because of what it has come to mean in contemporary English. If we understand it to mean something like “independent centre of consciousness,” we will certainly conclude that Christianity is actually tritheistic and not monotheistic. But in the original context in which Christian language about God was being forged, the Greek word prosopon did not mean that. It would be healthy for us to supplement our language of “three persons” with something like “three relations.” There are, in God, three relations that precede creation and exist in God as God. Christian theology has reflected deeply on the nature of these relations, particularly as relationships of knowing and of loving. If you are interested in a very readable account of the classical tradition’s way of talking about how the Second person of the Trinity is God knowing God and the Third person of the Trinity is God loving God, you could do worse than to check out the section on the Trinity in Frank Sheed’s Theology and Sanity.
Finally, the best short treatment of the Trinity that I can recommend for the general reader is Mary Ann Fatula’s The Triune God of Christian Faith. It is the one book I would recommend to anyone asking your question. In fact, I found myself trying to rewrite it as I wrote my first response. Sister Mary Ann does a much better job! She’s also probably a living saint.
