Taking the Trinity Personally since 325

“Three Persons, one Nature” – we take this formula for granted.  But such wasn’t always the case.  In the first few centuries of Christianity, this was still under contention, and the early Fathers of the Church were struggling to articulate it.

The Fathers realized that belief in the Trinity consists of realizing that somehow God is three, without rejecting the Old Testament’s central assertion that God is One.  Passages like today’s Gospel were the building blocks for this doctrine.  Simply put, they show us that (in the words of Pope Emeritus BXVI) “there is a ‘we’ in God:” there is a dialogue in God, a back and forth between more than one something.  

This stands in very strong contrast to the history of thought that preceded the early Church Fathers.  As heirs to the spiritual legacy of Israel, they knew that the New Testament certainly did not reveal a multiplicity of Gods, and as heirs to the philosophical legacy of the Greeks, they knew that God could not be a composite of multiple pieces.  But in the revelation of Jesus and the Holy Spirit, God had revealed some kind of threeness in Himself, and they had to grapple with this.

In their efforts to articulate this “God is three” and “God is one” coherently, the Fathers adopted and developed a concept that has been indispensable to theology and philosophy ever since – the concept of person.

Nowadays, because of the way it was treated in Modern philosophy, our idea of person tends to be more individualistic.  But in today’s Gospel, Jesus expresses His identity as the Person of The Son and illuminates the Divine perspective.

Jesus says that he can’t do anything without The Father, that he only does what he sees The Father doing, that he only seeks The Father’s will, and that he is given his very life by The Father.  Elsewhere in John, he goes so far as to say, “The Father and I are One.” (John 10:30)  In short, his whole identity is defined with regard to The Father. But he never says “I am The Father;” not in John or in any Gospel: he is a distinct person.

What Jesus expresses, then, is His relationship with the Father: a relationship so profound that in it, He and the Father are truly One.  Our relationships, in friendship or romance or family or whatever their nature, unite us with one another.  But no matter how close they bring us, they can provide only a tiny glimpse of the reality that is relationship in God.  In the perfect unity of their relationship, the Three Persons are truly One God.  The complete intimacy of Father and Son that Jesus expresses today give us insight into this truth.

So we come to ourselves: if, in God, being a person is defined as being in relationship, and we are made in His image, then we can’t fully be what we are without being in relationship – relationship with one another and above all with Jesus, who invites us into the intimate life of the Trinity today, saying “whoever hears my Word and believes in the One who sent me has eternal life.”