A Trinitarian Faith

While no one can explain how God can be both One and Three at the same time, one can affirm the Unity of God while acknowledging also the Three-ness of Persons within that Unity. The Biblical record leaves us with just that situation. Jesus comes not merely as a human teacher with unique--even divine--qualities, he comes as someone who is as much God as he is a Man. He is no avatar, or appearance of deity in human form, but God in the flesh--incarnate--as Christian teaching describes him. Jesus is fully human. Jesus is fully Divine. Yet he bears a relationship with God as Father, separate yet equal.

We also encounter in Scripture a figure separate from the Father and the Son yet, at the same time, equally God with them. The Holy Spirit makes his appearance in the symbolic form of a dove during Jesus' baptism and as a wind storm of fiery tongues on the day of Pentecost in the Upper Room where 120 disciples awaited his empowerment.

From the beginning, those devout Jews who became Jesus' earliest followers understood that there was more to the God of Moses than they had ever imagined. He was, and is, One God--but he is infinitely more complex and mysterious than what they had known up until then. Later reflection by the church would put words around that mysterious complexity of the One God, words that would only protect and preserve, not resolve, that mystery. Thus the formulation of the Holy Trinity came about, not as the fabrication of the Council of Nicea, but as the church's way of professing who it is they worship and proclaim. The roots of this belief are already deeply embedded in the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments, and in the life of the church since Pentecost.

Thus for me, there is only one way to think about God and that way is Trinity. If Jesus is indeed who he said he is, and if the record of the New Testament is true, then no other alternative is possible. No other belief system can interject itself into the way God has revealed himself. Orthodoxy is not a matter of personal preferences, but a matter of Divine direction: Let God be God, and let God tell us ultimately who he is. In the Name of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. Amen.

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