By Neil Earle
Guess what?
There’s a book out there that makes sense of the Trinity Doctrine for laymen. Darrell Johnson, a preaching instructor at Fuller Theological Seminary, has given us a concise (104 pages), readable, yet doctrinally sound exposition of a core Christian belief – the Trinity
Experiencing The Trinity keeps the average reader in view. I like that Johnson begins with relentless common sense. “Of course the Trinity isn’t simple,” Johnson concedes. It was a product of nearly three centuries of reflection on the effort to explain who and what Jesus Christ was and how he related to God the Father and they both to the Holy Spirit.
What a task! Johnson quotes C.S. Lewis: “If Christianity was something we were making up, of course we could make it easier…We are dealing with fact. Of course anyone can be simple if he does not have any facts to bother about.”
Apart from Lewis’ relentless British common sense it is best to approach this subject from the Biblical angle. Johnson’s sees “tracks” of God’s three-fold-ness even in the Old Testament. Passages such as Isaiah 63:7-16 with clear references to the Holy Spirit being “vexed” and the Holy Spirit’s intimate working with ancient Israel are very helpful. He could have thrown in Proverbs 8:22-32 where “Wisdom” is personified as another presence inside the Godhead. Jewish rabbis were about to embrace this concept of a more complex Godhead about the time Christianity appeared but the intense rivalry on both sides blew the idea out of the water.
But I digress. Johnson himself helpfully cites such New Testament passages as 1 Peter 1:2 and Ephesians 3:14-16 – “unobvious” trinitarian verses.
Johnson is right when he says there are no very good analogies from nature for the Trinity (Isaiah 40:25 tells us this). The teaching “cannot be deduced from nature.” It took all the wisdom of the Greek mode of thinking for Christians in the 300s to refine the trinity concept in relatively understandable terms. Johnson also clarifies the difference between God subsisting as Father, Son and Holy Spirit rather than co-existing. (You’ll have to buy the book.)
And what does all this somewhat abstruse theologizing mean for Christian living? First, the trinity teaching reminds us that God is neither a solitary monad nor an isolated cosmic figure such as Rodin’s statue of “the Thinker.” Rather there is more richness and variety inside the Godhead than anyone could have imagined. God exists but as Father and Son. This is a family relationship that we can understand. Add the Holy Spirit to the mix, that lively and life-giving mysterious entity who inhabits Scripture from Genesis 1:2 to Revelation 22:17, and we are in the presence of something no pagan has been able to conceive and which no heretic has been able to effectively get around. The Trinity is evidence that we humans are invited to embrace the fullness of God’s nature, baptized into that fullness in the one name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. As Thomas Torrance explains: “God has opened himself to us” through the Trinity. It is in this wonderful God-plane life, life on the highest register, that Paul says we “live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28), quoting Greek poets who came closest to the mystery.
It is the omnipresent and life-giving Spirit who draws us into the circle of the love that exists within Himslef. This makes sense of such sometimes enigmatic statements scattered all across John’s Gospel such as “I in them and you in me” (John 17:23). This is all pretty tremendous for, “at the center of the universe,” says Johnson, “there is intimacy, a deep, abiding, tender affection.” In the words of Diana Ross (if I may be so bold), no matter how alone or misunderstood you may feel, you’ve got a friend.
Johnson’s relentless optimism on the Trinity is refreshing as is his sense that Trinitarian love is yet another facet of Christian agape simply because it is an overflowing, a superabundance from the One God who is love, peace and joy in action. The news is good: through Jesus the Triune God has drawn near and wants to fill us with his three-fold fullness. The same power and love inside of him can be with us.
Read more in Darrell Johnson, Experiencing The Trinity. Vancouver: Regent College Publishing, 2002.