“Trinity Explained” Reconsidered

by David Dryden

On Wednesday 2nd May 2007, I had the opportunity to see a talk that was supposed to explain the Trinity of mainstream christianity (there are smaller christian groups that reject the trinity doctrine). I had done studies on it before, but I wanted to hear, from the mouth of a trinitarian, how the trinity was meant to be seen and understood.

This small article is a response to what was said there in order to at least give a different point of view to anyone who would care to read it. I hope it will, at the very least, be informative. Although it is not in-depth, there are resources for that.

Making up your own god

The society we live in is generally secular in thinking. That means although it displays a tolerance to religions, it views them all as myths, things created by the minds of men to help us be moral, but that's really it. The speaker pointed out that people these days think that God was created by men who simply imposed upon this created authority figure a way of fulfilling those needs we can't seem to give to ourselves. But then he said that was easy to see how you can make one singular God to fulfill those needs, but you can't really do that with the Trinity. How can any man create a trinity of persons and impose his own ideas on it?

Unfortunately there are problems with the reasonings of the trinitarian. In his talk, the man begins to tell us that trinity is all about “love”. It is simply three persons loving each other, and that trinity loving us. In fact, the trinity is about God the Father sending God the Son to live among us as a human, and God the Holy Spirit living in us. So that view has this Almighty figure becoming like us, and living in those who accept Him/Them.

Now just think about it. Wouldn't love be one of the greatest human needs we can impose upon a created god? A lot of humans want to be loved. And how wonderful it must be to feel that God Himself came down to live with us for a time, or that God Himself lives in our hearts. The love that is supposed between a human father and his son can easily be imposed upon a created God figure, and there is evidence that even ancient pagan cultures believed in a trinity of sorts for some of their own gods.

So the notion that somehow the trinitarian God of mainstream christianity is isolated from this accusation of our secular society and the atheist/agnostic charge against any belief that includes a supernatural being or supreme being is false.

Another problem with the speaker's argument is that it makes a mockery of religions that do worship only one God, subtly implying that it is believable that their God was created. This impacts Judaism and Islam. This is not to say that that speaker was purposefully making this point, but that is an unfortunate implication of his words. The argument about accusations of made-up gods and the one true God has more to do with questionable atheistic assumptions (presuppositions) that are at the basis of secular thinking, and has no place in discussing how the Trinity doctrine stands apart from all other doctrines about God or gods.

The only way love can exist

According to the trinitarian's argument, the only way God can truly love is if there is someone else around for him to love. Basing his logic on an interpretation of John 17:24, he tries to show that before creation the three persons of the trinity were loving each other. This is his argument in other words made by another trinitarian I had contact with.

“If God is love, who did he love if he is the only true god who has ever existed from before time. He had nobody to love when he alone existed. It is not acceptable to say that he had the POTENTIAL to love; if he WAS love (or in your eyes COULD love) he must have been able to exercise that love otherwise it does not really exist. In my view there HAD to be at least two gods for this to take place. I could go more into this but you will see what I am driving at. (There is a further reason why there were three Gods)” (note: The trinitarian tried to correct himself and said it was “three persons in one God” and not “three Gods”)

Again, the problems with this sort of logic are significant. Firstly, “before creation” or “before time” is out of our realm of thinking. Even the phrase “before time” is self-defeating because the word “before” is based on time. So outside time, we cannot think of “before”. God dwells in a way we cannot fully comprehend and it is pointless to speculate what happened “before time”.

The second problem is greater that the first. Going with the “before time” way of thinking, we need to ask ourselves some questions. Does God need creation for us to believe he can create? Does God need someone to judge for us to know that he has the ability to judge? How can the Almighty be righteous and good and just if there is no sin to implement those standards? All these are not biblical limitations, but rather limitations based on an unbiblical logic created by the speaker. And during the talk the speaker repeatedly warned us against putting human reasoning and abstract philosophical limitations and definitions on God, and yet he is guilty of the same crime.

In the end, it's his ability to do these things that matters, not the fact that there has to be someone or something else around for him to use these abilities on. He doesn't need someone to love in order to show that he has the ability to love, and the same way with his ability to create and judge and be righteous and good. We see God's abilities in the way he reveals them to us in His word and his deeds. In the same way we know that someone loves us by what they do, by their actions, we can see that love is an ability to do, not simply a feeling or a word. This is seen by the way in the Torah, the law of Moses, you show that you love God by doing what he says. The Hebrew word for love is closely linked to a word meaning “to give” which implies an action. The same can be said for the christian new testament which says “if you love me, keep my commandments” (John 14:15). In the same way, we should love our neighbours as ourselves, not simply by feeling good about them, but doing good deeds for them. And how to we love ourselves (because it does say “love your neighbour as yourself”, Leviticus 19:18)? But treating ourselves well via our actions and our thoughts.

So this need for God to be more than one in order for love to exist is a faulty one.

The missing element: the Holy Spirit

Throughout the speakers discussion, he emphasized the love between God the Father and God the Son. It would have been noted by some who listened that in order for there to be a trinity, there needs to be three persons. Where was the God the Holy Spirit?

Again, we must remember the speaker's warning not to impose our limitations, our philosophies upon God. And he insisted on using “God's revelation” to be the thing that governs our understanding of God. Why is it important to remember this? Because he spoke numerous times of the trinity being three persons loving each other. He pointed to new testament passages that spoke of the Father loving the Son and the Son loving the Father. But he gave no evidence that the Holy Spirit, who is meant to be a person, a “He”, loved anyone. In fact, there is no passage in the new testament, or in the “old testament” that clearly says that the Holy Spirit loves anyone. In order to come to that conclusion, you have to use some pretty ambiguous new testament passages, which are few. And ambiguity is a difficult friend to rely upon when it comes to proof. So how is he using what he sees as “God's revelation” to limit his thinking?

What is a “person”?

The speaker tried, with some effort, to avoid the notion that christians still worship three Gods. Whenever one of his listeners used a word like “individual” to describe one of the persons of the trinity, he would clarify using the word “person”. Apparently, he believed that this word had more clarity with what he was trying to say than the word “individual”. Why?

Because the word “individual” implies someone separate from everyone else. And the trinitarian Godhead cannot have separation within it according to the doctrine. He believed that “person” implies something to do with relationship rather than separation.

But when it comes to speaking to people with different kinds of thinking, it is best to communicate using the most common definitions of words, so that everyone has more chance of understanding. So what is the common definition of “person”? You can either look it up in a dictionary, or you can go to www.dictionary.com and find out. The word “person” is synonymous (has similar meaning) as “individual” and commonly means “a human being” or “a self-conscious being”. It is strongly tied to an individual identity. That is how it is normally understood.

The trinitarian understanding of “person” appears to be somewhat different, using words not readily understood, such as “hypostases”, but American Heritage Dictionary still defines the trinitarian meaning as “any of the three separate individualities of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, as distinguished from the essence of the Godhead that unites them.” But using words like “separate” and “individualities”, still implies “individual”.

To be blunt, even the way the christians depict their trinity, you cannot truly escape from some idea of separateness. And this is impacted even further by how they describe each person. They call them “God the Father”, “God the Son”, and “God the Holy Spirit”. Yet according to them, the Father is not the Son, the Son is not the Spirit, and the Spirit is not the Father. In other words, one “God” is not the other “God”, and the other “God” is not the third “God”, who is not the first “God”. Since this is the case, how many Gods do we have? Three! And thus any attempt to make them one, just makes them a unity of three, like a family of Gods. For all the trinitarian's “explaining”, this still remains to be the case.

That is one reason why a lot of trinitarians will fall back on the arguments that it is a “mystery” and God cannot be fully understood. Unfortunately for that sort of thinking, you are left wondering, how can you tell the difference between a mystery and a contradiction? The trinitarian will tell you that that is what his bible teaches him. But is it? Although the christian new testament may use the words “Father”, “Son” and “Holy Spirit” in the same sentence, does that imply a trinity? Because John 1:1 calls the Word “god” in some way, does that imply that the Word is Jesus in a totally literal way? There are other christians who would disagree with this sort of thinking (see links at the end).

I believe that trinitarians have held on to traditions, not necessarily biblical ones, that they believe to be true and lead them to problems and contradictions.

The one true God

The Jews came before the christians. They had a lot of time to study its words and learn what it said. They only accept what the christians call “the old testament”, and have never spoken of a trinity. They never have interpreted the Hebrew Bible (“the old testament”) as revealing there being more than one God or a trinity. In fact they were told about their God in their Bible: that he is infinite; that he is not a man; that he is simply one, alone; that he has no form; that he doesn't change; that he doesn't die; and that he knows everything.

Yet the trinitarians declare a God, God the Son, who became man (i.e., finite), that he was part of a unity of three (thus not alone), that he had a form, that he changed (from infinite to finite), that he died, and that he doesn't know everything (Mark 13:32). These are only a few of the problems with the trinity idea. Even Jesus himself said that his Father alone, on his own, was the true God (John 17:3). The language used in the verse shows that someone other than Jesus, i.e., his Father, was the only true God, and that Jesus was his messenger (whether Jesus was or wasn't is another question). All in all, this doesn't really bode well for a concept like that of the Trinity. It still doesn't ring true.

At the end of the talk given, I, for one, was left with a clearer impression of the three Gods of the christian trinity. The explanation of their being one and its logic was deeply flawed.

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