God: One and/or Three?

Critics of Christianity have long held up the doctrine of the Trinity (that there are three divine persons, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, in one divine nature) as the prime example of Christianity's irrationality. Strict monotheists, like Jews and Muslims, have accused Christians of worshiping three gods, while even many devout Christians seem to have come to the conclusion that the Trinity is one of those "mysteries" that we can never hope to understand and which God has revealed simply to test our faith.

But this has not always been the case. The fact is that belief in this three-fold aspect of God is not even a peculiarly Christian belief. Some five centuries before Jesus, the Greek philosopher Plato wrote of the three divine "hypostases" through which divinity progressively manifests itself in the world. Likewise the ancient religious philosophers of India (from whom both Socrates and Plato may have derived many of their ideas) also have held that the ultimate nature of God can be described as "Satchitananda", that is, as Being (Sat), Knowledge (Chit) and Bliss or Love (Ananda).

No wonder then, that early Christian theologians, most of whom were ardent neo-platonists, pounced on Plato's trinitarian ideas as the perfect solution as to how to explain how the Father, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit all could be equally divine. And in much the same way, St. Augustine, the greatest of the Latin Church Fathers, saw in the structure of the human soul, with its faculties of mind and will and their capacities to know and love, a reflection of the divine nature in whose "image and likeness" we have been created. In other words, rather than be regarded as just a mystifying puzzle meant to keep us humble, the Holy Trinity could (and should) be seen as a key to unlock the mystery of God and ourselves.

Still, there are problems. One of them is the use of the word "persons" to describe this threefold aspect of God. The early Greek theologians used both the platonist term hypostasis as well as prosopon, the Greek equivalent of the Latin persona, a word which originally meant an actor's mask. Some modern Christian theologians, like the late Karl Rahner, have suggested that the contemporary understanding of the word "person" is so far removed from what the ancient Christian theologians were talking about that there ought to be a moratorium on the use of the word in the trinitarian context.

But if so, what word do we have to take its place? The three "faces" of God has been occasionally used, or three "aspects" of divinity has also been suggested, but none of these, I think, can do justice to the dynamic understanding of God that lies at the heart of Christian faith and life. This dynamic dimension is seen most of all in the context of Christian prayer. Only rarely is authentic Christian prayer addressed to Jesus. Instead it is almost always through Jesus Christ to the Father and in the Spirit. In other words, we pray in the spirit of Jesus who moved by the Holy Spirit, always addressed his own prayer to the God who was both his Father and "Our Father" -- from whom all being takes its origin and to whom all creation shall return.

Return to Index of Articles

FILE:Trinity. htm 6/17/2000