The Importance of Trinitarian Dogma

Now, over against all those who want to base the doctrine of the Trinity on rational grounds, we must undoubtedly maintain that we owe our knowledge of this doctrine solely to God’s special revelation. Scripture alone is the final ground for the doctrine of the Trinity. Reason can at most somewhat clarify this doctrine a posteriori. Nevertheless, the arguments advanced to shed light on the dogma of the Trinity are not devoid of all value. In the first place, Scripture itself gives us the freedom to use them when it says that the entire creation and especially humankind is a work of the triune God. Certainly, all God’s works ad extra are undivided and common to all three persons. Prominent in these works, therefore, is the oneness of God rather than the distinction of the persons. In this unity, however, the diversity cannot be lacking. For Scripture itself points to this truth by saying that all created beings will show these imprints and human beings will exhibit the image of the triune God. Hence, however much the revelation of God in his works has been shrouded and our mind’s eye has been darkened by sin, it cannot a priori be denied that the mind, illumined by revelation, can discover in nature the imprints of the God whom it has come to know from Scripture as triune in his mode of existence and actions. Furthermore, though none of these arguments is capable of proving the dogma of the Trinity, and none can or may be the basis for our faith (we would be abandoning the truth to the ridicule of our opponents if we accepted it on such feeble grounds as reason can produce), yet these arguments can serve to refute various objections that have been lodged against the dogma.²¹⁴ They can show that what Scripture teaches us is neither impossible nor absurd and demonstrate that the belief of our opponents is ill-grounded and contrary to reason itself.²¹⁶

The doctrine of the Trinity is by no means as absurd as it has seemed to be to a shallow rationalism in earlier or modern times. It cannot be scuttled by the simple calculation that one cannot be three and three cannot be one. Philosophy again and again—and also again in the nineteenth century—returned to the doctrine of the Trinity and has at least to some extent recognized its rich meaning and profound significance. To this, finally, we must add that these arguments uncover and preserve the connectedness between nature and grace, between creation and re-creation. The God who created and sustained us is also he who re-creates us in his image. Grace, though superior to nature, is not in conflict with it. While restoring what has been corrupted in it by sin, it also clarifies and perfects what is still left in it of God’s revelation. The thinking mind situates the doctrine of the Trinity squarely amid the full-orbed life of nature and humanity. A Christian’s confession is not an island in the ocean but a high mountaintop from which the whole creation can be surveyed. And it is the task of Christian theologians to present clearly the connectedness of God’s revelation with, and its significance for, all of life. The Christian mind remains unsatisfied until all of existence is referred back to the triune God, and until the confession of God’s Trinity functions at the center of our thought and life. Accordingly, though the analogies and proofs advanced for the Trinity do not demonstrate the truth of the dogma, they serve mainly to make clear the many-sided usefulness and rich significance of this confession for the life and thought of God’s [rational] creatures. In the final analysis they owe their existence to a profound religious need, not to a craving for empty speculation or to immodest curiosity. If God is indeed triune, this has to be supremely important, for all things, according to the apostle, are from him and through him and to him (Rom. 11:36).

In the first place, the doctrine of the Trinity makes God known to us as the truly living God. The church fathers already observed that this doctrine rejects the errors of, while absorbing the elements of truth inherent in, Deism and pantheism, monism and polytheism. Deism creates a vast gulf between God and his creatures, cancels out their mutual relatedness, and reduces God to an abstract entity, a pure being, to mere monotonous and uniform existence. It satisfies neither the mind nor the heart and is therefore the death of religion. Pantheism, though it brings God nearer to us, equates him with the created world, erases the boundary line between the Creator and the creature, robs God of any being or life of his own, thus totally undermining religion. But the Christian doctrine of the Trinity makes God known as essentially distinct from the world, yet having a blessed life of his own. God is a plenitude of life, an “ocean of being.” He is not “without offspring” (ἀγονος). He is the absolute Being, the eternal One, who is and was and is to come, and in that way the ever-living and ever-productive One.

Attempts have been made to infer the Trinity from God’s thinking and willing, from his love, goodness, and perfection, and so forth. Intended as philosophical construals of the doctrine of the Trinity, these attempts have been anything but satisfactory. The derivation of the Trinity from God’s thought in no way leads to his tri-personality; instead, it fails to make clear the procession of the third person, and with a view to the Spirit has to pass over into, and augment itself with, a construction from the will of God. The derivation of the Trinity from love is open to the same objections and cannot make clear the procession of the Holy Spirit. The fact is that these attributes [of love and knowledge] as well as all the other attributes only come alive and become real as a result of the Trinity. Apart from it, they are mere names, sounds, empty terms. As attributes of the triune God they come alive both to our mind and to our heart. Only by the Trinity do we begin to understand that God as he is in himself—hence also, apart from the world—is the independent, eternal, omniscient, and all-benevolent One, love, holiness, and glory.

The Trinity reveals God to us as the fullness of being, the true life, eternal beauty. In God, too, there is unity in diversity, diversity in unity. Indeed, this order and this harmony is present in him absolutely. In the case of creatures we see only a faint analogy of it. Either the unity or the diversity does not come into its own. Creatures exist in time and space, exist side by side, and do not interpenetrate each other [like the persons in the Trinity]. Among us unity exists only by attraction, by the will and the disposition of the will; it is a moral unity that is fragile and unstable. And where there is a more profound physical unity as, say, between the capacities of a single substance, there is no independence, and the unity swallows up the diversity. But in God both are present: absolute unity as well as absolute diversity. It is one selfsame being sustained by three hypostases. This results in the most perfect kind of community, a community of the same beings; at the same time it results in the most perfect diversity, a diversity of divine persons. Therefore, if God is triune, the three persons can only be conceived as being “consubstantial” (ὁμοουσιοι). In as much as Arianism in its many different forms does not think consistently about God’s being, it cannot satisfy the mind. If there are distinctions within the divine being, these distinctions, that is, these persons, have to be the same in essence. In God there cannot be anything that is something other or less than God. There is nothing intermediate or transitional between the Creator and the creature. Either Father, Son, and Spirit all possess the same being and are truly God, or else they sink to the level of creatures. From a Christian perspective there is no third possibility. The same line of reasoning implies the condemnation of Sabellianism’s modal Trinity. For the homoousia of the three persons has meaning and significance only if they are truly and really distinct from one another, as distinct bearers of the same substance. The diversity of the subjects who act side by side in divine revelation, in creation and in re-creation, arises from the diversity that exists among the three persons in the divine being. There could be no distinction ad extra in the unity of the divine being, if there were no distinction ad intra

Second, the doctrine of the Trinity is of the greatest importance for the doctrine of creation. The latter can be maintained only on the basis of a confession of a triune God. It alone makes possible—against Deism on the one hand—the connection between God and the world, and—against pantheism on the other—the difference between God and the world. [The] creation cannot be conceived as mere happenstance, nor as the outcome of divine self-development. It must have its foundation in God, yet not be a phase in the process of his inner life. How can these two concerns be satisfied if not by the confession of a triune God? The life of God is divinely rich: it is fecund; it implies action, productivity. The doctrine of the Trinity, accordingly, speaks of the generation of the Son and the procession of the Spirit. Both of these acts are essentially distinct from the work of creation: the former are immanent relations, while the latter is work ad extra The former are sufficient in themselves: God does not need the creation. He is life, blessedness, glory in himself. Still, the creation is most closely connected with this fecundity. For in the first place, as Athanasius correctly noted, if the divine being were not productive and could not communicate himself inwardly (ad intra), then neither could there be any revelation of God ad extra, that is, any communication of God in and to his creatures. The doctrine of God’s incommunicability, with its implicit denial of the Son’s generation and the Spirit’s procession, carries within itself the corollary of the existence of a world separate from, outside of, and opposed to God. In that case God is absolutely hidden, “cosmic depths,” “absolute silence,” “the unconscious,” “the groundless.” The world does not reveal him; there is no possibility of knowing him.

The dogma of the Trinity, by contrast, tells us that God can reveal himself in an absolute sense to the Son and the Spirit, and hence, in a relative sense also to the world. For, as Augustine teaches us, the self-communication that takes place within the divine being is archetypal for God’s work in creation. Scripture repeatedly points to the close connection between the Son and Spirit on the one hand, and the creation on the other. The names Father, Son (Word, Wisdom), and Spirit most certainly denote immanent relationships, but they are also mirrored in the interpersonal relations present in the works of God ad extra All things come from the Father; the “ideas” of all existent things are present in the Son; the first principles of all life are in the Spirit. Generation and procession in the divine being are the immanent acts of God, which make possible the outward works of creation and revelation. Finally, this also explains why all the works of God ad extra are only adequately known when their trinitarian existence is recognized. Of the examples cited earlier, some are extremely contrived and in any case no more than analogies. Still, consciously or unconsciously, philosophy from Plato to von Hartmann has always again returned to three first principles (ἀρχαι) on the basis of which the creation as a whole and in its various parts could be explained. There is much truth in the belief that creation everywhere displays to us vestiges of the Trinity. And because these vestiges are most clearly evident in “humanity,” so that “human beings” may even be called “the image of the Trinity,” “humanity” is driven from within to search out these vestiges. The perfection of a creature, the completeness of a system, the harmony of beauty—these are finally manifest only in a triad. The higher a thing’s place in the order of creation, the more it aspires to the triad. One senses this effect even in the religious aberrations of humankind. Schelling’s attempt to interpret mythology along trinitarian lines, for example, is more than a genial fantasy.

Third, the doctrine of the Trinity is of incalculable importance for the Christian religion. The entire Christian belief system, all of special revelation, stands or falls with the confession of God’s Trinity. It is the core of the Christian faith, the root of all its dogmas, the basic content of the new covenant. It was this religious Christian interest, accordingly, that sparked the development of the church’s doctrine of the Trinity. At stake in this development—let it be said emphatically—was not a metaphysical theory or a philosophical speculation but the essence of the Christian religion itself. This is so strongly felt that all who value being called a Christian recognize and believe in a kind of Trinity. The profoundest question implicit in every Christian creed and system of theology is how God can be both one and yet three. Christian truth in all its parts comes into its own to a lesser or greater extent depending on how that question is answered. In the doctrine of the Trinity we feel the heartbeat of God’s entire revelation for the redemption of humanity. Though foreshadowed in the Old Testament, it only comes to light fully in Christ. Religion can be satisfied with nothing less than God himself. Now in Christ God himself comes out to us, and in the Holy Spirit he communicates himself to us. The work of re-creation is trinitarian through and through. From God, through God, and in God are all things. Re-creation is one divine work from beginning to end, yet it can be described in terms of three agents: it is fully accomplished by the love of the Father, the grace of the Son, and the communion of the Holy Spirit. A Christian’s faith life, accordingly, points back to three generative principles. “We know all these things,” says article 9 of the Belgic Confession, “from the testimonies of holy Scripture, as well as from the operations of the persons, especially from those we feel within ourselves.” We know ourselves to be children of the Father, redeemed by the Son, and in communion with both through the Holy Spirit. Every blessing, both spiritual and material, comes to us from the triune God. In that name we are baptized; that name sums up our confession; that name is the source of all the blessings that come down to us; to that name we will forever bring thanksgiving and honor; in that name we find rest for our souls and peace for our conscience. Christians have a God above them, before them, and within them. Our salvation, both in this life and in the life to come, is bound up with the doctrine of the Trinity; yet we grant that we cannot determine the measure of knowledge—also of this mystery—needed for a true and sincere faith.^[1]

^[1] Herman Bavinck, John Bolt, and John Vriend, Reformed Dogmatics: God and Creation, vol. 2 (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2004), 329–334.