Christians Can’t Do Math

This Sunday is traditionally known as Trinity Sunday, and sadly most Christians today are not quite sure how to understand, let alone explain, the Christian doctrine of the Triune God. What was once central to our Christian faith, because it had directly to do with the salvation of humans from sin and death, has now become an afterthought that many people are strangely comfortable being ignorant about. Sure, people who grow up in churches know to say that there are three distinct divine Persons—the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit—and yet there are not three gods because there is just one God. But when it comes to why it matters to say God is this way and not another way or how to explain that it is the case God is this way, Christians are often silent or accidentally fallback to ideas about God that the church roundly rejected centuries ago (e.g. the Trinity is like a clover, like water, or like a human family). The historical conversations that brought about the doctrine of the Trinity, though, were never more about the math of the Trinity, than they were about a deeply religious problem about the nature of the God who has offered salvation to us in the person and work of Jesus Christ. Once we rightly link the Trinity with who God is and how God saves us, then it ought to become something we think about at least once in our Christian lives.
When the church discussed the relationship between Jesus Christ and us, namely how his death and resurrection has meaning for our sins and eternal life, the church concluded from Scripture that Jesus was able to defeat sin, death, and the devil because he was more than merely human. Were he merely human like the rest of us, then how could his death be any different than the deaths of so many other humans? Jesus’ death was different, so he must have been different in some way too. But he could not be so different that he was not really human like all of us are, because he had to be truly human to save the rest of us humans. After all, we humans were the ones responsible for sin and death. How could God deal with our sin and its curse of death without one of us, a human, representing us by acting rightly? Thus, the church concluded that for Jesus to save us humans he too had to be truly human, just like we are, but he could not be merely human like the rest of us. Concluding that Jesus needed to be “more” than merely human, the church for a few centuries struggled explaining what that “more” was, according to what the Scriptures say about Jesus. This struggle uncovered an underlying issue, which was that, however we are to understand the “more” of Jesus Christ, how does that “more” relate to God the Father and God the Spirit? In other words, the historical problem behind the Trinity was what kind of God do Christians worship?
There were several possible answers to these questions. Some people thought God the Father put on a mask, like an actor, to play the part of Jesus Christ (and likewise the part of God the Spirit), but whatever Jesus said and did was really God the Father working in and through him. The church rejected this answer because it did not fit what Jesus himself says about his relationship to the Father because Jesus prays to the Father and the Father even speaks to him audibly at his baptism. So much for that answer, are there any others?
Yes, some other people thought God, as God, by definition had to be completely independent to be worthy of our worship. God could never share who he is with anyone else, so Jesus must be a creature of some sort through which God interacts with the world. In this way Jesus and the Father are distinct beings (explaining how Jesus prayed to the Father and how the Father could speak to Jesus audibly), but Jesus is an intermediary agent through which the real God does things. Jesus himself, as the Son of God, could never be the real God, for the real God is the Son of no one or no thing. In this way Jesus is still more than merely human, because God created the Son first and created everything else—even humans—through the Son who would later take on human flesh as Jesus Christ.

The church also rejected this answer because it undermined everyone’s salvation. Instead of God himself dealing with our sins, this answer has God sending an agent to do his work on his behalf, leaving us distant and apart from the real God when all is said and done. Besides, the church also wondered what people would make of Jesus’ claims in Scripture that he is no mere agent who represents the real God, but rather that the real God is one with him? Even more, what would we make of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the God of Moses, and the God of Jesus Christ who never seems to reveal himself to be completely independent, absolute, and unable to share? So much for that answer, are there any others?
Yes, the church settled on the answer we now know as the Trinity. This answer, when you get to the heart of it, is really about the God we Christians worship. After all the questions and answers were considered, what the church ended up endorsing is that the God who spoke long ago to Israel’s patriarchs and through her prophets has also spoken through Jesus Christ—and that God reveals himself to be love. Love, by definition, must be shared, so God is a sharer too. And God the Son, even though he is dependent on God the Father, is still just as divine as the Father himself. The Son is no mere created agent who represents God. Rather, the Son is God himself (and the Spirit too).
When the church approached the idea of which God is worthy of its worship, an absolute and independent and unsharing god, or the God of love, the church sided with love. The loving God generates, shares, and creates out of overflowing energy, while the absolute god would be barren. The loving God enjoys others and looks out for others, while the absolute god would seal himself off from others by creating agents to deal with them on his behalf.
On Trinity Sunday do not worry about explaining the math, because that never was the focus. Instead, remember that we Christians worship a God who is love. He has lovingly shared himself and will keep on doing so for all time in his kingdom. We have the privilege of sharing his own life through Christ, and what a privilege that is considering Christ is no agent of God but God himself!