What Do We Mean When We Say “God?”

What do we mean by the word “God?”

Every year, eight weeks after Easter, the Church celebrates Trinity Sunday. Sometimes Trinity Sunday falls on Father’s Day and sometimes it falls when we are celebrating graduation, so it is sometimes forgotten in worship. For congregations that do not follow the lectionary, sermons on the Trinity are infrequent as well. I suspect there is good reason for this state of affairs. The Trinity is a very difficult doctrine to understand and even more difficult to explain. Further, it cannot be made to be a practical doctrine. There is no “application” section that easily fits in a sermon about the Trinity. In fact, Roger Olson, a theology professor at Baylor University, recommends to his students that they not preach on the Trinity.

Part of me wants to disagree with Dr. Olson, but after looking at some of the resources for teaching on the Trinity, I have to admit he has a point. Recently, I was looking at resources to explain the Trinity to children and I was shocked. The teachings on the Trinity for children were not just unhelpful, they lead toward faulty views of God. One writer said,

Perhaps you have noticed that when someone is baptized the pastor says, “I baptize you in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.” Have you ever heard this before? Good! Now you will know when you hear those words – Father, Son and Holy Spirit — we are talking about the Trinity ─ one God in three persons.

As simple as that sounds, the Trinity is hard to understand. It is a mystery to us – something we can think about and wonder about. People have used many, many different things to try and help explain what the trinity is. Since we started out today talking about Humpty Dumpty, I think I’ll use an egg! (Hold up a hard-boiled egg.) How many eggs do you see? That’s right! I have one egg. As you probably know, the egg is made up of three parts. The first part is the shell. (Crack the egg and peel the shell.) The next part you see is the egg white. Next, I am going to cut the egg in half. Now what do you see? Right! You see the yellow yolk. The egg has three parts — the shell, the white, and the yolk — but only ONE egg. In the same way, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are three persons but only ONE God! Mystery solved![1]

No, the author did not “solve” the mystery of the Trinity, the author made the problem worse, much, much worse. The egg analogy fails because the yolk, the white, and the shell are part of the egg. Jesus is not part of God; Jesus is God incarnate. The Father is not part of God; the Father is God. The Spirit is not part of God; the Spirit is the Spirit of God. The concept of God that the writer of this sermon is describing is not Trinitarianism, but partialism, a false view of God.

Another way common way of describing the Trinity is saying, “the Trinity is like a man who is a Father, a son, and a Husband. There are three roles, but one man.” Again, this makes the problem much, much worse. The view of the Trinity one espouses in this example is what theologians call Modalism. Modalism is the heresy that God is one and that when one encounters Jesus, then one is encountering the One God in the mode of the Son. The early Church ruled this out as defective for many reasons, not least of which was that Jesus speaks to God during His ministry.

Some have tried to use the three-leaf clover as an example of the Trinity. The three leaves represent the three different persons of the Trinity. That example breaks down as each of the leaves is only part of the clover. While in the Trinity, each of the Persons is fully God. The clover example is the closest to tri-theism that one will usually hear.

Here is the problem: there are simply no analogies to the Trinity in human existence because God is not like us. Perhaps when you read a statement like that you think, “wait, humans are created in the image of God.” Of course, you would be right, but to think that the image of God in humans leads to the possibility of an analogy of God in the created order would be very mistaken. The image of God does not primarily refer to essence but to function. Humans represent God the way an ambassador represents a nation. Humans are divine “image-ers.” We project the image of God wherever we are. So, the concept of the image of God does not indicate that there is some analogy of God available to us.

Every discussion of the Trinity has to try to avoid two competing failures: tritheism and modalism. It is difficult to keep Trinitarian thought from falling into either of these two mistakes. The difficulty emerges because of the nature of God. As a great philosopher once said, “there is an infinite qualitative distinction between time and eternity, God and man.” The distance between who God is and who we are is infinite. For example, when we say that God is wise, we are not saying that God is wise like Solomon was wise. God’s wisdom defies any human comparison. I share a great theologian’s view, “God is not man shouted in a loud voice.”

God defies description. God is utterly beyond us. We have no access to understanding God. Even our best efforts at such understanding are helpless. Because of our inability to know God, we are only able to speak about God in the ways that God has revealed Himself to us. I like how contemporary theologian David Bentley Hart puts it,

To speak of “God” properly . . . is to speak of the one infinite source of all that is: eternal, omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent, uncreated, uncaused, perfectly transcendent of all things. God so understood in not something posed over against the universe, in addition to it, nor is He the universe itself . . . He is not one more object in the inventory of things that are, or any sort of discrete object at all. Rather, all things that exist receive being continually from Him, who is the wellspring of all that is, in whom (to use the language of the Christian Scriptures) all things live and move and have their being . . . He is the inexhaustible source of all reality . . .

Humans instinctively try to make God in our own image. We try to make God similar to us by trying to make it seem like our cause is God’s cause. We insist that God is on our side in our conflicts. We try to ensure that God’s blessings fall squarely on our shoulders. We use our prayers as ways to direct God to do our bidding. We operate as if our feelings and experiences about matters of faith are to be given equal or superior weight to what God has revealed. In other words, we can end up making up our own God.

The Trinity’s paradoxical nature should prevent us from forming our own God. It should testify to the God that cannot be understood fully by fallen human beings and cannot be ever be controlled. God is simply beyond us. God is God. God alone is God. Understanding the depth of His wisdom, mercy, and grace is beyond me. So, I seldom preach on the Trinity…

but perhaps I should.

[1]https://sermons4kids.com/mystery_of_the_trinity.htm