Trinity in Theory and Practice

Making the Trinity practical seems like a very tall order. Few areas of Christian doctrine are more filled with technical mine fields, terms and concepts that must be used in very specific ways to avoid heresy. We have to talk about a God who is one God and yet somehow three. How He is three isn’t entirely clear, and the explanations don’t seem to clarify things very much. We have to talk about substance or essence. We have to make sure that we don’t confuse substance or essence, whatever that may be, with “person.” If we do, we might end up talking about “three gods,” which isn’t what we should say. We have to talk about God as He reveals Himself and God as He actually is. We have to deal with strange statements of Jesus, like “I am in the Father, and the Father is in Me.”

How can we make this practical? We might follow the example of Immanuel Kant. He didn’t think the Trinity made any practical difference, so he suggested that it needed to be translated into practical concerns. We don’t worship Father, Son, and Spirit. We don’t pray to them. But we can translate the doctrine of the Trinity into practical terms. What it really means is that God is Love. We revere God as the loving one, the Father; we revere humanity, which is His Son; and we revere the Spirit because the approval of the Son depends on our agreement with one another, which is love based on wisdom, which is the Spirit. Kant doesn’t believe that the doctrine of the Trinity describes what God is actually like. We can’t know. But we can allegorize the doctrine for practical uses.

Kant’s way isn’t the way forward. The way to see the enormous practical import of the Trinity is not to abandon the dogma. We need to believe the dogma, and believe it intelligently, if we want to see how it transforms the way we experience and see the world day-by-day. We can take a page from science to see how the theoretical and practical work together. A scientist who said he wasn’t interested in theory but only practice would be laughed out of the lab. Not all great discoveries come theoretically, but many do. We have nuclear bombs and nuclear energy because scientists followed out the implications of Einstein’s theories.

Our daily lives display a similar relation of theory and practice. To have a flourishing family life, we need at least an implicit “theory” of family life. Theory is from theoria, which is not originally a scientific but a philosophical term, almost a mystical one. It meant “contemplation” or “speculation” in the sense of “look at.” It refers to a “vision” of things. It describes the way we look at things, and the way we look at things affects how we at toward them or in response to them.

A theory of family life would seek answers to questions like: Who are my children? To whom do they belong? What is a good life? How do I help them to lead a good life? What is the goal of my work? What are the means that I can use – is it right for me to use corporeal discipline or verbal? How should I love them? Without a theory, we don’t know what our parenting practices are aiming to achieve. Without a theory, we have difficulty dealing with the unexpected and unprecedented challenges of family life. Without theory, we can’t resolve the inevitable differences that emerge between parents. Without a theoretical vision of family, with only practices, we don’t know what the practices are for, what they’re aiming at. Without theory, our practices become impractical.

Christian doctrine is “theory” that guides Christian practice. Without doctrine as “theory,” we have only a list of commands and guidelines and regulations. Doctrine states what is true and so shapes our imagination of God, the world, ourselves; and imagination in turn shapes the way we live before God. Without a “theory” of the Trinity, which is a theory of everything, we can’t get practical.