Turris Fortis - The Holy Trinity

ON THE HOLY TRINITY

This was originally presented as a talk to the adult education class at St. Mary's Catholic Church in Sylva, NC, the Monday after Trinity Sunday.

There are two dogmas of Christianity that are foundational, absolutely essential, and make Christianity distinct from any other religion conceived by man. These two dogmas are related. We’ve talked about one, nearly a year ago, when we discussed the question, “Why believe in Jesus Christ?” That is the Incarnation – the belief that God came down from heaven and entered into His creation as a man.

The second of these absolutely foundational dogmas is that of the Holy Trinity – the notion that God exists as three Persons united in one Godhead, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. I say this dogma is linked to the Incarnation because it is in the Incarnation that the mystery of the Holy Trinity is revealed to us.

This series of classes has been geared primarily towards apologetics, and when we think of apologetics we tend to think either of defending and explaining our faith to Protestants who disagree with us on certain points, or secularists who disagree with us on just about everything! But when it comes to the Trinity, by and large Protestants share this same faith with us (though there are a few small groups, such as the Oneness Pentecostals, who do not). And though it may be useful to be able to discuss the Blessed Trinity with secularists who might dismiss our belief in a “one and three” God as illogical, chances are you won’t find yourself in a coffee house sipping a latte and discussing the mystery of the Trinity with the neighborhood atheist.

In terms of apologetics, being able to make a sound defense of the Trinitarian doctrine of the Church would be most useful in discussing the faith with Muslims, as Islam is at heart an early Christian heresy that denied the Trinity. We don’t tend to think of Islam as a Christian heresy, but many historians, including Hillaire Belloc, treat it as such. The fact that it is such a different faith than ours has to do with the fact that it denies one of the very foundational tenants of the faith. If you want to know what Christianity without the Trinity would look like, look to Mecca.

But until they build a Mosque in Sylva, you are not likely to be called upon to defend your Trinitarian faith to many Muslims. So we are not going to worry too much about the apologetics side of things tonight. I do want to give a good basic foundation in Trinitarian theology to you, however, because as I said, this doctrine is absolutely foundational to the faith. The Trinity, as Father mentioned in his homily yesterday, is in the inner life of God. And what is living a Christian life about, if not to know and love God? The more we know God, the more we love Him, and the more we love Him, the more we desire to know Him.

The Trinity is everywhere in our faith. We do everything “in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.” Those names are invokes countless times during Mass, when we pray the Liturgy of the Hours, the Rosary, any type of devotional prayer, when we bless our meals, cross ourselves – whenever we do anything relating to the faith, we invoke this Trinitarian formula. I believe there is a danger of it becoming rote. We learn about the Trinity early on in our catechism classes, and get one homily a year about the Trinity on the Sunday after Pentecost. But more is needed.

So tonight I want to talk about three things. I want to first talk about why it is that we believe in a Trinity, where this data comes from in the Scriptures, and from this I’ll talk about what exactly the Trinity is – what we mean by it. Secondly, I want to talk about procession within the Trinity (and this is important if you ever are discussing the faith with any Eastern Orthodox Christians). Lastly, I want to talk about what we mean when we speak of the “indwelling” of the Trinity.

So first, where do we get our information about the Trinity? What is the raw data? I say that the Trinity is linked to the Incarnation because it was through the teachings of Jesus of Christ that the Trinity was revealed to us. Now there are hints in the Old Testament. There is nothing there in the Old Testament that explicitly reveals the Trinity, so the ancient Jewish people had no idea about this facet of God’s life. But with the knowledge we now have of God, revealed in Christ, we can look back and see aspects of the Trinity in the Hebrew Scriptures. We cannot spend too much time on this, but one such example is at the very beginning of the Bible, Genesis 1:26, when God says, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.” Some people have thought that this use of the plural pronoun was akin to the “Royal We” indicating the sovereignty of God. On one level, this is certainly true. But with knowledge of the Trinity we can look back on this passage and realize, on another level, that when God says “Let us make man in our image” He is talking about the image of the Trinity. And indeed much has been written about this, especially by our late Holy Father John Paul II in his Theology of the Body, and echoed just recently by Benedict XVI in his Angelus message on the Holy Trinity.

But it is in the New Testament where we get the most explicit indications of the Trinity. Mark 1:10, speaking of the baptism of Jesus in the Jordan, says, “when He came up out of the water, immediately He saw the heavens opened and the Spirit descending upon Him like a dove; and a voice came from heaven, ‘Thou are my beloved Son; with thee I am well pleased.” Here all three persons of the Trinity are mentioned distinctly in one passage.

In Matthew 28:19 Christ tells His apostles to “make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.” Notice that this is one name, not three names, indicating unity and equality.

In 2 Cor. 13:13 St. Paul says, “The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with all of you.” This is the verse used at the beginning of the Novus Ordo Mass, and indicates our faith in the Trinity.

There are many other instances in the Scripture when Christ is either speaking of the Father, how He and the Father are one, how no one comes to the Father except through Him, or when Christ tells us of the Spirit, which will be sent by the Father, or which Christ Himself will send. Again, we have not the time to look at each Scripture verse, but they give us the raw data of the Trinity. This information found in the Scriptures has been studied and contemplated by generations of Christians and the Magesterium of the Church has distilled this for us and learned much about the inner life of God by thinking about this data.

If you wanted to look at only two of the great theologians who wrote about the Trinity I would suggest first St. Augustine’s work, De Trinitate, or On the Holy Trinity. Secondly I would examine the parts of the Summa Theologica where St. Thomas Aquinas deals with the Trinity. Much of what I tell you tonight comes from those two sources.

What is the Trinity? How do we define it, what do we mean by that term? When we say that God is one and three, this sounds like a contradiction. How can something be one and three at the same time? It is irrational. But we have to understand that when we say that God is one and three, we are not being contradictory. What is one in God is one thing, and what is three in God is another. When we talk about God’s essence, or nature, or substance, we are referring to the divine being, and this is one. This is the same for the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. When we talk about Person, this is what is three, and this is different for the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. So what is one in God is His essence or nature. What is three in God is His Persons.

In order for this to make more sense, let’s spend just a minute talking about “nature” and “person.” When we speak of a person we are talking about an individual, rational identity. When we say the word “I” we are speaking of our person. We, as human persons, all share in one nature – human nature. What makes me a human is the same thing that makes you and everyone else a human. We have the same human nature. But we are all individual persons.

But human beings are not the only persons in creation. Angels are also persons. And what the Catholic Church teaches us about angels is that each angel has a unique nature. There is no shared “angelic nature” like we share a human nature. Every angel has a unique nature. So with angels one person = one nature.

With Jesus Christ, we are taught that the one Person of Christ has two natures! He is unique in that He is one person but possesses both a human and a divine nature.

When we look to the inner life of God, we see that there are three Persons who share the same nature – but not in the same way that we can say any three human persons share the same human nature. No. With God it is different and this is because the essence of God is different.

What is God? That is an interesting question. When someone asks what I am, I say, “I am a man,” or I could say, “I am a human being.” If a cat could talk, he might say, “I am a cat.” And angel would say, “I am an angel.” What that “I am” means is “I exist as…” I exist as a human being. Or I exist as an angel. Now we only exist because God wills us to exist, correct? We are not responsible for our own existence. Nothing intrinsic in me, as a man, has to exist. I could not exist. And until one day more than 29 years ago, I did not exist!

But what does God say when He tells us who or what He is? This is what He told to Moses. He said, “I am.” Period. “I am He who is,” God said. What He is telling us is that it is of His very nature to exist. God is existence itself. God cannot not exist because then He would not be God.

Since God’s very nature is existence itself, then when we talk about the three Persons of God sharing the same nature, it’s not the same as three humans sharing in the same human nature. Because God’s nature is existence, to say the three divine Persons share the same one nature, it means they share the same one existence. They are one.

Many different metaphors have been used in history to try to illustrate this three-in-one that is God, including the triangle, and the shamrock. These are all useful to a point, but they are only metaphors and they break down at some level. But if you remember always that God’s very essence is existence, we can explain the Trinity in more technical terms.

Keep in mind that we only exist because God knows us and wills our existence. Our existence at all is a participation in the source of all being which is God. God knows all of creation and because He knows it, it has being. But God also knows Himself. In fact, He knows Himself with perfect knowledge, much more so than we can ever know ourselves. And since God’s nature is being, and His knowledge of Himself is perfect, this knowledge of Himself also has existence. We call this the Word, or the divine Logos.

So the First Person of the Trinity is God, knowing Himself. The Second Person of the Trinity is God’s Knowledge of Himself. Speaking now of the processions within the Holy Trinity, we say that the Son proceeds from the Father through an act of the intellect. And this is not something that God decided to do one day – “I’m going to know myself perfectly,” and then it was done. No, God is always knowing Himself perfectly from all of eternity. God always has knowledge of Himself therefore God the Father is always generating God the Son. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” (John 1:1)

We speak of this procession of the Son from the Father as a begetting. We call Jesus Christ God’s only begotten son, and in our creeds we talk of the Son being “eternally begotten of the Father, God from God, light from light, true God from true God, begotten not made, one in being with the Father.” We speak of it in these terms because when a father begets a son, he is passing on his nature to him. A human father generates a human son. Humans beget humans. Dogs beget dogs. Chickens beget chickens. And God begets God. God the Father is eternally begetting God the Son – there was never a time when this was not so.

One early error in Trinitarian thinking was that the Son was begotten of the Father at a specific point in time. This is called subordinationism, and has always been condemned. The reason is that it makes the Son into a created being -- something that did not exist, and then through an act of God was made into being. This was the chief error of Arianism in the fourth century.

So we have the Father, who is God knowing Himself, and then we have the Son, that is the perfect knowledge, or Word, of God. These two persons then contemplate each other and love one another and that mutual love, because it is an act of God’s will and also part of his essence, also has personal existence, and that Person is the Holy Spirit.

The Holy Spirit proceeds from both the Father and the Son through an act of will. Here we should make brief mention of the term filioque. This is Latin for “and the Son,” and it was not part of the original composition of the Nicene Creed (which simply read that the Holy Spirit proceeded from the Father). The Eastern Orthodox churches reject the addition of the filioque to the Creed. But it is important to remember that our faith is not based on any of the creeds traditionally used by the Church. Rather the Church creates the Creeds to use as teaching tools. When the Nicene Creed was first composed it was to combat Arianism and its errors about the relationship between the Father and the Son. This is why so much of the Creed focuses on that issue. Later on, the filioque was added to clarify the procession of the Holy Spirit.

That the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son is attested to in Scripture. In John 14:16, Jesus says, “I will pray the Father, and he will give you another Counselor, to be with you forever.” This tells us that the Father sends the Spirit, but at the bequest of the Son. In John 14:26 Jesus speaks of “the Counselor, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name.” So again, the Father is sending the Spirit through Jesus Christ. Even more to the point, in John 15:26, Jesus says, “But when the Counselor comes, whom I shall send to you from the Father, even the Spirit of truth, who proceeds from the Father, he will bear witness to me.”

It is important to pause now and consider the nature of the Trinity itself and the relationship of the three Persons with one another. Since all three Persons share in the same divine essence, and that essence is undivided, the Persons of the Trinity share all things in common except in their relationship with one another. What this means is that the Son is everything that the Father is except that He is not Father. The Father is everything that the Son is except for being Son. They are only distinct in their relation to one another. It is how they are defined. The Father begets and the Son is begotten but in all other matters they are coequal.

The same is true of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is Himself defined according to His relations with the Father and the Son. This is another argument for the dual procession of the Holy Spirit. If the Holy Spirit proceeded only from the Father and did not also have a reciprocal relationship with the Son, then there would be no substantial difference between the Holy Spirit and the Son. They would both be defined by the same equal relationship with the Father and the Godhead would then have only two divine Persons, not three.

Because the Persons of the Trinity are different only in relation to the other, and in all other things they are the same, it is true to say that what one does, all three do. What one participates in, all three also do. We tend to assign specific acts of God to one of the three Persons, as a matter of convenience. We assign acts of creation, for instance, to God the Father, because this seems fitting due to the Father’s status as the source without a source, the begetter of the Son. We assign acts of salvation to the Son, for it was the Son who became Incarnate and died for our sins. We assign acts of sanctification to the Holy Spirit, because it is the Spirit of God within us that allows us to grow in Holiness.

But it is important to remember that the Three Persons exist in an undivided unity. What one does, all three do. There is only one will and one intellect among the three Persons. Though we ascribe acts of creation to the Father, we know, for instance, that the Son also participates, for St. John’s Gospel says, “through Him all things were made.” We know that the Spirit also participated in creation, for in Genesis it speaks of the “spirit of God moving over the waters.”

The relationship of the Three Persons of the Trinity is so intimate that theologians speak of them mutually indwelling within one another. The Council of Florence defined it this way. “Because of this unity [the undivided divine essence] the Father is entirely in the Son and entirely in the Holy Spirit; the Son is entirely in the Father and entirely in the Holy Spirit; the Holy Spirit is entirely in the Father and entirely in the Son.” This mutual divine indwelling is called circumincession. It is evidenced in such Scriptures as in John’s Gospel when Jesus says, “I and the Father are one,” and 1 Corinthians, when St. Paul teaches, “The Spirit reaches the depths of everything, even the depths of God.”

When I took a course in the Holy Trinity, taught by Fr. Kenneth Baker (editor of Homiletic and Pastoral Review), he put it this way. “In the Trinity each divine Person is irresistibly drawn, by the very constitution of His being, to the other two. Branded in the very depths of each one of them is a necessary outward impulse urging Him to give Himself fully to the other two, to pour Himself out into the divine receptacle of the other two. Here we find an unceasing circulation of life and love.”

What this also means is that any external act of God is participated in by all three Persons. This has very important implications when we think on God’s actions in our lives.

We speak often of God’s grace. The sacraments, for instance, are when we receive in a substantial way the grace of God. But it is wrong of us to think of God’s grace as some thing that God gives us. Grace is not a thing in and of itself. It is not a stamp or a brand or a tag that says, “I belong to God.” Grace means “gift” but what is being given is God Himself. God comes to dwell in us. The full meaning of sanctifying grace is that God Himself, that is, the Holy Trinity – Father, Son and Holy Spirit – is personally present in me in a way that he is not present in the rest of the material universe.

In John 14:23, Jesus tells us, “If anyone loves Me he will keep My word, and My Father will love him, and We shall come to him and make Our home with him.”

Any time that we receive the Holy Sprit (as in our Confirmation); any time that we receive the Body and Blood of Christ in the Eucharist; any time that we are in a state of sanctifying grace (after our Baptism, and any time after a good confession) that means that the Holy Trinity of God, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are all three dwelling within us as within a tabernacle, and within us they dwell within each other, this complete and intimate family that is God’s very essence.

People want to know why they need to learn about the Trinity, what is so special about the Trinity, and what impact is has in their lives. This is it. It is that the Trinity is the very nature of God, and by glimpsing it we are getting a glimpse of the very inner life of God. And this is a life that God wants to share with us. So much so that He wants to dwell within us, be inside of us, and give us His Trinitarian life and love.