The Holy Trinity… Easy as One, Two, Three…
Every kid in Sunday school thinks he knows all about God. You know, that bearded guy on the throne who looks something like Zeus, right? And then there’s Jesus, God’s son. But He’s God too, right? And who’s the Holy Spirit? Is He Jesus’ side-kick? Or what?
Wait a minute.
An essential factor lacking from those concepts is the relational quality of God.
Meet the Holy Trinity.
The Trinity, one way Christianity attempts to define God, is difficult and tricky to explain. The best explanation I heard when a kid was, ‘You have to have faith.’ They couldn’t explain faith either.
The Holy Trinity, Blessed Trinity, in Christian theology, is the union of three persons; the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, in one Godhead. Three distinct persons? One God? The Trinity is a paradox, an apparent contradiction, a mystery unexplainable in words.
The Athanasian Creed reads: “We worship one God in trinity and the trinity in unity,” (neither blending their persons nor dividing their essence.)
Regardless the language, words are abstractions of the reality they attempt to describe. The word is not the thing. The word ‘water’ can never quench your thirst. One will inevitably fall short when using concrete terms to describe the…
