Guest post by Stephen Lorance
I recently completed the comprehensive exams for my academic program. (Don’t worry, they were even more ‘fun’ than they sound). At the end of the verbal portion, one of my professors asked a surprising question: “How do you teach the trinity to your children?”
We had spent the last hour analyzing the East/West divide on the Trinity, parsing the importance of the periochoresis and filioque, and discussing how the divine monarchy informs present and past Trinitarian debate. But his last question, though out of line with the conversation, pressed to the heart of the matter.
In it was a subtle reminder that the Trinity is not an academic concept to be picked apart by ‘professionals’ in a sterile environment; rather the personal reality of our God engages our entire life, even our most fundamental relationships, and it is God’s personal identity we are called to teach to our children (Deut. 6:7).
But have you ever tried to teach the Trinity to your kids? Without access to the big words, precise terms or theological arguments we use in our “adult conversations” it may seem impossible, even nonsensical. I remember during one conversation my four-year-old laughing, “Jesus is not God! God is God!”
To answer, both my professor and my preschooler, I thought of a well-known bible passage and its patristic appropriation.
In 1 John 4:8, we are told quite simply: “God is love.” While we normally talk about what that means toward us: God loves me, God is lov-ing. Augustine and Aquinas understand this verse, even fundamentally so, to be talking about God’s being—who he is.
So that, at its most basic, we understand the Trinity to articulate the reality that God is love.
Augustine recounts the struggle we all have: “To the best of my ability I grasp [love] with my mind and I believe the scripture when it says that God is love and whoever abides in love abides in God (1 Jn 4:16). But when I see it, I don’t see any trinity in it.” (De Trin VIII. 5.12) He offers himself a retort! “Oh, but you do see a trinity if you see love!”
To tease out this truth Augustine begins with our physical reality: “When I who am engaged on this search to love something there are three: I myself, what I love, and love itself.” (IX.1.2) Even in our non-material reality of the mind do we relate this way to our own word: “So love, like something in the middle, joins together our word and mind it is begotten from, brings itself with them as a third element in a non-bodily embrace, without any confusion.” (IX. 2.14)
In this way, we can proceed from our material examples of love to the immaterial reality of God who is love: “We also see God as trinity in the same way, since there too we intellectually observe one as uttering, and his Word (that is Father and Son) and the love common to them both proceeding thence, namely the Holy Spirit.” (XV.2.6) Therefore, God’s personal identity is our Heavenly Father eternally united to his Son in the bond of love of the Spirit.[1]
Thomas Aquinas, following the same tradition, begins his doctrine of God with a double movement within the same simple, spiritual being of God: the generation of the Son and procession of the Spirit. In the generation of Son, the divine intellect produces an image of itself that is consubstantial and coequal. However, “besides the procession of the Word in God, there exists in Him another procession called the procession of love.” (Summa 1a. 27. 3) For in this second movement—the procession of Spirit—the divine will is directed toward that image in love. And just like the procession of the Word is an “intelligible operation” (by that Aquinas means internal ), so also “the operation of the will within ourselves involves another procession, that of love, whereby the object loved is in the lover; as, by the conception of the word, the object spoken of or understood is in the intelligible agent.” (1a. 27. 3).
Aquinas summarizes with his trademark technical precision: “Since the Father loves Himself and the Son with one Love, and conversely, there is expressed in the Holy Spirit, as Love, the relation of the Father to the Son, and conversely, as that of the lover to the beloved” (1a. 37.1) Or, as we saw with Augustine, the trinity is meant to express the eternal unity of love of our Father for His Son in the Spirit.
There are certainly dangers inherent in any material Trinitarian analogy, as these “simpletons” try to make clear to St. Patrick. Both Augustine and Aquinas understood the same and were quick themselves to offer necessary qualification of this conception—namely these relations don’t negate God’s simplicity,[2] they are not external to Him,[3] and the Father doesn’t only love through the Spirit.[4] In all of our talk about God we should always be careful to proceed within the safety of the Trinitarian ‘guard rails’ put in place by the Fathers, codified in the creeds, and continued into the present.
However, why I love to look back to Augustine and Aquinas is because they point us back to the tradition they received, that itself points us all the way back to the scriptural text that introduces us to a God who is not only loving, who not only loves the world but who, in himself, is love.
Therefore, when we speak of our God, either in theology class with academicians or the backyard with our kids, we would do well to attend to this fundamental, scriptural reality: God is love.
Stephen is the pastor at Green Hills Community Church in Nashville, TN and a PhD student in theology at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary. He and his wife, Rachel, have two kids.
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[1] To speak of the Spirit this way is a uniquely Augustinian mark: “The Holy Spirit is that by which the two [Father and Son] are joined each to the other, by which the begotten is loved by the one who begets him and in turn loves the begetter” (VI.1.5)
[2] “There is in Him only one perfect Word, and one perfect Love; thereby manifested His perfect fecundity” (Aquinas, Summa, 1a, 27.5)
[3] Aquinas: These movements or processions can’t be understood in a material way “either according to local movement or by way of a cause proceeding forth to its exterior effect, as, for instance, like heat from the agent to the thing made hot. Rather it is to be understood by way of an intelligible emanation, for example, of intelligible word which proceeds from the speaker, yet remains in him.” (Summa: 1a, 27.1)
[4] Aquinas, “In the proposition, The Father and the Son love each other by the Holy Spirit, this word love cannot be true if taken essentially, because in the same way we might say that the Father understands but the Son; nor again, if it is taken notionally, for then, in like manner, it might be said that the Father and the Son spirate by the Holy Spirit, or that the Father generates by the Son” (Summa 1a. 37.2) Augustine likewise: Who dares to say that the Father loves neither Himself, nor the Son, nor the Holy Spirit, except by the Holy Spirit” (De Trin. XV.7)