In the Name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit: Toward a Trinitarian Worldview

By J. Scott Horrell

[J. Scott Horrell is Professor of Theological Studies, Dallas Theological Seminary, and an adjunct faculty member at the Jordan Evangelical Theological Seminary, Amman, Jordan, and the Seminario Teológico Centroamericano, Guatemala City, Guatemala.]

Broadly across Christian traditions today, the renaissance of Trinitarian studies continues to yield productive suggestions regarding the practical implications of faith in the tripersonal God.[1] Some ideas align fairly readily with classical Christian faith, whereas others appear more distant from the Trinitarian creeds of Nicaea (325) and Constantinople (381).

On the one hand church fathers and present-day leaders alike urge readers to beware of overspeculation regarding the Godhead, of trying to say too much about what cannot be said. The apophatic nature of Trinitarian confession indicates that creeds exist both to define the boundaries and to preserve the mystery of the transcendent God. As Placher comments, “We are asking about the very essence of God, and that essence is too great for our understanding. We must cling closely to Scripture and to the logic of salvation, flickering candles as it were against what seems such a great darkness but is in fact, of course, invisible to our mind’s eyes because of the brilliance of its too great light.”[2]

On the other hand even as creedal language helps guard what can finally never be said, God has spoken in the Son and by the Spirit, through acts in history and in the written Word. The very center of the biblical message is that the triune God has made known His personal richness[3] in both mercy and judgment. People are invited to know this God through Christ and to be transformed by the renewing of their minds through the Spirit. The theme of this article is that some things can be said about the Christian God in ways that may and should unite all believers.

The purpose of this article is to outline a transcultural Trinitarian worldview, one that attempts to set forth a universal framework of basic Christian faith for believers today. It presupposes that the biblical basis of the doctrine of the Trinity together with its early patristic development is correctly expressed in the Nicene and Constantinopolitan creeds. Rather than a detailed discussion of any single aspect, the work is designed as a synthesis of important Trinitarian themes. The article traces the Godhead’s internal relationships from before creation, and then discusses how Christians might think about God in relation to the physical universe, to themselves, and to others created in the image of God. Furthermore themes of divine love, holiness, and redemption are contrasted to non-Christian perspectives. The last section sets forth several basic formulations about God, time, and space, with some concluding cross-cultural suggestions.

These aspects of Trinitarianism are designed to form a biblical-theological superstructure that helps unify varying contextualized Christian perspectives of faith.[4] Integrated into the work is the argument that the doctrine of the Trinity with its broad sweeping and extraordinary implications for human existence may be a powerful apologetic for Christian faith amidst the religions and cultures of the world. As the late Gunton exclaimed,

It is part of the pathos of Western theology that it has often believed that while trinitarian theology might well be of edificatory value to those who already believe, for the outsider it is an unfortunate barrier to belief, which must therefore be facilitated by some non-trinitarian apologetic, some essentially monotheistic “natural theology.” My belief is the reverse: that because the theology of the Trinity has so much to teach about the nature of our world and life within it, it is or could be the centre of Christianity’s appeal to the unbeliever, as the good news of a God who enters into free relations of creation and redemption with his world. In the light of the theology of the Trinity, everything looks different.[5]

Any such framework calls for considerable humility before the mystery of God. Again, apophatic or negative theology—the theology of “not knowing”—surely has its place. Yet equally essential for a basic Trinitarian worldview is the open-armed working together of international Christians in critiquing, correcting, and nuancing what it means to believe in the triune God. Theology on the macrostructural level is necessarily an international dialogue.

The Trinity before Creation

Tertullian wrote, “Before all things God was alone, being his own universe, location, everything. He was alone, however, in the sense that there was nothing external to himself.”[6] Before any and all creation, God was completely self-sufficient and all-inclusive. All that existed was God. As Zwingli opined, “Since we know that God is the source and creator of all things, we cannot conceive of anything before or beside him which is not also of him. For if anything could exist which was not of God, God would not be infinite.”[7] In the absolute beginning God was everything.

This Supreme Being is infinite in each of His characteristics. Rather than envelop all opposites (for unlike pantheism God is not infinite in everything), the God of the Bible in His perfect nature eternally chooses to be Himself. That is, God is pure and consistent in being—good and not evil, holy and not unholy, immutable and not ever-changing. And God is free. He is what He is, then, both by nature and by choice.

The God who resides outside human dimensions cannot be exhaustively comprehended. He can be known in part; yet He stands beyond humankind in mystery. Any true understanding a person has of the transcendent God derives from His gracious revelation given in finite categories and conditions that have meaning for finite beings. Nevertheless what God has revealed of Himself is fully sufficient for humans to know and to love Him.

Moreover, the Supreme Being is profoundly personal. Though existing alone before creation, as Hippolytus remarks, yet He “existed in plurality.”[8] God reveals Himself as three eternally distinct persons. Whereas functions differ, each person is equally God in essence and unity.[9] The shared glory, love, and communication of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit forever distinguish the one Christian God from all other forms of theism. Thus the persons of the Trinity can be known together as the one God; yet they are also identified distinctly and worshipped.

The divine Being, before any and all creation, existed as all-inclusive, self-sufficient, and tripersonal, as expressed in the Trinity.

The Trinity and Impersonal Creation

Although some suppose a created order that is coeternal in the past with God, classical Christian faith declares that creation has been called into existence out of nothing (ex nihilo). There was an absolute beginning.[10] When God created, therefore, He deliberately chose to “limit” Himself. While yet fully infinite, God now created something that was not Himself. In creating something out of absolute nothing, God no longer remained all-inclusive.[11] The rock, the tree, and the animal were not God. In contrast to all pantheistic theologies, the God of the Bible did not flow or emanate out into the physical world.[12] To the contrary, all space, energy, and matter exist as God’s creation and artistry and not as His essence. Yet the existence of these dimensions is wholly sustained by the personal Creator. As Finger observes, “Yet radical as this self-giving, self-emptying process is, the Trinitarian God remains distinctly other. God’s intertwining with creatures thus evokes heightened wonder, for it proceeds not from natural necessity—not because we already are God’s body—but from grace.”[13]

The question of why God created is not easily answered, although classical Christian faith responds that in the final sense it was “to the praise of His glory” (Eph. 1:12, 14). Many surmise that the divine motivation for creation is best found in the overflow of generosity between the three persons of the Godhead. The deep love and joyful relations among the members of the Trinity are manifested in the creation of that which is other—especially other personal beings who might know and enjoy relationship, with service and worship of this God.

Having brought the created order into existence out of nothing, the triune God sustains it and in that sense is personally related to all dimensions of existence.

The Trinity and the Unity-Diversity of the Universe

The tension between unity and diversity in the universe is one of the great philosophic problems of history. Since the ancient philosophers, humanity has lacked a solution to this enigma. Is reality constituted by one single cosmic principle (fate or God) that unites and determines all existence? Or is ultimate reality centered in diversity in which the particulars are self-determinative, whether by choice or by chance?

At the pole of unity, one is locked in cosmic determinism. Whether from a religious or secular perspective, humans are but tiny cogs in a massive machine over which they have no control and in which they have no essential choice or personal meaning. Such a perspective is evident in the religious fatalism of ancient Greek religion, Vedanta Hinduism, traditional Islam (“If God wills”), and extreme versions of Christian predestinationism. Similar perspectives that minimize if not negate human freedom and significance surface in Marxist dialectic materialism, behavioral psychology, and evolutionary mind-body theory.

At the opposite pole, that of diversity, all existence is composed of particulars with no ultimate unifying principle or telos. By ridding oneself of God, Nietzsche argued, people are finally free. They are without any referent beyond themselves for meaning. But this absolute autonomy has its dark side. In a universe with no final unity, the human being is like a person floating in outer space, with neither spacecraft nor planet in sight and two hours of oxygen in his tank before he dies. From Kandinsky and Dada to Basquiat and Cindy Sherman, twentieth-century art reveals the angst of being one’s own god in a meaningless universe. Secular existentialism is grounded in individual autonomy. Socio-political theory presumes collective autonomy. And together individual and collective autonomy coalesce in postmodernism with nothing beyond oneself.

Outside of biblical Christianity, no structure satisfies the tension between the one and the many. As three persons in one God, the Trinity incorporates both unity and diversity within itself. Apart from special revelation, of course, human beings could never know that the one God eternally exists as three persons. That having been revealed, explains Cornelius Van Til, one surely can perceive “that the unity and the plurality of this world has [in] back of it a God in whom unity and the plurality are equally ultimate.”[14] All creation reflects this unity-diversity, from the immensity of outer space with its hundred billion galaxies to the complexity of inner space with subatomic bosons, leptons, and fermions. Whether vastly expansive or fathomlessly small, there is order between individual components and the total scheme of creation.

In the end, if there is no infinite, absolute point of reference in the universe, then all the particulars are meaningless. What is more, if such a point of reference is to give significance to all existence, it must be a personal Absolute. In contrast with all other religions and philosophies, the concept of the Trinity presents meaningful relationship between the one and the many in the universe. Everything and every person has significance because they were created by and exist in relation to the tripersonal God.

The Trinity and the Beginning of Personal Creation

The triune God also chose to create persons. By creating finite beings God again “limited” Himself, for no longer was He the only moral agent in existence. Unlike God Himself, of course, all created beings, whether angelic or earthly, are finite. In contrast to God the Son, for example, Satan is not capable of being present in all places at all times. Instead he extends his kingdom through his minions. In creating finite persons the God of the Bible remained infinite, but He was no longer morally all-inclusive; now personal beings could choose against Him.

Contrary to the atheist and the pantheist, the Judeo-Christian affirms that human personhood and dignity are grounded in the imago Dei. While far more ample than the following,[15] personhood surely includes the simple elements of thought, volition, and emotion: (a) God thinks and reasons in a logical manner, although not necessarily in the same thought patterns humans use;[16] (b) God chooses and possesses freedom of will;[17] and (c) God manifests a multiplicity of affections—all as a moral, purposeful Being. Just as Scripture establishes that each member of the Godhead reasons, exercises volition, and manifests a plurality of feelings, so finite persons evince similar characteristics. Other aspects of the divine image include creativity, aesthetic appreciation, moral conscience, aptitude for dominion, a sense of immortality, and desire and capacity for I-thou relationships. Therefore, although human beings have fallen into sin and suffer the defects of the Fall, the imago Dei, though disfigured, is not beyond recognition. Human persons have eternal value because the Creator of the universe is also personal. And God has come to humankind in Jesus Christ, the express image and manifestation of God.

Therefore Christianity argues that neither atheism nor pantheism has a sufficient framework for explaining humanness—the full-bodied “humanness” presumed worldwide in literature, music, and common life. Not even Islamic theism is at all clear that human beings are created in the image of God. Instead Islam sees humans as creatures made to serve Allah, but not to commune with him.[18] In Christianity the doctrine of God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is the structure and ontological ground for the realities of personhood: self-consciousness, rationality, self-determinative choices, a plethora of affections and emotions, a sense of afterlife, moral sensibilities of right and wrong, and the capacity for relationships with God and with other human beings. In Trinitarian faith, humanity has found its home.

The Trinity and Humanity in Community

The doctrine of the Trinity yields light regarding social relationships. From eternity past the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are united in communication, fellowship, and love—in essence one, and yet in a plenitude of interpersonal relationships.[19] Many in the secular world declare that human relationships exist only to serve selfish interests, that “love” is simply the product of biological hormones,[20] and that language is little more than a tool of manipulation. No longer are such attitudes merely oriented to the North Atlantic. From Beijing to Buenos Aires many consider life to be without significance.

In the midst of antihumanitarian affirmations, the Christian faith proclaims that communication, friendship, and love—all central human desires—assume profound meaning when one understands that humankind was created by God, who manifests social relations within Himself. From conception and birth to physical development, to language and cultural formation, to values acquisition, people are dependent on social relations. Humans are created for community. Yet a human being is one person, not three. Whereas God as Trinity is self-sufficient, humans are not. Created as individuals, people are made, so to speak, for a trinity of relationships—with self, other human beings, and the Lord God. As creatures rather than Creator, they are not designed to presume themselves all-knowing, to attain ultimate perspective, or to be in the center of the universe. People are designed to trust in and to enter into fellowship with the triune God.

Since God is three persons in relationship and since people are created to reflect or image their Maker, they have every reason to enter into full human relations: to work with others for the good of all; to engage in reasoned thought and communication; to enjoy the study of science, history, and other disciplines of learning; to create and participate in the visual and musical arts; to express emotions of joy, sadness, and anger as positively as possible in personal associations; to pursue and develop friendships in healthy, appropriate ways; to value social connections around the births, marriages, anniversaries, and deaths of others; to delight in sexual intimacy in marriage (which reflects the covenantal nature of God’s own unity, hence to be guarded as sacred); to be zealous for justice and compassion among those laden by poverty, oppression, hardship, and sin; to care for the earth as vice-regents. This is not to deny a fallen world with the surd that separates and destroys believers and unbelievers alike. Rather it is to say that Christians have a structure for being persons-in-relation in the world and all the more in the context of the believing community, the church.[21]

Thus the Christian faith leads individuals to the core of their humanity. Made in God’s likeness, now forgiven and reborn, the more believers become like Jesus Christ the more they reflect the wondrous personal glory of God. True Christianity—in contrast to many forms of pantheism and atheism—does not erase the person nor is it careless toward community. To the contrary, biblical faith leads to an abundant personhood. One may ask what human being in all of history compares with Jesus of Nazareth in His purity, magnetism, and ardent relations with others? What is seen in the humanity of the Last Adam corresponds to the ontology of every human being, an ontology that is awakened and renewed through faith in the Savior.

The Trinity and Love, Justice, and Forgiveness

A central characteristic of the God of the Bible is love. Love is pristinely manifest in the relationship between the Father and the Son (John 17:23-24), and further in God’s sacrificial love for the world (1 John 4:7-10).[22] Defined in 1 Corinthians 13, agape is not directed inwardly but outwardly in the sharing and giving of oneself to others. In contrast to Islam, Judaism, and other religions that insist God exists exclusively as one person, the triune God of Christianity is not egocentric, solitary, or isolated.[23] Richard of St. Victor (d. 1173) wrote, “It is never said of anyone that he possesses charity because of the exclusively personal love that he has for himself—for there to be charity, there must be a love that is directed towards another. Consequently where there is an absence of a plurality of persons, there cannot be charity.”[24] The tripersonal God does not need to create something or someone to love. For God to be “love,” the divine Being must exist as at least two persons.

As Jesus Christ revealed the attributes of God and taught people to follow Him (Luke 9:23-25), giving oneself in love to others manifests the imago Dei. The more individuals strive to give of themselves first to God and then to others, the more fulfilled they are as personal beings. In sacrificially loving others an individual imitates the persons of the Trinity—the Father as He gives “all things” to the Son (John 16:15; 17:10), the Son as He obeys the Father (5:30; 8:29; Phil. 2:8) and having conquered all things lays them back at the feet of the Father (1 Cor. 15:27-28), and the Spirit as He selflessly glorifies the Son and the Father (John 16:13-15). This divine “self-givingness” within God’s personal plurality serves as humanity’s model, first in one’s response to God Himself, and secondarily in one’s social relationships whether in the family, local church, or any other sociological level.

Just as God is love, so He is holy. The only attribute thrice repeated in both Testaments is the trisagion, the seraphs’ cry of “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord [God] Almighty” (Isa. 6:3; cf. Rev. 4:8). But how do God’s holiness and love work? God is the absolute moral standard of all existence. Ethical law and justice are directly derived from His moral purity. How can holy justice coexist with divine mercy if sin should enter His presence? (And with humankind it most surely has!) If God were mono-personal, He could be perfectly just and holy, but He would be equally unable to forgive sin without violating His own justice. In Islam’s Hadith (the sayings of Mohammed), Allah stands above the bridge that passes from this earthly life to the afterlife of paradise. Underneath this bridge that is “as narrow as the edge of a sword” is the burning abyss of hell.[25] Every Muslim admits he is not morally perfect as Allah is perfect; he can only cast himself on divine mercy. But in Islam there can be no assurance of God’s mercy. Allah does whatever he chooses; he is free. All Muslims believe God does forgive, but the question is how? A man who lived a life ninety percent good and ten percent evil might be granted paradise. A person with less virtue might be pushed into the abyss. But no one knows what Allah will do (yet whatever he does is necessarily “good”). The point is, assuming that no one is perfect as God is perfect, Allah must compromise pure justice to permit mercy in order for anyone to enter Paradise.[26] And if Allah compromises justice, he is no longer the Moral Absolute of the universe. He is no longer perfect.

Conversely the New Testament declares that God is both the Just and Justifier of those who have faith in Jesus (Rom. 3:23-26). Because “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God,” neither works of the law nor acts of righteousness can remove judgment. Rather, precisely because God is more than one person, this God can demand absolute justice and can Himself pay the price that He requires. Because of the plurality of persons, the triune God can be the holy Judge, the sacrificial Lamb who satisfies divine justice, and the sanctifying Spirit who works within sinners to lead them to God and make them His children.

The Trinity and Time and Space

In forming a transcultural Trinitarian worldview, the most speculative realm is that of God in relation to time and space. Yet certain tentative observations can be set forth that reflect historical Christian thought.

Unlike the cyclical concept of time in classical pantheism and some forms of animism, the biblical perspective of time is linear: the history of the world has beginning, direction, culmination, and (in some sense) end. For this reason, more than in any other religion, Judeo-Christianity has numerous predictive prophecies—more than one-fourth of the Bible.[27] The Christian faith takes objective history seriously as demonstrated in the Incarnation, ministry, death, resurrection, and second coming of Jesus Christ (1 Cor. 15:3-27). God enters time and space to relate dynamically with human beings. Simultaneously this same sovereign God is transcendent, existing outside of creational dimensions.[28]

Seen from a biblical viewpoint, time and creation have beginning but no definitive end. The physical order was created and will continue in some form forever, although the nature of time and space may be radically transformed. Such fundamental categories of existence belong to the covenant that the triune God has made with finite personal beings. Believers are given “eternal life”—a life filled with the plenitude of the Lord, a life of elevated quality, finally with “spiritual bodies” (1 Cor. 15:44)—but always within some kind of time and space whether heavenly or earthly (cf. Rev. 22:2), as these seem essential to the existence of finite beings.

Furthermore in Christian tradition God the Son has forever assumed human flesh (body and soul, John 1:14). Throughout eternity the glorified Christ will relate to believers as their Lord and brother, even as His spiritual body in no way confines His deity.[29] The Holy Spirit, likewise, is manifested as a dove and as tongues of fire. If not merely metaphorical, some language of Scripture suggests that even God the Father appears in finite forms within the orders of creation (e.g., the Ancient of Days, Dan. 7:9-10). Indeed certain concepts of heaven include some kind of appearance of the Father (“him who sits on the throne,” Rev. 4:9-10) while mainline theological understandings affirm Him as exclusively immortal, invisible, “whom no one has seen or can see” (1 Tim. 6:15).[30] However conceived, by God’s entering the world—principally in the Incarnation of the Son and by the ever-active Spirit—one can understand and relate to God in tangible ways. Indeed, if the infinite God did not reveal Himself in words and appearances analogous to human reality, then people would be without categories to understand and relate to Him. Whenever God reveals Himself, it is by grace and condescension.

From this vantage, the triune God reveals Himself through finite forms without limiting Himself to those forms. He is simultaneously inside and outside creation, not bound to but active within the created orders. In this way the Trinity’s presence encompasses both creation and noncreation, preserving divine transcendent glory together with the Godhead’s functional working within creation (sometimes described as the immanent Trinity). People often think in two dimensions: heaven and earth. But it may be better to conceive of reality in at least three spheres in respect to God: (a) the universe and world in which the triune God has shown Himself, most properly in the Incarnation; (b) the celestial dimension of angels, where saints too will have glorified bodies before the eternal God-Man Jesus Christ and in the presence of God the Father; and (c) the transcendent, immanent Trinity, beyond all dimensions and ultimately all comprehension.

Conclusion: Trinity, Glory, and Christendom Today

In view of the infinite, personal nature of the Most High God as revealed in the Bible with absolute perfection, self-sufficiency, unchangeableness, and free will, and in view of the Trinitarian structure of the universe which gives meaning to human beings as persons—with rationality, morality, love, balance between unity and diversity, and so very much more—something yet needs to be said. Nearly everything mentioned until now is related to the human view of reality. However, having begun with the Trinity before creation, one must remember that everything that is not creation is God. If the tripersonal God existed as the all-inclusive One before creation, then this God is now in all “places” and all “realms” where there is no creation. Surrounding the dimensions of creation resides the infinite triune Lord, the Lord of all, exercising His magnificent character.[31] For those who are Christians, redeemed by the work of Christ at the cross, finite creation constitutes an enormous “crib” over which and around which the triune God hovers, affectionately caring for His own. All creation will someday recognize the greatness and beauty of God, together with the unfathomable debt it owes to the Almighty for its existence and preservation, and for the provision of salvation in Christ Jesus. Almost certainly, the highest role of created personal beings is to understand their utter indebtedness to God. In glorifying the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit individuals are fulfilled as finite persons in the eternal plan of God. Nonetheless there is no more blessed glory than the glory given by each member of the Trinity to the other, each wholly comprehending and exalting the greatness of the other.

The First Ecumenical Council of Nicaea (325) and its theological development at Constantinople (381) established the confessional center of Christian faith. As stated at the beginning of this article, one must respect divine mystery, being mindful of biblical and historical evidence, that there is much about God that is not known and much more about which there are only informed opinions. Yet the concepts of the Nicene and Constantinopolitan creeds are the boundaries of what is licit versus what must not be said. In light of this confession new culturally sensitive constructions of Trinitarian doctrine should be welcomed as believers worldwide seek to articulate more deeply the Christian doctrine of God and its meaning for their lives. Surely some of the missteps that yet plague wider expressions of Christendom will reoccur (and these must be deemed in error). Yet as Christianity’s masses increasingly and overwhelmingly weigh the scales to the global South,[32] believers with non-Western languages and thought forms should endeavor to articulate Trinitarian doctrine and to work out its implications for how they should live in the midst of their own milieus.

The purpose of this article has been to offer a tentative framework for a transcultural Trinitarian worldview. The biblical-theological superstructure suggested here can hopefully help unify varying contextualized expressions of Christian faith around Trinitarian confession. Of course the international reader will rightly complain that the perspective here has been largely Western and North Atlantic. For this reason believers in different cultures need one another—to challenge, enlarge, deepen, and balance differing theological perspectives. But the suggestion, humbly submitted, is especially for a missional Trinitarian worldview—not missional as from one culture to another, but missional as each body of believers seeks to interpret and engage Trinitarianism within its own culture. Believers are to live out the faith they profess. And so in the plurality and beauty of the body of Christ worldwide, may the understanding of the triune God continue to unfold in fresh insights and intentional application—in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

Notes

1. Recent Trinitarian studies include Allan Coppedge, The God Who Is Triune: Revisioning the Christian Doctrine of God (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2007); Peter Drilling, Premodern Faith in a Postmodern Culture: A Contemporary Theology of the Trinity (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006); John F. Fish, ed., Understanding the Trinity (Dubuque, IA: ECS Ministries, 2006); Kevin Giles, The Trinity and Subordinationism: The Doctrine of God and the Contemporary Gender Debate (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2002); Stanley J. Grenz, The Named God and the Question of Being: A Trinitarian Theo-Ontology (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2005); idem, The Social God and the Relational Self: A Trinitarian Theology of the Imago Dei (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2001); Andreas J. Köstenberger and Scott R. Swain, Father, Son and Spirit: The Trinity and John’s Gospel (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2008); Robert Letham, The Holy Trinity: In Scripture, History, Theology, and Worship (Phillipsburg, NJ: P & R, 2004); Bruce L. McCormack, ed., Engaging the Doctrine of God: Contemporary Protestant Perspectives (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2008); Marc Cardinal Ouellet, Divine Likeness: Toward a Trinitarian Anthropology of the Family, trans. Philip Milligan and Linda M. Cicone (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2006); John Owen, Communion with the Triune God, ed. Kelly M. Kapic and Justin Taylor (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2007); William C. Placher, The Triune God: An Essay in Postliberal Theology (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2007); Fred Sanders and Klaus Issler, eds., Jesus in Trinitarian Perspective: An Introductory Christology (Nashville: B & H Academic, 2007); Stephen Seamands, Ministry in the Image of God: The Trinitarian Shape of Christian Service (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2005); F. LeRon Shults, Reforming the Doctrine of God (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005); Tom Smail, Like Father, Like Son: The Trinity Imaged in Our Humanity (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005); Miroslav Volf and Michael Welker, eds., God’s Life in Trinity (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 2006); and Bruce A. Ware, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit: Relationships, Roles, and Relevance (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2005).
2. Placher, The Triune God, 139.
3. While recognizing that the transcendent God is beyond gender, and while admitting occasional feminine language and metaphors for God (notably the Spirit), the author here is using masculine pronouns for God both as one and as three, as do the Scriptures. See Gerald O’Collins, The Tri-personal God: Understanding and Interpreting the Trinity (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist, 1999), 183-91.
4. Various efforts have been made to collate international Trinitarian perspectives or to relate Christianity through a Trinitarian lens to non-Christian religions, but to this writer’s knowledge, no direct effort has focused on a transcultural Trinitarian worldview. See Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen, The Trinity: Global Perspectives (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2007); idem, Trinity and Religious Pluralism: The Doctrine of the Trinity in Christian Theology of Religions (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2004); idem, The Doctrine of God: A Global Introduction (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2004); Gavin D’Costa, The Meeting of Religions and the Trinity (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2000); S. Mark Heim, The Depth of the Riches: A Trinitarian Theology of Religious Ends (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2001); Raimundo Pannikar, The Trinity and the World Religions (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis 1973); Aída Besançon Spencer and William David Spencer, eds., The Global God: Multicultural Evangelical Views of God (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1998); and Marjorie Hewitt Suchocki, Divinity and Diversity: A Christian Affirmation of Religious Diversity (Nashville: Abingdon, 2003).
5. Colin E. Gunton, The Promise of Trinitarian Theology (Edinburgh: Clark, 1991), 7.
6. Tertullian, Adversus Praxean chap. 5, in The Ante-Nicene Fathers, ed. Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson (reprint, Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2004), 3:600.
7. Ulrich Zwingli, “An Exposition of the Faith,” in Zwingli and Bullinger, ed. and trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley (London: SCM, 1953), 249.
8. Hippolytus, Contra Noetum 10, in The Ante-Nicene Fathers, 5:227.
9. Regarding the intra-Trinitarian relationships, in creedal language, the Son is eternally begotten of the Father and the Holy Spirit eternally proceeds from the Father and (in the West) the Son. The words begotten and proceeding do not denote inferiority of one person to another but simply shed light on the relational differences between the three. The words “essence” and “person” are difficult to define; nor is there consensus as to their precise meanings. See J. Scott Horrell, “Toward a Biblical Model of the Social Trinity: Avoiding Equivocation of Nature and Order,” Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 47 (September 2004): 399-421.
10. Note John 1:1-3; Romans 11:36; Colossians 1:16-17; Hebrews 1:2; 11:3; and Revelation 3:14.
11. The notion of God creating space within Himself for creation is seen in various historical thinkers including Isaac Luria’s zimsum or self-limitation of God (mystical Judaism), Nicholas de Cusa, and F. W. J. Schelling. See Hans Urs von Balthasar, Theodramatik II, Part 1 (Einsiedeln: Johannes, 1983); Eberhard Jüngel, God as the Mystery of the World, trans. Darrell L. Guder (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1983), 376-96; Jürgen Moltmann, The Trinity and the Kingdom, 5th ed. (New York: Harper, 1996), 108-11; and idem, God in Creation, trans. Margaret Kohl (New York: Harper, 1985).
12. Some theologians propose an actual or eschatological panentheism in which creation is in God but God is more than the finite universe; for some, God is said to incarnate hypostatically (or perichoretically) in the world. Process theology assumes panentheism. Other voices include Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Heart of Matter, trans. René Hague (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), 15-102; Leonardo Boff, Trinity and Society, trans. Paul Burns (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1988), 230-31; and Jürgen Moltmann, “The World in God or God in the World?” in God Will Be All in All: The Eschatology of Jürgen Moltmann, ed. Richard Bauckham (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2001), 35-41.
13. Thomas Finger, “Modern Alienation and Trinitarian Creation,” Evangelical Review of Theology 17 (April 1993): 204 (italics his).
14. Cornelius Van Til, An Introduction to Systematic Theology, ed. William Edgar, 2nd ed. (Phillipsburg, NJ: P & R, 2007), 364-65. See also Colin E. Gunton, The One, the Three and the Many: God, Creation and the Culture of Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
15. Helpful works include James R. Beck and Bruce Demarest, The Human Person in Theology and Psychology (Grand Rapids: Kregel, 2005); Kenneth Boa, Augustine to Freud: What Theologians and Psychologists Tell Us about Human Nature (Nashville: Broadman & Holman, 2004); J. Richard Middleton, The Liberating Image: The Imago Dei in Genesis 1 (Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2005); and J. P. Moreland and Scott B. Rae, Body and Soul: Human Nature and the Crisis of Ethics (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2000). Three views regarding the imago Dei are common: the substantialist, relational, and functional; all may be instructive in approaching the plenitude of what is human.
16. Ironically, given the Enlightenment, human reason itself is an enigma in twentieth- and twenty-first-century philosophy, often perceived as pragmatic and bound within factors of genetics, culture, and language. Conversely most Christians affirm that the principles of rationality are grounded in God’s own character.
17. Choice or “free will” is another phenomenon without adequate explanation in the nontheistic world, despite the fact that existentialism and humanism presuppose individual volition as foundational to their systems.
18. Rejected by mainstream Sunni and Shiite bodies, the more mystical Sufism may be the exception, for it affirms a trancelike experience of God’s presence.
19. For biblical evidence of intra-Trinitarian relations see J. Scott Horrell, “The Eternal Son of God in the Social Trinity,” in Jesus in Trinitarian Perspective, 44-79.
20. Richard Dawkins declares, “We are machines built by DNA whose purpose is to make more copies of the same DNA. . . . This is exactly what we are for. We are machines for propagating DNA, and the propagation of DNA is a self-sustaining process. It is every living object’s sole reason for living” (“Growing Up in the Universe,” quoted in Joel B. Green, “Body and Soul, Mind and Brain: Critical Issues,” in In Search of the Soul: Four Views of the Mind-Body Problem, ed. Joel B. Green and Stuart L. Palmer [Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2005], 7).
21. Explorations of these themes include Leonardo Boff, Trinity and Society, trans. Paul Burns (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1988); Paul S. Fiddes, Participating in God: A Pastoral Doctrine of the Trinity (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2000); Grenz, The Social God and the Relational Self; Donald Macleod, Shared Life: The Trinity and the Fellowship of God’s People (Fern, Ross-shire, Scotland: Christian Focus, 1994); Alistair I. McFadyen, The Call to Personhood: A Christian Theology of the Individual in Social Relationships (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Ian A. McFarland, The Divine Image: Envisioning the Invisible God (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 2005); Okechukwu Ogbonnaya, On Communitarian Divinity: An African Interpretation of the Trinity (New York: Paragon House, 1994); Ouellet, Divine Likeness; Seamands, Ministry in the Image of God; Smail, Like Father, Like Son; Miroslav Volf, After Our Likeness: The Church as the Image of the Trinity, trans. Doug Stott (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998); various articles in Volf and Welker, eds., God’s Life in Trinity; Ware, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit; and John D. Zizioulas, Being as Communion: Studies in Personhood and the Church (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1985).
22. D. A. Carson articulates five biblical dimensions of God’s love: intra-Trinitarian love between the Father and the Son; providential love toward all He has made; salvific love toward the fallen world; effective, elective love toward the elect; and conditioned love toward obedient believers (The Difficult Doctrine of the Love of God [Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2000], 17-21).
23. Brian Hebblethwaithe wrote, “If personal analogies are held to yield some insight into the divine nature (perhaps because man is supposed to be made in the image of God), then there can be no doubt that the model of a single individual person does create difficulties for theistic belief. It presents us with a picture of one who, despite his infinite attributes, is unable to enjoy the excellence of personal relation, unless he first creates an object for his love. Monotheistic faiths have not favoured the idea that creation is necessary to God, but short of postulating personal relation in God, it is difficult to see how they can avoid it. There does seem to be something of an impasse here for Judaism and Islam. Hinduism, at least in its more philosophical forms, avoids this problem by refusing to push the personal analogies right back into the absolute itself. The personal gods of Hindu devotional religion are held by the philosophers to be personifications at a lower level of reality of the one absolute being, beyond all attributes. (Hence, incidentally, the so-called Hindu Trinity of Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva is no real analogue for the Christian Trinity)” (“Perichoresis—Reflections on the Doctrine of the Trinity,” Theology 80 [July 1977]: 257).
24. Richard of St. Victor, De Trinitate 1.20.
25. Sura 19:68-71 of the Qur’an is sometimes termed “the Bridge Sirat.” Over it all must pass to their eternal destiny; nevertheless, the bridge is not explicitly described in the Qur’an. Most Muslims, but not all, accept the Hadith (with various versions) as authoritative.
26. Allah is the Arabic Christian term for “God” that well predates Mohammed; but here it is employed to name the God of Islam. Muslims leave the paradox of divine justice and mercy in transcendent mystery.
27. J. Barton Payne puts the figure at 27 percent (Encyclopedia of Biblical Prophecy: The Complete Guide to Scriptural Predictions and Their Fulfillment [Grand Rapids: Baker, 1973], 681). Islam has multiple prophecies, but many Islamic (and Jewish) prophecies are interpreted spiritually (or analogically) more than historically. See Judith Mendelsohn Rood, “The Consequences of Disobedience: Global Metanarratives in Jewish, Christian, and Muslim Historiography” (paper presented at the annual meeting of the Evangelical Theological Society, San Diego, California, November 15, 2007).
28. The church fathers struggled with the concept of eternity as do Christian philosophers today. Some say that God exists in time as people do; others say that God in His transcendence exists outside of time. Augustine suggested that time was created along with the universe (The City of God XI, 6). Overviews of current perspectives include Gregory E. Ganssle and David M. Woodruff, eds., God and Time: Essays on the Divine Nature (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002); and Gregory E. Ganssle, ed., God and Time: Four Views (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2001). See also William Lane Craig, Time and Eternity: Exploring God’s Relationship to Time (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2001); Garrett J. DeWeese, God and the Nature of Time (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2004); Paul Helm, Eternal God: A Study of God without Time (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997); and Alan G. Padgett, God, Eternity and the Nature of Time (New York: St. Martin’s, 1992).
29. Athanasius wrote, “The Word was not confined within the body; neither was he there and no place else; he did not activate that body and leave the universe devoid of his activity and orientation. Here is the supreme wonder. He was the Word and nothing confined him; rather he himself contained all things. He is in the whole creation, and yet in his essential being he is distinct from all else. Likewise, when he was in human bodily form, he himself gave life to that body; and at the same time, he was giving life to the entire universe and was present in all things; yet he was distinct from the universe and outside of it” (De Incarnatione 17, in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Second Series, ed. Philip Schaff and Henry Wace [Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2004], 45).
30. Some passages emphasize the invisibility of God (John 1:18; 4:23-24; 1 Tim. 1:17; 6:14-16; 1 John 4:12); others speak of apparent theophanies in which God appears on earth or in heaven (Gen. 3:8-9; 18:1-33; Exod. 24:9-10; 33:18-23; Num. 12:1-10; 1 Kings 22:19; Job 1:6-2:6; Isa. 6:1-6; Ezek. 1:26-28; Dan. 7:9-14; Zech. 3:1-6; Acts 7:56; Heb. 8:1-10:22; 12:22-23; Rev. 4:2-7:10, 21:23-25; 22:1-5). Rather than an either/or approach, a richer reading might understand some texts as referring to the transcendent God in His essential being beyond all creation and other texts as affirming that God may appear in finite form within His creation. See brief discussions in John M. Frame, The Doctrine of God (Phillipsburg, NJ: P & R, 2002), 583-91; and Wayne Grudem, Systematic Theology: An Introduction to Biblical Doctrine (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 1994), 188-90.
31. Finger observes, “As long as this space remains ‘empty’ enough for creatures to retain distinct identities, this image need not be panentheistic. I think it can help us conceive how the divine love is not really distant from our world, but still surrounds us; and how sin may not be running from God so much as pushing away the One who longs to draw near” (“Modern Alienation and Trinitarian Creation,” 205).
32. See Philip Jenkins, The New Faces of Christianity: Believing the Bible in the Global South (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006); and Lamin Sanneh, Whose Religion Is Christianity? TheGospel beyond the West (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003).