Beyond Trinity

Different ways of naming the Godhead can reflect our contemporary experiences of the divine

June 4, 2014 | Young Voices
Susie Guenther Loewen | Special to Young Voices

The Trinity is the central way that Christians throughout history have expressed who God is to us: Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

Many Mennonites view the Trinitarian nature of the divine as crucial. One such person was my uncle, the late theologian A. James Reimer, who was concerned that, as Mennonites, we tend to reduce God to Jesus, and thereby overlook the mysterious otherness of the divine as well as the “diversity” of the Trinity.

While I agree that God is not reducible to Jesus, I take his impulse even further: We tend to reduce God to the Trinity as well. After all, there are many more biblical names for God than just these three. These include God as “Woman Wisdom” in Proverbs 8 and elsewhere, God as a whirlwind in Job 38, God as a fierce mother bear in Hosea 13:8, Jesus as a mother hen in Matthew 23:37 and Luke 13:34, and the Holy Spirit as fire, instead of a dove, in Acts 2.

If you’re sensing a pattern in the neglected biblical names I’ve identified, you’re right. They’re all either female or non-anthropomorphic (not people-based) names and images for God. One of the dangers of reducing God to the Father-Son-Spirit Trinity is that we overlook those names for the divine that are not confined to maleness or even to humanness. We need both of these other kinds of names to remind us that, while both maleness and femaleness are in God’s image, God is ultimately beyond gender.

Remembering and making use of female and non-anthropomorphic biblical names for God can help us to avoid literalizing the traditional, male-biased Trinitarian language, which makes it idolatrous language for God.

There is also the problem of misunderstanding the paradoxical three-in-oneness of the Trinity. As my uncle pointed out, we sometimes overemphasize the “oneness,” making Jesus the sum of the divine. However, I think the problem is more often that we overemphasize the “threeness,” so that God and Jesus Christ become separated, especially at the moment of the crucifixion, when God supposedly hands Jesus over to be killed.

“The idea that God is a Trinity composed of three personalities who are able to carry out transactions among themselves is certainly not biblical, nor is it congenial with the best of the Christian tradition,” John Driver points out in his book Understanding the Atonement for the Mission of the Church. “The Nicene creed points toward the oneness of the Godhead (the deity of Christ and the Spirit), not in the direction of threeness. So the idea of the Father and Son as having separate wills and identities to the point of being able to hold transactions with each other has no grounds in the New Testament, nor is it the best of the church’s doctrinal heritage.”

We have to be careful that our thinking about the Trinity doesn’t treat each part as three distinct gods, who are able, for example, to hand one of the persons of the Trinity over to death while the others remain detached from the situation. This line of thinking neglects the notion of the mutual indwelling of the different members of the Trinity.

The Trinity is a wonderfully profound way of thinking about God, and represents and communicates a number of key truths about who God is for Christians.

For one thing, it’s a kind of shorthand for key Christian ideas of linking the Creator God of the Old Testament to Jesus Christ as God Incarnate or God-with-us, as well as to the Holy Spirit as the aspect of God which is among us, empowering us.

Relatedly, it also speaks to us about God’s multiplicity—the fact that no one name or image can contain God’s mystery—and that we therefore need the “threeness” of the Trinity, as well as all the other names for God, biblical and beyond, to name the bits and pieces of what we humans can understand about God.

Another interpretation of the Trinity that resonates with me is the idea that the Trinity is God imaged as a loving community, encompassing diversity and unity. This means that when we human beings are in community, we’re in the image of the divine Trinity.

For all these reasons, I don’t want to do away with the Trinity. But that doesn’t mean we have to abide rigidly by the terms Father, Son and Holy Spirit. I think we can celebrate many different, contemporary ways of naming the Trinity, such as the more gender-neutral Trinity of “Creator, Redeemer, Sustainer” and theologian Sallie McFague’s Trinity of “Mother, Lover, Friend.”

In these ways, we can renew this ancient Christian way of thinking about God, allowing it to speak to our time and to resonate profoundly with our understandings and experiences of the divine today.

Susie Guenther Loewen is a doctoral student in theology at the University of Toronto. She recently moved from Toronto to Winnipeg with her husband Kris and their son Simon.

--Posted June 4, 2014

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