Why do we set aside a day to focus on the Holy Trinity, even if it is a central teaching of the church? Many consider it a theory. If it is just a theory, then despite its antiquity, as something humans had created or projected on God, why not dispense with it, ignore it, or after giving it a nod, move on to something more interesting and relevant? That’s exactly what one often happens on Trinity Sunday. But the Trinity is no mere human creation or projection. It is in fact indispensible, a sine qua non. Far from a time-conditioned and irrelevant relic, the Holy Trinity is the deepest reality of God and his mighty acts of salvation. It is the biblical confession of the one true God, even though we don’t find the word in the Bible. We can even go so far as to say that apart from Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, there simply is no God, no redemption and no hope.

True, the word “trinity” is not in the Bible, and yet there is no conflict between the Trinity and the biblical story of God’s presence among us in Christ, no conflict between the Trinity and our battle against sin and suffering and our yearning for salvation; for the Holy Trinity encapsulates the story by which we identify and name the one true God, the story in which we find ourselves standing with and alongside Israel, standing over against ourselves and the world in the sight of God. When we confess Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, we thereby summarize the entire biblical story and witness that centers on the story of Christ. The Trinity is the epitome of what we mean by the God who is with us in Christ. Far from an outmoded theory or mathematical puzzle, the Trinity is the vibrant beating heart of our faith that directs us to the story of Israel and her crucified Messiah. The Trinity says everything that is properly Christian, without which God has no meaning. God simply is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. If there are some who would dispense with the Trinity, it would be tantamount to denying God. To compromise, mitigate, or dispense with the Trinity is to say that the God of the Bible, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the God who created the universe and raised Jesus from the dead, is a humanly-devised myth and projection that has no ultimate reality. But the Holy Trinity, far from a myth or human projection, is the biblical God in the deepest and truest sense. The Trinity is the inner reality and outward manifestation of the one God, God’s personal identity and name, as well as the form, content, and direction of salvation’s history as defined by God’s righteous and mighty acts of judgment and deliverance. The Holy Trinity, in other words, tells the story of the God who is love.

Nothing, therefore, could be more relevant to our lives, more important or more central than the Trinity. That the one God is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is a practical, logical, and reasonable conclusion based on the clear witness of Scripture. I am not exaggerating.

Let me illustrate. A well-known contemporary Greek Orthodox theologian [Zizioulas] has written an important book about this subject. He claims that the Trinity reveals God’s inner being and relationship to the world as essentially relational and personal. Father, Son, and Holy Spirit define what is personal and what relationship is. The Holy Trinity names the living God who is relational and personal. We on the other hand, in our fallenness and sinfulness, are neither. We regard God as an impersonal substance and ourselves as isolated individuals. We project this toxic individualism onto God. As individuals we see ourselves, not as unique persons whose humanity is derived from our relationships with other persons and with God, but as expressions of an underlying human nature that ultimately destroys personhood. We assume the same about God, that each person of the Trinity is just an expression of some sort of prior underlying divine substance, and that there is this divine stuff that is expressed as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, just as there is this human stuff, which we call “human nature,” that finds expression in each individual. But these are fatal mistakes that distort and destroy both our humanity and God’s divinity. The individualism we project on God denies the biblical witness to the one God who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and our bondage to individualism prevents us from being truly human.

The problem with individualism is that it becomes desperate, lonely, oppressive and tyrannical. The problem with individuals sharing a common human nature is that this nature, by definition, can never freely love and can never escape the inevitability of death. The Holy Trinity, as the loving relationship of free and unique persons overcomes these problems.

To be created in the image of God, therefore, is to participate in that free and loving relationship in which death is vanquished. Whereas sin prevents us from living into and from fully receiving that image, and thus from sharing in the divine life, our conversion from sin to righteousness, our rebirth in the waters of baptism, and thus our transition from isolation to love and from death to life, means that we cease being individuals and begin to live as free persons sharing a loving, faithful relationship to God who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit and to others who bear his name, image, and likeness.

But it is precisely this name that has become a problem today--unnecessarily. A word about the term “Father”: You will have noticed that the word is slowly disappearing from our liturgy and hymns. The reason for this disappearance stems from a legitimate concern about a cultural legacy that has been oppressive to women. Indeed it has been. That the church ought to be at the forefront of advocating for change not only in attitudes that for too long have been paternalistic, but also by putting gender equality into practice in order to overturn an oppressive patriarchal heritage in both church and society should go without saying; and that our texts, even sacred texts, should reflect this concern is also more than just appropriate. But to project uncritically this concern onto the name of God is a completely different project that is frankly more political than theological and which in fact fails to take theology, especially the long and rich history of Trinitarian theology, adequately into account. It is to mix oil and water. It is to bark up the wrong tree. Our Greek Orthodox theologian puts it this way: “The Fatherhood of God…has nothing in common with human fatherhood; no analogy between the two is possible….All fears that by maintaining the biblical language of God the Father we encourage sexism in religion and society are dissolved [when we see God as a relationship of persons]. The Fatherhood of God is incompatible with individualism and, therefore, with notions of oppression, and so on. If we keep it and refer to it in theology, it is on the one hand because this is how God calls and indicates himself in revealing himself to us, and on the other hand because this is the only way for us to express, indeed to experience, our savior Jesus Christ and our sanctifier, the Holy Spirit, as God….[Besides] the creed, by its very structure, suggests that divine Fatherhood is relational and totally inconceivable in human terms, which are conditioned by individualism.”

If we were to eliminate the word “Father” we would only perpetuate oppression rather than move beyond it, and we would project a human notion onto God that the Trinity both destroys and transcends. As the church’s ancient theologians always maintained, and modern theologians generally forget, God is beyond gender. No human qualities can be attributed to God. The Father, therefore, is Father not because the term is a projection of human fatherhood writ large, because that’s not what the First Person of the Trinity is any way. The First Person of the Trinity and human fatherhood have nothing at all to do with each other. They are qualitatively and categorically different. No, the Father is one with whom Jesus had an intimate relationship, in whom Jesus confided, and to whom he prayed. The Father is the origin of the Son in the power and life of the Holy Spirit. The Father is Father because of the Son. The Son exists because of the love of the Father who is the fount and source of divine life. The Spirit exists to unite them and to bind them together in love, and to extend this divine love to all of God’s creation.

Paul said it well: “When we cry, ‘Abba! Father!’ it is the very Spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs, heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ.”

-Amen-