The Trinity and Us Part 1

In one of my talks this past weekend I told about several student that I've enjoyed hanging out with over the past couple weeks who are not a part of any faith community on campus. They both spent the majority of their lives in Christian churches. But when I asked them about their concept of God, they were flummoxed, ambiguous, and/or apathetic. "Agnostic" is the catch-all religion these days of post-religious people, and it's the category they all moderately claimed for themselves.

These students had spent most of their lives in the place that was intended to show them God, specifically as he is made known in Christ. But the pointers forgot to point and the signs neglected their duty as signs to make as clear as possible who God is.

I told the students at New Student Retreat that my deepest hope is that no one would leave InterVarsity unclear as to the Christian answer to the deepest and most important question in the universe: who is God.

And so I want to do a series of posts on the Trinity, one of my favorite subjects. It was my Systematic Theology prof's deeply held belief that this is fundamental to the Christian understanding of the world that has continually brought me back to thinking about the Trinity in all it's wonder, mystery, and glory.

To start with, I'll re-post a snippet of a talk that I posted about/gave last February at a different IV conference on the Land of the Trinity and splice it together with bits from a talk I gave this past weekend.

If we go back to before "In the Beginning" we find God: Father, Son and Holy Spirit God. They're together in 'the Land of the Trinity' before time. You start talking about 'Trinity' and people start glazing over--it feels like A.P. Christianity, something for scholars or theologians. But Trinity is not A.P. Christianity. It's the very nature of who God is and it's essential to our understanding of the world that God is in his very nature relational, He is a relationship. Father, Son, Holy Spirit.

And so when he creates, he creates a world that is relational. Animals have pairs, Adam and Eve are in relationship, and of course there's the perfect un-broken relationship with God. But even deeper than that, we find that everything's relational: people and bodies are a relationship of organs, bones, tissue, and synapses. Press deeper and organs are a relationship of cells. Press deeper and cells are a relationship of parts like the nucleus, mitochondria and other things I've forgotten since 10th grade biology class. Press deeper and everything is made up of atoms, which are also a relationship.

So all of creation reflects the nature of God. All of creation shows us the unique related-ness of a God who is a relationship. God is not a giant piece of monolithic granite in the sky. God is a deeply interactive, loving, passionate, glad God who is dynamic, powerful. God is Love. And Love only exists in a community of persons, in this case, a community of Persons perfectly and eternally in Love.