The Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.
Justice, Mercy and Love.
Truth, Goodness and Beauty.
The Trinity is one of the most elusive biblical doctrines in Scripture. For some time, I struggled greatly with it. But it is there, and what triggered that realization was finding it in the Old Testament.
I have written previously that the Angel of Yahweh is the Logos, the Son.
The Old Testament Spirit of God, the Shekinah glory, is the Holy Spirit. By the way, this also solves the problem of the term 'holy spirit' being almost completely missing from the OT and then, in the NT, the authors expect everyone to know what it means.
The Father is the King of the Universe, Yahweh of Hosts. He sits enthroned between the Cherubim, above all the spheres of the cosmos.
The Son is the Redeemer Yahweh (Psalm 19:14, Isaiah 48:17, 47:4, 54:5, 63:16, 41:14, 44:6, 49:26, 59:20), the intercessor with mortals, the incarnation of God within the fallen world. He is the Logos, the glorious king, enthroned at his resurrection as the King of the New Heavens and New Earth (Matt. 28:18-20, Ephesians 1:21, Philippians 2:6-11, John 3:35, John 17:5).
The Holy Spirit is more elusive.
The Holy Spirit embodies the feminine aspect of God. Some skeptics have said that the Bible has a "problem of the female" because God is male. If God is exclusively male, then males must be inherently more like God.
Of course, God the Son, anyway, is male. Currently (if such words can be used of things in the Third Heaven), he is in the resurrected form of Jesus Christ, as a human, biological male.
God the Father uses masculine terms and imagery to talk about himself. In today's terms, he identifies as male. He is a Judge (Joel 3:12), a Bridegroom (Isa. 62:5), and a King (Psalm 47:6-7, 29:10, 1 Timothy 1:17).
The Holy Spirit, however, chose to appear as a dove. In that culture and throughout practically all human civilization in the Old World, doves were associated undeniably with the feminine. At the specific time in which the Holy Spirit descended to earth 'in the form of a dove' (Luke 3:22), doves were sacred to the Roman Goddess Venus, whose mirror still symbolizes the female gender even today.
In fact, the chariot of Venus was drawn by a team of trained doves.
Why would the Holy Spirit choose to appear as a dove if it didn't want to be considered feminine?
Early Christians usually thought of the Holy Spirit in feminine terms, even, in the Gospel According to the Hebrews, quoting Jesus as calling her 'my Mother.'*
This is very interesting. It is almost as if, in one person, we have a complete family unit- God the Father, God the Mother and God the Son. Of course, the term 'Mother' for the Holy Spirit isn't found in the canonical Bible, but it is still interesting and worth thinking about and, as we'll see, there is definitely maternal imagery used of God.
*See this article.
Even when God the Father and the God the Son use feminine imagery of themselves, it is often bird-related (remember that the Holy Spirit appeared as a dove). In Matthew 23:37 and Luke 13:34, Jesus describes himself as a mother hen.
In Deuteronomy 32:11-12, God is described as a mother eagle.
Then there's Psalm 91:4, where Yahweh, the Almighty Most High, is compared to a bird (probably a quail, chicken or pheasant) protecting her chicks from fowlers.
It is not too much of a stretch to suppose that these passages were talking about the Holy Spirit, who of course, in a sense, is the same person as Jesus and God the Father. Remember that early Christians thought of the Holy Spirit as a maternal figure.
Most would agree that Hosea 11:3-4 describes God playing a motherly role. Hosea 13:8 describes God as a mother bear whose cubs have been stolen. Also interesting is that in Genesis 1:27, both Adam and Eve are created 'in the image of God'.
Kabbalah mysticism (a very interesting sect of Judaism) has a term for the feminine aspect of Yahweh- the 'Shekhinah'. And, sure enough, orthodox Jews also associate that term with the Spirit (or 'breath') of God.
One objection to the femininity of the Holy Spirit is that, in the English translation of John 16:13, we read 'when I send him, the Spirit of truth.' This is the objection used by Ken Ham in his recent blog post denying the femininity of the Holy Spirit.
William Mounce argues that when Jesus referred to the Holy Spirit as Comforter (which is a masculine word in Greek), he used the proper grammar by using a masculine pronoun. But when Jesus speaks of the Holy Spirit as Spirit, grammatically neuter in Greek, he still uses the masculine pronoun. William concludes that this breaking of the grammatical agreement is an indication that Jesus was conveying the Spirit's masculinity.
However, scholar Daniel B. Wallace disputes the claim that ekeinos is connected with pneuma, asserting instead that it is in agreement with parakletos. He concludes- "it is difficult to find any text in which πνευμα [pneuma] is grammatically referred to with the masculine gender".
Thus, the pronoun argument for masculinity is not watertight, and considering the evidence for the feminine gender, as well as the fact that so many early Greek Christians considered the Holy Spirit feminine, I'd say we can discard it.
So, how does the Trinity work? First of all, it is undeniable that there is a hierarchy even within God.
The Father rules omnipotent (Revelation 19:6). He is omniscient, whereas the Son (at least while in the form of Jesus) has limited knowledge (Matthew 24:36). Jesus says time and time again that he obeys his Father (John 14:28,14:31, Luke 22:42, Philippians 2:8, Hebrews 10:9), that the Father is greater than him (John 10:29, 14:28) that he was 'sent', not that he came of his own will (John 6:38).
He even prayed prays to God the Father in the Garden of Gethsemane!
Now, churchpeople throughout history have attempted to define the Trinity in strictly logical terms. They use phrases like 'one essence, three persons' or 'translation of godhood to the Son.'
I think that is a mistake. The Trinity is the contradiction at the heart of reality. The Gods flow in and out of one another. They are three persons, and yet they are one unified being.
However, it is not AGAINST reason, it is BEYOND reason. Human reason, trapped within finite constrains and the boundaries of Time, cannot comprehend that which is Infinite, at least not in our present forms.
Nevertheless, let me present you with my favored Trinitarian analogy, one which I though of one day in church while not paying attention and drawing mythical creatures on my outline.
The Trinity is like an infinite, glassy sea beyond the Universe.
In that sea, water moves and circulates, but the surface is never disturbed by even the slightest ripple. The total mass, water level and chemical concentrations of the sea are constants- they never change. But say you were to zoom in and watch three drops of water within this sea.
You'd see them move around, intersect with one another, dissipate into smaller waterdrops, float up and down in the currents, and sometimes they'd even pass out of sight.
The Infinite cannot be contained in a finite space. So God entered into the story he'd written as three different characters, each with different qualities and roles to play.
The Ruach, the animating spirit of the world and the vague presence of Yahweh seems completely different from the very defined Logos, who has a very specific personality, a specific goal to achieve, and specific tasks and titles throughout the story.
Both, in turn are very different from the great King, the Just and Mighty ruler of the cosmos who destroys the wicked and whose face cannot be seen, nor may anything tainted the uncleanness of the world come before him.
And yet, if you watch closely, names seem to shift between these three, roles and attributes go from one to another, and if you try too hard to put the members of the Trinity in separate boxes, the boxes break.
To our eyes, God may seem to change his mind. He created mankind, but later regretted it. In Numbers 14, Moses has to convince God not to kill the Israelites, and Yahweh changes his mind.
But if you look at the bigger picture, the Infinite, timeless, incomprehensible being whose thought conceived the world, it never changed its mind at all. The Infinite is utterly immovable, and all its actions within Time exist at once within its mind as part of who it is.
Numbers 23:19 : God is not human, that he should lie, not a human being, that he should change his mind.
James 1:17 : Every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of the Heavenly Lights, who does not change like shifting shadows.
The drops may move, but the sea is still.
I realize this was mostly about the Holy Spirit being feminine. But that's the main thing about the Trinity that most Christians disagree with me about. Everything else in the article is pretty much basic Trinitarianism.