How The Christian Trinity Is Unique

Undifferentiated concepts of God, like God as nature, or God as the evolution of the universe, yield little meaning because they are so vague they fail to grasp the distinctly differentiated aspects of God’s personhood that offer concrete points of integration with human beings. 

The Bible holds a unique place among world religions because what it records about God and persons occurs over several millennia, arising out of particular historical situations and concrete interpersonal encounters. This creates a public account open to all peoples, a common legacy to humankind. “I have spoken openly to the world,” Jesus says. “I said nothing in secret” (Jn 18:20). The cohesiveness of Scripture comes from the divine Subject who guides the biblical narrative, and the human subjects who interact with God.

Bible

Two singular concepts arise from the Bible that reveal how this divine Subject, this God of the Bible, interfaces with people, concepts that arise from the Old Testament and carry forward into the New. 

The singular message of the Old Testament lies in the revelation of a personal transcendent Creator, a novel concept even in the world of ancient comparative religions. 

The singular message of the New Testament lies in the revelation that right thinking about God, or doctrine, combined with personal faith in God, leads to reconciliation and friendship with God, a thesis original to religions of that day.

Christianity

Christianity puts together the Old and New Testament into the synthesis of orthodox doctrine about the personal transcendent Creator, asserting that God can be known and loved by understanding his personality and attributes. This requires a rhythm of integration and differentiation, so that people can perceive, name, and engage the personal transcendent God.

Just how does God disclose and differentiate himself from all the other claims to deity in world history? He simply says, “I AM” (Ex 3:14; Jn 8:58). God’s essence, therefore, constitutes self-existent personality without beginning or end.

"I AM"

 

From this foundational premise, God continues to reveal himself throughout Scripture with names that provide clarification. From the Old Testament come the names God Almighty, for example, and Lord of Hosts, Holy One of Israel, and Ancient of Days—surely meant to convey awe and wonder, mystery and majesty. Not the average idol in the land of Canaan, or the average tribal god. This is God the one and only, Maker of heaven and earth, a transcendent-personal presence to be reckoned with. 

In the New Testament comes increased differentiation, this time toward personalizing God’s immanence, his holy and loving presence in the world. Now God becomes entirely personal—so personal that his name is Jesus. Human, yes, but also divine: one Person with two distinct natures, co-existing without mixture or confusion, in one interpersonal self: Jesus Christ, the Son of Man and Son of God. Here is differentiation, in rhythm with integration. 

Jesus Christ

And through Jesus, God the Almighty becomes differentiated as God the Father, Holy Father, Righteous Father…Our Father. And whom do the Father and Son reveal but the differentiated Holy Spirit: the Spirit of the Father, Spirit of Christ, and Spirit of the Lord.

And what is the sum total of God’s self-communication in the Old and New Testament story? 

One God in Three Persons, blessed Trinity.

For more, read: 

CHRISTIAN PERSONALITY THEORY:

Compass Psychotheology Applied

Christian Personality Theory

   

How Can Christians Be Holy As The Trinity Is Holy?

“Be holy as I am holy” (Lev 19:2).

In the Old Testament the Lord reveals a good deal of concern for both his holiness and the holiness of his people—a concern expressed with what one might consider uncomfortable frequency.

A frequency which the apostle Peter reinforces in the New Testament with a fair degree of forcefulness: “But just as he who called you is holy, so be holy in all you do; for it is written: ‘Be holy, because I am holy’” (1 Pet 1:15-17).

What is God getting at? What can he mean?

How can a person be holy like God?

And just how is God holy, for that matter?

Let us begin with Jesus.

When Jesus appears to his disciples after his resurrection, he blesses their hearts, declaring, “Peace be with you!” (Jn 20:19), offering his shalom of well-being and wholeness. Later, concerned for their physical well-being, he feeds them with fish cooked over a charcoal fire. How does he provide for them spiritually? Jesus breathes on them, saying, “Receive the Holy Spirit” (Jn 20:22).

Through this gift, Christ initiates human beings into wholeness, into holiness, into a new creation that came into being in Christ by his incarnation, death, and resurrection, and is actualized by the Holy Spirit.

Help from The Holy Trinity

So we could conclude that, far from being left out on a limb, struggling against impossible odds to be holy as God is holy, the Trinity really understands a person’s needs and frailties, really takes in the impossibilities of living a holy life on this planet without the all-out help of the holy Trinity. 

But the assistance is not unilateral. God does not accomplish it all on his side. For Jesus consummates his call to holiness and wholeness with the challenge, “As the Father has sent me, so I send you” (Jn 20:21). Such a challenge requires a good deal from anyone who accepts it, for it calls on human beings to embark on a process of holistic transformation in personality and attitude, thoughts and feelings, as well as practices and behavior (Lk 24:38-43). 

Holy Transformation

Compass psychotheology asserts that it is less helpful to view holiness in the Platonic sense of an absolute quality in God’s eternal being, and more helpful to view it as a relational dynamic that overflows from intra-Trinitarian love into God’s relationship with people. 

This means there is a compass dimension of holiness meant to connect people to their own highest good that grows from relating rightly to God and one another. Thus we can understand God’s holiness as a delicate balancing act between his altruistic love (Love compass point) and impartial justice (Assertion compass point), between his humble service (Weakness compass point) and glorious majesty (Strength compass point).

Taken together, these dynamic interactive qualities set God apart from both the physical creation and from any sense of moral degradation, because his faithfulness to his eternal consistency and wholeness endures forever. 

This holiness and sheer interpersonal health of the holy Trinity helps explain the great reversal of the cross, through which “God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God” (2 Cor 5:21). While God finds sin abhorrent, he nevertheless took sin into himself in order to ultimately vanquish it; that is, to dissolve sin from inside out, replacing its insidiousness with a deeper outworking of loving power.

The Great Reversal of The Cross

For instance, God initially sanctifies King Saul and fills him with the Holy Spirit, but when Saul disobeys God, the Lord sends his Spirit to torment Saul (1 Sam 16:14), and uses Saul’s paranoid jealousy to develop holy qualities in David, so that when David becomes king, he will rule righteously, having become a man after God’s own heart. In this way God makes even evil serve his holiness.

When people allow God to set them apart for his holy purposes, their lives take on a depth dimension, for the Holy Spirit has their permission to promote personality health, cultivate interpersonal communion, and actualize their mission on earth.

This is holiness and wholeness.

Hope is offered in the words, “Be holy as I am holy,” for in contemporary exegesis they mean, “Be well-balanced…in your whole lifestyle” (1 Pet 1:13,15; Davids, NICNT).

For more, read:

TRUSTING IN THE TRINITY

Trusting in The Trinity

 

The Inner Life of The Christian Trinity

Christ’s personality both shows how human beings are called to live and provides insight into all three persons of the Trinity, who are One in creating and redeeming humanity, inviting people to develop whole personalities and loving relationships, where loneliness and hostility are diminished, and where individuals learn to express their uniqueness in as original a manner as the Lord’s.

While God may be said in a certain sense to remain inscrutable and beyond human knowing, nevertheless, in another sense, because of the Trinity’s direct appearance and involvement in human history, it is possible to house the Self Compasses of each Trinity member within the unity of one Godhead. This arrangement, for diagrammatic purposes, illustrates the unity of the Triune God, while at the same time differentiating between the personal identities of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

                                                                     

The individual Self Compasses show that Trinity members relate through rhythms of communication and communion, the same way that they call human beings to relate to one another and to the Trinity. If one only looks for it, the Scriptures from Genesis to Revelation pulse with examples of God as a supremely innovative agent, brimming with creative motivation and action. Conceptualizing God’s personality as three Self Compasses within a larger circle of the divine self does not imply that God is containable, but rather implies an interpersonal selfhood that allows for infinite variations of self-expression and interpersonal exchanges among Trinity members who are nevertheless one God.

God’s inscrutability lies primarily in the fact that no one can predict what the Lord will say, think, or do next, other than in the compass sense that whatever God does will not contradict the health and wholeness of his being.

The larger circle encompassing the Trinity portrays the mystery of God’s diversity-in-unity, a circle that is not a physical barrier, but rather symbolizes the one God who is all in all. The back-and-forth arrows connecting each Trinitarian member to the others indicate how each Person exists in everlasting rhythmic presence to the other two, empowering the exchange of ideas, conversations, and emotions within an overarching essence of love, expressed through caring self-transcendence that respects, delights in, knows, and wills the highest good of one another.

Some such encounters between Trinity members are recorded for our benefit in Scripture. At Jesus’ baptism in the Jordan River, the Father says, communicating his own point of view and self-identity, “This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.” He is not talking to himself the way a person might self-reflect, but actually addressing the Son with sincere words that convey the depth of his love for Jesus. At the same moment, the Holy Spirit descends upon Jesus, anointing him with power for ministry, and then drives him into the wilderness where Christ must stand alone for a season, firming up his identity as the Son while learning to rely completely upon the Father and Spirit in preparation for his public ministry.

 

Compass psychotheology asserts that this dynamic interplay of the three Persons who are one God has always distinguished God’s essence, and will always characterize God’s relationality (theologians call this the immanent Trinity, meaning what God is outside of human history). Most importantly from the human perspective, this interplay creates a trustworthy basis for the Trinity presence as infinitely caring and intentionally creative dialogue partners across the temporal span of human history (the economic Trinity, which means God’s self-revelation in space, time, history, and personality).

Now note how the Trinity diagram focuses on the phrase “I AM.” Of all the names attributed to God in the Bible—the Lord of Hosts, the Lord God Almighty, the Holy One of Israel—there is none more revealing than “I AM,” for when God reveals this name to Moses (Ex 3:14), and Christ applies this name to himself (Jn 8:58), God means that his existence as the “I AM” transcendent Subject is the ultimate ground of being that renders all else contingent and temporal.

Finally, notice how the “I AM” of each Trinitarian Person fully indwells the others, showing the interpenetration of freely willed devotion, each Trinity member’s identity so secure, so engaged in self-transcendent love, that there is no existence apart from being one God.

In other words, each Person of the Godhead does not consider self-identity and autonomy something to be grasped at or competitively sought, but rather as foundational to adoring, cherishing, and actualizing the uttermost fulfillment of one another.

The Trinity indwells one another non-invasively and non-competitively, generating the perpetual glory of being one God, as Jesus explains: “I have given them the glory that you gave me, that they may be one as we are one: I in them and you in me. May they be brought to complete unity to let the world know that you sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me” (Jn 17: 21-23).

For more, read:

TRUSTING IN THE TRINITY: COMPASS PSYCHOTHEOLOGY APPLIED

How Jesus Shows What God Is Really Like

We can see Jesus' personality revealed in the Gospel narratives, where he discloses thoughts, emotes feelings, expresses a point of view, and acts with deliberation, choosing certain alternatives and not others, even to the point of unveiling his inner motivations at times: “The Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many” (Mt 20:28).

This historical identity helps to keep Jesus real for his created—not an ethereal, but a thoroughly human being, whose personality is understandable both as the Son of Man, and beyond this, as Christ, the Son of God. Jesus shows through his behavior what God is really like, that God cares about people, seeks companionship, challenges injustice, fulfills promises, and searches for lost human beings in need of salvation and welcoming into God’s family.

Compass Psychotheology suggests that Jesus embodied normal psychological processes in his personality, conjoined with gifts of the Holy Spirit, revealing both God’s full immersion in human life and how God’s divine psychology finds an echoing partnership with human psychology. To further illuminate both Christ’s and human beings’ personality structure and function, Compass Psychotheology offers the Self Compass, an empirically validated growth tool for assessing personality and helping individuals develop more Christlike personal and interpersonal health in their lives.

Personality research using a variety of statistical tools reveals a rhythmic structure to personality that accounts for many of the seemingly opposing dynamics within a person.

Reducing these dynamics to their most elemental form, one can say that human beings universally experience both Love and Assertion, the compass points from which a person loves, cares for, or nurtures those in their interpersonal world, and stands against, challenges, or confronts them. The Weakness and Strength compass points exemplify the times when a person feels vulnerable, uncertain, or anxious, as well as those times when the person displays adequacy, confidence, and competence.

Love and Assertion, Weakness and Strength, when taken together, form an anagram: the “LAWS” of personality and relationships that create a trustworthy guide for understanding human behavior in its healthy or dysfunctional expressions.

Though many theories of personality exist, compass theory offers the advantages of simplicity for ease of memory, yet sophistication for classifying mental health disorders known as psychopathology.

Just as a rhythmic use of Love and Assertion, Weakness and Strength, leads to personality wholeness that Jesus exemplified and persons can develop, so does the rigid overuse of one or more compass points at the expense of the others lead to dysfunction. (For an in-depth treatment on how compass theory utilizes the Self Compass in counseling and psychotherapy, see Compass Therapy: Christian Psychology in Action).

Thus in compass theory terms, Jesus’ personality perfectly expresses the LAWS of healthy human behavior; that is, on every occasion, Jesus functions with a balanced Self Compass, in which he employs the rhythmic use of Love and Assertion, or Weakness and Strength, as appropriate to the situation and his purposes.

Free of personality rigidity, Jesus enjoys complete access to all four compass points. He forms loving friendships with Peter, James, John, and Mary Magdalene, yet sets assertive boundaries if they presume upon his aims as the Son of God.

By the same token, he preaches the gospel of the kingdom of God with loving conviction, yet assertively debates many religious leaders because of their hardness of heart. This balanced interplay between Love and Assertion keeps Christ from developing the exaggerated traits of dependence upon people’s approval (too much Love), or unforgiving anger toward others (too much Assertion).

Picture Jesus experiencing Weakness and Strength in the Garden of Gethsemane, falling down with anxiety, pleading with both his disciples and the Father to help him hold true to his mission for coming into the world: to die on the cross for the sins of all people. Yet when the guards come to arrest him, he strides forth with such strength of purpose that they are speechless.

Perhaps the greatest revelation of Christ’s balanced Self Compass lies in the Messianic names given to him: Jesus as the Good Shepherd (Love compass point) watches over his sheep and calls them by name; Christ as the Lion of Judah (Assertion compass point) fiercely opposes social injustice and judges the unrighteous; Jesus as the Lamb of God (Weakness compass point) gives his life to save people from the inseparable breach that sin creates between them and God; and Christ as the Prince of Peace (Strength compass point) becomes God’s reigning Messiah who overcomes sin and the devil to inaugurate the kingdom of God.

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Knowing the Trinity Through Jesus Christ

Jesus Christ’s public ministry spans a short three years, during which he relentlessly shatters the shibboleths of the religious pundits of his day. Jesus challenges persons to surrender everything they hold dear -- including their own families -- to follow him. He is bent on changing their mind-sets, their beliefs about God’s purposes, God’s nature.   

What does Jesus want us to understand and find delight in, opening our deepest being to discover?

With consistent passion, a passion for which he is ultimately sentenced to death, Jesus witnesses that this present world finds its origin and fulfillment in a Triune Creator whom Jesus calls the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, who love human beings and desire to be loved by them, these three Persons who exist as one God. And as Jesus reveals his own divine identity, he says, so he reveals the Father and the Holy Spirit.

How does Jesus witness to these mysteries?

Jesus startles the Samaritan woman at the well. He tells her things about her life that she is trying to hide. And startles her into saying, “Sir, I can see you are a prophet.”

A response that is startling in its own right, for Samaritans accepted no prophet after Moses but the one they viewed as the Messiah (Deut 18:18).

Jesus goes deeper. He reveals to her that God is the Father who seeks worship in spirit and in truth.

She responds tentatively: “I know that Messiah is coming. When he comes, he will explain everything to us.”

His answer? Surely astounding. “I that speak to you, I am” (Jn 4:26; Morris, NICNT, italics ours), his use of “I am” asserting identification with the name for deity that God revealed to Moses (Ex 3:14; Jn 8:58).

Here is Jesus, pointing to his eternal pre-existence before his incarnation as Christ. His declaration of “I am” confirms deity as well as personhood, revealing that through Jesus, God is experienced as the divine Thou, who possesses identity, thought, will, and personality, and with whom it is possible to have a conversation, even at a Samaritan well.

And the Samaritan woman believes in him. So taken with Jesus’ person, his mission, and his interaction with her, this Gentile woman at the well becomes his first evangelist.

Peter is given more opportunity than the Samaritan woman to see Jesus Christ in action, hearing him preach the Gospel of repentance from sin, heal those afflicted with physical diseases or demonic possession, and work miracles like feeding five thousand people after teaching them about the kingdom of God.

So when Jesus turns to Peter one day and asks, “Who do you say I am?” Peter practically shouts, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.”

Jesus gives an unexpected response. He does not say, “That’s good, Peter, I’m glad you finally get it.” Or, “Well said, my good and faithful servant.” Instead, Jesus replies, “Blessed are you, for this was not revealed to you by man, but by my Father in heaven” (Mt 16:17).

Peter only knows this truth because the Father revealed it to him, Jesus is saying, providing witness to the Godhead itself, the inner, intimate workings of the Trinity, and the importance the Triune God places on being understood by their created, by individual human beings. 

Jesus and His Father

Jesus talks about his Father in heaven all the time, often to the annoyance of his listeners, particularly the Pharisees who don’t want to hear that Jesus models his behavior on his Father, the Lord God Almighty; his Father to whom Jesus prays constantly, with loving respect, certainly, but also with a strong sense of his individual identity as the Son of Man. “Father,” he says, “glorify me in your presence with the glory I had with you before the world began” (Jn 17:5).

So tangible, reciprocal, and intimate is the relationship between the Father and the Son, and so revelatory of God’s identity, that Jesus says, “No one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and those to whom the Son chooses to reveal him” (Mt 11:27); “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me” (Jn 14:6); and “I and the Father are one” (Jn 10:30).

Jesus and the Holy Spirit

What a difficult concept to get across, since the disciples must have been bewildered, and Jesus hard-pressed to explain in terms they might comprehend. When I leave you, (surely the most painful thought ever for them), Jesus says, “the Helper, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in My name, He will teach you all things, and bring to your remembrance all things that I said to you” (Jn 14:26 NKJV).

Certainly this makes more sense now, with the advantage of the New Testament as a clear explication of the Trinity in action, but even today the concept of the Holy Spirit is difficult to grasp, rather like seeing the effect of wind that whips up sand into swirls, or brings clouds scudding across the sky, but never seeing the actual wind itself.

Yet the concrete impact of the Holy Spirit’s presence in Jesus’ earthly life is definitive and palpable. When Jesus is in trouble, in pain, the Holy Spirit is there; when Jesus needs power to heal, the Holy Spirit provides it; when Jesus rejoices, he rejoices in the Spirit (Lk 10:21). And when Jesus departs from this earth as a human being, the Holy Spirit comes to impart his Word to the world.

It’s a team effort, this Trinity, these three distinct, individuated Persons in one overarching consciousness of the Triune God. You are in good hands in this Life Together with the Holy Trinity!

For more on how to experience the Holy Trinity in your life of Christian faith, read:

TRUSTING IN THE TRINITY

Who is the Christian Trinity?

The Trinity is the ruah, God the Spirit, who is first mentioned in Genesis, the Spirit who broods over the deep as co-architect of Creation, the Spirit who is the action generator of life, of humanity -- of persons and personhood.

God the Spirit

The Trinity is God as a loving Father who guides and sculpts the Hebrew experience, providing structure and laws, while making a friend of Abraham, and of Moses, creating relationships unique to each person, with Hannah, Samuel, David, and Solomon -- forming a covenant with the Hebrews so that they would be his people and he would be their God.

God the Father

The Trinity is Jesus Christ, the subject and object of Scripture, sent by the Father and empowered by the Spirit, who through his personality and life on earth becomes the entry point for persons to find forgiveness of sin, and entrust themselves to the process of becoming Christlike.

God the Son

It is that first person, ruah, the Spirit of God, whom we now know as the Holy Spirit. That same Spirit who brooded over creation is now our Comforter and Friend, who was promised by the Son and sent by the Father to indwell all who receive Christ, quickening their trust in the Trinity, inspiring their development as persons, and strengthening their capacity to love both God and other people. 

God the Holy Spirit

Compass Psychotheology proposes that Christ in his essence, as both the Son of God and Son of Man, serves as humanity’s connection point to the Father and the Holy Spirit. For human beings to understand and participate more fully in the life of the Trinity, Three Persons in One God, the starting point is Jesus.

For more, read:

TRUSTING IN THE TRINITY:

Compass Psychotheology Applied

Trusting in The Trinity