Plumbing the depths of the most central Christian dogma – Catholic World Report

The doctrine of the Trinity is surely complex: three persons and one nature at a visceral level defies what humans think about being. How do those three relate? Are they co-equal? Are they co-eternal? What does it mean that one person of the Trinity assumed human flesh? Where were the other two? And how could they be perfectly united if one of them is on earth?

Yet in another way the Trinity projects a certain simplicity. For at a basic level, the Trinity immediately helps Christians to make sense of their faith and categorize what constitutes error. Don’t recognize Jesus as truly God? That’s heresy (Arianism and Unitarianism). Think Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are simply three modes of the same single being? Also heresy (modalism and some pentecostals). There’s a reason we call the Trinity the heart of the Christian faith.

Fr. Thomas Joseph, O.P., in his new book The Trinity: On the Nature and Mystery of the One God plumbs the depths of this most central of Christian dogmas. At 715 pages, it’s no easy text, and certainly not for theological novices. Some of his most controversial arguments — that the processions of the Son and Holy Spirit must be immanent, not transitive; and that modern Trinitarian theology has too often obsessed with the analogy or likeness between the immanent Trinity and the supposed economic Trinity has “projected human attributes” onto God — will likely seem esoteric to most readers.

But Fr. White’s logic and prose help us perceive what Trinitarian theology has to do with the Christian life.

The Trinity is a reasonable Mystery

One of the first things Christians (and non-Christians) need to understand about the Trinity, and theology more broadly, is that it is informed by philosophy, the study of truth based on natural reason. Theology, explains Fr. White, is “bound by intellectual responsibility to face scrutiny from philosophical quarters.” Indeed, it is impossible for theology to be devoid of philosophical commitments. This is because every theology, be it Catholic, Protestant, or anything else, reasons about God and transcendent truths based on certain premises that are antecedent to theology, such as explaining how an infinite, transcendent being communicates to finite beings.

“All theology has philosophical commitments,” writes Fr. White.

Nor should the faithful fear natural philosophy, which says Fr. White, “is a form of wisdom insofar as it can attain to a knowledge of the primary cause of the things.” Philosophy can even identify God as personal, the creator of human persons, and the source and providential guide behind all of creation. But philosophy has its limits: “The knowledge of God that philosophy provides is indirect, inferential, and imperfect.” Nevertheless, philosophy that aspires to a natural knowledge of God can by extension open us to the possibility of revealed knowledge of God.

Indeed, we might even say that the two disciplines have a reciprocal relationship. Theology that obviously contradicts or denies logic and natural learning in human culture, including verifiable conclusions based on modern science loses its legitimacy, and slowly collapses in on itself. Alternatively, argues Fr. White, when philosophical traditions “close themselves off a priori to the possibility of revelation or mystical union with God, they self-sterilize by delimiting, in arbitrary and unwarranted ways, the human search for transcendence.”

Such philosophies can actually become unreasonable, because they may deny things (like miracles) that they cannot disprove. In the case of the Trinity, theologians have taken great pains to communicate its reality (and the relations between its three persons) in a way that is both intelligible and coherent.

The Trinity and our Christian Faith

Nor does Trinitarian theology exist in a vacuum of complex and esoteric intellectual frameworks. As Fr. White explains, Trinitarianism is thoroughly biblical. For example, in the New Testament we can perceive through various stories and apostolic reasoning that God is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Moreover, the Son (Jesus) throughout the New Testament makes references to the Father and the Spirit as interpersonal subjects who are in certain respects distinct from himself. Finally, Jesus in the Gospels manifests his divine identity and authority in various implicit and explicit ways.

It was through such themes that the early church fathers began formulating and articulating what eventually coalesces into what we now possess as a coherent Trinitarian theology. Some of those themes include that God is one in being and essence (ousia), and there are three persons (hypostases) in God. Moreover, as St. Augustine observed, the relations between the persons must not merely be held by each person in a fashion unique to Himself, as this would undermine the idea that God is truly one in being and essence. Instead, the great church father reasoned, the relations in God must mysteriously characterize the persons in all that they are, because the other two persons receive all that they are as God by way of generation (the Son) and spiration (the Spirit). This was later affirmed by the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 A.D.

Perhaps this already seems a bit too arcane for the laity — but Trinitarian theology truly does have immediate applicability to our Christian faith, including regarding soteriology, or the theology of salvation. For if God is eternal and unchanging, and not finite or evolutionary (as many heretics in the past two millennia have posited), God is able to act within suffering (particularly the suffering of His Son) and both redeem the world and overcome human suffering without being overwhelmed by it. “If Jesus is not God in his crucifixion, then he cannot save us, and it is only by a genuine theology of the divine nature that we can have some understanding of what it means to say that Jesus is God,” declares Fr. White. Without a Trinitarian understanding of Christ, the salvation of the Christian evaporates.

The Trinity and us

The implications of Trinitarian theology extend beyond soteriology to anthropology, as Fr. White proposes three ways in which creation itself resembles the Trinity. First, creatures bear what he calls “the ontological insignia of the Father,” in that they are both substantial (meaning have a substance) and are also enduring. Secondly, all of creation refers back to him, because each creature originates from another, and is thus given their being, rather than being self-generated. “Their derived existence is itself a testimony to the gift of being, which stems ultimately from the divine paternity,” writes Fr. White.

Finally, for those creatures which are intelligible, they also “bear the imprint of the generated World, through whom God made all things, and who is the source of order and intelligibility in creation.” Moreover, insofar as those creatures are themselves good and tend toward perfection, they also resemble the goodness of the Spirit, “the Love in whom God has made all that is good.” Humans in a special way manifest the image of God in an especially privileged way, because they possess the immaterial faculties of intellect and will, as does the Godhead. This is furthered by divine grace, which conforms the recipient to the uncreated love of God.

Through this final reflection, we can begin to appreciate how Trinitarian theology communicates truths to many of the most controversial debates of our contemporary political moment. If we are truly substantial and enduring, what we do with our bodies (and souls) really does have an eternal quality to them. If our lives possess a certain givenness that derives from the Trinity itself, then our attempts to refashion boys into girls or girls into boys is deeply mistaken. And if humans by virtue of their intellect and will truly, if imperfectly, reflect the Godhead, then their lives are of an incalculable worth, and worthy of protection from conception to natural death.

In other words, Trinitarian theology isn’t just for the theologians. It is related to all of human knowledge, to the things about the Christian faith that we hold most dear, as well as what we understand about ourselves and our place within the secular polis. The Trinity, it turns out, is not only relevant, but even perhaps indispensable. We should be grateful that a mind as deep as Fr. White’s, whose prose is always penetrating, has helped remind us of this eternal truth.

The Trinity: On the Nature and Mystery of the One God
by Thomas Joseph White, OP
CUA Press/Thomistic Ressourcement Series. 2022
Paperback, 715 pages