The Doctrine of the Trinity - by Ric Pointer

The Doctrine of the Trinity is probably the most difficult conception for us finite creatures to understand about the infinite Creator God.

Paul wrote “ 12 For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known. “( 1 Corinthians 13:12) Most will agree when we contemplate the The Great I am we are found lacking and at times mind boggled. James White sums up our Christian view “Within the one Being that is God, there exists eternally three coequal and co-eternal persons, namely, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. (The Forgotten Trinity, 26) This expression of of the Trinity is probably the norm among conservative evangelicals. But I have seen over the years few try to understand it and often put it on the back burner. In my view, it lends itself too easily to the view that the Trinity is merely a society of three divine persons, whose oneness goes no further than the abstract nature they share in common unless we spend time to see The Triune God for our selves in the scriptures.

Recently I have grown to see that “[In the New Testament], the truths of the Holy Trinity and of sovereign grace prove to be not two truths but one. The doctrine of salvation is the good news of the Father’s giving us his Son to redeem us and his Spirit to renew us. The doctrine of the Trinity is the good news of three divine persons working together to raise us into spiritual life and bring us to the glory of God’s kingdom. Genesis 1:26 seems to confirm the idea that there is one God whose oneness is complex. The idea of God's nature being triune (three in one) is mind-boggling. Contemplation of the infinite is always confusing to finite beings. Nevertheless, certain illustrations can help people grapple with the issue of a complex unity. C. S. Lewis, a talented philologist, writer and debater put it this way: We must remind ourselves that Christian theology does not believe God to be a person. It believes Him to be such that in Him a trinity of persons is consistent with a unity of Deity. In that sense it believes Him to be something very different from a person, just as a cube, in which six squares are consistent with unity of the body, is different from a square. (Flatlanders, attempting to imagine a cube, would either imagine the six squares coinciding, and thus destroy their distinctness, or else imagine them set out side by side, and thus destroy the unity. Our difficulties about the Trinity are of much the same kind.