The Holy Trinity Explained

by Michael Shackleton · June 6, 2017

The Trinity is a mystery. I tell this to my confirmation class, and try to explain it. What alarms me is that some have no idea that it means three Persons in one God. Others have thought Jesus is not a Person in the Trinity. It is so easy to say our belief in the Trinity is a mystery. Help me to find a simple way to guide ignorant minds into a clear understanding of this difficult subject.

The reality of the Blessed Trinity is certainly found in the New Testament, which refers to the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit as God.

This is undoubtedly the same God who revealed himself to Abraham. He is numerically one (Deuteronomy 6:4), in contrast with the many gods worshiped by the peoples of Abraham’s time. The Jewish faith in this single God continues in the Shema, the traditional prayer: Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is one.

We can say, then, that there is certainly only one God and he exists in his uniqueness eternally in three Persons who are each distinct from the other yet each fully God. Brilliant Christian minds have wrestled with this apparent contradiction for centuries.

A simple, non-theological way to approach this mystery, is to turn to Scripture, which says that among God’s attributes is that he is the source of knowledge (I Cor 2:11) and of love (I Jn 4), obviously even before creation. Therefore, since before creation there was nothing outside of him to know or love, he must have had to know and love himself in a way beyond our understanding.

This idea at once makes us see that there must be a vital dynamism in the godhead which, in human language, we have come to call the Trinity: the Father, who mutually knows and loves the Son, and the Spirit who is the expression of their mutual knowing and loving. This relationship among them is eternal. It is the unity of one God in three persons or ways of existence, expressing something of God’s infinite inner reality.

This is one of many ways to tackle the mystery. But we must stick to the creeds, including the Athanasian Creed which asserts: The Father is God, the Son is God, the Spirit is God, yet there are not three Gods but one God and all three persons are coeternal and coequal with each other.