Breakpoint
Author: John Stonestreet and Dr. Glenn Sunshine
This Sunday is Trinity Sunday, a day set aside in the western Church calendar to consider the significance of the doctrine of the Trinity. Any pastor or preacher tackling the topic is trembling, or at last should be. As one of my theology professors once noted, it’s basically impossible to explain the Trinity without, at some point, sliding into heresy.
But we must talk about it because it is at the top of the defining traits of orthodox Christianity. Perhaps more than any other doctrine, the Trinitarian understanding of God sets Christianity apart from other monotheistic faiths. It’s a difficult doctrine to understand, let alone explain to nonbelievers. As the great Augustine of Hippo confessed:
Which of us understands the Almighty Trinity? And yet which speaks not of It, if indeed it be It? Rare is that soul which, while it speaks of It, knows what it speaks of.
One way to talk about the Trinity is to clarify what it is not, and, to that end, the YouTube channel Lutheran Satire has produced the very funny video, “St. Patrick’s Bad Analogies.” It's a way to own the struggle, rather than treat what God has revealed to us about Himself as irrelevant.
British theologian NT Wright has described his struggle with the Trinity, and why the ancient Celtic Church was so fascinated by it. Though the Celts do like things in threes, more importantly, these early Christians recognized that the Trinity wasn’t an optional doctrine to the Christian faith.
In his 2025 book, Spiritual and Religious, Wright explained:
When I was younger, I could never understand why St. Patrick needed to use a shamrock to evangelize the Irish. I had never heard an evangelistic sermon which expounded the doctrine of the Trinity, and I couldn’t see why one would want to try. It makes a lot more sense to me now. Patrick could not assume, and we cannot today assume, that people know what Christians mean when we say ‘God.’
Wright then observed that for many people, “God” is a product of their cultural and individual imaginations, not the God who has revealed Himself in the Bible. Simply put, Christianity is Trinitarian. If it is not Trinitarian, it is not Christian.
The doctrine of the Trinity describes God as independent and personal in a way other monotheistic faiths cannot. The gods portrayed in Islam or Deism cannot be fully personal on their own. Such a god would be more of an “it” than a “He.” Though a person away from others is still a person, what is a person when there are no such things as other persons? A god like that would be more of a “thing” or a “force” than a person. Even more, such a solitary god would need to create a world and other persons in order to be personal. A god who needs his creation is dependent, not independent.
According to Scripture, God is a Tri-Unity, one God eternally existing in three Persons. As such, He needs no one. Beyond time, Father, Son, and Spirit has had full personal fellowship within Himself. He did not need to create the world. This also adds real substance to the biblical claim that God is love. The eternal, loving fellowship within the Trinity ground love in His eternal being, and not just merely something He decided to do after creating other things and persons. He exists fully independent of His creation and loves because He wants to, not because He needs to.
The Trinity also tells us something about what it means to be human. After all, we are made in the image of not just any God. We bear the image of the God Who exists, Who is Trinity. Thus, our lives as persons in relationships with other persons isn’t an accident, a quirk of evolution or a naturalistic survival mechanism. If God is Trinity, He doesn’t merely do relationships, He is a relationship. And we are relational as well. This has incredible implications for everything from the epidemic of loneliness to AI companions to the breakdown of the family.
It matters that God is not a thing, a force, or an energy. It matters that He exists eternally, one Being, three Persons. Who we are, including our roles as mothers and fathers, grandparents and grandkids, and friends reflects and expresses the loving, personal nature of the Triune God.