I think the issue is not whether the notion of a Trinity is right or wrong, but whether it is
essential and
legitimate. So there are two questions here:
1. Is the Trinity essential?
2. Is the Trinity legitimate?
In my view, the Trinity is not essential. It's just an approach to our spiritual journey. I've come to think that the primary purpose of the Trinity is perhaps to conceptualise an experience of God, rather than God himself. It's just that it perhaps degraded into a quantitative, technical definition of God rather than a qualitative expression of one's experience of God. People treated it as something concrete rather than something abstract. They asked questions like whether God is three-in-one and one-in-three.
But if we think of the Trinity as just a way of expressing how one
experiences God, then it's no longer a question of "is God three or one or both?" but "how does God reveal Himself to me and how do I relate to Him?" The Trinity could, perhaps, be summed up like this:
An experience of the Son is an experience of God.
An experience of the Father is an experience of God.
An experience of the Holy Spirit is an experience of God.
Was Jesus God? I think it depends how you approach that question. What exactly would I mean by "Jesus being God?" If I swapped bodies with my friend, am I my friend or is my friend me? The way I would explain that situation is that my personality is projected through my friend's body, and my friend's personality is projected through my body.
The situation with God and Jesus is certainly not body swapping, but it has to do with personality. Most of us conceptualise God as holy. Holiness is not a property one's knowledge, power and abilities, but one's personality. God's holy character gives him the moral authority and moral justification to do what he does. If Jesus had the same kind of personality, then his holy character also gave him the moral authority and justification to do what he did. It gave an honest man like Jesus the justification to criticise the religious leaders of the day for being phonies. (That's assuming Jesus was that kind of man to start with.)
However, if Jesus had the same kind of character and personality as God, being honest and accountable, seeing people as they really were, not as society judged them and treating people fairly, then could Jesus' character and personality also be seen as a
demonstration of God's character and personality? Jesus didn't have to have God's knowledge, power and abilities, only his character and personality, to demonstrate what God was like.
This is where "an experience of the Son" could have been seen as "an experience of God." The titles "Son of God" and "Son of Man" are quite vague. They aren't really defined in the Bible. We only see their usage. Yet, "Son of God" and "Son of Man" could refer to a human being that demonstrates what God is like so that God can be understood by human beings. Sure, we can never know everything about God and will never be able to define Him completely, but we can at least understand Him personally.
So what, really, is the Trinity? I think of it as a
mantra that we recite. A
signpost that tells us where to go and how to get to our destination. It is perhaps not really a definition of God, or that "God is three," but could, possibly, have started off as "the Three Experiences of God."
Just like the idea of the "Four Corners of the Earth," the Five Elements (water, metal, earth, air and fire) and what Western Medicine calls "the Five Basic Senses" of human beings, the Trinity could be a mantra, a saying that we chant. We know the earth doesn't really have Four Corners, but we sometimes mention the Four Corners because it's ancient tradition that has sentimental value. Modern chemistry has revealed that there are more than five elements. We also know from modern physiology that the body doesn't really have five kinds of senses!!! The Five Basic Senses are really just a way of describing something we can relate to personally. Some of the senses actually overlap. Taste and smell both involve detection of chemicals (a shared sense). Taste and touch both involve discerning the shape and texture of objects, and their temperature. Sight, sound, smell, taste and touch relate to an "experience" of our environment, not the actual physiological instruments used to capture the information used to generate that experience.
The universe is a lot more complicated than the simplifications we make. Same with God. We know we can never define God. We can understand and explain what he's like, but not define Him. God gave us a mind to think in the abstract. Abstractions are concepts we use to simplify things that are more complex. Life revolves around meaning but meaning must be put in context.
The Trinity, I reckon, was never meant to be a definition of God, and was never supposed to make faith
more complicated.
I think it's the exact opposite. We're not trying to conceptualise some grandmaster concept that advances our level of sophistication. The Trinity was probably more of a
simplification (experiencing God) rather than an "advancing to the next level of complexity" concept. Because God was too complex to define, we resorted to a way of
describing how the experience took place. So it's probably not really "God has three parts/Persons" but "the Three Experiences of God" mantra.
The Trinity was supposed to be a signpost, not the road itself!!! It's just an approach to faith.
The Trinity should
not be essential, but at the same time it
shouldn't be an illegal concept. The Trinity has a lot of critics, as well as a lot of proponents who insist that it be invoked. We expect to find spirituality in certain times, places, people and concepts. We expect spirituality to be systematic and rule-based. We expect to find spirituality in numbers, but yet it's not supposed to be a numbers game!!! It's supposed to be a standard way to explain something personal. In that sense, the Trinity is a legitimate concept for those who want to make it a part of their spiritual journey. I guess what we have to remember is that if it's just a mantra, there's nothing wrong with having and not having it in one's belief system.
I guess the problem only begins when we treat it as a technicality rather than a personal faith issue . . .
