Transcript

A few years ago, I met a Muslim man who saw me in my Dominican habit and struck up a conversation.

He was a nice fellow, and after we had spoken for a little bit, he asked me if I was a Christian.

And I replied, Yes.

In fact, I'm a Catholic priest.

Now, he actually was distressed to hear this because he said, Well, you believe that God has a Son.

And I said, Yes, of course.

That is part of the profession of faith of a Christian.

Now, he wasn't a hostile person.

He was actually very friendly.

He was concerned from the perspective of Islam, for two reasons.

Because he thought it was blasphemy to say that God has a Son, or to say that there are, in God, three persons.

And from the perspective of Islam, he took this very seriously.

And secondly, he was upset because he was worried about my future.

He thought I believed in a lie.

Now, of course, as a Christian, I thought it was absolutely fundamental to profess that God is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit; three persons, one God.

This is a truth revealed to us by the Holy Scriptures, something revealed to us by Jesus Christ.

So, let me ask you: how important is it to you to believe in the Trinity?

Does it matter to you?

Could you give it up?

What would be your destiny if you did?

Why does it matter to profess that we believe in the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit?

Is this a detail or is this something central?

In fact, I would say this is perhaps the central claim that Christianity makes.

That is, if you understand who Jesus is, that He is true God and true man, the Son of God, then you end up needing to affirm that God is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

You cannot profess a correct belief in Jesus and not also profess a faith in the Holy Trinity.

Now, this is a question that comes up in Scripture itself.

As you know, Jesus spoke and preached about his Father as if his Father was distinct from Him.

But Jesus also made claims, and the Scriptures clearly made claims, that Jesus himself is God.

Saint Paul, for example, uses the very same name that was reserved in the Old Testament for the one God who spoke to Moses, and applies that title to Jesus.

Saint Paul calls Jesus Lord.

Now, if a faithful Jew in ancient Israel believed anything, this was it; that there is only one Lord.

In fact, throughout history, the Jews have been persecuted by the nations around them for refusing to worship any other gods.

Jesus Himself professed this and claimed also to be God, who spoke to His Father, and who would send the Holy Spirit to His disciples to dwell in them like a temple, and only God dwells in a temple.

So, in fact, it's inescapable.

If you take the Christian faith seriously, the mystery of the Trinity is at its heart.

Now, when speaking about the Trinity, there are two main mistakes that you can make.

The first one is to emphasize, Yes, we believe in one God, but really, three persons, three independent actors, three independent entities, which, in the end, ends up looking an awful lot like believing in three Gods.

That is not what we believe and what we profess.

There is only one God.

The other mistake goes to the other extreme.

It says, Yes, yes, one God.

Very, very important.

It just looks like there's three when we encounter Him.

When, for example, God gives us grace, then we would be speaking about the Holy Spirit.

And then there's Jesus, He's the Son who redeemed us, and then there's God who created everything, and that's the Father.

But in fact, those are really only one God that just looks like three persons from our perspective, when we encounter Him in the world.

But this also is wrong.

The divine persons are not only appearances of God in the world, they are really distinct in God.

That is, God is not a Trinity only in relation to us, from our perspective .

he is at- a trinity eternally in himself.

At this point, many will say, Oh, well, it's a mystery, so you can't really understand it, so let's just say you have three persons and one God, and then move on to the next subject.

Now, that, I think, is a cop-out.

And as a Dominican who loves the Trinity, I want to try to understand how there can be distinction, not difference, but distinction within the unity of God.

How there can be distinct persons in the one divine nature, so that we profess that there is one God and three distinct persons.

Now here, actually, Saint Augustine is a big help to us, aided, of course, by Saint Thomas Aquinas, who built on Augustine's insights on how to understand this.

Here's a little thought experiment.

Imagine your intellect, your mind, thinking about itself or thinking of yourself.

Now, imagine being able to conceive in your mind a perfect image of your own mind or of your own self.

If you were able to do this, especially if you could do it perfectly, you would then be thinking yourself.

Now, if you had an intellect that is infinite and perfect, it could do this infinitely and perfectly.

The image in that mind of itself would be an absolutely perfect image.

In our case, we who have bodies cannot conceive of an image that would be exactly the same as ourselves.

But in God, who is a pure spirit, who has no body, if he thinks of himself, thinks himself perfectly, he can conceive or produce in his mind a perfect image of himself, and that image would then be identical with himself.

And that image is what we call the Word, the Word of God.

This Word is the idea that God has of himself, an idea of himself so perfect that it is also God.

And in fact, the only difference between this Word, this image of the Father, and the Father Himself, is that this image or this Word is from the Father.

Now, this idea of Himself, God knows to be so good that it erupts into love.

Because when we know something and we know it to be good, we cannot help but love it.

And this is how the Christian faith understands there to be two processions in the Trinity.

The first procession, a procession by way of intellect, is the Father who speaks His Word, the Father who knows Himself in eternity and speaks a perfect word or image of Himself, a Word which is also God because it has and expresses everything that the Father Himself has and is.

The only difference between the Father and the Word is that the Father speaks the Word and that the Word is spoken by the Father.

That's the only distinction between them.

And likewise, the Holy Spirit proceeds by way of love.

That's a kind of impulse of love that also creates a kind of image of the beloved in the lover.

Now, if at this point you're feeling lost, we can also speak about the Trinity in our lives, and this is very important for the Christian life.

As Christians, we worship in a Trinitarian form.

How do we begin mass, for example?

In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit?

If you're baptized, how were you baptized?

In that same name.

And in fact, the catechism of the Catholic Church emphasizes that there is only one name of God, a name which is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

It's also what we do in offering the Eucharist.

If you listen carefully to the prayer the priest says as he's offering the Eucharist, he is offering to the Father from the Son through the Holy Spirit.

And if you have been baptized, if you are in the state of grace, the Holy Spirit comes to you, He dwells in you, He gives you the love of God, which is the Holy Spirit, and makes you able to cry out, Abba, Father.

In other words, He conforms you to Christ, makes you an adopted son or daughter of the Father, and makes it possible for you to pray like a Christian.

Because a Christian prays in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

So in the end, there's no getting away from it.

The Trinity is the central mystery of the Christian faith.

It is truly a mystery, which means it can't be known simply by reason itself and we can't exhaust its meaning, we can't go all the way to the end and understand it in its every aspect, but it doesn't mean that we should then simply profess it in words and set it aside like a book on a dusty shelf.

Rather, it pertains most essentially to what we live as Catholics, what we have the immense privilege to live, that we are conformed to the three divine persons, that we know them as we are.

In fact, the most basic truth about the Trinity, you might say, is that God is a communion of persons, a communion of persons who are perfectly happy in themselves.

That is, God does not need us, but He so loved the world that He created us to draw us into the mystery of His triune life so that we could share in the mystery of His love and of His life, a communion of persons.

May we permit ourselves to be drawn more and more into this greatest of all mysteries.

May we strive to understand something of that mystery so that filled with the Holy Spirit, we will be made more like the Son and thus come to know His Father, who is perfect from all ages.