Okay.
So when discussing the trinity, i find the head of the problem is that most Christians grow up hearing the word Trinity, learn it and never understand what it means. You are being taught the father, son and holy ghost in Sunday school before you can make any sense of the bible itself and beyond that you never receive any further information about this. In fact the closest most people ever come to understanding the Trinity are a couple of vague doctrinal statements and some fourth century diagrams.
On this particular subject I think the most important thing to know is that the word Trinity is neither descriptive nor explanatory, its merely a label attached by first century biblical scholars in their attempts to compile a sound general doctrine for the church. The word was used by these Christian academics in reference to a phenomenon that they themselves repeatedly found in scripture. Part of the reason that the trinity is such a stumbling block for most is because we hear the word first and
then try to explain it in scripture. This is not how it was done.
I want anyone reading this to imagine those scholars in the first century. So they're going over the manuscripts and letters that would one day become the bible and they see statements like:
Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one,
Believe in God; believe also in me,
I seek not mine own will, but the will of the Father which hath sent me.
The Son can do nothing of himself, but what he seeth the Father do
The glory that you have given me I have given to them,
that they may be one even as we are one,
know and understand that the Father is in me and I am in the Father
My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?
Their confusion at this point should be apparent.
So their scratching their heads asking how this makes any sense but then they bunker down and keep searching through scripture for some kind of explanation. God is one, Jesus is God but at the same time Jesus is
not God. If Jesus thought he was God then why not just talk that way all the time; why begin referring to yourself in second and third person like you're crazy.
[1] At this point what these scholars were looking for was some kind of distinction, because despite claiming to be God and one with God, Jesus had still created a distinction between himself and the Father who was also God.
What they found was a relationship within the Godhead between a loving Father, an obedient Son, and a third person born out of the communion of the two. The entire thing a complex and colorful, back, forth and upsides drama of sorts all taking place within the individual being. Proving that God was not the staunch, stoic and inflexible character they thought he was, but rather something beautiful, dynamic, and full of life. It must have been a shock, it was completely unorthodox and yet they should have been looking for it from the start.
How could a being who was alone in himself be called love?
How could a single fixed and solitary icon be responsible for all the beauty and wonder we see in this world?
The answer was clear, there it was rising right before their faces. And like explorers standing on the brink of something alien and undiscovered, they gave it a name: The mystery of the Triune God.
So the Trinity is not merely a doctrine, it is a revelation, and like all revelation it is in its core a mystery, carrying a sense of awe that fills you as you break step by step into the understanding of it. When we use the word it is in reference to this mystery that we speak, to this secret thing of God's hidden apart from his grace or his miraculous hand but buried within the physicality of his very nature.
[2] The nature of the relationship that has been going on since before the founding of the world. The one atop of which everything we know was built and the one which through everything we have been asked to join. Looking back the trinity it seems should have been a self-evident truth because God is one, but at the same time He is so much more, He is infinite and he is eternal.
