What I love about the doctrine of the Trinity are as follows (many are ironically reasons why other people don’t like it).
- The doctrine of the Trinity is not actually in the Bible. At most it is a conclusion we draw logically from what is in the Bible and we can say it is the view of God most consistent with all of the Bible taken together. But since it is not actually in there, it punches a hole through ridiculous notions that all truths must be found in the Bible in order to be accepted by Christians.
- This gives us a picture of God which is nothing like human beings, so this is not a God made in our own image. And yet it is a God who is more than we are rather than less – a trans-personal God rather than some fragment of a person like a cosmic mind, energy, moral law, force, or principle of love.
- It is logically messy and difficult to understand which reminds me a great deal of the way in which quantum physics challenges many of our naïve notions of the way things “should be.”
- It helps a tiny bit in building a bridge to polytheism and thus does not give quite the basis for the kind of irrational hostility to other religions (often characterized as polytheist) that we find in some monotheistic religions.
Things I do not like about the doctrine of the Trinity.
- The tendency of many to overstate the doctrine as a limitation of God to the number three, which I see no justification for anywhere in scripture. The doctrine is simply that the Father, Jesus, and Holy Spirit are distinct persons but only one God. The only limitation here is our own knowledge of God and I see no reason to limit God Himself to that. I believe in a God who is infinite, not a God who is three. In the discussion above we have observed that our knowledge of the Holy Spirit is somewhat lacking and perhaps tongue in cheek we can say this is more of an understanding of God as two and a half. For me this suggests even more strongly that these three persons of the Trinity is just a matter of the limitations of our own knowledge of God.
- The tendency to employ some kind of modalism in making even more of the number three – even to saying it is like we are mind, body, and soul, or something like that. I see this as a total distortion. This problem follows logically from the previous problem, for if God is three then people want an explanation for why it is three and not some other number.