Not a math problem. . .

Nearly all the explanations of the Holy Trinity treat the mystery of God as if it were a math problem.  Even the doxological stanzas of hymns seem intent upon talking in the same language.  Three in One and One in Three.  But I fear that this shallow and inaccurate way we speak of the Trinity has overwhelmed the mystery.  Yet the creeds do not speak of numbers or in numerical terms.  The creeds are essential, at least in part, because they refuse to make the Holy Trinity into a math problem with a mathematical solution.

The Nicene tradition expresses the mystery of the Trinity but without the math.  Its language is not in numbers but in terms of origin.  So we confess the Son begotten, the Spirit proceeding, the Father without any origin at all.  The reality is that saying God is “three in one” or "one in three" actually says nothing at all about the Trinity.  So all the ordinary metaphors are false because they begin and end with the math -- water as vapor, liquid, or solid or the three clover leaves.  We like the math.  Equations are solvable.  The goal of the Trinity is the make comprehensible the incomprehensible, to break down to size the larger puzzle of who God is so that we can understand Him, approach Him as more equals than creatures, and meet Him on the ground of reason.  But that is the problem.  God is mystery -- known only how and in so far as He reveals Himself.  The creed admits this.  Indeed, the Athanasian Creed makes it plain.  There we talk more about who God is not than who God is.  But none of us really cares for such a creed.

The soft underbelly of Protestantism and Evangelicalism is the desire and, could we say insistence, to forsake the creedal statements in favor of systematic statements about who God is.  When we make God a puzzle, we presume that puzzle is solvable.  When we begin to find words about who God is, we presume that you can reduce God to words.  When we begin to turn the Trinity into a math problem, we presume that we can come up with the answer and theology becomes simply showing our homework.  Though some would lump Lutherans in on this, I suspect that the problem with Lutheranism to the rest of Christianity is that we are not systematicians but exegetical theologians, theologians of the Word in which grand explanations are cast aside for the paradoxes that form much of the Lutheran vocabulary.  It is satisfying to no one and probably not even to Lutherans but when we simply accept the Scriptures and confess the mystery we are closer to the earlier church fathers than anyone else.  Protestants have Calvin and his ilk.  Rome has Aquinas and his kind.  Luther's works are largely exegetical and sermonic.  And most of the time we long for more.

Eternal subordinationism and all the rest of the giant words used to try and define the mystery of God all fall short.  We are, in the end, like blind men feeling along something we have never known before but trying with all earnestness to figure it out, name it, solve it, understand it, and explain it.  If we are smart blind men, we will know enough to simply confess what has been revealed and leave it at that.  God is who He says He is.  It may not add up at all.  It may not fit into any reasonable box.  It may not be explainable to a world looking for simple answers.  If we confess it, however, we will have done all that can be done about the Holy Trinity.  And it will be enough.  Some wax poetic about the day when God will answer all the questions we have of Him.  I have long ago concluded that we are not waiting for the answers but for the questions to go away.  When that day comes, I will rejoice and be glad.  When the questions go away, only God will remain.