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I was never good at math. I still struggle. But I am proud to say I have the basics on lockdown. I can tell you with supreme confidence that 1 plus 1 equals 2. You say, “Well done.” Confidently, I walk around, trying not to let my math superiority turn to pride.
Enter the Trinity.
Where 3 equals 1 and 1 equals 3. On a math test, if you say 1 plus 2 equals 1, you will get it wrong every time. Yet in Christian theology, this oddity is absolute truth. Christians from around the world together profess our God is one and our God is three. How can this be? After years of study, I still do not fully know.
The Trinity is one of those Christian doctrines that is a mystery. We can grow in our understanding of it, but we will never fully comprehend how something that is three can be one, and how something that is one can be three.
“In the doctrine of the Trinity,” wrote Herman Bavinck, “beats the heart of the whole revelation of God for the redemption of humanity.”[1]
Theologian and author Michael Horton states helpfully: “The Trinity is not one doctrine among others; rather, the Trinity is our interpretive framework for all Scripture and doctrine. The doctrine of the Trinity—God as one in essence and three in person—shapes and structures Christian faith and practice in every way. Scripture reveals the three persons (Father, Son, and Spirit) as distinct actors in the historical outworking of creation, redemption, the application of salvation, and the consummation.”[2]
Understanding the Trinity more fruitfully will help us walk out our friendships more faithfully.
The Trinity has been explained in less than helpful ways because we are trying in our human minds to use the stuff of this world to describe something supernatural. We are limited in our understanding and limited in the material created by the Trinity out of nothing using only a song.
One of the more popular ways to describe the Trinity is through the imagery of water, ice, and steam. It is often said that water exists in three forms. All are water but in three different expressions. This explanation seems to make sense, yet it commits the ancient heresy of modalism. Modalism is a theological heresy that claims God is a single person who manifests in three modes: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, rather than being three distinct persons. This is significant because, in the right desire to understand and delight in the Trinity, modalism confuses the distinctness of God and the unity of God by separating each member into a unique, yet separately distinct, person.
Every analogy breaks down to some degree, but I believe the best way to understand the Trinity is through friendship. CS Lewis and Tolkien both believed friendship was more than a few friends hanging out and having a few laughs; they believed it was sacred. They thought it was a spiritual act. Lewis explains the nature of friendship in The Four Loves.
“Two friends delight to be joined by a third, and three by a fourth, if only the newcomer is qualified to become a real friend. They can then say, as the blessed souls say in Dante, “Here comes one who will augment our loves.” For in this love, “to divide is not to take away.” Of course, the scarcity of kindred souls—not to mention practical considerations about the size of rooms and the audibility of voices—sets limits to the size of the circle; but within those limits we possess each friend not less but more as the number of those with whom we share that friend increases. In this, friendship exhibits a glorious “nearness by resemblance” to heaven itself, where the very multitude of the blessed (which no man can number) increases the fruition which each has of God.”[3]
Friendship as a Spirtual Act
Here is why I believe friendship is a spiritual act. In true friendship, we model the relationship God has within Himself as much as we can. Friendship is never divided by adding more friends; friends multiply friendship. In the life of the Trinity, God has relationship within Himself, yet in salvation, He invites us into that trinitarian life. Through the Trinity, we experience the fullness of love and acceptance in Christ’s sacrificial love for us. I would argue we experience the trinitarian love God has in the love we have with our friends.
Friendship has fallen out of favor in our time. Lewis says in The Four Loves that, “To the Ancients, friendship seemed the happiest and most fully human of all loves; the crown of life and the school of virtue. The modern world, in comparison, ignores it.”[4] Friendship love has lost ground to romantic love. Because we have minimized friendship love, we struggle to understand the Trinity in our time. Romantic love or erotic love is exclusionary; romantic love should only be shared between two persons in the context of the covenant of marriage. Phileo, or brotherly love, friendship, and love, is inclusive. It becomes more beautiful the more you invite into the whole. It is one thing, yet complex.
For us to understand God’s love for us as His adopted children, we need to understand the love of a parent for a child. To understand God’s love for the church, we need to understand the love of a husband for a wife. To understand the love for the world, we need to understand Agape love. The love only God has for all He has made and all He has said is good. But phileo love is brotherly love, friendship love. Relational love is a love God has within Himself in the Trinity. This is a love in which we are invited into and called to reproduce in the communities God has placed us in.
The Christian life we are called into is an enjoyment of God and the enjoyment of our fellow Christians as brothers and sisters. We are invited into the friendship of God to model friendship to a world that sees God as distant and non-relational. Michael Reeves, in his excellent work Delighting in the Trinity, explains this beautifully.
“What is the Christian life about? Mere behaviour? Or something deeper: enjoying God? And then there’s what our churches are like, our marriages, our relationships, our mission: all are moulded in the deepest way by what we think of God. In the early fourth century, Arius [a priest who taught that Christ was created, not equal with God] went for a pre-cooked God, ready-baked in his mind. Ignoring the way, the truth, and life, he defined God without the Son, and the fallout was catastrophic: without the Son, God cannot truly be a Father; thus, alone, He is not truly love. Thus, He can have no fellowship to share with us, no Son to bring us close, no Spirit through whom we might know Him. Arius was left with a very thin gruel: a life of self-dependent effort under the all-seeing eye of his distant and loveless God.”[5]
Friendship, for many, has become a hobby, an interesting add-on to the daily Christian life. I believe friendship is indispensable for the Christian life. What we think about God shapes our relationship and motivates our actions. If we see ourselves as Arius did — self-dependent — and God as a distant, loveless being, we will reproduce those realities in every relationship we maintain.
Yet if we see God as whole, distinct, and loving in Himself. That we see Him as one and three, who has a loving community within the reality of the Trinity, a community that is not exclusionary but a community God, by His grace, invites us into. It changes our relationships. They are not just people we spend time with; for us, friendship becomes a means of grace to understand the unity and complexity of a God we cannot fully understand, but through the gift of friendship, we can grow in our understanding of the community we are invited into by grace through faith in Christ.
Sam Luce is the Director of ChildDiscipleship.com at Awana. He co-authored Forming Faith, writes at samluce.substack.com, and is a frequent speaker. A former pastor of 28 years, Sam holds an M.A.BTS and a M.A.CCS from Knox Seminary. He is a current doctoral candidate at Western Theological Seminary. He and his wife, Sandra, have four children and live in Upstate New York.
[1] Michael Horton, The Christian Faith: A Systematic Theology for Pilgrims on the Way (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2011), 273.
[2] Toby Kurth and Michael Horton, Pilgrim Theology (Study and Discussion Guide) (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2013), 20.
[3]C. S. Lewis, The Four Loves (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1960).
[4] Ibid
[5] Michael Reeves, Delighting in the Trinity: An Introduction to the Christian Faith (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2012).
