God is unifying love: a personal experience

[Fortinbras Armstrong]

7. Augustine on the Trinity

There is only one God, no others need apply. In affirming the oneness of God, Christians follow the Jewish tradition. As Paul says, there is "one God and Father of all, who is above all and through all and in all." (Ephesians 4:6.) Confession of the one God stands against both the pagan polytheism and Jewish accusations of apostasy from the one and only true God. We worship the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Jews insist — and Christians concur — that Yahweh is not a national god of Israel in the way that other peoples’ deities were. Israel’s God is the one God, the only God of every nation, the malek haolam — "king of the universe," the real God. This unqualified, absolute oneness of God is as basic to Christianity as it is to Judaism and Islam. However, we go farther. We also say that God is Three. This is a major difference between Christianity and the other great monotheistic religions, which declare firmly that God is One Alone.

This Christian insistence on oneness and threeness
worries some people, when they hear that the Father is God and the Son is God, and the Holy Spirit is God, and yet this threesome is not three gods but one God. They wonder how to understand this, especially when it is said that the Trinity works inseparably in everything, and yet an utterance of the Father was heard which was not the Son’s. On the other hand only the Son was born in the flesh and suffered and rose again and ascended; and only the Holy Spirit came as a dove. They want to understand how that utterance from the Father which was only from the Father was caused by the three; how that flesh in which only the Son was born of the virgin was created by the same three; and how that dove in which only the Holy Spirit appeared was formed by the Trinity itself. Otherwise, the Trinity does not work inseparably; but the Father does some things, the Son others, and the Holy Spirit yet others; or if they do some things together and some without each other, then the Trinity is no longer inseparable… People ask us these questions to the point of weariness. (Augustine, De Trinitate, 1.8)

Augustine spends hundreds of pages trying to answer these questions. The best that he can do is "There must be neither confusion or mixing up of the persons, nor any distinction between them as may imply any disparity. If this cannot be grasped by understanding, let it be held by faith, until he shines in our minds who said through the prophet, ‘Unless you believe, you will not understand.’ (Augustine, De Trinitate, 7.12. The quotation at the end is from Isaiah 7 .)

One image that Augustine gives really resonates with me. It is of the Father as Lover, the Son as Beloved, and the Spirit as the Love flowing between the other two.