Is God a Community?

Falling down a trinitarian rabbit hole

Photo by Tofin Creations on Unsplash

(A ten-minute read.)

I have to give you a warning: my reflections this week are the result of me falling down a theological rabbit hole over the last seven days, easily leading to the most research I’ve done for a single post (outside of my normal academic research, of course).

As such, it’s a bit of a wild, trinitarian goose chase, and may be a little more theologically dense than my normal reflections.

But to keep things straight, you can keep this question in mind: is God fundamentally a community—made up of three distinct persons who comprise a relational unit?

The goose chase started as I was innocently reading A Generous Orthodoxy by Brian McLaren, which my friend Tom gave me a few weeks ago. I had referred to this book a few months back in a previous post, admitting that I hadn’t read it before. So Tom decided he wanted to read it and then sent it along to me.

In the first chapter, McLaren explains how he’s learned so much from various stripes of Christianity, and then referred specifically to what he’s learned from the Eastern Orthodox tradition.

From them, he came to appreciate something called perichoresis, which is a Greek word that describes how the three members of the Trinity relate to one another in their oneness and threeness.

In McLaren’s telling, perichoresis is this sort of “divine dance,” wherein Father, Son, and Spirit live in an eternal waltz, forever in step with one another and inviting the universe into that dance.

Using very captivating prose, McLaren brings home the point:

I learned that the early church leaders described the Trinity using the term perichoresis (peri—circle, choresis—dance): the Trinity was an eternal dance of Father, Son, and Spirit sharing mutual love, honor, happiness, joy, and respect. Against this backdrop, God’s act of creation means that God is inviting more and more beings into the eternal dance of joy. Sin means that people are stepping out of the dance, corrupting its beauty and rhythm, crashing and tackling, and stomping on feet instead of moving with grace, rhythm, and reverence. Then, in Jesus, God enters creation to restore the rhythm and beauty again.

Such a beautiful picture captivated my imagination as I read it and convinced me to riff on the idea of perichoresis for my piece this week.

The problem is, such a picture seems to be both historically and etymologically dubious.

Wanting to do more research on the concept, I started reading all I could—both from contemporary and historic writers. And not only is the idea that choresis means “dance” largely rejected by contemporary scholars, it seems that the “Church Fathers” who first employed the term perichoresis were less interested in painting a beautiful theological picture than in trying to solve a deep philosophical question about how God could be both one and three.

The whole idea of perichoresis is an interesting one, and worthy of its own reflections, but it’s not where my goose chase ended. Far from it.

Instead, exploring the world of perichoresis ultimately led me down a hall into another room, where I’ve been camping out ever since.

The room?

Social trinitarianism—a concept that I’ve always taken for granted but have just recently become aware is rejected by many, many Christian thinkers.

What’s social trinitarianism?

There are many different explanations and versions of the concept (some prefer the term “relational trinitarianism,” for example)—but for my purposes, I’d say, at the very least, social trinitarianism affirms that the single God of the Bible is comprised of three different persons who all have their own distinct personalities.

Even more poignantly (and controversially), Father, Son, and Spirit are all one being, but they each have their own reason, will, and self-consciousness.

Simply put, while using the terms “Father,” “Son,” and “Spirit” need not necessarily imply a sort of hierarchy among the Trinity, they at least point to the idea that the godhead is in fact made up of three separate persons who have their own unique agency and will.

For some people, this may seem like an obvious understanding of the Trinity. They’ve always just assumed that when people refer to the Father, Son, and Spirit, that these three persons are, well, persons—each possessing their own personhood and center of consciousness.

This is certainly where I have been and still am, viewing it as obvious and self-evident.

So it came as a shock to discover that many Christian thinkers maintain that such an understanding of the godhead is not only a rejection of the classic orthodox articulation of the Trinity, but that it’s really only the unsophisticated and/or liberal Christians who subscribe to such a view.

Indeed, contemporary theologians have set up a dichotomy between the so-called “classical” view of the Trinity and the “social” view of the Trinity.

While the social view proposes that the one God has three distinct personalities with three separate wills and centers of consciousness, the so-called “classical” view, which has allegedly been standard orthodoxy since the fourth century, insists that there are indeed three different persons in the godhead—but these three persons have one will, one center of consciousness, and one center of reason.

In other words, when classical theologians say that God is one being made up of three “persons,” they don’t define “person” in this instance the same way we would define “person” when referring to a human being—as someone who has her or his own separate consciousness, will, and reasoning faculties.

This God-made-up-of-three-persons really has only one will and consciousness (and, therefore, these three persons, simply put, all think the same exact thoughts).

In fact, many classical theologians would insist that social trinitarianism isn’t truly trinitarianism at all. It’s instead tritheism (the belief in three distinct gods)—and, as such, is heretical.

Classical theologians claim, of course, that their views are firmly founded on the Bible, and were considered standard orthodoxy throughout the history of Christianity. It’s only been since the last half of the twentieth century that the social view of the Trinity developed, promoted largely by liberal theologians who were trying to leverage this novel idea of the godhead for particular political (read: socialist) ends.

As such, social trinitarianism was a foreign concept, imported into the Bible as a means to ultimately export it out into the world in the service of a specific political agenda.

So what are we to make of these claims? And how should we understand the Trinity?

Let me share a few brief reflections.

God, the eternal Lover

First of all, let me be clear: this is not my area of academic expertise. Though questions about the Trinity do broadly intersect with my research focus (many nineteenth-century anti-creedalists were especially troubled by the early Christian creeds, which were mostly focused on the Trinity and the nature of the godhead), I’m swimming in somewhat unfamiliar waters.

This reality is probably nowhere more evident than my “naïve” belief that the Bible does present the members of the godhead in a way that denotes separate centers of consciousness and intelligence.

In other words, this is one of those instances where I believe we should largely take the Bible at “face value” and embrace the “plain meaning” of the text (which is something I often feel a little unsettled about doing).

Thus, when the Gospel writers repeatedly quote Jesus as referring to “My Father” (e.g., Matthew 10:32; 26:39; Luke 10:22; 22:29; John 5:17; 8:19; etc.), it seems to me that the obvious way to understand such a dynamic is to conclude that Jesus and the “Father” are two distinct individuals, with two separate personalities and centers of consciousness.

Jesus is thus not referring to, or speaking to, himself back in heaven.

There’s truly, as theologians talk about, an “I-Thou” relationship when it comes to the godhead, where Jesus is an “I” and the Father is a “Thou” in some way that has some correspondence to reality.

I’m aware, of course, that Christian thinkers have spent the last two thousand years working through these types of issues and have come up with lots of different perspectives and explanations (in this instance, classical theologians make a distinction between the “economic Trinity,” which is the way the godhead operates in relation to the world, and the “immanent Trinity,” which is the way the Trinity operates apart from the world).

I’m also aware, and fully agree, that there’s quite a bit of mystery when it comes to the inner workings and reality of God (what is called “ontology”), and we should recognize that our minds can barely scratch the surface—if even that—when it comes to how we understand God.

But we do have Scripture, through which Christians have historically said God has presented humanity with a self-disclosure, wherein he employs human language to help us understand something about himself (even if it’s not anywhere close to everything about himself).

And that Scripture, while certainly maintaining that there is only one God, seems to promote the idea that this one God is comprised of three distinct persons who have separate personalities and consciousnesses.

So what?

But why all the fuss?

Why do I think this discussion matters?

Perhaps not surprisingly, I think the topic is so important because I believe, fundamentally, that God is love—and that everything flows from this reality.

And apart from social trinitarianism, I just don’t see how saying “God is love” makes any rational or emotional sense.

I know I’m not the first person to make this point, of course, and classical trinitarians would have plenty of ways to rebut my concerns. But I’ve yet to find any rebuttals that are truly satisfying.

When Jesus thus prayed to the Father in John 17 that “You loved Me before the foundation of the world” (v. 24), that’s a huge statement that has incredible theological content. It also gives us a framework for understanding love, wherein love truly requires an “I” and a “Thou.”

Notice: “You loved Me.” There’s a “You” and a “Me” in that statement. There’s a love-relationship between two distinct persons who are separate from one another. And absent a real “I-Thou” dynamic, I have a hard time understanding how love could truly exist at the center of God’s eternal reality.

Indeed, the statement would have to be interpreted really as “I loved Me,” which doesn’t sound like love at all.

(And for those who would want to interpret this in “economic” rather than “immanent” terms, the fact that Christ points to the idea that God loved him before the foundation of the world—that is, before and apart from creation—forecloses such a reading.)

Again, I realize our minds are limited and logic can only take us so far—and we need to be careful in the vocabulary we use.

But in order for the idea that “God is love” to have any intelligible content, and for that love to have existed as long as God has existed, I’d submit this fundamentally implies that God is indeed one being comprised of three distinct persons who all have separate centers of consciousness.

Anything short of this renders “love” vacuous—and, beyond that, calls into question any invitation for us to love as God loves.

So the bottom line—in returning to my first question about whether God is a community: I’d say, resoundingly yes. God is fundamentally a community of three eternal persons, all making up one single divine being, who nevertheless have their own centers of consciousness and will.

And this is entirely necessary for God to truly be love (in any way that approximates how we understand love—based on God’s self-revelation in the Bible and through the life and death of Christ).

This does, of course, have tremendous implications for how we order ourselves as societies and religious communities—but those are topics for another day.

Until then, even if this makes me a heretic in some people’s eyes, I will continue to fully affirm social trinitarianism, wherein God is truly comprised of three distinct persons, fully capable of eternally loving one another in a way that is intelligible and reflects reality.

*For those interested in doing further reading on this topic, I’d recommend a few resources. The first is Two Views on the Doctrine of the Trinity, published by Zondervan, wherein two theologians advocate for the so-called “classical” view of the Trinity, and two advocate for the “social” view of the Trinity. The second is a book by my friend, John Peckham, entitled, Divine Attributes: Knowing the Covenantal God of Scripture, in which he promotes a social understanding of the Trinity.

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Shawn is a pastor in Maine, whose life, ministry, and writing focus on incarnational expressions of faith. The author of four books and a columnist for Adventist Review, he is also a DPhil (PhD) candidate at the University of Oxford, focusing on nineteenth-century American Christianity. You can follow him on Instagram, and listen to his podcast Mission Lab.