The Trinity: Jesus, Human and/or Divine

Yahweh, he shall be what he shall be — Father, Spirit, and Son. The God who sees me, the God who knows me, and the God who saves me. This is a statement I’ve returned to often, almost like a breath prayer or a whispered benediction. And yet, is it so simple?

What I mean is, can we come away from this declaration with something more than a theological diagram or creedal assertion? Can the mystery of the Trinity, that ancient and strange harmony, inform the way we move through the world today? Or is it only a doctrine to be revered from afar, cordoned off in our minds with other theological curiosities?

Some would say, and I tend to agree, that a proper understanding of the Trinity is not a luxury but a necessity. That to misunderstand the Trinity is to misread the Gospel. The story of redemption, incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection only makes sense when God is understood as a communion of love, one essence, three persons.

Karl Barth would call the Trinity not just A doctrine of God but THE doctrine of God, the grammar through which all theology must speak. In his book, Church Dogmatics, Barth insists that we do not come to know God by speculative reasoning, but by God's own self-revelation, which is always triune: the Revealer (Father), the Revelation (Son), and the Revealedness (Spirit).1 It’s not an abstract structure, but a living form, a divine encounter.

Whoa, this is not as easy as the felt boards in Sunday School made it seem! The concept of three-in-oneness is a difficult paradox to grasp, let alone to visualize. In graduate school, I remember once seeing a children’s curriculum describe the Trinity as “Iike water: solid, liquid, and gas,” and while it was a novel attempt, I knew that wasn’t quite right, even for an 8-year-old.

The Trinity seems to resist simplification.

And yet we try. We reach for metaphors, analogies, and formulas. We repeat the old creeds, “God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God.” We try to define the Trinity, to label it, put it in a box, and on the shelf, categorized and placed. But since when do we do this to our other relationships? What is it to know your neighbor, spouse, or best friend? What is it to know the living and Triune God?

So, how might we draw closer?

Maybe not in abstraction but in a story. Yes, even the story of Jesus.

God, the Father.

Jesus, his Son and our Savior.
The Holy Spirit, their gift to us — the presence, the witness, the breath of God.

As we look more fully at the Trinity, our eyes are inevitably drawn to Jesus and his humanness amidst his divinity. In the person of Christ, we encounter the collision of heaven and earth, infinity and finitude, spirit and dust. It’s here that the questions become more intimate. If Jesus is God, and Jesus became human, what does that mean for our humanity?

Lewis and Demarest, among others, identify differing perspectives on how Christ’s divinity and humanity coexist. I want to focus here on the Reformers’ position, which has come to shape much of modern evangelical thought. The Reformers saw Christ’s identity through a two-fold lens: fully God and fully man, not confused, not divided, but conjoined in the person of Jesus. This view, rooted in Chalcedonian Christology, emphasizes the integrity of both natures, divine and human, united in one person without blending or loss.

What does this mean? It means Jesus wept. It means Jesus experienced thirst. It means Jesus felt the sting of betrayal, the weight of sleep, and the discomfort of suffering. It means he laughed, feasted, walked dusty roads, and died a very real and painful death. And it means, astonishingly, that this same Jesus is also the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of God’s nature (Hebrews 1:3).

Frederick Buechner put it this way: “Jesus is the face of God the way the sun is the face of the sky.”2 In Jesus, we are not left guessing what God is like. We are given flesh and blood. And it is this embodied presence — not a disembodied ideal — that becomes the very means of our salvation.

From Creed to Practice: The Trinity in Everyday Life

The practical implications of this perspective come to life in this week’s lectionary reading. In 2 Corinthians 13:14, Paul closes his letter with a blessing — one that many of us have heard spoken over us more times than we can count:

“The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all.”

Three persons. Three verbs. Three postures.

Each of these verbs becomes an invitation, a template. They allow us to understand not only who God is, but also how we might live in response. Grace, love, and fellowship are not abstract ideas. They are relational verbs — they move us.

Walter Brueggemann reminds us that the identity of God is never abstract in the Hebrew imagination; it is always tied to action. In his book, Theology of the Old Testament, he writes, “Yahweh’s character is known only through Yahweh’s performance.”3 The same applies to the Triune God: we know the Trinity not because we can map it out, but because we have been caught up in its movement.

Paul echoes this in Ephesians 2:

This isn’t just theological scaffolding. It’s spiritual formation. It’s the shaping of our lives by the relational reality of God.

A God Who Sees, Knows, and Saves

In the end, the mystery remains. We do not explain the Trinity; we are invited into it. Father, Son, and Spirit, a unity of love, overflowing. Not a hierarchy, not a division of labor, not a math problem to solve. But a divine communion, drawing all creation back to itself.

C.S. Lewis once described this as a kind of dance, the perichoresis4 of the Godhead, each person pouring themselves out into the other, eternally giving, eternally receiving. In Mere Christianity, he writes, “God is not a static thing, not even a person, but a dynamic, pulsating activity, a life, almost a kind of drama. Almost, if you will not think me irreverent, a kind of dance.”5

And as G.K. Chesterton so often reminds us, paradox is not the enemy of faith, but its deepest language. “Christianity got over the difficulty of combining furious opposites by keeping them both and keeping them both furious.”6

The Trinity is a great Christian paradox, and in this tension, is where the beauty lives.

And so we walk into a broken world, carrying grace, receiving love, and participating in fellowship. Knowing that God is not far off. God is near.

The God who sees us. The God who knows us. The God who saves us.

Amen.

  1. Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics I/1: The Doctrine of the Word of God, trans. G. W. Bromiley (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1936), 301–305.
  2. Frederick Buechner, The Faces of Jesus (San Francisco: HarperOne, 2005), 12.
  3. Walter Brueggemann, Theology of the Old Testament: Testimony, Dispute, Advocacy (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1997), 118.
  4. Perichoresis, a theological term originating from Greek, describes the mutual indwelling and interpenetration of the three persons of the Trinity (Father, Son, and Holy Spirit). It signifies that each person of the Trinity fully exists within the others, without confusion or loss of individual identity. This concept emphasizes the unity and relationality within the Godhead.
  5. C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (New York: HarperOne, 2001), 152.
  6. G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (New York: John Lane, 1908), 151.