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But why do we as Christians make so much fuss about all this? If we cannot understand it anyway, is it not wiser to drop it as a piece of sterile speculation? Does it really have any theological and religious significance? Is it important for our own personal experience? The answer is Yes. The significance of this doctrine is so great that it is the very foundation of our Christian faith. Why?

• Precisely in this doctrine it becomes clear that God is truly the living God, the God who has life in himself, who is literally full of life. Some of the early church fathers used a remarkable expression. They said: `God is fertile. Within the three-in-one God are all the possibilities of person-to-person communication.

God in no way needed the creation. He was not a lonely

God, who had to make a projection of himself, so as to have an ‘opposite’. The doctrine of the trinity is the end of all pantheism. If, in the depth of his own being, God is three-in-one, he does not need this world in order to come to his full potential. As Emil Brunner put it: ‘Only if, in himself, from all eternity, God is the loving One, no world is needed for him to be the loving One.’

• The doctrine of the trinity is also of great importance for a proper understanding of the doctrine of creation. Brunner again: ‘The world as creation is the work of his love.’ The idea of God does not need the world to make it complete. Athanasius told us long ago that, because God is ‘fertile’ and can communicate himself inwardly, he is also able to communicate himself outwardly. But this inward self-communication does not require the outward, since there is already communication within the Godhead. Through his Son, God freely reached out to create a world. What he made was something other than himself, but he is its foundation and he is its aim.
• This belief in the trinity is equally essential for the doctrine of revelation; in fact it is the basis for all revelation. In the revelation of the Father in the Son through the Spirit, we not only receive some external information about God, but we have the guarantee that God himself is speaking to us and opening his divine heart to us. Revelation is really and fully self-revelation.
• But above all the doctrine of the trinity is of importance for our salvation. It is the answer to the question whether or not our salvation is really God’s work. In the final analysis this is the reason why the church is so vitally interested in the divinity of Jesus Christ and of the Holy Spirit. The vital question to ask about the nature of Jesus Christ is this: In Jesus, do we really meet with God himself?

The same vital question is at stake in the doctrine of the Holy Spirit. Athanasius wrote: ‘If the Holy Spirit were a creature, we would have no fellowship with God in him; in that case we would be alien to the divine nature, so that we in no sense would have fellowship with it.’

None of this is bald theory. It is echoed in a Christian’s personal experience. The believer knows by experience that he is a child of the Father, that he is redeemed by the Son and that the Holy Spirit is in his life. And he also knows that in all three relationships he has to do with the one and same God.

It is, as it were, a constant moving to and fro: from the Father through the Son to the Holy Spirit in our life, and then again from the Holy Spirit in our life through the Son to the Father. True, we do not always experience this threefoldness as unity. Often the threefoldness in the relationship is more to the fore in our experience than the unity. And yet there is the experience of unity too, especially as the Spirit dwells in us, for in and through the Spirit,

Jesus Christ himself is present with us, and in and through Jesus we have fellowship with God the Father.

In spite of this experience, however, it remains a fact that we cannot understand the mystery of the Trinity, let alone take it in. It is far beyond our human thinking. We can only end where we started: by worshipping God the three-inone. In fact, this was and is the whole reason why the church tries to penetrate this mystery: that we may worship God as he really is; bring him praise, not only for what he has done for us, but above all for what he is in himself. In his worship, the believer will adore God for his incomprehensible greatness and glory.

The Athanasian Creed, the most theological of all ancient creeds, begins with these words: ‘And the Catholic faith is this: That we worship one God in Trinity, and Trinity in Unity.’ And at the end of the first section it repeats it emphatically: ‘So that in all things as aforesaid, the Unity in Trinity, and the Trinity in Unity is to be worshipped.’ This is indeed what the church has done throughout all the centuries of its existence and what it still is doing all over the world. In adoration Christians bow down and sing together:

Holy, holy, holy, Lord God almighty,

All thy works shall praise thy name, in earth and sky and sea;

Holy, holy, holy, merciful and mighty;

God in three persons, blessed Trinity.

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