Holy Trinity Sunday - personal reflections, questions, thoughts

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Beryllos

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As the title hints, this Sunday is the Solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity, and this is a space for your own thoughts, reflections, connections, and anecdotes about the Holy Trinity, and questions too. We love questions!

Keep it charitable. We’re likely to see stuff that wanders outside of Church teaching, e.g., Arianism and modalism, but we don’t have to take every opportunity to denounce it as heresy. Therefore do not dwell on error but shine a light on the truth:
“It is one thing to show a man that he is in error, and another to put him in possession of truth.”
— John Locke
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I will open the discussion with a problem that’s been vexing me today, and a question:

I understand the Trinity in terms of the relation of each divine person to man. The Father created man, and loves and sustains each of us. The Son became a man, triumphed over death, and opened for us the gates of heaven. The Holy Spirit sanctifies us, starting at Baptism, and continues to give us grace and guide us.

Here’s the problem: This understanding of the persons of the Trinity is totally dependent on the existence of man. However, the Holy Trinity is eternal, and, as God neither needs nor lacks anything, the Holy Trinity should be self-consistent.

And so the question: How can we understand the Holy Trinity without reference to man? Can we envision the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit existing by themselves if there were no creation to create, redeem, or sanctify?
 
Beryllos said:
And so the question: How can we understand the Holy Trinity without reference to man? Can we envision the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit existing by themselves if there were no creation to create, redeem, or sanctify?
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Absolutely. God is a Trinity because his nature demands that he be. Man is not needed to be in the picture at all.

Because God is Knowledge itself, he must necessarily have an object of his knowledge, and without Creation, the only object of the divine Knowledge is himself. God therefore forms an Idea of himself, and because it is impossible for God to have an inadequate Idea of himself, then God’s Idea of himself must be absolutely perfect, and therefore Infinite. This Idea must therefore be God himself, as there is only one Infinite and Perfect and Personal. This Idea is the Logos, the Second Person of the Trinity.

Because God’s Nature is also Love, the Father and the Son must necessarily love each other, and it is impossible for the divine Love to be anything less and infinite and perfect, this Love must also necessarily be God, and therefore Personal as well. This is the Third Person of the Trinity.

As for your comment on calling out heresy, I disagree. Calling out heresy is an absolute essential method of teaching whenever the Trinity is discussed because just as it is important to know what God is, it is just as important to know what God is not.
 
TheMortenBay said:
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porthos11:
Man is not needed to be in the picture at all.
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Well “needed” is pretty irrelevant, seeing ad God created us out of love and we are here, isn’t it?
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Man is not needed for God to be Trinity, as per the OP’s dilemma.
 
Just a thought.

Perhaps humans being created as they are is the result of the nature of the God head being Trinitarian in nature.

Thus, humanity as it exists is an effect, rather than a cause.

If the nature of the God head were different, the “humans”, if created would be different, but still consistent with God’s nature.
 
porthos11 said:
Because God’s Nature is also Love, the Father and the Son must necessarily love each other
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Could the greatest commandments describe the Trinity?

God the Father loves all that he is and all that he does with all his heart, soul, mind and strength. God the Father loves God the Son as he loves himself.
God the Son loves the Father as he loves himself.
Could the Holy Spirit be the power that puts this love into action?

Could there be any greater love?

Just a thought.
 
My priest at the Vigil Mass tonight said Trinity Sunday is probably the liturgical day of the year when the most heresies are preached since noone can really grasp it.
Then he went to say that story of Saint Augustine and that child with the shell on the beach.
I’ve always loved that story.
 
StephieNorthCo said:
Just a thought.

Perhaps humans being created as they are is the result of the nature of the God head being Trinitarian in nature.
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Yes, the Trinitarian God by its very essence is personal and loving, and it makes sense that a personal and loving God would create more persons and more love.
 
This is a quote from Brant Pitre’s series of talks The Mass Reading Explained Year C for Trinity Sunday:
“It really is a divine mystery that God has revealed to us, that’s central because it tells us not just what God has done (like all the other mysteries of faith: the Passion, the mystery of Eucharist, the mystery of our redemption; these are things that God has done, either in the order of creation or in the order of redemption), but the mystery of the Trinity tells us who God is from all eternity. And because Christianity is about entering into a relationship (a covenant) with this triune God, the Trinity stands at the very center.”
(The bold is my addition.)
 
Eric_Hyom said:
Could there be any greater love?
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There is no greater love. The priest in his Homily today described the love of the Trinity as total and infinite giving of self and receiving of the other at every moment and everywhere throughout eternity. This is beyond human comprehension, of course, but it is the love that God calls us to share in heaven, not only to receive but to give that love, with God and with one another.
 
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Magnificat monthly prayer book has a perfect meditation by Monsignor Knox for today. I am not sure I have liberty to share here.
 
For Father’s Day this year I got a book by Michael Gaitley, MIC, The One Thing Is Three: How the Most Holy Trinity Explains Everything (Marian Press, 2013). Based on other books by Gaitley this should be an interesting study to read.
 
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Jesus tells us to be like the ‘Trinity’.

Gospel John 17:20-26

Lifting up his eyes to heaven, Jesus prayed saying:
“Holy Father, I pray not only for them,
but also for those who will believe in me through their word,
so that they may all be one,
as you, Father, are in me and I in you,
that they also may be in us,
that the world may believe that you sent me.
And I have given them the glory you gave me,
so that they may be one, as we are one,
I in them and you in me,
that they may be brought to perfection as one,
that the world may know that you sent me,
and that you loved them even as you loved me.
Father, they are your gift to me.
I wish that where I am they also may be with me,
that they may see my glory that you gave me,
because you loved me before the foundation of the world.
Righteous Father, the world also does not know you,
but I know you, and they know that you sent me.
I made known to them your name and I will make it known,
that the love with which you loved me
may be in them and I in them.”
 
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