Why is God a Trinity

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I understand The Trinity is a mystery but why would God begot the Son and have The Spirit Proceed if Hes complete already?
 
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Fatima-Crusader said:
I understand The Trinity is a mystery but why would begot the Son and have The Spirit Proceed if Hes complete already?
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The Father doesn’t choose to beget the Son or spirate the Spirit. The Trinity is God.

Thomas Aquinas, following Augustine of Hippo, relates the begetting of the Son as God’s intelligible act of Intellect. The Spirit is related to God’s intelligible act of will and loving. God is his intellect, and is his will, and so he begets and wills from and as his essence, and so no new being is made. All of it is his simple essence. And even though his intellect is his will, still there is a non-temporal order by which intellect precedes will. What there is a relational distinction in God where the essence is knowing itself and is being known by itself, loving itself and being loved by itself. It’s actually because of God’s simplicity that we consider these distinct hypostases or “persons,” insofar as each relation is distinct from the other but to which the essence belongs fully.

Aquinas explains this much better than me in his Summa Theologica.

Another answer is that God has revealed himself to us in this way, and so it must be true.
 
So is the Trinity necessary and therefore provable by reason?
 
The Trinity is necessary (it’s not a thing God did or became, it’s what God eternally IS), but it is not rationally derivable without direct revelation. Properly understood, it doesn’t offend reason, however.
 
No. That is defined by the Church. There is a story I heard about a man who thought he could prove it without revelation. The Church refused to receive him into communion while he held that position. PS. This is not a reply to the post directly before this one.
 
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Fatima-Crusader said:
So is the Trinity necessary and therefore provable by reason?
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Without revelation we could not deduce by reason with certainty that God is a Trinity. Since it has been revealed, and we know it is true through faith, we can use reason to better understand the Trinity and the relations as revealed. But we could not use reason to demonstrate it true from scratch.

The Trinity is necessary since God is necessary, but I don’t think it is demonstrable as logically necessary apart from faith.
 
Fatima-Crusader said:
So is the Trinity necessary and therefore provable by reason?
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The Trinity is necessary but is not provable by reason. It is known only because God revealed it.

But once revealed, we then know the Trinity is necessary because God has revealed himself as both Knowledge and Love. That God is Knowledge necessitates the Son. That God is Love necessitates the Holy Spirit.
 
OP. I think a picture can help explain the Trinity a little.

(Please Note: This uploaded content is no longer available.)
 
The Trinity is absolutely necessary. God sent The Son to die for our sins. After Jesus’ ascension the Holy Spirit was necessary to guide us.
 
This is a mystery beyond human ability to understand.
 
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I think a big part of it comes down to who or what God is…Scripture tells us God is love. God is completely self-sufficient…so if God is self-sufficient and God is love, who does God love? God exists as a communion or community of persons who love each other.
 
awesomecatholic said:
The Trinity is absolutely necessary. God sent The Son to die for our sins. After Jesus’ ascension the Holy Spirit was necessary to guide us.
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That is not the reason the Trinity is necessary. Those “tasks” may be necessary for us, but they are not the reason the Trinity is necessary in God’s nature.

The reason the Trinity is necessary is because first of all, God is Knowledge but “before” all created things (and I use “before” in quotes because we cannot adequately explain the eternal in temporal terms) there was only God. Therefore there was only one object of his Knowledge: himself. This knowledge results in an Idea, or Image of God, but since God cannot form an inadequate Image of himself, this Image must be as adequate as God himself, and therefore Infinite. There is only one Infinite, and so this Image must be God himself. But the Image is distinct from the Thinker, and so the Father is the Thinker, the Image is the Son, which is why he is the Logos, the “mind” of God so to speak.

Since the Father and Son are both God, but distinct, they must be distinct Persons, and as such, relate to each other. Now God has also revealed himself as Love, and as such, the Father and Son love each other, and that Love is not inadequate. The Love they share must be equally Infinite as the Father and the Son are Infinite, because if they do not love infinitely, then they love finitely, but since Love is God’s nature (there is no distinction between God and his attributes), this divine Love must itself be infinite, for there is nothing finite in God (otherwise, he will not be God) and since there is only one Infinite, that Love must therefore be God himself. This Love is the Third Person of the Trinity.

The Trinity is therefore necessary not for us, because God’s nature must necessarily result in it. It’s not for our own sake or for future assignments. It’s because God is himself Knowledge and God is himself Love that he must necessarily be Trinitarian by nature.
 
Sorry, but in my view, that picture makes the Trinity more paradoxical, not less. Gd is the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit; but the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are not the same. In other words, they are distinct but not separate. I think in this particular case, a picture is NOT worth a thousand words. We need the thousand words of Aquinas and others; but, most of all, we need faith first.
 
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Aquinas must have been a true Talmudic scholar in the best sense, based on what you report he says here.
 
Where does Scripture say that Gd is love? To Judaism, this limits Gd to only one attribute. Gd is also truth, justice, all-knowing, all-powerful, the essence of all life, and several other things. Gd is infinitely loving, merciful, and compassionate but Gd is not (only) love.
 
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Love has to exist among persons if one is speaking of human love. Here, however, one is talking about Gd, Who is not human. Gd loves His creation: His angels, animals, plants, the universe, and, most of all, His human creation. He need not love Himself.
 
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The trick with trying to prove the Trinity is to show that multiple persons are necessary while at the same time not make God the father look insufficient. The result is best described as a word salad. If there were believed to be five persons of the Godhead the standard God Is/Is Not diagram would look something like this:

The resulting attempted proof would be a bigger bowl of word salad trying to say that because such-and-such is necessary it required a fourth person, then the interaction of the four persons would be the fifth person (or something along those lines). In short, no one knows. It’s ALL speculation.
 
Well, it does say that, but saying God is love is not saying, “God is ONLY love”, or “love is God”. Also, in the DRBO they use a (to my mind) much better word, "charity’. Too often the word ‘love’ is tossed around so it’s nearly meaningless, “I love my kids” "I love this dress’ "I love cat videos’ etc.

John Chapter 4: . . . We are of God. He that knoweth God, heareth us. He that is not of God, heareth us not. By this we know the spirit of truth, and the spirit of error. [7]Dearly beloved, let us love one another, for charity is of God. And every one that loveth, is born of God, and knoweth God. [8] He that loveth not, knoweth not God: for God is charity. [9] By this hath the charity of God appeared towards us, because God hath sent his only begotten Son into the world, that we may live by him. [10] In this is charity: not as though we had loved God, but because he hath first loved us, and sent his Son to be a propitiation for our sins.

[11] My dearest, if God hath so loved us; we also ought to love one another.[12] No man hath seen God at any time. If we love one another, God abideth in us, and his charity is perfected in us. [13] In this we know that we abide in him, and he in us: because he hath given us of his spirit. [14] And we have seen, and do testify, that the Father hath sent his Son to be the Saviour of the world. [15] Whosoever shall confess that Jesus is the Son of God, God abideth in him, and he in God.

[16] And we have known, and have believed the charity, which God hath to us. God is charity: and he that abideth in charity, abideth in God, and God in him. [17] In this is the charity of God perfected with us, that we may have confidence in the day of judgment: because as he is, we also are in this world. . .
 
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