God in Three Persons, not Three Personalities

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No one will “solve” the doctrine of the Trinity, as if it is a maths theorem waiting for a “genius solution”. It clearly defies and transcends the human imagination. Anyone who tries to re-define the terms with which we explain the doctrine of the Trinity is already on precarious ground, trying to re-invent what centuries of theological debate have settled upon. It is likely that we will not improve on the Athanasian Creed in terms of affirmations and denials, though we will continue to wrestle with what all those affirmations and denials mean.

One clarification may help; or perhaps, it will simply add more contours to the mystery. It is the notion that when it comes to Trinitarian terms, we should not give an identical meaning to the two terms person and personality.

Usually these terms are almost synonymous. A human person is distinct from another partly by his or her personality: a set of traits, a combination of temperament, preferences, intellect and nature. A person and his personality are inseparable.

In God, we have three persons. There are three in God who can say “I”; three who can say “You” of another in the Godhead. There is, contra some Thomists, some kind of mutuality in the Trinity. Ascribing the prayer of John 17 to a purely Incarnational application seems to defy the very words used (“before the world was”). Even if texts like Psalm 2 and Psalm 110 describe God’s speech to the Messiah; it is beside the point, for they are speeches made before the Incarnation, and qualify as intra-trinitarian mutualism. Father, Son, and Holy Spirit truly love each other.

But this mutualism must be qualified, so that we preserve genuine monotheism, and not in a merely say-so manner. To speak of the Three as if they are three personalities, begins to head to, if not cross over into, tritheism.

My suggestion is that our modern concept of personality corresponds with what theologians describe as God’s nature, essence, or being. The attributes and “character” of God are, in the most infinite and transcendent sense, God’s personality. And to be true to trinitarian doctrine, there can be only one personality in God.

The Three Persons then, differ from our concepts of personhood in that they each fully partake in and express the one personality of God. In God, there are not distinct personalities, who can be distinguished by temperament, disposition, attitude or other “personal” characteristics. That would truly be three beings, and therefore a council of three gods. No, the only distinction between the three “I’s” is that one is God as Sender, one is God as Sent and Sender, and one is God as Sent. One is God as Begetter, one is God as Begotten, one is God as Proceeding. But each of the three is identical in personality.

This is exactly why Jesus could say that whomever had seen Him had seen the Father. It explains why the promised Helper would truly be “another Jesus”. For Jesus reveals the Father, and the Spirit reveals Jesus, and this could only make sense if they are identical in personality.

Now, this by no means removes the mystery of how this is the case. The mutual indwelling of the Persons in each other is the most explicit biblical explanation of how three Persons can share one personality. But again, we have no experience of, and no conception of, a three-personed personality. We must take this on faith.

At least this suggestion perhaps helps us see more clearly what we mean by saying God is one being. Often that “one being” or “essence” becomes an amorphous abstraction, a kind of divine impersonal ether in which we imagine dwell three distinct personalities. For others, the “being” of God is a fourth combined instantiation of God, almost producing a quaternity. These do not do justice to what we mean by one God.

Instead, we should think of the essence of God as the one personality of God, and yet expressed three times over. Each Person fully indwells the other, expressing the one personality of God to each other as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.