After millennia of having it hammered into humanity’s heads that God is One, we found out God is a Trinity. In order to get us saved from sin and death, that fact came out. Not accidentally or unintentionally; God isn’t embarrassed by who he is. But God knew all the controversy that’d crop up as a result of us knowing this about him.
Remember, God’s emphasis is on his oneness. Not his threeness. We get fixated on his threeness—’cause it’s so weird. (And if you really want to bend your brain, bear in mind that we only know of three persons. For all we know, God is a lot more. He could be way more complex than we can imagine. But the scriptures only reveal three; let’s stick to three. That’s about all the revelation we can handle for now.)
God’s unified will.
Sometimes Christians teach, or we get this mindset, that we can pit one of the persons of the Trinity against another. Kinda like how kids tend to play Mom off Dad from time to time in order to get their way. Largely this comes from the scriptures’ explanations of how Jesus is our high priest or our advocate to the Father. Supposedly the Father is pissed at us over sin, but Jesus talked him down, and got him to forgive us.
This is an interesting metaphor, but it makes God look schizophrenic. Yes, Jesus is our advocate. But the Father is a totally biased judge. Yes, Jesus had to take care of our sin problem, but that’s because the Father wanted him to take care of our sin problem. Salvation wasn’t Jesus’s idea, where he had to talk the Father into it. Salvation is the Father’s idea. All three persons of the Trinity are on board. They’re One.
We aren’t ever talking about three guys who do their own thing, and accommodate one another’s differences. We’re talking about three persons who do the same thing, and share attitudes and opinions and motive: Love. Jesus may have his own will, but he absolutely submits it to the Father’s will. He does only what he sees the Father do, and only wants to do what the Father does.
From the scriptures, this doesn’t appear to be a consensus, as if the persons of the Trinity sat down and voted on it, and Jesus had to be talked into dying for us. Jesus is petty clear he does the Father’s will, not in opposition to his own will, or contrary to it, or by suppressing what he wants to do. He lives to do his Father’s will. As far as Christ is concerned, we should all want to do the Father’s will. The idea is this: We live in Christ; Christ is in the Father; so we all do God’s will together. Simple. It’s the only way to live.
The Holy Spirit has the same attitude as Jesus. He was sent by the Father, and reiterates Jesus’s teachings. Not because he bends his will to the Father, but because he wants to do the Father’s will. He has the same motives as the Father.
A hierarchy in the Trinity?
Humans are into hierarchies. (We like to know our place in ’em.) So, theologians often construct some kind of hierarchy to the Trinity: We set the Father in charge, with Jesus like his vice-chairman, and the Holy Spirit like his CEO. The theological term for this—no foolin’—is the economic Trinity, because it describes the Trinity in terms of their jobs.
Okay. There’s nothing wrong with this idea per se. But the problem, again, is that we Christians get it in our heads we can work this system, and manipulate the hierarchy: The Father is higher up on the food chain, and therefore farther away from our level than Jesus, so we gotta work through the lower guys in order to influence the boss. Or, because the Father seems to be the boss, he’s the guy we gotta go to in order to get anything done around here, so we pray to him instead of the Son or the Spirit.
Ideas like this slip into Christianity on a regular basis, and they’re all crap. Jesus demonstrated that service isn’t a sign of weakness and lowness, but strength and greatness. We look at hierarchies because we want to know who’s in charge, and leapfrog the underlings. But any hierarchy we perceive in the Trinity is, for our purposes, irrelevant. The persons in God don’t undermine one another, don’t presume upon one another, don’t manipulate one another, don’t have ulterior motives. Functionally, it doesn’t matter which person we go through: Each person of the Trinity is God, and God is in charge.
The reason Jesus emphasized his obedience to the Father isn’t because of hierarchy. It’s because Jesus is also human. As human, he’s our example. By being under the Father’s will, he demonstrated how we’re likewise to live under the Father’s will. His subservience isn’t a key to how the Trinity works, and with this key we can unlock the secrets of grabbing hold of the Father and shaking him down. It’s the key to how we’re supposed to work, as daughters and sons of the Father.
Functional monotheism.
Different Christian traditions like to focus on one person or another of the Trinity. As Christians, of course we’re all fond of Jesus. Pentecostals like to emphasize the acts and person of the Holy Spirit; so much so we don’t talk about the other persons as much. Other churches (namely one in particular I used to belong to) emphasize the Father, because like Jesus they want us to think of him as our Father. Which he is.
But the more we fixate on God’s threeness, the more astray we go. We start to develop these mistaken ideas about one person being more important than the others. Or one person, like the Holy Spirit, being the only one deal with; or another, like Jesus, having the only name we work through. Or, as I mentioned above, negotiating with the Son over and against the Father.
Instead of dealing with the paradox, we start to slide into tritheism.
Remember, we’re trying to hold up both ends of the paradox. If we’re going to make mistakes, better to lean in the direction of God’s Oneness. After all, that’s what he emphasized. We’re monotheists; there’s only one God. He’s complicated, but he’s One. So if anything, cling to the monotheism.