[Cal]

Drake, Lee did indeed focus on the economical side of the Trinity. In fact he said the reason God was triune was for his economy. Now that that's an ontological mouthful when you think about it.

At the risk of tooting my own horn, here is part of something I've been working on:


The Trinity—God’s Relationship with Himself

The Bible reveals a fascinating and baffling fact about God—that he is triune. Triune simply means three-one. God is revealed in the Bible to be three Persons—the Father, Son and Holy Spirit—while remaining one God. This is a difficult concept for all of us. The Triune God, or Trinity, is such a challenging idea that many Christians just choose to downplay it. Yet an appreciation of the Trinity greatly enriches our relationship with God.

The Persons of the Trinity are more than roles the one God plays or hats he wears. Each is eternal, co-existing, and has a relationship with the other, and each is fully God. The relationship between the Father and the Son is shown to be a full-blown personal love relationship of two conscious beings. Yet there are not three Gods, there is only one. So how can God be three Persons, yet remain one God, and what does that mean?

The Bible doesn’t explain the Trinity; it simply presents it as a reality. In the Trinity the three are shown to have certain roles—the Father conceives, the Son reflects, and the Spirit communicates. The Father is the source of God, the Son is the expression of God, and the Spirit is the reality or experience of God.

But how can one be three, and vice versa? Here’s one way of looking at it. Every self-conscious being has three unavoidable aspects of consciousness—what it is, what it thinks it is, and the relationship between the two. God has these aspects as well. God the Father can be viewed as God in himself, God the Son as God’s idea of himself, and God the Spirit as the relationship between the two.

Human beings also have a self, a self-image and the relationship between the two. But we are not perfect, and our self-knowledge is neither complete nor perfect, thus our self-images are not perfect, and so our relationships with ourselves are incomplete and rocky. But God’s self-knowledge is perfect, as is his self-image. He has no problems with himself, there is nothing about himself that he doesn’t know, accept and love. So his relationship with himself is also perfect. This relationship is the essence of God, the Holy Spirit.

God the Son is God’s idea of himself, and since God’s idea of himself is perfect and without error, the Son is the absolute perfect image of God, even to the point of being a person unto himself. The Father and the Son have a perfect relationship, a flow of love and light between each other, which is just the Holy Spirit. The Spirit, then, is the essence of God, the reality of who he is. Isn’t how you relate to yourself ultimately the essence of who you are?

Now it goes to another level. God’s self-love is so pure and holy that it can be manifested as sacrificial love for himself. Thus when the Son Jesus sacrificed himself to do the Father’s will it was real sacrificial love in every way.

Since being triune is a necessary aspect of any intelligent, self-aware being, it turns out that each of us is a trinity. So we are more in the image of God than we might have thought.

Finally, if God exists he must be Triune. Thus the Christian model of God is not only correct, it is the only one possible.