ACSI Research Fellow Program

Should Our Schools Be Trinity-Centered?

Michael Reeves quips in his book “Delighting in the Trinity” that Christians have reduced the doctrine of the Trinity to shamrocks, apples, and eggs. No wonder, he bemoans, that understanding the Trinity often seems irrelevant. Yet, the triune God is the most relevant reality there is. For us Christ-centered educators, however, it can be a struggle to understand or explain the Trinity.

The cultural pendulum is swinging youth back to spirituality. At the same time, I have recently walked the halls of some historically Christian schools where they are now speaking about “God” and “Father” but refrain from saying Jesus out of a desire to be hospitable to other faiths. I have walked other halls, where “Jesus” is boldly shared, but they rarely speak of the triune nature of God. Youth are returning to spirituality because they are starved relationally. And we know the root of this hunger is because they are made in the image of an eternally relational God. Are we equipped to show them that creation, salvation, heaven, and even “Jesus” and the “Father” are only possible if God is a three-in-one God? In this blog, I want to help educators explain why God has to be triune. I’m starting a conversation about how creation, salvation, redemption, and glorification can exist only because God is three-in-one. Each year, our faculty begins with four staff devotions where we reestablish the Trinitarian worldview as the cornerstone of our biblical worldview.

Creation

The other day, my fourth-grade daughter and I camped out at our local coffee dive and looked through Genesis 1, identifying several instances where we see the pattern of “the many and the one.” We talked about the very name “universe,” which means “combined into one.” We marveled at the Trinity’s fingerprints—this “many and one” pattern woven into every corner of creation. Then we turned to John 17 and joyfully daydreamed about the glorious love the Trinity shared before creation. We imagined creation much like a waterfall. Just as it’s the nature of a waterfall to overflow with water, it’s the nature of a many and one God to overflow His relational essence—His love (1 John 4:8). He waterfalls His love.

Reeves pokes fun at the idea that God created mankind because He was lonely—a “solitary God in search of a creation to love.” He rightly points out that God could not be a loving God if He existed in solitude for eternity past. Love requires relationship. We, the firstfruits of creation, are inherently relational. The Maker of such a relational creation must Himself be relational, for no one creates out of what they do not know. For example, if you know nothing about engines, you can’t build a car. A God who has existed alone for eternity could not create a relational world—much less relational humans. If God were not joyfully and perfectly relational, compelled to overflow His glorious love, why would He ever create our world?

Salvation

The Gospels give us many glimpses of the relationship between the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit throughout Jesus’ suffering, death, and resurrection. It is the Father who wills it (John 6:44), the Son who perfectly obeys the Father (John 14:31), and the Spirit who raises the Son (Romans 8:11). I encourage teams in your school to identify even more examples of how the persons of the Trinity relate to each other.

Here, I simply want to show that our salvation is not plausible or possible unless God is three in one. First, there’s no reason for a non-relational God to desire reconciliation with us. By contrast, a Father has every reason to want reconciliation with His children. Beyond simply the “want to,” only a Triune God can accomplish salvation through death. Technically speaking, God must be able both to die completely and yet remain fully alive at the same time. Jesus has to die to pay the just price for our sin. But if the Father and the Spirit also died in that moment, all existence would implode into non-existence. Only in the many in one God can He both die and not die simultaneously—and then resurrect the Son by the power of the Spirit through the will of the Father.

Redemption

The human race’s original mandate was deeply relational: to have children and fill and rule the world as image-bearers of the triune God’s relational nature. Jesus’ prayer in John 17 focuses on the unity of believers. He desires believers to be one, just as He and the Father are one. Our oneness is crucial in fulfilling the creation mandate, yet our selfish nature makes it so difficult. I believe Jesus’ awareness of how our selfishness constantly threatens unity contributed to His agonizing sweat of blood in Gethsemane (John 17).

Jesus goes on in His prayer to say that our oneness will also be unified with Him. As we know from the prior chapters in John, the Holy Spirit draws us and empowers us to obedient love so that we abide in Him and overflow that love to others. If God were not relationally triune, why would He desire to dwell with us? Yet He does want to dwell in us—between our shoulders (Deuteronomy 33:12). And that indwelling is our one great and glorious hope (Colossians 1:27): “Christ in us, the hope of glory.”

Glorification

It’s often easier to grasp how essential a triune God is to our understanding of heaven by considering a counterexample. Islam is strictly monotheistic. Allah is one and only, with no concept of a fatherly God, and the idea of a son is blasphemy. What, then, would motivate Allah to bring people into heaven? The Quran can only describe a heaven where believers do not truly relate to their Maker. So what do they do in heaven? The men hope to fulfill their earthly appetites with virgins and feasts.

Yet my mind goes to C. S. Lewis’s quote: “If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.” We’ve all seen the brokenness of the rich and famous. We know that more sex and food will never eternally satisfy a relational heart longing for the infinite. Eternity, indeed, is set in our hearts (Ecclesiastes 3:11), and any heaven where we are not satisfied with an infinite relationship would be more hellish than heavenly. Our only hope for a joyful heaven is one that reflects the pre-creation glorious existence of the Trinity. Only a relational God would both provide that and desire to include us in it.

“Father, I want those you have given me to be with me where I am, and to see my glory, the glory you have given me because you loved me before the creation of the world.” – John 17:24

As three further resources, I recommend Michael Reeves’ “Delighting in the Trinity,” the prayers of John Eldredge (which beautifully call upon our Triune God) at Wild at Heart, and the writings of John Owen, who deeply explored the Trinity.