The following is another assignment from seminary. It was supposed to be a concept map of the Trinity. I expanded on that idea and got creative. After the map is an explanation. Enjoy.
The Trinity is a term used to describe the relationship of the Father, Son, and Spirit, as spoken of by Jesus and written about by the authors of the New Testament. As a tool in certain contexts I consider it important and useful. As a complete picture of the complexity of what both the Scriptures and followers of Jesus mean when we say God, I find it insufficient. The complex nature of the Divine Revelation in Scripture demands a richer view. The journey begins with the Hebrew Scriptures. In it we find God bearing a name, YHWH, and revealing himself in various ways. These revelations are both YHWH, and distinct from YHWH. I have labelled them in my concept map as Wisdom, Word, Glory, Spirit, and the Angel of YHWH. The first one to explore is Spirit.
“When God began to create heaven and earth, and the earth then was welter and waste and darkness over the deep and God’s breath (Spirit) hovering over the waters, God said, ‘Let there be light.’”(Gen 1:1-2)[1] This is the first instance of the Spirit making himself known in the narrative. As you can see it is depicted as an attribute of God: distinct from God and yet also God. It is also evident as inhabiting individuals: “And yet, I have been filled with power, with the spirit of the Lord.”(Mic 3:8); 1 Sam 16:13; Gen 41:38-39; Ex 31:3. Transitioning us into the next attribute is the author of Deuteronomy writing that Joshua was “filled with a spirit of wisdom” (Deut 34:9).
Wisdom is personified in the book of Proverbs. In chapter 8 she is proclaimed as an attribute of God when the writer exclaims, “The Lord created me (Wisdom) at the outset of His way, the very first of His works of old. In remote eons I was shaped, at the start of the first things of earth…When He founded the heavens, I was there…And I was by Him, an intimate, I was His delight day after day.”(Prov 8:22-30) We will see this language for Wisdom reimagined by John in reference to the Logos, but for now we move on to glory.
There is a recurring motif throughout the Hebrew Scriptures of God revealing himself on a throne: “And they saw the God of Israel, and beneath His feet was like a fashioning of sapphire pavement…”(Ex 24:10); “Therefore hear the word of the Lord: I saw the Lord sitting on His throne…”(1 Kings 22:19); Isa 6:1-3. This throne language reaches its culmination in the vision of Ezekiel in the first chapter, when he proclaims at the end of it all, “Like the look of the rainbow that is in the clouds on a day of rain, this was the look of the radiance all round, the look of the likeness of the glory of the Lord.” (Ez 1:28); Psalm 26:8. We have seen that glory is an attribute of God, a physical or visual manifestation, and yet distinct from God.
“After these things the word of the Lord came to Abram in a vision, saying…” (Gen 15:1). This is the first instance in the Hebrew Scriptures of the word of the Lord being depicted as God but distinct from God. The word of the Lord also appears to Samuel (1Sam 3:1-8). The word is depicted as an attribute of God and yet distinct from God.
I round out the attributes of God from the Hebrew Scriptures with the Angel of the Lord. For evidence of the Angel of the Lord being an attribute of God and yet distinct from God we will point to three stories. The first is Hagar in Genesis 21 who speaks with the Angel of the Lord, but then later says she spoke to the Lord. The second is in the Exodus narrative, “Look, I am about to send a messenger before you to guard you on the way and to bring you to the place that I made ready. Watch yourself with him and heed his voice, do not defy him, for he will not pardon your trespass, for My name is within him.” (Ex 23:20-22). Finally, we have the story of Gideon in Judges chapter 6, where the Angel of the Lord is speaking and the Lord is also speaking, interchangeably. God can reveal himself in human form, and the final piece that brings it together is the Son of Man.
“I was seeing in the visions of the night and, look, with the clouds of the heavens one like a human being (son of man) was coming, and he reached the Ancient of Days, and they had him approach before Him. And to him were given dominion and honor and kingship, and all the people, nations, and tongues did serve him. His dominion is an everlasting dominion that will not pass away and his kingdom will not be destroyed.” (Daniel 7:13-15) Here we have within the Hebrew Scriptures a vision of a human being elevated alongside YHWH to rule and reign forever.
I’ll conclude this portion on the first half of the map with a quote by biblical scholar Mehrdad Fetahi, “Yahweh cannot be reduced to any one of the manifestations of his presence (Word, Spirit, Wisdom, Angel, etc.). Yahweh is not completely identified with any one of these, but rather dynamically related. Yahweh is the Spirit, in so far as he is relating himself to creation. This is why the biblical writers prefer to speak of Yahweh’s ‘spirit,’ or ‘arm,’ or ‘glory,’ or ‘word,’ rather than to refer to God himself in a more direct way. By adopting such a procedure, they manage both to express the objective reality of God’s contact with his creation, and at the same time maintain that God himself is always greater than any specific act of revealing himself to someone.”[2] This transitions us into the revelation of God in Jesus.
There is no New Testament text that better fully encapsulates Jesus in relation to the Hebrew Scriptures than John 1: “In the origin there was the Logos, and the Logos was present with God, and the Logos was god; This one was present with God in the origin. All things came to be through him, and without him came to be not a single thing that has come to be…And the Logos became flesh and pitched a tent among us, and we saw his glory, glory as of the Father’s only one…No one has ever seen God; the one who is uniquely god, who is in the Father’s breast, that one has declared him.” (John 1:1-3,14,18)[3] Here we have John hearkening back to “Word”, “Glory” and “Son of Man/Angel of YHWH” motifs to describe Jesus. But…he goes further to say that no one has seen God. But what of these revelations in the Hebrew Scriptures? John is not invalidating them, but rather pointing to Jesus as the culmination of all of them, and the most complete revelation.
Further on in John’s Gospel chapter 17 is Jesus’ prayer, again encapsulating these attributes, “Father, the hour has come; glorify your Son, so that the Son might glorify you, Just as you gave him power over all flesh, so that you have given everything to him, that he might give them life in the Age…On earth I glorified you by completing the work that you have given me to do. And now, Father, glorify me by your side with that glory I had by your side before the cosmos was. I disclosed your name to the men whom you gave to me out of the cosmos. They were yours and you gave them to me, and they have kept your word. Now they know that all the things you have given me, however many, are from you. Because the words that you gave me I have given to them, and they accepted them, and knew truly that I came forth from you, and they had faith that you sent me forth…And all that is mine is yours, and what is yours is mine, and I have been glorified in them…Holy Father, keep them in your name, which you have given me, that they may be one just as we are…And I have given to them the glory you have given me, that they may be one just as we are one.” (John 1) I could go on, as it is a beautiful portion of scripture, but the point is made. Glory, Logos (Word), Father, Wisdom, Spirit, all being proclaimed by Jesus as being him, but also distinct from him. He and the authors of the Gospels, and of the remainder of the New Testament, are not reinventing a new way to talk about God. They are using the same language that the Hebrew Scriptures already built upon to describe the complex nature of God.
Two remaining links to the complex nature of God remain: Son of Man and the relationship of love between the Father, Son and Spirit. Jesus refers to himself most commonly as the son of man, a link to Daniel 7, most controversially when the chief priest asks, “You are the Anointed, the Son of the Blessed One?” (Mark 14:61) and Jesus responds, “I am; and you will see the Son of Man sitting at the right hand of the Power and coming with the clouds of the sky.” (Mark 14:62) He is calling to the mind of the hearers Daniel 7 and Psalm 110 to exclaim who he is and what is about to occur. For the relationship of love, we turn to John again, “Beloved ones, let us love one another, because love is from God, and everyone who loves has been born out of God, because God is love.” (1 John 4:8) The language of a community of love in the Trinity had basis in the New Testament, thanks to the well-established complexity of language to describe God found in the Hebrew Scriptures.
The entire concept map is my conception of God, centered on Jesus. I have color matched the attributes of God that are linked from the Hebrew Scriptures in the New Testament. Where the bubble is not filled (Father and Angel of YHWH) is where I do not see a specific link between the two texts, but nonetheless those attributes are important for the full picture of God. The bidirectional arrows are meant to convey that all are related, and yet distinct. The single arrow along the right side of the page is to convey the progressive nature of God’s revelation, beginning with the Spirit hovering over the welter and waste, and flowing through the concept of the Trinity in the early church.
My concept of God (and thus the Trinity) is inspired by the work of Dr. Tim Mackie, PhD, as seen and heard in his BibleProject material on God.[4]
[1] Unless otherwise noted, all Hebrew Scripture passages referenced are from The Hebrew Bible: A Translation with Commentary (New York ; London: W. W. Norton & Company, 2018).
[2] Mehrdad Fatehi, The Spirit’s Relation to the Risen Lord in Paul: An Examination of Its Christological Implications (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2000), 57–58.
[3] Unless otherwise noted, all New Testament passages referenced are from The New Testament: A Translation (Yale University Press, 2019).
[4] Tim Mackie, “God,” The BibleProject, n.d., https://bibleproject.com/explore/god/.
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