When I first became a churchgoer, the Church of England still used Cranmer’s prayer book. On most Sundays, the Nicene Creed was recited at Holy Communion, between the sermon and the collection hymn. But on Trinity Sunday, it was replaced by the Athanasian Creed. I think that this less a creed, more an attempt by Athanasius to set boundaries around the doctrine of the Trinity. It certainly does not constitute an explanation. Basically it asserts with mind-numbing repetition that both the threeness and the oneness of God are real, meaning (I suppose) that any purported explanation or exposition which violates these criteria can be ruled out. It culminates in the genuinely amusing statement: “The Father incomprehensible, the Son incomprehensible, and the Holy Spirit incomprehensible, but there are not three incomprehensibles but one incomprehensible.” And so say all of us!
After the end of the service, there was always an unusually long queue at the door, not so much to congratulate the priest on his (fairly innocuous) trinitarian sermon, but to ask if he could explain the Athanasian creed to them, since apparently you had to believe it to be saved, and how could they believe it if they didn’t understand what it said? I’m told that Anglican Priests used to dread Trinity Sunday.
There’s an old Christian joke that no one can say anything about the Holy Trinity without falling into heresy of some kind. So anyone who reads what follows should treat it as a speculation, a jeu d’esprit. Don’t take it too seriously!
As I move through the world, I often seem to myself to be like the operator of a cine-camera continuously filming the things around me. But the film never includes that operator. She remains behind the camera, invisible. What I mean is this:
I think, I feel, I decide, I act... Every day I do these things but I am never able to catch myself doing any of them. If I try to do that by, as it were, moving the camera backward a bit, I can see a whole new tranche of things which constitute the inside of my mind: thoughts, feelings, mental images, memories, and so forth. They are now available for my inspection just like the objects and people in the outside world. But I still do not see “I”. When the camera moved back, its operator deftly moved back with it and is still out of sight. Instead of “I”, I see this thing that I call “me”.
“Me” is simply another idea that I have, part of the content of my inner world, basically no different from anything else that I find there. It is “I”’s self-portrait but it’s an inaccurate portrait for two reasons:
”O wad some power the giftie gie us
tae see oorsel’s as ithers see us!”
Now if you believe that God is also conscious, logically He should have a view of Himself. He should have an “I” and a “me” just as we do. For in what sense am I conscious if I am not aware of myself being conscious? But God is always described as being perfect and omniscient, so (again logically) his “me” ought to be a complete and perfect image of his ”I”, not the poor and inadequate one that is the best we can provide for ourselves. Which surely means that God’s built-in self-portrait must be everything that God himself is. It too must be a person capable of doing everything that the original does.
Although the terms “Father” and “Son” are commonly used to refer to the first two persons of the Trinity, the Bible does give us other metaphors for the same divine relationship: speaker and word, original and image, light source and radiated light. It is surely unscriptural not to make use of what scripture has provided. In particular the metaphor of original and image is very close to what I have been describing as “I” and “me”. Jesus said, “Whatever the Father does, the Son does too.” and “The Son does nothing that he does not see the Father doing.”
How then should God relate to this other Person, the eternal and coequal “Me” that His eternal “I” has generated? Logically on beholding the perfect image of His own perfection, He should experience overwhelming love for it. Admittedly self-admiration is generally considered to be a bad thing in human beings. We even have a specific word for it nowadays, narcissism, and nobody likes a narcissist. That is one reason why a lot of people find Donald Trump personally repellent even when they agree with his policies (though I have noticed that many of his most hysterical detractors on the self-styled left are every bit as narcissistic as he is). But narcissism is obnoxious mainly because those suffering from it are clearly deluded. No human being can be as perfect and deserving of praise as the narcissist thinks he is. Obviously that restriction does not apply to God who is indeed worthy of all honour and praise. In fact Jesus (quoting the great Jewish assertion of faith called the Shema in Deut 6, v.5) said that the first and greatest commandment was “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength”. So, if the precondition for goodness is to love God totally, God too should love Himself totally.