Trinity Sunday

This Sunday is “Trinity Sunday” in the Christian calendar. With this worship service focus in mind, I have a confession to make. I have never been comfortable with the Orthodox view of the Trinity – specifically the Holy Spirit. Don’t get me wrong, I believe in the power and in the product of the Holy Spirit, just perhaps not the “person.” I have heard plenty of explanations and metaphors to describe the Trinity (the egg, a river, different roles of the same person, states of matter, etc.), yet none seem overly supported by the Biblical revelation (as the word “Trinity” is not in the Bible either). Nowhere in the Bible do I see the Spirit as a physical entity, or part of the “Godhead.” Rather, the Holy Spirit seems to be a metaphor describing the extension of God’s power and action in the world.

Let me a give a few examples that support such a view:

In the Genesis 1 creation account, the Spirit of God hovered over the water. The picture here is that the power of God contained the mythological waters of chaos. From there, God transformed this chaos into something useful and “good.”

When Jesus quotes the Isaiah scroll in Luke 4, Jesus makes it clear that the Spirit of the Lord was upon him to accomplish a restructuring of the world order. It was the power of the Spirit in Jesus and his actions that would accomplish this, and not some entity.

Acts 2 provides an interesting example. In this story, on the day of Pentecost, the Holy Spirit actually makes a physical appearance. The Spirit, in the form of tongues of fire, comes down and allows the apostles to speak in different languages. Again, the tongues are a physical representation of what the Spirit is doing by empowering the apostles.

Finally, though the word “Trinity” is not used in Scripture, people often sight the usage of the phrase “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit” to point to a 3rd “person” of the Godhead. But using such logic, if Jesus is seated at the right hand of God, wouldn’t we expect the Spirit to be on the left? Yet no description of the heavenly realm contains such a depiction – the Spirit is not mentioned in such contexts.

I could go on, but the point I am trying to draw out of these examples is that I believe the Spirit of God/the Holy Spirit is simply a manifestation of God’s power. Or to put it a different way, the Holy Spirit is a term to describe the presence of God at work in this world in various means and ways. When we ask for the presence of the Holy Spirit in our lives we are asking for God to move in a powerful way in our lives. We are not praying to the Spirit but rather for the Spirit.

You may say to yourself, “Okay. This is not overly helpful.” On the contrary. I think it alleviates the burden of explaining an unexplainable concept. I believe this understanding also sheds light on what God is actually up to.