15th June 2025

It is hard to overestimate the importance of the Trinity to Christian thought as it ‘takes us into the very heart of Christian belief in God’,¹  it is ‘the very basis of the Christian faith’,²  and is ‘the specifically Christian way of speaking about God’. ³  Yet the theologian Karl Rahner has said, ‘Christians, for all their orthodox profession of faith in the Trinity, are almost just “monotheist” in their actual religious experience. One might almost dare to affirm that if the doctrine of the Trinity were to be erased…most religious literature could be preserved almost unchanged.’ ⁴

One reason for this is that in the West, we have become a society of individuals. Personal freedom and individual rights, with little or no collective responsibility, have become king, resulting in broken, fractured, and isolated societies. Understanding God as Trinity is good news in this context.

God is not simply ‘loving’, but as our header scripture shows, he is love. Richard St. Victor, a 12^th Century Scottish theologian, argued that love must have an object. If God is love and has always been love, then he must have always had ‘another’ upon whom to direct his love. Given that God loves supremely, it is necessary for love to be directed toward another for it to be love. Furthermore, argued Richard, love must have a third party, otherwise it’s selfish and self-indulgent. True love desires the beloved to be loved by another. So, the Father and Son desire to share their love with another: the Holy Spirit. In Richard’s words, ‘When one gives love to another and when he alone loves the other alone, there is love certainly, but not shared love…Strictly speaking, there is shared love when two persons love a third in a harmony of affection and a community of love…From this, then, it is evident that shared love would not  have a place in the divinity, if there were only two persons and not a third.’ ⁵

This divine, eternal community of love is what humanity has been created to share. In Genesis chapter one, God said, ‘Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness…’ (v.26 emphasis mine). We are made in the image of the one-in-three God: ‘In the image of God he created him’ – that’s our oneness. We are made for community, not to be alone, but to be in relationship and unity: ‘male and female he created them’ – that’s our togetherness (v.27).

Because humanity is made in the image of the Trinity, we become truly human as we image God in his shared communal love. Our true identity is found in relationships, the very opposite of individualism. Through our participation in Christ, we participate in the divine community of shared love (John 17:20-26; 2 Peter 1:4).

This has huge implications for Christians and the church. We can witness the trinitarian nature of God in living out the shared love of the Christian community. We’re to love one another, rejoice and mourn with one another, share our lives together, and thereby reflect the divine community. As we do this, the world will know we are Jesus’s disciples (John 13:34-35).

The challenge for us this Trinity Sunday is whether we are reflecting the divine community of shared love in our relationships. For this is what we were created for.     

¹ Torrance, Thomas, The Trinitarian Faith, p 303.
² Barth, Karl, Church Dogmatics Vol 1, p ix.
³ LaCugna, Catherine, God is for us. The Trinity and Christian Life, p1.
⁴ Rahner, Karl, Theological Investigations Vol. 4, p38.
⁵ Richard of St. Victor, De Trinitate, Book One, 3.19.

Local congregation:
Grace Communion West Hampstead 
Sidings Community Centre
150 Brassey Road
West Hampstead
London
NW6 2BA

Meeting time:
Sunday 12.30 pm

Local congregational contact:
Gordon Brown
gordon.brown@gracecom.church

Word of Life contact:  
wordoflife@gracecom.church