It’s strange, really, that humans have any kind of theology about the nature of God. As we are reminded elsewhere in Scripture: no one has ever seen God.
We are always in God’s presence, and our whole existence is held aloft in God, but that’s about it. We have fleeting experiences of being in the midst of God, but even those experiences entirely exceed the limits of our minds and of language.
That’s about as much as we have.
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The central claim of monotheism is that there is no other force, being, or essence which is like that of God. There is no bad god of darkness and no good god of light, there is just the one God, who is all-encompassing.
This is somewhat double-edged: there is no other power equal to or greater than God that others can wield against God’s followers, but it also means that there is nothing we can carve out from the Holy, and nowhere we can declare God’s absence. It is hard for the monotheist to deny what someone else has found in their encounters with the Transcendent. A religion which claims all truth must also contend with truths it doesn’t like or which are uncomfortable.
God is that which leaves nothing out. God is without limitation. This means, too, that our ideas about God are not God. We always leave something out. There is always something more to be said. Whenever we think we have God in our grasp, we have surely allowed the Holy to flee from our grip entirely.
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Trinitarian theology rests in an unsteady place in relation to our monotheism. Those who would claim to believe in some simpler kind of monotheism would say that the Trinity introduces three gods, or at least introduces complications to the oneness of God that are not far off. We know this, too. It’s why the notion of the Trinity attracts heresies and always has. Claims about the nature of God are bound to be heretical, and the more elaborate the claim, the more ornate the error.
A strictly dyadic imagination of God, though, I think ultimately lands somewhere that is too static, too stable, and thereby too susceptible to settled understanding.
For the binitarian, the one who perceives two persons in one God, there is an almost necessary hierarchy: there is a this-and-that, a one-and-the-other; there is a parent and a child, and one begins to move into the errors of imagining greater and lesser gods.
Instead, in the Trinity, we find a perfect sort of unease: if we think we have stabilized our understanding of God, if some tidy hierarchy attempts to emerge, it becomes unsteadied. This is why it’s meaningful to eschew attempted replacements for how we talk about the Trinity: there is no way to reduce some person of God to Creator, nor to say that only the First Person of the Trinity had a hand in Creation; the Johannine tradition tells us that Christ was the Word of Creation, and Creation is accomplished through the Holy Spirit.
When we get too concrete or talk at too great a length about the nature of God, we venture inevitably into either absurdity or heresy, often both.
So we settle on the unsettled and the unsettleable. Our ideas about God become restless. The Trinity gestures at a dynamic, moving sort of God that leaves nothing out. We are enticed to make more sense of God than that, and we are denied the ability to make more sense of God than that. Our ideas flash up in a moment of recognition of the Holy and just as soon collapse into the elusivity of God, fumbling towards silliness despite our best efforts, when we are trying so hard to reach for the Holy.
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These two things are not separate any more than God and Christ are separate, but: there is probably more life to be found in living than in thinking. I like thinking. My own mind has been a source of great comfort and solace and play to me at times, but minds can also be like prisons. We construct a world of our own thinking and then find ourselves either straining at or defending its limits. We cannot imagine that God would really love everyone, and so pretty soon we are deciding that God only loves the people we love. It becomes important, like a child whose uneasy relationship with make-believe is being threatened, that everyone else think our thoughts, too. We lash out at the world for threatening to insert so much complexity into our moments of clarity. We retreat into our own ideas, and deny or destroy everything else.
God is not our ideas about God. God is that which leaves nothing out, and if I try to say any more than that, I err. My ideas about what that means are error, too. The Holy I have felt in moments of terror and joy, but that does not mean that God is terror or God is joy. Love seems to get us there more often than anything else, and that says something about the path to God, but it does not constrain God to only those things which we love.
It’s like how if you claim to love nature, you are claiming to love the death and decay and suffering of it all, too, or you do not really love nature, but only what you, yourself, can bless and enjoy. I can marvel at nature, but it is hard to say I always like it. Awe comes more readily than enjoyment or acceptance. God is more elusive and more complicated, surely, than the nature which proceeds from God in turn.
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May you value your experience of God more than your ideas about God, and stand before the Holy with humility and awe, and maybe somehow love. May you imitate that which made you, and lend your own heart to loving all that is, leaving nothing out. May you love your own wholeness, and that unsteady dance within you which cannot be settled or reduced to one thing or the other. May you love your neighbour as yourself, and let the whole of Creation speak to you to disturb you and to comfort you. May God’s presence be to you a blessing, as your presence is to God in turn.