by Chuck Hedrick

In the summer of 1985, net.religion.christian hosted a debate about the Trinity prompted by Dwayne Lanclos's claim that the doctrine simply means "one God demonstrating three different aspects." Chuck Hedrick, a theologian at Rutgers University who posted frequently and carefully to net.religion.christian, stepped in to clarify: Lanclos's wording, while correct in its main thrust, reproduced the ancient heresy of Modalism. What followed was one of the clearest short explanations of Trinitarian doctrine to appear on early Usenet — notable for its intellectual rigor, its candid acknowledgment of the doctrine's difficulty, and its identification of the doctrine's deepest purpose: not to count persons of the Godhead, but to affirm that Love is intrinsic to God's nature.

Hedrick makes two moves that cut through centuries of Sunday School confusion. First: the Trinity is not about the number three. There is nothing in God that you can count. If theological tradition had gone differently, he writes, "we could have a duinity or quadrinity, and the same basic understanding would be expressed." Second: the real point of the doctrine is relational — to say that God did not need to create human beings in order to have someone to love. Love existed within God before creation. The doctrine is a claim about God's nature, not a mathematical formula.

The idea of the Trinity does not threaten the unity of God, as some have felt it did. However, the wording that Father, Son, and Spirit represent "the ways God shows himself to us" — while expressing a valid intuition — suggests the classical heresy of Modalism. Modalists believed (or are represented to have believed — it is sometimes hard to tell what those on the losing side actually believed) that Father, Son, and Spirit represent the ways God shows himself to us, but do not represent any actual distinction within God himself. Classical Trinitarian thought believes that Father, Son, and Spirit represent different modes of being within God himself. There is not enough distinction to give us three Gods. But there is enough to allow for personal relationship to exist within God before he ever created any human beings to love.

The Counting Problem

The Trinity is a difficult doctrine, because it requires us to walk a very fine line. On the one side, it is easy to talk as if we believed in three separate Gods. The examples often given in Sunday School do not help this. It is very typical to talk about three waterglasses and then talk about how it is all one water even though it is three glasses. Or about three people and how they share one humanity. I have never figured out how one can possibly get orthodox doctrine out of these illustrations. The mere fact that there are three things sitting there is enough to defeat the purpose of the illustration, at least for us in the West. As soon as we count them — one, two, three — we are out of the realm of orthodox Trinitarian thought.

For the Trinity has nothing to do with the number three. There is nothing in God that you can count. It is fairly clear that if theological tradition had gone differently we could have a duinity or quadrinity, and the same basic understanding would be expressed. (The illustrations that I criticize originated among people with somewhat different philosophical assumptions from ours. As far as I can tell, they must have meant something very different to them than they mean to us.)

Love as God's Nature

On the other side, we want to make sure that we are saying something about God himself, and not just about the way he interacts with us. As I see it, the primary purpose of the doctrine is to emphasize the fact that Love is part of God's nature. When he asks us to love him and each other, he is letting us into something that he has had all along. This means that for us God is no longer a mathematical point, with no observable properties other than the demands he makes on us. We actually know something about God in himself: that he has within himself that which loves, that which accepts love in obedience, and all of the interplay between these two.

Differing understandings of the Trinity have traditionally had effects on what one believes about Jesus. Normally heretical understandings of the Trinity — or the lack of the doctrine entirely — have been combined with what I would consider substandard understandings about Christ. Typically God is made too abstract to really involve himself in human history, so Jesus comes out as something less than a real incarnation of God.

A Note on Language

I use the term "mode of being" instead of "person" because I believe it more clearly expresses the original intent. The words that are translated "person" were not so clearly associated with the idea of individual people or with personalities as is the English word "person." "Mode of being" has its own dangers, however, since it sounds very close to modalism.

Colophon

Chuck Hedrick posted this reflection to net.religion.christian on July 31, 1985, from Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey. He was responding to a thread initiated by Dwayne K. Lanclos's post on the Trinity. Hedrick was one of the most theologically substantive regular contributors to net.religion.christian in the mid-1980s; his posts on biblical Greek, church history, and Christian doctrine consistently elevated the level of discussion. This post is his clearest statement on Trinitarian doctrine.

Preserved from the Usenet UTZOO archive (net.religion.christian, batch b49, Jul–Aug 1985) for the Good Work Library by the New Tianmu Anglican Church, 2026. Original Message-ID: [email protected].

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