We should think of the essence of God as the one personality of God, and yet expressed three times over. Each Person fully indwells the other, expressing the one personality of God to each other as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

No one will “solve” the doctrine of the Trinity, as if it is a maths theorem waiting for a “genius solution”. It clearly defies and transcends the human imagination. Anyone who tries to re-define the terms with which we explain the doctrine of the Trinity is already on precarious ground, trying to re-invent what centuries of theological debate have settled upon. It is likely that we will not improve on the Athanasian Creed in terms of affirmations and denials, though we will continue to wrestle with what all those affirmations and denials mean.

One clarification may help; or perhaps, it will simply add more contours to the mystery. It is the notion that when it comes to Trinitarian terms, we should not give an identical meaning to the two terms person and personality.

Usually these terms are almost synonymous. A human person is distinct from another partly by his or her personality: a set of traits, a combination of temperament, preferences, intellect and nature. A person and his personality are inseparable.

In God, we have three persons. There are three in God who can say “I”; three who can say “You” of another in the Godhead. There is, contra some Thomists, some kind of mutuality in the Trinity. Ascribing the prayer of John 17 to a purely Incarnational application seems to defy the very words used (“before the world was”). Even if texts like Psalm 2 and Psalm 110 describe God’s speech to the Messiah; it is beside the point, for they are speeches made before the Incarnation, and qualify as intra-trinitarian mutualism. Father, Son, and Holy Spirit truly love each other.

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