The point is clear: the single, perfect, pure communion of love between the persons is poured out on us, as we are loved by the Father because of our union with the Son, whom the Father loves. The love of God is poured out on us by the inseparable work of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

Trinitarian Unity in Communion

The word communion might bring to mind the Lord’s Supper that Jesus instituted before his death and has been practiced by Christians ever since (Luke 22:7–23; 1 Cor. 11:17–34). For now we will discuss the idea of communion more generally. Here is a simple working definition for communion in Christian theology: the sharing of fellowship among God and his people.

The eternal communion of Father, Son, and Spirit is the grounds for our communion with him and one another. Our triune God, simple and perfect for all of eternity, has always been the one God who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The Scriptures witnessed to the incarnation of the Son and the sending of the Spirit long before these events were made manifest in time and space. The Father did not “become” a Father at some point in time when he decided to create the Son with some unnamed heavenly mother. No, this would insinuate that the Father changed at some point, which would deny Scripture’s claim that God cannot change (Mal. 3:6). Further, this would insinuate that the Son was created, which would deny Scripture’s claim that he is the Creator, not a creature (John 1:1–3; Col. 1:16; Heb. 13:8). Rather, the Father and the Son shared a communion of love with the Holy Spirit in all eternity—indeed, “before the foundation of the world” (John 17:24).

If God truly is one (Deut. 6:4), then we cannot treat the persons as a “team” of disconnected beings or three “members” of a “divine dance.” This way of speaking hints strongly at three divine beings who are one only by virtue of agreement or a unity of will.

This is basic anti-Trinitarian Mormon theology. Instead, it’s more fitting to speak the way the Bible speaks: “God is love” (1 John 4:8). This verse is simple and yet packed with rich Trinitarian theology. God is love. He’s not a collection of entities or beings who simply love one another, however deeply, which leads them to work together as some sort of heavenly taskforce. He doesn’t love sometimes and not love other times. He doesn’t wrestle between fluctuating emotions. No, it’s much deeper than that—unfathomably so. The best we can make sense of this is to say with John that Father, Son, and Spirit just are the one God who exists in an inseparable communion of love. God loves us as an outflow of his very nature—the one who loves perfectly and eternally.

This one God who is love exists as three persons who fully and truly are the loving God. Do the three persons love one another? Yes. But we say this only insofar as the Scripture gives us language to distinguish the persons from each other. However, if we exaggerate the oneness, we deny that there are three persons who exist in a perfect and pure life of inseparable, mutual love.

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