The Trinity and Harmony

Trinitarian teaching is usually presented as a bare but inscrutable fact one must simply accept. “We can’t understand it, but we must accept it because the Bible teaches it.” Or it is defended on consequentialist grounds. If God is not Trinitarian, and thus if Jesus is not God, then Christ’s sacrifice for sin was ineffective, and there is no salvation from sin.

But while it is true that the Trinity is ultimately incomprehensible, it is equally true that the world makes no sense without it. The deepest desires of the human heart make no sense without it. Or at least the Trinitarian nature of the Creator makes sense of those fundamental human longings in a way that no other religion or cosmology of any sort does.


When you reflect upon life, you can’t help but notice that there is conflict everywhere -- in marriage, between siblings, at work, on the road in government, between nations...even within oneself. It is inescapable. So how do you deal with that?

1. You can force everyone else to submit to your will. This is tyranny, and we have seen it in men like Josef Stalin, Adolf Hitler, and more recently in Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe and Hugo Chavez of Venezuela. But people who deal with conflict this way end up entirely miserable.

2. Another way to deal with conflict is to preclude it by isolating yourself from everyone else. But this ends up in loneliness and self-absorption of a different sort. It is dehumanizing, and thus leads also to misery.

3. The third way, the one for which we were created, is to seek harmony through love. Because we were made in the image of the Trinitarian God, we were made for loving harmony, not for self-centered isolation, nor for self-centered domination. Father, Son and Holy Spirit exist in perfect agreement without any one of them oppressing the others and without each one walling himself off from the others. They exist in eternal, loving harmony.

Handel's Messiah

We can understand harmony between one another by the example God the Creator has given in music. Each note is different; it has a place in the musical order that God has created. That order is fixed. Not even Congress can change the notes, not even if they appropriated $700 billion to do it. Notes are notes. Each note, considered on its own, is beautiful and glorifying to God. But it does not fulfill its purpose until it’s arranged with other notes, e.g. in a melody. Still more glorifying to God, however, is the arrangement of notes in harmony with one another. In a harmony, a number of notes form one sound. That is most glorifying to God because it most resembles the Trinity itself. In a chord of three notes, the three are clearly discernable within one sound.

Accordingly, when we, who were made in his image, live in harmony with one another, we glorify him. We live in harmony when we live as God created us and gifted us to be. Sour notes produce cacophony, not harmony. Sin is a spiritually sour note. That harmonious living involves respecting what God created and gifted others to be. I Corinthians 12 pictures the church this way--as the body of Christ with many parts, each doing its part and respecting all the others for their contributions. This requires knowing godliness in general, and your own gifts and calling in particular. It also requires knowing the other gifts and callings, and respecting what God does with them.

Thus, in Christ, people, like different notes, can come together—regardless of race, class, occupation—and, without surrendering their differences, can find beautiful, God-glorifying unity of purpose. This is not the moralistic, relativistic celebration of difference we hear trumpeted as gospel these days. Nor is it a libertarianism that stands formalistically aloof from distinctions between good and evil. Rather, it is the harmony-shalom-unity that does not deny difference, but honors it's glorious divine purpose.

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What others are saying:

David Bentley Hart in The Beauty of the Infinite (p.276)

“The image of cosmic music is an especially happy way of describing the analogy of creation to the trinitarian life. Creation is not, that is, a music that explicates some prior and undifferentiated content within the divine, nor the composite order that is, of necessity, imposed upon some intractable substrate so as to bring it into imperfect conformity with an ideal harmony; it is simply another expression or inflection of the music that eternally belongs to God, to the dance and difference, address and response, of the Trinity.”

Robert Letham in The Holy Trinity: In Scripture, History, Theology, and Worship (pp. 438f.)

“The whole idea of developing a theme, of moving progressively and purposefully to a goal, of returning after a myriad of complex modulations to a resolution, of a variety of instruments playing different notes that are all part of a single score, is based on the matrix of realities found in the created order, which the Holy Trinity put there in the work of creation itself, and which reflects who he is.”

Also in Letham, p. 446

“Only a God who is triune can be personal. Only a Holy trinity can be love. Human love cannot possibly reflect the nature of God unless God is a Trinity of persons in union and communion. A solitary monad cannot love and, since it cannot love, neither can it be a person. And if God is not personal, neither can we be—and if we are not persons, we cannot love. This marks a vast, immeasurable divide between those cultures that follow a monotheistic, unitary deity and those that are permeated by the Christian teaching on the Trinity. Trinitarian theology asserts that love is ultimate because God is love, because he is three persons in undivided loving communion. By contrast, Islam asserts that Allah is powerful and that his will is ultimate, before which submission (islam) is required.”