The mystery at the heart of human life is discovered in our relationships, whose outlines might be simply explained but that are ineffable at the core. How we love and live for one another defies description. We struggle for words to make real what we know through experience. When one of my sons as a small boy told me, “I want you to live longer than anyone else,” he expressed his love as a desire that our lives together should continue on and on without end. This being for and with one another takes us to the mystery of Christian life.

God in Christianity is a supernatural mystery; and in the depth of God’s mysterious being, we discover the reality of the Trinity. God exists in relationship as Trinity and God exists in relationship with humanity, telling us through our very creation that God wants our lives together to continue on and on without end.

In Scripture, the reality of God as Trinity is revealed through the language of relationship. In the Book of Proverbs, Wisdom describes herself as God’s “craftsman…his delight day by day, playing before him all the while, playing on the surface of his earth.” While Wisdom is not necessarily identified with a particular person of the Trinity, Proverbs expresses the reality of God in communication, who takes joy in creation. This delight points to the gratuitousness of creation, for the God who exists in perfect communion as triune lacks nothing, but brings humanity into being for God’s and our good pleasure.
These same mysteries appear more fully in the
New Testament,
not as doctrinal
or creedal statements, but as the reality of God experienced in the lives of the first believers.

Paul’s words to the Romans outline the nature of God by virtue of the relationship Paul has entered into with the living God. Paul explains that Christians have gained “peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have gained access by faith.” Later Paul states that “we boast in hope of the glory of God…and hope does not disappoint, because the love of God has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.”

Within this short passage, Paul has mentioned the relationships among God the Father, Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit and how through them we are given peace, hope and love. Though the word trinity is never mentioned, the Trinity reveals itself to Paul through the experience of God’s being.

Jesus spoke of God’s relational essence as he prepared the apostles for his departure. The Holy Spirit would guide the disciples “to all truth.” But this truth that the Spirit speaks, Jesus says, is not the Spirit’s “own” but is intended to enlighten believers and to glorify Jesus and the Father as well, for “everything that the Father has is mine.” In perfect communion, the Trinity, three persons in one nature, reveals the mystery of perfect relationship: giving of oneself perfectly for the other, in order to bring all of us into the glory of God.

Even with this revelation of God’s inner life and God’s love poured out for us, it is impossible to truly describe in rational terms the nature of the Trinity. It is the revelation itself of the Trinity, and the experience of the Trinity, that makes it real for us, however we struggle to describe that God is three persons in one nature, that one person became human for us and that God desires that we share in the life of the Trinity.

Still, there is a parallel with human relationships and the way we come to know human beings. We can describe the visible form of persons, the behaviors that show who they are, but it is in being with them that we experience their essence, which concepts and words cannot capture. It is simply that in their presence one experiences love that in a moment becomes unending. God delights in these moments within the eternity of the triune mystery and for reasons that are inexplicable invites us to share in this life forever.

This article appears in May 20 2013.

John W. Martens is an associate professor of theology at the University of St. Thomas, St. Paul, Minn,where he teaches early Christianity and Judaism. He also directs the Master of Arts in Theology program at the St. Paul Seminary School of Divinity. He was born in Vancouver, B.C. into a Mennonite family that had decided to confront modernity in an urban setting. His post-secondary education began at Tabor College, Hillsboro, Kansas, came to an abrupt stop, then started again at Vancouver Community College, where his interest in Judaism and Christianity in the earliest centuries emerged. He then studied at St. Michael's College, University of Toronto, and McMaster University, with stops at University of Haifa and University of Tubingen. His writing often explores the intersection of Jewish, Christian and Greco-Roman culture and belief, such as in "let the little children come to me: Children and Childhood in Early Christianity" (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2009), but he is not beyond jumping into the intersection of modernity and ancient religion, as in "The End of the World: The Apocalyptic Imagination in Film and Television" (Winnipeg: J. Gordon Shillingford Press, 2003). He blogs at  www.biblejunkies.com and at www.americamagazine.org for "The Good Word." You can follow him on Twitter @biblejunkies, where he would be excited to welcome you to his random and obscure interests, which range from the Vancouver Canucks and Minnesota Timberwolves, to his dog, and 70s punk, pop and rock. When he can, he brings students to Greece, Turkey and Rome to explore the artifacts and landscape of the ancient world. He lives in St. Paul with his wife and has two sons. He is certain that the world will not end until the Vancouver Canucks have won the Stanley Cup, as evidence has emerged from the Revelation of John, 1 Enoch, 2 Baruch, and 4 Ezra which all point in this direction.