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In a recent issue of The New Yorker, you can find a cartoon with a couple sitting on a couch. One says to the other, "I don't want to be defined by who I am."

The line is so human and so modern. The human part is what makes it funny: Often, when we discover who we are, we want to deny it. But it's the modern part that most interests me: that relentless search for self, the yearning to know who I am.

As with so much of modernity, this is a highly individualistic quest, and as such, it is a pointless quest. Not because the search for meaning is pointless, but because the context of modernity—the individual—is a myth.

The myth becomes apparent when we start considering who we are from a biblical and Trinitarian perspective. Both the rigors of orthodox theology and the plain sense of New Testament passages reveal that the Trinity is not merely a formal and logical explanation of God's inner essence. It points to a reality that spills over into the universe. The reality is exposed ever so briefly by Jesus when, in praying for his disciples he says:

The glory that you have given me I have given to them, that they may be one even as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may become perfectly one, so that the world may know that you sent me and loved them even as you loved me … . I made known to them your name, and I will continue to make it known, that the love with which you have loved me may be in them, and I in them." (John 17:22, 26).

The formal doctrine of the Trinity, then, helps us grasp the nature of divine love.

First, it makes it clear that God's love for us cannot be based on his need for love and fellowship—as if we were necessary for a God of love to be complete. One hears this sort of silliness now and then, but it cannot be true of the Trinitarian God. This God has known love, and perfect love at that, from before the creation of time and space—love swirling between the Father and Son and Spirit. God created us not because he had to have someone to love to be self-fulfilled as God, but because the love of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit bubbled over into creation.

Given the type of love we reciprocate with—something rather paltry—this is a remarkable grace. God is slumming when he loves us. He doesn't need our imitation of perfect love, yet he reaches out, wanting us to grab his hand, simply because, well, he wants to.

Second, it sheds light on the modern question about who we are. For this Trinity-in-love, this Loving Trinity, is the God in whose image we have been created. If loving communion is at the core of the Trinity, it is also at the core of who we are.

Since the Enlightenment, we in the West have thought of ourselves mostly as solitary individuals, and individuals mostly defined by mind, by intellect. As Descartes put it, "I think, therefore I am."

This insight has blessed the Western world in many ways, but it has cursed us as well. It has led to an excruciating loneliness, which nineteenth and twentieth-century existentialists (Camus and Sartre, among others) articulated so powerfully. In the twenty-first century, it has led to deep despair, as expressed by many postmodern philosophers. When we take the individual as the starting point, we can find no way to satisfy the basic yearning of the human heart, which has been created for communion.

The biblical starting point, by contrast, says, "I love, therefore you are. You love, therefore I am." Our existence begins not with the solitary individual ruminating alone about the core of human identity, but with the creation of two people in relationship: "So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them" (Gen. 1.27).

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June (Web-only) 2007, Vol. 51