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For book endorsements, you couldn't top what Eugene Peterson said about The Shack by William P. Young. "When the imagination of a writer and the passion of a theologian cross-fertilize the result is a novel on the order of The Shack," wrote Peterson, professor emeritus of spiritual theology at Regent College. "This book has the potential to do for our generation what John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress did for his. It's that good!"

Bunyan's masterpiece didn't just invigorate his generation. Pilgrim's Progress is an all-time best-seller, an English-language classic. So Peterson's praise for The Shack is impressive indeed. Both books employ allegory to convey core convictions. Whereas Bunyan allegorized the journey of faith, Young tackles the question, "Where is God in a world so filled with unspeakable pain?"

Allegory is a notoriously tricky literary device. Many attempt it. Few succeed. Bunyan's central character, Christian, experiences the doubts and temptations that believers endure.Young is more ambitious. Each person of the Trinity becomes a character in The Shack. The Father is Papa, a deliberately peculiar name for an African American woman. Jesus, true to reality, is a man from the Middle East. And the Holy Spirit is Sarayu, an Asian woman.

When authors experiment with allegory, they risk only failure and ridicule. Christian history, on the other hand, is littered with theologians who experimented with new conceptions of the Trinity. All they got for their efforts was the lousy title of heretic. To be fair, the Bible does not provide a finished formulation of the doctrine. It took a succession of ecumenical councils over the course of centuries to finally articulate the biblical view of the Trinity.

Christians today generally do not share the early church's enthusiasm for Greek metaphysics. We show little patience for theology that can't be expressed by a single proof text. We really don't mind theology, so long as its application is obvious and immediate. So discussions of the Trinity often garner, "So what?" glares. Even so, the doctrine is Christianity's unique description of God. It won't hurt us to explore why the incomprehensible Trinity has endured as a hallmark of Christian orthodoxy.

What is the orthodox Trinitarian doctrine of God? Along with the Hebrews, Christians believe that God is one (Deut. 6:4, James 2:19). Yet Christians also teach that God is three persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit (Phil. 2:6, Heb. 1, Acts 5:3-4). Finally, Christians affirm that each of these three persons is God (Matt. 28:19-20, 2 Cor. 13:14). The Council of Nicea in 325 was especially crucial for the church's understanding of the Trinity. Meeting in what is now Turkey, church bishops rejected Arianism, which compromised Jesus' full divinity by teaching that God created him. The subsequent Council of Constantinople in 381 solidified what we now recite as the Nicene Creed. This includes these famous lines about Jesus: "begotten of the Father before all the ages, Light of Light, true God of true God, begotten not made, of one substance with the Father, through whom all things were made."

Modalism, an earlier challenge to Trinitarian doctrine, actually upheld both the unity of God and the divinity of Jesus. But modalism, popularized in the early third century by Sabellius, taught that the one God reveals himself in successive modes as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. These are not three distinct persons but rather three different names or functions for the one God. One common but mistaken analogy of the orthodox Trinity depicts modalism. The same bucket of water may appear as ice, liquid, or steam. But that water cannot simultaneously exist in every mode. God, on the other hand, exists simultaneously as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. 

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May (Web-only) 2008, Vol. 52

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