October 2000
Some people criticize the idea of one God in three persons as if it is a contradiction. They seem to think of us as if we are fumbling around with an unworkable scheme that was handed to us, and we don’t have enough sense to see that, or enough honesty to admit we were fooled. Is he one or three? Why can we not make up our minds?
But the idea is quite logical. Could it be a fact of life that it is not good for a person to be alone? Yes, we need privacy at times, but one of the essentials of being persons is that we need other people. Offenders are sometimes put in solitary confinement as a punishment. What happens to them there? What types of people are loners? Why do people need support groups? Why is it that men without friends are in trouble?
God said, after he had made man, “It is not good that the man should be alone.” Since this was true for the man, why begrudge God for having, established within the Trinity a basic principle of personhood, that persons require other persons (to live and) prosper? It is not so much that God has needs that must be met as that, being perfect, there is nothing lacking in him. No one can say he is a loner, that he lacks perspective. It is not that there is something defective about God being three in one; it is that there was something defective about the man being alone. Therefore, God put his finger on that problem and solved it by making him another person (to be with him). God is self sufficient, not having within him the deficiency of lacking what persons lack as persons—other persons. Our problems sometimes relate to others. He has no such difficulty; his perfections relate to the Trinity.
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