Bishop Barron's Trinity Sunday sermon explaining the doctrine of the Trinity through three theological models
Bishop Barron delivers a Sunday sermon on Trinity Sunday, arguing that the doctrine of the Trinity is not a theological puzzle but the central truth of Christian faith.
Summary
Bishop Barron presents a Trinity Sunday sermon in which he argues that the Trinity is not an abstract theological curiosity but the very heart of Christian prayer and life. He develops three models — personhood, love, and revelation — each drawn from widely accepted claims about God, and shows that each one logically implies a Trinitarian structure within the unity of God. He concludes by connecting the doctrine directly to the meaning of salvation, using John 3:16 to show how the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit each play a distinct role in the redemption of humanity.
Key Takeaways
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Introduction: Why the Trinity Is Not a Preacher's Nightmare
Bishop Barron: Peace be with you, friends. We come to Trinity Sunday, one of my favorite Sundays of the year. They often call it the preacher's nightmare. I don't agree with that. I think we should preach the Trinity all the time, because the Trinity is not just a little puzzle for theologians. It's the heart of the matter in many ways.
Keep in mind, Catholics and Orthodox too — whenever we make the sign of the cross, what are we doing? We are invoking the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. We're invoking the Trinity. So every time we pray, we pray in the name of the Trinity. We can't consider that a little side concern of a few theologians. No, it's central to the way we pray.
So, appropriately, I'm going to propose three images, three models, three ways of getting at this idea of the Trinity. I'm going to do so by beginning with three things that I think we would all take for granted and say, "Well, yeah, of course that's true of God." And I want to show that each one leads to the idea of the Trinity.
First Model: God Is a Person
Let me start with the idea of personhood. Do we say that God is a person? Well, yeah, of course. We don't think God is just some vague metaphysical force, or some vague cause way back when, some impersonal source of existence. No, we would hold that God is a person — mind and will and freedom.
Well, think about that word for a second: person. Where does that come from? The Latin word persona. Where does that come from? From a verb, personare, which means "to sound through." You might ask, how are those related? Here's how. A persona in ancient Latin designated a device used by actors in ancient theater. Obviously, before microphones, if you wanted to be heard, you held up in front of you a persona, which was a kind of mask with a little megaphone fitted to the mouthpiece, so that when you held it up and announced your lines, it could personare — it could sound through to the audience.
That's interesting, isn't it? Persona, person, personare — it has to do with communication. It has to do with speaking to another. The actor speaking to the audience so he can be heard.
Is God a person only in relation to the world he's made, or only in relation to us, his intelligent creatures? Well, no. He does communicate to us, but wouldn't we say God is a person independent of the world? God is a person even if he never created the world. God is a person from all eternity. Well, if he is — then somehow, within the unity of God, there must obtain some play of communication, of speaker, spoken to, and speech. Something like a speaking to another must be true of God if God is a person from all eternity.
Who's the speaker? We call him the Father. Who's the one spoken to? We call him the Son. What's the speech they share? We call him the Holy Spirit.
Here's something else interesting. The Latin persona, personare — the Greek word, and of course the Gospels are written in Greek — is prosopon. That's derived in turn from a Greek phrase, pros opthe. Now, opthe — think optics, think ophthalmologist — opthe is "to look." Pros is "toward." Who is a prosopon, therefore? A person is someone who looks toward another.
And isn't it true — Ratzinger put it this way — you can't speak of a person in the absolute singular. It doesn't make sense. A person qua person communicates. Personare, pros opthe, looks toward.
Again, is God a person only in relation to the world? No. God is a person in himself from all eternity. Therefore, there must be within the unity of God something like a looker, a looked-at, and the look that they share. Who's the looker? The Father. Who's looked at? The Son. What's the shared look? The Holy Spirit.
If God is a person — and I think we'd all agree with that — something like the Trinitarian play must obtain within God.
Second Model: God Is Love
Here's the second one. I think we'd all be very much at home with that great statement from the First Letter of John: God is love. Beautiful. God is love.
John is not saying, mind you, that God loves — I mean, all religions say that in some form — or that love is one of God's attributes. No, the claim of St. John is stranger than that: that God is love. That means in his own most nature, and not simply in relation to the world. Sure, God loves us, he wills our good — but the claim here is that God is love in his own nature from all eternity.
Therefore, there has to obtain within the unity of God something like a lover, a beloved, and the love that they share. Who's the lover? We call him the Father. Who's the beloved? We call him the Son. What's the love that they share? The Holy Spirit.
It was G.K. Chesterton who said that a lot of people are uneasy with all this technical language about the Trinity, but they love the claim that God is love. How beautiful. But Chesterton said, "Trinitarian doctrine is but the conceptually precise way of articulating that God is love."
Third Model: God Is a Revealer
God is a person. God is love. They both imply something like the Trinity. Here's the last one.
Wouldn't we all agree — we biblical people, anyway — that God is a revealer? Karl Barth, the great Protestant theologian, said the Deus Dixit principle is fundamental to the Bible. It's Latin for "God has spoken." And it's true, isn't it? We don't think God is a distant force. We don't think God is just dumbly out there. No, we think that God has spoken — in creation, yes, but spoken through the history of Israel, and then spoken finally in Christ.
What do we hear in the Letter to the Hebrews? That in times past, in varied and fragmentary ways, God spoke to our forefathers, but in these last days he has spoken to us through his Son. And don't we hear in the prologue to John's Gospel: "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God."
Is God speaking his word in all of creation? Yes. That's why creation is imbued with intelligibility — because it's been spoken into being by God's intelligence. Does God speak his word even more intensely and dramatically in the history of Israel? Yes, in Torah and temple and prophecy. And then, in the fullness of time, God — who has spoken in various and fragmentary ways — now speaks the whole of himself. The totality of his word, the word that is God, is spoken in Christ.
If all that's true, what do we have in God? There's a speaker — someone who speaks, we call him the Father — and there's a word spoken, which is coequal to the Father, because in this Word God has utterly communicated himself.
But now take the third step, which is very interesting. God has spoken his word. How can we — finite, historically conditioned, limited human beings — possibly understand the word that the Father has spoken? My mind is small, I'm fallen, I have trouble understanding basic mathematics. How in the world will I understand the Logos in person?
Well, there has to be an interpreter of the word. We call him the Holy Spirit.
In John's Gospel, Jesus says, "The Father and I are going to send" — in the Greek — "a Paracletos." Kalin means "to call," para means something like "over." So the Paracletos is someone that you call over to help you — as in a court of law, for example — which is why Paracletos, again to do etymology, gets rendered in Latin as advocatus. Vocatus — called; ad — toward. He's been called over to the table to help me make my case. That's the idea. The Father and I — the speaker and the word spoken — are going to send an advocate who will lead you into all truth, who will help you understand the word spoken.
We have speaker, spoken, and interpreter. Father, Son, Holy Spirit.
So again, everybody: God is personal? Yeah, sure. God is love? Yeah. God reveals himself? Yeah, I accept all those. Then you have to accept the Trinity. You can't hold those three descriptions without affirming at the same time the Trinity.
The Trinity and the Meaning of Salvation: John 3:16
That's a somewhat abstract theological lesson, but let me make this salvifically relevant. Look at our Gospel today — it's brief, but so important. It contains that famous John 3:16: God so loved the world he gave his only Son, that everyone who believes in him might not perish, but might have eternal life.
Now, parse this out. "God so loved the world" — who are we talking about? The Father. The speaker, the lover, the one who looks. The Father. "God so loved the world that he gave his only Son." He sent his Son out. He spoke his word out. He loved the world in the Son.
Why? That we might not perish, but might come to eternal life. The Father sent the Son all the way to the end of God-forsakenness — of our sin, of our rebellion, of our sadness, of our rejection. So that as I run away from the Father, I'm running, whether I like it or not, right into the arms of the Son. And now the Father is sending the Son, the Son gathers in — even the most reluctant sinner — and gathers us into the love that is the Holy Spirit.
In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. The Father sent the Son all the way down so as to gather us into the Holy Spirit. That's what the Trinity is about, everybody. That's why it matters that we come to understand it more plainly — that we might understand the meaning of our redemption.
And God bless you.