If I were to ask you to tell me about yourself, what would you say? Where would you begin? Would it be with your origins, your career, where you lived, your family, your interests, your major challenges, crises, your strengths? “Who am I” is a big question. If you ask that question about God, about his personal identity, imagine what a gargantuan response and resumé you would receive.

God and us human beings are related – God made us in his image. We are connected – he loves us and wants us to be his children, and live in love with him. In order to be able to do that we need to know who God is – just as we need to know our natural parents if we are to enjoy a loving relationship with them. What is the personal identity of God?

By definition God is larger than life. People who are larger than life are, William Willimon, maintains, effusive communicators. He writes in Pulpit Resource for Trinity Sunday that, from our experience, and the testimony of Scripture, our God seems to be an effusive, loquacious communicator. In the beginning of Genesis God spoke the universe into being. He is the Creative Word. When Christ came he became the Incarnate Word.

Martin Luther, in speaking of the real presence of Christ in the Lord’s Supper, spoke of God’s “ubiquity,” i.e. he is everywhere. Our God is ubiquitous, everywhere and at all times present. This is why Jesus said, before he ascended to the Father: “Surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.” (Matt. 28:20) God is not only loving, caring, and acting, our God is ubiquitous. He is larger than life, effusive, overflowing.

Augustine spoke of this in a passage in his great work The City of God. Augustine spoke of the “plenitude” of God. As evidence of this, Augustine mentioned the effusiveness whereby God created all of the flowers in the world. We might have stopped creating flowers after one or two beautiful specimens. But God didn’t stop, God kept creating multitudes of flowers, all in different shapes and colors and kinds. Not only are they beautiful, Augustine notes, but note the glory of how they will turn their heads toward the sun, bending towards the light. We might have been content, as humans, with just a few flowers and their beauty. God didn’t stop with a few, because God is effusive, overflowing with love and creativity. There is a plenitude there. When you read the first chapter of Genesis you are struck by the plenitude of God’s creativity.

In the New Testament we see that same thing in the Gospels. We don’t have one gospel, we have four. Four gospels! One might have thought that we could have stopped with one, saying to ourselves, “Matthew got it fairly right; let’s all go with Matthew.” But no, an effusive, ubiquitous, plenitudinous, and overflowing God requires at least four gospels to talk about his personal identity.

One way Jesus talked about God’s plenitude and effusiveness, God’s ubiquity and loquaciousness, is through the Trinity. He commissioned the apostles, and through them the whole church, to “Make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.” (Matt.28:19) He meant for us to be baptized, and to baptize, into the character of God, whose identity was to be known through the Trinity. Don’t think of the Trinity as some incomprehensible doctrine of the church, though God’s plenitude is often beyond our comprehension. Think of the Trinity as Christ’s way to put into words what we have experienced of the overflowing love of God, that he is larger than life.

Sometimes you hear people say, “Well you are a Christian, and I am not, but the important thing is that we all try to believe and serve God. Right?”

Wrong.

Christians are not those who believe in some amorphous, vague concept of “God.” We are not monists – people who subsume everything into one spiritual being, and therefore deny the reality of variety, creativity, and the dignity of matter. The problem with Islamic fundamentalists is that they see God in their own image rather than vice versa. Their God is smaller rather than larger than life. J.B. Phillips wrote a book entitled, “Your God is Too Small.” That is true for so many people. Their God is not my God or the God of the Bible, the God of the Trinity.

Christians are those who believe that God’s name is Trinity. God is not simply God, God is the Father, God is the Son, and God is the Holy Spirit.

We might have been able to say, at some early point, “we all believe in the same God.” However, we believe that God came to us as Jesus. We believe that Jesus is God. And after experiencing that, all of our notions of God had to go back to the drawing table. If Jesus Christ is God, then the personal identity of God is revealed to us in human form. That is the uniqueness of Christianity.

When God came to us as the Son, Incarnate in Jesus, God did not say, “Call me by my proper name, Trinity.” God didn’t have to. We did. That is, on the basis of our experience of God as complex, ubiquitous, and overflowing with love as the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, we just naturally started speaking of God as Trinity. We experienced God in these three ways. Though it was the same God that we had experienced as the great creator of the world, the Father of Israel, now we also experienced God in the flesh as Son, as the power flowing from God, the Holy Spirit, e.g. “May the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all.” (2 Cor.13:14)

Augustine, one of the greatest minds of the Western world, put his head to thinking about the Trinity. Augustine, a master of words, took 15 books to talk about the Trinity, 15 books that took him over a decade to write. Augustine’s On The Trinity continues to be helpful in thinking through that which is difficult to think about, and talking about that which is difficult to describe, namely the personal identity of God who comes to us as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

Early on in his massive treatise, Augustine had seven statements about God:

The Father is God.

The Son is God.

The Holy Spirit is God.

The Son is not the Father.

The Father is not the Holy Spirit.

The Holy Spirit is not the Son. And then, after these six statements, Augustine adds one more.

There is only one God.

This is the thinking that is tough to get into our brains. We have experienced three rather distinctive modes of God’s presence. God is the Father, the creator of us and the world. God is the Son, the one who comes to us as Jesus, living, suffering, dying, and rising among us. We experience God as Holy Spirit, that power that has intruded into our world as the near presence and power of God.

And yet, we are not tritheists, we don’t believe in three gods. We know, with Israel, that is only one God. These names, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are not three names for the same thing. They are three names of one God.

And how to make sense of that? You can certainly understand our sisters and brothers the Jews who hear talk of this kind and who may think to themselves, “Christians are no longer monotheist. They no longer believe in one God but in three gods.”

No, what we are attempting to do in the Trinity is make sense of how there can be one God, and yet that one God being experienced by us in three special ways.

In the Council of Nicaea, they spoke of God’s “three persons.” In our language, that sounds like we are talking about three different people. No, Nicea was building upon the Greek experience, from Greek drama of the way in which one character in a Greek play portrayed a number of different people in the play by simply moving off stage, putting on another mask, which was called a persona, and returning to the stage as a different actor. One actor could play three different roles.

I am one person, but I play the roles of father, husband, and brother.

In a similar way, though there is one God, we experience that God working in three different ways in the world.

And yet, like most analogies about God, this analogy helped, but not completely.

In Book 7 of On the Trinity, Augustine tried this. Rather than looking specifically in Scripture, or in the world, for analogies to speak about God, he looked within himself. In looking within himself, Augustine noted how the human soul itself is Triadic, Trinitarian. There is a kind of triune way in which we experience ourselves, as if the Trinity is built right into the structure of our reality.

We say, for instance, “I love myself.” According to Jesus, it is all right to love ourselves, for we are to love our neighbors as we love ourselves. So we can say, “I love myself.” When we do so, we are speaking in a triune way. When I say, “I love myself,” there is a lover that is doing the loving; namely, me loving myself. There is also the beloved, the object of my love, which is also me; then, there is the loving, the act and energy of the lover upon the beloved. So even with the one, there is the lover, the beloved, and the loving.

Thus, within our own hearts, in our own experience, Augustine said that there is the vestigia trinitatis, an image of God as Trinity. Reality is trinitarian.

It is as if the Trinity, God’s dynamic, effusive nature, appears to be built right into the structure of who I am and what the world is.

There is a modern word for talking about this dynamic structure – ‘synergy’. Within the Trinity, there is constant movement, interaction, as the Father gives to the Son, and the Son is constantly returning praise and glory to the Father, and the Father and the Son give to the Holy Spirit, and the Holy Spirit constantly draws everything back to the Father and the Son. There is the beloved, the lover, and the love.

When Jesus commissioned his apostles, and subsequently the church, to baptize in the name of the Trinity, he was intending to impart his personal identity of loving relationship to those who would receive him. He is the Lover, the Father, who brings the Beloved, the Son, into our lives by the love of the Spirit. This enables us to love others as God has loved us. In this way the sinful human heart can be changed for good. We call it regeneration or conversion. It is the purpose of evangelization, of missionary work, of the great commission. We are not only made in the image of God, but we can also be remade into his personal identity, if we will but receive it by repentance and faith. It is the world’s only hope for peace and goodwill.