Son of David, Lord of All

To speak of the divinity of the Son proclaims the holiness of Christ, the Lover who becomes incarnate.  When the divinity of the Holy Spirit is acknowledged, we proclaim the perfection of spirit free to be sheer truth, goodness, and love, and thereby capable of liberating us from the chains of our skepticism, lukewarmness, or coldness.  To believe the dogma of the Trinity is to respond to each of the three with equal adoring love. 

This is why those who deny the equality of the Members of the Trinity are not rejecting merely an intellectual formula, but are rejecting a manifestation of divine love.  Thus, if one says that Christ is but a great prophet, one denies to his crucifixion the significance of an act of divine love and relegates it to an event in human history no more eternally significant than the death of Socrates.  (We admire Socrates, but no one has thought of worshiping him!)  If one considers the Spirit to be but a crystallization of the movement of human thought through time instead of a divine source of truth and love, then one denies to man the benefit of such an eternally present Comforter.  Thus, it is the equality of the three Persons in their divinity which makes the portrait of his love of man complete....

The above philosophical meditation on the Trinity is not meant to prove that, given the nature of love, God must be triune.  We do not believe in the Trinity because we can understand it, but because God, who alone can know about his nature, has revealed it to us.  What ought to become clear however is that there is a deep relationship between the Christian mind and the love of God, so that far from dogma acting as a straightjacket, it releases vast fields of exploration.  On the one hand, it reaches into the profundities of our human experience, and on the other hand it represents the way the mind has of participating in God’s love by allowing itself to be transformed by the truth which God teaches.