The Trinity Beyond Imagination

Photo by BAYC 7739 on Unsplash

A report of a late-night conversation between two British luminaries nudged my spiritual life a stride forward. And deepened my appreciation for belief in God as Trinity.

As the story goes, J. R. R. Tolkien of The Lord of the Rings fame had been talking with C. S. Lewis of The Chronicles of Narnia fame. Tolkien was a confirmed Christian believer. Lewis, on the other hand, had just moved from believing there was no God to affirming that there was—that there must be a God.

But belief in Christ? That was a passage Lewis couldn’t quite navigate. He had huge trouble seeing how “the life and death of Someone Else (whoever he was) 2,000 years ago could help us here and now.” That’s where he got stuck.

Tolkien knew his friend well, that Lewis had jumped from absolute atheism to conviction about God’s reality through thinking it out. In a rational way Lewis had become convinced that God’s existence made sense. Tolkien also knew that only something more than logic would allow his friend to take the next step, the necessary leap. 

Tolkien suggested to Lewis, Lewis later recounted, that the imagination they brought to an immersion in medieval literature and pagan lore was key also in spiritual matters. Tolkien wanted to stretch Lewis’s openness to the Bible’s grand story and the cosmic dimensions it claimed for Jesus. The intellect alone would not arrive there, though. It would take something more akin to intuition. To imaginative expectation. Not just attention to reasoning but also to a revelation.

That’s where my own insight flashed. For all my fascination with the Trinity, I still needed to have a deeper part of me stirred. I’m not alone. There’s a lot of specialty language surrounding attempts to instruct people about this part of Christian revelation. But our efforts to persuade aren’t connecting much.

I recall a conversation with a friend: “I’ve given up trying to understand it,” she said, shaking her head in near-exasperation, a hint of defeat in her voice. It’s not that my friend isn’t bright. She is. She’s an executive for a Christian publishing company. She is well-versed in her Christian faith. But I think she forgot that to speak of God as one in three and three in one is less something to master with our mind and more to explore with our imagination.

We’ve focused on how complex it is intellectually. Is that perhaps why so many find the Trinity off-putting and hopelessly abstract? But the Christian belief in God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is about more than job description roles. It’s also compelling—spiritually, even emotionally. Rather than shrouding truth, I’m finding that my exploring of that picture warms my experience of God. The very names of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, while not without challenges, are family-like and inviting—and stretching in a way that expands our wonder.