The Trinity: Is God a united family?

There is an increasing awareness amongst evangelical Christians that the doctrine of the Trinity is foundational to what it means to be a Christian. One way that can be discerned is in the evangelistic materials produced in recent years. Rather than beginning with an affirmation of God as creator and ruler, as evangelistic tracts of old may have done, many evangelistic resources now begin with the triune nature of the Christian God as a key distinctive of the Christian message.

This is, in the main, a very welcome development. Since we are baptised into the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, it is clear that God’s triunity is basic to Christian discipleship and teaching. Yet, precisely because the triune nature of God is foundational, it is important to make sure we are being accurate and faithful in the way we think about it and express it. A mistake made in the foundations can lead to the whole building collapsing in the future.

A few years ago, when teaching on the doctrine for my church, I came across an evangelistic course which stated that “God is a united family”, “a loving community” and that the three persons “together form the one God.” This kind of explanation has become an increasingly prevalent way of thinking about the Trinity. Another popular level account of the Trinity explains that the “Father is the outgoing head of an outgoing family.” This description of God as a “family” seeks to emphasise, rightly, the relational nature of the Godhead. It also seems to have the advantage of negotiating the tricky relationship between threeness and oneness in God because the oneness emerges from the threeness, just like the oneness of a family emerges from the union of three (or more) distinct individuals. Therefore, if three persons make up one united family then the mystery of how threeness and oneness relate in God is solved. That makes the Trinity much easier to understand and, therefore, to discuss with non-Christians. What had seemed like an embarrassing theological knot has now become something to share confidently.