Some years ago, I noticed how Father, Son, and Holy Spirit — the three persons of the Trinity — kept turning up together in the New Testament, sometimes in the same breath. As when, for instance, Jesus told his followers to “go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit” (Matthew 28:19 NIV).
Yet the word Trinity itself never shows up in Scripture. Anywhere. So I’ve also long wondered: For a belief that sits at the center of the Christian faith, what should we make of this big, important word missing from the Bible’s vocabulary? Is the Trinity in the Bible?
If the actual word cannot be found, I have concluded again and again, the Trinity’s truth stretches across the Bible’s many pages. It interweaves so much of what we see of God in God’s character and work. And the Trinity, as the early church found, provides the best explanation for how the three persons belong together, work together, operate together for our life and salvation.
I find it helpful to categorize such pointers to God’s triune reality in four ways: hints, examples, teachings, and hopes.
1. Hints of the Trinity, Early On
You could argue that the Trinity first makes a subtle appearance in the very first chapter of the Bible. I mean the use in Genesis of the first-person plural — us — when God fashions and speaks humankind into existence.
To be clear: What we find in Genesis is more a hint than any proof. Still, many Christians through the ages have seen foreshadowing here. There is something intriguing when the one God in Genesis 1 says at Creation, “Let us make humans in our image, according to our likeness” (Gen. 1:26 NRSV). Why “Let us make”? Why “our image”? Does that not suggest a picturing of God richer than that of some aloof being shut up in lonely solitariness?
Of course, Bible scholars, including those well before there was a New Testament, have found varied explanations for the plural forms: God perhaps simply spoke out loud to no one in particular (as suggested the medieval rabbi and commentator Rashi). This would be a creative and affable God, almost talking to himself, you could say, as he came to the supreme culmination of all his creating.
Or maybe, another line of reasoning runs, God is speaking to the angelic host, a heavenly court of celestial beings of astonishing glory. (See, for instance, Isa. 6:8; Job 38:7, for tantalizing scenes of the heavenly realms.)
But Christians have long thought more than that was going on here. God would not say to his cherubim and seraphim, “Let us make,” would he? And look at how Genesis names clearly the “spirit” of God hovering over the dark, soon-to-be fashioned waters. The word spirit in Genesis 1 (capitalized in some versions) can mean wind or force. But also, in an image much more personal, it conjures the imagery and feeling of breath.
Was not the Spirit here hovering over the inky waters? As a Creed would later proclaim of the third person of the Trinity, here was “the Lord, the giver of life.” Might we be witnessing here a divine collaboration, a delighted, relational engagement as God makes the universe and bequeathes life?
Again, while the word Trinity is not in the Bible itself, later Christians would have a field day with the rich possibilities found in such interplay of the Three. With the benefit of the early church’s clarifying of the persons of the Trinity, fourth-century church preacher and archbishop John Chrysostom would go so far to say this: “‘Let us make’ suggests deliberation, collaboration, and conference with another person.”
To extend the ancient preacher’s thought, I think of what John’s Gospel also says about the world coming into being through Jesus, the Word. “Through him,” John declares, “all things were made” (Jn. 1:3a NIV, emphasis mine). So I’m thinking collaboration and conversation with not just “another person,” as Chrysostom suggested, but persons. Even in the Bible’s opening scenes.
No proof here, but, I would argue, a clue. But there’s more — far more.
2. Examples of the Trinity, as the Bible’s Story Unfolds
In addition to an occasional hint, God gives some moving glimpses. The Bible unveils not only the oneness, but also the triune, even conversational nature of God. I’m thinking particularly of examples of the communion enjoyed in the Gospels between Jesus the Son and his Father. I see their tenderness in a scene in the Gospel of Mark: John baptizes Jesus, and a voice, the Father’s, “came from heaven, ‘You are my beloved Son; with you I am well pleased’” (Mk. 1:11 ESV).
This isn’t even the first glimpse in Mark of the Father and Son in conversation and communion — that is found in Mark’s opening to his Gospel, in his very first line in Mk. 1:1 (ESV), “The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.” We learn how being “Son” rests at the heart of Jesus’ identity. And then, when you grant that, how do you have a son who does not share in the very nature of his father? For good reason, Jesus’s earliest witnesses realized he was God made flesh, God made human, the Son of God (see especially John 1:14).
And in the baptism story, while you could miss it, the Spirit also shows up, completing the whole trinitarian scheme of things, for in Mark, after his baptism by John the Baptist, Jesus comes out of the Jordan’s waters and “saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit descending like a dove upon him” (Mk. 1:10 NIV, emphasis my own).
Here we see the Trinity in action. Theologians would later call this idea of the operations of the Trinity the economic Trinity; that technical theological term refers to the “economy” or the “assembling” of the persons of the Trinity. This kind of vocabulary highlights the Fellowship of the Three’s unbreakable unity, and yet their distinctive, active roles in time and history: their deep work in creating, redeeming, and sanctifying.
3. Teachings on the Triune, Relational God
So much of the Bible’s imagery (inadequate as it must be in referring to an infinite God) has a relational feel. The Bible stresses all kinds of things about God through word pictures: a stone wall’s strength, a tree, cooling water, an eagle’s wings, but its profoundest word pictures also portray love in action.
Even the most concrete, most poetic images have relational aspects. For instance, God may be called a Rock in the Old Testament, but we see how he also lives as a Rock of refuge — for his people. We hear of the tenderness of God carrying his people on “eagle’s wings” — upon which God says, “I bore you.” As though all along he bears us, all along carries his people.
While we can take comfort from such reassuring imagery, the Trinity breaks the picture of a kind God wide open.
Perhaps nowhere is there a more triadic, triune-like bringing together of the Three Persons than on the lips of Jesus himself. As noted above, Matthew 28:16-20 presents a clear interlinking of the three. To return to our question, “is the Trinity in the Bible?” — it certainly seems so here, for in Matthew, as we’ve seen in Mark, we watch all three persons present and involved in Jesus’ baptism (Mt. 3:16-17).
But something exceptional happens in Matthew’s chapter 28, as the resurrected Jesus is commissioning his followers, instructing them on how to baptize new believers. Scholar R.T. France even calls 28:19, with its talk of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, a trinitarian “formula.”
“[N]othing like it occurs elsewhere in the New Testament,” he writes, “though the close association of the Son with the Father has been seen [elsewhere in Matthew’s Gospel] in 11:27; 24:36.” For, France continues, “It is one thing for Jesus to speak about his relationship with God as Son with Father … and to draw attention to the close links between himself and the Holy Spirit …” but for the Son to assume a place amid the Father and the Holy Spirit, to make all three a focus of “the disciple’s allegiance is extraordinary.” Why baptize the new child of God into the three if they were not all vitally important in the new birth and life made possible in God?
And later, another place where we gain more than a hint — what qualifies as a teaching — is 2 Corinthians 13:14: “May the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ,” Paul the apostle wrote, “and the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all” (NIV). (“God” in Paul’s formulation refers to the Father.) Here is Paul’s concluding benediction for the church at Corinth, a conclusion to an intense letter in which he had to confront them and brook some worrying challenges. And he knows that only a reference to all three persons will be adequate.
Paul envisions not just Christ’s grace, then — the central Gospel news of our unmerited grace and favor through redeeming love. No, we are also pointed to the love of a Father-like God, a love fathomless in depth and infinite in height. We are told of a communion made possible by the vivid, visceral presence of the Spirit, the intimate contact point of God with believers.
Of course, one can veer off into problematic ways in exploring the Trinity: so accenting the oneness that the richness of the three gets lost in a kind of vast, unrelatable God; or so emphasizing the threeness that we see God as composed in parts, with wills and “personalities” operating separately.
No, three in movements and person, but one in divine will and essence and being. And the one then points us back again to the three.
Lest we think all this merely comes as a philosophical add-on in later centuries, it strikes me how the three link in oneness and rich relational reality even in the early church’s first proclamation. Peter, on the day of Pentecost, declares to the crowd not only the redeeming atonement of Jesus on the cross, he also pulls in the divine three: “Exalted to the right hand of God, [Jesus] has received from the Father the promised Holy Spirit and has poured out what you now see and hear. … Repent and be baptized, every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins. And you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit” (Acts 2:33, 38, NIV, emphasis mine).
4. Hopes for What the Trinity Can Mean
Such is the mystery of the Trinity: not a mystery that baffles or confounds as much as one that calls forth reverent awe and growing expectancy that we, even in life’s hard or little moments, can share in that loving, wonder-filled communion.
When we think about our desires to pray and draw closer to God, we picture a way of talking about God and speaking to God that resembles a family’s moments of intimacy. Such imagery, rooted in Scripture itself, gives us a grammar for the expansive, extravagant love of God.
The Trinity, gently articulated in the New Testament, warms our view of God rather than complicates it. We feel the mountain sunshine air of a warmly personal God in the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit — calling us, welcoming us.
Discover the life-changing answer to your soul’s deepest question: Am I loved?
In Fully Beloved: Meeting God in Our Heartaches and Our Hopes, author and pastor Timothy Jones leads you on a spiritually nourishing exploration of how God’s triune nature of love really impacts your life, bringing deep healing, richer connection with others, and renewed passion for life.
Timothy Jones is a pastor and author known for helping people uncover greater warmth and depth in their relationship with God. Tim has an M.Div. from Princeton Theological Seminary and is a former editor for Christianity Today.He is a blogger (www.revtimothyjones.com), Substacker, and retreat leader. He has written regularly for the Rabbit Room, Inkwell, Mockingbird, and other publications. His latest book, Fully Beloved: Meeting God in Our Heartaches and Our Hopes, explores God’s triune love set amid our human, everyday brokenness.
