To my Muslim friends-‘let us reason together’-the Trinity explained

I have come to the conclusion that Islam’s rejection of the Trinity is one of the most profound ironies in comparative religion. Islam rejects the Trinity out of a fear that it leads to the unforgivable sin of shirk, which is saying that God has partners. Shirk is Islam’s cardinal sin because it diminishes God’s greatness by saying that he is equaled by another or that he needs associates to do what he wants or to be who he is. The irony is that, when properly understood, the Trinity is the very doctrine that glorifies God as the self-subsisting, coherent yet completely transcendent being that Muslims claim him to be.

For those Muslims who see what the Bible teaches, the Trinity puts them in a difficult position. To reject the Trinity, a Muslim may resort to claiming that it is a corruption of the Bible, but he cannot do so, because the Qur’an does not allow Muslims to believe in biblical corruption. (See my article addressing biblical corruption, here) So Muslims who truly understand this tension are left with only one avenue: they must reinterpret the Bible so that it does not teach the Trinity…Muslims do not need to resort to such measures if their sincere goal is to believe in the one and only great God. If it is, then I would argue that they must believe in the Trinity for three reasons. First, the Bible (which a Muslim must believe is uncorrupted) teaches it. Second, the Trinity does not defy logic. And third, the Trinity proves God to be the Greatest Possible Being over and above a Unitarian conception of God.

…Muslims ultimately do not have to sacrifice their sense of reason to see the reality of the Trinity. They can embrace the truth because it is taught in the Scripture, because it is consistent with logic and because it transcends human logic. This is a key distinction that must be kept in mind. A truth, like the Trinity, can exceed our logic without violating it. A concept can be transcendent in the sense that it is not illogical-it is not contradictory-but it is beyond our ability to full understand. Muslims and Christians share many such beliefs. They believe that God is a being without beginning and without end. There is nothing inherently contradictory about the belief in God’s eternality, yet it is impossible for us to understand fully. How can we? We are finite beings, each of us with a beginning, living in a world where everything in the natural order has a beginning. So it would be impossible to comprehend God’s eternality fully, though we might be able to apprehend it.

The Trinity is not the belief that God is one in his nature and three in his nature. That would be an obvious breach of the law of noncontradiction. Similarly, the Trinity is not the belief that God is one in his personhood and three in his personhood. That, Too, is explicitly contradictory and nonsensical. In distinction to either of these ideas, the Trinity is the belief that God has one nature-one essence-and three personhoods, or three centers of consciousness. This would be contradictory only if something’s “nature” is the same as its “person,” because then the Trinity would teach that God is only one in one sense and also three in the same sense. But “nature” and “person” are distinct concepts, which keeps the Trinity from internal inconsistency. Perhaps an illustration will help us unpack the nature/person distinction. Something’s nature is its very basic or inherent characteristic. A nature is what some is. One can look at a rock and ask what it is. In its most basic nature, a rock is a nonliving or inorganic thing. But “personhood” is a far different thing. Personhood describes something’s relational, volitional, intellectual and emotional qualities. Human beings have personhood because they relate to one another and to the world around them. They have a will an intellect and emotions. But a human being also has a nature, a basic or inherent characteristic.

And so we see that nature and personhood are distinct concepts. And as distinct concepts, there is no law of logic that is violated-there is no contradiction-in claiming that God is one in his nature and three in his personhoods. This may transcend our reason, but it does not defy it. Just because we cannot fully comprehend how a single being can be tri-personal does not mean it is not possible…Muslims’ affirmation of God’s differentness practically screams out for the answer found in the Trinity. In fact, I would expect a Muslim to readily acknowledge that if God in his very nature were simple to understand because he resembles our single nature/single person existence, perhaps we invented him to be that way. In other words, if God in his very being looks just like us, then the chances are quite good that we created him our image instead of the other way around. A Muslim would perish the thought. And so rather then bother us, the Trinity’s grand yet logically consistent mystery provides us with solace that we are on to something marvelous to our pursuit to worship the Greatest Possible Being.[1]

We close with an argument that a number of Christian philosophers have defended for God’s being a plurality of persons:

• God is by definition the greatest conceivable being.
• As the greatest conceivable being, God must be perfect.
• Now a perfect being must be a loving being. For love is a moral perfection; it is better for a person to be loving rather than unloving. God therefore must be a perfectly loving being.
• Now it is of the very nature of love to give oneself away. Love reaches out to another person rather than centering wholly in oneself. So if God is perfectly loving by his very nature, he must be giving himself in love to another.
• But who is that other? It cannot be any created person, since creation is a result of God’s free will, not a result of his nature. It belongs to God’s very essence to love, but it does not belong to his essence to create. So we can imagine a possible world in which God is perfectly loving and yet no created persons exist. So created persons cannot sufficiently explain whom God loves.
• Moreover, contemporary cosmology makes it plausible that created persons have not always existed. But God is eternally loving. So again created persons alone are insufficient to account for God’s being perfectly loving.
• It therefore follows that the other to whom God’s love is necessarily directed must be internal to God himself. In other words, God is not a single, isolated person, as unitarian forms of theism like Islam hold; rather, God is a plurality of persons, as the Christian doctrine of the Trinity affirms. On the unitarian view God is a person who does not give himself away essentially in love for another; he is focused essentially only on himself. Hence, he cannot be the most perfect being.
• But on the Christian view, God is a triad of persons in eternal, self-giving love relationships. Thus,
• Since God is essentially loving, the doctrine of the Trinity is more plausible than any unitarian doctrine of God. (emphasis mine)[2]