Discovering the Trinity

"An ordinary simple Christian kneels down to say his prayers. He is trying to get into touch with God. But if he is a Christian he knows that what is prompting him to pray is also God: God, so to speak, inside him. But he also knows that all his real knowledge of God comes through Christ, the Man who was God--that Christ is standing beside him, helping him to pray, praying for him. You see what is happening. God is the thing to which he is praying--the goal he is trying to reach. God is also the thing inside him which is pushing him on--the motive power. God is also the road or bridge along which he is being pushed to the goal. So that the whole threefold life of the three-personal Being is actually going on in that ordinary little bedroom where an ordinary man is saying his prayers." Mere Christianity, pp. 142-143.

C. S. Lewis has a great knack for showing us how practical the doctrine of the Trinity really is--that God's Triune being can be discovered by the ordinary Christian at prayer--praying to the Father, in the name of and following the example of Christ, by the power of the Holy Spirit.

Lewis not only shows us how the reality of the Trinity can be discovered by the average Christian today, but also how this reality was discovered by, or revealed to, the first disciples. In Mere Theology I summarized Lewis's thought on this point:

"The first Christians, before they became Christians, were mostly Jews who already knew Yahweh through the Old Testament Scriptures. Then Jesus came along, claiming to be God in the flesh. Through his life, death and resurrection, Jesus made his disciples believe that he really was God. Then, when the first disciples were formed into a community on the day of Pentecost, they discovered God, the Holy Spirit, working inside of them. Thus, through practical experience, Lewis postulates, the first disciples worked out a definition of the three-personal God." Mere Theology, p. 44.

Thus the doctrine of the Trinity was not something made up by arm-chair theologians some three hundred years after Christ's earthly life and ministry. The Trinity was something discovered by the first followers of Christ and communicated in a rudimentary way in their preaching and writing. Christian theology is not something esoteric, it is based upon experimental knowledge and it has a practical goal--that we, ordinary human beings that we are, should be drawn into the extraordinary life of God.

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Will Vaus

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