It is obvious that no difference can be or is made here by the distinction which is made in Holy Scripture itself between Yahweh dwelling on Sinai and Yahweh dwelling in Jerusalem, or in the New Testament the distinction between the Father and the Son, or the distinction manifested in the contrasts between Good Friday, Easter and Pentecost. The man who prays to the Father, who believes in the Son and who is moved by the Holy Ghost is a man whom the one Lord meets and unites to Himself.
The revelation of Scripture is clear, says Barth, in that God is One and “God’s triunity does not imply any threat to but is rather the basis of the Christian concept of the unity of God.” According to Barth, the concept of trinity is nothing more than an attempt to explain and confirm the name “Yahweh-Kyros” revealed in the Old and New Testaments. The threefold repetition of Father, Son and Spirit, does not indicate a faith in three unique names or different objects; but faith in one name and one God (Yahweh-Kyros). There is not a threefold essence, says Barth, or a threefold divinity, but one God alone.
Barth rightly observes that the use of the term “person” has always been a source of confusion when understanding the Trinity. This he prefers to use the term “mode” or “way of being” as a replacement.
What we have here are God’s specific, different, and always very distinctive modes of being. This means that God’s modes of being are not to be exchanged or confounded. In all three modes of being God is the one God both in Himself and in relation to the world and man. But this one God is God three times in different ways, so different that it is only in this threefold difference that He is God, so different that this difference, this being in these three modes of being, is absolutely essential to Him, so different, then, that this difference is irremovable.
Thus, the repetition of eternity within eternity, says Barth, is the expression of unity within the three modes of God–what he calls “triunity”. He expresses this “triunity” in the follow manner.
If Christ is not very God, what else can faith in Him be but superstition?…
If revelation is to be taken seriously as God’s presence, if there is to be a valid belief in revelation, then in no sense can Christ and the Spirit be subordinate hypostases…
Only the substantial equality of Christ and the Spirit with the Father is compatible with monotheism.
Barth goes on to make a very interesting assertion that has some bearing on the contemporary discussion of Trinity in a completely relational concept. Certain writers today continually asser that God exists as Trinity because he needed the essential relationship between Father, Son and Spirit. Barth seems to have a much different view that would vitiate this assertion.
God is One, but not in such a way that as such He needs a Second and then a Third in order to be One, nor as though He were alone and had to do without a counterpart, and therefore again—this will be of decisive significance in the doctrine of creation and man and also in the doctrine of reconciliation—not as though He could not exist without the world and man, as though there were between Him and the world and man a necessary relation of reciprocity. In Himself these limits of what we otherwise regard as unity are already set aside. In Himself His unity is neither singularity nor isolation. Herewith, i.e., with the doctrine of the Trinity, we step on to the soil of Christian monotheism.
What implications do Barth’s teachings have on your view of Trinity?
* All quotes from Karl Barth, Geoffrey William. Bromiley and Thomas F. Torrance, Church Dogmatics, Volume I The Doctrine of the Word of God, Part 1, 2d ed. (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 2004), 348-383.
The Existentialist lives for the moment, the Traditionalist live for the past and the Eutopinist live for the future. Jesus, when he broke bread said to the Disciples, “As oft as you eat of this bread and drink of this cup now, you do proclaim the Lord’s death in the past until He comes in the future.” God is involved in all of history; past, present, and future. We are now in history for such a time as this when God is in control.
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