The world in which the Christian belief in the Trinity, one God in three persons (though “person” is not equivalent to modern usage), differed radically from the Jewish and Christian world.

Of Greco-Roman religion, Christian historian Robert Louis Wilken has written The First Thousand Years: A Global History: “For the ancient Greeks and Romans, religion was an affair of rituals and practices, not doctrine. Christians, however, not only believed in God, they also believed God had created the world, that human beings were made in the image of God, that Christ, the divine son, had become man, died, and rose from the dead, that at the end of time there would be a general resurrection.”

The Christian Scriptures, however, do not describe the Trinity in abstract “theological” language, but in “relational” language – the kind of language we might use for an encounter with the Lord. In the first reading, from Exodus, the Lord, in a rare self-declaration, reveals his graciousness, kindness, and fidelity just after an incident of shocking infidelityⁱ on the part of the people. That self-declaration will be repeated in the Bible later. In the second reading, from Romans, St. Paul uses the trinitarian formula in his blessing of the people. St. Paul is feeling his way to a doctrine of the Triune God that would later be spelled out in more detail. The Gospel of John fills out the belief about the Triune using the language of family (father-son) that was so dominant an institution in Mediterranean culture.

Notice how different the scriptural contexts are from the Greco-Roman culture, and from modern conventional assumptions about God. The God of our Scriptures and our Christian tradition is a God who cannot be relegated to traditional rituals and invoked in only civic rituals. No, our God is richly complex and merciful, meets us in daily life as well as grand rituals, and enters our life through his Spirit and the Son whom he has sent.

ⁱ The construction of the Golden Calf.

Richard Clifford, S.J., has taught biblical studies for 55 years, most recently at the Clough School of Theology and Ministry, Boston College, and has written many scholarly and popular books and articles.