In AD 325, exactly 1,700 years ago, Christian leaders from Eastern and Western provinces were called together for a confab by the Roman Emperor Constantine. The empire was on its way to adopting Christianity as its official religion. But there was a problem. Disunity in the church.

The New Testament did not yet exist, and lots of Christian writings were circulating. Church teachings varied, depending on which sources were used. No agreements had been reached about the nature of God although Christianity understood itself to be monotheistic, in accord with its Jewish origins. Hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One.

So what to do with God the Father, Jesus the Son, and the Holy Spirit? What is the nature of God? The most immediate threat was a particularly influential Christian priest in Alexandria. Egypt.

Father Arius was teaching that since God is transcendent, unbegotten, and without beginning then Jesus, having been born in human form, could not be of exactly the same substance as God. Arius said therefore that Jesus was not co-eternal, nor fully divine, and existed by the will of God the Father. This particular matter had been debated for more than fifty years. And it had become a matter of serious conflict and division in the church.

Constantine implored church leaders to find unity. Not only for the sake of the church’s integrity, but because its conflict was destabilizing for the empire. Besides, what did lack of unity say about the followers of Jesus who prayed that his disciples might all be one?

The council of leaders met at Nicaea in Asia Minor for three months. They ultimately rejected Arius’s position, agreeing that Jesus is fully divine, fully human, and co-eternal with God.

A document called the Nicene Creed was authored which also described the nature and relationship of the Holy Spirit to the Father and Son. God is three-in-one and one-in-three. A Tri-unity. Et voila! The Holy Trinity became a thing.

And yet. This was not the end of the story. Language describing the nature and relationship of God, Jesus, and the Spirit did not completely satisfy Churches of the east. They agreed to disagree. Further tensions festered for nearly seven hundred years until finally the east and west severed all formal ties. And things remain broken today although current leaders are reaching out to one another and progress toward unity may be possible.

It would also be progress if we Christians could agree that the triune nature of God is not a formula that we can establish, from which we can teach absolute truth about God. Could we instead agree that Trinity is how we encounter God through scripture and personal experience?

Theology after all, is the study of God. Study suggests that we are always learning about God.

And since we say that our God is a living God, this makes sense.

Do we master God? Of course not. So in proper humility we should be asking not how do we teach the Trinity but, what can God, as the Trinity teach us?

Trinity teaches us that God’s nature is good. Humans have experienced God as Spirit. We’re accustomed to thinking in terms of “the” Holy Spirit, but the bible more commonly uses the phrase “a spirit holy”. Holy means something set apart from creation, worthy of God and serving God. This reminds us that while spirit can be impure and malevolent, God’s Spirit is pure and benevolent.

Trinity teaches us that God is cooperative. The Spirit of God was present at creation to breathe life into everything. Jesus the Son announced that he had come from God as God’s word to redeem the world and to show the Father’s glory. God the Father spoke at the baptism of Jesus as a spirit holy descended upon him.

The Trinity’s communal and open nature allows us to experience Wisdom as an attribute of God. Wisdom is poured out from God. As Proverbs says, Wisdom, whose nature is feminine, was there from the beginning. As were the Son and Spirit.

Wisdom was established by God as a skilled artisan, literally alongside God, playing with elemental forces. Wisdom is God’s delight; the living world and humankind is Wisdom’s delight.

And lastly, though not finally in any sense, the Trinity teaches us that God is love in motion. God the protecting and loving parent, mothering and fathering. The Spirit holy bringing life and healing. Jesus the Son caring, tending, rescuing, and ultimately giving us his life for us.

In the end, the council of Nicaea could not nail God’s nature down to everyone’s satisfaction. Which is only right if God is not a construct of any human mind, but is instead wholly (and holy) Other. So that, in the end it is not by any force of reason that we can ever understand God. And the psalm said it best of all: that only infants and children, and the host of heaven even rightly chant God’s praises.