MYSTERY OF RELATION IN THE TRINITY IN THE THEOLOGY OF

ELIZABETH JOHNSON.
OKECHUKWU. P. ONYENURU
Undergraduate Student of Department of Theology, Dominican Institute, Ibadan,
Nigeria. pauloke24@gmail.com. February, 2015
Introduction
How does the dynamics of the persons in the Trinity affect the common man on the street?
Wonderful as it may sound that God is Triune, does its understanding show the human face
of God? The concept of the Trinity, One God who is three, is a symbol that develops out of a
religious encounter with a God whose love for humanity makes him reveal himself to Jew
and Gentiles through the person of Christ Jesus and through the divine action of the Holy
Spirit. However, what we find in theology textbooks is the classical Trinitarian doctrine
which uses symbols that tend to distance humanity from the God who loved them so much as
to be born in the likeness of men and women.
In the contemporary world, a lot of effort has been put into discovering new symbols that can
give a human face to the persons of the Trinity without distorting the simplicity and
triunness of God. In this essay, I will present the thoughts of a feminist theologianElizabeth Johnson- on the concept of relations in the Godhead, with a view of proposing the
proper language that will bear its soteriological character, re-situating the symbols for God in
postclassical categories. We shall make use of one her most thought provoking works-She
Who Is
Classical Language of Relations in the Trinity
The whole struggle embarked upon by theologians especially in the first centuries of the
emergence of Christianity is based on the conviction that God, unlike humans, is faithful and
does not present what is not in the divine essence in the process of self-revelation. If in the
Old Testament the Israelites knew God as YHWH, and in the New Testament we know God
in the persons of Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit, we cannot but agree that all modes of

this divine revelation are instances of one divine essence corresponding to three distinct
persons.
The Fathers of the Church were able to arrive at one ousia in three hypostases according to
the Greeks, or one substance in three persons according to the Latin Fathers. In exploring the
relationship, both Greek and Latin churches hold that in the Trinity, there is the Father, Son
and the Holy Spirit related by paternity, filiation and spiration.1 Although the relations are
real in that they pertain to the essence of God, yet the terms used to make the concept
intelligible are often deficient due to the limitation of human language,2 owing to the fact that
the relations can only be said to be manifest in the divine substance but not predicated under
the mode of substance.3 Commenting on the weakness of human language used to name God,
Catherine LaCugna, says that Gods behavior towards us characterized as fatherly (or
motherly) is a statement about how God exercises divinity with us. It is a functional assertion,
not an ontological claim.4
Classical Trinitarian Doctrine uses the term procession (in eternity) to explain the relationship
between the three persons of the Trinity. However much this theological system helps us
arrive at a God that subsists ontologically in three equal persons, it creates an aura of
hierarchy stemming from the pervasive Neoplatonic influence that the one high God could
act on the world only through intermediaries5. While describing the persons, we cannot but
have first, second and third persons which implicitly create hierarchy in the Trinity.
Secondly, the terms employed by the early Church Fathers were product of their milieu
which is known to be largely patriarchal and chauvinistic against women. We have a father
who generates a son, and both breathing forth a third more amorphous figure, the Holy Spirit.
These terms cuts mothers and daughters and the other sharers of the family union from
partaking of the divine unity. In a world plagued by patriarchal subordination of women, it

Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I. Q. 28, a. 4

Elizabeth, A. Johnson. She Who is. (New York: Crossroad, 1996) p. 201
3
Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I. Q. 28, a. 2, ad. 1 and
4
Elizabeth, A. Johnson. She Who is. (New York: Crossroad, 1996) p. 173
5
Elizabeth, A. Johnson. She Who is. (New York: Crossroad, 1996) p. 194
2

robs the societies lesser off the emotional and psychological connectedness with the divine
as a safe harbor. In strong terms, Elizabeth says that
the evocative power of the deeply masculinized symbol of the Trinity points implicitly
to an essential divine maleness, inimical to womans imago Dei precisely as female.
Giving rise to the uncritically held assumption that maleness is of the essence of the
triune God, it has the sociological effect of casting men into the role of God while
women stand as dependent and sinful humanity.6
Proper Model of Relation is Communion
Having established the deficiency of the human language used in and by the Church to
explain the Trinitarian structure, we must proceed to present a language that will be all
encompassing, not excluding any gender, race, class, age or ethnicity. What we say about
God is with respect to his effect. We cannot know what he is but what he is not. Necessarily,
we are compelled to use indirect speech that is metaphoric, analogic or symbolic in character,
and consequently products of our human experiences.
We know God more so that he became incarnate, coming in flesh to save humankind,
meaning that we can know God better by virtue of the salvation history.7 Therefore, the
economic Trinity is the immanent Trinity and vice-versa.8 The God who created us in Gods
image and likeness is the same God who is a Trinity. The economic Trinity signifies Gods
plan of redeeming the world from annihilation by lavishing on humanity immeasurable love.
The economic Trinity is Gods self-communication. The immanent Trinity refers to God in
himself. The God who relates among themselves is the same God who relates with the rest of
creation. The same manner of relations in the Trinity is reflected in Gods relation with the
rest of humanity. It is the same God who encounters us in our day to day life, who is still the
God who is three, and the experience we gain from this encounter is not removed from the
very essence of God, Gods very triune nature. We experience the presence or absence of the
Trinity in both religious and secular spheres of life. Thus,

Elizabeth, A. Johnson. She Who is. (New York: Crossroad, 1996) p. 193
Elizabeth, A. Johnson. She Who is. (New York: Crossroad, 1996) p. 201
8
Elizabeth, A. Johnson. She Who is. (New York: Crossroad, 1996) p. 199
7

the historical world becomes a sacrament of divine presence and activity, even if only
as fragile possibility. The complexities of the experience of (God) therefore, are
cogiven in and through the world history: negative, positive and ambiguous; orderly
and chaotic; solitary and communal; successful and disastrous; personal and
political; dark and luminous; ordinary and extraordinary; cosmic, social and
individual.9
The way and manner in and through which God has been revealed to us in history, and still
maintains that revelatory relationship, gives us an insight into the mode of relationship within
the divine substance. Quoting Karl Rahner, Johnson insists that God is not so little involved
in relationship with us that the distinction we experience in divine encounter are only on our
creaturely side; instead, the triadic character of our religious experience indicates a
threefold character even of Gods own way of being God.10
In assigning names to things, due to the fact that we have become used to naming, we are
oblivious of the underlying principle of naming. A thing is given a name in order to
differentiate it from others. A person is unique if and only if that person is in relation with
another. The very fact that there are three distinct persons in the Trinity implies that each
must have a name, known to the person and others in order to identify that person as diffent
from others. Furthermore, the relation of one person to another individual is and must be
unique to any two relating individuals.
Relationality as a principle in the Trinity performs a dual function of distinguishing one
person as unique from the others and also forms the core of their unity.11 Because of this
unique unity, no one person can be intelligibly discussed in isolation. None is God without
the others. Thus at every point in our experience of any of the persons of the Trinity, we are
experiencing all the persons of the Trinity. In naming them according to economy, there is no
need for talk of procession which is deficient in intelligibility and monarchial. Rather, we
should talk about community; not an absolute ruler, but a threefold koinonia12

Elizabeth, A. Johnson. She Who is. (New York: Crossroad, 1996) p. 125
Elizabeth, A. Johnson. She Who is. (New York: Crossroad, 1996) p. 200
11
Elizabeth, A. Johnson. She Who is. (New York: Crossroad, 1996) p.216
12
Elizabeth, A. Johnson. She Who is. (New York: Crossroad, 1996) p. 216
10

Koinonia reveals the Immanent Trinity

The best model of this koinonia is expressed in genuine friendship. At the incarnation, God
entered into a divine relationship with humanity without removing fundamental human
freedom. Love which is the background of this friendship, that is the essence of the relations,
strengthens unity and maintains differentiation as correlates rather that contraries. In like
manner, the three divine persons are related in a perfect friendship. This friendship is perfect
in all its attributes. It is free rather than possessive; mutual rather than selfish. The three
persons are fundamentally side-by-side in common interest, common delight and shared
responsibilities.
What manner of friendship can we have as archetype other than that between a mother and
her child? The friendship of a woman is the best human expression of the persons of the
Trinity relating together. We are obliged to say that
in this living friendliness, the hypostases are not determined by their point of origin or
rank in the order of precession but exist in each in genuine mutuality. The image of a
woman being herself, expressing herself, and befriending herself in an inclusive
movement that issues in care for the world forms one remote human analogue. So too
does the image of three women friends circling around together in the bonds of
unbreakable friendship13
The figure of a woman best relates us to the divine mystery because of the following reasons.
First, every human on earth is born of a woman, which means that women are more akin to
the creative activity of giving life, of sharing their being, and giving their all for the feeble
and underprivileged. Second, all humans at birth depend on others-their mothers. It is the
woman who nurtures and socializes us. She is the first love we ever experience. Mothering
is associated with primordial experience of comfort, play, discovery, nurture, love and
compassion, security in being held and sheltered, and basic trust in being taught, disciplined
and led forth14 it is the mother who is able to resolve the growth to adulthood of a child
with a maturity of the relationship between them.

13
14

Elizabeth, A. Johnson. She Who is. (New York: Crossroad, 1996) p. 218
Elizabeth, A. Johnson. She Who is. (New York: Crossroad, 1996) p. 178

The divine essence is Holy-Sophia, Sophia being a feminine noun for wisdom. Spirit-Sophia
is love, grace, power, energy who vivifies creation-biological life as well as living
communities. The Spirit renews and empowers by mending hearts and situations torn apart by
sin, war and disasters. Spirit-Sophia imparts healing and liberation to those downtrodden by
oppression and injustice. She is friend, sister, mother and grandmother of the world, builds
relationships of solidarity, between God and creation.15
Jesus-Sophia is the incarnate one who came in the form of a man, preaching, healing and
calling all into the kingdom of God. Jesus-Sophia shows how far the friendship of HolySophia can go by paying the ultimate price on the cross and rising from the dead.16 Although
it is argued that Jesus maleness points to maleness as an essential characteristic of the divine
being, this claim lacks theological foundation. At creation Holy Sophia made them male and
female in the image of the Trinity. So both maleness and femaleness are attributes of God.
Therefore,
amid a multiplicity of differences, Jesus maleness is appreciated as intrinsically
important for his personal historical identity and historical challenge of his ministry,
but not theologically determinative of his identity as the Christ nor normative for the
identity of the Christian community.17
Mother-Sophia is the unoriginated source of all life. She ceaselessly cares for the wellbeing
of every dot in the world which she created freely. She is the mother who never abandons her
child but in mercy and justice brings all things to their final end.
According to Classical thought, relation within the Trinity is real, but that between Holy
Sophia and the rest of creation is not real because of the metaphysical chasm between these
two realms of existence.18 The relation among the persons of the Trinity is real by virtue of
being of the same nature. On the part of created things, Holy Wisdom was not compelled to
create, but did it out of free will. Therefore, the relation is real because Holy Wisdom freely
loves creation and love is predicated of Holy Wisdoms essence. Furthermore, when Jesus15

Elizabeth, A. Johnson. She Who is. (New York: Crossroad, 1996) p. 146
Cf. Elizabeth, A. Johnson. She Who is. (New York: Crossroad, 1996) pp. 157-161
17
Elizabeth, A. Johnson. She Who is. (New York: Crossroad, 1996) p.156
18
Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I, Q. 13, a. 7
16

Sophia broke into our history, the realness was made tangible. If we maintain that there is no
real relation, we will have to hold unto classical deism which is the position that God created
the world and not just left it but abandoned it. Therefore, human relationship with God is
impersonal.
Conclusion
According to Elizabeth, we cannot successfully symbolize the mystery of relations in the
Trinity by employing skewed analogues without encountering snags. The model that best
captures the relation in the Trinity is one based on communion between Holy Wisdom and
man (economic Trinity), which stands as a proper image of the Triune God (immanent
Trinity). Mother-Sophia, Spirit-Sophia and Jesus-Sophia are the three persons of the Trinity
symbolized in a feminist language in order to capture their relationship with the world and at
the same time speak of their inner life. I will like to add that the word perichoresis coined
by the Greek Fathers is apt in making this point clear. They talked of the relations of the
persons as a sharing of same consciousness. In one consciousness, there is an indwelling,
interwovennes, inter-connectedness of three consciousnesses, such that each member of
the Trinity not only experiences what the others are currently experiencingand with any
experience any of them has ever had.19 The three persons while relating to us reveal their
own relations, their internal relations, as they self-communicate. Since one cannot be
experienced devoid of the other, in experiencing one person, we experience the others.
Furthermore, in as much as we are able to come to the knowledge of our relations with God,
we have a knowledge of how the persons relate.
The three persons, whose essence is love, are related by a friendship that is mutual and
perfect, without prejudice to their distinctness. This model symbolizes communion in Holy
Wisdom rather than a monarchy ruling from isolated splendor. It is a reminder to the human
race of the need to create a community where persons can be distinct, free and relational in a
mutual and trustworthy manner. Thus,
19

Erickson Millars, making Sense of the Trinity. (Michigan: Baker Books, 2000). p. 59-60

the solitary, ruling male God envisioned as a single, absolute subject and named
father (who has a son subject to him) can hardly help but have a dominating
relationship to the world. This in turn justifies the social and political structures
of patriarchy with the solitary human ruler at the head of the pyramid of power.
Conversely, the triune God who exists essentially in mutual inner relationships
provides a different model for human interaction, pointing to a community
without supremacy or subjection where differences flourish in the matrix of a
relationship of equals. The triune idea of God points to a community of
brothers and sisters in which all are one in shared responsibility without
subordination or privilege.20

Finally, we must be cautious to know that not everything of the Trinity is revealed to us due
to our finite nature, with the implication that the economic Trinity tells us little about the
immanent Trinity. Nevertheless, we are comforted when we realize that the Trinity is a
mystery. Any attempt to unravel the whole of the essence of Trinity will strip theology of its
task of making clear in our time and age the truth of the mystery of God. Whenever we know
come to the knowledge about everything in the Trinity, it ceases to be a mystery.

20

Elizabeth Johnson, Female Symbol of God, an Apophatic Tradition and Social Justice. International
Journal of Orthodox Theology 1: 2, (2010), pp. 52-53.40-57.

Bibliography
Aquinas, Thomas. Summa Theologiae. Benziger Bros edition. London: Fathers of the English
Dominican Province, 1947.
Johnson A. Elizabeth. She Who is. New York: Crossroad, 1996.
_________Female Symbol of God, an Apophatic Tradition and Social Justice.
International Journal of Orthodox Theology 1: 2, (2010), pp.40-57.
Millars, Erickson. Making Sense of the Trinity. Michigan: Baker Books, 2000.