The Problem of Communicating the Trinity to Children

The festival celebrated in the church calendar as Trinity Sunday always poses some problems when there is ‘Family Church’, and the preacher wants to give a talk to the children on the theme of the day. How is one to communicate simply the ancient formula that God is ‘three persons and one essence? Roman Catholic preachers in Ireland have, from time immemorial, reached for the national emblem and sermonised on the three-in-one of the shamrock, much as early Christian preachers drew attention to the ‘root, the shoot and the fruit’ of a growing plant, or to the sun, its ray light, and the point of the ray where it touches the earth.

These illustrations, however, though expressing multiplicity-in-unity, fail to catch the personal and relational nature of trinitarian language…Two attempts to communicate these aspects in talks to children which I have heard in recent years went as follows.

In the first the preacher invited the children to raise their hands if they had three names, and asked them to tell him what they were – Fiona Susan Smith’, for instance. God, he then informed them, also has three names – Father Son Spirit’, the second talk invited the children to think of the persons of the Trinity as different members of the same football team – the manager (the Father), a player (the Son) and the coach (the Spirit). All too unaware, our preachers had aligned themselves respectively with two historic errors in the development of the doctrine of the Trinity, modalism in the first case and Pluralism in the second. The first stresses the one nature or essence of God at the expense of the reality of the persons, and the second emphasises the distinct identity of the persons but fails to articulate the oneness of God. As we shall see, there has been a tendency towards the first in the Western Church, and towards the second in the Eastern.