The Trinitarian formulation is one way of handling the paradox of incarnation. Again, the term kenosis is an important concept as God became human in Jesus Christ by letting go of divine qualities, and yet remaining fully divine. One way to talk about where those qualities went at the moment of incarnation is to posit a third divine person along with God the Father and God the Son, namely God the Holy Spirit. It is almost impossible to talk about the Trinity without committing some kind of heresy, so I may be treading on some dangerous ground for some, but this post represents my best shot at making sense out of the Trinity as it pertains to the incarnation.
I cannot think of a satisfying way to get around the masculine language of the traditional names for the three persons of the Trinity. Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer has the problem of assigning specific roles to each person, when all three have a part in creation, redemption, and sustaining life. I have in the past considered the labels God's Mind, God's Body, and God's Spirit, but such categories also seem to undermine the unity of the Godhead. One alternative that I really like is Source, Wellspring, and Water, but it is missing a sense of relationality. The Lover, the Beloved, and the Love between them is a popular one, but it takes some of the person-hood away from the Holy Spirit. I do not find any of these alternatives to be very helpful in terms of incarnation. So, please bear with the masculine language for now.
In Jesus Christ, the divine Son, God is revealed as the divine Father. It is the language that Jesus used, as it is recorded in the Gospel narratives. This is not the only way to talk about God, or the only way that God is revealed, but it is has value, despite its limitations and possible harmful interpretations. Traditionally, the role of the Holy Spirit in the incarnation is as the agent through which the Son was conceived in the virgin Mary's womb. What makes this confusing is that the divine Son existed before this conception, with the Father and the Holy Spirit before all of creation. This also illustrates a problem with explaining the Holy Spirit as a product of kenosis in the incarnation. That is not quite what I mean to suggest.
We might think of God the Father as God filled, God the Son as God emptied, and God the Holy Spirit as God out-poured. This could be potentially heretical in a number of ways. It sounds sort of like modalism, that God exists in different states. Basically, God starts out as the Father, then becomes the Son, and then becomes the Holy Spirit. Sort of like if someone uses the fact that water can exist in three different states to try to explain the Trinity. It does not quite work. It could also be a kind of Arianism, a belief that the Son is a lesser divine being than the Father, subordinate and therefore a created being. I do not mean to suggest these options either.
However we may try to explain the Trinity, the fact is that at its core it is an attempt to deal with God being revealed in human form in Jesus Christ and yet at the same time remaining fully God. We could say that, during Jesus' earthly ministry, the distinctiveness of the three persons of God revealed as Trinity were most clearly distinguishable. God the Father remained in heaven, God the Son was emptied of divine qualities in order to become fully human as Jesus Christ, and God the Holy Spirit was the divine qualities without specific place or form. Both before and after the lifetime of Jesus, God's threeness is more indistinguishable and yet it can still be said faithfully and with confidence that God is in three persons.
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