The objection
Father, Son and Spirit could describe different ways people experience God. Why turn this into statements about an eternal life within God that no one can observe?
1. Symbolic language need not be untrue
A symbol can refer to a real thing. The expression “symbol” therefore does not yet determine whether a statement is true. The decisive question is: Do Father, Son and Spirit designate real personal relationships of God, or are they reduced entirely to human experiences?
The second claim changes the Christian confession's content. It does not merely explain its language; it denies that this language says anything definite about God himself.
2. John explicitly begins before our experiences
The Logos is with God in the beginning, and everything created arises through him. He is thus not derived from a later religious perception. He belongs to the world's ground, in which humans can perceive at all.[1]
John 17,5 and 17,24 speak of glory with the Father and his love before the foundation of the world. Anyone reading these statements merely as an ordering of human experiences must explain why their express reference to before the world is not supposed to designate a corresponding reality. Pointing to a lack of observability does not refute this revelatory claim.
3. The mission explains the experience, not the reverse
Galatians 4 describes first the sending of the Son and then the sending of the Son's Spirit into our hearts. The cry “Abba, Father” arises from this divine action. Paul does not derive the names by sorting three feelings.
The direction of justification is decisive: We experience sonship because God sends his Son and his Spirit. Our experience does not first produce a Son and a Spirit as helpful images. Reducing the persons to effects would change precisely their revealed relationship to the Father.[2]
4. Knowledge of God is not limited to immediate observation
Even among humans, we know persons not only through external measurement but through their truthful communication. God's self-revelation does not depend on human reliability; it is the ground against which we test our understanding.
The objection would therefore have to show that God cannot communicate truthfully about his own life or that the relevant texts say something else. The mere demand that only what is immediately observable may count as real already presupposes an epistemic criterion scripture does not acknowledge. Trinitarian experience is a response to God's reality, not a production of this reality.
Biblical texts in context
Sources and further study
- Robert L. Reymond, A New Systematic Theology of the Christian FaithThe prologue of John's Gospel as a statement about the Logos before incarnation, pp. 299–305.
- John M. Frame, The Doctrine of GodPp. 688–690: personal distinction and the problem of a merely modalist interpretation.