Inspired by patristic trinitarian theology, various theologians in the 20th and 21st centuries have attempted to demonstrate the implications of trinitarian doctrine for questions of social relations, political economy, gender, and sexuality. Some of these efforts are captured under the term ‘social trinitarianism,’ a movement that argued that the Trinity, as a communion of equal and loving persons, provides a model for the ideal human society, while other efforts have explored the implications of relationality and desire within the Godhead. These avenues of investigation, however, often point to a vision of social, political, and even sexual ethics that is deeply at odds with historical forms of Christian political and social morality. For these reasons and others, such ethical or ‘social’ trinitarian undertakings remain controversial.

Cautiously retreating from ethical and political discussions of the Trinity, however, is not an option for an authentically trinitarian faith. As Sarah Coakley has written, “no doctrine of the Trinity, as charter and paradigm of relationship, can be completely innocent of political, familial and sexual associations.”¹ By virtue of its metaphysical signification about persons, relationality, and the very nature of the Godhead, the doctrine of the Holy Trinity has unavoidable ethical implications that the church is obliged to take seriously. At a time when ‘Christian ethics’ faces a profound crisis of credibility, revisiting the tradition of trinitarian ethics presents an opportunity to reassert the radically transformative potential of trinitarian faith and practice. 

Personhood, Equality, and Perichoresis

For theologians who have attempted to draw out the ethical and political implications of the Trinity, the interlinked themes of personhood, relationality, the equality of divine persons and the ‘perichoretic’ mode of their shared life recur as central nodes reflection. Accordingly, these concepts are outlined briefly in this section.

The equality of the divine persons within the Godhead was a major point of contention in the early Church, particularly during the Arian controversy of the fourth century. Seemingly motivated by a desire to safeguard monotheism, the Arian faction claimed that God was a solitary divine substance, and that Jesus could therefore be only a creature, thus subordinate to God the Father. In response to this claim, the Fathers of the early church (especially the Cappadocian Fathers of the Greek-speaking East) distinguished between personhood (hypostasis or prosopon) and substance (ousia) within the Godhead, arguing that God could possess a single divine substance while allowing for plurality of divine persons. Affirming the equality of the divine persons, the Fathers argued that the Son’s being eternally begotten by the Father in no one implied a lesser status, but rather “a nature equal to His who begot Him.”²

With the Council of Constantinople in 381 reaffirming the trinitarian position, the doctrine of ‘three Persons in one substance’ and the equality of divine Persons became established Christian orthodoxy, while the tradition – from the Cappadocians to Aquinas and beyond – has continued to distinguish the divine persons by their ‘processions’, or relations to one another. The inner life of God is therefore not only triune, but primordially relational, characterized by love and free self-giving.³ 

To affirm the simultaneous unity of God and the real plurality of divine persons, the Church Fathers used images of mutual co-inherence, emphasizing the eternal interconnectedness and shared, mutual life of the Father, Son and Spirit “in the single harmony of the Godhead.”⁴ Subsequent generations of theologians appropriated the term perichoresis, initially coined by Gregory of Nazianzus to describe the co-inherence of the two natures of Christ, to describe this mutual co-inherence of the persons of the Trinity.⁵ As an attempt to negotiate the tension between unity and plurality, the concept of perichoresis has also become significant for ethical and political discussions of the Trinity, as will be seen below.

From the Immanent Trinity to Human Society

In The Trinity and the Kingdom, Lutheran theologian Jürgen Moltmann distinguishes between an authentically trinitarian faith and ‘Christian monotheism’, a cultural synthesis that merged Christian identity with the monarchist-monotheistic ideology of the ancient and medieval world.⁶ Moltmann writes that “religiously motivated political monotheism has always been used in order to legitimate domina­tion […]. The doctrine of the Trinity which, on the contrary, is developed as a theological doctrine of freedom must for its part point towards a community of men and women without supremacy and without subjection.”⁷ For Moltmann, the normative power of the Trinity is largely derived from eschatology: in the final consummation of the cosmos, all of creation will be drawn into the life of trinitarian relations. Since our destiny is to be united with the Trinity, the trinitarian relations of freedom, equality, mutual self-giving and love take on a normative significance for humanity, representing both the prefiguration and fulfillment of our deepest eschatological calling. This led Moltmann to argue that “only a Christian community that is whole, united and unifying, free of domination and oppression, and only a humanity that is free of class domination and dictatorial oppression, can claim to respect the trinitarian God.”⁸

Brazilian theologian Leonardo Boff also emphasised the implications of the Trinity for human social and economic liberation. According to Boff, the foundational ontological principle of the Trinity is “communion-perichoresis,” the communion of love and mutual co-inherence, entanglement and sharing between the divine persons. Like Moltmann, Boff argues that all people are summoned to this perichoretic unity in the Trinity: “This trinitarian unity is integrating and inclusive; its end is the full glorification of creation in the triune God.”⁹

A libertarian-individualist concept of personhood, therefore, has little common ground with the Triune God: “in light of the Trinity, being a person in the image and likeness of God means acting as a permanently active web of relationships.”¹⁰ According to Boff, “a society that takes its inspiration from trinitarian communion cannot tolerate class differences [or] dominations based on power (economic, sexual or ideological).”¹¹ Instead, the Holy Trinity “seeks to see itself reflected in history, through people sharing their goods in common, building up egalitarian and just relationships among all, sharing what they are and what they have.”¹² The practice of liberation, the building up egalitarian and just relations in society, is thus orthopraxis rooted in orthodox Christian faith: the confession of the Holy Trinity and the transformation of human life in the image of the Triune God.

The Catholic theologian Catherine LaCugna has further elaborated the implications of trinitarian doctrine for matters of gender equality. For centuries, theologians have defended the subordination of women based on trinitarian analogies, arguing “that God the Father is to God the Son as men are to women” and that “God the Son is said to be obedient and even submissive toward God the Father; hence women are to be obedient and submit to men.”¹³ Such arguments, LaCugna notes, are common among Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant theologians alike, and “assume that the doctrine of the Trinity sustains a hierarchical complementarity between male and female.”¹⁴

Drawing upon the Cappadocians’ emphasis of the equality of the divine Persons, and their absolute rejection of Arian subordinationism, LaCugna argues that this “hierarchical complementarity” cannot be grounded in the metaphysics of the Trinity. “The theologians who make the complementarity argument do not seem to realize that their argument hinges on the very heresy that the church tried to overcome in its rejection of Arianism, namely, that the Son is in any sense subordinate to the Father.”¹⁵ On the contrary, LaCugna argues that an ordering of gender relations modelled on the inner life of the Trinity cannot be anything other than an order of equality and communion.

More recently, Anglican theologian Sarah Coakley has explored the ethical implications of trinitarian faith and, in particular, trinitarian prayer in relation to issues of human sexuality that currently divide the Anglican Communion and other Christian denominations. In her books The New Asceticism (2015) and God, Sexuality and the Self (2013), Coakley develops “a renewed vision of divine desire which may provide the guiding framework for a renewed theology of human sexuality – of godly sexual relations – rooted in, and in some sense analogously related to, divine trinitarian relations.”¹⁶

Drawing upon Gregory of Nyssa’s theology of divine desire, Coakley argues that “the God we desire is, in Godself, a desiring trinitarian God.” Unless we can appreciate the divine desire of the trinitarian Persons for us and for each other, a divine eros, “then we can hardly begin to get rightly ordered our own erotic desires at the human level.”¹⁷  If human loves are made with the imprint of the Holy Trinity upon them, then sexual loves must surely also mirror the trinitarian love in some sense. Asking what this would involve, Coakley answers, “surely, at least, a fundamental respect of each ‘person’ for the other, an equality of understanding and exchange, and the mutual ekstasis of attending on the other’s desire as distinct, as other.”¹⁸ Sexual love in this other-affirming, non-egoistic sense, prior to the creation of any child, itself has a trinitarian structure: “you, me, and the creation of that ecstasy of ourselves in us.” While Coakley admits that her work is incomplete, her analysis provides the groundwork for a renewed theology of human sexuality based on a deeper appreciation of the Holy Trinity.

Challenges to Social Trinitarian Ethics

These attempts to articulate social, political, and even sexual implications from trinitarian theology have not gone without criticism. Brian Leftow, for example, has argued that “social trinitarianism cannot be both orthodox and a version of monotheism,” warning that a trinitarian vision that presupposes a plurality of wills and subjectivities in the Godhead treads dangerously close to tritheism.¹⁹ Elsewhere, Karen Kilby has raised the criticism that social doctrines of the Trinity necessarily entail a high degree of projection: first, the projection of human modes of relation onto the Godhead, and then a projection from our politically loaded picture of God back onto humanity.²⁰ Kathryn Tanner has also objected that the triune nature of God does not necessarily imply a model for a loving, free society of equals, but could easily be otherwise appropriated to legitimize other models of hierarchical social life, while also questioning whether the divine persons are too qualitatively different from human persons for any analogous implications to be valid.²¹

These objections all pose challenges to the theological task of moving from a discussion of the relations of the immanent Trinity to the relations between human persons, and thus deserve careful consideration. Some of these criticisms may help to refine any attempt to extrapolate the ethical and political implications of the Trinity and to avoid certain pitfalls. For example, we ought to heed Leftow’s warnings and take care not to stipulate a plurality of wills of subjectivities within the Godhead, which is not only unorthodox but also unnecessary for the success of the trinitarian ethical project. Likewise, concerns about the radical qualitative differences between divine and human personhood need to be carefully reflected on and addressed by reference to the theological practice of analogy.

On the other hand, some of these critiques may be met head on. The movement from the immanent Trinity to human relations is not an abstract proposition, but has already taken place in the incarnation of God the Son as Jesus of Nazareth. Jesus entered directly into human social relations, communicating the love and fellowship of the Triune God and calling humanity to relations of love, sharing, service and compassion. In the incarnation, moreover, human and divine personhood cease to be merely analogous to one another, but become entangled at the deepest level of ontic and relational perichoresis. Accusations of projection, likewise, may be answered with reference to revelation and the Incarnation. While projection is always a risk in theology, and the Christian God has certainly been appropriated for a variety of political purposes, the direct communication of God in the incarnation shows that it is first and foremost God who condescends to our midst and becomes accessible to humanity in terms relevant to us. Nonetheless, in treating the risk of projection seriously, any trinitarian ethics ought to have the social teachings of Jesus of Nazareth and the New Testament as its point of departure, rather than the tenets of any political ideology.

Conclusion

The goal of this article has been to demonstrate that the Christian concept of God as Trinity has, “as charter and paradigm of relationship,”²² inescapable ethical, social, political, and even sexual implications. These implications, derived from a consideration of the immanent Trinity as revealed in the incarnation of the Son, underscore the importance of equality, love, freedom from subordination or oppression, and the ‘communion-perichoresis’ balance of both individuality and community in any society that wishes to participate in the divine life of trinitarian relations, the eschatological destiny to which we are all summoned.

It follows that an ethical vision founded on God’s trinitarian nature obliges Christians to work towards a society modelled on communion: an egalitarian society of reciprocal sharing and love, rather than one based on individual autonomy, hierarchical relations, subordination, or profit. It should also be clear that the conservative synthesis of ‘Christian monotheism’ must be resisted in light of an orthodox Christian understanding of God as Trinity. Instead, as LaCugna writes, trinitarian faith repudiates “the racist theology of white superiority, the clerical theology of cultic privilege, the political theology of exploitation and economic injustice, and the patriarchal theology of male dominance and control.”²³ In an era where Christian ethics faces a crisis of credibility, a revived trinitarian ethics in the 21st century can recall the church to a transformative program for Christian ethical and social practice.