Working Together Or One Work? Getting The Trinity Right

Imagine you’re working on a minor home repair and you need a knife, a Phillips screwdriver, and a flathead screwdriver. Thankfully, you have a multi-tool in your pocket. When you need the knife, you open that tool and then close it when you’re done. When you need the Phillips screwdriver, you open it and close it when you’re done. And when you need the flathead screwdriver, you open it and close it when you’re done. Each tool is opened one at a time and used for a specific purpose or need.

If we’re not careful, we can portray the triune God this way too. It’s easy to fall into what we might call a “divine multi-tool” theological error.

This happens when we separate the persons of the Trinity—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—into three distinct actors. Father, Son, and Spirit are individual “divine tools,” so to speak, with their own unique set of powers and skills. They act individually in accordance with those skills and powers, but when they do so, they’re still part of the “divine multi-tool” team. Ultimately, they work together to finish the final project: defeating sin and Satan.

But this isn’t who God is or how he acts. Rather than describing God in such a way that the three persons work together, even if in harmonious ways, we should be careful to say all his works are one work of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

Let’s examine how we should rightly think about God’s actions as unified (one work) so we can avoid thinking about God’s actions as three different actors doing something collectively (working together).

‘Divine Multi-Tool’ Error

This error often rears its head while we attempt to describe divine action in the story of salvation presented in the Gospels. It sounds like this: While the Father is presiding over events (by himself), the Son is acting them out (by himself). While the Father is pouring out his wrath (by himself) onto the Son at the cross, the Son is experiencing that wrath. And, occasionally in the narrative, the Spirit does something too (by himself), like anoint Jesus at his baptism.

But, unlike a multi-tool, the triune God isn’t a single collection of separate tools with individual purposes held together by an external mechanism and often working together on particular projects. Instead, the triune God always acts as one.

Doctrine of Inseparable Operations

“Divine multi-tool” theology separates the persons of the triune God into three distinct individuals who act independently of one another, even if they always act in harmony with one another. This amounts to an error called tritheism (“three gods”). It’s rooted in a denial of, or at least a lack of attention to, a crucial doctrine related to the Trinity: the doctrine of inseparable operations.

This doctrine states that the external works of the Trinity are undivided. Every act of God is an act of the one triune God, who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and therefore every act of God is an act of Father, Son, and Spirit. It cannot be an act of only one or two of the persons to the exclusion or negligence of other persons.

Inseperable operations is grounded in Scripture and is crucial for an orthodox and biblical affirmation of the Trinity.

Every act of God is an act of Father, Son, and Spirit.

Jesus’s crucifixion is a good illustration of both the temptation toward the “divine multi-tool” theological error and the better, orthodox doctrine of inseparable operations.

Crucifixion as Test Case

Let’s begin with the key question: Which person of the Trinity sent Jesus to the cross?

An obvious answer is that God the Father sent Jesus to the cross. And this is correct—Jesus attributed his impending crucifixion to the Father’s will (Matt. 26:39), and we can also rightly appropriate texts like Isaiah 53:10 (“It was the will of the LORD to crush him”) and Acts 2:23 (“This Jesus, delivered up according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God”) to the Father.

But it isn’t only the Father who sends Jesus to the cross. If we left it at that, we’d have a “divine multi-tool” problem, in which only one person of the Trinity (the Father) performed a particular action (the providential oversight of the crucifixion). More fundamentally, we’d have a biblical problem: The other two divine persons are also said to send Jesus to the cross.

The Bible tells us, for instance, that the Son sent himself. Or, to quote Jesus regarding who is sending him to his crucifixion, “For this reason the Father loves me, because I lay down my life that I may take it up again. No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord. I have authority to lay it down, and I have authority to take it up again” (John 10:17–18). Notice that Jesus is speaking of his own divine authority to both send himself to the cross and raise himself from the dead, an authority that is necessarily divine.

Finally, the Spirit sent Jesus to the cross. For instance, according to the author of Hebrews, Jesus offered his blood on the cross “through the eternal Spirit” (Heb. 9:14). The Spirit’s agency in Jesus’s actions was crucial to the cross’s enactment and effectiveness. Scripture tells us that all three Trinitarian persons—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—sent Jesus to the cross.

This wasn’t an act performed by one divine person, the Father, that affects another divine person, the Son. The divine persons weren’t “working together,” doing different things and working toward the same goal. Instead, the act of sending Jesus to the cross, just like any other divine act, was one work of the one God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

One Work, One God

We could multiply these examples from Scripture as they relate to other actions of the triune God—creation, providence, revelation, salvation, judgment, and so on. Every act of God is the one act of the one God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The Trinity isn’t “working together,” but instead the triune God acts in one work for everything he accomplishes.

All three Trinitarian persons—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—sent Jesus to the cross.

Why does this matter? For the same reason that anything having to do with God’s identity matters. Because it’s about who God is—the triune God who made us, the triune God who saves us, and the triune God we worship. Because he is one, his acts are one—the one work of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. And because of who he is and what he does, we worship him and him alone.