One of the implications the Trinity is that God exists in eternal, loving community within God’s-self. The Father begets the Son, the Son does the Father’s will, and the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son, as a bond of love between them.
The ancient theologians used the Greek word “perichoresis” to describe this relationship. Perichoresis is difficult to translate. Literally, it sort of means “rotating-forward-around,” and it’s trying to get at the way the Persons of the Trinity move in and through and around each other. Any activity of one is always an action of all three; and yet whenever God is at work, it’s still possible to differentiate between the unique work of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
The word did not originally have the connotation of “a dance,” but in popular theology, “perichoresis” is often translated as “a dancing around,” and is used to suggest that there is a joyful “dancing around each other” going on between the Persons of the Trinity.
This is difficult to visualize, but perhaps a non-visual metaphor may help.
In music, a chord is made up of three notes, played together at the same time. A major chord, for instance, is made up of the first, the third, and the fifth notes of a given scale. If you took the C scale, let’s say, and played the ‘C,’ the ‘E’ and the ‘G,’ you would have a C Major chord.
Now: a C chord is a single auditory experience—that is: you hear it as a single thing. Yet at the same time, the Chord is made up of three distinct, individual notes—C, E and G. And each of these notes completely fills up the sound-space. There is no ‘part’ of the chord where one of these three notes isn’t fully present, and you can always distinguish each individual note within the chord.
The notes of a C Major chord, we might say, inter-penetrate each other in a “perichoretic dance.” That is to say, whenever you hear a C major chord, you are always hearing three individual notes, and yet at the same time, you’re hearing a single chord.
This musical analogy helps us get at the relationship between the Father, Son and Holy Spirit in ways that visual metaphors simply can’t.
For instance, in a chord, there is no hierarchy between the notes—you can play them in any order, and yet it’s always the “First” or “Tonic” note that determines the Nature of the Chord.
The “Fifth” note, or the “Dominant” is always directly determined by the Tonic note. Whatever your tonic note is, the next note is going to be a perfect fifth above it, in this case “G.”
The third note, while seemingly third in importance, actually determines the tonal quality of the whole chord: if we play a perfect third, we get a major chord, if we drop it a half step, we get a minor chord, even though the other two notes stay the same.
In a similar way, the Father begets the Son—like the tonic note determines the dominant—and the Holy Spirit flows out from the Father and Son, expressing the bond of love between them—like the perfect third harmonizes between the first and the fifth, making it a major chord and not a minor.
And like the Persons of the Trinity, each of these notes completely “interpenetrates” the other, making an indivisible sound without losing their unique, individual identity.
While this is difficult to wrap our heads around, the way the Persons of the Trinity exist in a perfect relationship with each other, where each is fully One with the other and yet maintains their unique Personhood, is crucial to the Christian Faith, because Jesus said that he wanted this same kind of unity for us. “That you may all be One,” is how he said it, “just as the Father is in Me and I in him, and that you may also be in us.”
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