Paper 10 Overview: The Paradise Trinity

The Paradise Trinity is made up of the three Deities: the Universal Father, the Eternal Son, and the Infinite Spirit. The Trinity allows the Father to share his infinite power and personality while freeing him from limitations that would exist if he acted alone. The Trinity is the foundation of all reality in the universe.

The Trinity provides a way for God to fully express himself and reveal divine justice perfectly. Looking at the past, present, and future, the author believes that only the Trinity was truly inevitable. Without the Trinity, it would be impossible to understand how the Infinite could achieve a threefold personality while maintaining the oneness of Deity.

The Paradise Trinity helps the Father escape from being limited by his absolute personality. The Trinity perfectly joins God's unlimited personal will with the absoluteness of Deity. The Eternal Son, the divine Sons, and the Conjoint Actor all help the Father be free from limitations of being first, perfect, unchanging, eternal, and absolute.

The Paradise Trinity allows for the complete expression and perfect revelation of God's eternal nature. The Trinity's Stationary Sons fully reveal divine justice. The Trinity is the unity of Deity, resting on the absolute foundations of the oneness of the three original personalities: God the Father, God the Son, and God the Spirit.

From eternity, the Father has followed a policy of giving himself away. There is something in the Father's selfless, loving nature that makes him keep only those powers he cannot give away. The Father has given away every part of himself that could be given to other Creators or creatures.

The Father has passed on all possible power to his divine Sons. In local universes, he has made each Creator Son just as perfect and powerful as the Eternal Son is in the central universe. The Father has actually given away everything he could, with the dignity of personality, in every time, place, and to every person in every universe except where he personally dwells.

Through the process of trinitization, the Father creates the unqualified spirit personality of the Son. In doing this, he makes himself the Father of the Son and gains the unlimited ability to be the divine Father of all intelligent creatures. As the absolute personality, the Father can only function with the Son, but as a personal Father, he continues to give personality to many different intelligent beings.

After the Father gives the fullness of himself to the Son in a complete act of self-giving, the Father and Son together create a third being like themselves. This third personality, the Infinite Spirit, completes the personalization of Deity. The Son is necessary for God's fatherhood, and the Spirit is necessary for the Second and Third Persons to be brothers.

Even though there is only one Deity, there are three divine persons of Deity. When God said, "Let us make mortal man in our own image," he was speaking as plural Deity. Throughout the Urantian writings, the actions of plural Deity show that the three Sources and Centers exist and work together.

The Son and Spirit have equal relationships with the Father in the Trinity. In eternity and as Deities, they are equal, but in time and as personalities, they show different kinds of relationships. From Paradise, these relationships look similar, but from space, they appear quite different. The divine Sons are the "Word of God," and the children of the Spirit are the "Act of God."

Of all absolute associations, the Paradise Trinity is unique as an exclusive association of personal Deity. God functions as God only in relation to God and those who can know God. As absolute Deity, he functions only in the Paradise Trinity and in relation to the entire universe.

Eternal Deity is perfectly unified, yet there are three perfectly individual persons of Deity. The Paradise Trinity makes it possible to express all the diverse traits and infinite powers of the Universal Father and his eternal partners, while maintaining the divine unity of universe functions. The Trinity is an association of infinite persons functioning in a non-personal capacity, but not against personality.

It's not really right to say the Trinity has attributes. This association of divine beings should be seen as having functions like administering justice, taking attitudes toward totality, coordinating action, and controlling the cosmos. These functions are supreme, ultimate, and absolute for all living realities with personality value.

The functions of the Paradise Trinity are not simply the sum of the Father's divinity plus the specialized attributes of the Son and Spirit. The Trinity association creates new meanings, values, powers, and capacities for revelation, action, and administration. Living associations, human families, social groups, or the Paradise Trinity are always more than just the sum of their parts.

All law begins with the First Source and Center; he is law. The Second Source and Center manages spiritual law. Revealing law and explaining divine rules is the function of the Third Source and Center. Applying law and justice belongs to the Paradise Trinity and is carried out by certain Sons of the Trinity.

Justice is built into the universal sovereignty of the Paradise Trinity, but goodness, mercy, and truth come from the divine personalities whose Deity union creates the Trinity. Justice is not the attitude of the Father, Son, or Spirit alone. Justice is always a function of all three together, not a personal attitude of any one of them.

The First, Second, and Third Persons of Deity are equal to each other, and they are one. "The Lord our God is one God." There is perfection of purpose and oneness of action in the divine Trinity of eternal Deities. The Father, the Son, and the Conjoint Actor are truly and divinely one.

From a mortal perspective, the Paradise Trinity, like the Supreme Being, is concerned only with totals—total planet, total universe, total superuniverse, total grand universe. This totality attitude exists because the Trinity is the total of Deity and for many other reasons. The Supreme Being is something less and different from the Trinity functioning in finite universes.

Many truths about the Paradise Trinity can only be partly understood by recognizing that it functions beyond the finite level. It would not be wise to discuss the functions of the Trinity of Ultimacy, but we can say that God the Ultimate is the Trinity as understood by the Transcendentalers.

The Universal Father, Eternal Son, and Infinite Spirit are, in a way, the essential personalities of total Deity. Their union in the Paradise Trinity and the absolute function of the Trinity are equal to the function of total Deity. This completion of Deity goes beyond both the finite and the absonite levels of reality.