John Piper on "Trinitarian Thinking and Feeling"

[The following is from John Piper, Think: TheLife of the Mind and the Love of God (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2010), 34-35.]

One of the gifts Edwards gave to me, which I had not found anywhere else, was a foundation for human thinking and feeling in the Trinitarian nature of God. I don’t mean that others haven’t seen human nature rooted in God’s nature. I simply mean that the way Edwards saw it was extraordinary. He showed me that human thinking and feeling do not exist arbitrarily; they exist because we are in the image of God, and God’s “thinking” and “feeling” are more deeply part of his Trinitarian being than I had realized. Prepare to be boggled. Here is Edwards’s remarkable description of how the persons of the Trinity relate to each other. Notice that God the Son stands forth eternally as a work of God’s thought. And God the Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son as the act of their joy.

This I suppose to be the blessed Trinity that we read of in the Holy Scriptures. The Father is the deity subsisting in the prime, unoriginated and most absolute manner, or the deity in its direct existence. The Son is the deity generated by God’s understanding, or having an idea of Himself and subsisting in that idea. The Holy Ghost is the deity subsisting in act, or the divine essence flowing out and breathed forth in God’s infinite love to and delight in Himself. And I believe the whole Divine essence does truly and distinctly subsist both in the Divine idea and Divine love, and that each of them are properly distinct persons. [Jonathan Edwards, “An Essay on the Trinity,” in Treatise on Grace and Other Posthumously Published Writings, ed. Paul Helm (Cambridge, UK: Clarke, 1971), 118.]

 

In other words, God the Father has had an eternal image and idea of himself that is so full it is another Person standing forth—distinct as the Father’s idea, yet one in divine essence. And God the Father and the Son have had an eternal joy in each other’s excellence that carries so fully what they are that another Person stands forth, the Holy Spirit—distinct as the Father and Son’s delight in each other, yet one in divine essence. There never was a time when God did not experience himself this way. The three Persons of the Trinity are coeternal. They are equally divine.