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Editor's Note: In this excerpt from Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places (Eerdmans, 2005) Eugene Peterson discusses the importance of the Trinity—and stimulates fresh ideas for preachers.

Baptism definitively places our unique and personal name in the company of the Trinity: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Because we do not baptize ourselves—it is always something done to us in the name of the three-personed God in the community—the resurrection life by which we become our true selves is accepted as previous to and outside of anything that we can do for ourselves. At that moment we are no longer merely ourselves by ourselves; from then on we are ourselves in the community of similarly baptized persons.

As we enter the community of the resurrection, holy baptism redefines our lives in Trinitarian terms. Baptism is at one and the same time death and resurrection, a renunciation and an embrace. In baptism we are named in the same breath as the Name—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—and are on our way to understanding our lives comprehensively and in community as children of this three-personed God. We are turned around, no longer going our own way but living as members of the community that follows Jesus. We cannot be trusted to do anything on our own in this business. As Barth insisted so strenuously, we are always beginners with God.

The theological understanding of God as Trinity is the controlling center of what takes place in baptism. We are baptized in the name of the Trinity. Baptism is an immersion in the triune God, God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. The implications are enormous: we are now participants in the company of the God who creates heaven and Earth, the God who enters history and establishes salvation as its definitive action, and the God who forms a community to worship and give witness to his words and work. God understood as Trinity, God in three persons, lays the essential conceptual groundwork for living in the community of the resurrection. Three features are immediately clear: baptism in the name of the three-personed God means that our core identity is, as is his, emphatically personal; baptism in the name of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit means we are now welcomed as full participants in everything of God; baptism in the name of the Trinity means there is more to God, far more, than we can ever comprehend; we are baptized into a mystery.

The personal

By insisting that God is three-personed, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—God inherently relational, God in community—we are given an understanding that God is emphatically personal. The only way that God reveals himself is personally. God is personal under the personal designation of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit and never in any other way: never impersonally as a force or an influence, never abstractly as an idea or truth or principle. And so, of course he can't be known impersonally or abstractly.

We are not used to this. We are schooled in institutions that train us in the acquisition of facts and data, of definitions and diagrams, of explanations and analysis. Our schools are very good at doing this. When we study persons, whether God or humans, we bring the same methods to the work: analyzing, defining, typing, charting, profiling. The uniquely personal and particular is expunged from the curriculum; and that means the removal of the most important things about us—love and hope and faith, sin and forgiveness and grace, obedience and loyalty and prayer—as significant for understanding and developing as persons. The fact is that when we are studied like specimens in a laboratory, what is learned is on the level of what is learned from an autopsy. The only way to know another is in a personal relationship, and that involves at least minimal levels of trust and risk.

Because of long training in our schools and an unbaptized imagination, we commonly bring these reductionist, depersonalized methods to our understanding of God. But when we do, we don't come up with much, for God is totally personal, interpersonal, relational, giving and receiving, loving and directing. There is nothing in Father-Son-Spirit that is not communal. And so there is nothing to be learned of Father-Son-Spirit except by entering the communion, entering the company of the Trinity: praying and listening, being quiet and attentive, repenting and obeying, asking and waiting. Trained as we are in the schools, it is the easiest thing in the world to use words abstractly and to treat the gospel as information. But Trinity prevents us from doing that. Trinity warns us against supposing that we can lock ourselves in a room free of all people and distractions and just read, study, and meditate and then expect to know God. Trinity is our defense against every soul-destroying venture into the Christian life that depersonalizes the gospel or God or other people.

When we are baptized into the community in the name of the Trinity, our lives become relational in a more thoroughgoing and deeper way than ever, not only with God but with the membership of the baptized.

The participation

By insisting that God is three-personed as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit we are given an understanding of God that welcomes participation. We are baptized into the communal life of the Trinity. The spiritual life is a participation in the being and work of God. God is never a nonparticipant in what he does. He does not delegate. He does not manage from an impersonal position. He does not separate himself from his community by ranks of angel-secretaries through whom we have to arrange an audience. Baptized, we begin to get a feel for what it means to participate in what we have assumed we were not adequate for or qualified to do.

We are not used to this. For most of us, as our responsibilities grow we acquire skills for doing our work efficiently, which usually means by not participating personally. We send memos, prepare work assignments, develop programs, set goals, organize committees. It is a lot easier to guide and motivate people from a distance than to "get involved" with them. It is a lot easier and faster to depend on technology for travel and communication, building and farming, entertainment and managing, than to plunge into whatever there is to be done. But every time we do, engagement with reality, whether the reality is persons or things, lessens and there is consequently less of us, less life.

When we bring these managerial and technologized habits into our dealings with God, we soon end up dealing with an idol, a thing-god on which we can project our plans and projects, programs and piety. The world of religion is surfeited with this kind of thing. Some people make a lot of money helping people construct such thing-gods, or idea-gods. It seems to be very satisfying to a lot of people to listen to leaders tell them how to use God to their benefit—the leaders are so enthusiastic, so convincing!

But we can only participate in who God is, as he is. He is not for hire to implement our fantasies or demands. God is not an undefined sort of energy or function in place somewhere waiting for us to show up with the right technique or the correct password to swing him into action. He is already active, enormously and incessantly active, creating and saving, healing and blessing, forgiving and judging. He was active in this way as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit long before we showed up on the scene, and he has clearly made it known that he wants us in on what he is doing. He invites our participation. He welcomes us into the Trinitarian dance, what I earlier described as the perichoresis.

When we are baptized into the community in the name of the Trinity we are freshly defined as participants in the work and being of God. There are many ways of making our way in the world without getting overly involved with people and things. But not in the Christian life. The more we understand God as Trinity the more we realize that we are welcomed as participants in everything that God—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—is up to. And what's more, every act of participation is unique—God has not enlisted us in a regimented army marching in lockstep. We are immersed in particulars, not absorbed in generalities.

The mystery

It is commonly said that the Trinity is a mystery. And it certainly is. Large books are written by theologians probing the endless reaches of the mystery. But it is not a mystery veiled in darkness in which we can only grope and guess. It is a mystery in which we are given to understand that we will never know all there is of God. It is a mystery that prevents us from presuming to use what we know to control or manipulate God. It is a mystery in which we cultivate the posture of worship, adoring what we cannot wholly understand, receiving that for which we have yet no name. It is not a mystery that keeps us in the dark, but a mystery in which we are taken by the hand and gradually led into the light, a light to which our souls are not yet accustomed, but light nevertheless in which we recognize ourselves as persons in the company of a personal God, become participants in all the operations of God, and develop an identity of humility and receptivity, a not-knowing in the presence of the God who knows us.

With God and the Christian life there is always more, much more. So much more that if we keep that "more" in mind there will never be any chance of our reducing God to the dimensions of our needs or imaginations. The "more" is a mystery of light: the Trinity surpasses our understanding but not in an intimidating way; we are invited to be present and to worship.

God formulated as Trinity confronts us with a largeness, an immensity, a depth that we cannot manage or control or reduce to dealing with on our own terms. God is more than we can comprehend. "A God that can be understood is no God." We cannot "know" God in a way that explains everything about him. The only way that we can approach God is through worship: holy, holy, holy.

We aren't used to this. We want to be "in the know." Answers provide credentials for competence. Now that we are insiders in this community that early on in its existence acquired the reputation of "turning the world upside down" (Acts 17:6), we would like to make good on our reputation. Pressure develops, sometimes from within, sometimes from without, to be "relevant" to the society, to reduce God to fit people's needs, congregational expectations, or our own ambition. But God is never a commodity that we can use, never a truth that we can use to explain or prove what is by its nature beyond understanding. In a functionalized world, in which virtually everyone is trained to understand themselves in terms of what they can do, of their competence, of their expertise, we are confronted with the Trinity. In the Trinity we are faced with the reality that we are not in control, that we are not able to serve people on their terms but only on the terms of who God is in himself. We do not know enough—if we reduce God to what people want or what "works," we leave out too much; we leave out most, in fact, of God who dwells "in light inexpressible."

The focal practice of baptism is basic to our identity formation. In baptism we are named " … in the name … " This is our identity; this is who we are. Me—Eugene, but not just Eugene—Eugene is in the community of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, but also the community that includes Dorcas and Richard, Fletcher and Charles, Mildred and Yvonne, George and Beulah. If you want to know who I am and what makes me tick, don't, for heaven's sake, look up my IQ or give me a Myers-Briggs profile or set me down before a Rorschach test. Study me in the company of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

The Trinity is of particular use to Christians in times of confusion. Our age certainly qualifies on that score. With the theological, religious, and cultural traditions in disarray, the options offered by opportunistic teachers and religion marketers for dealing with God and/or the soul are beyond calculation. In desperate times we are tempted to go for the quick answer and the efficient solution. But the quick answer is almost always the oversimplified answer, leaving out all the complexities of actual truth; the efficient solution is almost always the depersonalized solution, for persons take a lot of time and endless trouble. In such conditions the Trinity is our most practical theological formulation for staying in touch with Christian basics: it keeps us in touch with the immense largesse of God and at the same time the immediate personalness of God. Meditating and praying in the name of the Trinity is essential for keeping our lives both large and personal during these times when the devil is using every strategy he can come up with to make us small and mean.

From the moment we are newly named in the name of the Trinity we know ourselves in a new way, a unique way, a way counter to the naming directed to us by our parents and our teachers, our friends and our employers, our neighbors and our enemies. We suddenly acquire ears to hear Thoreau's different drummer. Our eyes are opened to see, with Moses, "him who is invisible" (Heb. 11:27). Our baptismal name summons us to a way of life that follows Jesus.

From Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places (Eerdmans, 2005). Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Eugene Peterson is professor emeritus of spiritual theology at Regent College, Vancouver, British Columbia. Among his many other books are Eat This Book and The Message.