The Trinity: A Sixteen Word Summary of
Glossary
The Trinity: Summarized In Sixteen Words
By Stephen Michael Leininger
Published: 07/23/2026
STOSS Books
The following is, to my knowledge, one of the shortest (16 words, not counting parenthetically enclosed words) layman’s versions explaining a Loving Trinitarian God. Understanding the Trinity helps us to understand ourselves, who are created in the image and likeness of that Triune God.
Here it is:
God is Truth (the Father); Truth known (the Son); Truth penetrated (cf. Wis 7:24), Loved (the Holy Spirit)—on Fire to Fruitfully share (i.e., radiating ordered, coherent Spiritual—not material—Divine Light/Glory).
By way of caution, let me add this: the Trinity is not a serial process. It is not X, followed by Y, followed by Z. There is no such serial progression in the Eternal Now.
Let’s examine the Trinity in a little more detail:
The Father:
He is the one who neither proceeds nor is generated from any other Divine Person. The Father is the unoriginated origin of generation and procession.
In his writing, On the Trinity, Augustine writes, Nemo potest amare quod penitus ignorat.[1] This is typically translated, “No one can love what he completely ignores,”[using Google Translate] or more loosely, “No one can love what he does not know.” In context, Augustine is exploring how the mind knows and loves itself and God, and he uses this principle repeatedly as a premise: love presupposes at least some knowledge of the object loved.
Given that Augustine’s words were written in “On the Trinity,” it makes sense that they were written to help us to understand a Trinitarian God. Thus . . .
The Son:
If the Father is to be accurately described as Love, He must know himself. The Son, the Word of God, is the intellectual generation/begetting of the Father’s knowledge of Himself. The Father is in the Son and the Son is in the Father (Jn 10:30, 38; 14:10-11; 17:21-23).
The Holy Spirit:
While the Holy Spirit is one of the Three Persons of the Trinity, the above description in John is not, to my knowledge, applied to the Holy Spirit. Instead, the word “procession” is appropriate rather than “in”.
Both the Person of the Father and the Person of the Son Love what they Know, i.e., Divine Truth. Several Bible passages tell us of the Father’s love of the Son (Jn 3:35, 5:20; Mt 3:17, 17:5) and vice versa (Jn 14:31, 15:9, 17:26).
The Love of God demands fruitfulness. The exegesis of Exodus 3:14 tells us that the Trinity is fruitfulness. The Holy Spirit is the Holy Desire to share (Breathe in and Breathe out Truth fruitfully). God did not create man in his image and likeness because he needed to, but because fruitful expression is what God is on fire to do. It is its very Essence/Name. The Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son.[2]
Man in the Image and Likeness of God
This aspect of love, knowing ourselves, would apply to rational man as well. This is so because we are created in the image and likeness of God.
Let’s rephrase the 16 words at the beginning of this article and apply them to the human person, i.e., me. If I were asked to describe myself accurately—and I knew no one else would ever see or hear it (so I would not be tempted to be less than truthful), I would begin the process of drawing an intellectual picture in my mind. Somewhat like how God the Father intellectually begets the Son, we can, in a way, beget an image of ourselves to penetrate and judge our thoughts. Because I am not God, my intellectual generation does not create another Person.
During the exercise, I would tell myself things like: Oh, I’m good at such and such; I’m talented in . . .; I treat people like . . .; I’m smart about . . .; and so on. As I become cognizant of each aspect of myself, I draw this mental picture. However, I am not doing it within an intellectual vacuum. During this process, I’m simultaneously forming judgments about what I know. From a human standpoint, these judgments coincide with a spiritual soul’s conscience, but not one dulled/killed by sin.
Put another way, was this aspect of me objectively good or bad? Would I be happy to tell other people—but not in a prideful way—or do I want to hide it from others? Do I want to keep my pride-motivated mask on? Put in a spiritual context, when I come before Jesus after my death, am I going to fear what He shows me? Am I going to be remorseful for my empty hands bearing no, or few, gifts of fruit?
The Sacrament of Reconciliation
As a quick aside on the topic of pride/sin, I am, as a Catholic, often confronted with the question: Why do I have to confess my sins to a man? While there is a lengthy response to that question, I am going to limit it to a not-often-thought-of aspect of the Sacrament of Reconciliation.[3]
To begin with, every Sacrament conveys both Actual and Sanctifying Grace.[4] Expressed in a few short words, Sanctifying grace purifies us from the inside, i.e., the spiritual heart where the Holy Spirit dwells, out. Actual grace purifies from the outside in, e.g., the presence of the priest in the confessional (more on that below).
Pride is one of the Seven Deadly Sins. “Pope Francis warned against pride, calling it the worst of the ‘devious sins, which lurk in the heart without us even realizing it.’ ”[5] Pride is why Satan fell, and Satan is the father of all lies/sin (Jn 8:44).
From this we can begin to deduce the reason God wants us to confess to a priest face-to-face. It also should be brought up that, in the confessional, the priest is in Persona Christi[CCC, n. 1548], i.e., in the Person of Christ. Jesus uses the priest as his instrument to hear our confession. Make no mistake, it is Jesus who is actually hearing our sacramental confession.
While God does not need a man’s intercession to forgive us of our sins, he uses one to instrumentally communicate Actual grace to the confessee. By doing so, the confessee is forced to partially remove the ‘pride mask’. To counter the vice of pride, the antidote is humility.
My oldest son likens the Sacrament of Reconciliation to a gym. We go to this spiritual gym to painfully build up our humility muscles. We do so in preparation for the time we come before Jesus after our death. Why? Because at that time, the pride mask will be completely ripped from our faces. We will see ourselves as God sees us. We will see every hurt we caused our Savior and his brothers and sisters. We will experience their heart’s pain.
I believe that those who willingly remain prideful in the face of Divine judgment condemn themselves. God does not need to send them to hell. They FLEE the pain of seeing themselves as God sees them. They would rather go to hell with their pride intact rather than face God’s gaze. Prideful, elitist, selfish people cannot stand the pain of being wrong, of being ‘caught in the act,’ so to speak. They will always seek to find someone else to blame for their failures. This is why people in hell hate and curse God. They blame God for their condemnation.
What Does Scripture Say About the Necessity of Objectively “Knowing” Ourselves?
Scripture teaches the connection between knowing ourselves and loving/hating what we know. Following are some examples:
2 Corinthians 13:5:
“Examine yourselves, to see whether you are holding to your faith. Test yourselves. Do you not realize that Jesus Christ is in you?—unless indeed you fail to meet the test!”
Lamentations 3:40:
“Let us test and examine our ways, and return to the Lord!”
Psalm 4:4:
“Be angry, but sin not; commune with your own hearts on your beds, and be silent.”
Psalm 51:3:
“For I know my transgressions, and my sin is ever before me.”
Romans 12:3:
“For by the grace given to me I bid every one among you not to think of himself more highly than he ought to think, but to think with sober judgment, each according to the measure of faith which God has assigned him.”
Galatians 6:3–4:
“For if any one thinks he is something, when he is nothing, he deceives himself. But let each one test his own work, and then his reason to boast will be in himself alone and not in his neighbor.”
1 Kings 8:38:
“[W]hatever prayer, whatever supplication is made by any man or by all thy people Israel, each knowing the affliction of his own heart[emphasis added] and stretching out his hands toward this house.”
Luke 15:17:
“But when he came to himself he said, ‘How many of my father’s hired servants have bread enough and to spare, but I perish here with hunger!”
Again, as Augustine writes, “No one can love what he does not know.” We truly love ourselves when we know our own hearts through introspection, repent, seek Sacramental confession, and then seek to do God’s will—recognizing, however, that we will most likely fall again. There is an old adage that sums it up. It goes something like this: We are God’s children. As such, he knows that we will spill our milk. He understands that we will do so often. He judges us by whether we admit the error and by how or whether we clean it up.
The Domestic Family: The Closest Image of the Trinity in Creation
According to Brian Kranick:
Man is ontologically created in the image of the one Trinitarian God. As God is a family, so is man created in His image as a relational being made for families. After God creates Adam, He says, “It is not good that man is alone.” (Gen. 2:18) Man by himself did not yet fully represent the relational nature of God. With that, God creates Eve, the first woman, so that man “cleaves to his wife, and they become one flesh.” (Gen. 2:24) This is the primordial sacrament of marriage. It is Trinitarian by nature. Husband and wife become a communion of persons in the natural order, where the two become one, reflecting the communion of Persons in the Godhead in the heavenly order. The perfect self-knowledge of the Father eternally begets the second divine Person, the Son; and from the perfect self-offering of will and mutual love between the Father and the Son proceeds the third divine Person, the Holy Spirit. In an infinitely imperfect but analogous way, husband and wife come together in a mutual self-offering of love, consummated in the sexual union, which conceives a third independent being, a child, just as from the mutual love of the Father and Son comes the Holy Spirit. Although with obvious and profound dissimilarities, this is our closest imitation of Trinitarian relations within the natural realm. As Pope John Paul II wrote in his Theology of the Body series, “Man becomes the image of God not so much in the moment of solitude as in the moment of communion.”
The Trinitarian image is reflected in our families, and the family is the icon of Trinitarian life. As the Catechism teaches, “The Christian family is a communion of persons, a sign and image of the communion of the Father and the Son in the Holy Spirit” (CCC, n. 2205). The family is a mythic archetype of the relationships within the Trinity. Living with a husband or wife and children necessarily draws us out from ourselves. It challenges our pride and selfishness. It forces us to minimize ourselves for the sake of others. It pushes us to focus on someone else, not just our own well-being. It challenges us as a form of preparation, within the concreteness of our flesh and blood relationships, to be holy as God is holy. The family, as the “domestic Church,” is the foundational building block of the greater Church, and of society on the whole. It was part of God’s plan for humanity from the beginning. Indeed, Jesus Himself incarnated into a family, in order to highlight its institutional importance, and to personally sanctify them (CCC, n. 533).[6]
This trinitarian family relationship can be expressed thus: All true internal and external beauty generates, by an ordered rational nature, a desire for closeness/union with that which is perceived as beautiful. This beauty would be strictly hormone-based for animals.
The husband desires union with the beauty he perceives in his spouse. The wife is drawn to desire a union with her husband because of the beauty she perceives in him. Beauty, however, is probably defined differently by each spouse. I have written a blog series, Parts One and Two, making the case that God created women to be in the image and likeness of the appropriations of the Holy Spirit within the domestic family. Like the Holy Spirit, the fruitfulness (i.e., free openness and desire to it) of the conjugal embrace is an integral and inseparable part of the one flesh nuptial union.
A more thorough discussion of the ramifications of sacramental versus non-sacramental marriages is beyond the scope of this Glossary Definition. Therefore, I would recommend reading Chapter 3, Article 7 of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, nos. 1601-1666.
Endnotes:
[1] Augustine of Hippo, On the Trinity, trans. Arthur West Haddan, in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, First Series, vol. 3, ed. Philip Schaff (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1994), X.2.
[2] Catholic Church, Catechism of the Catholic Church [CCC], 2nd Ed. (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1997), n. 254.
[3] See Catholic Church, Catechism of the Catholic Church [CCC], 2nd Ed. (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1997), nos. 1420-1498.
[4] John Hardon, “Sacramental Grace,” Modern Catholic Dictionary, Fourth Edition (Bardstown, KY: Eternal Life Publishing Group, 1999), p. 477, ISBN: 978-0-9672989-1-7.
[5] René Ostberg, “pride,” Encyclopedia Britannica, March 2, 2026, https://www.britannica.com/topic/pride-deadly-sin.
[6] Brian Kranick, “Trinitarian Life of the Family,” Catholic Exchange/Sophia Press, May 20, 2016, https://web.archive.org/web/20250524032824/https://catholicexchange.com/trinitarian-life-family/.