God in Relationship: Advent and the Trinity with Rev. Dr. Michael Chen

This Advent season, Dan Allender and Rachael Clinton Chen are joined by Rev. Dr. Michael Chen for a rich and deeply human conversation about the Trinity and what it reveals to us about God, ourselves, and our relationships with others. 

Together, they explore how the mystery of one God in three persons shapes our understanding of love, relationality, and beauty—particularly in the context of Advent, when we reflect on God’s incarnation and presence in the world.

This episode is an invitation to pause, wonder, and engage your heart with the presence of God in this season of anticipation.

The podcast will take a short break next week for the holiday, but we’ll be back on December 26 with an end-of-year reflection from Dan and Becky Allender.

About Our Guest:

Rev. Dr. Michael S. Chen completed his PhD at Eastern University in the Marriage and Family Therapy program. He has extensive background in campus ministries in and provides counseling care to ministry workers and pastors through the Rest Initiative. He also has experience with racial trauma resolution and is certified in Narrative Focused Trauma Care® from the Allender Center of The Seattle School of Psychology and Theology where he serves as Adjunct Faculty. He lives in Philadelphia with his wife, Rachael Clinton Chen, two sons Jamison and Silas, and daughter Evelyn.

Episode Transcript:

Dan: Rachael, we are in the delightful event season and we have what I would consider to be a very remarkable, extraordinary, compelling, essentially wild human being to join us. Would you like to introduce this presence?

Rachael: Sure. We are very privileged today to be joined by the one and only Reverend Dr. Michael Chen, who also happens to be the love of my life.

Dan: Well, the right Reverend Dr. Michael Chen, it’s such an honor to have you here and especially the first chance to be able publicly, at least to be able to acknowledge…

Michael: Yes, thank you.

Dan: The hard labor to become a doctor, but as all my children would say, not a real one.

Michael: No, no. Yeah, I get to, it’s great to be with you both. I did get to when booking our holiday airline tickets, get to put the suffix PhD onto the website, so that felt really good. Felt really good.

Rachael: Also, Evie did refer to Michael as Dr. Dad for a good three weeks after he got his PhD.

Dan: Oh, that is fabulous.

Rachael: She was very serious. Is Dr. Dad coming? Hey Dr. Dad.

Dan: Can you help me tie my shoes Dr. Dad?

Rachael: I’m going to ask my children to reprise and reconcile and repair their failure and mockery even something came up not long ago and my two daughters were there and both of them almost in a duet said, well, he is not a real doctor. I’m like, okay, whatever. But nonetheless, we have the privilege of talking with you, Michael, about Advent and the Trinity. We had the pleasure of having Blaine Eldridge last week talking about Athanasius and the significant work, particularly his rather brief book on the incarnation, and we were able to set up a little bit more now to be talking about how the Trinity creates a framework, a presence to be able to enter into this glorious season. So talk with us, Michael, about the Trinity.

Michael: No, thank you. I have heard parts of that conversation and look forward to hearing the fullness of it, but something I gleaned from the conversation, at least in part was just how contentious debates about the Trinity were in the formation of this idea of who God is, who Jesus is, who is the Spirit, how do they all interplay that it wasn’t simply an intellectual debate, but it was fierce, it was contentious. There were everything from our understanding of church history is that it had massive social and political ramifications. And so I just want to, I think, just start off by saying to acknowledge this isn’t simply an abstract conversation, a conversation about philosophical ideas, but in as much as we experience this upheaval today, I think around the question of what is the church? What does it mean to be a follower of Jesus today? As fierce as we feel like this is a question, a consternation, there’s so much heartache and division. My sense is that was the experience in debating the Trinity over the course of several hundred years. It’s so fascinating to me how it coincided the development of the doctrine of the Trinity happening over the course of 300 years, particularly at the end of the Roman Empire, that it was no doubt in my mind connected to social and political identifications. And so this is, I think, again, very resonant with how we’re approaching these questions of what does it mean to be a follower of Jesus today? What is the church? How do we live faithfully in this context where it feels like massive upheaval?

Dan: Yeah. Well, it’s such an important statement to be able to say that when we think theology is already finally fully, clearly given resolved, and then to be able to say we don’t know what was happening in 90 AD, what was happening in 110, our earliest finding of the term Trinity was Theophilus of Antioch in 170 AD. And even there, it wasn’t quite the clarity of Father, Son, Holy Spirit. Nonetheless, you’ve got Tertullian in 200 AD, you’ve got significant theological fathers that we’re speaking, and we also know in terms of the aesthetics and the women of faith of that day, they were articulating something that came into being congealed by Council of Nicea 325 and the Council of Constantinople and 381. Again, not to bore you with our history here, but just to say as you put it so well, Michael, this is hard labor and bloody to come to theological truths at the end of empires. It requires a great deal of courage, fortitude, and willingness to stand, at least in the context of Athanasius, in the way of Arian philosophy, theology that was dominant. So when you think about Trinity, Rachael, Michael, talk to me.

Rachael: You go Michael. Well, I will say this, one of the things that stuck with me from the conversation about Athanasius was how pastoral he was. And I think that that’s also a piece, and we talked about this in our conversation about the Seattle School Certificate of Living Theology, but just that reality that theology does, it walks around, it moves. So like Michael, when you’re saying it has sociopolitical ramifications and we see this kind of convergence right now or collision of what you could almost say is basically different theological systems and understanding who God is and what the Trinity is. I know we were talking about, we mentioned a little bit part of the, when you’re talking about Arias, that part of the conflict was how we understand the relationship of the Trinity and the divine. And so if maybe we could just even breifly refresh our memories as we talk about Trinity, what was at stake if the other theological assertion won the day? How would we understand God and how would we understand ourselves in relationship to God since in many ways we’re talking about the incarnation and advent and what that has to do with the Trinity.

Dan: Take that on Dr. Chen.

Michael: Yeah, to me, getting to this question of who God is and then who we are bearing God’s image. And so to me, to be able to distill 300 years of fierce debate into two sentences that God is of one essence, but three persons, and that’s developed primarily as we’ve named in Nicea and Constantinople but developed a bit further in subsequent councils. But if we were to hold the reality that God is of one essence, but three persons that God exists in the three persons distinctly in three different ways of being or modes as church historians have talked about, that there are three different ways of being God, and yet God is of one essence. And so that starts to shape our understanding of God in a very, very different, very, very unique way in which for me, what’s at stake is we get to start to talk about relationship and the nature of what it means to be human and connected to others and connected to God in very, very specific ways. And so in as much as we can try to formulate our ideas about God, I think that starts to open up this possibility of asking the question of, again, not only what we think about God, but how does God experience me? I love that. What does God feel about me? About creation? And so there starts to open up, not in a sense of equals, but this consideration that if this is not an abstraction or an abstract concept of God, but that God is in covenantal relationship with us, what is the experience of God, one essence existing in three persons, and how do we relate to God? But also how does God relate to us?

Dan: And again, it can be said, I want to say it briefly, we’re talking, Calvin used the word that you have to talk about God with baby talk meaning conversation where you’re almost murmuring giving just lovely lullabies, but you’re talking about something very true and real. None of us can pass the mystery. Nobody can escape the complexity, yet we’re called to find language for meaning. So in that process, we really are coming back to we’re not just understanding who God is through the Trinity, we’re understanding what it means to be a being, what it means to be person as we talk about being made in the image of God. So all that to say we are complex, God’s complex, he’s complex because of his utter and complete beauty and perfection we’re complex because we revealed that, but also with brokenness. Yet there’s something in the very essence of being made in the image of God who we are that portrays something of what it means for God to be Trinity. So as you ponder that, talk to me about what both of you understand the Trinity to actually be.

Rachael: I’ll say this, when I was in undergrad as a young Southern Baptist studying biblical studies being exposed to different theological thoughts, I remember encountering Jürgen Moltmann became one of my favorite theologians and is who I read at our wedding that Dan often reversed to as the big thick book that I had someone hand me. It was a tiny little, it was his book for laypeople. It was a small little paperback book. However, for me, that was the first kind of shift in actually letting my imagination experience something of a Trinitarian God. And it was because Jürgen Moltmann was the first theologian I encountered. I’m not saying he was the first theologian doing this, but he was the first theologian I encountered who talked about a suffering God and in many ways actually a God who moved beyond some kind of wrathful relationship with creation, but a God who was suffering with creation. And when I think about what it means, and so this started shifting things for me to be asking like, wow, yeah, who is God and Genesis when we hear God articulate they, let us make them in our image and this, what does this mean? And obviously, yes, logically I understand God and the Spirit and Jesus as three in one. It’s not like that was a novel idea to me, but just this sense of how they relate to one another has implications for what it means for me to be made in their image. And yes, that sense of we are beloved and we are good. We were created in a kind of belovedness and goodness of creation that has experienced profound brokenness and splitting and division and all these things. But it also took, I think it was probably a lot of Stanley Grenz’s work for me too, as coming into seminary around the Trinity and the social God and the Imago Dei. What does it mean then that actually me being made in the image of God is that I actually at my core am a relational being and that we image God in some ways, it really brought the mission of God, how we love how we repair, how we co-create something that pulls people into a new identity, a new kind of embodiment is how we bear the image of God, like our most true form, especially in places where we are radically diverse and radically other in a sense of you want to talk about one essence different… How did you put it? One essence, but different persons. And for me, that actually had huge implications for what it meant to be a follower of Jesus, that there wasn’t really any way I was going to be able to just live into the full humanity of who Jesus created me to be in isolation or by becoming good in whatever moral behavior that meant there’s something more. And so I think in some ways that’s a long way of saying this idea of a God who suffered the loss of a son, this idea of the Spirit as not just the kind of like, oh, a little add-on, we’ll throw in to extend to humanity when Jesus departs, here’s some little sprinkle of the essence of God, but an actual part of God that remains in a palpable, tangible way with us kind of in this absence of Jesus as we wait for the full revelation of God’s authority and God’s dwelling with us. So I don’t know. It started to open a door for me that made pondering these different persons of God feel like, not like, oh, okay, now God’s made an our image. But yeah, I never really felt good about an immovable God that didn’t really make sense to me. How could that be possible? This changes something of even what God has experienced in God’s personhood around separation, around when you think about the death of Jesus around loss, around what it is to with some thread of love for life, to persist in the midst of death. I don’t know, maybe it’s just my kind of, these are the nerdy theological places that I can kind of step into and they never sound nearly as academic and cool as they should. And I’m referencing a lot of academic things that I couldn’t tell you, like who said what and how did we get here? But I know that it’s radically shaped my imagination for who God is and what it means to love and what it means to hope and what it means to faith.

Dan: Well, often we think of the Trinity of it in functionality. The Father is the one who plans, who forms and plans, the Son executes, the Spirit applies. And I think the idea of functionality, the roles are a lovely way to begin to get to know the Trinity. But what I hear you say in that is, without diminishing at all the roles and shall we say the tasks they execute, the reality is it still doesn’t speak to the richness of the personhood and relationship of the Father to the son, that the Spirit to the Father and to the son. And as we begin to imagine the relationship of the Trinity, we’re right back to again, one of my long lost colleagues that is Dr. Grenz and the social gospel and the social meaning the relationality of the Trinity is actually what becomes the major category for defining who we are as beings. We’re not just truth seekers, we’re not just doers of good. In other words, you’ve got the three universals. That is truth, goodness, ethics and beauty. And Balthazar and others made this shift to saying, no, no, no, it’s beauty first. And in that what we’re looking at is that beauty defines how goodness that is ethics are applied and opens understanding of this broad word epistemology and the knowledge of what’s true. So back to one simple point, it’s how relationality bears beauty that gives us a great taste to talk about the nature of, you’re a couple that loves one another. You’re a couple that bears the marks of years of sacrifice in terms of Michael getting his PhD. You two have suffered the Trinity in relationship with one another just in growing your family and something of the work and career. Is that a well put statement?

Michael: Oh yeah. And I definitely think of Evie in this as expanding the beauty that was already there, but it is so costly and it requires so much suffering. And yet it is something remarkable to have her say, participate in our love. And that’s what is coming to mind as I think about your comments on beauty in the Trinity before time, before space, there is this atemporal that somehow exists in another quantum realm, this beauty and this dance of the Trinity and that in the suffering of sending the son. And we hear this on the cross like, “my God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” But we rarely think about the Father’s agony and the Father’s suffering the loss of the Son to make room for us. And to me, the key word is participation for us to be able to participate into the divine life and in divine beauty. And what this Trinitarian view of God I think opens up for us is this suffering beauty, an increased openness to more goodness and more beauty. But that’s costly, that it’s so costly. So when I think about my journey with God, I think it really resonates with that sense of me never feeling like I belonged here in the United States, me feeling like I never really belonged in Taiwan, where my parents grew up and immigrated from, that there is a sense of, oh, you do belong and I have suffered so much because of your goodness and your beauty, and you are so delightful. And so to be brought into the symphony of the Trinity, to be able to participate, to be able to play my own notes, to be embraced, that to me is such good news.

Dan: Well, and to add, not only are you a PhD, but you are a markable musicians. So when you think about how your artistry not only the creation of beauty, but just the notion of notes, how has music helped you understand something of how the Trinity engages one another and therefore how we’re meant to engage one another?

Michael: Yeah, I think about temporality and rhythm and harmonic structure. And so when I think about what makes a good song, what makes beautiful music, there has to be some development, right? We’re not just playing one note. And although that’s where we start that when I think about the complexity of what story is being told through the change in a harmonic structure, it’s exactly in the study of music and music theory that they also from Greek times used the word modes. And so when I think about different modes that exist with different harmonic structures that are brought together in various ways to give the utter complexity and beauty of music from across different cultures, that to me is such an expression of a Trinitarian thought of one essence, but three modes interacting now with opening up through suffering for increased flourishing and diversity and complexity and particularity. If you think about folk songs, if you think about songs from different cultures that have a different harmonic structure through these different modes of being, that to me as we start to really, I think, play with or disrupt some of, again, our egocentric or western centric views, I think that is the beauty in this intersection of music, of harmony, of discord. So much of music I think is important, is moving through dissonance and what we feel like might be discomfort or rupture to get to some denouement or some resolution of someplace that feels like home.

Dan: So here would be my guess, but I want to get your input on this. They play music, don’t you think?

Michael: Absolutely.

Dan: There’s no question. They all play some multiple instruments.

Michael: Jesus sang hymns, I think that’s right from the gospels when they were finished singing the hymns.

Dan: Well, and he is the Psalm writer. The Psalms are about him, and he sings the Psalms for our sake about him. So yeah, so we know that there is no music that Trinity wouldn’t play, but what particular music do you think they shall we say by the end of their so-called evening end up playing together?

Michael: Yeah, yeah. It’s got to be a few different soundtracks, three persons, one essence, three persons. It’s got to be a multiplicity of mix tapes and various power ballads.

Rachael: The Blues, Spirituals, Jazz.

Michael: The Blues. Yeah, Spirituals.

Dan: Yeah. So just even the thought that we are being sung over, and there you’ve got some of the prophets speaking about the nature of singing lullabies over us, that that’s the presence of God singing to us, not just to comfort, but to bind and bond our heart to his. So we’ve got the reality…

Rachael: Which by the way is a very feminine image. And I’m just going to throw that out there. For those of us who have a hard time imagining God as a mother, that’s a very feminine image of singing lullabies over a beloved one.

Dan: Absolutely. It’s the presence of, again, not male/female, but the feminine presence of an inviting care, comfort, rest, joy. So when I think particularly, especially as we step into the advent season, I remember the first time I read Jonathan Edwards on the Trinity, and again, I am not well versed enough to be able to recall what I read about 48 years ago, but the reality of what he understood the son to be is the Father’s physical presence of his face among us. In other words, the ideal of who God is in the presence of Jesus. And so this is God’s self-image, literally his self-image is Jesus. And so the self-image, especially in incarnation, is the presence of God as baby God, as infant God as vulnerable. And in that it’s enough to just whack my brain to be able to go, especially as we enter into the season of advent. And when he speaks about the spirit, he speaks about the spirit as the cumulation, the presence, the person of love that binds the heart of the Father and the Son. In that sense, if you had a single word to describe the work of the Spirit, it’s the word joy, delight. And that sense then of not just we are relational beings, but we’re relational beings that are meant to reflect something unique about ourselves in and through our face and being able to honor the face. I know this is a little off, but to me, advent is honoring the power of the face, the face of God in the presence of Jesus. And the Trinity compels me, even if I’m not feeling it at a particular moment, to enter into the dance of delight into the musicality of God and into the play. And those words that you use, Michael, the musicality, the play, the dance of God, there is something about the season that is meant to be, that’s just long period of honoring one’s own face as a revelation of God with joy. And I think that’s one of the challenges, at least for me. Do I honor my face and see joy? Do I see joy in my face? But do I have joy with regard to my face? Your thoughts?

Michael: Yeah. And it’s so fascinating that Jesus was born at a time where there was such little technology where everyone now has their own camera and their own phone and selfies. And so there is, I think an incredible amount of honor and yet mystery around the face of Jesus, obviously the Shroud of Turin and the hundreds of thousands of different portrayals of what we think Jesus’ face looked like. But there’s I think, kind of a beauty in not really knowing, in being able to say, Dan, your face is so glorious, Rachael, your face is so beautiful. And my face, I have such a good face,

Rachael: And part I know of our faces is that they also bear so much violence and not just personal violence because of personal particularities, but gender-based violence, racialized violence, and we don’t have a selfie of Jesus, but we know he was a Palestinian Jewish man. So we know something of the particularities of his features. And I think that that’s part of that dialectical mystery as well of our faces, because I know if there’s something about our faces and the delight and the joy and the honor, well that means something about what I might feel towards other human beings and their faces and what their faces say about their inherent dignity in our social structures and our political structures as brown people are being racially profiled in our country right now. Again, not the only people, but being racially profiled by state police, federal deputized, police forces and tackled to the ground because of something that their face bears that has major implications for us as followers of Jesus, of how we’re meant to… Because something I would add, Dan to what you’re saying for Jonathan Edwards as a woman who has born a child, there is joy, there is delight, and there is a kind of primal ferocity of protection toward your tiny human and anyone who would seek to harm your tiny human. And in some ways, if there’s also that part of God that feels, and I think this is where justice and mercy kiss, right? And we don’t fully comprehend how God can at the same time love us so fiercely and also probably at times want to ferociously attack us for the ways in which we harm ourselves and other image bearers. And so to me, I also am thinking about in advent and the vulnerability of a God-baby. I’m thinking about Mary and that sense of nourishment and delight and joy and also ferocious protection that we know she had to lean into, not alone in the presences of our community very quickly into this newborn’s life under the threat of empirical forces who were really threatened by this prophecy of a coming king. And so I know that there’s just, there’s something there too for me in this Advent season.

Dan: Well, I don’t think I’ve ever admitted that I’ve watched something comparable to this, but I was in one dissociative state looking at Instagram reels, and it was a ferocious dog who had cornered a little baby kitten. And the mother walks up and you can see in the dog’s face, I mean, it’s so clear, I wish I had it available for you to watch, but watching kitty videos can be very entertaining. And the cat walks up and the dog has this sideways look like, Ooh, what’s going to happen? And the cat and the dog, the mother and the dog face off, and the dog has this blink, and as soon as it blinks, the mother screeches and attacks the dog, and the dog races away. And that image of the ferocity, not merely of Mary, but of the Father wanting to protect the vulnerability of his son and giving his son knowing full well that the incarnation and the crucifixion are linked from the very inception, the notion that you will crush his neck and you will bite his heel. There will be suffering and the crushing of evil. I’m grateful that you put words again to each one, the Father, the Son, the Spirit, are each experiencing in some sense the incarnation from a radically different entry. Even if we can’t comprehend it, we can at least note it that there is a different joy and suffering for each of them. So if relationality is one of the things that we are honoring in the Advent and the face, the face in all its beauty, joy, but also suffering, then what else holds for you a window into the advent through the Trinity? How do you two play in the context of Christmas?

Rachael: We like to create rituals in our home that help us step into stories, right? Because Advent has happened and we practice it and remember it and reflect on it. And in some ways it’s an opportunity to live out the story in the here and now to let it continue to disrupt us as we await for the return, another coming, so to speak. And so I do think part of our play in our home are very kind of simple rituals, actually like nothing. I mean, we have a Christmas tree, we put up a lot of twinkle lights, which actually we put up in our second Advent in our home was the first year of COVID, and we put up tons of twinkle lights in our home that actually never left. It felt like we needed to have them year round. So they actually are up year round, but we put more in the space. And yeah, I don’t know Michael, what you would say, because I think everyone there is actually such on… the assault of capitalism on the season of advent is pretty profound. The sense of we really should be focusing and doing all these other things and it can be quite stressful. So I also feel like this season can be a conflation of deep desires to gift well, but not the time and space to gift in the ways you would want to if you were trying to move outside of these systems that tell you what you should be doing. So there’s always, for us, I think a wrestling in this season too, of how do we let this story impact how we’re living and how we’re moving and how we’re relating to one another as a family and also toward our neighbors and those in our midst. So I don’t know what you would say to that, Michael, but…

Michael: No, part of me is still, and I wonder if there’s a connection here that the ferocity that we were talking about starts early. Evie has for a long time tried to guard you, Rachael, from me, from just hugs, or even yesterday as you came back from a long road trip. Let me just rub your back. And she says, dad, don’t touch mom, don’t touch my mom. Don’t touch my mom. There’s something, so I think ferocious in the three-year-old, but it probably also feels very playful to us that she, she’s learning through these kinds of interactions what it means to be in relationship. And so when I think about our holiday season and the need for our marital dyad to in a sense be buoyed or encouraged buoyed up by, let’s say another, to form a Trinity, family. And so I think that is so fraught, obviously in this season for so many people. And so we are in the situation of not having nearby family in our city. And so we do travel and we do have to plan for that. And we do have to make space maybe we even talked about today with our group of friends that we spend part of the holiday with that feels like Spirit-filled fun and a good community. So if there are, I think, I imagine so many people out there that this season brings up a lot of heartache and a lot of tension that there, I think my hope is that yeah, there are places of Spirit-led, Spirit-filled community and communion that strengthen.

Dan: Well, when you begin to go look, the holidays have a certain set of expectations, rituals, processes, and they’re socially bound. They’re often historically passed from family to family to family. And again, no critique of that other than to say, I don’t think we think enough. I don’t think enough that when you create multiple faces at the table, you’re creating no matter what community you’ve brought together, diversity. And that diversity is a reflection of the trinity, not merely a reflection of culture. It’s a reflection of the Godhead and in that the interplay of different roles that honor and delight and bring joy to one another, that just the process of bringing a meal to the table with the types of, shall we say, complexity, that at times may look like contention. Oftentimes, that is the playground of diversity, playing in each one, having a sense of what goodness will need to be brought, can that shall we say at times, what may you look like cacophony simply be seen to be the play of jazz and the intersection of goodness coming together. Can you see the larger umbrella here, rather than just tensions in the kitchen? Can you see this as you are living out the Trinity? Now, maybe the Trinity doesn’t have a few sharp words for one another, but nonetheless, the goodness of creation, the goodness of making beauty and splendor of smell and taste, and that the playground of laughter is not just a family, it is a reflection of the God we serve in love. If we can begin to see how does the Trinity play in your family in this context, then this podcast will have been something that we want you to know. And that is everything you do over this holiday is a gift, gift you’ve received and a gift you give. And so all sacrifice, including the ferocity of protecting your young is part of that gift. So may there be for you both, many gifts in this season.

Rachael:Thank you Dan, and you as well. And since next week on the podcast, we’re letting our whole team take a week off, and then we’ll be back with you and Becky shortly after Christmas with kind of your traditional end of year reflection. I’d like to take a moment to say to you, dear friend at least, on the podcast, happy Advent, Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year, and I’ll look forward to returning with you again in 2026.

Dan: Yeah, I’m thrilled for that to be the case. What a gift to me.

Rachael: Thanks, Michael.

Dan: Thank you.