“If God were not triune, He would not be able to dispense Himself into us, to work Himself into us, and to mingle Himself with us.”1
This idea appears frequently in Witness Lee’s writings. The connection between the divine Trinity and the divine dispensing is central to Lee’s theology. For Lee, the Holy Trinity is an eternal dispensing. This is what the terms Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are getting at—an eternal communication of divine essence that constitutes and structures irreducible hypostases (“persons”). As such—and since God’s eternal purpose is not arbitrary but a luminous and spirited logic that conveys God Himself—the economy of salvation manifests God’s eternal being and identity by mapping onto time as a deifying dispensing of the life of God into that which is not God by nature but becomes God by grace.
God as an eternal Trinity, or as the trihypostatic Person (in Bulgakov’s idiom), as such, funds and enables the dispensing of Himself into created beings. In other words, if God were an undifferentiated Monad there could be no divine dispensing.
God does what God is—dispense. What God is enables what God does—Trinity. This is what Jonathan Edwards called God’s diffusive disposition.
Sometimes this kind of statement in the quote above—would not be able to—leads to head-scratching. The phrase can sound like God is subject to outward constraints. But Lee’s language is not about external limitation on God; it’s about divine logic. Who God eternally is determines what it means that and how God gives Himself to another.
There seems to me to be four overlapping reasons for this head-scratching.
1) Most of Lee’s published works originated as spoken messages. His delivery, while prepped and outlined, was extemporaneous and lively.2 At times, this meant that rhetoric and audience-attuned, dynamic communication took precedence over analytic precision (but not always!). He tended to deliver complex theological claims in a compressed and accessible form rather than with cumbersome conceptual analysis.
2) Lee was an ad hoc metaphysician. He doesn’t pursue the kind of philosophical rationale one finds in scholastic-type theology. In this respect, he stands closer to figures such as Luther or Calvin or Barth—biblical, exegetical, rhetorical, and christocentric theologians—than to metaphysical masters like Bonaventure or Thomas Aquinas.
3) Some of Lee’s theological commitments find their home in patristic theology. If one is not familiar with the standard affirmations of this period, then such claims may be perplexing. It is therefore always worth asking where a critique is coming from in order to understand what assumptions are already in play. Ideas outside one’s inherited tradition can initially appear strange. Yet Scripture itself often confronts us with precisely this kind of strangeness—a feature that Karl Barth famously celebrated in his lecture The Strange New World in the Bible.
4) Understanding Lee, like most theologians, requires both charitable reading (see for instance Reading Barth with Charity: A Hermeneutical Proposal)—what does he mean, and just as importantly, what does he not mean?—and historical sensitivity—who else has said something like this, and within what conceptual grammar? When read this way, Lee’s claim finds substantial resonance within the broader catholic tradition. A striking example comes from Hans Urs von Balthasar, who argues that grace itself is unintelligible apart from the triune being of God.
Like Lee, Balthasar argues that God can dispense Himself into us (grace) only because God is triune:
Only on the basis of the divine Trinity can there be something like grace. Grace is a “participation in the divine nature”, which does not destroy the difference between God and man. Multiplicity could not participate inwardly in a monolithic One, in spite of all that the Platonists tell us: they feel something of the reality and necessity of this participation, but, with their presuppositions, they can never reach it. For the multiplicity, the mere “One” remains an inadequate yonder realm. God can only communicate himself, his inner life, if such distributing and communing are of the essence of his own life, that is, if God is “being for another” and in such an absolute sense that, in him, the Three do not stand over against each other, each subsequently communicating something of himself to the others: here these Three are themselves the fruit of such communicating. He in God whom we call “Father” is the “fruit” of his self-giving to the One we call “Son”; he exists as this self-giving, and the Son exists as receptivity, gratitude and giving-in-return. Again, this giving-in-return does not close the Two in on themselves but opens them to the fullness of the “with” (the “co-” of “communion”), which is made absolute in the Spirit who is common to both. Only in this perspective does grace become intelligible. The Father can give us the Son to be “with” us at a human level—the Son’s eternal proceeding from the Father is continued in the dimension of time—but when the Son takes us with him into his communion (“being with”) with the Father, he does so in a way that opens us to the cascading stream of life of the absolute “With”, namely, the Holy Spirit.3
Comparing these two statements, the similarities are unmissable.
Lee: If God were not triune, He would not be able to dispense Himself into us.
Balthasar: God can only communicate himself if such distributing and communing are of the essence of his own life.
Read with charity and with an eye to historical theology, Lee’s claim turns out to be anything but idiosyncratic. It echoes a deeply catholic conviction that only a God who is eternally self-communicating can truly give Himself to creatures. The Trinity is not an abstract doctrine but the living reality that makes divine dispensing possible at all.
- Witness Lee, Life-study of Revelation, 722. ↩︎
- Lee would spend 100 days in intensive study and preparation for his 10-day long Life-study trainings on a book of the Bible. See CWWL 1985, vol. 5, p. 177. ↩︎
- Hans Urs von Balthasar, You Crown the Year with your Goodness, 187. ↩︎
conversant faith 