Hagar, Ishmael, and the Trinity

The doctrine of the three persons is the Bible in a nutshell

“The word is with God and just so is God.”

— John 1

Genesis 21

It is perhaps not immediately obvious that this Sunday’s Old Testament lectionary displays an instance of the doctrine of the Trinity.

Scripture knows no other instantiations of its doctrines than the kind we find in Genesis 21. That we do not so see the story of Hagar and Ishmael simply reveals the extent to which the church has accepted modernity’s limitations on the formulations of doctrine.