Is God Lonely?

This past semester the poem The Creation, by James Weldon Johnson (1871-1938), was read during a chapel service at Calvin Seminary. The poem’s opening lines are striking:

“And God stepped out on space,
And He looked around and said,

‘I’m lonely—

I’ll make me a world.’”

The lines are striking because they ask such an unusual question: is God lonely? Johnson suggests He is. Fred Sanders, writing on the implications of the Trinity, disagrees. In The Deep Things of God: How the Trinity Changes Everything, Sanders describes how reflecting on God’s triune nature (how God exists as three persons but is still one nature or substance) should dispel any notion that God is, or ever was, lonely. According to Sanders:

“[The doctrine of the trinity] expels bad ideas about God… The doctrine of the Trinity expels unworthy ideas about the perfection of God’s life. It is unworthy to think that God without us is lonely or bored. God is not looking for something to do in the happy land of the Trinity. God did not create the world in order to fill the drafty mansion of heaven with the pitter-patter of little feet. God is not pining away for companionship in a lonesome heaven” (Sanders 95).

God exists as one God in three-persons, with each person in relationship with the other two. For instance, God the Father relates, in love, to God the Son; or, the Father sends the Son (another case of relating). The interrelation of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is an eternal relation, having neither beginning nor end.

The internal relationship between Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is why Christians can say, in truth, with full confidence, that God is love (c.f. 1 John 4:8). When Christians profess that God is love, they are not saying that love is an accidental characteristic of God (that it at some point begins or ends, or is an unnecessary part of who God is). God is love necessarily. If God was not love, He would not be God! God is love—He always will be and He always has been. If God has eternally been love, He must have always had a recipient of His love. Before He created anything or anyone, God was able to love because the eternal Father, Son, and Holy Spirit related in love to each other. The recipient of the Father’s love was the Son, the recipient of the Son’s love was the Father, etc.

James Weldon Johnson attributes loneliness to God. Yet, loneliness implies a deficiency or a lack in God. Trinitarian theology argues that God exists in an eternal state of essential blessedness. He lacks nothing! He does not act—either to create or redeem—in order to fulfill some void in His existence. God exists, says Sanders, in the “happy land of the Trinity”. The eternal blessedness of God distinguishes God’s acts of creation and salvation from mere self-fulfillment.

“The triune God is one, not solitary. Nothing that God does in creation or redemption is done because God lacked employment and occupation. The incarnation of the Son of God was not undertaken as an excellent adventure to provide diversion from the dullness of being the eternal Son. All these ideas are unworthy of God, as the doctrine of the Trinity makes obvious” (Sanders 95).

God is not lonely. It is because Christianity is Trinitarian that any statements to the contrary should, and can be, rejected. God exists in an eternal state of Trinitarian fullness and never acts out of need or lack. He creates—and saves—according to His good pleasure. Any suggestion to the contrary grinds at the Trinitarian foundations of gospel.