- TRINITY
'trɪn.ə.di noun. The godhead as one God in three people: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. - [Trinitarian
trɪn.ə'tɛr.i(.)ən adjective.]
In the scriptures, from the very beginning of the scriptures, it’s strongly emphasized that Y
Deuteronomy 6.4-5 KJV - 4 Hear, O Israel: The L
ORD our God is one LORD : 5 and thou shalt love the LORD thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might. Exodus 20.3-6 KJV - 3 Thou shalt have no other gods before me. 4 Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth: 5 thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them: for I the L
ORD thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me; 6 and shewing mercy unto thousands of them that love me, and keep my commandments.
One God. No other gods. Got that?
Well, Israel didn’t always get that, which is why the L
Okay, one God. Till we get to the gospels, and the teachings of Jesus, and the rather obvious statements from the gospels that
Yet Jesus talks about his Father, “whom you say is your God.”
Then Jesus talks about the Holy Spirit. He’ll pray to the Father, who will send us this
This idea of three people (or to use the way theologians much prefer to put it—and rebuke me all the time for not putting it—three persons) who are nonetheless one and only one God, is called
- There’s only one God.
- Three individual people—Jesus, his Father, and the Holy Spirit—are God.
Got that? Good. Hold both ideas in your head at once. Accept and believe both. Never dismiss one idea in favor of the other, or try to explain away one by using the other. And there ya go. That’s the trinity.
“Wait, no, it’s not a paradox.”
Whenever I describe the trinity as a paradox, I get objections. Partly because they don’t understand what paradox means:
- PARADOX
'pɛr.ə.dɑks noun. A seemingly self-contradictory or absurd statement (which, when investigated, may prove to be well founded). - 2. A statement which, though sound, leads to a conclusion which appears senseless, illogical, or self-contradictory.
- 3. A situation which combines contradictory qualities.
- [Paradoxical
pɛr.ə'dɑks.ək.əl adjective.]
They think paradox means illogical. Really it means something appears illogical. Three people are one God sounds illogical. But it’s how the scriptures describe Father, Son, and Holy Spirit: Three people.
Others are gonna object, “It’s not a paradox, because it’s not really a contradiction. See, when you think about the trinity this way….” and then they proceed to give an explanation which appears to sort everything out. Though nearly every time, their “explanation” knocks down one of the two ideas: “Three people” aren’t so much three people; or “one God” isn’t exactly one God.
Upholding both ideas, without favoring one or the other, is part of Christianity’s struggle. And let’s be honest: Some of us have simply given up. You get some churches where they’re all about how God is One; so much so they never talk about trinity. (For that matter, they never talk about the Holy Spirit either.
Hey, humans are creatures of extremes. We don’t even bother with the struggle to juggle the ideas, and pick a side… and sometimes follow it into error
Don’t be too hard on such people. They mean well. But they were raised to believe Christianity must be absolutely consistent—and if any part of it isn’t, the whole house of cards must collapse. As if Christ and his apostles and prophets
Yeah, I went there. ’Cause it’s part of the problem too, innit? We don’t want a God who’s too conceptually hard for us. Why? Because we’d imagine we have no handle on this relationship—and therefore no control over this relationship. A god without boundaries—even logical boundaries—might push us to believe things, try things, do things, we’d never dream of doing. Frightening. So let’s not go there.
To such people,
We want a relationship with God entirely on our own terms. Paradox implies that’s not possible. We can’t understand what, at his very core, God really is. How’re we gonna box that up?
Bad analogies.
Since the idea of trinity makes a lot of Christians squirrelly, we’ve gone out of our way to explain how God can possibly be One Yet Three without contradiction.
LIKE A SHAMROCK! Supposedly
St. Patrick came up with this one: God’s like a shamrock. One plant, three leaves.Thing is, it just leaves us with the image of one God with multiple body parts. God with three heads, like the weird multiple-headed beasts in Revelation. Or God as conjoined triplets. Thing is, conjoined people are not one being; they’re two, but stuck together. It ultimately doesn’t work in a whole lot of ways.
IT’S NOT 1+1+1; IT’S 1×1×1. This was my high school youth pastor’s favorite explanation: Stop adding and start multiplying!
Of course, to anyone who really knows mathematics, it’s a stupid answer. ’Cause 1×1×1 means you have one instance, of one instance, of one. Or three dimensions… and hey, wait, I’m three-dimensional; does that make me a trinity? Nope.
Doesn’t explain God so much as it reveals a lack of intellectual depth. But hey, shallowness never stopped shallow people from tackling the trinity idea.
GOD MAKES MORE SENSE IN MORE DIMENSIONS. In Edwin Abbott’s novel Flatland, a two-dimensional triangle in a two-dimensional universe (where everything’s flat, called Flatland) discovers a three-dimensional sphere. It freaks him out. He can only perceive slices of this sphere, and as it moves up and down his plane, the slices appear to grow and shrink. The sphere bumps him into its universe, where suddenly the triangle can now look down upon his universe and see into everything… and this likewise freaks him out. It’s a worldview he never expected, and struggles to describe to others.
One of my theology professors loved this book and had us read it, and posited God the very same way: God has another dimension which we can’t perceive either, and we can’t explain without a serious struggle. But thanks to this dimension, he can be Three Yet One. It’s not a struggle in four-dimensional space.
Problem is… this once again means the three people are multiple body parts. Their extra-dimensionality only makes them look like three people to us. Ultimately it denies their separate personhood.
MODALISM. About a century ago, Oneness Pentecostals gave up on the trinity idea and adopted
modalism , the belief God isn’t three people, but only appears to be: Sometimes he operates in Father mode, sometimes Son mode, and sometimes Holy Spirit mode. Because he’s limitless, he can appear to be in three places at once, and looks like he’s three… but he’s only one.
I wrote a whole article on this. Basically it’s God with multiple secret identities. Like Batman. Usually he’s Batman. But sometimes he takes off the costume, acts like a billionaire idiot, and goes by his birth name of Bruce Wayne. And other times he disguises himself as a gangster called Matches Malone so he can infiltrate the underworld. Three different modes. One Batman.But Batman isn’t really three different people.
GOD’S LIKE WATER. My mom’s favorite analogy is how water regularly appears in three states of matter: As solid ice, liquid water, and gaseous water vapor. And God’s sorta like that.
Yeah, it’s just another example of modalism.
My own favorite analogy likewise falls apart when you push it too far. I swiped some of it from C.S. Lewis: God’s like the author of a novel. The novel’s been written in first person (“I was strolling through the park one day, in the merry month of May…”) so the author sorta wrote himself into the story. He’s a real person, but he’s also the narrator of a book, plus he’s a character in the book: Three people. Neat, huh?
Where it all falls apart is the narrator and character are creations of the author. They don’t have free will; they’re fixed in the book to forever do as the book says they did. In other words they’re not individual people, like Jesus and the Holy Spirit are.
Every analogy of the trinity breaks down. Doesn’t matter how clever our stories are, or how simple they make God sound: We’re trying to explain a paradox. And we can’t. Wouldn’t really be a paradox otherwise.
Go on. Embrace the paradox.
The trinity forces us to believe in a contradiction. A paradox. As the ancient Christians used to describe it, it’s a
The best explanation we Christians have been able to come up with, is to say God’s one
And we have to accept it. More: We’ve gotta base our faith, our relationship with God, our religion which furthers this relationship, and the future of our existence, upon it. Not simple, nor easy.
Ordinarily we humans barely struggle with contradiction. We live with ’em all the time. (Hypocrites certainly do!) We juggle ideas, juggle lies, switch our opinions whenever they become politically or economically inconvenient. We don’t even mind those inconsistencies in ourselves; we know we’re not perfect.
But now we’ve gotta juggle truths. That’s way harder. We’ve got it in our heads that perfection means “without contradiction”—and yet we have a perfect God, who’s kinda got a big contradiction in what he is. His character’s consistent, but his structure itself is kinda… well, unclear. We’ve tried to sort him out, and can’t do it without wandering into heresy.
But if we wanna be
I’ve known many Christians who get frustrated with the idea. I once had a student throw up her hands: “That doesn’t make sense. It can’t be true. So I don’t believe it.” I had to rein her back: “No no no. We don’t just reject something because we don’t understand it. That’d mean you have to throw out your phone because you don’t know how it works. Somebody knows how your phone works; just not you. (Yet.) Same with God. He knows how the trinity works. We don’t. May never know it. But that’s okay.”
Yep, it’s a faith thing. We gotta take God’s word for it.
And the reason the trinity is at the heart of Christian theology, is because faith is at the heart of Christian behavior. Its our litmus test: If we can’t believe the one, we can’t really practice the other.
So try.
