The easiest analogy is to make it personal
I can be a father, a son and a husband. Each is distinct. Each describes me perfectly. Each involves all of me. Three in one? Where is the mystery?
Richard
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I could tell you, but this shows you what I learned from my daughter when she was a child.
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Very cute! And Iâm going to guess that wasnât the sharing procedure of choice during our recent COVID years!
-Merv
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Glad youâve got everything nailed down!
The mind that is not baffled is not employed. -Wendell Berry
There really should be a font or alert for sarcasm.
With the modern multi-tasking phones and the like, the idea of three functions in one should not be a problem either. Perhaps there is a reason why we should consider God unfathomable, but in terms of the Trinity, people seem to want some sort of assurance that it is explainable, otherwise the impossible becomes a barrier.
Richard
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I was on a discussion board where people used colors; red text meant angry, purple was used for sarcasm. The colors for all the positive aspects werenât used as much as just those two together.
Most people Iâve discussed it with have been content with my pointing out that in science and other areas you have to know when to multiply and when to add, and that often has to do with what youâre dealing with; thus in the case of the Trinity, when the âfunctionâ is âGodâ, the correct approach is to multiply, 1 God x 1 God x 1 God = 1 God, but when the function is âPersonâ the correct method is to add, 1 Person + 1 Person + 1 Person = 3 Persons. This doesnât explain, but it shows that there is sense to the idea of one God, three Persons.
I still like the analogy of an electron with its charge, mass, and spin; they are very different things yet if you take any one of them away you have eliminated the electron. Unfortunately to most people that makes no more sense than the Trinity in the first place!
I think that these days I would follow the approach of showing that in the Old Testament we see a Yahweh who is always unseen in heaven and a Yahweh who walks on the earth as a man, yet there is still just one Yahweh â and that second-Temple Jews had no problem with this (and point out along with this that when it says âthe Word of the Lord came to meâ it is sometimes clear that âthe Word of the Lordâ is a person in human form). Then itâs a short step to showing that the Holy Spirit (Spirit of Elohim, Spirit of Yahweh) also shows up as a person, as Yahweh â and if two is no problem, then three isnât either. Then when (inevitably) someone objects that this makes no sens, I would point out that if four centuriesâ worth of Jewish scholars who grew up reading the scriptures in Hebrew and Greek and to whom studying the scriptures was the greatest activity they could engage in thought it was no problem, Iâm not going to disagree.
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Interesting how most of our explanations of the Trinity fall into old heresies like Modalism
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The thing about modalism is that the whole being becomes the mode so that at any one time only one mode exists. Clearly, while Jesus walked the earth there were at least two modes in eistenced so modalism cannot work.
Ice, water and steam is the classic modalistic view, except that it is possible to have all three at once, so maybe not? Except that water is not one body but fractured all over the place
The point of the Trinity is that the three âpersonsâ coexist as one but are still distinct and non interchangeable. Jesus is not the Father. The Holy Spirit is the working of Bot The Father and Jesus, distinct and yet directly under the influence of either or both.
I would claim that the identity by role, as in Father, Son etc is a fair comparison, even though we could also be knw by our occupation, or hobby, or faith etc. But just because we have identified three âpersonsâ it does not exclude the possibility of there being others unidentified (known).
The âappsâ of a phone do not quite qualify unless the Father is the operating system and you allow an App to be a separate âpersonâ, but the apps need the operating system and the Operating system does not âneedâ the app Also the operating system has no outside application.
Actually I quite like that idea, because superficially God the Father works using the Holy Spirit directly or Jesus indirectly. rather than in His own right.
I guess that there really is no perfect analogy, but several come close enough, perhaps?
Richard
PS
Perhaps the problem is with the Trinity itself. The working of God maybe closer to that of an operating system and apps, but they did not exist when the Trinity concept was decreed.
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Analogies are meant to make a concept accessible, but can be misleading when taken too far.
The problem with properties of electrons, or states of matter, as analogies for the trinity, is that by orthodox doctrine the persons of the Trinity are not attributes of God, but personalities, with the Son begotten of the Father, and the Spirit proceeding from the Father.
The concepts of begotten, and proceeding, are themselves analogies of human experience and speech.
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I like that point.
One analogy I remember in a Muslim/Christian context was that Jesus is the âword,â âkalimaâ of the Father. Since a person with human limitations is perhaps not as deep as God, the picture the evangelist would give was of a letter. In communication, a letter is the representative of the sender. So, Jesus was Godâs letter, or âword.â
Since the Koran says, âAnnabi Isa,ibnu Maryam, kalimatullahi, ruhullahi,â --âThe prophet Jesus, the son of Mary, the word of God, the spirit of God,â that sort of made more sense to Muslims than the heresy that they were taught.
It seemed to make sense to me, too, in a certain degree.
Thanks.
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When people start discussing the concept of the Trinity I am often reminded of this quote:
âIf you think you understand quantum mechanics, you donât understand quantum mechanics.â
âRichard Feynman
This isnât a knock on anyone or on Christian theology, just my reaction to the complexity and counter-intuitiveness of the concepts. There may be a good analogy in quantum mechanics somewhere, but I will leave that daring attempt to someone else.
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Neutrinos and resonance structures have come to my mind before, but the latter seems to end up as a form of unitarianism, and the former is something that Iâm not sure if anyone understands well enough to use it as an analogy. The idea that I once had of an analogy involving infinite sets ended up as tritheism.
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I donât think the issue is with the nature of God. We just need to recognize that our best efforts to characterize His nature cannot escape our own subjective limits. Whatever descriptor we choose will be satisfactory for some and not -or even heretical- for others.
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I was thinking more of wave/particle duality or superposition, how something can be two things at once. Probably a poor analogy, but they all seem to come up short.
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