My Understanding of the Trinity
Two Parts of a Discussion
This page came out of a discussion of the Muslim charge that Christians are polytheists.
There are two parts. The first tells why the manhood of Christ doesn’t place spatial limitations on God. The second tells why it is not necessarily contradictory to perceive three Persons in the one God.
The Manhood of Jesus Places No Spatial Limitations on God
# Also the manhood of Christ must be rejected because it
# would place spacial limitation on Allah, who is otherwise
# omnipresent.
Interestingly, I see this exactly the opposite way.
We Catholics agree with Muslims that God is omnipresent. But I think that most Muslims would also agree that God can manifest himself in special ways if He chooses, with His conversation with Moses at the burning bush being one dramatic example.
God’s omnipresence wasn’t diminished by His presence in the burning bush. His presence in / as the man Jesus also can’t diminish His omnipresence. In neither case is His presence limited to those physical locations. In both cases those locations (the bush and Jesus’ body) are places in which God is manifest in a special way.
In other words, Christians believe that the life of Jesus as a man on Earth is an Incarnation: a time during which God manifested Himself as a man. That does not prevent him from being omnipresent, but only says that He was present in a different way in the person of Jesus.
Against the Muslims, I would say this: if I say, “God could not be present in the man Jesus because He is omnipresent”, then I am placing restrictions on how God can manifest himself. If He could manifest Himself in the form of a burning bush without giving up his omnipresence, why could he not manifest Himself in the form of a man?
Three Persons in One God is Not a Contradiction
# The notion of three Persons in one Godhead is usually
# rebutted with the arguement that Allah is indivisible
# and of course some Koranic proof of this.
The problem here, in my opinion, is that people tend to confuse what is with what we perceive.
The gist of my argument is this:
- God the Indivisible has revealed things about Himself to us. These things are only properly understandable by the human mind if we conceive of Him as three Persons.
- These three Persons aren’t merely different aspects of God, since we can’t understand what we know of Him without using the three-Person concept.
- Our limited understanding of Him, which requires the three Persons, can’t divide him into three distinct Gods. He is what He is, which is indivisible; we understand Him as best we can, which is through the Trinity.
It remains to show what this means, and how it can be true.
When we identify objects and concepts, we do so according to our perception of them. Thus a woman, unfamiliar with Japanese culture, might call a tatami mat a “rug”, even though it’s very much not a rug. (It’s a mat that they sit on while eating.) Once she realizes that the mat doesn’t function as a rug, she will stop calling it “rug” and will instead call it “mat” or “tatami”.
Changing your thinking from “rug” to “mat” is pretty simple. In the 20th century, quantum mechanics required us to make a much more difficult conceptual change. Experiments showed that subatomic particles sometimes behaved as an energy wave, and sometimes behaved as a solid particle. They showed this by using the same type of particle in different situations: electrons fired at a TV-like screen, for example. This led scientists to identify what they call the “wave-particle duality” of matter.
What is this “wave-particle duality”? We have a concept of “wave”: fluid, a form of energy, oscillating, conforming to the medium through which it passes. We have a concept of “particle”: solid, a form of matter, generally unchanging in form. We even have a concept of how waves and particles interact; a particle might oscillate in space because a wave is moving it. But the “wave-particle duality” says that subatomic particles have both the properties of particles and of waves. This is very counterintuitive: how can something be both solid and yet fluid, matter and yet energy, unchanging in form and yet conforming to its medium?
We don’t really know. We have equations to describe it, but we can’t form an intuitive perception of something that is simultaneously particle and wave. We perceive waves and particles as separate, but through our experiments we have come to know that there is a substance that is neither what we perceive to be particulate, nor what we perceive to be a wave, but somehow appears to be like both.
When we perceive an electron as a particle, does that take away its duality? Of course not. And when we perceive it to be a wave, that doesn’t take away its duality, either. An electron is one thing, one type of substance. Therefore, even though we can’t help but think about electrons in terms of “particles” and “waves”, an electron just is what it is, and is only one thing.
Relating this back to God:
The use of the words “person” and “God” must be related to how we perceive a reality. The use of the words “monotheism”, “Godhead”, “God”, and so on all identify the truth that, regardless of our perception, there is only one God, who is indivisible.
The use of the word “person” generally identifies the fact that we are in a relation to another living entity, and therefore the use of the phrase “three Persons” identifies the fact that when we relate to God, we are relating to three living entities, each of Whom would be independently identifiable as a “Person”. We cannot help but perceive Him / Them as three different Persons, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, because our perception is so limited.
But that is our limitation, not His. God is What He is, as He told Moses; and even though the Incarnation has made it impossible to think of Him without thinking of three Persons, our perception of these three Persons cannot change God’s essential unity.
This may all be junk, but it’s as close as I come to understanding the Trinity. We’re told to accept the Trinity as an article of faith, and that’s pretty much what I do. This is just my analysis of the intellectual problem that comes along with that acceptance.