Paradoxes Part 1: The Trinity

Or, 2D Personhood and the Possibility of Love

The doctrine of the Trinity says that God exists simultaneously as one being yet as three persons. How can a being be one yet three? Well, I suggest that Nescafe has produced a product capable of this (right). However, if we are unsatisfied in equating the nature of God to a coffee-cream-sugar mixture,
a direct explanation is not forthcoming.

Nor should it be, if I am not omniscient. Perhaps my inability is the explanation. For example, imagine a 2-dimentional flat man like Mr. Game and Watch from ye old Nintendo. Suppose I want to pass through his world as a 3-dimentional creature. Well, because he can only see a 2D slice of me at any point, I would first appear as the tip of my nose, a hand, a foot – then a cross sectional slice of my body would appear and morph bizarrely until my butt and the back of my heel finally popped out of existence. I would seem to be a strange, mutating blob of parts, and those parts would appear at certain moments to be separate, disconnected blobs. For a visualization of this, check out this video on the 10th dimension, especially 1:25-1:45.

In the same way, I suggest, God’s personhood is beyond us. His transcendent nature can only be perceived by our limited “two-dimensional” personhoods as 3 persons or 1 person depending on our perceptual aspect or point of view, but the full nature of his personhood is beyond our ability to comprehend, simply because our perception is limited.

So what does this paradox give us? What is the benefit of accepting it? The Trinity turns out to be essential, for the reason that it alone enables love. Think about it. God is love, right? His character has always possessed this sublime virtue. Yet love cannot exist without an object other than the self, because love is the preference for another to oneself. How then could God, being the only being in existence, have possessed love in eternity past, before he created the world?

But if the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit have been forever engaging in a dance, each encircling in love around the other persons of the Trinity, face to face, bringing glory to each other, relating to each other, then love could exist within the Trinity, and thus love could be an eternal virtue.

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
(John 1:1)

Jesus was “with God” – the Greek word pros carries the idea of “toward” or face-to-face, relationship. Reciprocal direction, if you will. And yet the Word was God. We get both unity and yet relationship internal to the unity. The Son is said to have been “in the bosom of the Father,” i.e. close upon his chest (John 1:18).

If you think about it, the fundamental building blocks of the material world are interestingly similar. Atoms are indivisible (under normal circumstances), yet they are made of particles orbiting closely around each other – relating to each other, if you will. I like the parsimony and pattern of the thought that at a very core level, both the material and the divine have intrinsic relationship. In fact, I suggest that this patterns the whole purpose of life and humanity – man was made for relationships, with God and with others. But I’m getting ahead of myself – that will have to wait for Part 2.

The sum of the idea is that the Trinity enables love and relationship to be woven into the fabric of the eternal character of the divine. It gives room for and explanation for the highest virtue known to man.

Religions that propose a strict monotheism (Islam, Judaism), or an otherwise-single divine essence (Buddhism, New Age) have no ultimate explanation of where the love of the Supreme Being came from and what it truly means. Religions that propose no Supreme Being at all have an even greater task – explaining the origins of love in total and what it is, other than a mechanism of social cohesion and survival.

So, the Trinity might not just be a strange paradox of person, but the genesis of the possibility of others-centeredness, the root from which comes all the love in the world.

Paradoxes: Intro

I am glad that Christianity doesn’t make sense. If it could totally fit inside my rational mind, I would wonder whether it could have been invented by some other human mind. As it is, I don’t think any man could have (or at least would have) invented a system so baffling. Yet it is mysteriously beautiful and coherent. Christianity is built on top of several paradoxical claims about reality. The best way to see the heart of the Christian message is to understand (not resolve) these paradoxes. I choose four big ones.

The Trinity: God is one being, yet has three distinct persons.
The Problem of Evil: God is both infinitely good/loving and omnipotent, yet evil exists.
Sovereignty vs. Free Will: God ordains everything that happens, including men’s decisions, yet man has the responsibility to choose what is right.
The Hypostatic Union: Jesus was fully God and at the same time fully man.

These are perhaps the four biggest intellectual objections to Christianity – many Christian sects have attempted to tweak their doctrine in order to alleviate the pressure of the apparent incoherence in these paradoxes. But I suggest that it is inside these very paradoxes where lie the core truths and enrapturing beauty of the story that Christianity tells.

Not in persuasive words of wisdom

This post is a stub, a question I’m asking myself, not an answer. Paul says the following in 1 Corinthians 2:

And when I came to you, brethren, I did not come with superiority of speech or of wisdom, proclaiming to you the testimony of God. For I determined to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ, and Him crucified. I was with you in weakness and in fear and in much trembling, and my message and my preaching were not in persuasive words of wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power, so that your faith would not rest on the wisdom of men, but on the power of God.

What does Paul mean? What is the role of rhetoric in the proclamation of the Gospel? “Persuasive words of wisdom” are something I’m passionate about. Do I need to settle for a simpler (or more arcane) idea of what it means to apologize the gospel? Or what kind of attitude is Paul decrying here?

Hmm….

Psalm 25:12-15

Who is the man who fears the LORD?
He will instruct him in the way he should choose.
His soul will abide in prosperity,
And his descendants will inherit the land.
The secret of the LORD is for those who fear Him,
And He will make them know His covenant.
My eyes are continually toward the LORD,
For He will pluck my feet out of the net.

Amen, amen, amen. May it be true of me, Lord.

The Power of Now and Christianity

Below is a humble attempt at an objective worldview comparison of Eckhard Tolle’s book and Christianity.

QUESTION	ECKHART TOLLE	CHRISTIANITY
Nature of the Supreme Being	God is everything, or the universe.	God is the creator of the universe, a personal being distinct from it.
The purpose of life	Life is a game God plays with himself in which he forgets part of himself (man), then inflicts pain on it, to lead it into the process of remembering it is part of God.	Life is a story God tells to his creatures of their fall, their hopeless depravity, his rescue of them, and their future union.
Nature of man	Man is part of God.	Man is part of God’s creation.
Pain/evil	Man’s mind-induced delusion of “self” as a separate identity causes him pain. The mind/thought is evil.	Man’s selfish compulsion to supplant God causes him pain. Placing ultimate value on an improper object (any creature) is evil.
Enlightenment / the good news	Realize that you are not your mind, perceive that you are Being, and accept the world as it is as perfect	Realize that, without any merit of yours, God has redeemed you by Grace through faith in Jesus.
How to live	The goal of life is to regain awareness of Being and to abide in that state of “feeling-realization.”	Believe that Christ has redeemed you, and seek to consistently bring glory to Christ.

Turn signals and repentance

I was on the interstate the other day when I saw ahead of me a minivan in the right lane. It had its left turn signal on. Must be changing lanes, I said, so I slowed down not to get in its way.

But the minivan did not change lanes. It just kept blinking and cruising along in the right lane. After about 30 seconds I became incredulous. I don’t think that person realizes that their turn signal is on. They’ve had plenty of time. After 60 seconds I decided to re-accelerate in my lane.

Sure enough, as I pulled alongside the minivan, I saw a rather elderly lady hunched over the steering wheel, intent on the road ahead, entirely oblivious to her turn signal. Sure enough. She had never meant to change lanes at all!

I think the process of my realization says something to the nature of professions of faith. (Now let me explain.) A turn signal is the outward expression of my intent to turn. A profession of faith, whether it be telling a friend that I’ve changed, or going forward in a church service, is similarly an outward expression of my intent to turn – turn away from sin, and to God.

And just like a turn signal left on without an actual turn soon seems to be a mistake, so claims to faith without action in keeping with them soon become dubious. Intentions which are initially projected by the symbol must lead to action upon those intentions. If there is no action, our faith in the intentions “expires” and we see them as fake.

Generally, in life, sincere decisions are always accompanied by action and follow-through. We do not accept claims without evidence. Neither should not call people Christians who do not obey his commandments. I don’t think that’s judgmentalism, just common sense.

Ungentile, unwhite, unborn

“Hey dude – fair comparison?” called the guy in the middle of George Mason University’s courtyard. He was holding a big poster.
“Well, actually, no,” said the graduate student he had caught traveling between buildings.
“Why not?”
“I don’t want to get into it. We will get nowhere.”

“I just stood there looking at it for a few minutes, describing it to my sister on the phone,” said my friend as he concluded his story, “I really found that offensive. It was propaganda. But I know it’s his right to free speech. Still….” He shook his head. “Makes me frustrated.”

“Did they use graphic pictures?” asked another friend.

“Yes, the other two were in black and white, to highlight the picture of the fetus, all bloody and stuff.”

“It’s offensive,” agreed a third friend. “I think they mean for it to be offensive.”

* * *

My friends are well-thought people. The discussion that ensued between them hinged not on whether abortion of itself is good or bad, but on whether the right of the mother to choose what to do with her body is greater than the right of the embryo to its life. Let me take a stab at expounding the rhetoric of the poster, to get to the heart of the ethical question of which right is greater.

Ungentile = “A Nazi does not think that a non-Aryan Jew is fully a person. Nevertheless, it was wrong for the Nazis to kill Jews.”
Unwhite = “A racist white man does not think that a black man is fully a person. Nevertheless, it is wrong for whites to kill blacks.”
Unborn = “Like the racists, a woman (and her man) who aborts does not think her baby is fully a person. Nevertheless, in the same way as it is wrong to kill an ‘inferior race,’ it is wrong to abort a baby.”

The rhetoric hinges on the concept of personhood, that is, what it means to be fully or optimally human. Before any value can be assigned to “fully a person” or “optimally human,” we have to answer to enormous question, “What is a person?”

The materialist says that a person is merely a physical organism whose mental synapses get firing so intricately that there eventually rises a byproduct, like smoke from a fire, called a consciousness. To him, the right to life is a property of this consciousness. Therefore, before any self-awareness has surfaced, the fetus is not entitled to human rights. I knew a guy in high school who said that infanticide was okay until about age one and a half.

The theist says that a person is not only a body like all animals have, but also an essence, breathed into the body by the Divine, and capable of relating to God and other humans in an immaterial plane of reality. To him, human rights are a property of this “soul” or “spirit.” Furthermore, the standard position of the Big Three monotheistic systems (Islam, Christianity and Judaism) is that the spirit enters the body at conception.

The answer to the question “is the right of the mother or the baby greater” depends on whether you say that the baby is fully a human. If it is a person, with all the rights pertaining thereunto, then it’s an easy step to Pro-Life beliefs. One need only agree that, of the rights to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” the right to life is the most fundamental, and outranks the rights to liberty and the pursuit of happiness, which might be violated for the mother. If the fetus or embryo is not a person, then the mothers right to liberty trumps the “organism’s right to life.” We permit women to go hunting and kill deer, which are organisms, but not persons.

One the friends who engaged in the discussion above said it best (and I paraphrase): “There’s no way you can be a Christian and not be Pro-Life. There’s no way you can be an atheist and not be Pro-Choice.” The two sides of the political issue follow from the deep-rooted worldviews they derive from. So that sign in the courtyard and my friend’s response uncover a deeper question at hand: Does God make a person, or is a person the byproduct of his body?

Holy texts as unholy weapons: rephrasing the question

October 10’s USA Today featured an article by Tom Krattenmaker in the “On Religion” column that was quite an interesting read. The title: “Holy texts as unholy wapons”; the main idea: “The Bible, as well as the Quran, has some accounts of God commissioning barbaric violence.” Krattenmaker illumines the discussion between Biblical scholars such as Lucado, Frazee, and Jenkins on passages of the Old Testament. For example, when God tells the Israelites to destroy all of the Amalekites – every man, woman, boy and girl. Even every animal.

Krattenmaker conveys the flavor that this God is arcane and embarrassing to Christians. Not only that, but belief in such a God could open the door to modern-day violence. The prescription? Krattenmaker cites Jenkins:

Situate the bloody passages in their place and time – a place and time with a vastly different moral understanding of violence and its justifications. A useful takeaway for Christians today is the imperative to spiritually smite…anything that corrupts one’s faith or devotion to God.

For the most part, I agree. The way that God dealt with the nations surrounding the Israelites cannot be imported wholesale today. We must understand the cultural filtering that hermeneutics and Biblical history require. “What would my ‘Amalek’ be today?” Some abstraction and internalization of the meaning of these stories is necessary, if only for the reason that the New Covenant moved God’s presence from the outside of His people to the inside.

I would ask, though: does Jenkins’ reponse carry some subtext? His answer sounds like one made by a person who believes that the commands of annihilation were contrived, and the holy books compiled, by men who only thought they were hearing from God. Is there a whispered message? “That’s what was right for them, in that time, with their slightly archaic understanding of the divine. The question is, which parts do you feel comfortable garnishing your own spirituality with?” What’s the problem with that? It assumes that God was merely a cultural imagination. If those commands really were delivered by an unchanging God, we cannot just relegate our explanation to culture.

Understanding why some misguided, devout people thought that their God wanted them to murder a nation would be rather easy. Delusion. Inferior evolution. Does Jenkins really believe that God exists as he is discretely described in the Bible, and that he was saying what the Bible says he was saying? I wonder whether he would give a straight answer to this question. (It feels to me that Krattenmaker is perhaps insidiously indicting the moral consistency of the Bible, and to the extent that this is the motivation behind his article, we should get a coffee and talk about his objections to the existence of an objectively real God and whether God can actually reveal himself in the world.)

For those (and only those) who accept the Bible as the actual penetration of the revelation of YHWH into a race of doomed souls, the question of what to do with these Biblical passages gets a little harder. We believe in an all-powerful, all-righteous, all-loving God. How God might be exercising fierce wrath as well as unrelenting mercy boggles the mind. Especially for the modern man. Did God really say that the Amalekites were a stench in his nostrils, and did he really command the Israelites to commit a genocide? Our global culture (and many of Jesus’ teachings) champions acceptance, tolerance, and peace. How do we explain actions which at first seem like they come from a being with a radically different disposition than the God of the New Testament? That’s the real question that emerges from this USA Today article. It’s not a question I have satisfactorily answered. But I’m committed to finding an answer that works. So…onward in my quest toward Immanuel.

Jonah, and what we deserve

Recreation and walking with God

I had a conversation last night with a friend, in which we agreed that we should always strive to live a life of excellence, never turning up an opportunity to please the Lord and do good. We used Micah 6:8 as a benchmark verse for defining “good,” or what God expects of us.

He has shown you, O man, what is good. And what does the Lord require of you, but to do justice, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God?

We disagreed, however, on how one applies this verse. This issue really arose around the question, “Can recreation for personal enjoyment be an optimal way to walk with God?”

Take, for example, a man who has the choice one evening between watching a movie (as a champion archetype for all things recreational) or reading the Bible (as a champion for all spiritual disciplines). Which action is better than the other? We could claim that reading the Bible is always better than watching a movie, thereby eradicating recreational activity for the devout (since we presumably always have access to Bibles), but that is quite a heavy claim.

We are left, then, either to determine that we cannot make the judgment, or to judge based on his motivations. “The movie is an idol.” How can we make this determination without the ability to see into the heart of the man? Only by saying that recreation is always an idol. In other words, obeying Micah 6:8 and acting for one’s personal enjoyment are mutually exclusive.

Are they?

I don’t think so. Consider this response to the man’s dilemma: “Lord, I could be reading my Bible right now, but this movie would be more relaxing. I know you have given me the freedom to enjoy things in life without fear of condemnation. Thank you for buying this movie for me with your blood. Thank you for joining me with your warming, intimate presence as I watch it.”

Could it be that watching a movie is, at times, the way to be most satisfied in Christ? Are there times when reading the Bible becomes a legalistic chore? Now I know that we are to exercise discipline beyond the level of our emotions, but I’m talking about the kind of obedience that says, “Well, I should…” with the undertone of “…or God will wag his finger at me.” There are times in my life when I’ve just read the Bible (or done whatever kind of spiritual discipline you please) out of a fearful sense of obligation. And there have been times when I have heard God say, “Just go watch the movie, kid,” and I exhaled a big sigh and said, “Thanks, God!” That movie was a wonderful, God-given gift, in which I “walked humbly with God.”

I am closer to God because of the freedom he gives me and the generosity with which he gives it. Since I have been given the right to be called his son, God is pleased when I am pleased. How incredible, that he is genuinely concerned with my happiness! Whenever I am open-handed and humble before him, he gives me the world as a playground of grace. And this does not produce in me self-centeredness. Rather, it makes me love him more, and wish that others shared in the blessing.

Praise be to our God and Father that he has made a time for everything, and with the giving of Himself has given us every good thing in this life. Drenched in gratitude, even my recreation is worship.

As always, thoughts of any sort are welcome!