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.