Tag: the trinity

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.

On tawhid and the trinity

A Muslim friend recently challenged me on the point of God’s consistent message of Tawhid, or his Oneness, as found in the ancient revelations. Why would the unchanging God fundamentally change the way he showed himself to man, shifting from oneness to three-in-oneness? He raises a very good question. Below was my attempt to answer him, which I think resembles theories of progressive revelation.
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Although the scriptures are clear about the singleness of the Sovereign One, they are also replete with hints about something much more grand and mysterious, hints I believe are preludes to the Messiah, the climax of God’s reaching out to man.

1) In Genesis 1:2, the “Spirit of God is hovering over the waters”- before he begins creation. With the traditional Islamic interpretation of the “Spirit of God” meaning Gabriel, this would mean that Gabriel existed “in the beginning” before God started creation.

2) The word translated “God” in the first chapter of Genesis is plural (“Elohim”) and he talks to himself saying “us”, as in Genesis 1:26, Genesis 3:22.

3) Ibrahim meets with Allah in person in Genesis 18: “behold three men were standing opposite him”…two of them go down to Sodom while “Ibrahim was still standing before YHWH” and barters with him about the city’s fate. It is YHWH who replies to Ibrahim during this conversation, and YHWH is the one who departs afterward.

4) Yaqub/Jacob wrestles with God in Genesis 32. “A man wrestles with him until daybreak” – literally grappled with Jacob. When Jacob asks for his name, he says “why do you ask my name?” When he departs Jacob names the place Peniel (meaning, the face of God), saying, “I have seen God face to face and lived.”

5) When Moses received the second copy of the ten commandments in Exodus 34, YHWH: descended in the cloud and stood there with him as he called upon the name of YHWH. Then YHWH passed in front of him and proclaimed, “The Lord, the Lord God, compassionate and gracious, slow to ander, and abounding in lovingkindness and truth…” This seems like a physical presence of God

There are many interesting hints like this in the book of Judges (Samson and Gideon have similar mysterious encounters) and the prophetic revelations to Israel and also the Zabur of David/Dawood have hints of God coming to man, but I’ll select a very intriguing one, one of my favorites:

6) The book of the prophet Isaiah, in 9:6- “For a child will be born to us, a son will be given to us; And the governremnt will rest on His shoulders; And his name will be called wonderful counselor, mighty God, eternal father, prince of peace.” (!)

So you see, I’m not saying that these things make God into gods plural. I’m saying that the true nature of the one God was gradually being revealed throughout time, he was preparing his people for the time when he himself would come to save them. Jesus was the fulfillment of God’s constant intention throughout the ages, ever since the Fall of Man.

7) God gave the first prophecy: “And I will put enmity between you [shaitan] and the woman, and between your seed and her seed; he shall bruise you on the head, and you shall bruise him on the heel.” (Genesis 3:15) That is, there would come one born of woman who would defeat Shaitan. And who can defeat the greatest of angels but the Maker of the angels?

God has always been one, and he has always three in one. Only at the coming of Jesus did God see that it was time to reveal the fullness of his nature, and the true meaning of his name Immanuel, which means “God with us.”