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We’re Not Stupid, We’ve All Seen an Egg | The Trinity – Part 1


 If you’re a Christian, then you will be aware of the Trinity, and if you’ve ever thought about the Trinity for more than ten seconds, it will be an idea that you have struggled to get your head around. Trinitarian theology attempts to provide a simplified understanding of God, but somehow ends up creating a doctrine of faith which is more like an annoying, logic riddle.

 

Trinitarian doctrine was developed through a number of church Councils, in an attempt to figure out an understanding of God, and the way Jesus talks about Father, Son and Holy Spirit in the Bible. The first meeting where the idea of the Trinity was discussed, was the Council of Nicea in 325 CE, which was attended by over 1800 bishops from across the Roman Empire. You may have heard the phrase, “too many cooks spoil the broth”, meaning if too many people are involved in a task, then it won’t be done well. Well in this case, I’d say that, “too many bishops, spoil our understanding of God”.

 

Ever since the birth of the early church, people have been trying to make sense of the Trinity, through writings, artwork, diagrams, analogies, novels, PowerPoint presentations, and more recently, through videos made by social media influencers, who claim that they can tell you the truth of what the Trinity is, but apparently don’t know how to film themselves in the correct aspect ratio, the pillocks!

 

For many Christians, the doctrine of the Trinity is non-negotiable. If you deny the Trinity, then you can’t be a Christian, or if you deny the Trinity then you can’t be saved, because you don’t truly know God. Yet it seems that most Christians don’t really understand the Trinity, and are incapable of explaining how it works. Here are some examples I found, and if you could also kindly bear in mind as you read them, that Jesus is fully God, and fully human, just in case they aren’t confusing enough on their own.

 

First off:

 

God is one but is three distinct persons, the Father, Son (Jesus) and The Holy Spirit. God is the Father, God is the Son, and God is the Holy Spirit. The Father is not the Son and the Son is not the Father, the Son is not the Holy Spirit and the Holy Spirit is not the Son, and the Holy Spirit is not the Father and the Father is not the Holy Spirit. The Father is in the Son and the Son is in the Father, the Son is in the Holy Spirit and the Holy Spirit is in the Son, and the Holy Spirit is in the Father and the Father is in The Holy Spirit. The Father glorifies the Son and the Son glorifies the Father, the Son glorifies the Holy Spirit and the Holy Spirit glorifies the Son, and the Holy Spirit glorifies the Father and the Father glorifies the Holy Spirit.

 

Here is another one:

 

God is One God, The Father is God, the Son is God and the Holy Spirit is God. The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are uncreated, co-eternal, inseparable, and perfectly equal in essence. God is one but is also three persons. God is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, the Father sends the Son and the Spirit, the Son is sent by the Father, and sends the Spirit, and the Spirit is sent by the Father and the Son. The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit work together to create the cosmos, sustain life, and redeem the church, and God’s visible actions in history reveals his invisible triune nature.

 

And another one, this time, just for variety:

 

The egg is comprised of three parts: The yellow yolk, the whitish part (famously known as the white), and the shell. Despite these three substances, the egg is not three but one. Likewise, we believe that God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost are one God, but made of three persons – hence they are ONE IN Trinity.

 

Perhaps all these explanations make perfect sense to you, maybe it’s something that all Christians understand effortlessly, and I’m just extremely stupid. If that is so, then well done, you have solved the mystery of God. If you’re so great at solving mysteries though, then maybe you can help me answer this one.

 

If the concept of the Trinity is so easy to understand, then why do most Christians actually see it in the following way.

 

God is the Father of Jesus, who we imagine as being a man with a beard who sits on a throne in Heaven. Jesus is the Son of God, and the Holy Spirit is a bit like God in some way that we can’t really explain. God is at the top of the hierarchy, and Jesus is underneath him, because he is the son and that’s how things work in families, and the Holy Spirit is at the bottom of the hierarchy, because we don’t really know what it is.

 

A lot of Christians gained a fresh understanding of the Trinity from the book/film, The Shack. However, I think that most people who read the book and watched the film, myself included, can’t remember how the characters explained the Trinity. The main thing we took from The Shack, was that was God the Father was a nice black lady, Jesus was a hot Indian guy, and the Holy Spirit was a sexy Asian hippy. Conceptually, it seems to reinforced the ideas that we already have, but at least now our confused notions of the Trinity are at least racially inclusive now.

 

This obviously isn’t what we say if our pastor or vicar asks us what we believe about the Trinity, or we’re discussing it in a Bible study group and don’t want to look daft in front of our friends. We’re not stupid, we know what the Trinity is, we’ve all seen an egg. This is what we privately think though.

 

We think that the Father is God, and that ‘God’ is his name. This is why we call him ‘Father God’ and we don’t call Jesus, ‘Jesus God’ or the Holy Spirit, ‘Holy Spirit God’. The Father created the universe and made humanity to be in relationship with him, but because humans are stupid and always mess things up, the Father had to send his son, Jesus, to save us. We also think that Jesus’s surname is Christ, which logically means that God’s full name must be Father God Christ.

 

We believe that Jesus is the Son of Father God, and that he came to earth to show people how to live better, how to be in relationship with Father God, and how to get to heaven. Jesus died for us and rose again, which meant that people could now come to the Father, through Jesus.

 

We see the Holy Spirit as a kind of ethereal presence and it/he/she is important, but actually we only really bother with the Holy Spirit for ten minutes a week at the end of a church service, or when we want to experience something supernatural, like healing, speaking in tongues, or falling over/being slain.

 

Maybe you have never seen the Trinity in this way, and you think this is a ridiculous, childish notion, but I know that people do think of it like this, because this is how I have understood the Trinity in the past.

 

I do remember having a moment of clarity concerning the Trinity when I was at my church youth group. One of the leaders gave a very helpful example of the Trinity being like water. Water can be a liquid when it is at room temperature, it can be a solid when frozen, and it can also be a gas when it’s heated. It’s all water, but it exists in three different essences. I thought this was a really good analogy, and it seemed to explain the Trinity in an easily understandable way.

 

There is one substance, or one essence, which presents in three different ways, simple. I looked on the internet to see if anyone else had heard of this example, or to find out if my genius youth leaders had thought of it themselves, and to my utter shock it turns out that people have heard of it, and it is a heresy, called Modalism.

 

I found numerous blogs and articles where people were explaining why this view of the Trinity is heretical, and they pick holes in the illustration. Here is a summary based on a few articles that I found.

 

·       Water cannot be liquid, ice and steam, all at the same time. Liquid, steam, and ice, are destructive to one another. Liquid and steam melt ice, steam can boil water, and ice can change the temperature of water and steam.

·       The Trinity reveals a relationship of love between the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, but water doesn’t have the capacity to love. (I mean, really…)

·       Water, steam and ice are created things, but Father, Son and Spirit are uncreated and are self-existent. This way of thinking about the Trinity is called Modalism, and it is heresy.

 

You might think that the people picking at the analogy in this way are just being pedantic and sanctimonious. I think that would be a fair assessment, but they are also wrong about it being heretical. Modalism is based on Sabellianism, which was condemned as heresy, but it isn’t the same thing, and it is accepted within some Christian denominations, such as Oneness Pentecostalism, whose theology attempts to begin with an Old Testament understanding of God, in order to interpret what the first apostles would have believed about Jesus.

 

Modalism perceives God to be one but existing as three different modes, as God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. The godhead was in Jesus from the incarnation, as a manifestation of the God of the Old Testament, and the titles ‘Father’ and ‘Son’, describe the distinction between the transcendence of God and the incarnation, and the Holy Spirit is not understood as a separate entity, but describes God in action.

 

This sounds good enough to me. OK, it might be unorthodox because it fails to acknowledge the three distinct persons of the Trinity, but I think any illustrations that we have of God will only ever be helpful to a point, and none of them will ever be faultless. The common view of the Trinity may be agreed upon by church tradition, and seen as the best estimation we have of God, but I don’t think we can really say that anything counter to that view is heresy. I don’t even know of this view of God is biblical. The word ‘Trinity’ doesn’t appear in the Bible, and the idea of God being three people or persons, isn’t a consistent biblical idea, and could just be something we have jumped to.

 

 

Text taken from “Unanswerable: Exploring the Complexities of the Christian Faith and Biblical Truth”, which is available from Amazon, and from all good book shops.

An audiobook is also available at https://mindmole.bandcamp.com/music 

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