God is Trinity? Who can understand or believe that?

It may at first sight seem that I have completely changed tacks from my last post.  In fact I have not. As a “heads up”, let me say that a subtitle for my book (see blog heading) is “A trinitarian approach to inner healing”.   There are however a number of issues that I need to address before I can proceed. The heart of the matter is this,  that while we are multidimensional creatures placed in a multidimensional habitat, we have this strong tendency to live one dimensionally.  My point is not just that modern Western secular man tries to ignore the spiritual dimension of who we are (though he/she certainly does this). No even Christians have this strong tendency of being one dimensional.  We see it even in the names of the denominations, or in the names of movements with which we identify.  Too often our Christianity is a one note samba, when it is intended to be a rich and haunting harmony of all that God is. At some level it is inevitable since no matter how much we know, no matter how much we learn, no matter how wise we become, it will still be true that down here we “know in part and prophecy in part” (I Corinthians 13:9, see also 1 Corinthians 8:2). 

So often the error that we perceive in another, is truth out of balance. And in our failure to see the other side of the coin,  we ourselves become one sided. One person put it this way “In the inevitable swing of the pendulum, we pass through the point of rest (the bottom of the swing) at maximum speed.  So Christians have for example,  tended to emphasize the Spirt over the Word, or the Word over the Spirit, or the Free will of man vs. the Sovereignty of God. Or in the non-religious sphere logic over intuition.  The truth more often than not, is not “either,  or”, but “both,  and”. May the Lord have mercy upon us when in our zeal, we do not see the need for balance,  or when we fail to communicate in love.

The heart of the issue has to do with “Unity in diversity”, and I want to adopt this as a working definition of both “Trinity” and “trinity” (with lower case “t”). In the case of the Godhead, it describes the diversity of Father Son and Holy Spirit as a Unity, as being One.  For a more formal definition of Trinity, I suggest that you Google “Trinity”, but this may well leave you non-the wiser, and that is okay.

There are two immediate things I want to say. The first is that the Church did not  formulate the doctrine of the trinity because it thought it was the most logical and informative description of God. No it started as an attempt to make sense of the two diverse strands of Scripture. The first of these two strands is that in the context of mono theistic (one God) Judaism God is clearly One. The second strand is the teaching (also deduced from  Scripture) that Jesus is also God.  Here is not the place to debate this, though I can't resist saying that in the book of Isaiah, two of the names of the “the child born, the Son given” are “The Everlasting Father”, and  “The Mighty God”  (Isaiah 9:6).

The other thing that I want to say today concerns the part of the title “Who can understand or believe that?”. It seems to me that there is an (unreasonable) demand  we make, in the religious sphere and only in the religious sphere,  that we will not believe something we cannot fully understand.   (See also future post “Mystery banished in the West”).  But who can understand quarks and quasars, or black holes or even electricity? Yet we probably believe in electricity. 

Concerning not being able to understand Trinity, I want to suggest that if we think we have fully understood God, then our god is too small,  and is not really God at all, but an idol. One of the classical definitions of God is “That which is greater than we can conceive”. The Scripture puts it this way  “As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways,  and my thoughts higher than your thoughts”. Compared even to the highest mountain, the heavens are way higher than anything on earth. The admonition to be childlike before God comes to mind, to have a little humility about the capacity of our tiny minds to grasp the wonder of the unity and complex diversity of creation, let alone of the Creator!  More coming.