Ten Hundred Word Trinity
If you’re wondering what this is about, there’s an explanation in my post Ten Hundred Word Theology. I’m intending to make this a regular Sunday feature for a while, at least until I get bored of it.
There is only one God, but he’s made up of three people. One person is the Father, who made everything, and is sort of like the most important person, but in other ways they’re all the same. Another person is the son, called ‘Jesus’, who became a person so that he could understand us, tell us things, and die so that we could be better people. And the last one is the air-person-God, called the ‘Spirit’, who tells us what to do and how to live in a good way.
The Big Book of God doesn’t mention that God is three people, but people decided He was because of other things that it said about God. The Big Book of God says that when Mr Jesus was being made wet in the water, God the Father spoke to say that he was His son, and the air-person-God came down from the sky, like a flying animal, to be with him. People think this means that God is three people, but the Big Book also says God is one person. It’s confusing.
It’s very hard to understand how God can be both one God and three people. Lots of people have tried to explain how it works. Some of them say God is like a figure with three sides. Some say that it’s like water, which is usually soft, but can be hard when it’s cold or like air when it’s hot. Some say that it’s like one person having different jobs. Some say that it’s like a green growing thing with three parts. And some say it’s like numbers – one and one and one is three, but one times one times one is one.
Some people who talk about God think these ways of explaining are bad and wrong, because they sound as if God can only be one person at a time, or is three completely different people. They call these explaining words bad names, like ‘heresy’, which means it’s not what they should believe. Instead, they explain it with hard words which are strange ways of saying God is both three people and one person at the same time. They don’t really help anyone to understand, but they make God-liking people feel happy.
Image courtesy of MeHere, used with permission
Good job, still confusing
Hi, I don’t really care all that much if anyone believes in the Trinity or not, but you have mis-stated it as far as I understand it. The doctrine of the Trinity is not that “God can be both one person and three people”. The Trinity as i understand it says God is one God and three persons, which removes the
Sorry, I must have hit the wrong button. It removes the contradiction. Since God is way beyond our understanding (by definition), its not very sensible to say he can’t be three persons, any more than a two dimension person could say a cube can’t be 6 squares. God is different to persons just a solids are different to plane figures. It doesn’t make it much easier to understand, but at least the obvious contradiction is gone. Best wishes.
Granted on the God-person point, but this is the sort of linguistic subtlety that I’m trying to avoid. I’ll keep it in mind, though.
I think it’s much more than a linguistic subtlety. God is a very different form of life from humans or persons, very. very different, and we shouldn’t confuse them.
I’ll look forward to more.
I think that’s a matter of opinion and conjecture, but I was thinking about this during the day, and there’s no good reason to insist on the word “person”, so I’ve changed it.
Well done, and thanks. Best wishes.