One of the strangest doctrines in all of Christianity is the doctrine of the Trinity. This doctrine holds that there are three divine persons — the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost — yet only one deity. Each of the three persons is fully God, and not just a part of God. A famous diagram known as the “Shield of the Trinity” compactly summarizes the idea:
The Trinity doesn’t make much sense, and many Christians recognize this. What most of us would call absurd they call a mystery, meaning something that is known to be true through revelation but cannot be demonstrated by mere human reason.
Some questions for the Christians out there:
1. Do you accept the doctrine of the Trinity?
2. Do you recognize the absurdity of it?
3. Do you deal with the absurdity by declaring it a “mystery”?
keiths:
Alan:
No.
More…
If you created nuclear furnaces, like the Sun, should I expect you to be ice-cold, like our admins, or Darwinists, and their god natural selection?
Think keiths! Think!
You are the only one doing it, you and Harshman 😊
Charlie,
If the reflection carries intelligible and true information about God, then God isn’t really ineffable. If the information is false, then anything you say about God is pure jabbering.
If you give up the idea that God is ineffable, the problem is solved. Why not take advantage of such an obvious solution?
Sorry keiths, but this is not going to work…
Btw: I’m going for a social dystance biking…while it’s still allowed…😊
Charlie,
If the spiritual realm is beyond human understanding, how do you decide whether a given statement or idea about God is true or not? Especially when the idea is incoherent, like the Trinity.
From Hymns to the Night, by Novalis
The love is given freely,
And Separation is no more.
The whole life heaves and surges
Like a sea without a shore.
Just one night of bliss —
One everlasting poem —
And the sun we all share
Is the face of God.
ENCYCLOPÆDIA BRITANNICA:
J-Mac,
Because?
Because the Trinity supporters will always use excuses, like Darwinists with omnipotence of natural selection…
Both are incomprehensible…😊
Sorry…
I’m on my way out…
Huh?
It was you who first brought up the phrase, “God is ineffable”, when you wrote:
The closest I had come to this was when I wrote:
When we use words to describe entities we are already on the path to ambiguity. Truths that we experience within, we find ourselves unable to express outwardly. The written word is a dead image of the living meaning which can only be kept alive in the mind.
As Steiner said
What is it about God that is ineffable? It is ‘I AM’. When a person utters these words it can only be in reference to herself or himself and no other. This is the unutterable name of God. We can all agree to use the same names for any object or entity we like, but the word ‘I’ cannot be used in common like all those other words. You,I and everyone else can write ‘triangle’ as a common referent. It is otherwise when we write, ‘I’.
This is so obvious that many people think that it is trivial. It isn’t.
CharlieM:
No way is it trivial. After all, Popeye says “I am what I am”, and Popeye certainly isn’t trivial.
Seriously, the word ‘I’ is an indexical — a word whose meaning changes depending on the speaker. Not trivial, but no great shakes either.
CharlieM:
You agreed with it and tried to defend it.
My point is that you can’t have it both ways. If God is ineffable, then anything we say about him is pure jabber. Only if he’s not ineffable can we say anything at all about him.
I asked above:
Charlie,
I’m still interested in your answer to this question:
That question gets at the central theme of this thread, which is to understand how Christians justify their belief in the Trinity.
Being able to say ‘I am’ is the most treasured gift we have, but also burdens us with the greatest individual responsibility. Daffodils can do nothing but be true to their nature laid out Our egos allow us a freedom unsurpassed by any other living organism. I’d say its shakes are very great indeed. Look at the trajectory of the power we have to shake the planet, from the first rifle shot to the devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
I discussed the phrase “God is ineffable”, and the general inability we have to translate inner convictions into words. I should have used quotation marks to clarify my meaning, i.e.:
My point is that there are aspects of God that are beyond the power of words to convey.
In a letter to Jacobi Goethe wrote
In the poem, ‘Antepirrhema’ he says
Nature in God, God in Nature. He could see unity in multiplicity and multiplicity in unity. One whole, two aspects.
I do not believe the spiritual realm to be beyond human understanding.
We believe that we enter this world as separate individuals, whereas in actual fact we are much more connected with the wholeness that is reality.
My understanding has evolved as I developed and hopefully will continue to do so. Over the course of my life so far I have gained an ever increasing understanding of reality by making the connections which, like a jigsaw puzzle, increasingly clarifies the picture of reality which I hold in my mind.
I first hear a wren singing deep within a thicket, Another time I see a wren flitting around the bushes. Later on I actually see the wren sitting on a branch and singing. What I first experienced as unconnected sense impressions now becomes united. In the future when I see a wren or just hear one, I can know that the source is the whole being that is the wren.
My journey towards reality is made up of having these individual experiences and giving them their place in a consistent whole. Why should I believe that there are limits to understanding? My current understanding may be extremely limited, but it is gaining ground. Why should I who professes ignorance in my current understanding, set any limits to future understanding? I cannot set a boundary. If I lack an understanding of the terrain then I cannot set a boundary therein.
Therefore I cannot agree that the spiritual realm is beyond human understanding. All we can know is that the understanding of each one of us is finite. We each know our own understanding, we know what we know and no more (although it could be and usually is less). But we should also know that this is not static, it is capable of being expanded.
CharlieM,
You did indeed use the word ‘ineffable’ in your comments about God. I’ve already given you one example. Here’s another:
keiths:
CharlieM:
Again, to solve the problem, why not simply affirm that God is not ineffable?
Charlie,
Let me see if I can put my question in less evadeable terms:
If certain aspects of God are beyond human understanding, how do you decide whether a given statement or idea about God is true? Especially when the idea is incoherent, like the Trinity?
I stated a truism that the ineffable is beyond words.
I believe that there are aspects of God, of the Divine, that are beyond words, beyond definition. But I do not believe that God, the Godhead, the Divine (as I struggle to find words that will convey meaning of something without limit) is totally transcendent. This ‘undefinable whatever’, from my point of view, is both immanent and transcendent.
Even when we use the word ‘beyond’ we are talking relativity in time and space. All I can do is admit my limitations at this time. To believe in the Father is to believe in the spiritual realm. To believe in the Son is to believe in the reality of Christ’s manifestation in the body of Jesus of Nazareth in the earthly realm. To believe in the Holy Spirit is to believe in the ever present spiritual realm, as Goethe calls it, the Eternal Feminine.
It is not always easy to put into words things that are revealed to us. How many wrens had hopped about before humans attached names to them? Languages come and go but reality is beyond our words. Reality is ineffable. Words are not lasting reality but they give us paths through which we can find reality. But only if we can find our way past them and not get tangled up in their convolutions.
I can only go on what appears to be true from my perspective given what I know and believe. I have tried to explain what the trinity means to me, but I know that not everyone sees it this way. Given my belief in a higher reality and my understanding of our limitations, the Trinity does seem coherent to me.
Although any sect or religious that stipulated I must believe in certain tenets would be inconsistent with my beliefs.
If the incarnation of Christ did actually happen and the experiences of St. Paul are basically true, then the Trinity is coherent in my understanding.
If I am to understand anything about God then I must understand Christ first. The latter task is more than enough for me at the moment.
Charlie,
You seem to be resistant to stating that God is not ineffable, but I don’t understand why. Your statements indicate that you agree:
CharlieM:
Here we go again. 🙂
Charlie,
Okay. So the way you handle the incoherence of the Trinity is to declare it illusory.
But you can’t express that coherence. How convenient.
And your beliefs just happen to coincide with Steiner’s.
I look around me at the world and ask myself: Where has it come from? Was it created ex nihilo, or did it have a creator? I have concluded that it did indeed have a creator.
I now have a duality, creator and creation. But no dualities exist without there being something to link them. So I have now reached the point where I see a trinity, creator, creation and the creative activity.
In Das Ewig-Weibliche, by Mrs. E. D. Cheney, she writes in a piece about Goethe’s Faust:
Now if I apply the principle of ‘as above, so below’ as I’m apt to do, I can think of creation on three levels:
The Logos or creative word, human intercourse, and sexual intercourse.
At the lowest level we have the trinity of father, mother and offspring. The power of the parents in shaping their creation is limited. At the next level a person can create through the medium of language but they cannot create life in this way. At the highest level the Logos is purported to create the living world. ‘In the beginning was the Word…All things were made by Him’.
How am I by means of the second level, supposed to express the attributes of a being who operates at the next level up? It is asking the impossible. But this does not stop us from studying the creation.
I really admire your patience, keiths… 😊
Can you quantum-teleport some to me?
I really need it due to the side-effects of hysteria that doesn’t look like is going to end any time soon…🤔
I don’t see what is illusory about the principle of creator, creation and the productive activity which realises the creation.
Goethe’s words at the end of Faust are apt:
I wrote:
I have tried to give a coherent account of my understanding. And I’ve studied what has been said about the trinity by others who have no doubt climbed further out of Plato’s cave than I have.
Goethe’s Titanism by Thomas Davidson
And here is an old piece written about the Trinity:
It’s not just Steiner, many wise thinkers of past ages have seen coherence in the concept of the trinity, and I would say that an understanding of creation at any level and in any context requires it.
keiths:
CharlieM:
You’re misunderstanding me. I meant that you declare the incoherence to be illusory. It’s a handy trick, because it allows any belief, no matter how incoherent, to be incorporated into your belief system. The bad news is that it allows any belief, no matter how incoherent, to be incorporated into your belief system.
Belief systems tend to fill up with crud if their owners don’t apply sufficiently stringent filtration.
J-Mac,
It’s a good way to kill time while on lockdown.
Charlie,
You’re now talking about a bunch of lower-case trinities, whereas this thread is about the upper-case Trinity of Christianity.
The trinities (or at least most of them) aren’t incoherent in the way the Trinity is. So when you say…
…I agree with you. That’s just a trinity, though.
Do you acknowledge the (you would say apparent) incoherence of the upper-case Trinity?
I figured… 😉
I wanna do an OP on the Gods permission of evil we talked about a while back…
Do you remember?
J-Mac,
There have been a bunch of OPs dealing with the problem of evil (including some by you):
…but if you have something new to say, go for it.
Yes , I did suspect that’s what you meant. But I decided to leave it as I’d written it and wait for your response.
I am quite sympathetic to your argument that the doctrine on the Trinity that orthodox Christians are expected to adhere to appears to be incoherent. But I don’t want to categorically dismiss something that I may be wrong about, thus I wrote:
I am reluctant to say the orthodox doctrine is wrong because it would be an argument from a position of a knowledge of God. I prefer to admit my ignorance and just to try to explain what the Trinity means to me. This symbol aligns nicely with what the various traditions have to say and my belief in a creative principle and its creation in respect to higher realms.
As I’ve shown there are many versions of trinities throughout the various traditions and religions of the world. I am more interested in looking at all of these to see what they have in common.
We know that from its very inception, Christianity began to bifurcate into a multitude of sects and factions. And those who held the power got to decide what official doctrines were to believed and what was to be rejected. Much has been suppressed. This is all well known. It comes as no surprise that I am inclined to esoteric Christianity rather than the orthodox exoteric Christian creeds that we are obliged to follow. I think ‘The Life of Brian’ put the point across brilliantly when the huge crowd of followers all shouted in unison, ‘We are all individuals’, or words to that effect.
As I see it is a fundamental attribute of any creative process that it is triune. The source of the creation, the thing created and the creative activity.
I know you would prefer to be arguing with orthodox Christians about this, but it would seem you are lumbered with me.
I thank you for allowing me to use you as a filter.
Yes from our perspective existing within the confines of time and space it does seem incoherent. But we do know of entities that are not governed by the same physical laws as we are subject to. So can I justifiably say for definite that it is incoherent no matter the perspective? I don’t see the need for me to adhere to that stance.
CharlieM,
Physical laws and reasoning are two different things. We know of no entities for which our standard rules of reasoning fail.
But then you have a reason to reject it — its known incoherence — and no reason to accept it apart from the mere possibility that it might be coherent at some higher level, whatever that means. Or even whether such higher-level coherence is possible when the lower level is incoherent.
Known incoherence deserves far greater weight than any unsubstantiated claim of higher-level coherence. The Trinity should be rejected on those grounds.
Charlie,
Earlier you were defending the Trinity as coherent:
keiths:
CharlieM:
Now you appear to acknowledge the incoherence:
keiths,
Instead of going back and forth on the Trinity, why not focus on the relatively unknown? The Holy Spirit.
J-Mac,
I’m trying to stick to the subject of the thread, but feel free to start a thread on the Holy Spirit. No one else has broached that topic, as far as I can tell.
Are you sure you want me to do it?
It could be your #9…
My series isn’t meant to be exhaustive, so the topic is all yours.
Quantum mechanics maintains internal coherence because it has its own laws which are incompatable with the laws of classical physics.
I was trying to argue the internal coherence of the Trinity within the terms of the creed.
The three aspects of the Trinity are said to be not created but eternal and almighty. This makes them absolute. The absolute is infinite. The infinite has its own mathematical logic regarding units and quantity which does not conform to our experiential world.
I was trying to point out that your equation of 1+1+1=1 is incoherent in our everyday world but not when applied to the infinite.
I was trying to defend the doctrine from the point of view of the Athanasian Creed.
But I am not going to defend the creed itself. It may have an internal consistency but I do not adhere to it. It says that in order to be saved we must think of the Trinity. I believe we should be looking for the Christ within. And that is not dependent on us abiding by any belief system. We can be a Christian, Muslum, athiest or agnostic and still find the Christ within. He can be found, not only by consciously looking, but by right action.
Steiner:
If Christ’s descent is a fact then He is within each and every one of us no matter who we are or what beliefs we follow. But He remains crucified and entombed within me unless I demonstrate genuine selfless love. This is the message we should be following, not some external list of stipulations.
And here I have to be careful. Am I acting purely from within, or am I just following the dictates of some external authority, be it a church, a creed, a figure such as Steiner, of whatever? Here the saying, ‘know thyself’ is very important. We can perform all the loving actions we want but unless our motives are pure don’t mean a lot. I believe this is the paradox we have to face.
Back to the Trinity. I think that there are ways of understanding it which are coherent, but as it is laid down in the Athanasian Creed, it is not consistent with my beliefs.
So when pushed to give a yes or no answer, (as you have been pushing me), I would have to take your side and say that it is incoherent.
Charlie,
Despite your argument regarding infinities?
Charlie,
The number 1 does not turn into infinity when we include infinities in our mathematics. 1 is still 1, and 1+1+1 is still 3.
Suppose the Son is infinite. How many Sons are there? One. One infinite son. The same reasoning applies to the Father and the Holy Spirit.
Transfinite mathematics augments, but doesn’t replace, ordinary math like 1+1+1=3.
Yes, because in my opinion the whole point about the Son is that, in loving action, He sacrifices absolute power in order to descend to the level of humanity. this is a severe restriction. In this respect the Son does not remain equal to the Father.
The orthodox view of the Trinity does not seem to take account of this sacrifice as far as I can see from my perspective.
Quantum Trinity?!
And I was accused of inserting quantum mechanics into theology…😉
10:4
Some day…perhaps…😊
I blame the way we are taught arithmetic from an early age. Counting beans. ‘Here is one bean. Add another bean and you have two beans’. (no small casserole jokes! 🙂 )We are taught to think of units as separate entities. There is another way of teaching which treats the unit as a whole. Beginning from the whole and dividing will arrive at the same result of multiplicity. The first method sets us up well to be reductionist in our thinking.
The unity is primal and the Trinity is derived from this unity. It is not a case of beginning from the Trinity and trying to lump them together into some amalgamated whole.
Charlie,
The fact that Jesus prays to the Father (and the nature of those prayers) also indicates that Jesus is not equal to the Father. That belief is considered heresy, however.
I thought you’d be all over that one. Two particles plus the activity that unites them, hey presto, a trinity 🙂 = 🙂
If you are looking for heretical thoughts about Jesus read what Steiner has to say on the subject 🙂
Charlie,
The problem isn’t with how arithmetic is taught. We all (I hope) learn arithmetic with both whole numbers and fractions. That doesn’t prevent us from seeing separate things coming together to form a whole or a whole being divided into separate pieces.
Okay, so derive the Trinity. What do you have? Three persons. It’s still 1+1+1=1.
The difference is in your equation the ‘1’ is a simple, separate, abstract unit, while the unity of the whole can be a complex entity. We as individuals are complex units.
One person equals one nerve sense system plus one rhythmic system plus one metabolic limb system. The three systems can be distinguished but they are meaningless in isolation from the whole.