How Can We Understand the Trinity?

In a previous article titled Improbable or Impossible: The Trinity, I attempted to explain how we are to understand the idea that God exists as one God, but three separate persons: The Father, The Son, and The Holy Spirit. Many skeptics, Muslims, and even people professing to be Christians deny the existence of the Trinity or that Jesus was God incarnate. I have also heard many people claim that a tri-unity God is absurd and makes no sense. So today I am going to recycle a lot of that old article, but refine and make some additions that I think will make a strong case that the trinity is not absurd and is logically sound.

Yahwhe's Compsite Unity

Before we begin, there are numerous passages in the Old Testament that point to the existence of more than one power/person that are all equal to God in characteristics. Deuteronomy 6:4, the famous Jewish Shema that declares:

“Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one"

Echad

Many skeptics use this exact verse to argue that the Trinity is an absurd idea foreign to scripture, but is this truly the case? Are there other occurrences of a composite unity of God in the Bible? The Shema uses the Hebrew word Echad to describe God as "one." It also uses the word Elohinu for "Our God", which is Elohim (God) written in the plural form. Now, ancient writing often employed plural wording to denote glory and authority, so it's not surprising that God is presented as plural here. The plurality of Elohim here is not what's surprising; it is the word Echad. Numerous passages in the Old Testament employ the word "Echad" in a composite fashion.

"Therefore, a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh." (Genesis 2:24)

This verse uses the word Echad to describe how both a man and a woman come together in a lifelong commitment of marriage, to become one flesh. Marriage speaks theology, and God made man and woman equal, both reflecting His image. Through both imagotypes (man and woman, derived from the Imago Dei), marriage fully reflects the image God has bestowed on both sexes of the Human race.

"When the seventh month came, and the children of Israel were in the towns, the people gathered as one man to Jerusalem." (Ezra 3:1)

This verse also uses Echad to describe a very large gathering of Israelites, describing them gathering in Jerusalem as being one (echad) man. Other verses include Genesis 1:26 and Ezra 2:64, along with other instances. Now, you may be asking if Echad can mean absolute unity. If there is another Hebrew word that expresses absolute unity, as opposed to composite, then that will strengthen our case that Scripture describes the Trinity. Well, there is a Hebrew word, Yachid, that expresses an absolute unity, where there is "one" of something, not made up of parts or distinguishable entities.

Yachid

The Trinity: A Practical Analogy

Some say that God cannot be three persons within one being. This logic flows from the characteristics of our finite persons of individuality, but is this the right way to understand it? Can one thing be distinguished into different aspects? Can the Trinity exist as one being, with more than one person? There are plenty of things in nature that are one single causal entity, but exhibit distinguishable aspects that, when revealed, sharpen our understanding of how a process works. For example, Electricity. I think this analogy opens the door to understanding the composite unity of the Trinity, not completely, but it gets us started. Remember that analogies are not purposed for making something fully comprehensible, they only serve as points of lift off for us to begin to understand a way of thinking about something that makes understanding it easier.

When you flip a light switch, and the ceiling fan and lamp turn on almost immediately, it's easy to think that electricity is a single, unified force of energy that flows through the wire and is released in the filament of a bulb. But as we examine its operation closely, we see a tri-fold composite operation. Ohm's law states that current is proportional to the voltage and inversely proportional to the resistance. Electricity has 3 aspects of its nature: Voltage/Electromotive Force, Amps/Current, and Ohms/Resistance. Voltage is the force that drives the current, current is the movement of electrons in and on a wire, and the Ohm is the resistance or material for current to flow. But if you do not have all three in a complete circuit, no energy flux will manifest. I am going to now explain a little more about electricity, just because I am a nerd and love explaining this. If the paragraph below bores you, go ahead and skip it; it is not necessary to get the message of this article.

In a Direct current circuit, without a complete circuit, the electric field will never surround the circuit, and cause electrons on the wires to move slightly, causing a net charge to form on both sides of the circuit (one side negative, and the other side positive). This, in turn, causes an electric field inside the wire to form, and electrons begin moving in one direction within it and on its surface. This movement is very slow, but the movement of a charge through space generates a magnetic field around the wires, which complements the electric field, and allows electromagnetic energy to flow through the generated fields, around the space of the wires, and terminate in the light bulb. In an Alternating Circuit, the voltage is changing magnitude from negative to positive rapidly (commonly 60 times a second), and when a complete circuit is made, the (-) and (+) alternating electric field causes the electrons inside to vibrate, or move in random directions as the field swaps charges. These movements generate a magnetic field that is also alternating, which allows electromagnetic energy to travel the same way as in a Direct Current circuit.

By taking this tri-fold operation into mind, we can easily see how God can have three distinguishable persons, and this is in no way contradictory or absurd; it makes sense. God is one in being, one essence, one God. But this One God has three distinguishable persons within His unity.

Understanding and Comprehending

What is the difference between God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit? How can God be one, but three persons? First, there are aspects of Gof that, as humans, we cannot fully comprehend. Salvation is not based upon one's total knowledge of theology, thankfully. What we do see in scripture is that God is complex in his unity. We have examples of God reigning from within heaven, but also within a physical presence on the mercy seat of the Ark of the Covenant:

"There I will meet with you, and from above the mercy seat, from between the two cherubim that are on the ark of the testimony, I will speak with you about all that I will give you in commandment for the people of Israel." (Exodus 25:22)

In Genesis 18, two angels and another person identified as Yahweh come to meet Abraham and Sarah at their tent:

"And the Lord appeared to him by the oaks of Mamre, as he sat at the door of his tent in the heat of the day. He lifted up his eyes and looked, and behold, three men were standing in front of him. When he saw them, he ran from the tent door to meet them and bowed himself to the earth and said, “O Lord, if I have found favor in your sight, do not pass by your servant." (Genesis 18: 1-3)

They speak with Abraham about Sodom and Gomorrah, when God sends the two angels to Sodom to fetch Abraham's relatives, Lot and his wife. But the man called Yahweh stays behind to further talk with Abraham, and there's a specific verse in Genesis 19 that caught ancient Jewish writers' attention:

Then the Lord rained on Sodom and Gomorrah sulfur and fire from the Lord out of heaven. And he overthrew those cities, and all the valley, and all the inhabitants of the cities, and what grew on the ground." (Genesis 19: 24-25)

Did you see that? It says that the Yahweh in heaven rained brimstone and fire from the Yahweh on Earth. There are two people here, both called Yahweh. There is another instance in Exodus 33, where Moses meets God in the Tabernacle and then leaves unharmed. Later, he meets God again, but requests that he be shown God's full glory and presence, to which God responds by saying no man can see the full glory of Yahweh and survive. So there seems to be a power of God that cannot be seen by men, and one that men can interact with and not die. This concept was known as the "two powers in heaven" and was a very confusing aspect of God.

If we could fully comprehend God, we would know that God is not the real God, but one fashioned in your own head. God, by definition and nature, transcends the universe and human minds. So why be surprised at the fact that human minds don't have the capacity to fully comprehend God's composite unitified nature? Moreover, the human mind is complex enough, and God, also by definition, would infinitely fulfill that, as we reflect His very image. A human being can understand what the bible means when it mentions eternity, as an extremely long period of time, one with no end, a potentially infinite forward motion of time; but a human cannot comprehend what true time without end is like. We can only create general, finite ideas of what it may be like.

Being and Personhood

There is another really good way to explain the Trinity, and it has to do with an acronym called H.A.N.D.S., which describes how the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are all given the Honors, Attributes, Names, Deeds, and Seat of God Almighty. The Father. The Bible tells us in John 5:23 that all must honor the Son, as they do the Father, and elsewhere we are told not to "quench" the Spirit, or "Gieve" the Holy Spirit," which implies that we are to be careful even when approached by the Spirit (Thessalonians 5:19; Ephesians 4:30). All three are given the Honor of God. All three have the attributes of God, exhibiting attributes such as omniscience, omnipotence, and eternality (John 1:1-3, 14:26; 1 John 5:7).

They are all given the name Yahweh, the tetragram of the God in heaven, a name revered by Jews so much as not to even say it. Often times when you see the name LORD in all caps, it it translating the word יהוה, ot Yahweh. God heals and is the only one who can forgive sins, yet we see the Father forgiving sin (Isaiah 43:25), Jesus forgiving sin and healing (Matthew 9:2), and sinning against the Holy Spirit (Matthew 12:31-32), which all suggest that all three persons perform the deeds of Yahweh in heaven. The bible describes the Father as on the throne in heaven with Jesus (the Son) at His right hand, symbolizing equal authority and status (Hebrews 1:3; Acts 7:55-56), also with the Holy Spirit originating from God, working in the world, descending on people (and Jesus in Matthew 3), and being sent to comfort believers (John 14:16-17) aswell as dwell inside them (Esphesians 1:13-14). They are all given the H.A.N.D.S. of God.

We see that the bible describes all three with the qualities of God; there seems to be one being of God, but three persons of God. You see, a cup has being in that it exists, and may be interacted upon or changed in material state. A cup has no personhood, no mind, no soul, no intelligence; it is simply an impersonal object, just atoms. A human has being; the type of creature she is, a human being. But she has an individual personhood aswell, a mind, soul, intelligence... the qualities of conscience we inherently know from experience. Humans, God's image-bearing creatures, are each one in being and one in person. But if God transcends that, creating us in a finite way with personhood to inhabit flesh, then it is not surprising that a transcendent personage would be more complex, and that isn't an issue.

More Than One Person?

Christianity has the only real answer to what a being beyond personality would be like. All of us (who can admit it) feel and know about the great being behind all of this, and it must be beyond personal to have created us. The sad part is that many people, though they say they believe in a super-personal God, really only degrade Him to some impersonal force or "the universe." C.S. Lewis helps put the puzzle together rather nicely in "Mere Christianity." In a three-dimensional world, you can move in three spatial directions (up/down, left/right, forward/backward; or simply X, Y, and Z). On one spatial dimension, you can only draw a single line. In two dimensions, you can create a figure out of more lines to create something like a triangle or square. In three dimensions, you can create what Lewis calls a "solid body," like a cube that is made out of those single-lined figures.

His point is that as you move to more real and complicated levels, you never suddenly 'lose' what you had before; you are granted more creative freedom with what you had before. So when we are speaking of a personal being in finite space-time, we can compare that to a second or first dimension. If we were to go into another higher (transcendent) existence, then it would be a perfectly logical possibility for this being to be made of multiple persons. Just like the line in the first dimension (now multiple lines) forming a figure in the second dimension. Multiple persons construct one being, the Trinitarian God. That is the Christian claim, and it is the only realistic and non-degrading answer on the market.

Does Difficult Comprehension Rule Out Possible Existence?

Does the fact that God's nature is hard to fully comprehend rule out its possibility of existence? There are many concepts and objects that we deal with every day that we do not fully comprehend, but understand to a degree. Just take your being for example, you have Flesh (a physical body), a soul (a mind, emotions, a will, and personhood), and a spirit (the part of us that connects us with God, where the Holy Spirit can connect with us). You exist in a finite, difficult-to-fully-comprehend way, but that certainly doesn't mean you cannot exist.

Take a tesseract, for example, it is a cube existing in four spatial dimensions. This is an object that we cannot fully comprehend, or imagine in our minds; all we can do is draw what its shadow would look like... When you go on a walk on a sunny day, do you ever notice that your shadow superimposes itself on the sidewalk in two dimensions, flat? Well, we can draw what a four-dimensional object's shadow would look like in three dimensions, which makes understanding it easier, but does nothing to aid our full comprehension of it. When we take our four-dimensional cube and draw its shadow, we get the tesseract.

A drawing of a dimensional progression from a square (2D) to a tesseract (4D)

The fact that the trinity is hard to comprehend is only as much of a stumbling block as a person is not willing to admit the ontology of the human mind and God's. Thus far, our case for the existence and possibility of the Trinity can be summarized with the following points of interest:

1. No verse in the Bible describes God as existing in an absolute, unified manner, only a composite unity, which still means one God.

2. There are numerous passages in the Old Testament that apply the characteristics of God to two separate persons, one man can meet, and one man cannot, and these passages have confused ancient and modern Jews alike.

3. The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are all given the Honors, Attributes, Names, Deeds, and Seat of God Almighty.

4. We encounter many things daily that have a composite operation or function, which we consider as one agent, such as Ohm's Law.

5. There is a difference between understanding something and fully comprehending it, and there are many things we understand but cannot comprehend.

6. There is never a loss of what was before when gaining complexity, such as dimensions and lines.

7. God being hard to comprehend is expected; knowing God 100% is Idolatry.

We can confidently conclude that the Old Testament hinted at God's complex unity, and Jesus came to reveal that complexity to us in a magnificent display of the most gracious and loving act any person could do. May your confidence in the validity of the Word of Jesus Christ grow stronger with every day that passes, and may you draw close and remain still. Amen.

A drawing of a dimensional progression from a square (2d) to a tesseract (4d)