The Trinity?

jasmine tarkheena

jasmine tarkheena

Active member
Did you catch the concept of the Trinity in The Horse And His Boy? In the chapter about the Unwelcome Fellow Traveler, Shasta asks Aslan what is His name. Aslan answers "Myself" three times, each in a different voice. There's also the concept of "I Am", as God often refers to Himself as.

The different voices that Aslan uses are deep and low, loud and clear, and almost in a whisper. The trinity is a very difficult concept, especially for a kid. I've been a children's ministry, and we often use the example of an egg (the shell, the whites, and yolks) or water (water to drink, ice, and steam) to explain the trinity. So Aslan saying "Myself" each in a different voice has the concept of the Trinity- deep and low for God the Father, loud and clear for God the Son, and almost in a whisper for God the Holy Spirit.
 
Early in my Christian life, I had some difficulty with the Trinity: not so much because of the complexity, but because advocates of the Trinity so often turned it into what was really the Jesus Only doctrine. To this day there's some of that going on, as some pastors will describe EVERY action of God as being done only by Jesus-- except inspiring the Bible, one thing that the Holy Spirit is allowed to keep for himself. They try their hardest NOT to permit God the Father to have ANYTHING which is His function in particular.
 
The Trinity answers a vital question. Namely how can God be love, according to some understandings of theology. That being that God is this old man in a pink robe and slippers who hovers in a past-eternity in darkness and emptiness and then one non-day for apparently no other reason than that he can, he decides, "I could invent love and try making other people to love and to love me." The idea of love as an INVENTION is abhorrent to me on so many levels. However if God has always been a Trinity, then the perichoresis (fellowship) of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit would explain literally everything about God "so loving" the world because he's used to loving and being loved. He's not trying out a new toy, he's expressing an eternal part of his existence. And just as I look at my dog Ninky and treat her as family and wish she would not grow old and die, why wouldn't God want his companions to be family and not grow old and die?
 
Jasmine, the Trinity is actually quite an argument in favour of Christianity. It's not something someone invented to make Christianity seem more plausible to the average person, but something simply said because it is true and for no other reason. It has that eyewitness quality, unlike the invented alibi which is full of details purporting to manipulate those who hear it.
 
To put it in crude earthly terms:

If there's only one conscious being, that being cannot have any relationships. If there are two conscious beings, they CAN relate with each other-- but they can ONLY talk to each other; there's no one else for them to talk ABOUT.

When there are THREE conscious beings, any two can make remarks about the third one. Super-simplified though this is, the Father could say to the Son: "The Holy Spirit sure is great, isn't He?" The Son could say to the Holy Spirit: "The Father sure is great, isn't He?" And the Holy Spirit could say to the Father: "The Son sure is great, isn't He?"

Three Persons is the necessary minimum for God to comprise a true SOCIETY inside Himself.
 
As a creator rather than created, it may be perfectly natural for God to be a trinity. We assume that all life on earth has DNA, so wouldn't God have DNA too? No, he didn't originate on earth. He didn't originate AT ALL. So things that all life on earth has in common and finds perfectly normal are not what God would find in common and perfectly normal. Perhaps it would help you to think of God as a Trinity if you think of us as life fragments that are disconnected and do not have memories in common. Perhaps that's what a created creature has to settle for...at least for now.
 
jasmine tarkheena said:
Did you catch the concept of the Trinity in The Horse And His Boy? In the chapter about the Unwelcome Fellow Traveler, Shasta asks Aslan what is His name. Aslan answers "Myself" three times, each in a different voice. There's also the concept of "I Am", as God often refers to Himself as.
The different voices that Aslan uses are deep and low, loud and clear, and almost in a whisper. ... So Aslan saying "Myself" each in a different voice has the concept of the Trinity- deep and low for God the Father, loud and clear for God the Son, and almost in a whisper for God the Holy Spirit.
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Nice :) I hadn't seen this before.
The trinity is a very difficult concept, especially for a kid. I've been a children's ministry, and we often use the example of an egg (the shell, the whites, and yolks) or water (water to drink, ice, and steam) to explain the trinity.
Click to expand...
Analogies for the Trinity are always dangerous. The egg analogy, for example, risks breaking God into three separate (and separable) parts, none of which are God in themselves, but in fact God cannot be separated in this way. The states of matter analogy risks a modalist view of a God who is sometimes Father, sometimes Son, sometimes Spirit, which was declared a heresy in the 3rd century. I do think God has left traces of his trinitarian nature in the created world (like the three states of matter, three dimensions, three primary colours, for example), but it is risky to draw any conclusions about the Trinity just by looking at those things and saying, "Therefore that is what God is like".

EveningStar above expressed the fundamental importance of the Trinity, which is that is explains how God could be love before he had created anything to love and without 'love' becoming a selfish, self-focused thing. Importantly, I think this is also the key feature of humans being made in God's image: in the statement of what it is to be made in the image of God, it says that "in the image of God he created him (singular); male and female he created them (plural)" (Gen 1:27). So in their original and perfect state, humanity was to be, like God, in a sense a united and singular whole, but at the same time distinct and differentiated individuals with differentiated attributes and roles but in a loving and complementary relationship with one another. And that is what God aims to restore us to by uniting us with Christ and so drawing us into the life of the Trinity.

Peeps
 
Any analogy of the Trinity that does not make room for fellowship among the three persons is modalism and does not explain the eternal nature of love, a love that pre-exists creation. That's why I refer to the perichoresis...a dance like the hora in which the participants link hands in a circle and dance TOGETHER, not AT each other but as ONE. Perichoresis also does not imply some sort of hierarchy in which the Father is General God and Jesus is Major God who answers dad back with, "Sir, YES SIR!" every time he's given an order. The only way to have a trinity that is worthy of the name is if all three persons was fully capable. If not, then parts of God are flawed or lacking, and that would be awful. Rather, I think of the roles of the trinity like three equally capable flight crew members who need to get that Boeing 727 off the ground. "I'll be captain, you be my first officer, and you serve as flight engineer. Ok?" I could also imagine them as sight, hearing, and touch, where during a car ride sight takes center stage until they hear an ambulance coming toward them, then hearing says "pull over." But when it comes to trying on a new pair of shoes, sight must like the way they look but touch gets the final vote if the shoes pinch. That seems to be implied by the way creation was made FOR and THROUGH the son, and bringing life to the dead such as Lazarus or Christ himself was handled by the holy spirit.
 
EveningStar said:
The only way to have a trinity that is worthy of the name is if all three persons was fully capable. If not, then parts of God are flawed or lacking, and that would be awful. Rather, I think of the roles of the trinity like three equally capable flight crew members who need to get that Boeing 727 off the ground. "I'll be captain, you be my first officer, and you serve as flight engineer. Ok?"
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Yes, I do think that all three persons are fully capable. Gregory of Nazianzus (rejecting as tritheism a suggestion that the Trinity was like Peter, James and John who are distinct but all human, just as the Father, Son and Spirit are distinct but all divine) suggested that it was not so much like Peter+James+John as like Peter+Peter+Peter - "one God in threefold repetition", to use Karl Barth's phrase. There's a lot that I like in that description. HOWEVER, I do think that description lacks something, because I don't think it's that the three members drew straws for who would be Father, who would be Son and who would be Spirit, as if the Spirit could equally well have been the Father. The Son is begotten from the Father and the Spirit proceeds from the Father. The Father is not begotten and does not proceed, nor does the Son proceed, nor is the Spirit begotten. So there is some real distinction between the members, even though they are all, as you say, "fully capable".

Peeps
 
Peepiceek, I think it comes down to how the persons are one in a Trinity. For instance, my heart does not scold my stomach over not pumping blood, nor does my stomach scold my heart for not holding food.
 
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