Three-Dimensional God
Dear Sisters and Brothers in Christ,
Today the Church celebrates Trinity Sunday. This feast invites us to ponder the mystery of God, who He is in Himself. Often preachers in their attempt to explain the mystery of the Trinity end up dumbing things down or inadvertently slipping into passing on a heretical teaching.
Attempts are made to oversimplify the doctrine and thus to express exactly what the doctrine is not trying to convey. Preachers might erroneously stray into presenting a notion of the Trinity that is actually tritheism/polytheism (that there are three gods); modalism (that there are three forms of God – like steam, liquid, and ice); or Subordinationalism (God the Father is the greatest and the Son and Spirit are inferior.)
In his book, Mere Christianity, the author C.S. Lewis attempts to explain the mystery of the Trinity in this way, “The human level is a simple and rather empty level. On the human level one person is one being, and any two persons are two separate beings — just as in two dimensions (say on a flat sheet of paper) one square is one figure, and two squares are two separate figures. On the Divine level you still find personalities; but up there you find them combined in new ways which we, who do not live on that level, cannot imagine. In God’s dimension, so to speak, you find a being who is three Persons while remaining one Being, just as a cube is six squares while remaining one cube.”
We already knew from the Jewish scriptures that there is only one true God, even though there were hints in the writings of some kind of plurality in God. But Jesus revealed that this one God, in whom the faith of Israel rested, was Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
It might be best for us Christians to bow down in awe before the mystery of the Trinity, worshipping the inexpressible wonder of God, rather than trying to figure it out.
Sincerely yours in Christ Jesus, the Way, the Truth and the Life,
