by Roland Wrinkle. We talked last week about this issue. Not whether we need to understand THAT God is 3in1 but whether we need to understand HOW God can be three persons and yet still be just one god (i.e., the definition of Jewish monotheism). While some early, nascent Jewish Christians were balking at the notion of the Trinity because it sounded like a rejection of monotheism, no one was running around using analogies or metaphors to convince them. That technique came much later in history. The three-leaf clover analogy had to wait for Glen and Linda’s central European ancestors (the Celts) to become enthralled with a plant in their new country. The Enlightenment ushered in rationalism and added the three states of H2O to the pot of explaining “here’s how it works.” I confessed that I once displayed a stupid wood carving of a bearded old man and his bearded son with their beards all tangled together with a dove in the middle. I tossed it. Now I realize I got the same problem with the shrine I put up above the shrine of the Kings’ two Stanley Cup victories.
It seems rather clear to me now that, whenever God wants to use analogies or metaphors to have us get our heads around something, he does just that—and quite readily. For example, look at how Paul approaches the equally difficult concept of a resurrection body in 1 Cor 15:
But someone will ask, “How are the dead raised? With what kind of body will they come?” How foolish! What you sow does not come to life unless it dies. When you sow, you do not plant the body that will be, but just a seed, perhaps of wheat or of something else. But God gives it a body as he has determined, and to each kind of seed he gives its own body. Not all flesh is the same: People have one kind of flesh, animals have another, birds another and fish another. There are also heavenly bodies and there are earthly bodies; but the splendor of the heavenly bodies is one kind, and the splendor of the earthly bodies is another. The sun has one kind of splendor, the moon another and the stars another; and star differs from star in splendor.
Paul gushes forth a bushel basket of analogies…sowing, plants, wheat, animal versus human flesh, the sun, the moon, the stars. So do each and every one of the other biblical authors: The teaching of the wise is a fountain of life… But now, O Lord, You are our Father, We are the clay, and You our potter; And all of us are the work of Your hand…. The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want… Jesus said to them, ‘I am the bread of life; he who comes to me will not hunger, and he who believes in me will never thirst.’… Let us rejoice and be glad and give the glory to Him, for the marriage of the Lamb has come and His bride has made herself ready… So now let me tell you what I am going to do to my vineyard: I will remove its hedge and it will be consumed; I will break down its wall and it will become trampled ground. And the umpteenth analogies Jesus used to explain, “The Kingdom of God is like a….”
You know what you don’t find in scripture? “The father, the son and the spirit is like a Leprechaun’s favorite plant or a physicist’s material taxonomies.” It literally tore the body of Christ in two in the 11th century. Ala 1 Cor 15, “But someone will ask….’But it’s not going to tear us apart. We’re merely exchanging lively ideas at a bible study’”…and I fully agree. My concern is that our analogies and metaphors inexorably create visualizations in our imagination and those images, I fear, tend to create an impression of a tripartite separateness in the Trinity which leads to a distortion of many other dependent biblical doctrines, e.g: The Father becomes the god of the OT. The Spirit becomes detached from the Godhead. Jesus becomes the god of the NT. And then: as with so much evangelical Christianity today, the OT intentionally becomes “unyoked from the NT.” (Andy Stanley, the pastor of North Point Community Church in Georgia, announced in a book of his which I read that Christians need to “unhitch” the Old Testament from their understanding of the faith. By this he means to instruct people to ignore the Old Testament and focus solely on the resurrection of Jesus Christ.) This is really bad stuff.
The Bible Often Endorses Mystery. Scripture goes to considerable lengths in many places to help us “get our heads around” many things. But, perhaps just as often, scriptural revelation intends (I am convinced that it is always intentional) to, in the lyrics of Iris Dement, “Let the Mystery Be.”EXAMPLES: From what does true Godliness spring? The answer given is “mystery.” (1 Tim 3.16). How can it be “that through the gospel the Gentiles are heirs together with Israel, members together of one body, and sharers together in the promise in Christ Jesus.”? Answer: “This mystery…” (Eph 3.6). How can it be that a man and his wife “become one flesh”? Paul answers: “This is a profound mystery.”
Paul refers the Ephesians to “the mystery made known to me by revelation, as I have already written briefly.” Some mysteries are made known to us by revelation. Some aren’t. In Rev 1.20: “The mystery of the seven stars that you saw in my right hand and of the seven golden lampstands is this: The seven stars are the angels of the seven churches, and the seven lampstands are the seven churches.” Some mysteries get explained. Others don’t. The trinity of God and the duality of Jesus are simply two instances of the latter.
The Bible Often Endorses Paradox. Paradox is seemingly absurd or contradictory statement or proposition which appears to be irreconcilable yet is actually true…we may eventually be able to explain or reconcile the conflict, but often not. My point is that God apparently wants us to be able to use paradoxes to understand revelation…to be able to tolerate the cognitive dissonance caused by paradoxes (and unexplained mysteries). How can the Kingdom of God be both now and yet to be? How can the first be last and the last be first? HOW (again, “how” is the most dangerous thought in bible study) can both of these scriptural statements be true? “I did not come to judge the world.” (John 12:47) “I came into this world for judgment.” (John 9:39). “Do not judge.” (Matthew 7:1) “Judge according to righteous judgment.” (John 7:24). “He will be named…Prince of Peace.” (Isaiah 9:6) “Don’t assume that I came to bring peace.” (Matthew 10:34). “Let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works.” (Matthew 5:16)“Be careful not to practice your righteousness in front of others to be seen by them.” (Matthew 6:1). “My yoke is easy.” (Matthew 11:30) “How difficult the road that leads to life.” (Matthew 7:14)
If the Trinity Still Keeps You Awake at Night. When I wrote about everything in the OT being contained in Matthew, Art chided that there was no allusion to the Song of Songs. If you really need more than scripture offers on the Trinity, read Bernard of Clairvaux’s Sermon on the Song of Songs:
“If, as is properly understood, the Father is he who kisses, the Son he who is kissed, then it cannot be wrong to see in the kiss the Holy Spirit, for he is the imperturbable peace of the Father and the Son, their unshakable bond, their undivided love, their indivisible unity.”