Once, when I couldn't sleep and my philosophical mind was in overdrive, I pondered the nature of the Holy Trinity. I concluded that the Father, the Son, and the Paragnat (a priest once said in a sermon that this is the name for the Holy Spirit) could be roughly compared to three beds. God is a large sheet, three times larger than them, which has been cut into three pieces and covered with them, yet is still considered a single sheet. If there's a priest, please let me know how accurate or inaccurate this thought is.
>>18053966>God is a large sheet, three times larger than them, which has been cut into three pieces and covered with them, yet is still considered a single sheet.That's partialism, Patrick!(For those who don't get the reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KQLfgaUoQCw)
>>18053966>God is split into-
>>18053966>my philosophical mind was in overdrive, I pondered the nature of the Holy TrinityDiscoursive reason is nowhere near strong enough (at least in humans) to penetrate heavenly mysteries in general, much less the biggest one of them all. >God is a large sheet, three times larger than themIt sounds like you're trying to pin down God's essence, common to the three persons. But understanding essence is fairly uncontroversial. Understanding how three are one, without partialism or modalism etc. is the challenge. And it's not one you'll solve by philosophy, I can guarantee that. The best you can hope for is that God will disclose it to you if you achieve sainthood. Or at least that's how I understand theologians were able to "understand" it in history.
>>18053966unironically, the>game dev playing his own RPGis the best metaphor for the trinity
>>18054211It sure does seem like a good loyalty test, declaring every way to make logical sense of it a heresy and then demanding you swear you believe it in its entirety. I'm not even saying it was deliberately designed that way by any one human, it may have just happened by memetic evolution.
>>18054220You're not asked for belief in the positivist sense, where you create a model of reality and then cognitively affirm that this model is the case. You're asked to rely on God in your life, practically. And to come to Him through His Son - Jesus Christ. If you're wondering who God is, the Trinity is the best answer, as unintuitive as it might be. And there were naturally many attempts to make it more convenient, the hallmark of heresies. But in the end you don't have to rationally understand something that transcends reason and nobody is asking for that.
>>18053966Doesn't work because each member of the trinity fully participates in the divine nature, not part of it. In your analogy each would be covered by the entire entire sheet at the same time, which wouldn't physically make sense so the analogy falls apart.The trinity just doesn't make sense since it doesn't allow the three persons to be parts of God, so each must be fully God, but they can't be each other. At a certain point theologians all admit you have to accept it because of divine revelation.
>>18054215What's the Holy Spirit in this metaphor? I do think it explains the relationship between Jesus and the Father decently well in that the idea of Jesus being the perfect image of God (a detail which trinitarians seem to pay very little attention to) can be interpreted as him being God's avatar, and it sort of fits with Jesus saying he can do nothing by himself, and "whatever the Father does, the Son also does." Though I think a stronger metaphor that might be suggested by that is that Jesus is the Father's mirror-reflection somehow (And Jesus is also called God's reflection.)
Implies modalism
Augustine said that if you understand charity, and the word he uses (caritas) means love (read the papal encyclical Deus Caritas Est), then you can grasp the trinity.Because God is love, in his essence.Think about what love really is, not in the limited way we experience it, but the thing in itself as an ontological relationship between two or more persons.Then consider that God's essence has been complete and perfect since before the world was made. And suddenly the necessity of multiple persons within the Godhead makes complete sense, so long as you accept that God truly is love. Literally speaking, not figuratively. Constituting the divine essence.The reason the Trinity is a mystery isn't because this doctrine is itself ineffable, but because love itself defies our attempts to reason. It simply can't be broken down like a math equation.The Trinity is a mystery because love is a mystery.
