In a brief conversation with my friend Amanda J. Meadows this morning, I was inspired to think about the Holy Trinity. For those unfamiliar, one of the core doctrines of orthodox Christianity is that the God of the Bible expresses himself in three different persons: God the Father, God the Son (aka Jesus Christ), and God the Holy Spirit. This idea has been the subject of much controversy throughout the 2000-year history of the Christian church, and most consider it to be a profound mystery.
In staff meeting this morning, Amanda remarked that she looked forward to finally understanding the Trinity when she gets to Heaven. The idea that we will understand the Trinity when we are with God for eternity, and that it will no longer be a mystery, makes perfect sense. Even Paul seems to assert that our knowledge will be made complete when we behold God face to face (1 Corinthians 13).
However, for whatever reason, the thought immediately occurred to me that maybe we never will understand the Trinity. Maybe there is no explanation. And I don't think that would be so bad because there's something beautiful about mystery.
Throughout the centuries people have used various analogies as a way of feebly attempting to wrap our brains around the idea. One common one I've heard is an egg (shell, white, yolk, but all one egg). While this makes some amount of sense, it's overall a fairly poor analogy. While all those are parts of an egg, none of them are the egg. Also, the shell is not the white. The white is not the yolk. The yolk is not the shell.
There are two basic ways of not understanding something. One way is incomplete understanding. We're on the right track, but there's some key information missing. If we obtain that information, we can complete our understanding. The second way has not so much to do with lack of information as it does with some fundamental error in the way we approach an idea. We're not even on the right track. A good example of this second way is found in the way physicists discovered that Newtonian laws of physics were practically useless for describing the behaviors of subatomic particles.
I'm thinking that all of our groping around for an explanation of the Trinity is probably along the lines of this second way. And I'm willing to entertain the notion that maybe, just maybe, our attempts at explanation are so frequently frustrated because there actually is no explanation. That God simply is who he is, and that no explanation is necessary. Oddly, I find this idea more attractive than the idea that God is mostly like an egg, except with more complexity that we don't understand yet but will one day.
