Back of the Envelope

On a superficial level, Judaism looks a lot like other ancient tribal religions. Why would the real God, someone wholly different from the tribal gods which so many cultures created for themselves, deign to interact with humans in that way? Unless, perhaps, it was to make a point. We spend a lot of time demanding that God deal with us on our terms. We ask questions like, "Why doesn't he just reveal himself to us directly, with clear and undeniable revelation? Set up our government, and tell us exactly what he wants us to do? Give us clear rules and judges to rule over us? Provide for us and destroy our enemies?" We ignore the fact that the story of Israel is the history of him doing exactly that. He chooses Abraham, makes him into a tribe to compete with all the others, and promises him that he will prove that he's greater than all those other gods. Then, in the time of Moses he calls the Israelites from bondage, demonstrates his power through plagues and the parting of the Red Sea, gives clear instructions as to what he wants, physically dwells with the Israelites in the form of cloud and fire. And the Israelites reject him anyway. They complain and whine, they're fickle and hard-headed. Despite all they've seen, they don't trust that he'll fulfill his promises: on the threshold of the Promised Land they turn away, fearful that they can't beat the Canaanites living there, even though God has already demonstrated his ability to defeat the far more powerful Egyptians. God doesn't give up, though. He gives them chance after chance, as a tribe, as a nation, as a kingdom, as two kingdoms. He gives them prosperity and hardship, judge and prophet, king and priest, making sure they have every opportunity to see that he's faithful, that he's good. And time after time, we see that this sort of relationship doesn't work. Obedience predicated on punishment, the type which the ancient world so indoctrinated, had a hard enough time getting strict obedience: it could not draw out love. Belief based on proof is not the same thing as faith, and will soon find excuses to revert to disbelief anyway. The story of Israel isn't the story of one nation's rejection of God, but rather a demonstration of all humanity in a microcosm.

And that's where the new covenant comes into play. When God called on Abraham to sacrifice Isaac, he was doing more than testing Abraham's faith. He was teaching something as well. Love is demonstrated through sacrifice. And for Abraham to sacrifice not just his firstborn son, but his only son, the long awaited fulfillment of God's promise miraculously given to him and Sarah in their old age, was an amazing act of love and faith in God. But why demand it at all, even if it was turned away at the end? Wasn't it cruel? It was hard, but it was a lesson. At the foundation of the Jewish religion is the story of the painful sacrifice of the son averted. At the foundation of Christianity is the story of the painful sacrifice of the son carried out, not as a sacrifice to God, but as a sacrifice by God for us. I won't attempt a full explication of the Crucifixion here, except to note that the son went willingly, every bit as committed to saving humanity as the Father. This sacrifice changed the covenant between God and Man. No longer was God demonstrating his power and asking for our obedience; instead, he was demonstrating his love and asking for our love in return.

Old Post: This is a continuation of a discussion of the Trinity here.

I was looking over some old e-mails, and I came across the original e-mail on which the previous post on the Trinity was based. The explanation of the Trinity was written in response to some questions my old fellowship, MIT's Graduate Christian Fellowship, received from a Muslim. (It turns out the questions weren't really asked in earnest--he had no interest in engaging us in conversation, just challenging us, which became clear once he began repeating his questions while refusing to explain why our previous answers were insufficient.) In any case, my original answer was even longer than what I posted, and portions of it got cut even before it got sent to our Muslim questioner. However, looking over it, I decided it'd be worth sharing. Our questioner was particularly interested in whether belief in the Trinity was a belief in three gods, and thus idolatry, which is what I address here. (I later decided that explaining what the Trinity is should suffice, and that I could cover the rest in the follow-up, which never really happened.) In any case, here it is:

How does one worship the Triune God? Doesn't the nature of God divide the commitment and obedience, the love and adoration we must give Him between three people rather than just one? Isn't this as bad as idolatry in any form, where idols were not condemned for their own power and influence (of which they had none), but rather for what they stole from the living God who deserved it all?

This is a serious charge, especially since it drives at the heart of something Jesus himself said, that "No man can serve two masters; for a slave will either hate the one and love the other, or be devoted to one and despise the other." (Matt. 6:24) Consider, however, that God told Moses, "You will be God to Pharaoh." [Ex. 7:1] Moses was not God, and never claimed to be. But he acted as God's representative, and when he spoke to Pharaoh, he spoke with the authority of God. Jesus claims a much different relationship with God than Moses (Moses never would have said "I and the Father are one" or "If you've seen me, you've seen the Father." He never even called God Father.). But this shows how one human can act as God toward another human, simply by acting on behalf of God. To disobey Moses was to disobey God, not because Moses was literally God, but because he spoke for God, acting not out of his own will but on behalf of God's will. Jesus's claim is stronger than that of Moses, since Moses still had his own will and often ran counter to God. Because Jesus and the Father are one being, their will is the same. Jesus cannot want anything other than what the Father wants. Thus when Jesus speaks, he carries the authority of the Father. To disobey one person of the Trinity is to disobey all three, whereas to obey one person of the Trinity is to obey all three. They are never in conflict, they always speak from the same will and for the same purpose, even if they speak in different ways and about different things.

This resolves the matter of divided loyalties, but does not address the matter of divided affections. How can the finite human being give all the adoration due to God to not one but three persons? The adoration due to God is to love him with all our heart and soul and mind and might. But if all our love goes to the Father, how can we love anyone else? Not just another person of the Trinity, but what affection could we possibly have left over for family, or friends, or country? The answer is that God commands us to surrender all our love to him not so that we can love no one else, but so we can love the things that he loves. To love God is to love what He loves. Our love for others is unsteady, fitful, and conditional. It varies depending on how we perceive and deal with a person on a day-to-day basis. God is the only being we can come close to loving consistently and completely, the only being who deserves that kind of love. When we give Him the love He deserves, He directs us to love those whom He loves, including those who cannot deserve that kind of love. So how can we talk of our love for God being divided among the three persons of the Trinity? If we love God we love what He loves, and the Trinity's love for one another is so complete, no person of it can begrudge love given to another of it. The Father is intent on glorifying the Son, and the Son is eager to glorify the Father. The Spirit receives their affection and works to glorify them both. Each works to direct the love given Him to the whole of the Trinity.

I'd love to hear other people's thoughts on the matter.

New Post: In response to my commenter, I've written a post on the use of the phrase "Son of God."

The Trinity is one of the most difficult Christian concepts to understand, and I think many would-be believers give up when they cannot wrap their minds around it. When I was very young, the Trinity bothered me. As a teenager, I simply decided it was one of those things that man couldn't comprehend, so why worry about it? I was having more serious crises of faith anyway. It wasn't until recently, within the last five years, that I've taken a close look at the Trinity again. To say that I've probed its depths would be hubris of the first order, but I've finally seen beyond the surface to begin to comprehend its meaning. Once you get past the surface, so many of the Bible's more esoteric sayings begin to make sense, and the very nature of God becomes clearer. My investigations have reaffirmed my faith by showing me that once again, God is deeper than I thought.

I adapted the following from an article on MIT GCF's Skeptics Anonymous webpage, which I co-authored with Susan Kern and Cynthia Lo:

Christians believe that the three persons of the Trinity are all one God. Deuteronomy 6:4 states, "Hear, O Israel! The Lord is our God, the Lord is one!" He is a super-person, so to speak, His nature being so much more complex than our own that we cannot describe Him as a single "person." The doctrine of the trinity is perhaps the most difficult and perplexing to explain, since we are trying to describe the nature of the infinite God, which finite human beings are incapable of comprehending.

The term trinity is never used explicitly in Scripture, but the concept is there from the beginning and specific passages such as Matthew 28:19, "baptizing them in the name [singular] of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit", refer explicitly to there being three "persons". All three persons of the trinity make an appearance at Jesus's baptism, as recorded in Mark 1:10-11, "As Jesus was coming up out of the water, he saw heaven being torn open and the Spirit descending on him like a dove. And a voice came from heaven: 'You are my Son, whom I love; with you I am well pleased.'" The "he" who saw this may be either Jesus or John the Baptist, who later testified about this event (John 1:32-34).

Although it took centuries to resolve, the church has rejected the heresies of modalism and tritheism. Modalism is the denial of the distinction of persons within the Godhead, claiming that the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit are simply three "modes" of God expressing Himself. Tritheism reaches to the other extreme, that of falsely declaring that there are three beings who together make up God. The Christian definition of God asserts that the three persons of the Godhead share the same essence, the same co-eternal existence, and the same will, but not the same mind, the same position, the same role, or the same relationship. All the persons in the Godhead have all the attributes of deity.

The trinity does not refer to "parts" of God and, unfortunately, human analogies fall short. An interesting but imperfect analogy may be found in ourselves, however. Human beings are composite creatures. Physically, we are trillions of cells working together to form the body, billions of neurons firing simultaneously to produce thought, two distinct hemispheres of the brain which "think" in different ways. Psychologically, we are a mess of conflicting emotions and ideas, each vying for primacy in our psyche. Spiritually, we are creatures of both soul and body, an uncomfortable mix filled with the strife between the physical and spiritual parts of our nature. Ultimately, one human person has less internal unity than the three persons of the trinity. And yet we never think of ourselves as more than one being.

One of the best explanation I've heard is fairly traditional, used by C. S. Lewis in Mere Christianity:

God is a Being which contains three Persons while remaining one Being, just as a cube contains six squares while remaining one body. But as soon as I begin trying to explain how these Persons are connected, I have to use words which make it sound as if one of them was there before the others. The First Person is called the Father and the Second the Son. We say that the First begets or produces the Second; we call it begetting, not making, because what he produces is of the same kind as Himself. In that way the word Father is the only one to use. But unfortunately it suggests that He is there first--just as a human father exists before his son. But that is not so. There is no before and after about it... The Son exists because the Father exists: but there never was a time before the Father produced the Son.

We must think of the Son always, so to speak, streaming forth from the Father, like light from a lamp, or heat from a fire, or thoughts from a mind. He is the self-expression of the Father--what the Father has to say. And there never was a time when He was not saying it... All these pictures of light or heat are making it sound as if the Father and the Son are two things instead of two Persons. So that, after all, the New Testament picture of a Father and a Son turns out to be much more accurate than anything we try to substitute for it... Naturally God knows how to describe Himself much better than we know how to describe Him. He knows that Father and Son is more like the relation between the First and Second Persons than anything else we can think of. Much the most important thing to know is that it is a relation of love. The Father delights in His Son; the Son looks up to His Father...

The union between the Father and Son is such a live concrete thing that this union itself is a Person. I know this is almost inconceivable but look at it thus. You know that among human beings, when they get together in a family, or a club, or a trade union, people talk about the "spirit" of that family, or club, or trade union. They talk about its "spirit" because the individual members, when they are together, do really develop particular ways of talking and behaving, which they would not have if they were apart. It is as if a sort of communal personality came into existence. Of course, it is not a real person: it is only rather like a person. But that is just one of the difference between God and us. What grows out of the joint life of the Father and Son is a real Person, is in fact the Third of the three Persons who are God.

This third Person is called, in technical language, the Holy Ghost or the "spirit" of God. Do not be worried or surprised if you find it (or Him) rather vaguer or more shadowy in your mind than the other two... Perhaps some people might find it easier to begin with the third Person and work backward. God is love, and that love works through men--especially through the whole community of Christians. But this spirit of love is, from all eternity, a love going on between the Father and the Son.

This explanation helps to illustrate a number of things. For one, the term "Word" applied to the Son in John 1 begins to make sense when we consider the Son as the "self-expression of the Father." Perhaps more importantly, it illustrates what is meant by 1 John 4:8, which declares that "God is love." We tend to minimize this, saying it means that God is loving. But throughout the Bible, the refrain is that God loves us because His very nature is love, and it would be unlike Him not to love us. But before humans and angels, what was there to love? What besides God is eternal? Love requires an object; the word is meaningless otherwise. Love could not be part of His eternal nature if He has not had some eternal object for His love. Instead, it would be something God learned to do once He had created someone to love. Only the trinity offers an explanation of how love can be a facet of the eternal nature of God, since contained in the three persons of the trinity are the subject, object, and expression of love. The three persons of the trinity are defined primarily by the relationship shared among them.

Update: (5/1/2004) I changed the phrasing to make it clear that Susan, Cynthia, and I are responsible for the article on Skeptic's Anonymous, not the whole page. Although... Cynthia as webmaster really is co-author on all of them, and I had a hand in quite a few. Susan may have joined in the debates on some of the other questions, but I don't really remember.

Update: (8/4/2004) Significant changes as I removed some repetitive and confusing parts which I didn't think added much to the explanation. Also, on the advice of Timothy Chow, I've corrected some church history, since it really did take centuries to resolve the heresies which had formed concerning the trinity.

New Post: More on the Trinity above.

I don't know that this will be a series. To answer the question in full would take a long series of posts, and likely several years, but when I was discussing it with my small group on Monday, I explained how God kept surprising me with his "fittingness" (I checked: it's a real word). As I learn more about God, as I glimpse more and more of His mystery, the better everything fits in place, and the more I can say, "Of course, that's exactly as it should be." In some ways, it's like a scientific theory. A good theory should not only explain what we've observed, it should predict what we haven't observed yet, and new, even unexpected discoveries, should follow the theory, sometimes leading us to say, "Of course. We should have expected that." Here's one example, from my youth (I was probably 12 at the time):

I was pondering the question of why we call God "God." "God" isn't a name--it's not even a title--it's a classification. It's a hazy one, to be sure, having been applied to a wide range of immortal (and semi-immortal) beings with authority and influence over mortal events. Of course, I don't believe in any of those gods: Zeus, Odin, Moloch, or the like. And that, I suppose, is the reason why we simply call God "God." If there are lots of gods, you need names to tell them apart, just like we need names to distinguish us. But if there's only one god, he doesn't need a name, because there's no one to distinguish him from. Oh, that's no reason not to give him descriptive titles, which are peppered all through the Bible, titles such as the Lord of Hosts, the God who sees. All descriptive, none necessary to distinguish him. How cool, I thought. Of course God doesn't need a name.

Imagine my disappointment when I discovered God did have a name. Not a title or an appellation, but a formal name that he's claimed for himself. We know it by it's Latinized form, Jehovah, but the Hebrew, which was by the first century never pronounced aloud, is YHWH, also called the Tetragrammaton. The pronunciation would be something like Yahweh. If you have a King James Version Bible, everyplace you see LORD (in all caps), it's substituted for the Tetragrammaton (similar to what the Jews would do whenever they encountered the name while reading the scripture aloud). That discovery was disheartening to me. I suppose no one else will appreciate this, but in my mind it made God less, closer to the hundreds of national gods worshipped by the peoples appearing in the Old Testament.

That is, until I learned what YHWH meant. The name appears very early in the Bible, and is commonly used for God in Genesis, but it isn't until Moses asks God what he is called that we get an explanation:

And God said unto Moses, I AM THAT I AM: and he said, Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, I AM hath sent me unto you.
(Exodus 3:14)

God's name means I AM. And suddenly I found my logic trumped. Not only does God not need a name, he doesn't even need a classification. It is enough that he exists, as he is the only thing which exists independently, self-subsistently. He is the origin of all other existence. God is, and the simple declaration of that fact is name enough for him.

I've found that most people are mightily unimpressed with this story: it doesn't prove anything. There are, in fact, other, less profound interpretations of what YHWH means. For me, though, it was an "Aha!" moment, one that showed me that God was greater than my expectations, greater than my philosophy predicted. But if God is real, if he is what I think he is, then isn't he greater than my imagination can predict? Only when the truth is revealed to me can I recognize its appropriateness. Going back to my scientific theory analogy, it's one more piece of evidence, unexpected but congruent with the theory: God is, and he has spoken to us.

Update: (4/26) I changed the name of this post from "Why I believe in God — A small part of it, anyway" to "Why I believe in God: His Name." I figured a better name was worthwhile.