Caught off guard -- I couldn't explain the Trinity

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njlisa

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Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ:

A Mormon friend asked me to explain the Trinity. I had no idea what to say; so I sent her a link to a Catholic site that explained the Holy Trinity.

From my childhood, I was taught that the Trinity is God in Three Persons. I accepted that teaching on faith alone – without understanding the theology.

I’d like feedback from other Catholics about how we should understand the Holy Trinity.
 
I always liked the three-leaf shamrock explanation, but a lot of philosophers with three-dollar words in their vocabulary claim it is theologically unsound.
Whatever. I still like it.
 
Best resource for me is the Nicene Creed.
We believe in one God, the Father Almighty, the maker of heaven and earth, of things visible and invisible.

And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, the begotten of God the Father, the Only-begotten, that is of the essence of the Father.

God of God, Light of Light, true God of true God, begotten and not made; of the very same nature of the Father, by Whom all things came into being, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible.

Who for us humanity and for our salvation came down from heaven, was incarnate, was made human, was born perfectly of the holy virgin Mary by the Holy Spirit.

By whom He took body, soul, and mind, and everything that is in man, truly and not in semblance.

He suffered, was crucified, was buried, rose again on the third day, ascended into heaven with the same body, [and] sat at the right hand of the Father.

He is to come with the same body and with the glory of the Father, to judge the living and the dead; of His kingdom there is no end.

We believe in the Holy Spirit, in the uncreated and the perfect; Who spoke through the Law, prophets, and Gospels; Who came down upon the Jordan, preached through the apostles, and lived in the saints.

We believe also in only One, Universal, Apostolic, and [Holy] Church; in one baptism in repentance, for the remission, and forgiveness of sins; and in the resurrection of the dead, in the everlasting judgement of souls and bodies, and the Kingdom of Heaven and in the everlasting life.
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I can understand. I was an Arian for the first 13 years of my life.

When someone told me Christ existed before his birth, I was like “what!?!”

I’m sure the link you sent them would have ironed out the basic arguments.
 
The Trinity is one God who is three persons. The persons are co-equal and co-eternal. Even so, there is one God, and not three. They are also not parts.

There’s ways in speculative theology of explaining the processions and relations which can aid in understanding, but it requires some depth.
 
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We could use the symbol of the indwelling Trinity I guess, but it doesn’t seem all that different from the Shamrock to me.
One God, three persons, constantly communicating with each other, doesn’t seem hard for me to understand, but then again most faith things aren’t hard for me as I don’t even try to view them logically.
 
God is One in three persons, namely, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. God the Father is the source and origin of the Trinity, He is from no one. God the Son is from the Father alone as His only begotten Son. The Holy Spirit is/proceeds from both the Father and the Son. The three persons are one God because they possess one identical divine nature. The Son is God from the Father alone who begot Him from all eternity. The Holy Spirit is God as proceeding from both the Father and the Son from all eternity.
 
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The problem with using the shamrock to symbolize the Trinity is that each person of God is said to be fully God. A shamrock leaf is never a full shamrock.
 
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Yes, no material analog will really cover it… God’s divine substance is infinite, thus three persons can equally share that divine substance without lessening it in anyway or taking anything away from the others. Infinity divided by three is still infinity. Doesn’t work for finite material objects.
 
No one truly understands the Trinity, so you are not alone. I like to think of the trinity the same way I think of us humans. We have three parts: Consciousness (intellect), soul (which give us life), and physical body. God also has three parts: the Creator (consciousness), the Spirit (life-giving soul) and the physical Body (Jesus). Unlike humans, God’s parts can operate separately or together.
 
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Dear @njlisa,

We all know, in a way, God the Father creator of heaven and earth. So too, we know His son, born as man, died on the Cross to redeem our sins, and resurrected on the third day, Our Lord Jesus Christ.

Who is the Holy Spirit?

The Holy Spirit is normally the person of the Trinity that is not straightforward to define, hence probably your difficulty in defining the Trinity is connected to your difficulty in defining the third person.

The Holy Spirit is the always-eternal love between Father and Son, thus He proceeds from Them. In an infinite eternal unending dynamic of Love.

After the Crucifixion and Resurrection, at Pentecosts, the Holy Spirit was sent to us. And thus the final phase of the history of Salvation commenced. Our Lord Jesus said himself it be necessary He ascend to heaven for our own good that the Holy Spirit, the Paraclete, may be sent to us.

The OT was God the Father’s time in Salvation history, then the Gospels were Our Lord Jesus time in the history of Salvation, finally we are living in the time of Salvation of the Holy Spirit. And thus we are living currently in that time of completeness of the history of Salvation, where the three persons of the Holy Trinity come together to us.

The Holy Spirit can be verified by His fruits, in our own spirit and hearts and in others. By the fruits you shall know Him acting on us and through us. By peace, by love, by understanding, by meekness, by chastity, by joy…By His fruits.

The Holy Spirit dwells in our bodies, in our hearts, in our spirit, in our soul.

You should look up ‘Perichoresis’, ‘Eternal Procession’ and ‘Eternal Generation’.

 
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I used to be LDS. One thing that helped me grasp Catholic teaching on the Trinity was to contemplate what it means to say that God is eternal - that he does not dwell in space and time like us.

The Mormon god is a resurrected, glorified man; they deny that anything immaterial exists. They aren’t used to thinking outside the materialist box. As a result, reflexively, when Mormons try to think think about the Trinity, they put God inside the universe. When we say things like God is infinite, or the divine substance is infinite, Mormons use concepts rooted in time and space to think about that. It’s common for them to imagine a kind of infinite gas or other material substance spreading in all directions endlessly, somehow divided into three parts. The shamrock metaphor doesn’t help. It’s just one more metaphor rooted in matter, time and space.

So, before trying to explain the Trinity, you first have to get them thinking outside the box. You have to help free them from their unconscious materialism. What helped me the most is the following:

God is not material. He is not in time or space. He made matter, time and space out of nothing. To understand what Catholics mean by God, you have to grasp that God would continue to exist in undiminished goodness and greatness, even if nothing but God existed. God is.

Ask your Mormon friend to think about God existing absolutely alone, with nothing else but God existing. Odds are, they’ll still be imagining ‘something’ floating around or filling an infinite empty space. They’re still thinking like a Mormon. They can’t understand what we believe until they get rid of all that. Get rid of space. Eliminate the concept altogether, along with time and matter - absolutely everything that isn’t God. Get rid of it all. Now try to think of God. If they conclude ‘I can’t, I literally can’t think about God without using those concepts,’ you’ll know they’re finally ready to start contemplating what we mean by God. Only then will they be ready for a conversation about what we mean when we say things like God is one, is in three persons, and is an infinite divine substance.
 
NewSeeker said:
they put God inside the universe
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God created the Universe. Before creation only He existed because only He needed to exist.

God created the Universe, out of nothing, through an act of His will.
 
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I think I have a clearer idea of the Trinity after consulting the Catechism. From what I learned, every person of the Trinity contains the totality of divinity. They are defined by their relationship to one another. The Father begat the Son. The Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son.
 
The best example I have is, as all examples, faulty, but it makes sense to me.

The Trinity is SORT OF like talking to the same person through three mediums - text, phone, and in-person. Nuances in communication style and the relationship to the physical presence of a person can alter your perception of them but not who they are. They are all the same person, but manifest differently and distinctly in their roles. One is strictly text on a screen. One is a disembodied voice, the other is the flesh-and-blood person. Each presentation of the same person has “limitations” because of the nature of how they present themselves that are totally self-imposed in order to fill a specific role.

Just my thinking on it. shrug It’s a tough concept!
 
There are several publications [1]–[3] that explain the Blessed Trinity but none is satisfactory. This paper explains the Blessed Trinity in a novel way which the author believes to be satisfactory.

To begin, consider the gothic novella entitled, “Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” [4]. In this novella, Dr. Jekyll is a sympathetic and righteous person. However, he attempts to eliminate his evil desires by creating and then drinking a serum. His objective was not achieved. Instead, he becomes an evil person, named as Mr. Hyde who lies, steals, murders and does not have any conscience. At the beginning of Dr. Jekyll’s adventure with the serum, his transformation exists for some duration after each serum intake. But eventually, he becomes Mr. Hyde when he is morally weak even without the serum.

His fictitious predicament is similar to that of a realistic schizophrenic. Thus, it is logical to extract lessons from his story that are listed as follow:

(1) Dr. Jekyll is a different person to Mr. Hyde.

(2) Dr. Jekyll did not created but begotten Mr. Hyde.

(3) By the fact that Mr. Hyde is the altered state of and facially recognized (carries the image of) as Dr. Jekyll then He can logically claim that Dr. Jekyll is the recognized owner of the body (of Dr. Jekyll).

(4) Mr. Hyde cannot exist without Dr. Jekyll, but Dr. Jekyll can exist without Mr. Hyde. Thus, in this sense, Dr. Jekyll is greater than Mr. Hyde. However, both are equal in the sense that each is the owner of the body.

(5) Due to time constraint, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hide each cannot manifest simultaneously as the owner of the body.

(6) There is only one owner of the body at any given time, alternately, as Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

(7) The schizophrenic-like Jekyll-Hyde system can logically be extended to a tri-persona system.

Now, if in the above enumeration the phrases “owner of the body”, “Dr. Jekyll”, “Mr. Hyde” and “recognized” are made to correspond to “God”, the “Father”, “Jesus Christ”, and “only true” respectively one arrives at the conclusions listed as follow:

(1) The Father is a different person to Jesus Christ.

(2) The Father did not created but begotten Jesus Christ.

(3) Jesus Christ carries the image of the Father and can logically claim that the Father is the only true God.

(4) Jesus Christ can logically claim that the Father is greater than Him. Further, they are equal and each is God.

(5) There is no time in heaven. Thus, logically, the Father and Jesus Christ each manifest simultaneously as God.

(6) From Item 5, there is only one God simultaneously (i.e., con-substantial) as the Father and Jesus Christ.

(7) The Father-Jesus Christ system can logically be extended to include the Holy Spirit to form the Blessed Trinity.

Each item of the second enumeration is based on the same item number of the first enumeration. The logical explanation is: The Blessed Trinity is a non-psychopathic tri-persona schizophrenic-like single body system (explains the belief on con-substantiality); has the appearance (face) of God the Father only (i.e., the only true God); and each persona manifesting simultaneously due to the timelessness in heaven.
 
This is not Catholic teaching. The three persons of the Trinity have always been and always will be… that’s what co-eternal means.
 
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