Trouble With Trinity

[Gilbert_Keith]

Valiant Domain

Well, you’re in good company. Isaac Newton also could not understand the Trinity and repudiated the Trinitarian God. But that was long before modern science discovered that atoms exist and they have three parts in one … proton, electron, neutron. Since everything that exists is made of atoms, it becomes more and more peculiar that the author of Gensis should say that we were made in God’s likeness, since the author of Genesis could have kown nothing about atoms.

 

[FCEGM]

Also this is a very basic explanation of the Trinity … it is not all encompassing but it does give some perspective, though limited, into the essence of what God is.

Hey, neighbor!

Our late Holy Father, John Paul II, wrote beautifully on God’s love and its familial nature:

God in His deepest mystery is not a solitude, but a family, since He has in Himself fatherhood, sonship, and the essence of the family, which is love. . .

A great mystery, a mystery of love, an ineffable mystery, before which words must give way to the silence of wonder and worship. A divine mystery that challenges and involves us, because a share in the Trinitarian life was given to us through grace, through the redemptive Incarnation of the Word and the gift of the Holy Spirit: ‘Anyone who loves me will be true to my word, and my Father will love him; we will come to him and make our dwelling-place with him’ (Jn 14: 23).

This Mystery as one revealing that God, while One, is never alone. God is a Community of Persons, and it is in this Divine Communion that man finds the fulfillment of his desire for communion with another. It is only because of the “First” Communion of the Divine Persons that our communion is possible with one another and with the Divine Persons. These Persons have no need for Communion with one creature, let alone millions, yet out of the fruitfulness of the impenetrating Love within the Godhead we have been created in order for us to participate in that Divine Communion (primary) and communion with each other (secondary).

 

[seremina]

No … I don’t believe so … it tells us a little more about God, that is why He could exist as the essence of love without any need of created creatures be it man or angel.

Then why does your post sound like you’re saying God could NOT be love AT ALL if He wasn’t Triune? If that was what you were saying, then that is limiting Him.

 

[YADA]

I always wonder at the mystery of the Trinity in another fashion. It is not the trinitarian nature of God that ammazes me but how is it only three?

The perfection of God summed up totally in Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Everything in the universe springs forth from that perfection, Trinity.

Yet we mere mortals, made in the image and likeness of God are many things. I myself; am or was at one time many. And many of these I was concurrently. Many more than three. I am daughter, sister, student, niece, aunt, wife, mother, friend, grandmother, employee, employer, tax payer, voter etc. I cannot even list all that I am.

How can I quantify God? Yet I know that God is One, Holy and Triune. I can’t totally grasp it but it is something to wrestle with in the wee hours of the day when sleep escapes me!

 

[ncgolf]

Then why does your post sound like you’re saying God could NOT be love AT ALL if He wasn’t Triune? If that was what you were saying, then that is limiting Him.

Then tell what what love is? How is something the essence of love without love, a lover and a beloved?

 

[KindredSoul]

Then why does your post sound like you’re saying God could NOT be love AT ALL if He wasn’t Triune? If that was what you were saying, then that is limiting Him.

It doesn’t seem to me that this limits God at all…God is Triune. Since we believe that the Father, Son, and Spirit are co-eternal, that means that God has eternally been Triune, in some manner. By definition, God (in Christian theology) simply is Triune. Trinity is as much a part of Who God is as Eternally Existing, Righteousness, Love, etc. Therefore, to say that a non-Triune entity cannot be Perfect (key word) Love (regardless of whether or not that is in fact true) is to say that something other than God cannot be perfect love…we could, for instance, argue that if God were not Eternal, would this limit Him? If the answer is yes, this is no insult toward God, because God is eternal, so whatever would be true if He weren’t eternal has by definition totally no affect on what is actually true of Him. The same is true of His Triune nature.