--Again, the basic doctrine of the Trinity is that God is fully both a single entity (being) and a triple community of persons. He’s neither more fundamentally a singularity nor more fundamentally a plurality.
--And the terrible difficulty of expressing this concept is shown by the fact that almost all analogies people give err too much to one side or the other of this most important fact at the center of the nature of the universe.
--But it’s still useful to see some of the more well-known attempts, because even if they fail, understanding how they fail may yet get us closer to seeing the reality.
--First, God is like a man who is a father to his children, a husband to his wife, and a son to his parents. Alright, this is a good one to start with because it’s actually the heresy of modalism. This analogy denies the distinctness of the three Persons, saying they are merely manifestations of a single Person in different relationships or contexts.
--Second, God is like the Sun, in which heat, light, and global shape of the star. This is a little better, since they are all different manifestations, and yet they really are all just the various attributes of a single thing, not truly separate things themselves. So, it errs toward modalism again.
--Third, for contrast, consider the idea that God is like an atom, in which proton and neutron form the nucleus and the electron circles at the periphery. This better captures the distinctness of the parts and their close connection, but now you’ve started to slip towards polytheism since atoms can be split apart and interchanged into other things.
--Also, one small additional problem is that isn’t actually any known element with just one proton, neutron, and electron (Hydrogen has one proton and electron but no neutrons, and Helium has two of everything).
--So if these are all flawed, are there any good analogies? We’ll see tomorrow.
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