--As we noticed yesterday, many analogies for the Trinity are useful, but also limited because they tend to err either toward modalism on the one hand or polytheism on the other hand.
--Nevertheless, seeing where they point and also where they fail is helpful for getting closer to the real thing.
--And in reality, this difficulty shouldn’t surprise us since God’s very Nature one would not expect to be a simple thing to grasp.
--A fourth analogy people sometimes use is that God is like an apple, with skin, meat, and seeds all being necessary ingredients in what makes an apple. It’s fine as far as it goes, since it’s true that an apple with no skin or meat or seeds is something other than a complete apple. And yet, it is possible to separate the meat or skin away without thereby destroying the other parts. God is not like this. Their interconnectedness is so constitutive that separating them would destroy them. Understanding this is what makes the three hours of Jesus’s separation from the community of God on the Cross so baffling and terrifying a thing to contemplate.
--Fifth, God is like a three-leaf clover, where one cannot tell any one leaf’s departure from its fellows and yet they display as three separate leaves. The problem here is that the leaves don’t need each other the way the Trinity needs its Persons, so the interdependence is underemphasized. Also, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are in fact separate Persons, and so the idea that they all somehow “grew” from some original single thing is a mistake. They are eternally distinct while being eternally united.
--So yet again, we have imperfect analogies. But is there a good one?
--I promise I’ll have one for you tomorrow.
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