[Serious] The Trinity

[Belacqua]

I'd like the human interaction and to be able to ask questions. 

For Christians, calling God the "Father" is an analogy. Like a lot of theological terms, it's expressed by analogy to things we're familiar with, since the case of God is absolutely unique. 

God is the Father because the existence of everything in the universe depends on him being prior. Just as the existence of all children depends on the prior existence of a father. The analogy ends pretty quickly, since in the case of human fathers the priority is different. Human fathers are only temporally prior, meaning that if they die the children can go on existing. God is essentially prior, meaning that if God stopped everything else would stop too. But he's called the father because he is that which is necessary for his dependents to exist. 

(Note that this doesn't say that God is an object which exists, like a human father. God is the Ground of Being, existence itself, not an additional thing that exists. So that's another way in which the analogy is limited.) 

"Son" of course is also analogous. The second person of the Trinity is the Logos, which is often translated as "word" but is more closely related to the older Greek meaning of the term. It's the full set of logic and principles by which the world operates. As you can see, you can't have existence (the Father) separate from the principles by which existence operates (the Son). Stuff exists, and the principles exist simultaneously with it. So the fact that 2+2=4 logically, unchangeably just is, whether we want it to or not, depends on Logos, which is the Son. 

The part that can't be explained logically, only by a miracle which Christians accept on faith, is that the Logos could undergo kenosis and manifest itself as a human person for 33 years. The idea here is that Jesus, as an embodied person, acted fully in accord with the principles of the universe. Unlike every other embodied person, who is fallible, every choice Jesus made was exactly the correct choice, in accord with how the universe runs. 

Sometimes Christians speak of the Holy Spirit as a sort of disembodied thing like a ghost or demon, which can fly around and enter into a person's soul. Other times they speak of it as a kind of force or power. Both are analogies. Either way, the Spirit is the way in which the Father and the Logos affect living people. Only Jesus, as a person, was fully Logos. The rest of us may or may not be in accord with the principles of things and how we ought to act. 

It may be useful to think of the Holy Spirit analogously to "school spirit" or something like that. "We strive to act in the spirit of Dr. King." This is not being haunted by a ghost, but having the wisdom to act according to the principles of the model. So when the Holy Spirit was said to enter into the disciples at Pentecost, we could say in modern language that the disciples entered into the spirit of God. They got into the spirit of the thing. 

The thing, the principles by which it operates, and the spirit of the thing, can't exist separately. And since they are not material objects with extension and location, we can't talk about them being separated and isolated from one another. They are more like ideal objects -- like numbers, for example, or the rules of logic -- which are everywhere and eternal without being physical. 

You just recently shouted that apologetics is all lies, so I wonder if you're really interested in this discussion.