[Serious] The Trinity

[The Grand Nudger]

Then I'll work on the assumption that you have no thoughts on the matter at all - and the questions remain exactly the same.

[zwanzig]

1. The three corners of a triangle. They are perceptually distinct and yet indivisible from each other. All three are the same triangle.

We're talking about something more complex than a triangle and it's corners. "Distinct" means what? Different personalities, individual thoughts, separate souls? What is the form that they're all a part of? You know, the "triangle" in this metaphor that connects all three together in one shape. Do they occupy the same space? Are they all connected in one form like the three headed dog, Cerberus? Does your God have three people in his head?

2. A person looking at three mirrors. There are three perceivable reflections, and each image provides a unique perspective, but all are still the same being.

This is weird. Because if each member of the Godhead is just a reflection of the same thing, then why is it three? I don't go around turning in front of people referring to "this is my right side and...this is my left side...and this is my front side."

It's as I said, in order for you to break it down for me, you have to simplify it so much that it changes what it is. We're talking about God. Is Jesus Christ simply his right angle and the Holy Ghost his left? Do they both occupy no other space other than an illusory picture that can only be viewed from outside himself? Or do both of his reflections have different personalities and individual minds?

If the God represented by the Trinity has a cosmic personality disorder, I'd still consider it polytheistic because each gets a separate representation in the lore. If it is all just metaphor and each are just facets of the one God's personality, then the Trinity is broken.

Ambiguity means you cannot draw a conclusion. Taking it as a no is as incorrect as taking it as a yes. I'm not interested in dishonesty. I'll save the remainder of my conversation for Five's respose.

Hrm. I meant for my last statement to be my concluding statements on this topic, but alright. I feel like you and I in your two new metaphors, are not seeing the same things or defining the terms in the same way.

[John 6IX Breezy]

It's as I said, in order for you to break it down for me, you have to simplify it so much that it changes what it is.

All your questions are valid. Metaphors are inherently limited, and solely provide templates by which you can organize and comprehend more complex ideas. In cognitive linguistics these are known as the source domain and target domain. The metaphor Time is Money undoubtedly changes what time is, and yet it allows us to comprehend what it means to spend time or waste it.

The atom, the triangle, the mirror, each provides frameworks by which the concept of a Trinity becomes coherent and familiar. Whatever the nature and specifics of the Christian Trinity actually are, these metaphors allow us to see that they are nevertheless built on something comprehensible.

[The Grand Nudger]

Trinitarian doctrine states that the trinity cannot be known except by revelation from god. It is inaccessible to reason alone and emphatically not comprehensible by man - it cannot be made coherent...and be true. That is a rejection of trinitarian doctrine.

You are giving the boards metaphors for an anti-trinitarian position. How could these explain or rationalize the trinitarian position? Could we interpret this as something similar to other trends in ethnographic surveys? That a persons place and place in time not only changes what they believe - but how? Now only the belief, but beliefs about it? How jews in palestine could come to be christians in rome without believing that anything about their belief had changed or that they were discussing something else entirely with respect to their predecessors?

When we discuss trinitarian doctrine, it's development, or the sense that -it- makes...we are considering what is contended to be a central and strict mystery of the faith with a rather frank claim to it's rational status - but when you discuss trinitarian doctrine you're considering some other thing - a rational product that can be coherently described and is comprehensible to man.

[John 6IX Breezy]

You struggle to represent simple comments on here honestly. I doubt you can give a faithful representation of anything more complicated than that.

Cite your references. It's common practice.

[zwanzig]

Yeah, I'm done. I ask you specific questions to define the characteristics of what you're talking about because the metaphors are useless without them. The idiom "Time is money" is defined by what we know about those two things; it assigns value to time based on the implications of "money" and the way the acquisition of it works. Saying the Trinity is like the corners of a triangle doesn't inform me of anything about the characteristics of the beings and parts involved. No being is just a shape and no trio of people works the way you've defined a triangle as working, i.e. "They are perceptually distinct and yet indivisible from each other." So there needs to be MORE information about the parts. Is God only a metaphor?

I'm cool with that being the answer. And I'm okay with there being things that you don't know. After all, I'm not the one who needs faith for this stuff. But I asked for someone to make sense of it for me, came to the conclusion that it doesn't, and you come in with a "well actually" that doesn't clear anything up.   

I'm officially stepping away now. You guys can continue if you like, just do not expect further comment from me on this topic. I'm satisfied with the length and depth of discussion I've seen.

[John 6IX Breezy]

That's fine. My goal was not to comment on characteristics but to show analogous relationships in familiar objects. So we'll leave it at that.

[The Grand Nudger]

We could asks the catholics directly, who have this to say.

The Trinity is a mystery of faith in the strict sense, one of the "mysteries that are hidden in God, which can never be known unless they are revealed by God".58 To be sure, God has left traces of his Trinitarian being in his work of creation and in his Revelation throughout the Old Testament. But his inmost Being as Holy Trinity is a mystery that is inaccessible to reason alone or even to Israel's faith before the Incarnation of God's Son and the sending of the Holy Spirit.

https://www.vatican.va/archive/ccc_css/a...s2c1p2.htm

-and this is pretty much always a good place to start, if you want to have a conversation about a subject like this. It helps you to be familiar with positions and the use of terms that aren't strictly your own.

After its formulation and imperial enforcement towards the end of the fourth century, this sort of Christian theology reigned more or less unchallenged. But before this, and again in post-Reformation modernity, the origin, meaning, and justification of trinitarian doctrine has been repeatedly disputed.

b-mine
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/trini...understood.

It would seem as though you're representing the bolded content, which ofc can't be the explanation for the other. It would be an explanation for another thing. What you believe the thing really meant - trinitarian doctrine having been wrong. The incomprehensibility and rational inaccessibility of the trinity is a feature of trinitarian doctrine, not a bug. A statement of exactly what they believe, not what they got wrong. Truth in advertising. An honest ask. There are far more uncharitable ways to phrase it, but I think that captures what I'm trying to express.

It's also a blisteringly simple and effective rebuttal to any of the objections to the doctrine in thread, btw.

Does it appear to be inaccessible by reason alone? Sure does, they agree. Does it seem pagan? So what if it did, it's still what they believe and seeming pagan doesn't make things false. It's untrue? Can't be, it's revealed by god. Each of these is present in the literature concurrent with the assumption of the belief or, as may be the case, prior to the assumption of the belief in the community. When these trinitarians are the last man standing in the 400's, do we think that theology progressed on account of the people before having died and taken their anti-trinitarian beliefs with them, and now, trinitarians are doing the same with respect to non trinitarians? This was an interesting possibility that you brought up which I'd love to explore.

Ties directly into a difference in how we deal with the relationship between theology and reason from one moment or one region to the next. Do we, as was once hoped, use theology to reform our reason - or have we given reason pride of place to reform our theology? Order of commitments and all that.

[John 6IX Breezy]

It seems your initial comment requires an amendment:

"According to Catholic doctrine the trinity cannot be known except by revelation from god...."

Honesty requires that you specify such narrowness in criteria to your audience from the outset. Classifying Christian beliefs as anti-trinitarian on the basis of Catholic doctrine is devoid of meaning if there are no Catholics present.

[The Grand Nudger]

Did you think that the op was asking about something else, and haven't all of your own responses been revisions -to- that doctrine?

I also discussed the phenomena of functionally non-trinitarian christians in thread, seems to be more than a few of those. The distinction between themselves and anti-trinitarians is that by creedal invocation they are trinitarians. They say they believe in trinitarian doctrine. When they express what they mean when they say that - they provide an anti-trinitarian position. Some position that violates the traditional understanding, or, as our other friend noted, immediately violates the position in it's own setup. The whole situation would be a paradox in itself were it not for such a ready answer.

Decline in religiosity is the cause as surmised by sociologists and church leaders. The strength of christians conviction in the trinity is no longer greater than the strength of their conviction in rational argument. Do you think it declined because people began to put reason over revealed theology, or because the people who put revealed theology over reason are dying off?

That rule up there you assert about the meaninglessness of catholic doctrine in a discussion about a catholic doctrine in the absence of a breathing catholic seems like it might not be a rule. One day there may be no breathing catholics at all - and we'll still be able to refer to the beliefs they produced, and to any existent group's disagreement with them. They had a tendency to write things down.