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| Traditional Orthodox icon depicting Father (R), Son (L) and Holy Spirit (Top) |
The Trinity and the Logos
"The Logos became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth." (John 1:14)In the last post, we discussed the Logos as the expression of the final purpose of God. The Logos is what God is seeking, it is His ultimate aim or end. The opening of the book of John draws a clear parallel between God's creation of the world (in Genesis) and the appearance of the Logos in history. The New Testament explains that the world was created by, through and for the Son. This is not an accident. Note that God created the world by a speech act. "And God said, 'Let there be light'..." God speaks in many ways, in fact, it is not an exaggeration to say that God speaks through all things at all times (Psalm 19). Despite the apparent cacophony of the world, with its conflicting messages, God does not speak equivocally. For mortals like us, then, the question is which voice is the voice of God? The Logos! The Logos is God's final word on everything. The key observation, here, is that God does not speak through lifeless statues, rote laws or even words written on pages of paper - God speaks through a living person. He once spoke through an entire people (the Jews) but, today, he speaks through one man: Jesus Christ. Specifically, he speaks to us through the living Spirit of Jesus Christ.
It is crucial to let this idea sink in. We write messages on lifeless, material objects: paper, plaques, banners, posters, displays, and so on. We write stories and convey them through through print, film and acting. God writes messages on people and their lives, as such. This is the full meaning of God's sovereignty.
“Shall what is formed say to the one who formed it, ‘Why did you make me like this?’” Does not the potter have the right to make out of the same lump of clay some pottery for special purposes and some for common use? (Romans 9:20,21)
The Trinity and Knowledge
We can divide the ways of thinking about the world into two approaches. The first approach is to see the world as a single substance that manifests a wide variety of particularities. The second approach is to see the world as a (potentially unlimited) number of irreducible particulars upon which we impose a subjective sense of unity (conscious awareness). Because these two approaches do not appear to have any resolution, this is sometimes called the problem of the one and the many.
The Trinity is the solution to the problem of the one and the many. The light of consciousness within us is lit from the one flame of the Spirit (Genesis 2:7), yet all the varieties of particular knowledge proceed from the mind of God (Psalm 139:17-18, I Cor. 2:10). The universal is God speaking to us from within - the particular is God speaking to us from without. This fact is why separation from God is torment - it is a denial of the fact of our relation to God, a relation so intimate that it is impossible to correctly interpret any fact of reality without reference to this relation.
The Trinity and Being
Being is identity. Identity is mutually exclusive between "self" and "other." Thus, the category of being is logically dependent on that which is not-being. But if God is being, and all that he creates is an extension of himself, there is nothing besides God himself and, thus, God does not exist, that is, God cannot distinguish his own existence from non-existence.
Father and Son, together with the shared being of the Holy Spirit, exist each as "self" and "other" to one another. While God's being is, of course, one, this being must be first understood in its logical relation. And this is why we speak of God being both one and three. God's oneness and threeness is not an arithmetical fact about God. It is a logical fact that is prior to all other logical facts. Without God's oneness and threeness, there is no physics, there is no mathematics, there is no philosophy, there is no being of any kind.
Every part of God's being is existing but because Father and Son are distinct, each can point to "other" and this otherness can fulfill the role of non-being (death, destruction, desolation). In this, we see God's knowledge of both good and evil and the susceptibility of the perfectible Creation to falling. God is knowing the susceptibility of the Creation to the Fall because God is able to conceive of death without being destroyed. No created being in the perfectible state can have this knowledge because they cannot point to non-being, to something outside of themselves. Rather, their existence, being created, is logically dependent upon the unconditional existence of God.
The Trinity and Action
If God is a peerless, omnipotent being, he is alone. Thus, he would not be that being than which none greater can be conceived (Anselm) and he would not be God. Another way to put it is this: suppose God wanted to play chess. With whom would he play?
If God is peerless, he cannot act, that is, he cannot choose. The triune relationship between Father and Son - with the Holy Spirit as the shared basis of being - is the only solution to this problem. God can act because he is not alone. The Father is eternally existing with his Son. The Son is eternally existing with his Father. Both share, between them, the Holy Spirit who is coequal with Father and Son.
The Trinity and Substance
The gross features of the material world are defined by the property of mutual exclusion of objects in space. We call this property substance or matter. "Two objects cannot occupy the same space at the same time." Logically, this is a category of mutual exclusion.
Consider our state-of-being from the point-of-view of a heavenly being. Time and space are really an obstacle to action. I must travel to my destination (this takes time). I must labor to provide for the satisfaction of my wants (this takes energy). I must arrange my possessions in a way that makes them accessible (this takes space). And so on and so forth. The mind can easily conceive of the absence of these obstacles that frustrate action so that every state-of-being is immediately actualized by a mere act of will. God's state-of-being cannot be less perfect than what the human mind can easily conceive.
So, then, why is there a material world at all?
Mutual exclusion is impossible without conscious choice because there is no sufficient reason for the ephemeral objects of pure contemplation not to overlap. A non-overlapping geometry requires the application of collision-detection algorithms - such algorithms are necessarily more complex (less probable) than those which permit arbitrary overlap. The material world of substance could not exist without the conscious choice to engage in non-overlap for the purpose of interaction. The material world is substantial by agreement. In short, the material world exists, as such, by agreement between Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Their purpose in the material creation is precisely what is explained in Scripture: to create man in the image of God in a perfectible state and to provide the Redeemer who has delivered fallen man from death.
The Trinity and Causality
Descartes contemplated the possibility that we are deceived by a malicious being of unimaginable power. The famous "cogito ergo sum" was the result of this thought-experiment.
Causality-as-such is very difficult to establish on any kind of formal basis. Suppose you roll a pair of dice and you wish to know whether the outcomes of these rolls are random or whether they are being influenced by an evil trickster. You can count the outcomes of rolls and you can compare them with the probabilities of outcomes to see if they match up. For example, a pair of dice that consistently roll 7, 7, 7, 7, ... are not random and are not behaving the way we expect dice to behave, on the basis of causality. If the dice behaved this way, you could be quite sure that something was amiss.
But no matter how well-behaved the dice seem to be, you can never really know - even if you employ mathematical methods with uncomputable time! - that the results of dice throws are not being influenced somewhere by an unimaginably greater being. Even if the dice checked out - after uncomputable time - as "true random", you cannot conclude from this investigation that the next roll of the dice will be unbiased. Our sinister Cartesian demon could simply have been waiting for you to check the dice - and believe they are unbiased - before playing shenanigans with them. Stated another way, it is always possible to prove a phenomenon to be non-random, but it is never possible to prove a phenomenon to be random. Scientific claims about quantum randomness, for example, are not rigorous because no one could ever distinguish, by experiment or computation or both, a truly random source from a merely apparently random source.
Because of this, a universal conspiracy - that our senses are feeding us an incorrect picture of "the real reality", for example - cannot be ruled out. Conspiracy is the opposite of randomness; random dice do not conspire to make you lose or win at the betting table. But since we can never prove a phenomenon to be truly random - as opposed to apparently random - we can never actually rule out the possibility of universal conspiracy.
Like substance, causality is a limiting factor. Regret is only possible under the constraint of causality. A being than which none greater can be conceived has no regrets, by definition. Such a being has no use for causality and cannot be shackled by any law of causality. Causality operates for the same reason that substance exists: by agreement between Father, Son and Holy Spirit in order to create, to redeem the creation and to glorify the Father through the Son.
The Trinity and Transcendence
Contemplating the infinitude of God can leave the mind lost in a boundless ocean of limitlessness. This state of mind is equivocal and is incompatible with the presence of conscious awareness. The presence of the being of God is a result of the focus of God's mind on the Logos - His purpose for being and existence.
God's mind, conceived as an infinite, uncentered consciousness, would be necessarily equivocal. Every point of being would be equal to every other point of being. In other words, being conscious in a state of utter torment would be equivocal with being conscious in a state of utter bliss. This contradicts our working definition of God as the greatest conceivable being.
The Father's mind is univocally focused on the single end of raising the name of his Son above every other name and causing all things in heaven and earth to bow and acknowledge his Son as Lord. Thereby, the Father glorifies himself (Phil. 2:9-11). This is how it is that the Father causes that not one sheep will be lost (John 6:39). To borrow a mathematical metaphor, the mind of God is like an infinite plane with a single point that is the designated center of the plane - that point is the Logos.
Conclusion
God is light. This light is not physical light - rather, physical light is a material metaphor of the Divine light. The Divine light is conscious awareness, choice and, especially, holiness. The Trinity is the shared reality of light in God: God's awareness of all that is, God's power to choose as he sees fit, God's dispersal of all darkness that opposes his light, God's absolute perfection - a perfect creator, Father, redeemer and ruler. It is the light of God that best illustrates God's oneness without becoming entangled in irrelevant questions of arithmetic - the light of the Father, the light of the Son and the light of the Spirit are one. They are one being, with one mind, one will, one purpose and one, divine perfection.
This series began as an inquiry into the causes and conditions of existence - a cosmology. As we near the end of the series, I want to underscore that any conception of existence that is informed solely from the particulars of material world-states is woefully inadequate. Your life is a story that God is telling you. His redemption is the focal-point of that story. You cannot live apart from God's redemption, that is, you will die without redemption. The common idea of a tension between faith and reason, or between faith and science, is a wholly mistaken notion. God is not a story that we are telling each other -- we are a story that God is telling us!
Next: Part 24a, Epilogue
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