Yes, this is personal mail. My somewhat sceptical response is the result of a number of dialogs with moslems on the net. I realize there is a range of Moslems, from fundamentalist to liberal, just as there's a range of Christians. But the network activity seems generally to be from people who seem to come at these questions with a fixed belief that what Christians say makes no sense. Just as people who are convinced that they can't learn how to use computers find that they can't learn how to use computers, someone who is convinced that the Trinity doesn't make sense will find it impossible to understand any explanation, no matter how clear it is. There's a difference between understanding and agreeing with. I don't expect everyone to agree. But I do believe it's possible for everyone to understand what is being said, and to agree that even if it's wrong, it at least makes some sense. I'm sorry that a Christian couldn't find out reliable information about the Trinity. But I guess I'm not surprised. I've heard some pretty confusing explanations myself. There are two areas where someone might reasonably think Christians worship multiple Gods. Some of the confusion results from not keeping these things separate. The Trinity talks about God as he is in eternity. The Incarnation talks about the relationship between God and Jesus. To make things worse, the term "Son" is used somewhat differently in these two doctrines. In the Trinity, "Son" refers to the eternal Logos, rather than Jesus -- though of course the Logos was incarnate in Jesus. At least in the West, the Trinity has come to be thought of in terms of personal relationship. It's basically a consequence of the fact that God has love as part of his basic nature. If I understand Judaism and Islam correctly, in some sense neither of those religions believes we know much about God in himself. We know what God wants us to do, and we know that he treats us mercifully. But we don't really know God in himself. While Christians don't think we know everything about God, we believe we do know something, because Jesus showed us what God is like. One of the things we know as a result is that God is personal. I don't mean he's a white-haired gentleman sitting on a throne in heaven. But he's also not just an abstract force. He is loving and caring. Personal relationship is part of his essense. The Trinity is really a consequence of this. For human beings, to have a relationship you need more than one person. But we don't want to say that for God. We don't want to say that God needed the world before he could love, because we believe that God's love is basic to him, and existed before he created the universe. Of course we also don't want to say that there needed to be more than one God so they could love each other. So instead we conclude that God is a slightly more complex kind of thing than human beings are. There's enough complexity in him that he can have personal relationships such as love, even though there's just one of him, and before the world existed. This doesn't mean that there's more than one God, just that within himself God has both sides of the relationship of love: both the lover and the beloved. That's all the Father and Son really are. (The Holy Spirit is associated with the bond of love itself.) The most influential work on the Trinity in the West is Augustine's book "De Trinitate". He gives a number of human analogies for the Trinity. His analogies are things like memory, intelligence, and will -- things that are different faculties of a single person. Similarly with the Trinity. Father and Son aren't separate Gods. They're different aspects of a single God. One of the problems in this area is that many Christian theologians liked paradox. As a result, there are a lot of explanations that are really more obscure than they need to be. For some reason some people liked things that looked like contradictions, but really aren't. One of these is the famous "Athanasian creed". It's full of statements that are true, but a bit misleading if you don't understand them. An example is the famous "the Father is God, the Son God, and the Holy Spirit God, yet there are not three Gods, but one." This is true, but more mysterious than it needs to be. The reason they aren't three Gods is because Father, Son and Holy Spirit are simply different aspects of a single God. To be honest, I think the clearest explanation would be to call them different parts of God. But few Christians have ever been willing to use the word "part". Probably the reason is that part suggests physical separation. Your arm and shoulder are different parts of your body. They're defined by position: If you take a picture of a body, you can draw a line between the shoulder and arm. Of course God doesn't have parts in that sense. The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are all present everywhere. You can't draw a line between them. But we can talk about memory and intelligence as being parts of the mind. Clearly they aren't in physically separate places. In that case we're using "part" in a more abstract way. I think as long as we're willing to think of parts as being very abstract, it would be OK to call Father, Son, and Holy Spirit different parts of God. But I don't know of any official statements that actually use the word "part", and many Christians would probably not like it. It seems to me that there's a philosophical problem if you don't believe in something like the Trinity. Either you have to give up the idea that God is personal, or you have to say that God's ability to have personal relationships depends upon something else (presumably something in the created world, since neither of us believes that there's more than one god). Christians want to say that God is the source of human personality and human relationships. Thus God must be himself personal. His personality can't depend upon the existence of something external for him to have a relationship with. That's all the Trinity is about. It's not really about the number three. It's about the fact that God is a more complex kind of being than we are: sufficiently complex that he can love without needing someone else to love. Now, let's talk about the Incarnation. The Incarnation describes the relationship between God and Jesus. Note that I try to avoid using the word "Son" in this discussion, because it's ambiguous. It's used by Christian theologians to refer to three slightly different things: - one of the persons in the Trinity. I am going to use the term "Logos" for this. The Logos is a basic part of God. Thus he is eternal. - Jesus, regarded as a human being. Jesus was born at a specific time. He is the human form of the God. While the Logos is eternal, his human form is not -- Jesus came into existence at a specific time. - the Logos as he is present in Jesus. In this usage, the term Son is used more or less interchangably for both. As with the Trinity, a large part of the problem is that Christians like to use language that's slightly paradoxical. I get the feeling that theologians sometimes said things for their shock value. This is OK when everybody understands, but it can give the wrong impression. In this case the problem is the statement "Jesus Christ is God". While I agree with this, I'm also afraid that it's misleading. It leads people to think that Christians are claiming that somehow there's no difference between the eternal, immortal God, and an obviously mortal human being. It would be insane to say that a human being is God in a direct sense. What Christians actually believe is that Jesus is the *human form* of (the "incarnation" of) God. We mean a number of things by that: - that as we get to know Jesus as a person, we also come to know God - that Jesus spoke in a uniquely authoritative way for God - that Jesus acted for God -- that is, that God asks us to regard Jesus' acts as his - that God took Jesus' life to himself in such a way that Jesus' experiences are God's But it's quite obvious that Jesus remained a human being. He died, while of course God is immortal. What's going on in Jesus can be seen in two different ways. When looked at as a human being, he is a normal human. He had no extra powers *as a human* (though he could call on God, of course). But when looked at as God's presence, we see God through him. If this sounds hard to understand, think of a novel. Very often there are characters in a novel that represent the author. This isn't anything that the other characters in the novel can see: that person isn't any different from any of them. But he is the author's way of showing his own ideas and the way he would do things. What makes that character special is the correspondence between him and the author. Similarly, Jesus is God's way of being in history. When looked at on a human level he's just another human being -- a doctor could look at him forever and wouldn't find anything unusual. But we believe that he is God's way of being present with us. Again, what makes him that is the close correspondence between Jesus and God. The Bible talks about him as the visible image of the invisible God. The term it uses for image is the impression made by a seal in wax. Now obviously that image is different, because it's wax and the original is metal or ceramic. But the same basic pattern is the same, so that they form the same picture. Similarly with Jesus: there's obviously a difference between flesh and divinity. And yet the correspondence is close enough that we can say they are different forms of the same thing. Everything Jesus did has to be seen in two ways, as actions of a human being, and actions of God acting through that human being. When he died, did God die? Yes and no. Obviously God didn't stop existing. Only a human being can die. And yet, because of the fact that God was truly present through Jesus, God experienced death through him. We can say that God died, but vicariously. One question that is often brought up is how Jesus can pray to God if he is God. But recall that according to the Trinity, God has within himself personal relationship. Relationship implies communication. I don't know what type of communication goes on in eternity between the Father, the Logos, and the Holy Spirit. Because they are aspects of one God, I'm sure their communication is more direct than human prayer. But relationship implies communication of some sort. So if we are serious about saying that God is personal, he is involved in communication in some way. As God is the source of personality, he is the source of communication. Because Jesus is the human form of the Logos, he also communicates with the Father and Holy Spirit, but his communication is in the manner that's appropriate for humans: prayer. These explanations may not agree with what you were told as a Christian. Unfortunately, there are several serious problems with the way many churches teach doctrine: 1) They insist on using words that came from the 4th and 5th Century. Things like "of the same substance" made sense to people then, because those were the terms they used to understand the world. But they don't make any sense to us. Just as we translate the Bible into modern languages, theology needs to be done in ways that make sense. 2) Many Christian teachers emphasize Jesus' unity with God in such a way that they forget that he is a human being. The official standards (in this case the creed of Chalecdon) are always very careful to make sure that they do justice both to the fact that Jesus is God's way of being present in human form, and that he is a human being. It's a heresy to deny that Jesus was completely human (just as it's a heresy to deny that he is truly the incarnation of God). But this heresy is very common. I think it's because Christians are so scared of "liberals", who don't believe in the Incarnation. This leads many to go to the opposite extreme.