Category: Christianity
One of the best lay explanations of the Trinity that I’ve heard yet
If you ask a lot of people, the concept of the Trinity is one of the most non-intuitive concepts in the Christian faith. God is three separate persons, but He is also one, somehow?
User rainer511 in reddit’s Christianity community posted a great response to the question, “Can you please explain the concept of the trinity to me?” I’ve copied it below. Click to read the rest or here to read the original post.
Can you please explain the concept of the trinity to me?
No, not really.
Since you asked so nicely, I’ll give it a go though. At the very least I’ll explain how I understand it.
The doctrine of the Trinity is not explicitly stated in the Bible. Most doctrines aren’t. I think the earliest recorded mention of the Trinity is by Theophilus in 180 C.E., and it’s really just a mention.
The Hebrew Bible seems to tell of a people who were polytheistic half the time and henotheistic the other half, with religious leaders who were mostly monotheistic. Whatever the history of the theology of the people, by the first century ““Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one” (Deut 6.4) was constantly recited and was essential to the Jewish faith.
Then along comes Jesus. First he seems to be a prophet, then people start calling him the Messiah (anointed one, King), and then he hints at and sometimes outright states that he and God are one.
Later, Jesus talks about leaving and says that when he leaves, he will send God’s Spirit, “another parakletos”(translated advocate, counselor, comforter). Later epistle writers would talk about Jesus as being our “parakletos”—so whatever the Spirit is, it is whatever Jesus is, and Jesus is whatever God is.
The problem is that they don’t seem to be the same person. The Bible certainly doesn’t treat them that way. Greek verbs are very explicit about who or what is acting and the Bible never talks about Jesus “raising himself” from the grave, God always raises Jesus from the grave. Jesus prays to God, his Father.
This is explained in different ways by different people.
Some people stress that “Jesus”, “God”, and “Holy Spirit” are just three names for the same thing. “The same old fiery bush” as you put it. They try to explain away any moment where Jesus refers to God as something other than himself as Jesus “modeling the way we should live”. Jesus only prays to God as Father because we should pray to God as our Father.
However, here is how I choose to think about it:
Think of flatland.
Imagine someone from flatland suggesting, “I think there might be a shape with three sides, yet at the same time it is one continuous circle”. It just wouldn’t make any sense. How could something have three sides, yet be a circle. A circle can’t be a triangle. A triangle can’t be a circle.
Unless, of course, it’s a cone.
Is it a triangle, or is it a circle?
Yes.
Well, not exactly, of course. It’s a cone. In a sense it’s neither. But if you lived in flatland and you tried to describe a cone you’d end up saying something like, “I don’t know, it’s sort of like a triangle, except if you look at it a different way, it’s a circle”.
Ultimately doctrines are just models we use to talk about Something that we can’t comprehend.
The Trinity is when we answer “Yes” to the question of, “Is God a triangle, or is he a circle?”
Posted on Sep 08, 2010 - 01:25 PM
Scientists Confirm That the Universe Exists Even When We’re Not Directly Observing It
This is actually quite reassuring, somehow. From an article in The Economist:
Now two groups of physicists, working independently, have demonstrated that nature is indeed real when unobserved.
You should read the whole article - it’s very short and relatively non-physics-y. Although I suppose this doesn’t preclude the whole disconcerting “brain in a jar” philosophical hypothesis, I still think it’s good news. Life is a little less scary now that I know that the things I like have a greater chance of still existing when I get back to my house.
Posted on Mar 05, 2009 - 09:44 PM
Mugshot Mosaics
While doing research for the the Busted Weekly post from a couple days ago, I came across a whole bunch of mugshots - thousands of them. They’re all taken from the Kent County Inmate Lookup page. At the time, I downloaded a bunch of them, sure that I could find something interesting to do with them in the future.
I have. Using a piece of software called Metapixel, I turned all of those mugshots in to mosaics.
Thinking of possible subjects for a mugshot mosaic, my first thoughts were of crime, punishment, prisons, etc. I made the following mosaic, based on ethomsen‘s Flickr photo of the Salem Jail in Salem, Massachusetts.
Then I realized that prison mosaics were too… tasteless, I guess. It seems like something Busted Weekly would do. After all, the people whose mugshots I used for the jail mosaic weren’t yet convicted of any crimes: they were just arrested. They won’t spend any time in prison until/if they’re actually convicted for the crime they were arrested for.
I decided to use Jesus as the subject for my mugshot mosaics. It makes sense, I think: Jesus was arrested often for preaching the Word, and would have had the 1st century AD equivalent of a police mugshot. As God’s children, we all have a little bit of Jesus inside of us. Also, every single person on Earth, whether we have mugshots or not, was made in God’s image.
Click on the mosaic for a 1/7 scale version. The mosaic directly above is called “Christ In Majesty,” and is taken from a page from the Stavelot Bible page on Wikipedia. The original image is 13,000 pixels tall, and 294 MB. I also have a 3,500 pixel version.
You can download the mugshots that I used in zip format (125MB download) or bzip2 format (122MB download). I used Metapixel on Linux to make these mosaics: iMosaic is supposed to work well on Linux and Windows, although I haven’t tried it.
Let me know what you think about these. This is my first time making mosaics: I haven’t yet tried tweaking the mosaics at all yet for increased clarity or better color.
Posted on Dec 02, 2008 - 02:16 PM
