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Real Answers™
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Copyright: © 2010 Donald E. Lindman
575 words

TO MANY PEOPLE, CHRISTIANITY DOESN'T MAKE MUCH SENSE

By: Don Lindman

Jews, Muslims, Unitarians, atheists, and agnostics are among a long list of people who find many Christian ideas incomprehensible.  For example, from its early years Christianity has confessed that God exists in three persons—Father, Son, Holy Spirit—but is never-the-less one God.  This belief, that Christians call “the Trinity,” is illogical and irrational, say the critics.  Illogical, perhaps, but true, reply Christians.

St. Patrick supposedly tried to explain the Trinity by using a three-leaf shamrock—one leaf and yet three parts of that one leaf.  An egg, made up of shell, white and yolk, has been offered as another visual illustration.  Biblically, however, these object lessons don’t hold up.  Christian creeds confess that each person is all of God, not just 33%.  Jesus said, “I and the Father are one,” referring not just to being on the same page but being the same person. 

Others have explained that Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are simply three different ways in which we experience the one God at different times, like experiencing water as liquid, solid, or gas.  But at the baptism of Jesus, where the Son has just been baptized, the Spirit is pictured as descending from heaven in the form of a dove, and the Father offers a verbal commendation.  All in the same place at the same time.

If you insist that belief in the Trinity make logical sense, you end up with a mess—quite a mess!

But why does this have to make logical sense?

As soon as you make sense of God you have a God who isn’t any bigger than your brain’s ability to understand and comprehend.  Your ideas of God may fit together logically and safely, but you are left with a pretty small God.  If God is no bigger than that, this world is a very scary place in which to live.

So, here’s the situation.  If he’s going to be any kind of God at all, God has to be beyond our ability to understand.  We are left out to dry on the clothesline of our insistence that things make rational, logical sense.  That’s how it is.

“How can God be one God and still Trinity?”  ”How can Jesus be both 100% God and 100% human, as Christian theology demands?”  “How can God die on a cross and still be alive?”  “How can there be unbelievable evil in a world created and run by a good God who can’t tolerate evil?”  All of these are God-based paradoxes.

Paradoxes, however, may simply represent ideas that only seem contradictory.  Imagine railroad tracks that start in New York City and end in Los Angeles, roughly 3000 miles.  In New York they are 6 feet apart; in L.A. they come together.  You could stand at any segment of that track and you would swear that the rails are parallel—that they would never meet (or that they were never separate).  Yet that’s not true.  They really aren’t parallel at all; we just don’t have the perspective from which to see that fact.

This illustration is overly simple, but it makes the point.  Our brains aren’t big enough to grasp all there is of truth.  If there isn’t a God, we’re all in trouble; we live in far too big a Universe to be comfortable with that situation.  If there is a God, he (or she) has to be a lot bigger than our brains can encompass.

Thank God for that!

"Real Answers™" furnished courtesy of The Amy Foundation Internet Syndicate. To contact the author or The Amy Foundation, write or E-mail to: P. O. Box 16091, Lansing, MI 48901-6091; amyfoundtn@aol.com

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