Letter to Owen Benjamin part 2, explaining the Trinity.

Dear Owen,

On SG someone was able to link me to one of your most recent videos and gave me a time mark to see exactly what your question is regarding the divinity of Christ, where you ask how Jesus can be both God and praying to God, and you made the comparison to yourself praying to Big Bear.

Now that I have a better understanding of your exact question I want to offer you a more complete answer. First, I want to preface this with a statement that there are some things, even within the realm of observable science which you can verify through experimentation, that we simply cannot fully comprehend. It is beyond our ability.

An example of this is the big bang. We can observe that the universe is expanding. It follows logically that if you do the math and reverse the expansion, you will eventually get to a singularity and a giant explosion to cause it. However, there are issues with this. First, the Universe is too big to have expanded the way that we think it did based on our observations. The observable Universe is 93 billion light years across. But it’s only 13.8 billion years old. There is no way that it could have expanded to that size in the time since the big bang. So they made a fudge factor. The Universe must have expanded to somewhere around 90% of its current size in the first few fractions of a second. This of course would require an enormous amount of energy. But then they noticed that the rate of expansion of the universe is speeding up, rather than slowing down like you would expect. So they made another fudge factor and called it Dark Energy. And then there is a point when they’re trying to prove the Big Bang through mathematical calculations, where the laws of physics and math completely break down. They cannot prove the big bang and expansion beyond a certain point.

The same is true for physics on the micro scale as well. Take gravity for instance. You drop something, it falls. We have been aware of gravity since the dawn of time. In the 1600s Isaac Newton began to experiment with and chart gravity, but he still had no fucking clue about how it worked. Today, even hundreds of years later, although we have a much better understanding of gravity, we have yet to discover the fundamental particle of the Graviton. It is just a mathematical place holder. A fudge factor.

Having said all this, my goal here is simply to help you answer some of your objections. Not to prove anything. Ultimately, we all have to accept the Trinity on Faith, because just like God, we can observe the Trinity, but we can’t necessarily prove it, or even truly ever fully understand it.  

Now, what I’m going to do here is provide you with a model. When you study physics, and they show you a picture of an atom, they will usually tell you that the picture is not actually what an atom looks like, it is just a useful model for helping us understand how the atom works. We aren’t actually able to get any real image of an atom and its parts because they are too small. We must take it on faith.

The reason why I want to clarify that this is just a model is because there will invariably be some autist who will scream that my explanation is heretical. So, this is just a useful model, not how God actually is.

Now, imagine God before the creation. There is no time, there is no space. Just God in a void. God has His Word and His Spirit, just like you and I have our word and our spirit. Now imagine God igniting the Big Bang right in the middle of His essence, and suddenly there is this sphere that is the Universe. God is outside of this sphere, as we know that God is not subject to the confines of time and space. But inside the sphere are bits of God, His Word and His Spirit. They are still God, but they are now distinct persons who can operate independently from the Father within time and space. And they were there united with the Father before creation. The only difference is that the Father is the cause of the Word and the Spirit. We see this in scripture where the Word is begotten of the Father and the Spirit proceeds from the Father.  

Now, I repeat, this is just a model. This is not a declarative statement of how God is. But it does offer an explanation for your objections.

I came to think up this model because scripture describes Christ as the Word. The Logos. I asked myself “What is that? What is the Word? What is my word?” The best answer that I could come up with is that my word is my will projected into time and space. It is my thoughts leaving my mind, where they exist only to me, and taking form in the universe beyond myself. And yet they were always with me and a part of me. And are indeed a bit of myself that now exist independently from me.

Back when I was trying to understand the Trinity, I asked my priest if this summary was correct and he said yes: You have God, The Father. He has His Word and His Spirit. But God is so powerful and so divine that His Word and His Spirit are their own persons.

Here is another useful model that may help your understanding. Please let me know if you have any other questions.