THE TRINITY,

JESUS AND
FLATLAND
2b: Models in Science and Religion
THE TRINITY
 THE TRINITY
Defines Christian
But how many Christians can
Orthodoxy
talk about what they understand
about the Trinitarian nature of
God with any confidence? Is
this because they forget that the
Trinity is a model of what God is
thought to be like? Models have
limitations but are illuminating
nonetheless.
 “I believeINinTHE
TRINITY God CREEDS
the Father
Almighty, creator of heaven
and earth; and in Jesus
Christ, His only Son, our
Lord ... I believe in the Holy
Spirit ...”
One God in three Persons,
coeternal, coequal and
consubstantial.
 In the Godhead there
TRINITARIAN FORMULATIONS are
three Persons: God the
Father, God the Son and
God the Holy Spirit.
These three form one
true eternal God, whose
substance is undivided,
and each Person is
equal in power and glory.
Royston Pike, Encyclopaedia of Religion
and Religions.
Because God is
The need for
infinitely greater than
we cananalogies
imagine,
theological language
has always needed
analogies.
We have to say, “God
is like this or that” and
immediately qualify
this by saying, “But
various analogies
Three kinds have been
used historically:
From inanimate nature or
plant life
From the life of man, in
particular his mind eg.
Augustine’s psychological
unity of intellect, affections
and will, as an analogy of the
Trinity.
From the nature of love
 struggled to imagine
what God is like. To
imagine is to make an
image of some kind.
Hence the twin
dangers of getting the
image wrong and of
Hence the Second
“You shall not make for
Commandment
yourself a graven image,
or any likeness of
anything that is in the
heaven above, or that is
on the earth beneath, or
that is in the water under
the earth...
(Deuteronomy 5:8)
 Other Theistic
religions are
therefore keen
Jews will not utter toof
the name
God, YHWH
avoid idolatry
Jewish synagogues are devoid
of pictures
Muslims consider the Christian
notion that Jesus is the image
of God to be blasphemy
Muslims have a theologically
motivated tradition of non-
 And Paul’s Athenian
address commenting on
the altar ‘To an unknown
“..we ought not to
God’
think that the Deity is
like gold, or silver, or
stone, a
representation by the
art and imagination of
man.” (Acts 17:29)
 have been fanatically
keen to avoid idolatry,
not least with regard to
anything to do with
artistic imaging of God
- witness the
iconoclasts in the
Protestant
Christians substituted
an idolatry of words?
Do they underplay
the importance of
other ways of
encountering God in
say art, theatre,
language about God can
be just as fraught with
difficulties and
misunderstandings. It is
easy to think that
our words about God
define God,
rather than partially
CRUCIALLY FOR
Knowing about God is
BELIEVERS!
not the same thing as
knowing God.
Religious language -
God Talk - is only
useful inasmuch as it
enables folk to ‘Keep
God company’, to use
spontaneous expression of the
Christian experience. The earliest
Christians knew themselves to be
reconciled to God the Father, and
that the reconciliation was
secured for them by the atoning
work of the Son, and that it was
mediated to them as an
experience by the Holy Spirit.
Thus the Trinity was to them a
fact before it became a doctrine,
but in order to preserve it in the
keen on the belief that
God has revealed
Himself to us, in Jesus
in particular. This puts
controlling limits on
Christian speculation
about what God is like,
even when we forget
All images and
language are
partial
representative
s of the real
thing !
In the end of the day our images
are partial - these are only
photos of the real young men, but
Take the concept of the
Kingdom of God (or
Heaven) in the gospels,
and notice Jesus’ habit
of comparing it to a
whole host of things,
each one of which
sheds some light on the
 Thus, in Matthew 13 alone,
The Kingdom of God
is like (resembles Gk:
homoios)....

A grain of mustard seed (v 31)

Yeast in bread (v 33)
Treasure hidden in a field (v
44)
A merchant in search of fine
pearls (v 45)
 It is important to
grab the relevant
part of the
comparison,
otherwise we
misunderstand
What aspect of each ofthethe
comparisons on the
comparison.
previous slide is important?
FLATLAND
 consider
Edwin A.Abbott wrote a
FLATLAND
nineteenth century novel called
Flatland: A Romance of Many
Dimensions, from which this
idea is loosely based.
See also ch 5. in Eric
Middleton’s The New
Flatlanders, Highland, 2002
and p31 of God Talk, Science
Talk, by Brown, Poole and
Hookway.
What would it be like
Flatland
to be a two - 1
dimensional being
who has an encounter
with a three
dimensional object?
You live on Flatland. A
sphere moves into
and through your
 What you see
as a flatlander
looking
along the plane
that
s the boundary
of sight
in your flat
What do you see?
What you see
What you see
What you see
What you see
What you see
What you see
What you see
What you see
JESUS
 “He is the image
Jesus the image of of the
invisible God, the first-born of
the
all invisible
creation; God
for in him all
things were created in heaven
and on earth...all things were
created through him and for
him. He is before all things,
and in him all things hold
together...For in him all the
fulness of God was pleased
The doctrine of the
incarnation is
making the
apparently absurd
claim that the
infinite God
became finite in
Jesus of Nazareth.
Consider Cantor
on infinities
There are
an infinite
number of
numbers
in this
0interval 0 1
to 1
Cantor on infinities

0 0.5 1
Cantor on infinities

00.250.5 1
0.125
0.0625
Cantor on infinities

0 0.0625
0.03125
0.015625
0.0078125
Cantor on infinities
There is
an infinite
number
of
subdivisio
0An
ns of
0.0071825
infinite
this
number of
interval
infinites
too!
between 0
and 1?!
Cantor on infinities
Theologi
cal point:
by
analogy
you can
conceive
of an
infinite
being
It has always been
the case that
theologians have
struggled to find
ways to express
their belief that
Jesus was
somehow God
 at new models which
attempt to capture
something - but not
•
everything - about
these central Christian
beliefs about the
person of Jesus. Here
are a couple from
 Jesus the strange
attractor!

•
Jesus the fractal
image of God
make sense if you
already
understand
something about
•the basis of the
model ie. the
mathematics of
chaos. Otherwise