As should not be surprising to anyone, the local newspaper here in Mormon country has an entire section devoted to religion. It comprises two full pages every day. In addition to the church listings and announcements of missionary stuff, there is an editorial. Normally, I don't pay attention to them, but there was one recently that had an attention-grabbing title. I read it, and can't help but want to address the issue.
The article was about the doctrine of the Trinity, and how it not contradictory, in this guy's opinion, anyway. It was written by the pastor of a local evangelical church. I certainly won't reprint the article here, since I don't want to infringe on anyone's copyrights, but I will paraphrase from it rather liberally.
The premise of his article is that the concept of the Trinity (that God is simultaneously one being and three beings) is bloody confusing to most people. Well, yeah. I'd agree with that. He also makes a cute little backhanded stab at non-believers by saying that if people were to invent a god, they wouldn't invent a threesome for a godhead, so to speak, since it's so weird, so "unsatisfying." I can just picture his "logic," now… Humans would never think up an "unsatisfying" thing like the Trinity… But the Trinity exists… Therefore mankind didn't invent God. Yeah, right.
Anyway, he goes on to say that there is only one God. And after going on about how God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit are all God, he launches into the statement that I thought was most inane. You see, he insists that the three parts of God are different persons, but not different beings. He concedes that such a claim just might strike some people as "double-talk," but says that we lowly humans know only "uni-personal beings," meaning one being is equal to one person.
Darn right it sounds like double-talk. Or more like Orwellian doublespeak, intentionally misleading.
In fact, later he says, in reference to the whole confusing mess, that he can't really see how it works that one being can be three people, either! He then proceeds to give the illustration of a rope that hangs over a pulley. Down below, the one rope seems like two, since it has two ends. Only far above, where our reason can't penetrate, does the rope become one. There, there isn't a contradiction.
Well, excuse me for being a human with reason, but I can't get past the contradiction. It's like the whole "omniscient, omnipotent Creator vs. free will" issue. Or the "everything must be created, except God" issue. None of them hold up under scrutiny. To use this rope analogy again, it seems that the only way believers can rationalize this idea is to fold it back upon itself so that it appears to be two (or three) separate things, but is in fact, just one long, twisted tale.
