DAY 39
CHALLENGE
“The concept of the Trinity makes no sense. How can God be one and three at the same time?”
DEFENSE
The doctrine of the Trinity does not say that God is one and three in the same sense. He is one God and three Persons.
“The supreme being must be unique, without equal . . . . If God is not one, he is not God” (CCC 228). Yet God is also Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. “The Trinity is One. We do not confess three Gods, but one God in three persons” (CCC 253).
It is not surprising that the doctrine of the Trinity is difficult to understand. God is infinite and we are finite. It is natural that our minds would have difficulty grasping what a being so far above us is like. Our minds are designed principally to interact with the world in which we live, and in this life we do not meet beings that are trinities. That’s outside our experience. We would not even know God is a Trinity unless he had revealed it (CCC 237).
Nevertheless, God designed our minds to understand at least some aspects of his mystery, and we can see that the concept of the Trinity does not involve a logical contradiction.
This is possible because the category being and the category person are distinct—something we can see in things we are familiar with (CCC 40–41). In life, we encounter many beings, or things that exist. Some are impersonal (not persons), such as rocks and trees and snow- flakes. Other beings are personal. You, me, and everyone we know are persons. This shows that there is a distinction between being and person.
This distinction is important, because if some beings are less than one person (in fact, zero persons), and if some beings are exactly one person, then there is no contradiction in the idea of a being that is more than one person.
Thus God—the supreme being and thus the ground of all being—is three persons. This may be difficult to envision in this life. God is not yet part of our experience in the way he will be in the next life (CCC 163), but even now we can see that there is no contradiction.