Triessence

Descartes postulated that humans were composite beings, made up of a mind and a body. He found that he could make a good argument for his existence as a thinking entity, "Cogito, ergo sum" (I think, therefore I am), but was uncertain that he could argue cogently for the existence of his body. He just didn't trust his senses enough to believe them. Like Scrooge, he viewed his body as too easily led astray by dreams and delusions. His view of humans as dual in nature followed the teaching of Socrates, as outlined in Plato's Phaedo, and should not be considered a Christian idea.

It is interesting that science has lately been emphasizing the notion that our bodies and souls are connected in more profound ways than Socrates or Descartes could have imagined. Neurologists and philosophers of the mind cannot discount the influence of the physical on how we emote and process ideas. This lines up with the Christian idea of the resurrection of the body. Not that anyone imagines that the actual cells wil be revitalized. Decay and dispersion happen. But the hope of the Christian is that the soul and spirit will live forever with a body that cannot decay, and that exists as a cohesive unit forever.

Why is the resurrection of the body important? Because it carries the idea that we will exist forever as individuals, as selves, and not as part of a blended soup of souls, part of one giant oversoul. The amazing fundamental of Christianity is that Jesus loves me, as an individual, just as I am. The resurrection of the body is the outworking of this transforming truth.

In the classic Dickens story, A Christmas Carol, Ebenezer Scrooge sees a ghost. Skeptic that he is, he does not believe what he sees. When the ghost asks him why he doubts his senses, he replies:

"Because," said Scrooge, "a little thing affects them.
A slight disorder of the stomach makes them cheats. You may
be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of
cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato. There's more of
gravy than of grave about you, whatever you are!"

While this is not a true story, Scrooge does make a valid point. Our thoughts and perceptions can be influenced by what we ingest. That is why we have laws about driving while intoxicated. When we are cold sober, however, it is usually safe to assume that our thoughts and perceptions are our own. And so we do.

The adoption of a materialistic point of view questions this assumption. If all we are is what can be seen, touched or measured, then what we commonly experience as our own thoughts and perceptions is nothing more than "an undigested bit of beef." To the true empiricist, everything that we know as our consciousness, our minds, our souls, and our personalities can be reduced to random chemical reactions and electrical impulses.

Call me pretentious, but I can't resist the compulsion to see human consciousness as more than a cosmic accident. Call me greedy, but I prefer to take ownership of my thoughts and refuse to attribute them to a blob of grey jelly inside my skull that is at the mercy of what I eat and drink.

I love my brain, but it is not all that exists of my mind. I am thankful for my heart that beats so strongly and makes possible the vast conduit of health throughout my body that is my circulatory system, but it is not all there is of my soul. So much of what we are is not accessible to our senses and never will be.

Human consciousness is much more than "a fragment of an underdone potato."

Thinking about the doctrine of God as Trinity we have to admit that the concept of three in one is not difficult to grasp. There are examples of such things in our everyday life.

An obvious three-in-one is water, without which there would be no life on our planet. Water exists for us in three forms, most commonly as the liquid. We don't just depend on drinking water for our survival, we consist largely of water. Between 55% and 78% of the human body is water, varying according to age, gender and amount of body fat. It makes me thirsty just thinking about it! Other than liquid water, we experience water in its solid form, as ice, and as water vapour. The three states of matter can be seen as a simple and imperfect simile for the three persons of the Trinity.

We also experience the notion of three in one as we contemplate the material world that surrounds us. We view our environment in terms of three dimensions: depth, width, and height. Our everyday understanding of the physical world is interpreted entirely within this strange concept of three in one. Theoretical physicists might postulate the existence of more dimensions to our universe, but for practical purposes, we only experience three.

Is it possible that God has built this into the universe to be an object lesson for us?

Christian scholars agree that God spent all of human history up to the birth of Christ preparing for that exact moment when a young Jewish girl would speak her acquiescence to the will of God with a humble "behold the handmaid of the Lord." Nations were brought low, and nations were raised up to provide the propitious circumstances for the birth of the son of Mary and the Son of God in long ago Bethlehem.

The notion of a single deity was remarkable in the setting to which Christ was introduced. God's chosen people were surrounded by polytheistic cultures rife with blood rituals that sometimes included human sacrifices. In the midst of this, God presented a clear message: Hear O Israel; The Lord your God, the Lord is one. Whenever there was an attempt to integrate foreign gods, the prophets responded with rebuke and the reminder that there was only one God who had chosen and delivered them. How on earth then did we get to the bizarre Christian doctrine of the Trinity?

Given the difficulties in understanding and communicating the concept of the Trinity, perhaps it is best put aside as too mysterious and indefensible. This would deny the value of the meticulous groundwork that is laid in history and in scripture for this surprising doctrine. If there is any one defining characteristic of historical and present day Judaism, it is monotheism. The Shema Yisrael proclaims in no uncertain terms, Hear, O Israel, the Lord your God, the Lord is one. This is the key distinction that set ancient Israel at odds with its neighbours and put the "chosen" in the "chosen people."

If there are a multitude of gods, then surely there are enough to go around: one for you, one for me, and one for those crazy Philistines that live down the road. If, however, there is only one God, we had better be sure to be on his or her side when the going gets tough. Israel was on the Lord’s side, and paid the price dearly when she strayed.

Into this strict setting, Christ was born. We must conclude then, that he is nothing other than a remarkable man, or that he is truly God incarnate. There is no room here for a demi-god.

Christians understand and define God according to the pictures drawn for us in the Bible. We see God as Father, Mother, Shepherd, Judge, King, and Advocate. None of these are perfect pictures of the wonder of God. Each image is limited by the imperfections both of our understanding and the human models provided for our consideration.

All of us have known, and some of us have had, fathers who have not lived up to the ideals we might imagine for them. Some are cold, unloving, irresponsible and downright abusive. These are not characteristics of God the tender, loving, diligent, and caring Heavenly Father revealed in Scripture.

The same point can be made for God who loves us as the best of mothers loves her nursing child. But while a mother might, through cold-heartedness, selfish substance abuse or the ravages of dementia, forget her child, God declares that he will never forget us. He writes us on his hands.

To continue down the list: shepherds can’t all be perfect; history attests to the cruelties of judges and kings; popular wisdom has only unflattering things to say about lawyers. None of these biblical analogies is bulletproof. No analogy can say all there is to say about anything.

The idea of the Trinity, that God is three persons in one, poses challenges to our understanding. It always seemed to me that the doctrine of the Trinity, as otherworldly and unimaginable as it is, must somehow surpass these weak human analogies and get to the heart of what God is as a spiritual being. However, to gain any usefulness from the doctrine in terms of comprehending God, I have found that it is more valuable to me personally to consider the doctrine of the Trinity as one more picture drawn for us by insightful reading of the texts and history. I certainly would not dare say "merely a picture," but it is a picture nonetheless.

If this smacks of sacrilege, ask yourself: what does a spiritual being have to do with numbers, a robustly physical concept? Trying to depict the spiritual in our material world is difficult. This needs to be acknowledged from the start.

A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, of the manifestations of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty, which are only accessible to our reason in their most elementary forms--it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute the truly religious attitude.
--Einstein, Albert, The World As I See It, (Philosophical Library, New York, 1949)

There is something within us that resonates with the divine. Einstein was certainly not religious in the conventional sense: he didn't believe in a personal god and felt certain that physical death was the end for the individual. In his worldview there was no survival of the human personality and no accountability to a Divine Judge in the afterlife. But he couldn't deny the attraction of the spiritual Power that charges the cosmos:

Every one who is seriously involved in the pursuit of science becomes convinced that a spirit is manifest in the laws of the Universe — spirit vastly superior to that of man, and one in the face of which we with our modest powers must feel humble.
--Dukas, Helen and Banesh Hoffman (Editors), Albert Einstein - The Human Side (Princeton University Press, 1979)

In no way am I trying to read more into Einstein’s words that what he is actually saying, nor am I quoting him as an expert in human spirituality. There is, however, an unspoken consensus that there is a reality beyond what we can perceive with our senses. Even the strictest materialist acknowledges such a thing as the human mind, which resists all attempts at definition within a purely materialistic framework.

Einstein said he that "can no longer wonder, no longer feel amazement, is as good as dead, a snuffed-out candle." (The World As I See It ) He evidenced a continuing fascination with the scientific realities and theories which fuelled his imagination. This same delight in the material world runs like a leitmotif through the writings of Oliver Sacks, the brilliant neurologist made famous in the movie Awakenings. In his charming memoir Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood he describes the joy he had even as a child exploring the wonders of such scientific marvels as the periodic table, and explosive chemical reactions.

Science as we know it would not be possible if we didn’t start with the premise that, for all its quirkiness, there is a rationality behind the universe. The scientific method would not exist but for the hypothesis that truth is predictable and verifiable. These fundamental beliefs are themselves inherently religious, and point to the existence of a more profound reality than an accidental and random universe would suggest.

To quote Einstein:

While it is true that scientific results are entirely independent from religious or moral considerations, those individuals to whom we owe the great creative achievements of science were all of them imbued with the truly religious conviction that this universe of ours is something perfect and susceptible to the rational striving for knowledge.
--Einstein, Albert, The World As I See It

We have always had an inkling that we are greater than we seem, that there is more to a man than meets the eye, and that there are depths to a woman's soul that no man can fathom. Even the late nineteenth century psychologist William James, who authored the seminal text on the psychology of religion, The Varieties of Religious Experience, could not imagine "that the world of sensations, and of scientific laws and objects may be all." He concluded rather:

"The total expression of human experience, as I view it objectively, invincibly urges me beyond the narrow ‘scientific’ bounds. Assuredly, the world is of a different temperament, - more intricately built than physical science allows."

Empiricist philosophers are bending their brains into all kinds of contortions trying to find a purely biological explanation for what we call the mind. They end up with nothing but inadequate and unsatisfying hypotheses. How do we know that we have a soul? Is there a purely spiritual aspect to the human personality? How can we know this, and how can we define how our spirituality defines us as humans? What does this have to do with God, and what does God have to do with us?

These are the issues that will be explored in this space.