The Light of the Trinity

Many people who criticize Christianity say that Christians worship more than one god. After all, how can Jesus and God and the Holy Spirit be gods at the same time? You worship 3 gods? So Christians are polytheists, right?

Wrong.

All three are one God.

This is the profound Mystery of the Trinity: the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. They are not and cannot be separated.

All three are one God? But how can three be one?

Here’s one way that I imagine it: think of light. For the purposes of this metaphor, let’s say that Light is God.

Pure light, the very conception of light, at its most essential level, would be God the Father. Light is absolutely essential to our existence, but can you hold light, can you touch and feel and know light? Not really, because it is beyond our understanding, beyond our physical ability to grasp it. Scientists still don’t agree about the quantum reality of light – is it a particle, is it a wave, is it both? We do not know. We may never be able to know. Likewise we cannot know God the Father, at least not directly. The Father is so far beyond our comprehension that such as we are, we could never know Him.

But we MUST know Him. We must be able to touch and feel and hold God physically because man is physical. But God is supernatural and we are merely natural. How do we bridge that gap? We need a God on our comprehension level as man. We need a God-Man.

This is why we needed God the Son, Jesus Christ. The Son IS the Father made man. Because we could not grasp the abstract nature of the Father, we needed the physical embodiment of the Son. We cannot grasp the very reality of light, so we need a physical embodiment of light that we can know and feel. In our light metaphor, God the Son is the Sun. Through the physical Sun, light enters our natural world. Not the abstract idea of light, but physical light, something we can know and experience and see. The Sun is a physical embodiment of light, so much so that the Sun IS light. We can point to the Sun and say THAT is light; we can point to Jesus and say THAT is God. The Son is the Father; sun rays are light. The Son is not like the Father or similar to the Father; the Son IS the supernatural Father who has entered into nature. This is the beauty of the Incarnation. As the Nicene Creed says, “Light from light, True God from True God.”

This brings us to the Holy Spirit, who is nothing more than the Father and the Son in perfect unity with each other. In our light metaphor, the Holy Spirit is the warmth and brightness of the light that falls on us when we stand under the Sun at noon on a summer’s day. The Holy Spirit is HOW we feel and experience and know the Father through the Son. The Holy Spirit is the Comforter promised to us by the Son, as warm light comforts us and as brightness illuminates our way while we stumble about in the cold darkness.

These three – the essential conception of light, the physical embodiment of light, and the warmth and brightness of light – are all one light. They are one and the same thing. Likewise the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are one God.

I hope this helps you understand the Trinity a little better. I am no theologian, but this is how I think of the Trinity. Another simpler mathematical way is to remember that the Trinity is not 1+1+1=3, but instead He is 1x1x1=1.

I hope if you are one of those critics who say Christians are confused polytheists, you can now more easily appreciate the Mystery of three being One.