Metaphor 21 - Self-Contemplation

We have now come to a consideration of something I have briefly mentioned earlier in a footnote. I agree with C.S. Lewis that if God has personhood, it is likely of a Super Duper variety. I now want to give you a metaphor that may help you see this in a way that, perhaps, you may not have before.

First, I want you to recall that seemingly normal and everyday act I have previously taken such pains to complain about: the act of contemplating yourself. From our previous discussion of Walter Mitty, we now know that self-contemplation is a defective act. There are a least four aspects to this defect:

1.) It is defective in order, because we are contemplating ourselves instead of God, who has first priority.

2.) It is defective in self knowledge. We think things about ourselves that are simply not true (ask your significant other or your parent or teacher), or we do not think things about ourselves because we don’t know of them (or don’t want to know of them).

3.) It is defective in morality, because we can imagine doing evil.

4.) It is defective in memory. We can’t hold a consistent image of ourselves in our minds for any great length of time without it changing in some way.

Now, in addition to defect, our contemplation of ourselves is also subject to limitations.

1.) It is time bound. Our thoughts of ourselves have a beginning at a point in time and (hopefully) an end.

2.) It is not expressed. We can think all we want about ourselves, but those thoughts can never become real, and exist in the world we share with other people, unless we manipulate our physical world (or other people!) in some way as to bring some aspect of our thoughts into reality. But even then, many people find that things are still not the same as what they had in their minds!

Now if we reverse this picture, we can possibly get a sense of what God’s contemplation of Himself would be like:

1.) It would be perfect in order, because the priority would be right.
It is perfectly okay for God to think about Himself.

2.) It would be perfect in self-knowledge. He is all-knowing.

3.) It would be perfect in morality, for God is most holy.

4.) It would perfect in memory (see 2.).

And as to limitations:

1.) A single thought of His would be eternal, never beginning, never ending.

2.) His thoughts can become expressed. I.e., He can bring them directly into reality just by thinking them so.

Now with these initial concepts in place, we come to the metaphor proper. And do remember that this is a metaphor. I am not saying that what I am about to say is what is really going on, but only giving an analogy so I can make a point later.

Before I show you the metaphor, I have to remind you that I am a material being in a creation that consists of things and time passing and other material beings like myself. But I am going to talk about God, who exists before all those items and is in fact their Creator. Therefore I am going to use certain words that only make sense in a material, time-bound existence and in reference other beings like myself. But I am going to put these words in quotes and explain some of them before I use them.

The first word is "Person." Historically, this a word is taken from the Latin word Persona, which was a mask that an actor in ancient Rome wore to let his audience know which stereotyped role he was playing in a comedy or a tragedy. And it is the root of the modern word, personality. So what I am thinking of is something between the idea behind the Latin root and its modern extension. But bear in mind that I do not mean the kinds of things we mean or associate with a human person.

The second word is "essence." If you wanted to say that one thing was exactly the same as another thing, or that one thing is different from another thing, you could say that they were "of the same substance" or "of different substance." In this creation of substances and things you would be perfectly right to do that. But what if something existed before the creation of substances and things? How would you express it then? One way is just to go ahead and say "substance" and hope you are not misunderstood. Another way is to use the word "essence," and hope you are not misunderstood in another way (or mistaken for talking about a perfume).

I will use the word "essence" and keep it in quotes to remind you that I am still talking about something (thing?) that exists before the creation of things. The other words are "results" (as in "this results in xxxx"), "becomes," "expression," "expresses," "expressed" and "now." I am going to be talking about relationships in eternity as though they were processes happening in time. The above words are words based in time and processes.

Are we clear on the ground rules?

Okay, here goes:

The first thing (note that "first" is a time based word and "thing" is a material based word. We can’t get around them!) is to think of God contemplating Himself. As in the above discussion this contemplation would be:

1.) Perfect and complete and without defect or lack.

2.) Expressed in reality ("the express image of").

The contemplation of the First "Person" "results" in the "expression" of the Second. And there is "now" a First and Second "Person" of the same "essence". These being both Godhead, have the same quality of thought, are both contemplating the same self, and this self "now" "expresses" as the Third "Person" who is also of the same "essence," and whose contemplation includes that of the First and the Second "Person." The self of the Godhead being fully expressed, no other "Person" is expressed.

Now remove all the time based references like "results" and "becomes," "now," and "expression" and "expresses," and just see this as a single relationship of three "Persons" that has no beginning and no end and no reference to time other than calling it into being by the creation of matter.

You have now arrived at a metaphor of the Trinity. [Footnote 23]

"Now why," you may ask me, "did you go to all that trouble? I was perfectly content just to simply think of Him as ‘The Big Guy.’" Well, I find that if I am going to lead you any further on this journey into a special kind of happiness, I have to lead you into some facts about the nature of God. If we are not going to be toying in our minds with some Walter Mitty style day dreams about God, we have to replace childish ideas we have about Him with ideas that He has about Himself.

And as for the Trinity, I have found that anytime a discussion of the concept comes up, the first reaction some people have to it is "My, how arbitrary! Why not a Binity? or a Quadity?, or a Quintity?, or .... Googlelity? Why only three persons? Why not several? Indeed why not a whole crowd?" And this usually leads on to the next thought, "I’ll just smooth that all out and just go back to calling Him ‘The Big Guy.’"

But if you have followed the metaphor, you can just glimpse that there is in God, not what I would call "design principles" exactly, but rather, revealed features that have led to a Trinitarian explanation of His personhood, which is indeed revealed to be Super Duper.

Then too, I also wish to knock away some erroneous Walter Mitty notions that people have about the Trinity. For one, the Trinity is not tri-theism. It is not three Gods, three separate Persons in three separate essences. It is God in three "Persons," Who are of the same "essence." And it is not "modalism" which is one God "appearing" for a time in one of three modes of being. It is God in three eternally existing "Persons," who are of the same "essence." And it is not any of the other "-isms" that make any of the "Persons" to be greater than or less than any of the other "Persons." It is God in three "Persons," who are of the same "essence," co-eternal and co-equal.

Okay, I’m starting to become a grind. But you begin to get the picture. As C.S. Lewis once pointed out, when something we notice begins to have a grainy not-quite-what-we-were-expecting quality, it usually means that we are looking at something real rather than something we have imagined or simplified in our heads.

Remember, if you will, Gallileo’s famous experiment with dropping two objects of unequal weight. Centuries prior, the philosopher Aristotle had a Walter Mitty day dream that if two bodies of unequal weight were dropped from a height, the heavier one would fall faster than the lighter one and hit the ground first. For centuries learned people actually believed Aristotle’s day dream. Then Gallileo actually performed the experiment instead of day dreaming about it and found out the weights fell at the same speed and hit the ground at the same time.

Today, our physicists are struggling over observations of something that half their machines call a "wave" and other half call a "particle." It is the same thing happening at the same time, but to their instruments it looks like two different physical phenomena. Reality is very grainy. And the Trinity is reality.

Now before I go on further, I want to make something clear. I have used imagination as a metaphor for creation. But I have also used it to build up a metaphor of the Trinity. The thing I want to make clear is the relationship between the Godhead and the creation. That relationship can be summed up in two theological terms, immanence and transcendence.

Transcendence is the easier one to grasp. It means that God is not the same thing as His creation. The creation, the universe, is not co-eternal with God. God created it, and began time by doing so, but God existed before it was created.

Immanence means that, having created the universe, God is everywhere present in it at the same time. There is nowhere in His creation where He is not.

I will rephrase an analogy C.S. Lewis once gave. Stephen King has written a series of novels. So in a sense, Stephen King is in all his novels, his creations. There, he is immanent. But there is more to Stephen King that just his novels. There are other things he does in his life that have nothing to do with his novels. In that sense he is transcendent with respect to his novels.

My use of imagination as both a metaphor of creation and the Trinity is just a convenience on my part, and not an implication that they are the same thing.

So, to continue, an undivided "essence" of three co-eternal, co-equal "Persons," a Godhead, was, is and ever shall be.

What, you may ask, was the Godhead up to before the creation? That is not as blasphemous a question as some have tried to make it seem. [Footnote 24] We actually do have a clue. The clue is in this sentence: "God is love."

That sentence does not mean, as some has taken it to mean, that "love is God," putting the emotion itself above the Being who best expresses it. If that were true, He could not do anything about His created beings who become unlike Him, and love itself would thereby suffer. God must be able not only to love love, but to hate hate.

No, what "God is love" means is that the "Persons" of the Godhead have, in and for all eternity, a relationship of love, the highest possible form of happiness. An emotion which is subordinate to the Godhead, has, in a sense, been taken up into the Godhead and transmuted by the eternity of the relationships in the Godhead. And that kind of love is the ultimate form of happiness that there can ever be.

From this love, the Godhead brought forth the creation and the Chain of Being. And with the Chain of Being, there came into existence beings who could experience God and have a relationship with Him.

Some of these beings are time based and reproduce by being divided into sexes. Hence they refer to the First "Person" as the Father. The Father, they have learned, is as to His essence unknowable because the whole of His creation is not the whole of Him. (Transcendent, remember?) The Father must be manifested in the creation for His beings to perceive Him. More on this anon.

But these created beings also have a created inner world as well as the created outer world - the inner world of Chicagoland, if you will. Anciently, they referred to themselves, as to this inner world, as having a "spirit." And when God manifested in this inner world, they called Him, in His third "Person," the Holy Spirit, in contradistinction to their own spirits, which were decidedly unholy. He is also referred to as the Spirit of God. For God, as we have seen in our discussion of the Trinity, has, in a sense, an "inwardness" also.

So, given our lack of an exit from the wrath of eternal God, what will God do to fulfill His deepest desire of love that knows no end of days. What will God do to retain the perfection of His love while retaining the justice of His wrath? To what lengths will God go in the love of His alienated creatures who are blind, deaf, and dead to Him? The metaphor is Immersion.
--------------
(23) Some of you may have wondered why I didn’t use water as a metaphor of the Trinity since it can be a liquid, solid, and a gas. Well, that is actually a good metaphor for modalism since water exists, singularly, in each of those states at different temperatures - or rather times. Also, water is a substance, while thought is not.

(24) I’m trying to remember where I heard a apocryphal story about St. Augustine that goes like this: A skeptic once asked Augustine what God was doing before He created the universe. Augustine supposedly replied "Making hell for people who ask questions like that!"