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The Rev. Frank Logue The Mathematics of The Trinity I want to begin with nature, specifically spirals in nature. I saw a professor explain a pattern in spirals in a lecture by beginning with a pineapple. He counted the spirals on the face of the pineapple in one direction and found 8 of them. Counting the other direction, there were 13. Then he counted the spiral pattern in the unfolding of the center of a daisy and found 13 spirals in one direction and 21 in the other. The professor moved on to coneflowers and sunflowers and then back to a pine cone. In the process he showed an overlapping series of numbers in the spirals in the sequence 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89. These numbers are part of the 13th century mathematician Leonardo de Pisa’s famed Fibonacci sequence of numbers. Any two numbers in the line add to make the next number in the line. The amazing thing to me was not that a mathematician had come up with a string of numbers, but that a professor had demonstrated these numbers in nature. It’s like Pythagoras who was so enamored of numbers, he taught that numbers were ultimate reality. But in doing so, he then found patterns all over nature that could be shown mathematically. To find the patterns in nature, he had to move beyond nature to the theoretical and then back to nature. He never saw or could draw an exactly perfect triangle. Given precise enough measurements an intended equilateral triangle would still have ever so slightly unequal sides. Or the lines of the sides of a right angle triangle wouldn’t be exactly straight. Close but not exact. But in thinking about the ideal triangle, he created the Pythagorean theorem, a2+b2=c2. This description worked for the ideal triangle, but once he moved from the realm of the ideal, it worked well to use the math in real world models. OK. I have to stop there. That’s further than I can go with Math. After all, I often say that I went into theology because there was no Math. My engineer brother feels like my masters isn’t a real degree because it didn’t involve Math. I point out that if he gets a calculation wrong, it’s a matter of life and death for those around the missiles he works on for Lockhead. But if I get something wrong in my job, it’s much bigger than just life and death. And yet, there is no Math. In the Bible we find numbers like 7 and 12, 40 and even 144,000. We are aware of them. We notice that there are twelve Tribes of Israel and 12 Apostles. We see the 40 years the Israelites wandered in the desert and Jesus’ 40 days of fasting in the desert. But we don’t mess with the numbers, we just notice them. That is especially true with the numbers one and three. Now we are talking about The Trinity and its best not to add, subtract, multiply or divide. We know that there are three persons—Father, Son and Holy Spirit—and yet just one God. And at some level we realize that here our language falls short. I have a book Modern Trinitarian Perspectives that goes on for just over 150 very dense pages on The Trinity. On page 86, the book says the best single sentence in its 150 pages, “Here all runs out into mystery.” It’s like the here be dragons at the edge of the world on an ancient map. The book should have stopped with the mystery, but it went on to nearly double in length after that insight. A seminary professor of mine asserted that if you can describe The Trinity, clear and distinctly so that anyone can understand it, then you are a heretic. Keep talking and we’ll figure out which kind. This is because our language and our understanding fall short of being able to describe God. John Wesley put it this way, “Bring me a worm that can comprehend a man, and then I will show you a man that can comprehend the triune God!” God is more than we can wrap our minds around and that is necessarily so. And yet we know of God from God, by the Revelation of scripture, from the way God is revealed in nature, and through that most perfect Revelation of God, Jesus the Christ. And now I want to pick up with the idea with which I began, moving from nature to pure thought and back to nature. For in another version, that is how we got the doctrine of The Trinity. The word Trinity never appears in the Bible. Yet, in passages like our reading from John’s Gospel, there were places where Jesus spoke of the gift of the Holy Spirit even as he spoke of his own oneness with the Father. Even in the Old Testament, we find passages like the three visitors who came to Abram at the Oaks of Mamre, there were three of them, yet they are described as the Lord, Yahweh. All through the Bible there was both the idea of one God and the description of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. So moving from these passages to pure thought, the early church writer Tertullian coined the word Trinity. He also coined “Person” and “Substance” to describe what his mind saw when he contemplated the scriptures about the three in one God. This isn’t too surprising. Tertullian loved to create new Latin words. He made up 509 nouns, 284 adjectives and 161 verbs. Some were not used by other writers, but many of his new words lived on, especially Trinity, Person and Substance. Tertullian said that there is a Trinity—a threeness—with three separate persons of a single substance. John Wesley would use the example of three candles in a room yet one light by which to read. We could speak of other analogies for The Trinity, like h2o being steam, water and ice. Saint Patrick’s three petals forming a single shamrock. Or God as lover, beloved and love. Even the wall behind the altar of our church. A single wall with glass looking out on creation to remind us of the Father, the cross to remind us of the Son and the stained glass of a dove to remind us of the Holy Spirit. And yet we know that God is, in the words of a U.S. Catholic Reporter article, “More than two guys and a bird.” These are analogies we use to describe the God we find in scripture and who we meet in our worship. Let’s test my theory for this Trinity Sunday. I posit that the early Christians looked to the God revealed in scripture, moved to the realm of pure thought and created, with a nudge or two from that undivided Triune God, the doctrine of The Trinity. Then moving back from that newly formed word, they looked anew at the scripture and discovered how well it all fit. Reading the Bible anew, they now knew that God was in communion with God’s own self before the creation. God is a relationship among father, Son and Holy Spirit and then God creates all that is for relationship. If we humans preferred to be alone and came together only rarely to procreate and then separate as some animals do, the theory would fall short at this point. But we love to get together. We are, in fact, the beings in communion we were created to be. Jesus would put it this way: Love God with all your heart, mind, soul and strength and love your neighbor as yourself. This is that for which we were created, love upward toward God and outward toward humankind. That web of relationships is very interconnected. When we come to love God more, we get that heart for other people God has and so love of God draws us to other people. And loving other people fully means seeing them as God sees them and so loving people can also draw us to God. It is the communion for which we were created. This is why as we only have one Sunday a year devoted to a doctrine of the Church, that Sunday is dedicated the The Trinity. The belief in a triune God is so foundational to Christianity the early church clarified that you simply can not be Christian without having this understanding of God. Because you can not pull out this idea of God being in communion and calling us into that life of the communion and still understand Jesus’ teaching about the Holy Spirit or his statements that he is in the Father and the Father is in him and so on. But if you take this understanding of being created for relationship—relationship with God and with other people—then the world makes more sense. No matter what you are going through, you are not alone. You have God present within you and beyond you, and desiring you to live into that communion. Even though 3=1 seems like bad Math, there is a way in which even as mathematicians see the patterns in nature that lead to equations which lead to new understandings, so to was the concept of The Trinity developed. Whether you like the “ice, water, steam” analogy, or “lover, beloved and love,” or Patrick’s shamrock, grab hold of the importance of three being one before there was anything else. Not an empty universe before creation. Not just one being. But there are relationships and communion, before time and forever. This is why you were created, to be in healthy, loving, generative relationship with God and all creation. And out of this web of relationships comes both your salvation and the redemption of all creation. And that’s so important; it’s worth stopping once a year to extol the doctrine of The Trinity. Amen.
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