THE TRINITY, JESUS AND FLATLAND 2b: Models in Science and Religion.
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Transcript of THE TRINITY, JESUS AND FLATLAND 2b: Models in Science and Religion.
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THE TRINITY,JESUS AND FLATLAND
2b: Models in Science and Religion
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THE TRINITY
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But how many Christians can talk about what they understand about the Trinitarian nature of God with any confidence? Is this because they forget that the Trinity is a model of what God is thought to be like? Models have limitations but are illuminating nonetheless.
THE TRINITYDefines Christian
Orthodoxy
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“I believe in God the Father Almighty, creator of heaven and earth; and in Jesus Christ, His only Son, our Lord ... I believe in the Holy Spirit ...”One God in three Persons, coeternal, coequal and consubstantial.
TRINITY IN THE CREEDS
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In the Godhead there are three Persons: God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit. These three form one true eternal God, whose substance is undivided, and each Person is equal in power and glory. Royston Pike, Encyclopaedia of Religion and Religions.
TRINITARIAN FORMULATIONS
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Because God is infinitely greater than we can imagine, theological language has always needed analogies.We have to say, “God is like this or that” and immediately qualify this by saying, “But only in a limited way”!
The need for analogies
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Three kinds have been used historically:
From inanimate nature or plant life
From the life of man, in particular his mind eg. Augustine’s psychological unity of intellect, affections and will, as an analogy of the Trinity.
From the nature of love
various analogies
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Mankind has always struggled to
imagine what God is like. To imagine is to make an image of some kind. Hence
the twin dangers of getting the image
wrong and of thinking that the image is the real
thing!
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“You shall not make for yourself a graven image, or any likeness of anything that is in the heaven above, or that is on the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth... (Deuteronomy 5:8)
Hence the Second Commandment
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Jews will not utter the name of God, YHWH
Jewish synagogues are devoid of pictures
Muslims consider the Christian notion that Jesus is the image of God to be blasphemy
Muslims have a theologically motivated tradition of non-representative religious art
Other Theistic religions are
therefore keen to avoid idolatry
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“..we ought not to think that the Deity is like gold, or silver, or stone, a representation by the art and imagination of man.” (Acts 17:29)
And Paul’s Athenian address commenting
on the altar ‘To an unknown God’
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Sometimes Christians have been fanatically keen to avoid
idolatry, not least with regard to
anything to do with artistic imaging of God - witness the iconoclasts in the
Protestant Reformation!
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But, have Protestant Christians
substituted an idolatry of words? Do they underplay the importance of
other ways of encountering God in say art, theatre,
icons, music...?
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We tend to forget that language about God
can be just as fraught with difficulties and
misunderstandings. It is easy to think that our words about God
define God, rather than partially
represent God. It is too easy to be
idolatrous!
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Knowing about God is not the same thing as knowing God. Religious language - God Talk - is only useful inasmuch as it enables folk to ‘Keep God company’, to use a limited but helpful image!
CRUCIALLY FOR BELIEVERS!
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It has to be recognized that the doctrine arose as the spontaneous expression of the Christian experience. The earliest Christians knew themselves to be reconciled to God the Father, and that the reconciliation was secured for them by the atoning work of the Son, and that it was mediated to them as an experience by the Holy Spirit. Thus the Trinity was to them a fact before it became a doctrine, but in order to preserve it in the credal faith of the church the doctrine has to be formulated.R.A.Finlayson,
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But Christians have keen on the belief
that God has revealed Himself to
us, in Jesus in particular. This puts controlling limits on
Christian speculation about what God is like, even when we
forget that the language is not
literal!
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All images and
language are partial
representatives of the real
thing !
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In the end of the day our images are partial - these are
only photos of the real young men,
but to those who know them personally, they are
evocative images.
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Take the concept of the Kingdom of God (or Heaven) in the gospels, and notice
Jesus’ habit of comparing it to a
whole host of things, each one of which
sheds some light on the nature of the
Kingdom.
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Thus, in Matthew 13 alone, The Kingdom of God is like (resembles Gk:
homoios)....
A grain of mustard seed (v 31)
Yeast in bread (v 33)Treasure hidden in a field
(v 44)A merchant in search of
fine pearls (v 45)A fishing net (v 47)
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It is important to grab the
relevant part of the comparison,
otherwise we misunderstand the comparison.
What aspect of each of the comparisons on the previous slide is important?
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FLATLAND
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Edwin A.Abbott wrote a nineteenth century novel called Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions, from which this idea is loosely based.
See also ch 5. in Eric Middleton’s The New Flatlanders, Highland, 2002 and p31 of God Talk, Science Talk, by Brown, Poole and Hookway.
consider FLATLAND
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What would it be like to be a two dimensional being who has an encounter with a three dimensional object? You live on Flatland. A sphere moves into and through your world. What do you see?
Flatland - 1
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What you see as a
flatlander looking
along the plane that
is the boundary of
sightin your flat
world
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What do you see?
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What you see
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What you see
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What you see
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What you see
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What you see
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What you see
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What you see
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What you see
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JESUS
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“He is the image of the invisible God, the first-born of all creation; for in him all things were created in heaven and on earth...all things were created through him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together...For in him all the fulness of God was pleased to dwell...” Colossians 1:15-19
Jesus the image of the invisible God
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The doctrine of the incarnation is making the
apparently absurd claim
that the infinite God became
finite in Jesus of Nazareth.
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Consider Cantor on infinities
0 1
There are an infinite number
of numbers
in this interval 0 to 1
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Cantor on infinities
0 10.5
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Cantor on infinities
0 10.50.25
0.1250.0625
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Cantor on infinities
0 0.06250.03125
0.0156250.0078125
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Cantor on infinities
0 0.0071825
There is an
infinite number
of subdivisi
ons of this
interval too!
An infinite number
of infinites between 0 and 1?!
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Cantor on infinitiesTheologi
cal point:
by analogy you can conceive of an infinite being
occupying a finite
space!
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It has always been the case
that theologians have struggled to find ways to express their
belief that Jesus was somehow God incarnate.
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It is interesting to look at new models which attempt to
capture something - but not everything - about these central
Christian beliefs about the person of
Jesus. Here are a couple from chaos
theory!
•
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•
Jesus the strange
attractor!
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Jesus the fractal image of God
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These will only make sense if you already understand
something about the basis of the model ie. the
mathematics of chaos.
Otherwise the model is totally
opaque.
•
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?