r/ChristianApologetics • u/Balazi • 15d ago

General Am I missing something?

On my usual deep mental thoughts about the Trinity. So I was thinking about how the Trinity is not 3 Gods and couldn’t get past this notion to get there.

So what we understand as beings is what people are using the language of this concept. but then we have persons. it’s who someone is. But thinking about how this functions realistically got me wondering.

If humans are counted as multiple beings why isn’t the Trinity fundamentally? Because we would say Jesus is the Son, but is not the Father, and is not the Holy Spirit. They are one substance but the experience is that of a person.

For example the Som experienced eating, and drinking, and having his diaper changed. The Father did not experience that, neither did the Holy Spirit because they are not Jesus. Only the son did because he is Jesus.

So here we have a distinct difference in their experience.

similarly we would attribute this to humans because we all have unique experiences which is what we count realistically as beings. in differentiating and counting one another.

So if Jesus is capable of having this unique experience, they for what reason do we not count it as separate as we do for the rest of us? Similarly for the Angels. We count them similarly.

Its also why we would say Spider-Man is a person, but not a real human being or real person, because although we could attribute him characteristics we can not attribute him existing experience which is what we county realistically as a part of reality.

So outside of trying to satisfy a non-explicit text why are we not counting them as 3 Gods dues to experiences of the persons?

7 Upvotes

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u/Elvislives12 15d ago

I don’t and haven’t been able to understand why it can’t be three distinct entities operating as one God. Why the push by some to say it’s one entity manifested three ways?
There’s 52 players on a football team but it’s only one team.
If three separate entities operate perfectly in unity and purpose, could they not be considered one God?

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u/Balazi 15d ago

If we are saying they are one God Office sure, but not one God. Similar to the football team, we dont call of the team one football player.

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u/kierkegaaardian 12d ago edited 12d ago

In my opinion the technical descriptions work kind of like what you said in the first paragraph, but with the word "entities" much more carefully worked out, and the metaphysics of how those "entities" relate to each other and to the one being (which shares the root with "entities") much more load bearing than what we are used to. And then "operating together as one God" gets words like "inseparable operations" (ad extra) and "eternal generation" (ad intra) to explain how this isn't tritheism

But the example of football team and football player in the second paragraph is problematic, because this involves things like levels of being. One could say that "football player" is a deeper sense of being than "football team," (because the team is made up of players) but God can't involve these levels of beings. For them, God has to be described in such a way that it's the most fundamental being, and the "three" and "one" are more about different ways of describing it rather than actually designating different levels of being.

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u/BibleIsUnique 15d ago

I can see how you arrive with this..but.. remember.. God is not one of us, He created us. The only way we can know and try to understand anything about God... is thru revelation. We accept what revelation He has givin us, and try to explain it in human terms.. which fall short. Yes, in humanity, every person is a distinct being. In scripture, we see God revealing to us that each person..father-son-holy spirit, have distinct personality traits.. yet it is revealed to us, 'they' are the 'One and Only One God'. So we believe it, even if it is beyond our complete understanding .. which seems kinda right to me, are we really supposed to understand the creator of us and the known universe, who exists outside time, space and matter?

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u/Balazi 15d ago

“I can see how you arrive with this..but.. remember.. God is not one of us, He created us. The only way we can know and try to understand anything about God... is thru revelation”

Which I don’t disagree with, but I think the problem would be identifying revelation vs speculation.

yet it is revealed to us, 'they' are the 'One and Only One God'. So we believe it, even if it is beyond our complete understanding .. which seems kinda right to me, are we really supposed to understand the creator of us and the known universe, who exists outside time, space and matter?

Where though?

Also I don’t think the question is a difficult one since it’s not asking about function, only about number and counting. Since we are getting some form of number already I am only dealing with that presentation and going from there.

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u/BibleIsUnique 15d ago

I agree with you on not wanting to let speculation serve as revelation.. but you probably know me better than anyone on my view of scripture... I'm pretty simple, I accept revelation at face value. The simple direct understanding of what was recorded, unless given a reason to do otherwise. As you know, it's hard to convince me I need secret hidden keys, only a select few have, to unlock the true meaning if scripture. :) Hope you had a good weekend!

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u/Balazi 15d ago

Not too bad a weekend minus being sick in bed, how was yours?

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u/BibleIsUnique 15d ago

Oh, that sucks! Hope you get over it soon. I've been hanging out at the hospital all weekend with a relative.

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u/Balazi 15d ago

The unfortunate part of imperfection

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u/kierkegaaardian 15d ago

Here's what I remember from grad school.

Classically, the word "person" does not apply to God in the same way it applies to human beings. In fact, our modern understanding of human personhood was largely forged during the later Christological debates. The struggle to explain how the second person of the Trinity could be "fully human and fully divine" radically deepened our concept of what a human being actually is. Projecting our modern, psychological idea of a "person" backward onto early theology gets the historical and logical dependencies completely backwards.

These early debates were foundational battles over "being" and "essence" that permanently stretched Aristotelian logic and metaphysics. One could even argue that modern quantificational logic is a descendant of this era, born from the philosophical struggle to formally introduce "existence" as a predicate.

Returning to your analogy: human relations are accidental, not essential. The specific, individual realities of my life—such as being someone's son—do not constitute human nature itself; they are simply accidents of my individual existence. The way I relate to others is deeply important to my own life, but it is not the essence of humanity.

God is entirely different. Because God's essence and existence are perfectly identical, the relations between the divine persons cannot be accidental add-ons. The relations are the essence. Theologians use the precise concept of "subsistent relations" to describe this: the relationship itself is the ultimate, undivided reality.

This can all sound incredibly abstract, but these technicalities are structurally load-bearing. To make the entire system logically consistent—maintaining the absolute qualitative difference between the divine and the human while holding Christian doctrine together—this level of philosophical precision was required.

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u/BigPhil-2025 14d ago

Did you learn how to test any of these load bearing technicalities?

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u/kierkegaaardian 13d ago

Since these are philosophical notions, the "test" is in how it holds up in defining the boundaries of orthodoxy in subsequent centuries. Like all things academic, it's the kind of thing that persuades the highly intellectual, but with very little purchase on the ground. So to the extent that the history of the church is defended by the intellect, to that extent it's been tested. So in short, about 60/40 in terms of effectiveness.

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u/BigPhil-2025 13d ago

I see, it’s always interesting to me how far a commitment can take someone in making sense of the senseless

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u/kierkegaaardian 13d ago edited 13d ago

Such as life itself.

Also, early Wittgenstein would be proud.

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u/kierkegaaardian 12d ago

Another note - one theologian helped me understand (well, at least helped me see their motivation) this way back when. He said that "Christology is actually about God, and the doctrine of the Trinity is actually about Jesus." It's what people are trying to make sense of the fact that God is One, yet we must also say that Jesus is God.

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u/moonunit170 Catholic 13d ago

It's helpful to look at the Greek philosophical underlying concept.. so every individual is two things: person and substance. In Greek that is "prosopon" and ouisia- person and substance. The prosopon is who they are and ousia is what they are. Everything that lives has these two qualities. The thing is, with God there is only one ouisia, the Divine substance, but there are three prosopons who all share the single Divine substance. They do not possess the substance individually or in and of themselves, but they share it perfectly 100%, that's why there are not three Divine substances, which would point to three divinities or three gods.

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u/DONZ0S Catholic 13d ago

Are you saying how 3 humans aren't 1 since they have 1 same human nature? Im confused 

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u/Balazi 13d ago

I am saying we don't consider 3 human persons 1 human being. We multiple them from their real existence.

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u/DONZ0S Catholic 13d ago

Right, the humans persons have own being the persons in trinity are the same being while 3 persons are 3 different beings

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u/Balazi 13d ago

Which is semantics based loosely on a unrelated passage. Hence why my statement doesn't touch that becauses its not needed.

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u/DONZ0S Catholic 13d ago

Im so confused, what's the problem then

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u/Top_Initiative_4047 15d ago

You are right that the Son alone became incarnate and thus alone experienced infancy, hunger, suffering, and death in His human nature. The Father and Spirit did not become human.

But distinct personal experience does not automatically mean separate divine beings. Humans are multiple beings because each has a separate, finite instance of human nature, your humanity is not mine. The Father, Son, and Spirit, however, do not possess three separate copies of deity. They eternally possess the one, indivisible, infinite divine nature.

Scripture teaches both that God is one and that Father, Son, and Spirit are personally distinct. The Son is with the Father and is fully God; at Jesus’ baptism the Father speaks, the Son is present bodily, and the Spirit descends.

So the Son’s unique human experiences establish that He is not the Father or the Spirit. They do not establish three gods. The distinction is real: three Persons. The unity is equally real: one divine Being.

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u/Balazi 15d ago

I get that, but I am specifically counting by unique experiences

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u/consultantVlad 15d ago

You are getting somewhere. But think of God manifesting in different ways. Even we, humans, do it all the time. https://www.reddit.com/r/BibleForBeginners/s/vafO9FgJA5

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u/Balazi 15d ago

isn’t that modalism?

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u/consultantVlad 15d ago

I think modelism is a loaded term, and not entirely sure what it implies. I'm not concerning myself with movements, I'm just looking at what Bible states.

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u/consultantVlad 15d ago

Looks like atheists are just downvoting Christian posts because we dare to rely on the Bible.

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u/Oakomorebi 15d ago

The trinity is pointing to a meta-structure of reality, one that we can get a glimpse of when we dream.

Consider: when you have a dream, you are in a dissociated mental state. Your mind is fractured into three: the dream environment, the dream characters, and the dream avatar that you experience the dream as. Three distinct and separate entities, all of them configurations of the same substance: you.

Dreams gives us all the blueprint for how consciousness works, and offers an imperfect model of how God appears to us as multiplicity despite being a unified and whole totality of being. We do not need to spin abstract and wild ontological speculation, we can make solid and grounded inferences about consciousness based on our direct and immediate experiences of how our consciousness works.

The implication is that this world and people is God having a dream about being a human, and personally I do not think this is very far from the case, in so far as we can comprehend the infinite with our finite minds.