What do you think of the Cerberus analogy of the trinity?

Heresy commenters, always so proud of their surface level skimming of Catholic theology (or whatever they are — whatever parts of Catholicism they’ve chiseled away out of personal distaste before coming to their provisional allegiance to Anglicanism or whatever, until the tides of their distaste ebb back into the safety some other new purported allegiance after they’ve “figured it all out” for the twentieth time in life) completely miss the point — these analogies are never (in any formal context anyways) designed to a claim of “this is how it is”. They are mere provisional aids meant to instill someone with the sense that “something like this” is perhaps not as necessarily impossible as their base intuition informs them. Analogy as apéritif. It gets their mental metabolism going. That’s the one and only function. The days of proactive declarations of “this is how it is” in regards to heretical conceptions of the trinity are long gone, there are maybe twelve total people in the world still involved in any theological project comparable to that.

(“something like this” being any conversation oriented around the “suchness” of a particular subject that conflicts with the materialist inclination to assume that “what something is” is equivalent to “the form of a thing” which in turn is equivalent to the matter comprised a thing — which is horribly stupid but I suppose one is committed to it if one is an atheist. But as Thoreau remarked; the gun gives you the body, not the bird — See: Trinity debate, ‘real presence’ debate, sophists arguing against the existence of motion in Ancient Greece, etc.)

In this context, one can only speak in analogies, there is no other choice — the actual nature of the trinity is a complete mystery, which the ‘hardline little o orthodox’ will ostensibly concede as true right before segueing into another grating speech of false humility where they assure you that the problem is in fact solved — uncovering another mystery in which they’re perpetually unable to explain themselves beyond the level of tossing around heresy accusations.


Anyways. Use whatever analogy you want. You have no choice, there is no other means through which to “explain” it. Analogies are necessarily insufficient, which is why they’re “heresy” so called. If you could be the first to manufacture some answer with perfect explanatory power, you wouldn’t need the tool of analogy at all.

/r/Christianity Thread