More on the Christian Trinity

I wanted to share another quick take I had on the Christian Trinity. I’m not terribly well read in Christian theology, but I have never seen anyone make the observation that I will lay out below.

Once again, the idea of the Trinity is that God - or Godhead - exists as three divine persons: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Not every church takes the Trinity as part of their doctrine, but most do, and it is an undeniably important aspect of Christian theology. We might represent the Trinity in a diagram like this:

The presence of a Father and a Son - or a Parent and Child - in this conception of God implies both a grandfather and a grandson. (Or a grandparent and a grandchild, if you prefer.) We expect a child to be similar in some ways to their parent, including in their procreative abilities. Of course, we can apply this intuition recursively, revealing a great-grandfather and a great-grandson, and so on to a line of ancestors and descendants. We might represent this extended Trinity in a diagram like this:

I’m not fully satisfied with this diagram, because there are too many branches connecting the Holy Spirit to all the ancestors and descendants. As far as I can figure, there are only two situations where this kind of multiplicity of relationships can arise naturally. In the first situation, we have a whole comprised of a large multiplicity of parts, such as a human body consisting of a vast number of human cells. The problem here is that a human body is made up of much more than just human cells. Bacterial cells outnumber human cells by a factor of ten to one in the body, and there are large quantities of liquids flowing through the body that are not contained within any cell. In short, the human body is not simply composed of human cells, but also of a substrate that the human cells reside in.

The second situation where a diagram with this kind of multiplicity of connections might arise is when the single entity represents a type, or a kind, and the multiple entities represent instances of that type. For instance, we could have a box that represents the category of human beings, and many boxes that represent individual human beings. The problem here is, we typically don’t want to mix the types and instances together into the larger concept. In other words, if the Holy Spirit were a category, and the Fathers and Sons were instances of this category, it would be a little odd to find them all coexisting within the same conception of Godhead. But perhaps not - perhaps an enclosure of both type and instantiation is a fundamental quality of the Godhead?

Of course, both of these conceptualizations - whole and parts, type and instances - do not match the Christian conception of Holy Spirit and Father/Son. But that’s not necessarily what I’m trying to work out here. I’m trying to resolve what seems to me to be a modeling problem: a graph with an indefinite number of connections from a single entity to an indefinite number of other entities.

One way we could resolve this problem is to imagine that, similar to the way that we have a whole progenetive chain of Fathers and Sons, perhaps the Holy Spirit is also a progenetive force, and we have generations of Holy Spirit to sync up with the generations of Fathers and Sons. We might represent this further extended Trinity like this:

Interestingly enough, what we end up with here is a double helix, spiraling through eternity.

Okay, let’s get past this fixation of mine on the aesthetics of modeling. The idea of generations of gods is a fascinating one that has both mythological and theological support, and interesting implications.

In Norse mythology, we have different kinds of divine beings, and progenetive relationships between them. The forefather of them all is Ymir, who gives birth to the Jötunn, commonly translated into English as the giants. The two major tribes of Norse gods are the Æsir and the Vanir. They were at war with each other at one point, and reconciled after that. Most of the Norse gods that we are more familiar with are Æsir, and there is some indication that the Vanir family of gods is older. Lines of descendancy can be quite vague at points, but in general, it seems as if the Æsir and Vanir descended from the Jötunn. So after Ymir, we have at least two generations of different kinds of divine beings.

In Greek mythology, the gods we are most familiar with are the Olympians and their descendants. The Olympians in turn were descendants of the Titans, which are also sometimes referred to in modern times as giants. The Olympians went to war with the Titans and overthrew them. These Titans, in turn, overthrew a previous generation of gods when Cronus seized power from his father Uranus.

In the Abrahamic traditions, we have a sort of succession of generations of gods that follows the horoscope. The Yahweh of the Old Testament is represented by the lamb or sheep, and is in conflict and contrast with a potentially older generation of gods, particularly Baal-Zebub, represented by the bull or cow. The bull precedes the lamb in the zodiac, and the lamb is followed by Pisces, the fish, which becomes a common symbol of Christianity. Each zodiacal era lasts a bit over two thousand years, and roughly correspond to the times of pre-Abrahamic, Abrahamic, and Christian religions. According to this scheme, the Christian era should be winding down right about now, and the Age of Aquarius is to follow.

So in this scheme, who would be the next generation of gods to appear? Could it be us? We recall that the Elohim fashioned human beings in their own image. And the Christian conception of Jesus brings divinity down from the skies, and more and more into the human sphere. Our creative abilities are growing, and it could be said that our ability to connect directly with the divine, is also growing. Of course, we’ve caused a lot of strife and grief along the path, but what generation of gods has not done so?

Everything I have presented here is highly speculative, and is more food for thought than a well prepared thesis. It would definitely be interesting to dig into these ideas more deeply. For instance, it could be useful to look at other mythological traditions, and see if they have patterns of successive generations of different kinds of gods, like we sketched out from Greek and Norse mythologies above.

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Addendum: Some time after writing this post, I got this fascinating comment from a reader that tells about the Yahweh of the Old Testament being more than just a single god, but rather a lineage. It definitely seems related to what I am discussing here. I have yet to watch the video that presents this idea, but I will soon.