FATHER POTHIN’S REFLECTION

GOD IS RICH AND MYSTERIOUS 

G.K. Chesterton once said that one of the reasons he believed in Christianity was because of its belief in the Trinity.  If Christianity had been made up by human person, it would not have at its very center a concept that is impossible to grasp or explain: the idea that God exists as one but within in three persons.

How do we understand the Trinity?  We don’t!  God, by definition, is ineffable, beyond conceptualization, beyond imagination, beyond language.  The Christian belief that God is a trinity helps underscore how rich the mystery of God is and how our experience of God is always richer than our concepts and language about God.

The God that atheism rejects is precisely a conceptualized God, a God captured in a picture.  In the end, atheism is less faithful to human experience than was polytheism which more rightly sensed deity, gods and goddesses, hidden under every rock.

To what does this call us?  To humility.  All of us, believers and atheists, need to be more humble in our language about GodThe idea of God needs to stretch, not shrink, the human imaginationOur actual experience of God, just as for ancient polytheism, is forever eating away at all simplistic conceptions of GodThank God for the complexity of the doctrine of the Trinity!