Tuesday, April 2, 2013

Time Travelers & The Trinity

We are blessed to live in a time with an expanded concept toolbox that we Christians can use to create models of how our more difficult doctrines work. St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas probably couldn't think much in terms of time travel, but thanks to Einstein and a century of good science fiction films, we can. Quantum physics has given us a language by which we can talk about the absurdities of nature, that same language can be translated so we can talk about some of the absurdities of theology. Example: The Trinity. One can imagine a time traveler coming from the future and meeting his present self. You have here a model for how one can at least imagine how the Trinity might work. For indeed we would have one person in two. One person, living two different lives concurrently. That at least gives us some imaginative basis for talking about the Trinity. Now, this model is incomplete, it doesn't capture the whole truth. But, then no model really captures the whole truth about anything, does it? Imaginative modeling 'points' to the truth, it doesn't contain it. This is one way of 'pointing' to the truth in this case.

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