I love these diagrams because they demonstrate the absurdity of the Trinity. These diagrams put God in a three sided box and we Lutherans know that God cannot be put in a box. To be relevant in the 21st century, we have to be clear about what the Trinity is and what it is not.
What it is. The Trinity is a non-scriptural concoction of the 4th century church fathers who were looking for a statement about the nature of God. They came up with this convoluted concept and agreed to agree but not debate the nature of God any more. We have been stuck with it ever since. Lutherans accept three creedal statements about the Trinity - The Nicene, the Apostles, and the Athanasian. Fortunately the Athanasian Creed has been removed from our latest hymnal. This creed is absolutely irrelevant in the 21st century and we should say so, not just remove it from our hymnal..
The church has a much better term for God - the magnum mysterium or great mystery. God is unknowable. In one of our sacred stories, God was asked "who are you?" God's response? YHWH - "I am" or "I will be who I will be."
The Trinity is a metaphor for helping us realize that God cannot be put in a neat box. God is a mystery and we can only talk about God using the language of the unknowable - mythology.
Follow this link to see a modern artist's interpretation of the great mystery.
What it is not. The Trinity is not a definitive statement about the nature of God. If we accept that God is unknowable, we cannot then turn around and declare that we know who God is.
The Trinity makes no claim about the gender of God. Lutherans in the 21st century know that the men who created the concept of the Trinity were constrained by the world view of people in the 4th century. We look really silly when our modern "theologians" jump through twisted hoops of reason and logic to defend the masculine language of the Trinity.
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